2
points
Gustomaximus
Joined 5,163 karma
Email: angus [usual symbol] angusthompson.com
www.angusthompson.com www.yayclicks.com
- I was thinking the issue might be its much better for factories to automate sections of production over time.
It must be a huge expense with risk to design a new factory, automate it end to end and push live hoping the market expectation for the product exists and the automation is as good as planned.
Whereas if you have a manual production line you could have a massive advantage as they can automate out sections ongoing and it allows engineers to build skills in this also as they go.
- I use a VPN for 3 main reasons:
1) I need to come out of a particular country for some systems access. If I'm travelling it's easier than having IT team change permissions.
2) I use dedicated IPs for some systems.
3) Testing websites where I want to appear local to a particular country.
- Not my experience or people around me (rural area so it's common). WFH with no fibre and patchy mobile so starlink is a godsend.
The most common outage is a regular 3am reboot. Otherwise outages are infrequent and typically a few seconds.
Also the latency is surprisingly good, it's not fibre but can game FPS on it.
- Was a long article and only skim read, but wouldn't a bigger factor be rising living standards? As more of the world moves to developed world living standards, which would be ideal, if this shift is faster than green technology + depopulation we are going to see increased climate pressure. I didn't seem them mention this but my inexpert view seems the rising tide of living standards may present the real problem.
- > I'd love to make that I think would honestly be worth a small subscription ($5/mo maybe)
I buy a few things for web dev side. I'm a sample of one but I avoid /mth pricing for most stuff if I can and prefer annual. Maybe me but the 'another monthly subscription' feels annoying as much as I respect I want this for my own business.
Will almost always start using free first then pay if its business beneficial to feature enrich of scale.
I think your best focusing on free and getting users. Once you hit a threshold you can ask for some $$ and some people will feel that's reasonable. If you start paid I suspect you'll have little chance of growth unless you come out with something truly amazing.
- Unless it really doesn't suit your commute, pay more to be central. This will help you see the city + be social. It can be really difficult if you are one side of the city and your friends end up being the other side as you can have an hour travel to see people type deal.
With location, proximity to a station & what train line matters - you'll likely use the underground a bunch so consider your commute for this closely.
Take one of those bus tours. I did only after living there for years as 'that's for tourists' but its really worth it and gives a good city perspective.
Do lots of travel to Europe from London. So much is on your doorstep with cheap flights if flexible on where you go. Take advantage of this especially if kids are on the horizon.
If you dont already, learn to like beer and pubs. There's something better about British pubs and pub culture. Also it usually well priced reasonable quality meals.
Speaking of pubs, anything crowded in the city will have pickpockets so watch you phone/bag closely or it wont be there.
Its quite common to rent flats furnished, this is likely a good option for you to start. Also what I did as I had no rental history there is offer to pay 6-months up front (and requested a discount for that) to show there financial risk was reduced.
Its an awesome city - I personally enjoyed immensely. I noticed people tended to be there 6-month or 6-years - it was kind of love or hate though, with the majority loving.
Oh and go to Shakespeare's globe theatre for me will you. I walked past that place for 2 years thinking I'll line that one up sometime and never did!
- > There is no untapped source of demand anywhere in the world.
What about global growth and development? There are ~billion living in poverty + general low income for even more.
If India and other high population poor countries achieve what China did over the last ~50 years, while China continue to export while transitioning towards a consumption/service economy, there is another engine for global growth. I'm sceptical this will happen, but the potential source of demand is sitting there.
- I live in an area where we get a handful of outages every year. From a few hours to a few days.
My current setup is a 2.8Kv generator I haul our of the shed, run a few extension cords to core things like fridge/freezer, internet, office etc.
This is a nice fit between a generator and a Powerwall. Generator is a pain if you have to setup + if not home the fridge stays off or my wife will leave to me unless its urgent. A Powerwall (or similar) is a significant investment.
This product covers people like me with occasional outages but it doesn't have the setup or out of home hassle, and its a more financially accessible solution than a Powerwall. I could def see people interested in this.
- 54 points
- I wouldn't take that as face value.
We know how big the taxi market is and it's growth rate. There is clearly room for a few businesses here alone. Then consider driverless will go beyond taxi to general transportation like trucking which is massive market. Also likely play a significant variable in what cars consumers choose.
