Yes, but we are in 2024. Our expectations of products have changed, and especially after their fresh look on their email product, I hoped they had a new take on corporate chat as well.
If you take some of the public slack channels, campfire fits the better.
Look at Elixir's slack for example. Since it's a free tier, you can't view older messages that can be beneficial to someone. And Elixir's slack channel is not going to need fancy workflows, web hooks for CI, gitops capabilities et all.
Your expectations might have changed. Most users are quite happy with core chatting features. And in the case of Slack those features have become a bit too intrusive and disorganised, so that is one of the selling points of Campfire.
I had a Tesla Model 3 which was very optimistic with the range. My BMW iX3 however is quite conservative and I can usually drive longer than the display states.
We don’t have the iX3 in the US (yet?). I was looking at the x5 plug in hybrid with ~40 miles electric range and the normal b58 straight 6 motor. My wife has the X7, we have 3 kids and hobbies so I’m not sure if even an i5 would work. The new X5 headlights are not my favorite.
The X5 hybrid is a wonderful car to drive, but as an EV it's... not good. You get less than 1/10th the range of a full Tesla Model Y (< 30 miles), using a battery that's 1/3rd the capacity. I assume some of the lost efficiency is due to the X5's higher curb weight, but it's only about ~1200lbs heavier (4,416 vs. 5,646 pounds) which doesn't seem to justify a 3x efficiency difference.
The BMW also includes a tiny 16A charger, whereas the old i3 had a 32A charger. This limits charging to ~3 range-miles per hour, making public chargers basically pointless (again compare to the LR Tesla Model Y which has a 48A charger and can add 40+ range-miles in an hour.) In gas-only hybrid mode, the mileage is ~19 MPG, which is actually kind of offensive for a hybrid car.
I don’t have towing needs or any real desire for a pickup truck, but the F150 Lightning is what I would buy if I could even slightly justify it. My beef with the X5 is that it’s the opposite of an engineering triumph: its efficiency and EV charging rate are so unnecessarily terrible that I no longer take BMW seriously as a firm that operates in the EV/hybrid space. (And more critically: I am worried that if/when they do become serious about EVs they will toss the whole X5 eDrive drivetrain design in the trash, making it expensive to repair once it leaves warranty.) But if you’re able to make it work for your specific needs, it’s still fun to drive and very comfortable.
I have the 330e Hybrid Plug in. The electric range on a full charge varies from about 28km to 44km (17-27 miles). When I do my usual around town driving, I never need to go off all-electric, so this range works perfectly for me. The range shown on the dash is slightly conservative. For example, I can get from suburban Vancouver to SFU (on top of Burnaby mountain), a distance of 24km with a couple of kilometres still showing, but I can get back home using only about 50% of the reported range. The up-hill portion of the drive versus the down-hill return journey makes a big difference.
When I recharge at home (using Level 2), the reported "full" values range from 28km to 44km. I cannot figure out why there is such a big range.
I have the BMW i4, and I would echo the same comment. BMW is extremely conservative with range estimates and would almost certainly meet or beat their range estimates.
It looks like the AR glasses will depend on an external compute device, like the phone. If Facebook had invested more into their phone product, they would have a much easier time to compete against Apple/Google. Funny to think that they for a small amount of their VR investment (31b) they could have bought Xiaomi which would have given them a platform to expand on.
I remember as a 8-9 year old kid going to the library and finding a book about creating games in QBasic. I Spent most of the summer just copy and pasting the code from the book in hope of it working. As I didn't speak English it was very hard for me to debug, so any error just meant I had to start all over. Only a few games worked, but when it happened it was like magic.
Speed is important, but so is quality of results, especially when it comes to search. You can make something search blazingly fast, if it doesn't need to be accurate.
