tech bubble v4.5: please subscribe to my ennuifans

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > YOSPOS > tech bubble v4.5: please subscribe to my ennuifans

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qirex: Feb 15, 2001

infernal machines posted:

i love that every individual steaming service is now approaching a significant fraction of the price of a cable sub. i'm sure this is indefinitely sustainable and won't lead to any kind of market collapse

this is by design. they're making the streaming market more annoying and expensive to try to push you back onto cable which is impossible to cancel, share passwords, etc.

# ¿ Oct 30, 2019 16:17

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 17, 2022 08:04

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

yet another amazing softbank bet

quote:

Fair.com, a startup building a flexible car ownership business that is valued at $1.2 billion — backed by some $500 million in equity from SoftBank and others, plus billions more dollars in debt funding — said today that it will be laying off 40% of its staff. On top of this, it is removing its CFO, Tyler Painter, the brother of the CEO and co-founder (and car business veteran) Scott Painter. He’s being replaced in the interim by Kirk Shryoc.

quote:

Scott Painter, the founder of SoftBank-backed car leasing startup Fair.com, has resigned following last week’s layoffs and announcement of a planned restructuring, The Verge has learned. SoftBank’s Adam Hieber is taking over as interim CEO. Painter’s brother, who was Fair’s CFO, left the company last week.

“As I’ve said so often in the last few days - - what we do hasn’t changed; how we do it must change,” Painter said in an email to staff that was obtained by The Verge. “I’m so incredibly proud of the company and the team we have built, and I’m not going anywhere. I will continue to be Fair’s fiercest advocate, and I’m here to support the entire team, including the team of experts we’ve brought in to help sharpen Fair’s focus on sustainable growth.”

Painter founded Fair in 2016 after founding and selling TrueCar, a massive automotive buyers’ guide website. The company grew to around 700 employees over the last three years, and bought up a few similar car leasing and subscription startups along the way.

weird that apparently putting your relatives in officer level positions isn't a giant red flag for them

# ¿ Oct 30, 2019 19:51

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

I'm going to guess that from facebook's point of view all the thousands of awful identical chud groups called like "patriots united" or "greater america" paying per post for increased visibility of their racist memes won't count as "political advertising"

# ¿ Oct 30, 2019 22:14

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

infernal machines posted:

sure, but platforms are expensive

are they really? I always thought the issues with writers starting their own site is startup costs, [need content for several months before revenue spins up] and not having existing relationships with advertisers or a sales team since cutting google out gets you 30% more money

# ¿ Oct 31, 2019 07:05

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

yes people are constantly talking about how much they love ads in this forum

# ¿ Oct 31, 2019 16:42

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

Krankenstyle posted:

hes always been a republican

probably voted for paul "the dumbest governor (and that's saying a LOT)" lepaige

multiple times

# ¿ Oct 31, 2019 17:22

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

millnials are killing... vaping :confused:

quote:

Altria Group wrote down the value of its $12.8 billion investment in Juul Labs by a third, the tobacco giant revealed Thursday during its earnings results.

“We’re not pleased to take this impairment charge in Juul,” said Howard Willard, Altria’s CEO., during Altria’s earnings call. “We did not expect this dramatic change in the regulatory environment.”

Across the U.S. a number of states and local governments have taken action to either ban flavored e-cigarettes or e-cigarettes altogether in response to a growing number of deaths and illnesses tied to vaping products as well as a sharp spike in the number of youths who are now using e-cigarettes.

In December, Altria Group invested $12.8 billion into Juul for a 35% investment stake. And in February, Altria boasted how Juul’s revenues had soared to $1 billion in 2018 from approximately $200 million in the previous year.

maybe the whole thing was just a huge fad?

