My sister had an issue with RCS not working on her Samsung. It turned out she had a SIM card too old for AT&T to support RCS on it and some Samsung related software issues related to their SMS apps and Google’s SMS apps conflicting. A fresh SIM and a couple software tweaks netted her RCS.
I’d assume this isn’t the issue here but RCS seems to be a bit fickle.
There isn't specialized hardware support. As I remember Samsung had their own RCS implementation with some carriers (T-Mobile, possibly AT&T but I'm not sure there). They sunset this and moved to Google Messages. Those android devices would report which servers they used. This of course is hidden from the Apple user.
I was going to make the MMS section of this post about the 'ISIS Wallet' boondoggle that is the closest business parallel I can think of to RCS and actually did require specialized hardware support. Same 3 carriers I've been trying RCS with on the iPhone tried to make a mobile payment wallet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softcard They rebranded it to Softcard since the 'We support ISIS' branding aged like milk. Google Wallet competed and took over the assets, sort of like what happened with RCS.
For the specialized hardware... the SIM card needed to have an embedded secure element that handled the keys for the payment system and the phone needed to support connecting to that secure element on the SIM card. I think these started to hit the market in 2010 or so, and you would have had to have a SIM card new enough to support it, here's a pic of the T-Mobile one, I had one: https://www.tmonews.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Screen-Sh...
Community Colleges being considered corrupt is not an accusation I’ve heard. Is there something behind this or are you grouping them with the issues seen with Public Universities and grants/loans fueling spiraling tuition?
The Community College I went to was about $20 per unit and offered a great education. Currently they’re $46 per unit. The instructors worked in the industry and were sharper than my 200 level University course
instructors I paid $100 per unit for the year after my Associates Degree. I went to University as the Great Recession happened and had to go back to Community College as financial markets melted (and some life events happened) and that Associates Degree and an additional quarter of a Bachelors has served me well. I got my first job in software through a Community College affiliated internship, hopped to a Startup, and after a lot of years in between I’m on here musing with the rest of the industry.
There are certainly “Extension”
or non Trades “Certificate Only” programs but when looking at LinkedIn’s Alumni view they’ve minted a lot of Solar Techs, Electricians, and Building Engineers. I took Electronics courses as an elective with the PV guys and it was a lot of fun and seems rather profitable for that cohort.
Ergo, I’m genuinely curious to know if this has been derailed in some way at large. Do you have any links to news on this?
As I am no longer in the business of higher ed, I do not have any links but do have work experience at the CC level as well as an Associate, though no BS. The reason you don't see accusations is because it is kept on the downlow by the powers that be. I can say that in the time that I spent working at a particular CC, multiple CC presidents were kicked out for diverting funds into their private bank accounts. They were hired even after it was known that they got kicked out of other previous CCs. Millions of dollars in Financian Aid fraud was an issue in one state, in particular by fake Ghost Students enrolling only for the Financial Aid. Here's a link to that story: https://www.opencampus.org/2025/06/16/financial-aid-fraud-is...
The administrators tend to be overpaid, half of the degrees that are offered are useless, mine included. Why are they useless, because there will never be sufficient employment for the graduates. Even knowing this economic reality, the college admins still insist on having the main goal as "graduation," not "employability."
In my view, only auto, nursing, medical subjects and other practical trades guarantee employment, and thus are worth the $46 per unit as you put it. Please note that at one time, CCs were free, in the state that I reside in, though I myself went to school when the cost was $15 per unit.
You should check out this link to take a look at the outrageous salaries that a lot of administrators generate: https://transparentcalifornia.com/ The problem with this is that the various student department and programs get a disproportionate allocation of the funds, with some getting the bulk, and others getting just a tiny slice of the budget that the office of education provides.
Here's a simple example of the news that never gets carried by mainstream media.
In last November 2024 Election, in California, for example, there were various measures which passed, that forced communities to pay taxes to pay for Community College expansions and repairs. People don't realize that in one school in particular the same thing was done some years or so before, and the money was mysteriously mishandled. This is a common occurrence in that state, for example. http://www.bigbadbonds.com/CALBONDS/ballot-argument-referral...
