misterbwong

TBH I was thinking moat in terms of enterprise customers so I think we're actually on the same page. The majority of (non-tech) companies do not want infrastructure-they want capabilities. If anthropic can drive adoption for agentic capabilities in enterprise _running on their anthropic's infra_, that can help keep anthropic customers inside their ecosystem as there would be switching costs.

For the B2C side, my gut is telling me that Anthropic couldn't care less about that market, at least for now, with their bot product.

It might become a triple-whammy benefit for them. More efficient compute, as you said, but also a bot capability creates a better moat around their infra ecosystem and the amount of training data that can come from a bot ecosystem is significant.

Models are becoming increasingly interchangeable but setting up and maintaining (!!) the ecosystem still takes expertise. Not everyone wants to host their own MicroVM infra and would happily pay Anthropic/Grok/OpenAI to do it for them.

I think parent is saying "% of code being generated by AI" is not a generally good, direct metric for business value. It's akin to the "we are pushing SO MUCH CODE" phase of early ai marketing.

If we're trying to measure the value of adopting tool, it's probably better to measure the ROI of that tool rather than the usage % of that tool, especially when usage is basically mandated.

To directly answer your questions:

1. You're being paid to create value for the business, which "doing what they think is productive" is a proxy for. You're not being paid to use a tool a high % of the time.

2. I doesn't seem like parent even commented on the quality of the code generated. I think anyone that uses it regularly can agree that: a) the code is not useless and b) all generated code is not immediately production ready c ) AI generation of code is an accelerant for software development

Agree 100% everyone should ask what you want to achieve before even considering starting. General archetypical goals of travel hackers I've seen are:

  1. Maximum number of trips
  2. Minimum cost for trips (cheap or free travel)
  3. Free or discounted luxury travel (business class, luxury hotels, etc)
  4. Maximum cash back (to the point of being a full time job)
  5. Maximizing elite status (for business travel, etc)
  6. Short term, saving up for one or two big bangs (honeymoon, bucket list item, etc)
  7. Any combination of above and more.

Each one of those goals require a different strategy. If you're aiming for maximum cash back, I personally think the work involved in the CC game would be worth the time but everyone is different. A sign up bonus generally represents 7-10% cash back on the bonus spend so I'm ok with spending a bit of time updating spreadsheets and keeping track.

On the other hand, I have some friends who do not want to bother due to the stress and overhead involved (finances can be difficult). For those types, I usually recommend foregoing the CC game and putting everything on a no annual fee 2% card.

Edit: not sure if your comment was meant for me or timqin. Leaving it up just for general awareness

General tips:

  - Never carry a balance, ever.  If you do, forget about playing this game because it'll cost you more than you gain.  Pay off your CC debt first.
  - There are many blogs/sites that push "their" link over ones that pay more to the user because they get paid a hefty affiliate fee.  Be wary.
  - Have a goal in mind before you accrue points so you can be more strategic about accruing.  I recommend starting with a list of all the trips you'd like to take in the next two years and using that to frame what points you will need to accrue.  Don't forget hotels as the cost of hotels can easily outweigh the cost of flights.
  - Figure out how much work you want to put in.  There are levels to the game-the deeper you go, the more work it will be.  It will also get that much more rewarding
  - Prioritize transferable currencies (UR, MR, Cap1, TYP, etc) because devaluations happen often and transferrable currencies help insulate a bit.
  - Try to get your partner on board if at all possible, having a second (third, fourth, etc...) player (P2-P100+) is a scaling super power
  - Keep in mind the "burning" side of the equation and use them often.  Points and miles are worthless bits of made up paper dressed up as currency and subject to the whims of corporations that don't have your best interests in mind.  Treat them as such.
  

My general strategy for a (US based) newbie is:

  1. Read above, create a strategy and an ordered list of cards
  2. Sign up for the credit cards and put all your organic spend on those credit cards to meet spend.
  3. Repeat 1 & 2 after meeting spend and gaining sign up bonus
  4. If you have another player available, switch between players every time you meet the spend and get the bonus to lower your velocity and appear "safer"
  5. You might also want to get a (minimum) 2% everywhere card for everything you can't put on the new cards.

It can get a bit difficult as the minimum spend requirements can be high. There are many strategies out on the web that can help with this.