# ¿ Oct 31, 2019 18:16

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

general purpose "business" people have always been frauds and the whole idea of being able to have a leadership position in a large organization without years of domain knowledge is just a veneer created to streamline getting a bunch of your bros in somewhere and stripping out all the value

# ¿ Oct 31, 2019 18:20

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

infernal machines posted:

the problem is the value was the ad space sold via the content, and they proceeded to absolutely tank that almost immediately by replacing the people managing both the content and the ad sales. so to the extent that they're stripping value it's seems to be solely by means of their salaries.

the amounts of cheap debt these firms can get means they're not even trying that hard, it's just easier to get in there and try stuff because it's not your money so this is like the media exec D team

haveblue posted:

isn't this often the intentional private equity vulture business plan? take over a company, redirect the entire gross revenue to yourself, walk away after it implodes

to a degree yes but the G/O guys seem exceptionally dumb

# ¿ Oct 31, 2019 18:30

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

Shame Boy posted:

aren't those nuts the reason like everyone in indonesia has mouth cancer or am I thinking of something else

idk but he's rolling pretty deep on the johnny depp man bracelet game

# ¿ Oct 31, 2019 19:01

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

Xaris posted:

ban airbnb imo

it turns out when most of your customer base is landlords they get up to tons of shady bullshit, almost like they'd been pulling this kind of sleazy crap for years before this company existed

# ¿ Oct 31, 2019 19:54

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

Broken Machine posted:

i'm willing to believe that an entire management team of 50s and 60s white guys from forbes are that incompetent, rather than malicious

big surprise there's a bunch of links between these clowns and the tronc crew

# ¿ Oct 31, 2019 21:44

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

Bulgakov posted:

that quote in particular got me so mad

what a scab

there is no ethical tourism under capitalism

# ¿ Oct 31, 2019 22:57

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

PIZZA.BAT posted:

there’s nothing i’d like to see more than zuckerbergs browser history

eating toast
how to eat toast not weird
how to eat toast not weird wikihow
how long is staring at blank wall in empty room weird
Skinner box
Skinner box adult size
Skinner box adult size -fetish
worlds greyest tshirt
worlds greyest tshirt “crewneck”
optimal blink frequency
how bad of a crime is blackmailing senators

# ¿ Nov 1, 2019 03:52

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

Internet Janitor posted:

every hci researcher i have worked with has been weirdly obsessed with minority report

i don't get it. even the film itself does a lot to point out why its designs aren't great

that movie caused like a decade of bad waste of money projects because dumb people became obsessed with it

# ¿ Nov 3, 2019 17:42

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

Sagebrush posted:

there was a paper at SIGCHI one year that made big waves bc its thesis was "stop doing all this pretend user testing where you showed your interface to the eight other young white male grad students in your lab. it's meaningless and only done to pretend that the work is scientific. just write up the design and evaluate it through critique"

the responses were evenly split between "THANK YOU" and "but if we don't do user testing, the work will not be scientific "

the only reason people get a masters in hci is because they want to teach it or want to work at google or netflix, the only two remaining companies I know of who care about HCIs

the academic practice is so far removed from real world UI/UX activity it's hilarious

no/pitiful levels of design education
no project management
focus on "correct" heuristics over user or business need
focus on single issue validation [eg research] over whole system validation

there's plenty of hcis who are working as designers, developers, researchers, etc. but their education was mostly about the masters degree itself and in my experience the ones who don't have other skills flail outside of organizations willing to insulate them from the realities of software

I was once at a table at a conference with an entire google design team [all hcis] and not a single one of them could sketch even a basic wireframe

# ¿ Nov 3, 2019 20:42

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

looking cool is a valid criteria for evaluating a visualization

why do you think everyone uses donut instead of pie charts now?

# ¿ Nov 3, 2019 20:44

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

animist posted:

Starting to think that some problems can be solved in ways that aren't "Add more software"

most organizations are going to try that solution at least once though because it has the least capital outlay [vs building physical objects] and the most margin to capture for the vendor, who's incentivized to make unrealistic promises

# ¿ Nov 4, 2019 17:52

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

which "we're sorry" song will they use in their inevitable rebrand tv campaign? I predict movin' on up by primal scream even though vw just used it recently

# ¿ Nov 4, 2019 18:08

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

rotor posted:

i'm thinkin maybe some stone roses

right here right now by fatboy slim?

