jj4211

The paradox of a good company and product.

Make a good product with good ownership terms by the customer, and why would there be repeat business?

Frankly, that second idea seems really consistent with whatever residual brand value they have.

Unfortunately, they got burned by doing it poorly around 2017 and seem to have been scared off of playing in that space ever.

The first is probably already done but maybe not enough to keep the niche afloat. If the GoPro's need replacement, then they won't have a reputation for durability. If they keep going, then why replace your old one when it already does 4k 60fps? Problem is either they need replacement and erode brand strength, or are durable and can't compete with already owned product. That path probably most likely ends with selling themselves to some other company that will probably slap the name on random Chinese cameras.

The USA has great data infrastructure and comparitively cheap power compared to anywhere else that has a vaguely credible grid.

Staff barely matters, the handful of folks they need is a rounding error in the scheme of things.

Real estate in rural America is pretty cheap too. Since they don't care about proximity to anything day to day, they just need to make sure there's credible access to power, data, and water.

Meanwhile, they have a government that varies through different degrees of support and pretty much never wavering toward the side of making life difficult so long as they stay at home, but will make things more complicated.

If they did build somewhere that was cheaper, it would be unreliable for their customer base due to network connectivity, and they'd probably have a problem keeping their datacenter suitably powered, and some the US would get pissy about exporting that much compute.

My car does this based on which keyfob is in the driver seat.

Various things like the seat position, radio presets, the color of the ambient lighting, some various driver mode settings.

I mean, it's weird terminology and to my knowledge doesn't imply anything about logging into any 'online' profile, just changing to another person's settings. Adding a profile just requested some label, no email address or anything. Just something to associate with the keyfob.

It also has a driver facing camera, but it doesn't use that for detecting which driver is there.

Sadly, the strategy tends to work. Just like slop and clickbait by any sane world should not be rewarded, it rakes it in for the people who do it.

Because in this scenario, taxpayer money has been tied into the "winners" already. So that company eager to take his place? Well, that's bad news because the taxpayer fund already picked his company to be the right answer. So we want to prop up Altman and discourage that upstart that might disrupt this theoretical fund.

Same reason why OpenAI was pushing for regulation that they get to shape. Easy for OpenAI to navigate, hard for newcomers to get going.

Doesn't really create symmetry for risk/reward, because, for example, the corporate leadership decides how much to pay out to investors versus how much they spend including a lot of their own compensation.

So they can carve out the reward as they see fit, but if things go bad they can lean on the public investment as leverage to get bailouts.

Feeling this at my company.

The amount of time I have spent working with European customers has dropped a lot. They are doing whatever they can to buy European instead.

Crazy compared to how freely things worked out years ago. Early 2000s I worked at a company basically doing stuff with all sorts of folks from USA to Europe to Russia to China.

It is, but unintended consequences.

With this, then we couldn't afford Sam Altman to experience failure because he will drag folks down with him. So the companies invested become too big to fall, and the still private leadership gets to run things however they wish knowing the government will cover for any mistakes.

It's bad enough as the government will panic about retirement accounts when they falter, this exacerbates it.

It's a risky form of private-public partnership, with a lot of ways the company can privatize rewards but socialize the risk.

That's the fun part, in that time, cubicles were seen as terrible, dystopian, cheapass things because folks used to have offices, and how much cheaper could it really get than some flimsy modular furniture for you to sit at?

Then the companies gestured to just some tables in a room and said "figure it out, and no assigned seating, so just figure it out each day" to show how cheap and how little regard they have for the employees.

At this rate, I fully expect in the next few years for the next wave in office space optimization:

The thing is 'AI' is a broad net....

So while you do have for example, utility in code generation, that ranges in usefulness to nearly the whole thing to mild completion, depending on the nature of the task. There's not going to be a full "going back", but maybe we can hope that people who are flooding with shit software they don't understand will get over it.

Which highlights one of the major real problems. AI enables people that have shit ideas to make shit content with unprecedented volume. This applies to code, video, text, music. The people that use it to make quality content might be seeing less than 20% more productivity as they keep it on the rails, the people making shit are now able to spew out 1000% more stuff because they just don't care.

Which in turn drives unreasonable infrastructure demands. So if the former "goes back", so too does the infrastructure build out.

The misinformation angle though...

One, as many point out, insurance is about covering the extremes. Most people won't use as much money as the premium, but others...

For example, a relative of mine got a rare cancer, that is pretty treatable, but the medicine alone would have cost 10k a month, ignoring the frequent oncologist appointments. No amount of savings would have covered that. Even a single visit to an ER could more than wipe out a couple of years of premiums.

The other thing is the discounts are no joke. Now if you are truly uninsured, many of the providers will upon negotiation give you some severe "break", but you have to fight every time and your results are unpredictable. The insurance companies have lots of leverage, and the providers jack up prices to make the negotiated rates look good compared to their alleged list prices.