The other versions of recaptcha show the annoying captchas, but v3 just monitors various signals and gives a score indicating the likelihood that it's a bot.
We use this to reduce spam in some parts of our app, and I think there's an opportunity to make a better version, but it'd be tough for it to be better enough that people would pay for it since Google's solution is decent and free.
Many people who want to work from the office are mostly interested in doing so because they want to be around their coworkers. If their coworkers are remote, they won't get what they want. Similarly, remote people might not be happy at a company that allows remote work but primarily has an in-person culture.
Letting everyone do what they want is not a path towards everyone being happy. I think a better approach is for companies (or at least teams) to land somewhere on the spectrum from full in-person to full remote, and then employees can work at the place that fits them best.
I understand that point of view but I don't agree with it. I work remotely because my coworkers are in different countries. But some of them come to local offices because they like it. This is a great setup for everybody and noone is complaining.
I know anecdata doesn't count but I observed the same in various companies: yes, those who prefer to work from the office miss their colleagues, but are surrounded by like-minded people and that works better for everyone.
As long as the company is large enough for there to be a critical mass of people in a bunch of locales, I think this works great. I work for a company with < 100 people spread across like 10 time zones, and I wish it made sense for us to have some office space in my city where I could work with people sometimes, but it doesn't because there are only three of us and we don't work on the same things.
I think this is the right answer, and I especially want to call out the second part, because it can be a bit counterintuitive.
The reason for having security documentation isnt so that it can answer the questions the client has. No one will actually read it. The thing is, people have an unlimited appetite for wasting your time if it's free for them to do so. By pointing them at documentation and having them get back to you with questions, you're now making it their problem instead of yours. Some clients will say no, fill out the questionnaire. You can politely bow out with those clients. Others will glance at your docs and decided it's not worth it to them to figure out if you actually answer all their questions, so they'll just check the "security review complete" box in their buying process.
That's an interesting thought. Any company that raises money from VCs will ultimately either fail or end up publicly traded (via IPO or acquisition), and at that point it's just a matter of time before they start squeezing their users.
I wonder what the ideal time is in a company's arc to start their eventual replacement. Render just raised a series B which probably means they're still many years away from step 3, so it's probably too early. But maybe when they're raising a series C or D, it's time to start thinking about making their replacement.
I feel like Stripe is entering that territory right now. Not that they're worse than alternatives, but they no longer have that "wonderful experience" magic because they've started to turn on the maximize shareholder value engine.
I generally agree with your comment, but isn't there an exception for companies that do well enough early enough to let the founders keep control with supervoting stock? Then the founders can do whatever they want... which might be make short term money but doesn't have to be.
From what I'm seeing, Photoshop only costs $20/month (actually $20.99) if you commit to an annual plan. It's $31.49/month if you want month-to-month.
And in the past, every time I've wanted to cancel a subscription, I've had to spend ~30 minutes with their support. How are you able to turn it on and off so easily? I'd love to figure out a way to avoid their normal cancelation flow.
I had an annual plan last year that was 50% off for new users (easy, use a new email) and I canceled it online this year, no problem. I had a 12 month commitment but just set a reminder to cancel in month 11. No problem. This was better than past experiences.
(I also get CC from work which negated me needing another subscription.)
Right now, a lot of "creators" use Twitter to generate leads to sell premium content of various sorts (e.g. paid newsletters, ebooks, etc.). But the premium content has to live somewhere else, and there's a challenge getting people from Twitter to those other platforms.
I can see both the creators and consumers of content being happier if the lead gen and delivery of the premium content could happen in the same place. This especially makes sense if Twitter integrates this further with their Revue acquisition.
A few examples I could imagine:
- This could be used as an alternative to Substack/paid newsletters.
- I could see this being popular with people who share tips like crypto/stocks, etc. Get the basic tips for free, pay to get the good stuff (note: I don't endorse this, I'm just saying I bet it'll happen).
- This is a bit different from everything else I'm mentioning, but I bet celebrities could get their hardcore fans to pay for inside access to various things (e.g. backstage videos).
