> They scaled up the team briefly, which meant that lots of weird stuff was tried, but the roadmap was diluted.
Boz never cared for Portal, it wasn't his product. I was one of the original engineers on Portal. The VP running the research lap responsible for Portal was canned in a political coup, and her entire org moved under Boz, merging it with Oculus into the AR/VR team. There was some ham-fisted justification around why a smart home product should be part of AR/VR, but it never really made sense.
Portal had a bunch of other problems, including:
* Massively over-specced hardware, the SoC was the same SoC as the Quest, even though it had no reason to be. The BOM was something like $500. We were selling these units at a huge loss.
* Cambridge Analytica broke right in the middle of development, which completely tanked any remaining trust in the Facebook brand. Everyone knew the product was completely sunk at that point, but nobody wanted to come out and say it. At the last minute we had to stuff a plastic camera cover into the box as a result.
* Boz was convinced we could build a voice assistant for Portal and Quest that was better than Siri, but the Assistant team at FB was completely out of their depth. We ended up right before launch having to sign a deal with Amazon to ship Alexa on the product.
* So much politics. AR/VR had a virtually unlimited budget so there was a massive land grab to hire as many people as possible, with no consideration around what they'd actually work on. Even though Quest and Portal had the same SoCs, they had completely separate Android OS builds and engineering teams, because everyone was trying to build the biggest engineering teams they could. People were constantly leaking shit: I found out we were delaying the project because an executive leaked it to Bloomberg while the executive meeting was still happening.
We bought two portals for elderly relatives, predominantly for video calling, and I don't think there has been another product, then or since, that fitted that use case as well, especially with people who maybe aren't as familiar with smartphones.
So somewhat frustrating when it all started to wind down various bits of functionality disappeared a bit at a time, until finally you had something that would receive calls, but not be able to make them - and perhaps not even that any more.
(About the only downside I saw on it was the messenger vs whatsapp tussle caused a bit too much confusion).
But it was a solid bit of household tech for several years, so +1 for that!
> It's common here in France for credit card operators to have fees in the 5-10% range (or 0.30€ per operation + 2% of the amount)
Interchange in the EU is capped at 0.4% for credit cards. Typical costs for processing are much lower than 5-10%.
For example, Adyen charges the 0.4% interchange + their fee of 0.6% and a flat 0.11€. On a 10€ transaction, that's 2.1%.
In most cases this is cheaper than handling cash. When you accept cash, you have to pay somebody to close and reconcile the drawer, take the cash to the bank (or have a security company do it for you), account for shrinkage / mistakes...it's a bit of a myth that cash is cheaper for businesses to handle, especially in places like the EU where card interchange rates are highly regulated.
Now of course, if your cash is not going the usual routes and isn't getting accounted for in the books...that equation can change.
> Interchange in the EU is capped at 0.4% for credit cards
Still clients pay much more. To be fair, the prices i remember are from 15 years ago, and now there seems to be better offers for small businesses. For example, SumUp proposes 1.75% flat (no per-transaction fee). But yes, i'm quite sure that's not the kind of fees Carrefour or FNAC are paying.
Had a conversation with the landlord of my local pub a few years back, he said he'd go "Card Only" if it wasn't for the handful of patrons that refuse to use card, couple of which are the "Cash is King" Facebook types.
And he was paying his staff under the table in cash anyway! But would still rather just withdraw from the business account, rather than having to deal with handling of customer cash every day.
Indeed, although today I got on a plane at LaGuardia and they made me check my carry on at the gate even though there was plenty of space in the overhead bins ( 60% capacity flight, about half of us had to do this) so YMMV.
No idea why they made us do that, but I had to grab my bag at the luggage claim.
> SpaceX already produces solar panels for the 10,000+ satellites it has in space
No they don't, they procure them from Taiwan Solar Energy Corp. They do not produce or manufacture their own cells, they're using off the shelf components.
> Beneath the Emmanuel Church on Newbury Street in Boston, tucked away in the basement, sits a library
This is underselling it: it's in a side street off Newbury, where nobody would have any reason to go, with a tiny little door about half the size of all the other doors marked "Puppet Library"[1].
I visited many years ago by complete accident: I was out running with some friends on a Tuesday afternoon, we were going down the public alley because Newbury was heaving, and saw this sign. We wandered in, and...yeah, there's a lot of puppets.
