Seeking: Chief of Staff, anything at the right VC firm, Sales Engineering, Solutions Architect, GTM, User Operations / Support Engineering ideally at a cool AI startup, but am flexible for the right team, opportunity, CEO, industry, etc.
Location: Los Angeles (Santa Monica)
Remote: In-person preferred, hybrid 3 days/wk in SF or nearby ok, open to remote.
Willing to relocate: Open to NYC or SF.
Technologies: Engineering + MBA + coding bootcamp.
Résumé/CV: 15 years in various technical, customer facing, and sales roles at startups and tech companies. Employee #30 at Segment; angel investor in various companies, managed $20m lead gen vertical at public online marketing company; started tutoring business in 20s.
Seeking: Chief of Staff, anything at the right VC firm, Sales Engineering, Solutions Architect, GTM, User Operations / Support Engineering ideally at a cool AI startup, but am flexible for the right team, opportunity, CEO, industry, etc.
Location: Los Angeles (Santa Monica)
Remote: In-person preferred, hybrid 3 days/wk in SF or nearby ok, open to remote.
Willing to relocate: Open to NYC or SF.
Technologies: Engineering + MBA + coding bootcamp.
Résumé/CV: 15 years in various technical, customer facing, and sales roles at startups and tech companies. Employee #30 at Segment; angel investor in various companies, managed $20m lead gen vertical at public online marketing company; tutoring business in 20s.
Seeking: Chief of Staff, anything at the right VC firm, Sales Engineering, Solutions Architect, or User Operations / Support Engineering ideally at a cool AI startup, but am flexible for the right team, opportunity, CEO, industry, etc.
Location: Los Angeles
Remote: In-person preferred, hybrid 3 days/wk in SF or nearby ok, open to remote.
Willing to relocate: NYC or SF okay.
Technologies: Engineering + MBA + coding bootcamp.
Résumé/CV: Early employee at Segment in various technical, sales, and customer facing roles; angel investor in various companies, managed $20m lead gen vertical at public online marketing company; tutoring business in 20s.
Do you all not think that companies should charge prices that maximize their profits (in the long run)? Typically, companies are trying to predict the price elasticity curve that yields the most profit via # units sold * price. That said, if you overcharge, that could be bad for the brand, turning off users in the short and longer term.
Another product like this for me is the Manta Sleep Pro Mask. It’s $80, but the best I’ve found, so I buy it anyways. I’m mildly annoyed and also feel like they’re taking advantage of me on price and will switch as soon as there’s an alternative at least as good for less…but when that happens, they’ll probably lower their price, which is what typically happens as sectors and products mature due to competition.
Profit maximization curves are interesting, and I think explain things like how convenience stores exist with much lower volume compared to grocery stores. Eg XYZ food costs 90 cents and the grocery store sells it for $1, yielding profit of 10% whereas a convenience store sells it for $1.50, just a 50% increase in price for the consumer (for the convenience), but the profit is 6x that for the grocery store, so they only need to sell approx 1/6 to make the same profit.
In the case of the author clock. If COGS is $50, profit is $150ish. If they sold for $100, they’d have to sell 3x as many to make the same profit. Given that it’s a niche product for readers (smaller population and typically more educated and wealthier), I think they care less about the price. Doesn’t seem that unreasonable to me.
It’s interesting; we’ve lived within capitalism so long, it sounds reasonable for you to (archly) ask “do you not think all companies… should maximise their profits?” - as it that’s a given, and anyone even treading around questioning this fundamental is by default wrong, or forgetful, or crazy. It’s almost as if had moved from being a choice, to an immutable natural law.
But I’m coming to the conclusion —more powerfully in the recent few years— that not only is this an issue that should be debated, but the pursuit of profit above all else is responsible to a greater or lesser degree for many of the ills that we see and suffer in our societies. And from my European perspective, I believe that it is responsible for America (its culture, way of life, the ‘American way’) fracturing and falling apart.
We just had dinner in our favourite Vietnamese restaurant. It’s closing tomorrow. The rent got too high and the lady who runs it wasn’t taking a wage. It was busy every day. It’s a favourite lunch spot, their bahn mi is the best in town.
So they’ll close, and that’s another empty shop front. God knows if anyone will rent it, ever again. There are plenty more empty shops to choose from.
This is in the centre of Canberra. The capital of Australia.