Since people are commenting on how they hate Dropbox offering additional products beyond the basic file syncing, I feel compelled to say that I really like Paper. I use it for all my personal note-taking, and our company wiki is in there since they make it really easy to share folders with the whole team. It's basically Google Docs but waaaay faster (both in terms of the actual page speed, and the speed with which I can use it due to the more streamlined UI).
It has the best WYSIWYG markdown editor I've ever used which makes note-taking super simple. Good search, a few nice features like assigning tasks to people within documents, etc. but otherwise it just gets out of your way.
I hear they're about to move it into the core Dropbox file system which could be great (it's always been a bit annoying that Dropbox's main offering is basically just an online file system and yet Paper had a totally different folder structure) but I'm also worried that it might make the experience a bit heavier which would negate the main reason I use it.
IDK about JIRA, but Trello allows offline access and that’s been very helpful at times (works if you have loaded the board while online fairly recently).
Yeah. I'd argue this is quite a bit better. People can comment on the image, add it to their dropbox, view entire galleries, preview things like word files that couldn't open natively in the browser. And it doesn't make it any harder to just look at the image if that's what you want.
It seems very reasonable to me that they're not designing for the use case of people who are trying to host images for their website directly from their Dropbox folder. That was never what Dropbox was meant for.
I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but I don't think it's true that optimizing for profits makes you more competitive.
When a company makes a profit, it essentially means that they're capturing wealth that could have otherwise gone to the customer. The more wealth the customer captures, the more they want to use your product or service. This is why so many startups are unprofitable for so long. They burn money in order to compete with more established players until eventually they dominate the market, and then they turn the knobs to become profitable. All else being equal, profit is at odds with competitiveness.
Of course if you have outside investors (especially institutional investors) they'll eventually require you to start optimizing for profit. But it's not to be competitive, it's because the competition is now over because they've effectively monopolized their space, and now it's time to cash in.
I'm a big proponent of bootstrapping, and this is why. In the early days, you have to be a little bit profitable (you can't burn money for years like a Softbank-backed company would) but once things start working, you can stay in the "a little bit profitable" world which allows you to treat customers and employees well, instead of moving into the "maximize profit" world that most successful companies end up in.
I believe that this is not possible in America. I'm a founder and we just started offering health benefits earlier this year. I tried really hard to figure out a way to let employees effectively pay 100% of their premium (either by paying them more if they opt out or just having the company share be 0%). I talked to a number of people, looked into different types of plans (HRAs, etc) and at the end of the day, I couldn't figure out legal way to do what you're suggesting.
I think the closest possible thing to this is for the company to offer to pay 50% of the cheapest plan possible and then let employees opt-in to better plans, add dependents, etc. at their own expense. That way the majority of the expense is "optional" to the employee, but whatever the company pays still isn't.
Note: this only applies to health benefits. We do compensate employees who decline other benefits e.g. a parking pass
Even if you had found a legal loophole to do this, just about everybody is going to want health insurance and I’m pretty sure if the company pays then it’s not taxed, plus you can get better rates that way as you get bigger. So it’s more expensive overall for the same plans if you make employees pay.
The tax benefits and better rates (which I think is a myth btw, but it shouldn't effect the argument either way) would be there regardless of who pays. It's still a group plan, the question is just about who is paying for it.
So given that, the difference between "we offer free health insurance" and "we pay you extra and let you opt in to health insurance" is purely academic for someone who wants to be on the group plan. Both the company and the employee end up with the same amount of money in the end, and the insurance is the same.
The reason I'd prefer letting people opt in is because it gives employees more choice. Maybe they want to use a different carrier. Or they get free insurance through their spouse's work. Or they're on Medicare. At the end of the day, it seems really paternalistic for a company to say to its employees "here are the things we want you to have, and instead of letting you choose, we're just going to buy it for you." All else being equal, I prefer a world where employees get money and spend it how they want.
Having said that, since there's no way to do that while also getting the convenience and tax benefits of a group plan, we decided to compromise and go with the employer-subsidized group plan rather than giving employees total freedom.
The other versions of recaptcha show the annoying captchas, but v3 just monitors various signals and gives a score indicating the likelihood that it's a bot.
We use this to reduce spam in some parts of our app, and I think there's an opportunity to make a better version, but it'd be tough for it to be better enough that people would pay for it since Google's solution is decent and free.
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