I think the risk here is software tends to a winner (or small number of winners) gets all market.
That has to be a major risk/reward concern on the companies investing in this tech.
- In my very limited experience of firing a handgun you shoot with a slight pause between shots to bring the muzzle back down on target.
If you go full auto, I suspect the shooter would find their muzzle going higher and higher so after the first couple shots they are shooting way high. So if they have 15 bullets in the magazine 3 are good and 12 are way off target type deal. Whereas if they were pulling the trigger at each shot they might aim the '12 air shots' more effectively.
Pure speculation but as I said has the feel of one of those things that may be counter intuitive to what you would initially expect.
- Obviously not supporting having these switches, but wondering if it makes shooting more dangerous or less.
My non expert guess is the people using these 'pray and spray' in something I suspect is very hard to control. This would serve to make a heap of wild shots plus make them run out of bullets very quickly for any kind of follow up or ongoing fight. But at the same time send a heap of bullets fast.
I wonder if it becomes one of those events that on the surface looks far worse but statistically is not. Or more unintended bystander deaths?
To be clear. I don't know the answer or are promoting one, but it has the feeling of something that might have a counter initiative answer.
- We focus on discussing their work effort and minimise focus on the grade.
That said we do have a 'B' rule where our 2 kids get an ice-cream for B's.
Our daughter is straight A student so we like to take the pressure off on getting a B.
Our son is dyslexic and tends to get C's so he gets an ice-cream for his B/A grades.
- For emails, I generally feel these are a 24hr thing. I turn off email alerts so I can focus on my tasks then check a few times a day only.
I used to filter CC emails into their own folder for reading maybe once a day which worked mostly well but occasionally people can't seem to use to/CC as they are supposed to.
Calls I always try to pickup or callback asap but my job calls usually means urgent.
Chat like Teams I'm mixed. Often it's urgent but too many people use Teams in my current company like email and it's really disruptive to work flow getting 50 unimportant messages a day + long "just one more thing' task requests. Ive considered putting an auto-reply of "if it's not on JIRA it's not a task" but that would not come across well.
But generally I feel a better law change would be right to work your contracted hours. Put the onus on the company that they have to get your workload to the contracted hours or pay overtime. Some exceptions for execs on top end pay, but generally this would be a better win for employees, and then you can get that after work call but your being paid extra, which in itself will make people think twice about calling etc when they know there is a cost.
- Not the best example for a tech savvy person. He had that image as he made a heap of $$ investing in some early internet company, but yeah he didn't seem to actually know what he was doing tech wise.
His real crime was playing a part in destroying the fibre to the premise internet rollout across Australia. He thought he could do it cheaper with mixed copper/coaxial technology.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/10/malcolm-turnbu...
I can't imagine how many billions this has cost the country and generally lowered our internet standards.
- Would it be worth putting a price to investigating? Message like:
"Our premium support can investigate this for $XYhr. If the fault is at our end we will waive any fees. Please let us know if you wish to proceed."
- > It's absolutely common for many 30 year career stretches to never actually see a decent hard-working executive out in the wild.
Really? In my bubble this is far from common and more likely ignorance to what executives are doing. Execs tend to become so because they are highly motivated people willing to dedicate themself to their jobs.
I had an employee once would would constantly complain about their old bosses, all of them as far as I could see. He was a really smart guy with potential but so negative about anyhting leadership. One day I decided to roll the dice and said something like "you always talk about how bad your bosses are, and no doubt you'll add me to the list when you move to the next company. Have you ever considered we all get a bad boss or two, but when every boss is bad maybe you're the problem not them". I knew this was a risky move but it worked. He took it on board and became a much better contributor and dropped this 'all bosses are bad' type approach.
- I assumed they could accept the next ride while close to dropping someone off, but the app limits their location while they drive the last bit to another customers house for privacy.
- Are there any viable solutions here?
- Larger vessels can only fish <increased distance> off shore? - Increase 'no fishing' zones which has shown great success in studies creating nursery locations
Even if there is a solution would it be enforced off the coast of Africa? Some nations fishing fleets dont have the best reputation for following rules.
- > how and where do you find effective and affordable freelancers?
Something things I've found important.
