Hasz

What I really want to know is.. Where is that cheap Micronics SLS printer that Formlabs bought 2 years ago?

He has a lot riding on this particular idea, and I think HN will generally be receptive.

I am not a believer in winner-take-all mechanics for models (even for AGI -- look no further than the natural world for many examples), and a large F50 company committing money/strategy to something outside the frontier labs is a great thing for the ecosystem.

Interesting, but what on earth are the photos in this piece?

It looks like a teen vogue profile. It is kind of hilarious to have an guy who is objectively brilliant posing in flowerbed or deliberately quasi-candid overexposed shots. Not even a pick of him up at 2am wandering around or hunched over a terminal or whatever he does.

> We trust confident people, even when they're wrong

I think this idea can be expanded on, and it is to separate the merits of the idea from the delivery of the idea. I see this frequently with: - neurodivergent people (of whatever variety) - ESL speakers - cultural clashes (eg Dutch / American meetings)

If you can separate delivery and the merits of a discussion, you can benefit both ways -- taking a skeptical view on the best pitches (eg from anyone on a Forbes 30 for 30 list) and an optimistic view on the worst.

imo, the easier and more likely-to-be-successful podcast idea is to press successful people on times they failed. Very few are going to be "first at bat, hit a homerun"; those people are not as interesting anyways to interview.

You solve the credibility problem (they ended up successful) while still distilling down the more valuable failures.

I used to think this as well, but until it turns out to be a problem for the business worth solving (eg impacting $ machine), it will not get solved. There has to be a why now, otherwise plenty of "problems" get shoved under rug.

Internal tools, IME, are almost always short budget. unless it is in path of revenue, then there is $ and performance matters a great deal *if* more performance means more $.

Software is not sold, used, or replaced on speed and memory efficiency. Case in point, most software today (including written by LLMs).

Absolutes matter. If 1x is good enough, making it 20x literally does not matter.

turnover is also extremely high; only partners are going to be around that long. At this rate, many of those long-time partners are being forcibly retired to make way for the next gen.

>"Commercial" implies to extract the most out of every potential customer

Disagree, this is an unreasonable framing. We just need to exchange goods/services for money, not optimize every transaction on a curve by some measure of "extract everything"

There are many incentives apart from $ -- general fame, specific, niche credibility, love of the thing, internal projects (eg a phd/masters/capstone project), etc. Looking at everything from a $-incentive only will lead you to actions and incentives that don't make any sense. Look at the linux kernel or something like sqlite -- more deployed than almost any piece of "commercial" closed-source software, huge community, signifigant resources, but tiny, tiny slice of revenue by any metric of popularity.

Making stuff good (fast, performant, non-addictive, etc) are directly opposite the KPIs that most businesses are going to measure.

IMO, something like home assistant is a good example of what tech can be. No nagware, open ecosystem, no subscription, self-hosted (with optional hosting/support if you want it), etc.

That is user-centric design, but the are not exactly be rewarded commercially for it. Until we can better align commercial incentives and technical excellence, you're going to keep having the same shit experience with a lot of tech products.

Work on changing the incentives, it is the only thing that matters in the long run and is, to steal a phrase, "scalable".

The interview I linked higher in this thread specifically calls out targeting non F2000 type customers with point solutions and not taking their traditional sales motion everywhere. I think this will be quite difficult for them to do, but will see.

I am not too worried about Linux specifically. RH is a large committer, but a lot of those commits are down to a handful to very talented individuals. One of the other BigCos will sweep them up if RH culture falls apart, imo likely Qualcomm (see their large open source push recently), maybe Linaro (although I dont know much about them).

I think this approach of integration is the mistake in IBM's strategy -- they are squeezing some very slippery customer hard, and IMO this was Broadcom's mistake. The integration must go very deep, be multi-threaded, beyond a single app, OS, whatever, and it has to be a slow noose, not a hard jerk.

If I am IBM, I continue to invest in core, open source, deploy my army of PS people to build custom business solutions around that core open-source (but tailored to their specific issue), use "AI" and very strong core product engineering to reduce risk/time-to-effect, and keep pushing their entire ecosystem (rhel, hashicorp, confluence, whatever else) to customers.

Integrate deeply, then put those annual increases at 9% and build a very healthy, strong moat on a premium brand, experience and level of trust. Better to not give anyone a critical event to justify walking away from you.

basically. Comparing a company with google resources (and needs) is not really the same as RH resources (and needs). Basically, what percentage of rev/resources/profit/engineering headcount are you spending on linux?