This has been the status quo prior to Trump. The federal funds have had a tendency to disappear. I noticed you used LinkedIn as a reference above, but it has its own issues with Fraud, aka Ghost Jobs posts and fake scammers offering users jobs that don't exist. I myself got approached by one and reported it LinkedIn support. In my view, LinkedIn is just another scam site that posts fake jobs just to lure people into purchasing their Pro subscription. I get that message and reminder every single day, so I disabled most notifications and don't use LinkedIn as a job search engine, anymore.
Apologies, way too long of a response and I need to have some Soylent Green.
I’ve met both. Even when I disagree with them I appreciate the ones that actually put the work in. Most recently I’ve worked with a string of them that barely understand how their companies make money and certainly couldn’t do any of the actual jobs there. Performance is independent from them being on the payroll.
Which is good because a lot of such matching and ML use cases for products I’ve worked on at several companies fit into this. The problem I’ve seen is when decision making capabilities are inferred from/conflated with text classification and sentiment analysis.
In my current role this seems like a very interesting approach to keep up with pop culture references and internet speak that can change as quickly as it takes the small ML team I work with to train or re-train a model. The limit is not a tech limitation, it’s a person-hours and data labeling problem like this one.
Given I have some people on my team that like to explore this area I’m going to see if I can run a similar case study to this one to see if it’s actually a fit.
Edit: At the risk of being self deprecating and reductive: I’d say a lot of products I’ve worked on are profitable/meaningful versions of Silicon Valley’s Hot Dog/Not Hot Dog.
These have been around since I last used WINE in anger on macOS. Basically think of it as a container for running an app in WINE with all the settings predefined for best compatibility. The homepage doesn’t really highlight this but you can look through the docs for more information.
I used it a decade ago and it was handy at the time. I’d hope it got better over time. Generally I know enough about how Windows works I didn’t have much trouble using normal Wine installations of software but the bottles did make some Adobe products easier to use.
It was funny being able to use Photoshop 7 in Wine but not the native macOS version.
As an aside that absolutely is not intended to detract from your point, Sweetgreen has always had some sort of “This is what we do but also make salads because money.” Like when they were a lifestyle brand with annual concerts. The first time I went into a Sweetgreen I was very confused by the 10 foot tall poster of Kendrick Lamar performing and promotion for that year’s convention and concert.
Could you imagine being offered a ticket to Arbyfest or Jambacon?
Like you said, please just make a good salad.
I got Google’s DPA update email included a number of Uber’s Model training side gigs and analytic products. I’m guessing this all came out of the Self Driving car project, but it’s another - albeit less goofy - data point of “We’re and AI Company but we do X for money.”
I feel like I see a few of these every month.
A few years ago Foresquare realized their business model was less profitable than that of the data aggregator they used so they bought the aggregator and basically became that company given the other hooks they have. I sort of wonder if that’s what is running through some of these companies’ C suite meetings.
It’s not good but it’s commonplace for every company these days to be a {whatever pumps the stock price/gets us the most VC interest} company that does {original business model} on the side.
The difference between good CEOs and bad CEOs is how aware they are of the game.
Good CEOs say they're a {whatever pumps the stock price/gets us the most VC interest} company, but continue to invest and excel in being a {core competency / original business model} company.
Ugh your last point has been the last half decade of CEOs at the places I’ve worked. Add in a smattering of other C Suite members as well.
My personal theory is we’re experiencing people who came into senior leadership in the 2010s and could make money even with poor choices by riding the hype cycle and we’re all paying for their one year of experience ten times.
As someone who has had to implement these blocks, it’s not generally done because anyone wants to, it’s because someone passed a law that requires us to do it. I don’t get to override the ITAR or Entities list just because I don’t feel it’s fair someone is on it.
Didn't CF CEO post in March 2019 that they were going to start working with govts on suggestions for how to implement laws that would get them to block things people didn't like?
