> While at my desk, I preferred it to the thin-sounding built-in speakers on my M4 MacBook Air.
Weird, I find the sound in my MBA to be quite good. I tried listening to podcasts through a HomePod mini and by comparison that was awful. I'd be surprised if this little IKEA speaker was substantially better than the MBA, though if so that'd be great!
The current MBA's speakers are at least 50% worse than the MBP speakers. My last job switched me from the Pro to the Air and I had both on hand to compare and it was really disappointing.
No doubt the MBP sounds better than the MBA, but I'd be pleasantly surprised if there were $10 options from IKEA that sound so significantly better than the MBA. If so, that just reinforces how badly Apple nerfed the HomePod mini, which is awful (for podcasts especially) by comparison.
I think AI will actually produce price deflation in some areas. There could be inflation based on mechanisms you describe, but it's obviously making it cheaper to make some products/services.
Why? You're going to reference them from Google Drive. Google has 400 trillion gazillion servers with copies of it. There's no way you can lose it! You wouldn't do anything weird, so there's absolutely no reason to think you'd lose your account. And honestly, we're all humans here - surely you can reach out to a company as large as Google and speak to a human if there's an issue this significant.
Another consideration: kids do not have the ability to think ahead and consider future consequences. It's one of the last functions of the brain to develop, and it doesn't fully complete until, often, you've already finished college. Looking through the comments in the reddit thread, it appears the daughter had her dissertation on her google drive and lost it despite having done nothing wrong herself.
And just the final point I want to drive home: these people lost their google accounts because of what someone else did. Nobody thinks ahead to account for something like that.
At what point are we going to start looking at digital mail the same way we do physical mail? It's equally as important today. It needs protections, regulations, and oversight.
Even if you don't think you're at risk of permanently losing access, you would want to have access during power outages or other internet outages. Or even just when you're on a plane and want to look up an old email.
Yes, they should be regulated. Or more likely outright shut down.
Nonetheless, at the moment, it's a real risk, and plenty of people do in fact think ahead and not make themselves dependent on those services.
> kids do not have the ability to think ahead and consider future consequences. It's one of the last functions of the brain to develop, and it doesn't fully complete until, often, you've already finished college.
Please stop posting kindergarten-level distortions of neuroscience. It burns.
Even just for offline access when on airplanes, when the internet/power is out. It's not just about rugpulls.
Honestly it's a bit insulting to non-HN people to assume that they'd never want offline access or realize that having a single point of failure is a bad idea.
It’s reasonable to assume that a subset of the population thinks of these things. It is not unreasonable to assume that >50% of Gmail users have never considered it.
I didn't say anything about all or most gmail users. I specifically referred to a person who relies on gmail for his business, and who is apparently screwed without access to it. People who run businesses think through their risk exposure in general, and they get things like key man insurance policies to mitigate risks related to single points of failure. Anyone thinking through such things would realize that an email provider is a single point of failure.
Completely aside from strategic business planning, plenty of people realize that gmail doesn't provide offline access. It's obvious if you try to get into your email when you're not online. This is not the sole province of experts.
I doubt every small business manager considers ‘what’s happens if I lose my gmail’, there are plenty of trades so far detached from email where that would be the case. I doubt many plumbers are checking their business email while flying, either.
It's splashier this way, and is meant to shape the narrative, make other companies fear their warchest, and make hiring easier. Of course, those who are in-the-know won't be fooled, but the perception of the general public will be set in stone by the PR framing.
I've wondered how many announced fundraising rounds were like this. It's in everyone's interest (VCs and entrepreneurs) if the message to the outside world is "this company is amazing so they've raised a boatload of cash". But VCs might not want to give it all up front, or unconditionally.
It makes it hard to say what the valuation of a company is. If the milestones are unlikely to be hit, then it's anyone's guess.
This is a common structure. It's confusing to people who don't know finance or startups when they first see it.
Even VCs don't get all of their fund money delivered into their bank account when they raise a funding round. It's inefficient and undesirable for everyone involved to have to move all of the money up-front, at once.
If you talk to anyone in startup funding or finance they'll be familiar with the term "capital call" which describes how committed capital obligations are delivered at a later date than the initial deal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_call
I've been involved in many startups, and this type of fundraising is not common, or at least it wasn't common before a few years or so ago
The whole concept of talking about "runway" is basically calculating how much cash in the bank, that is actually in your bank account, will last. And this arrangement is different, as there are contingencies. In the past, VCs would just give you money in a particular series, and then if your business did well, they'd eventually give you more money in a later series. But it wasn't like they announced it all up front in, say, a Series A, but a big chunk of the money would only be delivered if you met milestones.
