ozzythecat

Ads = revenue = promotions.

I was at Amazon for over a decade. Show YoY growth in terms of revenue, you’ll get a bigger empire. Sr. Managers become Directors. Directors become VPs. The senior engineers who worked on the low latency performance optimization becomes principals. The tech program managers become principals as well.

All the other cogs in the chain either get burned out, managed out, or they bounce to AWS, maybe Alexa.

All the analysis and commentary in this thread is interesting, but there’s nothing complex here. It’s basic incentive structures incentivizing undesirable outcomes.

If one tenant misbehaves and takes down your database, how will your other tenants feel?

What do you have to keep synchronized across tenants?

And is consistency across tenants really a hard requirement? Would an eventual consistency model work?

How does migration factor in? Do you mean migrating one database vs multiple databases?

What exactly would you be migrating? And if it’s written in code, migrating individual tenants one at a time, at your pace or when a particular tenant is ready to migrate, might be a feature and not a bug.

1. My grandchildren

2. Everyone else in my family and their good health. My children are happy in the marriages. Spouse is as energetic as ever and still has the enthusiasm and love when we met back in college

3. Quitting my last job before my physical and mental health completely shattered. Tell you what, if you’re also in the Amazon rat race, get out before it eats you.

4. Not doing too much over the past year, aside from reading, light travel, and participating in some online communities

I’m convinced this a bit overblown.

I don’t know enough about twitters infrastructure, so I’m only speaking at the application layer.

If the code isn’t changing, things should be extremely stable and resilient. Presumably, Twitter had already made significant investments in resilience, fault tolerant services that function independently at scale.

I’d think the more risky parts are server/hardware failures, hardware load balancers, etc.

One of the key services my big tech org owned was in support-only mode with no active feature development. Despite 500k requests per second, it had just a one person on pager duty.

The majority of support issues were OS level updates and application level dependency updates/fixing vulnerabilities. But not doing that work wouldn’t take the service down, so much as be corporate policy violations for not keeping software up to date. You could also definitely swing by exceptions.

> The people in small town Northern Germany went so far as to criticize and attack you for your achievements that far surpassed what they have accomplished.

Isn’t this a salient feature in US culture? We attack the wealthy, celebrities, politicians. I’m not saying these people are saints by any means or it’s completely unwarranted, but the US seems to have an increasing victimhood culture. It manifests in different shapes and forms, but the outcome is more or less an attack on some person or group of people who we consider to be relatively more “privileged”, and we use that to dismiss their actual accomplishments or whatever good they may have also done. The root of the issue is always about comparing yourself to someone or some group and their accomplishments and justifying one’s or short comings.

Many of the diversity, equity, inclusion initiatives, regardless of good intentions, are spin offs from this.

To be clear, I’m not taking a swing at the social justice movements. But what I am saying is that in US culture, there’s definitely massive resentment of those who are successful.

This is an interesting thread :)

I see lots of conjecture on the nature of voice assistants, or why they haven’t taken off.

As someone who was at Amazon, and close to this area, let me offer a simpler explanation.

Alexa has stagnated because its leadership has little to no direction. The incentive structure driving the product teams and tech falls under two categories: 1. rest and vest 2. or write documents to build your promotion portfolio and get promoted. Then leave the org to find a job in AWS.

In fact, Alexa could be used as a text book study in empire building.

* Myriad teams that maintain or increase head count each year, with absolutely no meaningful deliverables.

* Services that could be maintained by a 2-3 person on call that have an entire team of 6-8 engineers.

* Tech directors, Sr. SDMs, and SDMs in a race to build their empire to get promoted to the next level. SDMs solemnly hiring head count for the sake of having more reports. Other SDMs hiring SDMs below them, even though there’s no need for additional management (team is idle), so they can show a larger footprint and get promoted to the next level.

Voice assistant tech may as well be hitting a brick wall for technical or human computer interaction gaps that need to be thought much more in depth. But saying this was just an insanely hard technical problem is misleading and missing the bigger picture.

If you build an organization as a pet project and then throw money at it to do whatever the hell it likes, with practically no accountability, of course you won’t get meaningful results.

In recent years, Alexa became a place to chill and wait for your RSUs to vest. I personally know great engineers in Alexa, who are now stressed out of their mind about their work and visa situation because of the layoffs. But look - you decided to join a team where you basically just hang out at work, have a series of useless meetings, or half the time, your manager is complaining for some reason that his team doesn’t all show up to daily stand ups. A ton of extremely talented folks became extremely lazy, and so here we are.

To root cause: misaligned incentives, lack of accountability and a poor work ethic, shockingly poor given at least some other parts of the company are still on the other, opposite extreme.

> As global sales for new cars have fallen in recent years, car manufacturers have pivoted toward selling software updates and features as subscriptions to generate a continuous revenue stream long after a car has been purchased.

Are we surprised here? MB’s leadership has one primary goal: satisfying shareholders and the broader market.

We’ve been in a race to the bottom for a long time now. Inferior construction, cheap parts, overseas labor (or for the car market, labor in the US, Canada, or Mexico but also because of cost optimization).