Could be. Regulatory capture is evident in a lot of places. TurboTax isn’t accidentally a very easy to use Tax filing software. It gets things right I’ve had expensive CPAs get wrong. TurboTax has more lobbying dollars than the CPA with an office down the street.
Jets are also simply too loud for homes under the takeoff path in standard use. There’s what amounts to a ghost town next to LAX due to this and the history of the airport.
Burbank Airport has quiet hours and has left a bunch of commercially zoned area under that takeoff path.
I’m in Atlanta now and they bought up a lot of land around the airport when redeveloping it and do similar zoning tricks for the buffer. One of the buffer zones is the Porsche Experience. It’s loud as heck when you’re on the part of the track closest but not bad where the corporate HQ and paddock is
I recently toured SEA. The third (western-most) runway there is too close to homes to use regularly for takeoffs due to noise. Though the FAA has made the Port of Seattle no promises, they apparently do tend to use the third runway as much as possible for landings only, and not late at night as much as possible.
I just looked that up (Atlanta) on https://noise-map.com/ and man, that's way not enough zoning tricking in my book. Not that it's much different in other cities (or countries).
There's no need to zone for airport noise in Atlanta because the highway passing through the city center and hotrodded cars already are much louder and more disruptive in practice. I wish I was joking.
That's wild, I was in LA recently for work and drove by that area and wondered what was up with the street grid. I figured it must be something like this given the airport.
MDW immediately came to mind as an airport closely surrounded by neighborhoods. I've always wondered what it's like to live in one of those neighborhoods. Is it a perpetual nuisance or do you get used to it?
Not at MDW but there are plenty such places and yes, some people do "get used to it". But there are studies that show that you increase health risks from such levels of noise even if you get used enough to it so that you can sleep through them. Search for increases in problems of cardiovascular health from car and plane noise.
And some people just won't really get used to it. I've lived near airplane noise and I never got used to it. I also don't sleep better with white noise. I sleep worse.
First time I was ever on a flight that landed at Midway, I was pretty freaked out by the visuals as we were descending. It's like ... "we're going to land on a house... we're going to Land On A House... we're going to LAND ON A HOUSE!! ... OMG, there's a runway <phew>".
> Developers working over 1gbps Internet connections often don't realize the data gluttony of the software they write.
As a developer and AirBnB owner, what I’ve also noticed is the gluttony of the toolchain as well. I’ve had complaints about a 500/30 connection from remote working devs (very clear from the details they give) which is the fastest you can get for much of the metro I am in.
At home I can get up to 5/5 on fiber because we’re in a special permitting corridor and AT&T can basically do whatever they want with their fiber using an on old discontinued sewer run as their conduit.
I stick to the 1/1 and get 1.25 for “free” since we’re so over-provisioned. The fastest Xfinity provides in the same area as my AirBnB is an unreliable 230/20 which means my “free” excess bandwidth is higher than what many people near me can pay for.
I expect as a result of all this, developers on very fast connections end up having enough layers of corporate VPN, poorly optimized pipelines, a lot of dependency on external servers, etc that by the time you’re connected to work your 1/1 connection is about 300/300 (at least mine is) so the expectation is silently set that very fast internet will exist for on-Corp survival and that the off-corp experience is what others have.
Not only bandwidth but also latency can vary dramatically depending on where you are. Some of your guests might have been trying to connect to a VPN that tunnels all their traffic halfway around the world. That's much, much worse than getting a few hundred Mbps less bandwidth.
I had this very same argument today. It was claimed that a once per year data mapping process of unstructured data that we sell via our product - would not scale. The best part is if we somehow had ten of these to do it would still be something that would take less than a year. Currently it takes a single person a few weeks and makes millions of dollars. This is the sort of fiddly work that you can find an Ontologist for and they’re happy to do it for the pay.
I’m unsure what is unattractive about this but I guess anything can be a reason to spend a year playing with LLMs these days.
I’ve had the same problem with compliance work (lightly regulated market) and suddenly the scaling complaints go away when the renewals stop happening.
I’d assume this isn’t the issue here but RCS seems to be a bit fickle.
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