violins or a gospel chorus are extremely important in apology commercials

# ¿ Nov 4, 2019 18:36

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

uber only lost one and a fifth billion dollars last quarter which is an improvement over the ~five billion dollars last time. stock is down 5% after hours, only $1 above its all time low to date

qirex fucked around with this message at 23:52 on Nov 4, 2019

# ¿ Nov 4, 2019 23:40

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

chestnut santabag posted:

Any idea on what is the total loss they've accrued over time?

probably at least 20 billion dollars, all to make a couple dozen people super rich

# ¿ Nov 5, 2019 15:19

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

I'd be surprised if more than a few dozen people at uber cleared even a million dollars from their stock after taxes. that's nothing to sneeze at but by bay area standards that just means you can make a down payment on a house and end up with a mortgage under ten grand a month. travis, a few of the early officers and the early vcs got all the presale money

on a lighter note, this is what happens when you don't properly test financial software:

quote:

A glitch in the Robinhood Markets Inc. system is allowing users to trade stocks with excess borrowed funds, giving them access to what amounts to free money.

Dubbed the “infinite money cheat code” by users of Reddit Inc.’s WallStreetBets forum, the bug is being exploited, according to users on the forum. One trader bragged about a $1 million position funded by a $4,000 deposit.

Robinhood is “aware of the isolated situations and communicating directly with customers,” spokesperson Lavinia Chirico said in an email response to questions.

The Menlo Park, California-based money-management software designer touts trading “free from commission fees.” Robinhood Gold customers are invited to “supercharge” their investing by paying $5 a month to trade on margin, or money borrowed from the company.

Here’s how the trade works. Users of Robinhood Gold are selling covered calls using money borrowed from Robinhood. Nothing wrong with that. The problem arises when Robinhood incorrectly adds the value of those calls to the user’s own capital. And that means that the more money a user borrows, the more money Robinhood will lend them for future trading.

# ¿ Nov 5, 2019 20:34

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

Optimus_Rhyme posted:

Like, how do you ever get another job after this? The division you were put in charge of self destructed because of your bad decisions. It doesnt exist any more, its bonkers.

here’s how: [from his linkedin]

wasn’t forbes a money losing vanity project for most of its existence? maybe these dudes who all worked there never actually learned to do the job

# ¿ Nov 6, 2019 04:38

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

Progressive JPEG posted:

50 story soulless concrete apartments would be a drastic improvement for sf in terms of cultural standing

this is 100% false, as the giant soulless buildings they're putting up now loving suck from the perspective of creating a community since there's like 4 retail units for every 100 apartments. the luxury towers end up with an extremely overpriced restaurant as the only retail tenant while the shorter block-long ones in SoMA and mission bay ones choose four from a list of: nail salon, hair salon, hipster barber shop, dry cleaner, pet toy/groomer, somewhat overpriced restaurant, group exercise studio, coffee shop, bank branch.

we should be building central paris/the east village, not west harlem. high density housing without high density retail/services makes unlivable spaces. alternately go hong kong/singapore and put a 3-5 story mall in the bottom of every apartment tower.

# ¿ Nov 6, 2019 14:45

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

bob dobbs is dead posted:

Stick some 50 story malls around

someone spent 5 years and $150 million building a mall on market street and since they finished it 3 years ago it's sat empty

# ¿ Nov 6, 2019 15:00

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

bob dobbs is dead posted:

You gotta have the 50 story soulless concrete apartments first, revolutions start in cities, like proper cities

there's never been a revolution in a city with tons of skyscrapers to the best of my knowledge

I mean they're trying in hong kong but china would rather wreck the whole spot than give them what they want

# ¿ Nov 6, 2019 16:24

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

Bulgakov posted:

I forgot google spent that much on ITA for the flight thing

which I thought they announced is being killed off? hard to keep track

it seems weird to kill it off since they're keeping the ita system itself running since it's still the backbone of the whole industry

# ¿ Nov 6, 2019 19:32

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

Progressive JPEG posted:

today’s sf residents don’t want culture, if they did they’d be la residents

and the fact that la is so much better despite terrible sprawl shows that building design doesn’t fix nonexistent culture

it’s just like any techie trying to fix social problems with technical solutions

most people who live in san francisco aren't techies and you certainly seem like someone who knows a whole lot about the city