There is actually a phrase "free library" commonly seen in older libraries often called a "Carnegie Free Library" because they were created as a philanthropic project by the industrialist Andrew Carnegie. They are called "free libraries" because many libraries in the 19th century were businesses run rather like video stores (if you can remember those) where you had to pay to check out a book, while Carnegie's were free of charge.
Indeed, the Romance cognates of "library" even usually mean bookstore (or maybe bookshelf...etymologically it's just a thing that does something vaguely related to books). Most languages where a cognate of "library" rather than "bibliotheque" means primarily a lending library (which still might be paid) picked it up as a loan from English.
Many original “libraries” ran on the idea that a book is valuable and rarely new - you’d buy your used copy of Plato, read it, and sell it back for almost what you paid for it. This is infinitesimally different from just renting.
> Meanwhile in Germany: Let's stick to combustion engines for at least 10 more years with 500km range and a multiple of energy and maintenance costs...
BMW is heavily invested in Neue Klasse[1], the iX3 has a long waiting list and a 800KM range.
The range estimates use different test procedures. BMW's quoted range uses the WLTP test procedure. China's CLTC test procedure is much more generous.
As noted in the article:
> "The Seal 08’s claimed 1,000+ km CLTC range translates to roughly 620+ miles — though real-world figures under EPA or WLTP testing would be lower. For reference, the recently updated Mercedes-Benz EQS 450+ claims 926 km under WLTP (575 miles) with its new 800V architecture and 118 kWh battery."
To compare the range properly you need to do a real world test of the vehicles on the same circuit in the same conditions.
What's your spreadsheet's coefficient for emotions like fun? BMW doesn't sell cars so much as they sell a brand. It's an emotional play for buyers to need "The Ultimate Driving Machine™."
> Majority of California based companies employee English only or English and Spanish speakers possibly with some Indian language as well [...] Never mind rarer languages like Czech or Greek.
That may be generally true, in this case Apple actually has an engineering team in Czechia that works on biometrics and authentication:
Guess what, they’ll do nothing. If Czech market is small enough for them to fix quotation marks, they’re not fixing Czech keyboard.
OTOH, if an American will whine enough on Internet, they may fix it for him. Maybe some other American should use standard Czech quotes as password to get it fixed also.
> Your post feels like the last generation lamenting the new generation [...] There's so much plumbing and refactoring bullshit in writing code [...] I've had my excitement
I don't read the OP as saying that: to me they're saying you're still going to have plumbing and bullshit, it's just your plumbing and bullshit is now going to be in prompt engineering and/or specifications, rather than the code itself.
> in any other threat model, security is an advantage of closed source
I think there's a lot of historical evidence that doesn't support this position. For instance, Internet Explorer was generally agreed by all to be a much weaker product from a security perspective than its open source competitors (Gecko, WebKit, etc).
Nobody was defending IE from a security perspective because it was closed source.
Boz never cared for Portal, it wasn't his product. I was one of the original engineers on Portal. The VP running the research lap responsible for Portal was canned in a political coup, and her entire org moved under Boz, merging it with Oculus into the AR/VR team. There was some ham-fisted justification around why a smart home product should be part of AR/VR, but it never really made sense.
Portal had a bunch of other problems, including:
* Massively over-specced hardware, the SoC was the same SoC as the Quest, even though it had no reason to be. The BOM was something like $500. We were selling these units at a huge loss.
* Cambridge Analytica broke right in the middle of development, which completely tanked any remaining trust in the Facebook brand. Everyone knew the product was completely sunk at that point, but nobody wanted to come out and say it. At the last minute we had to stuff a plastic camera cover into the box as a result.
* Boz was convinced we could build a voice assistant for Portal and Quest that was better than Siri, but the Assistant team at FB was completely out of their depth. We ended up right before launch having to sign a deal with Amazon to ship Alexa on the product.
* So much politics. AR/VR had a virtually unlimited budget so there was a massive land grab to hire as many people as possible, with no consideration around what they'd actually work on. Even though Quest and Portal had the same SoCs, they had completely separate Android OS builds and engineering teams, because everyone was trying to build the biggest engineering teams they could. People were constantly leaking shit: I found out we were delaying the project because an executive leaked it to Bloomberg while the executive meeting was still happening.
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