Both of CFS B rounds were cash, in recent years, and each in the range of "low billions". Sure another 2 orders of magnitude is another story, but so is selling hope. I'd say the latter is the thing that is unique here.
$100B isn't a startup. And if there's a $100B deal, you better believe the cash is there. Case in point - Netflix/Paramount wanting to buy WB. Or the $44B that Musk had to raise to buy out Twitter shareholders.
Both your examples are purchases. Musk had to raise actual capital to buy Twitter because the people getting the money were taking it and walking away.
Funding doesn't work like that. Investors are giving you money as part of a longer-term deal where they stick around.
This was already common in tech for Series C+ fifteen years ago when I raised a round. Once you’re talking tens or hundreds of millions, almost everyone wants milestones and tranches instead of giving all the money up front.
No, it's not common for the startup itself to make capital calls. The phrase (and your link) refers to capital calls made by VC firms to their limited partners. Same thing in PE.
I think more people are aware that VCs raise commitments for a fund that they can pull in via capital calls than are aware that startup funding from VCs come with hurdles to clear.
This is perhaps because the most common round to raise is a small/early one, and these tend not to have hurdles. Founders that only ever raised these rounds wouldn't necessarily know what happens in later/bigger rounds.
Also, I wonder if capital calls come with hurdles as well? That is, can an LP refuse to put in more money if the VC's recent investments have not done well? I would think not, since it typically takes many years to determine whether investments were good or not.
Gotta hit that high IRR as a fund manager and the clock starts when the cash comes in so capital calls are appreciated by fund managers. Unless they are emerging managers (the startup equivalent in finance) and their LP’s are less than institutional and ghost them when the capital call hits.
IRR is so trivial to manipulate - it'd be wonderful if more investors began demanding actual metrics on capital performance. If you're parking cash with an investment firm you want to know about how much of a return you can expect when it is withdrawn, and while history is a guide and not a guarantee, there are much better ways to inform that expected return than IRR. "My million got a return of 2% during a year when your reported IRR was 10% - where's the other 8%!" is a common cry from those who haven't just rolled over their investment, unaware of how little it has functionally appreciated.
There's an accelerator here in Taiwan with a model I truly don't understand: 100k usd for 10%. 10%!! You've just valued the company at only 1 million! And taken a HUGE chunk of equity, not much left on the table!
Maybe it makes sustainable sense but in the world of venture capital it seems the most profitable thing to do is lie through a Cheshire grin, every day.
As a mini fan, I don't know when I'll get my next iPhone. I've tried (and returned) the 16 and the Air. I don't want a phone that I can't type on one-handed, and for me that means sticking with the mini.
I hate that Apple is no longer providing security updates on iOS18 except to devices that cannot run 26 (like the X). Everyone says that 26 is lousy on all but the newest devices, so I am not going to update. But that means that my new AirPods don't have Find My, and I can't use the new AirTags either.
Ticky-tack moves like this tell me that Apple knows adoption is slow, and they're doing everything they can to force people to upgrade OS (or device). For us small-phone lovers, it's a no-win situation.
Relevant to the headline, though less relevant to the actual article, I miss the pre-AI youtube era. I search for educational videos for my kids and videos that are from the last couple years are likely AI slop. Some are pure slop, just terrible. Others are also slop (no visible narrator, pronunciation mistakes an AI would make, repeating stock footage) but are actually well done enough to be educational. However, I don't want my kids watching these even if they are educational because it could lead them to think that the style of video is not bad. I want them to have an attuned radar to that kind of junk.
For now, I just keep scrolling until I find something from before 2020, which is much more likely to be purely human-made and edited.
I think iPads now have a feature that 'neatens up' your handwriting. It's supposed to retain some of the original character, but just be a bit more legible. I've not used the feature but look forward to trying it when I upgrade to a newer device.
I think AI could be used to help make social media platforms more usable by people who embrace deep thinking. For example, we could use AI to surface the top 20 posts of the day relating to our work, so we wouldn't have to sift through tons of crap on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook.
I completely agree that there are other downsides to AI, cognitively speaking, but this seems like one potential upside.
Weird, I find the sound in my MBA to be quite good. I tried listening to podcasts through a HomePod mini and by comparison that was awful. I'd be surprised if this little IKEA speaker was substantially better than the MBA, though if so that'd be great!
reply