AlbertCory

910 ms·

1. 3751.▲
   by AlbertCory 4y ago

   My neighbor, in fact, has a spinet which he can't give away.
2. 3752.▲
   by AlbertCory 4y ago

   Did he not have that Steinway flown around with him for his concerts, though?
3. 3753.▲
   by AlbertCory 4y ago

   It's true, that "older is better" is only true up to a point. A 40-year-old Steinway? Probably great. A 120-year-old? Not so much.
4. 3754.▲
   by AlbertCory 4y ago

   wow, you're really a Steinway hater, aren't you? I've talked to lots and lots of players, and an extremely common statement is that the feel of the Steinway keys is the best. I kinda agree with that, while realizing that th
5. 3755.▲
   by AlbertCory 4y ago

   I took lessons from someone who had TWO grand pianos, a Steinway and a Bechstein. They sold their house, and I became the custodian of the Bechstein on indefinite consignment. It had a cracked sound board, but she was sure that collectors w
6. 3756.▲
   by AlbertCory 4y ago

   I think I'm agreeing, depending on what you mean by "extractive." Scaling economies mainly benefit the shareholders. Possibly they lead to lower prices, or higher royalties to authors, but that's only speculative.
7. 3757.▲
   by AlbertCory 4y ago

   Unlike the Staples - Office Depot merger, about which I couldn't care less, or a tech giant stifling smaller competition by buying it: These are two giants in a very small oligopoly. I can't see any consumer benefit to a merger,
8. 3758.▲
   by AlbertCory 4y ago

   Like I said: tough tradeoffs. Maybe now you can't easily access a ginormous cloud of AI-optimized processors (I don't actually know this is true, by the way. Anyone?). A few years from now, maybe some large player will offer tha
9. 3759.▲
   by AlbertCory 4y ago

   It isn't just "execution" -- it's choosing what you ought to build in house now, and what's better to just buy. Building the processor in house probably IS a good call. In Jobs' day, even he didn't build
10. 3760.▲
    by AlbertCory 4y ago

    One pedantipoint for you.
11. 3761.▲
    by AlbertCory 4y ago

    Correct. Apple also picks and chooses which things it buys and which it builds in-house.
12. 3762.▲
    by AlbertCory 4y ago

    It's not a "counterexample" because I didn't give an example. In any case, it's never a simple answer: vertical integration has advantages and disadvantages.
13. 3763.▲
    by AlbertCory 4y ago

    A good article. > This level of investment simply isn’t viable for a company like Snap or Twitter or any of the other also-rans in digital advertising (even beyond the fact that Snap relies on cloud providers instead of its own data cent
14. 3764.▲
    by AlbertCory 4y ago

    That must be what happened, then :) Of course, you still have this morbid curiosity: "Is that it? What am I not seeing?" Then you shudder and close the page.
15. 3765.▲
    by AlbertCory 4y ago

    Indeed. Once you ignore all the other bazillion things you can do, you attain bliss.
16. 3766.▲
    by AlbertCory 4y ago

    FFmpeg is definitely in one of the lowest circles of Hell. I did figure out the very simple switches to convert WAV to FLAC. Mercifully I don't need it for anything else (yet).
17. 3767.▲
    by AlbertCory 4y ago

    Edit window now closed, so an update: After much research and brainstorming with my friend Jerry, I'm hitting on some tags from Chipolo. They're in the same league as AirTags and Tile, designed for consumers to find their lost ite
18. 3768.▲
    by AlbertCory 4y ago

    All good points. If you look online for industry-wide comparisons, you tend to find them behind paywalls. That's why I used SEC filings, which are public. It's also very tedious. I suppose that's why people think they can cha
19. 3769.▲
    by AlbertCory 4y ago

    That's true. I could make the argument that, on the macro scale, it all evens out. So maybe some activities are counted that shouldn't be, and some aren't counted that should be. On the scale of billions of dollars, it probab
20. 3770.▲
    by AlbertCory 4y ago

    I can't look at seekingalpha without being logged in, which I refuse to do for publicly available information. Anyway: Palantir is developing lots of new products, being in the security area, I imagine, while I don't know what Rin
21. 3771.▲
    by AlbertCory 4y ago

    .. and Facebook is only a couple years older. And their numbers are not monotonically increasing. Can you find some companies you think are comparable?
22. 3772.▲
    by AlbertCory 4y ago

    .. and yet, the percent is going up, not down. secondly, you are incorrect about it being "young." It was founded March 21, 2006, making it 16 years old. For a web company, that's an eternity.
23. 3773.▲
    by AlbertCory 4y ago

    As I indicated in my post https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/should-elon-lay-off-all-... : Twitter spends more on R&D as a percentage of sales than 5 other large tech companies, even Facebook, and moreover, the per
24. 3774.▲
    by AlbertCory 4y ago

    hey HNers, this is sorta related to an idea I have, using a Pi plus an RF transceiver for reading RFID tags. Commercial ones with Bluetooth seem to run $1,000 or more. I'm helping out with a food distribution org (lfrad.org). One of th
25. 3775.▲
    by AlbertCory 4y ago

    Hey. I want my audiobooks on Spotify. This is purely a disinterested position, of course. In order to serve you better. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Audible-The-Big-Bucks/dp/B0BDBG5VNP/r... [2] https:/&
26. 3776.▲
    by AlbertCory 4y ago

    "industry norms" was my initial inspiration: maybe Twitter is not a tech company at all, and the industry they're in is actually "media." So what are those norms? So I got the News Corp. annual report. As I said,
27. 3777.▲
    Should Elon Lay Off All Those Developers?(albertcory50.substack.com)

    12 points by AlbertCory 4y ago|4 comments
28. 3778.▲
    by AlbertCory 4y ago

    I guess we could both read the part of the report where they explain it :) If it's capitalized, then it's not R&D, which is all expensed.
29. 3779.▲
    by AlbertCory 4y ago

    R&D costs: went from 7,694,000,000 to 10,273,000,000 quarterly 2021 to 2022. whereas revenue went 65,118,000,000 to 69,092,000,000. Somewhat less of an increase. You'd assume R&D is mostly fully loaded costs of engineers, but I
30. 3780.▲
    by AlbertCory 4y ago

    I just answered my own question, since I had the MS report in Word. I was hoping I'd have to supply a password to edit it, which would be a somewhat reasonable level of security. But no; you just click "edit anyway." Duh.