The author discovers the wild world of financial engineering and "float".
Instead of settling usage changes for it's image service with a single charge, Cloudflare settles it with two charges in such a way that the customer "floats" Cloudflare money for some portion of their billing cycle.
This is the bullshit that you start to do when you become publicly traded. It adds zero value for the customer.
It's not 2000. This is (imho, random internet goober) engineering around an unfavorable valuation and IPO environment. Sequoia does Stripe a favor providing liquidity, which is founder friendly (allowing Stripe to stay private aligned with founder desires), and they'll be rewarded with more business during the next favorable startup/VC cycle. It's a marketing and PR expense assuming Stripe's valuation isn't sustainable (and Sequoia takes a loss or breaks even when they sell these shares in the future). If by some chance Sequoia profits off this transaction, all the better for them.
When the economy spins back up (and it will, based on bond market and Fed signaling), Sequoia wants to be who people think of when the VC spigot opens back up. I'm not a founder, but they would be on the first page of folks I'd call for investment or a tender offer based on actions to date and how they operate, and that might be a similar perspective of Stripe millionaires who go off to build their own startups. Take that for what you will.
In other words you can choose to play the game, or you can choose to fight the rules. I don't recommend the latter, it doesn't work.
Frankly I recommend the former - if you don't like the game, don't play. There are lots of other markets to play - enterprise software is just one of them. Other markets have different rules and you should find a market that suits your strengths.
While it frankly doesn't matter, I will point out that your comment that "its bad" should have the phrase "from my point of view" tacked on. You might even suggest it's bad from the "users point of view". But the "business point of view" is a different view, and also important. The ability to understand that point of view - and to best address those needs as well, are critical if you want to enter the Enterprise space. The business writes yhe check, not the user. The business is the customer not yhd user.
Or, to reference back to the original article, if you want to play in the Hospital Admin space you need to understand what hospital admin is, and what it needs. Are hospital admins asking for free unsupported, open source software, with funding models based on "hope"?
As software people we are seldom trained to understand business needs. Our career is in writing software for end users. We focus on technical things, complain about bloat or speed, are UI focused and think "user" when someone talks about "customer experience".
Google is the poster child for this. They push the technical boundaries, have really good products, do technical things really well, spend lots of yikes on UI etc. But I wouldn't depend on them for my business, because, frankly they're not dependable. They don't offer me customer (much less user) support. Their pricing is erratic and subject to change. And the service they provide may be gone tomorrow. They serve "me the user" but not "me the business". They're not "bad" - they just don't serve the needs I have.
The last part missing is "build a flawed product and bake it into the contract so you charge high consultant costs to the customer to fix it" which is where the cash cow is for many enterprise / B2G products.
If Figma continues along this path I worry that they are doomed.
Generally, there are three paths to profitability: 1) increase pricing, 2) decrease expenses, or 3) offer new products and services with superior margin.
It seems like Figma has chosen to implement 1) but sell it to customers as 3). However, in contractionary periods like we are in now, 1) does not work -- no matter how much lock-in you have and how you sell it.
Weirdly, they don't preference contracts for shell corps owned by, say, poor white trash from Middletown, Ohio -- despite these people meeting your definition of "someone who historically hasn't been paid well".
But I digress. In the biz, if the contract has to be trafficked through a shell corp where the owner takes a 20% cut, everyone simply bids a 20% higher rate.
It's the taxpayer's prerogative if they would rather their government pay an inflated contracting rate -- as opposed to using that money for education, infrastructure, social services, etc.
From subpoenaed communications we even know that certain figures who publicly denounced the lab-leak theory, privately believed the theory was plausible or even likely.
This article is part of what I like to call the narrative media. You decide what the facts are and don't give a damn about reality -- because that's what keeps your readers coming back for more.
I do always find this funny as a major support for the lab leak theory. At that time there wasn’t any of the genetic lineage information that we have now which is the strongest evidence for zoonotic origin.
Why does anybody’s public or private beliefs at that point in time matter? Politics have always existed in science but generally over time the truth wins.
"Truth wins over time" means 50 years after you die and none of this matters anymore, someone will bravely say the truth with no fear of consequences. Especially when there is such a huge conspiracy to cover things up and the facts are so inaccessible to ordinary people.
>Why does anybody’s public or private beliefs at that point in time matter?
If someone demonstrated a pattern of lying in their own favor, isn't that important?