For a couple using this strategy, you'll be averaging ~2 new CC's per person per year (which is very safe) and earning ~7-10ish percent back on most spend. After a year or so of doing this, you should have enough for a vacation or two.

Congrats on the launch! Been using your free product for a little while. As a fellow traffic hacker, some random comments:

  - I've been in the points game for a long time so I may not be your target customer.  Take feedback with a grain of salt, I guess.

  - Commissions & Trust: You should disclose (more clearly?) that you're getting commissions from the CC signups and, ideally, that those may not be the best offers available.  (ex as of this comment, referrals are paying 90K to sign up whereas your link is at 60K-an almost $300 difference).  I understand this is a huge revenue driver, but that's not an excuse for shilling affiliate links where the user loses out on real, actual money.

  - Last Refresh: Would be nice to know when the last refresh was.  I've clicked a few times for available seats and found that the airline did not actually have the flights available.  As a user, this erodes trust in your results.

  - Slider: Points min/max slider interface isn't great but honestly I can't think of an alternative.  1 AA point is not the same as 1 Asiana point.

  - Program coverage: Your tool coverage seems similar to the other cached searching tools (Seats.aero, award logic, etc) but, honestly, needs improvement.  Most airlines are quickly moving towards releasing more inventory to their own members, so coverage is much more important now than it was two years ago. As an example, Singapore Air very rarely releases ex-US business class awards to partners but releases them much more reliably to their own members.

  - Alerts: I understand this is part of "SkyView" but you should make it more prominent and clearly marketed.  Alerts are *super duper useful* and give your product direct, permissioned access to a user's email and/or SMS that they actually want!  This is what differentiates you from Point.me and the airline searches and also what gave ExpertFlyer its edge for so long.  My guess is making it more prominent will drive more subscribers.

OP's link should really include the full title:

Ikea’s boss solved the Swedish retailer’s global ‘unhappy worker’ crisis by raising salaries, introducing flexible working and subsidizing childcare

Cutting it off there just makes it seem like ikea thinks "more money = happy workers" when in reality it is more nuanced than that.

Honestly, this is like watching a movie about "How MBA's kill businesses" in real time. The lure of a recurring revenue forecast has driven HP into investing in dodgy subscription services instead of further improving their core product (aka making better printers).

Early on revenue will increase but, after some time, HP will wake up to a dwindling customer base and alternatives eating their lunch. No doubt that those same MBA's will have already been promoted and/or left, whilst touting their "wins".

The thumb cluster design was one of the reasons I went with the Glove80. Moonlander, ErgoDox, and even Advantage 360 thumb clusters seem harder to hit than the Glove80's, though I do wish there was some option to use 1.5u keys on the Glove80 thumb cluster.

I was doing quite a bit of shopping for a split ergo about a year ago.

My main contenders ended up being:

  - Glove80
  - Advantage360
  - ZSA Moonlander
  - ZSA Ergodox
  - Various alice layout KB's (not full split.  ex: Keychron K15)
  - Custom building some sort of sofle or dactyl - ZSA recently came out with the voyager which looks essentially like a wired 65% sofle.

In the end I went with the Glove80, which I _highly_ recommend. It's the most comfortable keyboard I've used, bar none. The biggest knock I have on the Glove80 is the fit/finish for its price-it doesn't feel like you'd imagine a $400 keyboard would. The unique design makes it worth it for me, though.

This is really cool! I love pet projects like this. Although, I can't help but wonder why OP didn't put a frame around an ancient Fire tablet or something else with an LCD screen and web browsing out of the box.

Seems like it would result in a better experience (color) with much less work and about the same price point.

What technology did you use to build the scraper and how did you get around the usual challenges (anti bot, ip banning, etc) with scraping large amounts of data?

I also find that tone a bit annoying but I'm OK with it because it highlights how these types of bets, without an immediate benefit, can pay off very well in the long term, even for huge companies like Google. AI, as we currently know it, wasn't really a "thing" when Google started with it and the payoff wasn't clear. They've long had to defend their use of their own money for big R&D bets like this and only now is it really clearly "adding shareholder value".

Yes, I know it was a field of interest and research long before Google invested, but the fact remains that they _did_ invest deeply in it very early on for a very long time before we got to this point.

Their continued investment has helped push the industry forward, for better or worse. In light of this context, I'm ok with them taking a small victory lap and saying "we've been here, I told you it was important".