1) Hire at the cheaper end of the devs your looking at. I've found within price/experience bands, price and quality are not correlated. I prefer to hire at the lower end of expectation, then if a dev shows themself as good, give them an solid pay bump early, like 3/4 months into working together. This way you get a good person, and someone that knows you will look after them as you took the pay rise to them.
2) Fire fast. By nature I like to work things out and help people but if people have troubles early, move them on fast, its most likely going to get worse and you'll beat your head against a a wall trying to fix them and it will take from the project.
3) Document the shit out of what you need + do a dummy visual version. When things get to the pointy end its too easy to get to arguments about what you agree, what you agreed means, or what is 'expected' even if not stated specifically. A dummy version helps sort a bunch of this out - it adds extra but will really help over doing more written notes and key screens only plus helps you plan your product better.
4) Clear payment milestones. Make it fair but you need real deliverables for each payment so you can get what you paid for.
5) Leave at least 30% for extras. No matter how much you plan it out, you'll find extras as you go.
- Farming. Live on a small farm and WFH. Too often I don't even leave the house and even in better work/balance times I seem to get an hour or 2 a day in the shed/paddocks maximum.
When/if I get to FIRE I'll be farm focused.
- I use https://uptimerobot.com/
They have a call option and a bunch of others.
- Didn't they do this in Germany? Where emails couldn't send push notifications after hours. Anyone know how that worked?
In my experience it's fine to stop push notifications for email/chat messages after hours and "call me" if it's an emergency. I often get 'urgent' emails and chats that aren't really urgent, but people rarely want to call you unless it's something truely important. Nor should people send email for urgent generally, I think that's expect a reply within 24hrs channel type environment.
I feel for society we need stinger rules to balance work/life. A great one would be something like like for employees under $200k it's the employers responsibility to ensure they are working their 40hrs or pay overtime plus right to claim bad extra hours on leaving a job. Add to that some serious overtime rate minimums like 2x or 3x for weekend and out of hours.
Ultimately we should aim build a society for good living and a productive economy is part of that, but not more important.
- By taxing charity?
Wouldn't most genuine charities be a dollar in and a dollar out type situation, and any unused income/funds that year should be fairly minimal.
The large endowment funds that have billions like Harvard ($50bn) probably have massive excess but at that point I'd have no problem taxing them if they are not spending the excess.
There be some some scenarios where charities get large donation right at FY end and need some rollover function to push funds to the next year's spend before being taxed, or they have to make payment schedules for multiyear projects they are 'saving' for but generally it seems to make sense that charities are taxed.
Other scenarios not considered that would make this a bad thing?
- I suspect we'd see a bunch of change. A difference of when we moved 6 to 5 days is in those times most business were closed on the weekends + generally people were more tied to one company for longer term. Plus 2 days off is very different than 3 in terms of alternate work opportunity.
From that a likely issue is a steep increase in people having second jobs so they work a 4 day job and a second 2/3 day job.
I suspect the 4 day week will work well for people with good salaries and market power, but encourage working class to 'work the weekend' in alternate jobs resulting in lower downtime.
For this I'd actually like a 4 day week but with it either more restricted business opening on Sunday type thing or significant wage multiples over 3 day weekends to encourage time off vs the 24/7 economy.
- This one seemed;
1) Spot small business product that has potential.
2) Remake & update as your own version
3) Build a large distribution network
4) Blow any other competing company away with court cases.
On that, something I changed my mind on years back, distribution network often more important than product and it would be interesting to know what he did here. Generally I would prefer to have an average product with a great distribution network than an amazing product with a poor distribution network. People tend to be very product/feature focused but access to markets is often more important for success.
- Even if not videos, most people have a bunch of photos in the public, or widely available. Even if the person themself doesn't share, other people around them will. It would take a very insular life to have no photos of yourself in public domain.
- Just some well meaning feedback.
Opening with the line "Umm where have you been the last decade?" feels like throwing insults, and not conducive to a positive enviroment to learn from one another. You probably didnt mean it that way but though Id point out this style.
Regarding the last decade,, the pertinent part of the comment you responded to is "do bulk video calls to parents/grandparent pretending to be the kids" - more referring to when these existing scams hit a higher level.
Great site and community. I suspect keeping the interface so basic has kept it that way.