# ¿ Nov 6, 2019 19:54

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

the sf housing market is a lot more complicated than "build more," it's ended up where it is because aging nimbys and landlords have teamed up to designate most of the city be a historically significant area that must be preserved in amber forever so there's only a few areas where building more is even possible and in those areas the city has done nothing to actually make them livable

those giant "soulless" 50 story buildings in hong kong tend to have schools, libraries, restaurants, grocery stores, rec centers, bars, shopping, medical centers, post offices, daycare, and a train station in the bottom of them. in a new soma development the only thing on the ground floor is a "public open space" with one sculpture and some plants that's open 10am-3pm monday through friday

# ¿ Nov 6, 2019 20:22

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

other factors ruining sf housing:

developers incentivized to make lower density luxury units
prop 13 encouraging flipping since that's the only way property taxes go up
the rest of the bay area [except for oakland] nuking all semblances of nightlife in the 1990s
lack of available construction crews
increased costs means these new "luxury" units are mostly plywood boxes that won't last more than 20 years

central paris has 3x the population density of sf with exactly one building over 7 stories tall [and everyone hates it]. high rises aren't the cure all solution, at least not the way we're building them

# ¿ Nov 6, 2019 20:35

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

PIZZA.BAT posted:

galaxy-brain american landlords would rather earn zero money than admit the market can't support their rent

oh god so much of this

there was an awesome little produce store on polk I used to shop at, the building owner tried to raise their rent their rent from 3k to 10k so they closed and it's sat empty for almost five years. the "for rent" sign came unstuck and slid down the window two years ago and has never been fixed. of course if anyone proposes a blight tax every developer in the city phones up their pet supervisor and they go nowhere

# ¿ Nov 6, 2019 22:00

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

holy moly

quote:

Two former Twitter employees have been charged with spying on user accounts on behalf of the Saudi Arabian government, according to The Washington Post.

The Justice Department announced the charges today after one of the former employees was reportedly arrested. That suspect, Ahmad Abouammo, was charged with spying on three Twitter accounts for the government, according to the Post.

Another former employee was charged with accessing data on more than 6,000 Twitter accounts, including one tied to a confidant of murdered journalist and critic of the Saudi government, Jamal Khashoggi. A third man, who prosecutors said acted as an intermediary between the employees and the Saudi government, was also charged. Those two suspects are still at large.

According to the Post, prosecutors linked the three men to a charity operated by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has been tied by US officials to Khashoggi’s killing and has worked to undermine dissidents in the country. Prosecutors reportedly found that the former employees had been seeking data on prominent critics of the government.

The charges outline a major breach of security for Silicon Valley. In a statement, a Twitter spokesperson said the company “limits access to sensitive account information to a limited group of trained and vetted employees.”

“We understand the incredible risks faced by many who use Twitter to share their perspectives with the world and to hold those in power accountable,” the spokesperson said. “We have tools in place to protect their privacy and their ability to do their vital work. We’re committed to protecting those who use our service to advocate for equality, individual freedoms, and human rights.”

I guess this is way easier than hacking them externally. also loving laffo at twitter's response "we have tools in place" aka "someone runs an audit log when we get subpoenaed"

# ¿ Nov 6, 2019 22:44

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

fishmech posted:

ah yes the two options: trash 1950s city san francisco and trash 1860s city paris

lmbo

since you are pathologically incapable of thinking of any point of reference outside the tri state area how's this: would you rather live in a place like the east village or like the alphabet city towers by the river?

all those cheap midcentury le corbu knockoff towers they put up as public housing are the worst places in new york and have continued to be for 40 years as the rest of the city has changed

# ¿ Nov 7, 2019 00:20

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

today in "google has a tiny handful worthwhile products and everything else they do is garbage" their security focused splunk knockoff is dead/dying

quote:

In early 2018, Google’s parent conglomerate Alphabet announced the birth of a new "independent" startup that was supposed to revolutionize cybersecurity. Chronicle was meant to be a new type of startup. One of its products was designed to structure, organize, and help companies understand their security related data—a "Google Photos for businesses’ network security," as Forbes put it when the company announced its first product this year.

