Is anyone else annoyed that Apple are extra shifty with performance comparisons these days, comparing to M1 and not to M2 MB Airs?
I opted for a M2 Air in October seeing small differences in M2 pro vs M3 pro, so I guess I was right - the difference must be so small that Apple can't stomach the difference.
I'd rant about how they try to market new models with more and more stupid marketing when they don't have anything to show, but I guess this only means I don't need to upgrade for a while since they are all out of proper innovation...
Imagine being a fanboy for Apple this days. Nothing to look for. They are so blatant in extracting value and not bringing anything new to the table, probably best compared to Nokia in it's heyday.
As a company that moved to 4-day work week for our development team I can share the following results:
- Output per person per day increased compared to 5-day work week (throughput increased based on surveys, performance metrics and personal experience of leads)
- Happiness increased
- Fifth day remains as a reserve for extreme situations (eg. some unexpected thing occuring that requires additional capacity in the system)
It is true that we're a dirty communist EU country, but so far this works for us.
Btw: the fear of working less hours and doing more is real. Even internally some teams/employees do not want to move to 4-day work week saying it's not for them or that they can't cope with the time limit. And then they move and everything works out better...
So implementing 32-hrs work for 80% of pay feels like a steal even with the overhead. You're probably getting better rested developers that output 100% of 40-hrs workweek.
A suggestion for engineers that lack business experience. As soon as your project grows beyond the non-hobby scale and starts making real money, invest some time to reach out to company providing the services that keep it alive and find an account manager that will take care of you.
We're a Google customer and of course we had our fair share of issues (btw: it's the same with Azure, based on our experience), and we always escalate to our account manager. That usually starts turning the wheels much faster.
Also, do not be afraid to ask your account manager for additional discounts. Everybody in sales has some wiggle room to get you a better deal. With Google their account manager actually suggested that we work through a reseller and we're getting % off the list prices.
Dealing with Google, Amazon, etc.. is not like dealing with code. It's not only transactional and you need to invest some time in the relationship even if you're the customer.
I found the Azure reps to be completely useless for any of the actual problems.
I worked for couple of really big enterprises, one of which had such a high commitment that Azure sent two engineers to sit with the teams working on their cloud. Highest level Enterprise support .. and yet for actual non-obvious problems it took them a month to reply with: can't help you with this, you must be doing it wrong.
This was techsupport tho, I'm sure the billing for multi-million commitments was just fine and dandy including wining and dining.
One other company was a big AWS user (and some Office365 so there were Azure pitches too) and GCP tried to get in with the business as well. When we went to their offices the level of patronizing smug that came from their reps was astonishing, so off-putting that I refused all further interaction with them as I wanted to barf.
I worked for one of Azure's biggest customers and our account management teams were fantastic. A few individuals were some of my favorite people I've worked with. That's where all the talent in the Azure support org goes- promoted to the biggest contracts.
Yes the big fish get attention and the small fish get ignored. Welcome to the B2B universe. If you're a small business relative to the scope of your counterparty, you generally won't get good service or have any leverage.
Seek out resellers or providers who are closer to yourself in size. You want it to hurt a bit if they lose your business. Of course you can go too far the other way as well, if you're a large client of a small company you'll probably get good service but they will be living parasitically off of you which isn't healthy and they may not be able to respond quickly enough if your needs grow.
I see this for actual service providers that have full control over their business, but if you have resellers of similar size as your own org, don't you end up with the problem that they are about as important for the big provider as you are and you are as screwed as before when things go wrong?
You comment reminded me of what my dad said about service contracts from IBM back in the 1970's. They promise they'll get a tech on site in 24 hours. They don't promise he'll know how to do anything.
I have dealt with Google and AWS under 4 different companies that spent between low double digit to high triple digit a month.
General view:
* AWS - Great customer service. Steak house level customer service when moved from cc billing to contract billing.
* GCP - terrible service regardless of spend and regardless of dynamic or contract billing. AM do not know products. AM's are equivalent of BOA branch employees that solve a problem by calling the same number the customer calls and give the phone to the customer who came to see them in their branch, except that the customer service phone is the same opaque process the customer is subjected to. The only GCP product that had good customer service was the original App Engine, supported out of Germany ( I think ). We could get in touch with engineers responsible for it over video chat.