There is more than enough evidence now to make a strong conclusion, as the OP shows.
When the people were caught lying, only like 5% of the eventual information was known. It’s bad for their personal reputations that they were caught lying (or at minimum misrepresenting their own views), but their lies don’t change the underlying facts. I also think it is notable that the politically correct view turned out to be most likely correct.
I also strongly suspect a lot of lab leak proponents and/or anti-vaxxers are knowingly lying as well. But still it doesn’t change the underlying facts.
>There is more than enough evidence now to make a strong conclusion
I would disagree, all the evidence we have right now supporting zoonosis is circumstantial. The evidence being a mapping of early cases to around the market but given the shortcomings of this early evidence it's hard to rule out sampling bias: https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/a5102da1-9b47-4e11-...
But so far we have not found an intermediate host nor any closely related viruses in any animals yet. By contrast for the two previous spillovers SARS and MERS they not only identified an intermediate host, but they have found many closely related viruses in animals due to the fact the virus is circulating and thus branching off into many variants. Just take a look at the phylogenetic trees of MERS: https://virologyj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12985-... and SARS-CoV-1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1212604/
There could be liars or foreign agitators among the anti-vaxxers. That's why scientists need to be extremely aboveboard, because if they can't be trusted then people will turn to charlatans. I am against mRNA vaccines and skeptical of some others, but I'm not against well-established vaccines in general.
>It’s bad for their personal reputations that they were caught lying, but their lies don’t change the underlying facts.
If your job is to advise the country about how to conduct research and how to deal with a pandemic, it's not just reputational damage. The lockdowns virtually destroyed the economy and cost more than WW2. Fauci lied about not doing gain of function research and the media has his back.
The guy in the OP paid somebody $100k to beat him a debate using a self-defined empirical system, which somebody did, and the original guy now believes the lab leak theory even more.
Honestly I think I’d prefer if it were a lab leak, since that seems easier to prevent in the future, sadly for me I think the overwhelming evidence points otherwise. A quest for the truth isn’t real if the truth can only be one thing.
But look I’m not going to convince you, your faith is your own and I hope it serves you well.
Love to see people has interest over our demo. But, I checked his former post, and he already built a voice Agent a couple of days ago. So I believe he just changed the prompts to create this demo: https://twitter.com/sean_moriarity/status/175895035375034804.... Also, after testing their live demo at https://nero.ngrok.dev/, it appears it might still be missing some key features, such as latency and endpoint detection.
As a bystander, I definitely agree that Retell's demo wins on latency — it felt pretty close to human. The voice also sounds more natural to my ears (not sure why, since Nero is apparently using Eleven Labs for voices, and Eleven's voices usually sound pretty good to me).
Playing around with the Nero demo, it also feels pretty... broken? I never actually managed to make a booking with Nero; it seemed to often not be able to tell I was done speaking, and would just hang after a couple back-and-forths. Still impressive for a one-man demo built quickly, but they don't feel in the same league.
I do wish Retell's pricing was cheaper, though; $6/hr is pretty much the cost of a call center employee in India, and LLMs still perform below the average human on most things. That being said, I imagine the cost of Retell will come down as the tech advances, and LLMs will also improve over time.
Yeah the latency in my demo is definitely worse. There also seem to be some issues where it picks up it’s own audio and keyboard/mouse clicks and tries to transcribe them which leads to derailed convos.
The unnatural voices happen I think because for some reason the way I stream audio to the browser breaks up the audio from ElevenLabs, so you get almost this “start/stop” sound that makes it sound worse than usual.
There’s a lot of minor details to get right, but it’s a fun problem to try to solve. I wish Retell the best :)
Hard not to see these recent stories about backchannel deplatforming and social media accounts getting accidentally-ed and not recall the warnings that this behavior won't stop with just the people/views you prefer not to see. It was all great fun when "election deniers" and lab leak "conspiracy" theorists were getting ban hammered right and left. But now we're where you were told we'd get, and the righteous defenders of establishment narrative have you in the crosshairs.
In the long run, anyone who thinks for themselves will eventually be on the "wrong side" of an issue, and the people who copy the leaders, even when the leaders change, remain "right" through all of them. See also: the huge number of brilliant intellectuals burnt to death by the Church because they applied the principle of making up their own minds about stuff to religion. That means, if there is a policy of "burning" people who are "wrong," it will eventually catch every free thinker.