And why? Because whomever owns the shop owns it as an ‘investment’. So the lovely lady who runs (ran) it needs to not only run a profitable restaurant — pay staff, suppliers, taxes, insurance, take a wage — but she also has to make a profit for the guy who owns the shop.
Because his ‘business’ is owning a shop. So he (I’m sorry, I’m just assuming it’s a dude) needs to turn a profit. For owning a building.
So she’ll close.
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So restaurants are fucked. They’re all closing. At what point do we think, restaurants are the fabric of society. Cities need restaurants. It’s what makes a city a city. So when do we realise that imposing a condition on a restaurant that not only must they make a profit, but they must make a profit for the owner of the building, who does fucking nothing, is ridiculous?
Anyway. I know this is a rant. I just had dinner at a popular restaurant with amazing food with a wonderful owner that’s closing tomorrow so that the landlord can own an empty space. I’m bitter and sad.
This kind of thing permeates through our society. We can all see it, we all know it's absurd, but we can't change it. That requires the people with the money and power on board. I don't need to tell you how they got that money and power. It's not only the buildings that have owners
I wonder if more and more people come to the same conclusion, but are not able to voice their opinions loud enough. I also wonder what needs to be done so that the "maximize profit" mantra gets away.
Don't get me wrong, unfettered capitalism has plenty of problems - eg tragedy of the commons, regulatory capture, effective monopolies, etc. That said, pricing things to maximize profits (given societal and economic constraints) still seems like the best route, especially in this case. How else could / should they price it?
I think one of the jobs of gov't is good regulation, which is hard. And once the rules have been set, maximizing profits within that box of regulation seems good, yea? Capitalism is reasonably good at allocating resources in many cases.
For me, "important" basically means "if somebody somehow stole my 1Password vault and had access its contents, it would be logistically problematic for me that they'd have the MFA for this account". So email, banks, cell phone / DNS hosting / etc, but also things like my MFA for Slack, PyPI, Steam, etc.
Things that aren't important are accounts like my rewards account w/ airlines, various forums / etc where there's MFA but it's less valuable than the password vault itself.
For MFA enrollment, my basic approach is:
1. If the site supports FIDO2/U2F, I enroll a yubikey in that.
2. If it supports multiple FIDO2/U2F devices, I enroll 2 other yubikeys (My primary yubikey is USB-C, then I've got a USB-A and a backup USB-A)
3. If the site supports TOTP, I generate a TOTP key and enroll my phone's TOTP app
4. For sites I'm likely to need to log into a lot, but that don't support multiple FIDO2 devices, I also enroll my Yubikey as a TOTP device ( https://www.yubico.com/products/yubico-authenticator/ for reference). I don't do this for every site because the Yubikey has a finite number of slots for TOTP secrets.
I feel like the long term equilibrium of stuff like this is that in the not too distant future, anyone will be able to easily generate weird deepfake inappropriate porn / content for anyone. It seems unavoidable.
I might argue this could be good in that this sort of stuff will become so commonplace that it won't be a big deal and people will learn (be forced to shrug it off). Up until now-ish, the scarcity of celebrity nude leaks and revenge porn type stuff made it somewhat of a forbidden fruit. I like the idea of destigmatizing this sort of stuff so that it loses power.
That said, I'm sure there will be some casualties along the way. Eg vulnerable teens who are picked on by mean girls / boys, semi-celebrities / public figures who are targeted by online trolls, etc. I hope that the prevalence of this sort of stuff enlarges the conversation around this, increasing the reach of strategies to deal with this stuff psychologically, and significantly reduces it's impact.
I don't know many celebrities or politicians, but I suspect that after they see a few weird / porn related photos of themselves, they stop caring.
I would love a Wikipedia list article of games that have been solved computationally and but also games where humans can still beat computers / AI, discussing the challenges and context behinds wins / losses.
I couldn't imagine any computer beating a human at any Collectable Card Game in the near term. Likewise I'd imagine that computers would be at a insurmountable disadvantage at Deck Builders like Dominion in the general case (in that I could easily imagine a Computer being trained to play perfectly on a specific Kingdom but no where close to a top human on a randomly selected Kingdom).
AFAIK there are no good bridge computer programs. A crucial difficulty is making sense of the bidding phase, and of signals during the card playing phase.