Same experiences here. AWS was awesome. They did crazy things I wouldn’t expect like spend days in person and join us at equinix colo to get the direct connect working. We didn’t even spend that much relatively, under $100k/mo.
THIS. I love how AWS AM go out of their way to deliver, where as Google's AM simply start to ghost you when the conversation gets to heated or not contributing to their bonus cheques.
As I've said and others have experienced, GCP's AM are killing their business and we've built up everything around AWS. There's no need to even learn Terraform, all of what we do are automated anyhow without it. CDK is enough.
At a prior gig we were using their FPGA instances and had a way of causing hard faults on the system that required reboots, with specific FPGA bitstreams. Their systems monitored this and when we reached out about it they scheduled at least 2-3 different calls with the engineers/PIs who were directly responsible so we could coordinate with them and help pin down the issue to get things working. We were literally renting by the hour; I don't even think we had an account manager, with variable costs; maybe a few hundred to 3k a month?
The funniest thing was that we got about a million in CAF bucks from them to go contract and move more stuff from AWS ( our monthly was low triple digits thousands ) and their AMs still messed everything up.
Ironically enough, the last time I was "Courted" by google cloud to move some of our infra there (after it went public that we had raised a round), they were up front about how their "account management sucks" and that we'd have a better "customer experience" if we went through a reseller.
That...always sticks out to me, but, when dealing with the Google Education folks, there were some things that even resellers couldn't do, and I had to email people directly (via LinkedIn stalking) only to have my issue disappear a few days later with no reply.
Thing is parent's advice is horrible because the account manager at google simply started to ignore my billing issues. Like I could reach out to no one, the account manager realized I was going to leave and stopped responding.
So the "make sure you invest in an account manager" is not really an option at Google. AWS does this very proactively.
Unfortunately after 5 years, I can still see Google Cloud screwing over their customers like this. They seem determined to send more customers to AWS.
This is an easy way to accelerate the sale without having to do any of the leg work. The same thing happens when people use procurement vendors like SHI.
As a sales person I'm thinking sweet, I get to send a PO to SHI for example, I don't have to negotiate price, volume discounts, or go back and forth with legal departments depending on whos paper we used. You just need to approve and I get paid, probably quicker than if I used an internal deal desk.
I had amazing AWS reps, that I had a good personal relationship. Request your rep to visit your office, and have lunch.
Seriously.
The best reps I had from AWS moved to GCP, and while I couldnt move my loads from AWS to GCP, I still had a good relationship with them. One of the best things an account rep can do is understand your business, and, in my case, actually pushed for changes in the system to our benefit based on how we were using the system.
They have evolved a lot since that occurred, but a good rep is going to seriously push for your success. (They want you to be successful and increase your use! :-) and thats a good ting)
So, make requests for your reps to meet with you face to face.
Someone should invent a sue-as-a-service ("SaaS") where you can just sue companies in a couple clicks if they shutdown your services or have bad account management that leads to downtime.
Considering the problems are repetetetive, the legal documents can easily be templated and reused and the victim would not have to waste much time or effort in court. Scale the lawyers just like we scale cloud instances.
Maybe even have a way to programmatically sue based on automated downtime metrics.
The reason this hasn't been done is that the ToS for all enterprise-scale cloud services would prevent success, either by requiring arbitration vs. litigation, or via a disclaimer of liability.
If it's so easy to prevent someone from ligitating why don't all small businesses do this? For example, why don't restaurants have you sign a ToS on the menu saying that by ordering you agree to not ligitate?
This is sound advice in my experience. The last company I worked with who was utilizing Google Cloud had a great experience, an account manager and a reseller who offered training as well.
after Azure sunk my employers project with no recourse or discussion allowed, I always advise everyone I meet to run far away from Azure if they value a reliable service.
I think when the parent commend said "no discussion allowed", it was in the context of "no recourse", not that they got some sort of a pseudo-gag-order.
I.e., basically meaning that Azure refused having any further discussions between then and the parent user, as attempts to resolve that specific case. Not that they dont't allow the parent comment user to talk about it with others on HN (or elsewhere).