This is the latest in a long line of cost cutting measures and patterns where the customer ultimately loses. I’m not even mad at Mercedes Benz. They know the game they’re playing, and this is what it takes I suppose.

My son in law bought a new C Class a few months ago. He and my daughter were very pleased. Now me, I’m an old goat, and so when I saw a massive iPad on the center console instead of buttons, I’d tell you that car wouldn’t be my first choice. And they had me sit in it and try it out. It is certainly a nice looking interior, but I pressed on the passenger side dashboard area and on the armrest between the front seats. I heard plastic crackling noises. It’s all plastic, even though it looks like some much superior metallic material. It was just some skin/vinyl on top of plastic.

How well will it hold? Time will tell, but it goes to show you the generation gap. I think he said he paid upwards of $50k for the car. With all the plastic, I can never see myself paying that much money for a vehicle. But hey, Mercedes Benz has a market for these things, and so it’s reasonable to believe that no matter what I think of the $1,200 subscription, there’s a market for that too.

> The other striking news of the week is Elon Musk's epic flaming death spiral at the helm of Twitter.

I am old, and admittedly, my oldest grandchild cares more about Twitter than I do.

Maybe one of you here can enlighten me. Why does Musk get so much attention? Why is Twitter so important? Perhaps this is incredibly ignorant to say, but why not let people who want to use Twitter use it, and those that don’t, don’t use it?

I keep hearing about freedom of speech, toxicity on social media. Is it unreasonable for people who don’t like Twitter to just not use it anymore?

I feel the loudest voices are anti Twitter. Or they hate Musk. And Elon Musk seems to rather enjoy trolling these people.

Mainly, it feels like Twitter and FB have somehow become the defining issues of our time. Maybe I’m just stupid, but I don’t understand why. Why this obsession with Musk?

I’ve gone through layoffs several times in my career. As has my older son, as has my sister, my wife. So Musk bought a company, took it private, and fired a ton of folks. Has corporate America never had layoffs? Have we never had layoffs where honest, hard working people were needlessly fired, because of market conditions, short sightedness and greed on part of their business execs, or some combination of both?

I worry that this country is hyper addicted to needless drama, and it’s self imposed and obfuscating bigger challenges we have as a society.

I saw a Twitter conversation between Democrat and Republican House members. Absolutely shameful how these people hurl insults at each other, try to respond with sly, “witty” insults. Maybe I’m the one being the drama queen, but it feels like Rome is starting to burn and we have no one to blame this time but ourselves.

End of rant from this old goat.

Is your goal to turn your calculators into web interfaces? Are you wanting to learn how to do that?

If the goal is purely providing something functional to others on the internet, just create a simple page. Describe your calculators. Add links to download your calculators as excel spreadsheets.

No need to over complicate and build a spreadsheet in a browser.

If you don’t want to do that, just create some HTML pages with forms and use some JS to chain together input boxes and spit out a calculation.

Many of the suggestions here will take you the route of complicated layers of abstraction. Unless your goal is to learn these abstractions, you can avoid that complexity.

I’m a layman with no knowledge of how ICUs work, because (thank God), I’ve never had to visit one.

I found this article informative, and not cynical at all. No system is perfect, and so with all of the significant benefits they provide, ICUs have some things they aren’t best for.

> Continuing to say that is reason "you" have to wait for getting a slot and asking whether or not the observed sotuation is actually hood is cynical.

I see you bashing the author, but you haven’t made a coherent argument at all. In fact, I’m not sure if this is even English.

If there’s something op got wrong, help us understand and make it a teaching moment. Just bashing them isn’t productive.

Gah! I’m a big fan of Michael Lewis. I feel he could write a book about nothing and still make it a page turner.

But at the risk of coming across arrogant, I don’t care for crypto or anything related to its celebrity frontmen.

Crypto, it’s obsession, and entire culture, in my mind, is like “Keeping up with the Kardashians” meets tech culture.

The article says Michael Lewis hasn’t written a word of the book yet. Perhaps he’ll reconsider and write about something else entirely.

> The judge should not view Theranos as "a house of cards," but as the "ambitious, inventive, and indisputably valuable enterprise it was," they wrote. "The court's difficult task is to look beyond those surface-level views when it fashions its sentence."

I’m trying to stay level headed and reason about this. I am a layman when it comes to the US justice system, but I find this insulting and making a mockery of the justice system.

It was absolutely a fraudulent, house of cards. The courts task is to actually carry out justice, and keep in mind the fact that Elizabeth Holmes carefully concatenated an imagine of success, even dressing like Steve Jobs.

Forget the investors. This crime defrauded actual patients. An 18 month sentence? Ha! Why not just abolish the entire judicial branch of government? What’s even the point?

> The way this works today, a person is competence at raising children is untill social services prove otherwise. Kinda like innocent until proved guilty.

Nobody is talking about 16 year olds or abortions. Are you sure you’re not deliberately changing the topic and really are debating in good faith?

Why do you believe it’s appropriate to compare a random 16 year old with a convicted criminal, who is awaiting sentencing?

> a person is competence at raising children is untill social services prove otherwise. Kinda like innocent until proved guilty

And no one is arguing against that. You’re making a straw man argument.