Did he design the yellow pedestrian/biker bridge connecting Facebook to the the Bayfront? I recently drove underneath it and it's quite interesting.

"the naive approach to moats focuses on the cost of switching; in fact, however, the more important correlation to the strength of a moat is the number of unique purchasers/users."

I was not able to find any research that posits that moat strength is determined by customer diversity.

I think customer diversity correlates instead with resilience.

Author isn't non-financial, but the "moat 2.0" doesn't feel right.

> More than anything, though, I believe in the market power and defensibility of 800 million users, which is why I think ChatGPT still has a meaningful moat.

It's 800M weekly active users according to ChatGPT. I keep hearing that once you segment paid and unpaid, daily ChatGPT users fall off dramatically (<10% for paid and far less for unpaid).

I would say that customer diversity may be a marker of past resilience, and likely results in moat.

Customer diversity says nothing about current or future resilience.

Technical point: "While LLMs/AI fall short of many promises made by enthusiasts over the last couple years, we are relying on them for the one thing they are good at: summarizing and analyzing text...The full prompt used in this analysis is given in the footnotes.1"

I worked on compilers and tools starting in 1981. Proprietary compiler technology has disappeared over the decades and the development tools/language/process/compute have changed considerably. But the skills and role of a compiler developer seem similar, although maybe it just means this sub-field of software has matured.

Early in my career, I worked for a subcontractor to Boeing Commericial Airplanes. I've worked in Silicon Valley ever since. As a swag, the % of budget spent on verification/validation for flight-critical software was 5x versus my later jobs. Early in the job, we watched a video about some plane that navigated into a mountain in New Zealand. That got my attention.

On the other hand, the software development practices were slow to modernize in many cases e.g. FORTRAN 66 (but eventually with a preprocessor).

Likely air New Zealand flight 901 which crashed into mount Erebus in Antarctica (not in New Zealand proper) in 1979. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Erebus_disaster

Yes, thanks for the identification.

When I was in Wuhan, I talked with an engineer who was having his second child. I asked what he thought about raising kids in such bad air pollution. He said at least it is getting better each year.

The ad: "Vigilant Mobile Companion transfers your mobile device into a powerful, secure license plate recognition and facial recognition data collection, analysys and alerting tool -- increasing productivity and insight, anywhere you go."

e.g. Turner Classic Movies channel

I mostly look at the most recent reviews, and found them useful if not definitive.

I took a long road trip this summer and felt like I had plenty of options. My cumulative stays ended up: 1) Hilton 2) IHG 3) Choice 4) camping 5) AirBnB

My Hyatt and Marriott experiences sucked...