I dug into the archives, every attempt to discuss or resolve the issue got shut down with the boilerplate text of:
=============================
Greetings for the day!
I have received an update from Account Research Team: As part of our strong commitment to the protection of our customers and our interest in preserving the quality and integrity of the Azure Marketplace, we perform supplementary reviews of accounts which may exhibit irregular or suspicious activity. Your account was selected for one of these reviews and after careful consideration, this account will remain closed.
Please understand that we keep security checks like these in place in order to protect the quality and integrity of the Azure Marketplace
The ridiculous thing.. my employer makes huge use of Office365? We signed up for Azure via a slightly different path with no issues.. but I know this could be pure chance it just happens to work as the service could be teetering on a precipice of arbitrary policy application and the rug could be pulled from under it any second with the same infuratingly cheery account deletion..
That’s a good suggestion - it worth noting it comes with a cost (eg X% of your cloud bill) but you get much better interaction with the support and service team.
AWS sometimes even connects small players with service team PMs and managers. It was really great but probably only for greenfield services
> it worth noting it comes with a cost (eg X% of your cloud bill) but you get much better interaction with the support and service team.
An account manager doesn't cost you anything - neither would a CE (or SE). There would likely be a minimum spend required, or if you're below that a commit, but there's no %age of annual spend charged for having an AM. In reality, and AM will save you money, as you can negotiate with them, whereas you can't with a website.
USDT is shady. USDT is not depegging. USDT FUD is a classic bear market move. Whales make a killing swapping USD for USDT and pocketing 5% for zero risk.
It feels like we'll just keep repeating the same story of tether depegging, without anyone actually looking at the redeem process and what would it truly mean for USDT to depeg.
What you're seeing is USDT-USD slip on an exchange that provides that trading pair. As it is with any other traded asset, if all of a sudden you get this huge demand for USD trading, to the point that the liquidity dries up, of course this will push the price up. Take that graph and zoom out, perhaps looking at 5 year scale. This slip actually happens once or twice a year, depending on the FUD that's on the market. Market is in extreme fear with cataclysmic level events occurring (Celsius and Terra events are close to what happened to banking in 2008 or worse) weekly. Obviously every news will cause increased sell pressure on USDT and eventually arbitration between entities will not occur fast enough.
Now let's look at what happened during the last "depegging". Price dropped to .90 cents per dollar and after a while it returned to 1 USD. Look at the circulating supply of tether - in the aftermath of Terra people actually cut 20% of all supply of USDT and converted it into alternative stable coins BUSD (by Paxos/Binance) and USDC (by Coinbase/Circle) being the primary benificiaries of the flows.
Now let's look at the "depegging" claims. Tether would need to not honor the promise of USD payout when you send them USDT. BitFinex is the exchange thats behind tether and you can redeem tether for USD. During the height of the last "depegging", you could always send your USDT there and get USD back at ~1:1 ratio (https://trading.bitfinex.com/t/UST:USD?type=exchange).
While we can talk about the USDT reserves and we can talk about shady/enron level practices and the court trials, we can also say that after 5 years of they have yet to break USDT. They've cut 20% of their circulation without breaking a sweat. USDT will not crash until there is a bigger functioning alternative. All the key players will ensure that; it's game over for crypto otherwise.
I really wonder if USDT bashing will get old or will people finally get that USDT will not just disappear overnight. They've redeemed 11% of their total capitalization and nothing happened.
I despise shady accounting practices and I'm sure Tether is on par with a good american financial institution, but I highly doubt it they will ever default.
I know it's a long shot, but hear me out:
1. Their redemption process can be handled in a way to prevent an uncontrolled bank run. You can redeem 100.000 minimum, hence it's a not a retail bank run for sure.
2. They print the dollars for much of the old school crypto ecosystem, with all players acknowledging their importance. So unless the key players in the field want to take USDT down, it's not going down. Even the NYAG tried and gave them a penny fine instead.
And even the article here really lacks context. The USDT reedeming right now is tied to all the negative publicity in the media. I've traded through this current depeg (a week ago), that was purely speculative and generated by the panic. A twitter thread stared to report a depeg, and more and more people piled on the exchanges to swap USDT for BUSD and USDC. In the end a lot of USDT was redeemed, nothing happened, expect that some people made a lot of money on the panic itself (and the premium).
