strongpigeon

Google Ad revenue didn’t drop, but it also didn’t grow as much as the market anticipated (search grew 12% vs expectations of 16%)

The 520 and I-90 bridges in Seattle are built with floating concrete pontoons.

This is awfully unimaginative. I don’t see people using this. Where is the incentive to continue your conversation with the sponsored agent as opposed to, you know, the one you’re already talking to.

You’re partly right. It’s indeed mostly about AdX but also because Google owns all three sides of the equation (publisher-side via AdSense (and to a lesser extent DFP), AdX, and buy-side via Google Ads)

Sophisticated advertisers measure “incrementality”, which is exactly what you’re talking about. Alas, most advertisers are not sophisticated.

I thought this was pretty well known already. Being “overfat” is the problem, not being overweight (though they’re often correlated). BMI is really easy to measure, and is mostly accurate, that’s why it’s so pervasive. However it remains a pretty rudimentary metric (and really should use the third power or your height instead of the second).

> Lastly, and perhaps most egregiously, Google quietly stopped respecting budget caps by a factor of 2x. For example campaigns we’ve been running for years with $1000 daily budget caps suddenly began spending $2000+ per day

When I worked on Google Ads (I left in 2020), I remember this one tripping a lot of people. As I remember it, the limit for a single day is indeed 2x daily budget, but over a month it will average to it. This is supposed to give more flexibility to the auto bidder.

Noteworthy:

- Negative free cash flow for the quarter

- $98B in unrealized gains on equity securities

- Cloud revenue are up 82% to $24.8B

What’s crazy is how Oracle’s free cash flows have gone from “money-printing machine” to deep in the red due to their data center investments. My guess is that some of those cuts are to try to balance that?

At the risk of sounding overly negative, these things are pretty much always vanity projects. Someone wanted a really cool boat and managed to get some investors onboard. It’s more about an aesthetic than a business case.

We’re talking here about a fairly large crew that will transport a small amount of cargo while taking a really long time. On top of that, these aren’t container ship so loading/unloading will take a long time. There is no economic case here.

The only way you can make this somewhat work is by selling the aesthetic/story. E.g.: this coffee was shipped by sailboat. But even then, notice how every company linked in the article of another commenter aren’t actually operating anymore…

Echoing the article, anyone who has experienced both will agree: it’s far easier to work with an under engineered code base than an over engineered one.

The second point is only true if you don't do any RL, right?