True! Here's a pull request to BEIR to compare Manticore with Elasticsearch in terms of relevance https://github.com/beir-cellar/beir/pull/92. Spoiler: in this test Manticore provides better relevance than Elasticsearch in average. Of course you can tune both further and Elasticsearch now has KNN which when combined with BM25 can give even better relevance. In general I would say for most users the results quality in terms of full-text relevance is about the same in Elasticseach and Manticore.
>Octopus, a US subsidiary of a Chinese national high-tech enterprise, built a cloud-based platform designed to provide paying customers access to on-demand scraping software and services.
It is interesting as how they try to position this as a Chinese attack on them.
It must coincide with Christopher Wray's sudden claim that there is an active dragnet of sorts that is trying to subvert America from within much like the recent election interference of a former Tianmen square activist who tried to run for congress I think.
It makes me think that there are many people on CCP's dole, rich powerful famous people are somehow beholden to the CCP in some unknown way but we can all guess correctly that they are all old white men who have previously been seen with young females.
I do believe that we have seen solutions trying to be a horizontal solution to problems, and I think the evolution will turn into vertical solutions. I have also invested a lot of time, as we are a couple of people who has been building on a vertical BI tool for the SaaS space for about a year.
The main goals are:
- Easy accessible for novice users. We want to make the Google for BI to help empower non-technical people (no more salespeople asking for reports from devs)
- More advanced editors for the more technical people
- Advanced alerts + integrations to 3rd parties
- Later on proactive reports
Hit me up on @philipanderse if you want to test it out.
If the company was bootstrapped it could just have kept running and creating profits. Many business can create value in the world, but who are not VC material. Unfortunately the people behind was hitting for the fences and missed, instead of playing it more safe.
Bootstrapping has an opportunity cost that a lot of people gloss over, wages you could have made at a BigCo for years. Even if you are "successful" you still could be millions in the hole vs working at FAANG.
Very true, so you would compare it to the <best job you could get>. But simply saying "It's such a bad idea to take VC money, just bootstrap" is too simple of a statement. Again, I say this as a bootstrapper.
Seems like bootstrapping isn’t just about the money for many bootstrappers, perhaps including you. There’s a type of person who would much rather grind out $150K ARR at something they create and own than pull down $450K/yr at Netflix.
This is true but I think there's also a question about the difference between VC as in huge amounts of money trying to build the next unicorn versus traditional business startup loan levels. I think a lot of startups would be better getting _some_ investment but with a target valuation in the millions rather than billions range. The founders can still do well in that range but they won't have hundreds of employees and expensive offices in NYC.
Right, you can do this to some extent with midwest angel / VC. If you stay out of coastal VC, you can a bit more modest, but the trend for even midwest VC seems to be pushing for unicorns lately...
This is assuming that they could have created profits early enough to support them, which might not have been the case (then maybe it means that this shouldn't have been a business at all, but that's another question...)
I don’t think this model is bootstrap-able. It’s pretty much a social media play, which requires lots of burn to acquire first cohort of users.
My friend bootstrapped a genius for books competitor with a subscription model and it was really difficult to grow. It’s hard to build value based on network effects with subscription model.
That is pretty normal on high scaling SaaS solutions. If you earn 100k a year on a solution, and you know they in average stay for 5 years, you might spend 150k to acquire them as it is still a good business.
By that logic, as long as you're growing you'll always be losing tons of money and never be profitable? How is that a good business model? I mean we're only talking about revenue vs sales and marketing spend here -- the business has a load of other costs too.
You hit a tipping point with enough market grab that customers start to approach you without advertising.
There is volume discount as you grow.
There is upsell potential on the customers you've signed.
As your signed customers grow their pockets grow to spend more on the solution.
Takes about 3-6. If I use Snowflake today at company X without issue and I switch jobs in a couple years to a new company that hasn't picked their platform, what do you think most people will pick?
> as long as you're growing you'll always be losing tons of money and never be profitable?
Basically yea. This effect is just assumed in the world of physical products. As long as you're growing you're nearly out of business because you need to use N revenues to buy your next N+1 of stock.