I've been hearing the same story for the past 6 years. USDT will fail, they don't have any backing, US will shut them down,.... And the world keeps on turning. Sorry to break it to you. Nothing is going to happen until key crypto players have a legit alternative that will keep the ecosystem alive.
As long as there is a BTC/USDT and a BTC/USD market, Tether will work. If someone wants to sell USDT for USD, All Tether has to do is buy BTC with USDT, then sell the BTC for USD.
I just want to stress that while Jabras statement sucks, you really should be reaching out to Apple.
Have the same issue on my MBP with Sennheiser Pxa550. With Monterey I actually had to install a plug-in for Chrome that keeps my volume at max during meet calls.
List of my issues:
- audio doesn't work
- audio doesn't switch from call mode to HiFi mode
- if I have a call running, it will not switch or work via my headphones
- audio balance switches to right headphone
....
I tried every recepie and thread I found online. Nothing.
Apple sucks.
Funny thing tho, I actually have a pair of Jabra 75t. And they seem more stable than Pxa550.
Again - direct hate towards Apple. I'm guessing all works with Apple headphones, as they sprinkle that secret sauce in their drivers that nobody else has access to.
I think computer BT announces many more features, and they weed out problematic BT implementations much better.
I'm running an old Philips SHB3075 with my MacBook Air M1, and it has no problems whatsoever. The connection takes a bit longer compared to my iPhone, but I think it's negotiating a lot of things over the air during that connection.
I've attended half day long meetings, and join 2 meetings on average over zoom and Skype. Nothing shifts, nothing drops.
So, BT is a complicated protocol with a lot of baggage and layers, and proper debugging is much better than finger pointing.
Jabra can update the firmware on the device, but they're lazy or there's something wrong with hardware. I own a 45 (previously called Stealth), and the family got 5-6 software updates over the years.
We're happy users of Confluence (SaaS version) and try to store all knowledge there. At 50 employees we have multiple teams approaching the Confluence as a KB with various success so there are a couple of takeaways.
1. You need to mandate that everybody uses one tools and push for the use from the top down as well as showcase the use bottom-up.
2. Split responsibilities on a per team level; eg people working on product lead the product confluence page, people working on hardware lead the hardware confluence page...
3. Try hard to push all relevant discussions and decisions to the same KB.
4. Request that leads schedule time for updating knowledge base (we sometimes push for this via OKRs).
5. When people are leaving the company, we primarily push that they update the KB to the maximum (other work is not important after they give notice).
It will be the same as it's currently in post-covid bar and restaurant business. Nobody wanted to work the shitty 24/7 jobs after being out of the trade during the lockdowns so they had to increase salaries.
Problem is not yet big enough and the hurdle of getting into construction is not so high that it's impossible to learn the trade in 6 months.
On the other hand if that would mean that construction industry is not competitive, then well, I see a lot of Turkish and Chinese companies getting deals in EU.
> not so high that it's impossible to learn the trade in 6 months.
In Germany, with its apprenticeship system, it is. Typically it takes three years. In some trades you can work without the official license, but in many you are not allowed to. The whole apprenticeship system is so fundamental in Germany that I think it would be very difficult to get rid of it.
And really, would we want that? I’m not saying that it’s a perfect system on every dimension, but it makes for insanely high quality work on average. And it’s easy to get used to it and take it as granted. Being married to a Hungarian wife and seeing the quality of work in the trades in Hungary first hand really made me appreciate the German system.
As stupid as “am deutschen Wesen soll die Welt genesen” is in general – for the trades it might actually make sense.
I fully agree that the author of the piece should volunteer for a low paid job of a janitor. They are becoming the elderly population, if somebody doesn't sacrifice themselves what oh what will happen?
Sure, there is a lack of young workers for janitorial positions, but not everybody is a boomer with a home and family that can afford (let alone thrive) to be janitor.
There are only three possible scenarios: either the wage goes up, the job gets automated (eg robots) or the job ceases to exist.
Stop making op-ed pieces from your pedestal, screaming there is an issue, when you're directly responsible for the issue, hoping that somebody else will bail out your ass. Op is a lender and a banker, work with the companies you're financing to increase the wages and make the jobs attractive.