The promise was radical: Chronicle would leverage machine learning and Alphabet’s near-endless well of security telemetry data about known malware and internet infrastructure and use it to help security teams at companies detect intrusions that could threaten a company’s network. Crucially, Chronicle would also remain independent from Google, according to Stephen Gillett, the startup’s CEO.

"We want to 10x the speed and impact of security teams’ work by making it much easier, faster and more cost-effective for them to capture and analyze security signals that have previously been too difficult and expensive to find," Gillett wrote in a blog post announcing Chronicle. "We know this mission is going to take years, but we’re committed to seeing it through."

At the time it was unclear what Chronicle was going to be. But industry observers were excited for what they thought was going to be a significant disruptor in an industry that is full of relatively old technologies such as antivirus and firewalls, is rife with products that offer solutions in search of a problem and outright snake oil.

Just a year and a half after the announcement, however, Chronicle has been folded back into Google, within its Cloud department—and some employees feel Chronicle management abandoned and betrayed the original vision. Chronicle’s CEO and chief security officer have already left and the chief technology officer is leaving later this month, Motherboard has learned. Others are eyeing the exit.

"Chronicle is dead," a current employee told Motherboard. "Stephen [Gillett] and Google killed it."

someday a real ceo is going to have a lot of fun trimming like 2/3 of what they do and laying off tens of thousands of people

# ¿ Nov 7, 2019 16:19

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

infernal machines posted:

it's weird how they keep discovering "the algorithm" is not some panacea and just shoving metric fuckloads of data at ML doesn't automagically make it good at solving certain types of problems.

also weird that their hiring practice of "get pretty much anyone who meets our specific elitist top 50 bscs hiring criteria and throw hundreds of them at problems" hasn't yielded and magical results either

# ¿ Nov 7, 2019 16:25

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

alphabet as a concept is a flawed idea, their only actual things of value are search, adwords, gmail and youtube

# ¿ Nov 7, 2019 16:26

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

laffo uber might have to pay a license fee to google to do self driving or rewrite it from scratch

quote:

“The independent software expert recently made adverse findings as to certain functions in our autonomous vehicle software.” Uber wrote in its 10-Q filing. “These findings, which are final, will likely result in a license fee or in design changes that could require substantial time and resources to implement, and could limit or delay our production of autonomous vehicle technologies.”

Uber’s statement comes just a few short months after Anthony Levandowski, the ex-Google engineer accused of stealing trade secrets and taking them to Uber, was charged by federal prosecutors with theft and attempted theft of trade secrets. Levandowski is alleged to have stolen 14,000 documents from Google containing information about its self-driving car program.

In response to the expert’s report, Waymo told Reuters that the findings “further confirm Waymo’s allegations that Uber misappropriated our software intellectual property. We will continue to take the necessary steps to ensure our confidential information is not being used by Uber.” Uber declined to comment to Reuters on the report.

meanwhile the financial press doing its job

quote:

Uber Technologies still looks like a money maker for patient investors.

The ride-sharing pioneer reported 30% revenue growth for the third quarter from a year earlier, but also a net loss of $1.16 billion according to GAAP metrics. With revenue on track to top $15 billion over the next 12 months, the stock is trading at less than four times sales. With that kind of top-line growth and with gross margins around 50%, I would expect this stock to trade closer to six times or eight times sales.

# ¿ Nov 7, 2019 17:01

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

rotor posted:

maps

maps, like android, is a loss leading gateway to ads

# ¿ Nov 7, 2019 18:16

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 17, 2022 08:04

qirex: Feb 15, 2001

rotor posted:

now correct me if i'm wrong but all of the goog services can be described in this way

yuuup

e: I separated out search, gmail and youtube because they sell different kinds of ads

qirex fucked around with this message at 18:23 on Nov 7, 2019

# ¿ Nov 7, 2019 18:21

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > YOSPOS > tech bubble v4.5: please subscribe to my ennuifans

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