This is a a beautiful thread. All the concerns that come into play with a commercial business, a very human representative of that business, and someone outside expressing a need. A need that some would see is contradictory to the pure business goals.
Doing business out in the open like Tailscale is doing is so refreshing. Having seen Brad Fitz communicate in other places, it is obvious he isn't doing the right thing for the user only because these conversations will be scrutinized in public. Tailscale has a lot of great technical people who actually are even better communicators.
This is the lesson for me in this thread: remember to optimize hiring good communicators and not just good technical people. This conversation would have quickly gone south if it was purely about the technical or business reasons for doing it. After all, the root word of communication is commune: to connect. We often forget that.
The people on that thread are very dope. I've filed tickets with Denton before and he's ridiculously thorough. My mesh is a little complicated on my side, and he was super patient as I walked through the relevant stages of determining where and why I was getting packet loss.
Denton was my manager at Google for a couple years. He won some award for being one of the best 10 (? some very low number) managers in the company. Thorough and patient are definitely two of his good qualities. :) Tailscale did well to hire him.
I'm not aware of any state law that prohibits a hushable smoke alarm.
Short-term (<15minute, repeatable) hush modes are considered a safety feature. They prevent angry homeowners from removing the smoke alarm entirely, a far more dangerous situation than a short term hush.
NFPA 72 recommends a desensitization method for ionization smoke alarms and requires one for smoke alarms installed near a cooking appliance, and several states have followed in codifying this into law. Hush is not required for photoelectric smoke alarms, under the theory that they are less prone to cooking and shower-related false-positives, but this feature is still allowed and they are a common user convenience.
UL 217 allows smoke alarms to be provided with a <15 minute desensitization feature which prevents an alarm from triggering unless obscuration/ft exceeds 4%.
Also... the Nest v2 got an in-app hush feature. My understanding is that V1 had some kind of false-positive issue that triggered a ">4% non-hushable" alarm, though, so this wouldn't have mattered.
I think it might be being a public company more than it is about earning large sums of money. The people who own public companies ultimately have control of the company, and typically care only about how much money is generated.
Yup, this what what I eventually grew to dislike the most about working for a public company. At the end of the day the stock price was the only thing that mattered. It would have been easier to stomach if the shareholders had a long-term vision of a healthy successful company whose value accumulates over time by making good long-term business decisions. But, quarterly returns were the name of the game. The executive compensation was tied to that performance and that cemented it into the basic strategy of all decisions.... (And this was for a large (20000+ employees), well established (40+ years old), corporation in a relatively stable sector (health care tech).
The problem with public companies is they effectively have no shareholders; none that can actually do anything to affect the company. Which leaves the company to be run by the managers for the managers.
Bogle (the father of the index fund) talks about how the index fund and friends has warped the benefits of ownership to leave companies effectively "unowned".
A private company (and some public companies) have shareholders/owners that are large enough and active enough to control the company (Ford, famously).
Most just are kind of "managed", especially after a "star CEO" or similar moves on.
The alternatives to index funds are either that ordinary middle-class people can't participate in ownership of companies at all, or that they have to pay extortionate fees to fund managers. No thank you.
The choice isn't between index/active fund ownership - the question is how to make it so the company is not managed for the benefit of the managers, but actually for the benefit of the owners, however many or few there are.
Some companies in Europe have what might be part of the solution, with the union et al having board representation.
I've heard this before: "The product isn't the product. The stock is the product."
This can be true in VC-backed private companies too, but with public companies it seems to be even more amplified since the investors unlike angels/VCs often don't even know let alone care what the company really does.
Doing business out in the open like Tailscale is doing is so refreshing. Having seen Brad Fitz communicate in other places, it is obvious he isn't doing the right thing for the user only because these conversations will be scrutinized in public. Tailscale has a lot of great technical people who actually are even better communicators.
This is the lesson for me in this thread: remember to optimize hiring good communicators and not just good technical people. This conversation would have quickly gone south if it was purely about the technical or business reasons for doing it. After all, the root word of communication is commune: to connect. We often forget that.