Survival of the fittest (or largest)

Thailand. Private pay.

Take a ride share car to the private hospital.

Greeted by concierge when I walk in. She asks why I’m here and then directs me to another desk on another floor.

Entering the next room feels a bit like a hotel lobby. There are big sofas and comfortable lighting. It feels cozy even though it’s a large space. There’s a Starbucks. Another concierge approaches me. I explain why I’m here and I’m sat down and handed an iPad where I can fill in some medical background. They have my record from a previous visit so it’s quick. I confirm that I will pay with a credit card instead of using any insurance.

In about 10 minutes I’m brought to a room where a nurse catches my weight and blood pressure. Then I’m brought to the patient exam room.

A few minutes later the doctor comes in and performs his examination. He makes his diagnosis types some notes into his computer. He asks me to come back for a follow-up in one week and pick up my prescription on the way out.

Leaving the exam room, another nurse catches me to hand me the diagnosis paperwork and points me to the pharmacy.

I walk to the pharmacy and hand them my paperwork. They collect my payment for the whole visit and ask me to wait until my name is called to pick up the prescription.

About 10 minutes later the prescription is ready and I’m out the door with a small bag of drugs and about $125 out of my wallet.

The service is comprehensive and everything is available in one building. For this country it’s a bit expensive but you feel like you’re very well taken care of and it’s instant.

In response to the title, he better be driving the competitors vehicles often to understand what they are doing well.

I think this is a classic case of a company being unable to disrupt itself.

Ford makes internal combustion engines. Ford makes F-150s. Undoubtedly every executive, marketing guy, R&D engineer, and factory worker is focused on how many F-150s are being produced and sold. Anybody who shows up to a meeting suggesting they don’t sell more F150 is booted out the door (metaphorically).

They probably also thought there’s no way a Chinese mobile phone / tea kettle / Wi-Fi router manufacturer could ever kick their ass with a car. Yet here we are.

Makes sense, it seems like Caddy is like a Swiss army knife and nginx is now the whole Home Depot.

A decade ago or so nginx was the swiss army knife to Apache

I’m an old school nginx pro. So I keep using nginx for reverse proxies because it’s what I know. What does caddy have to offer (or traefik is anyone wants to jump in)? Are they just optimized for this function and more modern?

UBI is probably a good idea but it’s coming too slowly for anyone to rely on. Even if UBI is fully implemented, I suspect it will be life sustaining but not a life fulfilling. So humanity still needs to find purpose.

It’s hard to imagine a scenario where someone cannot be trained to do something new. Isn’t that a core feature of humans?

Next, how shall we define value? I argue that humans can always create some kind of value that machines cannot, even if only because a human is involved.

We still value actual art over AI generated art. We value uniqueness and rarity. We value the faults that are inherent from things that are natural and organic.

Tons of the jobs people did a hundred years ago in developed countries are now gone or have been streamlined down to require fewer people. Yet there are more people on earth now than there ever have been before and arguably worldwide hunger is at its lowest point. So somehow we have figured out how to survive despite vast amounts of automation already. It seems unlikely that our new “AI” tools are going to somehow dramatically disrupt this balance.

I think Gary Ridgway, the green river killer from the Seattle area, famouslygot out of questioning because he seemed honest and unintelligent. The cops didn’t think it could possibly be him.

Echo chambers and all, yeah it’s likely TikTok has this issue too. TikTok gives you content you want to see, because you’ll stay around and watch more ads. No surprise here.

conservative TikTok users tend to stick together. They rarely follow accounts with opposing views or mainstream media accounts. Liberal users, on the other hand, are more likely to follow a mix of accounts, including those they might disagree with.

That’s weird and somewhat descriptive of my anecdotal experience with many people I know. I wonder why this is.

All these minorities may share a common problem yet it’s unlikely they have the same vision for the solution.

Ebay can be really really bad too, Google around and start with the ebay executive team that sent a bloody pigs head to a journalist who said some bad things about ebay

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal

If he’d tried to nurture some goodwill, perhaps the users wouldn’t so harshly reject all attempts at monetization.

Perhaps then he’d be able to afford yachts that don’t look so puny next to those of other social media oligarchs and could go to bed with the satisfaction of having made a profit at least once in his life.

It’s really wild that the guy who co-founded Reddit is so universally hated by the users.

Talk about having completely lost touch.

That’s actually pretty cool. That thing might be forgot about and then found again 10,000 years from now

Is that car in some kind of orbit, or did we just send it?

There are at least 2 of us! I think it was widely reported that the downfall of MySpace was at least partially linked to their use Coldfusion. When they needed to scale and adapt it just wasn’t ready.

I remember that IBM was famously missing the trend in the late 80s/90s and couldn’t understand why regular consumers would ever want to buy a PC. It’s why they gave the PC clone market away, never seriously approached their OS/2 thing, and never really marketed directly to anybody except businesses.

Microsoft really pushed the idea that regular people needed a home PC which laid the foundation for so many people already having the hardware in place to jump on the internet as soon as it became accessible.

For a brief moment it looked like a toss up between Microsoft IIS webservers serving up .asp files (or coldfusion .cf - RIP) vs Apache pushing CGI but in the end the Linux solution was more baked and flexible when it was time to launch and scale an internet startup in that era.

Somebody else would have done what Microsoft did for sure, had they not been there, and I suppose we could be paying AT&T for Unix licenses these days too. But yeah, ultimately both Gates and Torvalds were right in terms of operating systems and well timed.

Both Torvalds and Gates are nerds… Gates decided to monetize it and Torvalds decided to give it away.

But without Microsoft’s “PC on every desktop” vision for the '90s, we may not have seen such an increased demand for server infrastructure which is all running the Linux kernel now.

Arguably Torvalds’ strategy had a greater impact than Gates because now many of us carry his kernel in our pocket. But I think both needed each other to get where we are today.

Interesting, that’s got to be intentional. Microsoft was so slow to webbify their Office suite (and probably thought why should we?it’s printing money!) that they lost out on a generation of startup companies.

The thought of switching back to Microsoft hasn’t even crossed my mind since I moved everything to Google around a decade ago. But now I’m actively de-googling because they’re starting to mess with the core solutions.

There was a time when gsuite was a scrappy little service that gave you a serious option that wasn’t Micro$oft (which at the time was deep into shady monopolistic practices) at a fraction of the price with replacements that were good enough for most small businesses.

If memory serves, the initial price was around $20 or perhaps $50 a YEAR per user. It was a steal if you were used to paying 10 times that for an annual subscription to Microsoft Office Pro plus needing to support a local NT server running Microsoft Exchange and probably a file server that needed backups and antivirus and on and on.

As more and more businesses have gone SaaS and put the whole thing in the cloud, Google has capitalized on this by cranking up the prices while probably scanning and using our data for their benefits somehow (mostly without adding additional features… Google Sheets is nowhere close to feature parity with Excel).

Thankfully we now have way more FOSS and private cloud solutions such as Nextcloud.

I still can’t help but notice, however that feature-wise we really haven’t gone anywhere in 25 plus years.

Injecting AI buttons into Google Workspace or whatever they call it now is probably not a feature that too many of their customers are asking for. But in the never ending push to increase revenue, it seems like now we’re going to get it and that’s the justification for the latest price jump.

Websockets are often used for quality of life features like notifications and websites that are dynamic without needing to be refreshed. Almost went website with any kind of chat will use WS for example. Turning it off will make web browsing a little more annoying.

However websockets are also sometimes used for anti-fraud related software that can also leak information you may deem private. Disabling websockets might prevent that data from getting out but of course all this depends on your threat model.