thomassmith65

4 ms·

31.
by thomassmith65 3mo ago
Too late to edit my comment. I'm embarrassed to say, I just realized the big problem with my original comment, and it is hackneyed: the end-users probably weren't the customers . I doubt Google was cavalier about its relationship
32.
by thomassmith65 3mo ago
Gmail was a great product because they doled out a GB of storage for free. Agreed that they introduced other features people liked. As a user, you were faceless. I have a vague memory from the early Gmail days. I'm pretty sure they cha
33.
by thomassmith65 3mo ago
25 years ago, 'customer focus' was the buzz word. Gmail (and similar products) killed it. The internet made it possible for a company to serve hundreds of millions of people without the overhead of listening to, or supporting, or
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by thomassmith65 3mo ago
It is a disgusting dysfunctional institution that should have never been created in my opinion. The EU successfully addressed some big issues that young people don't feel are relevant anymore because the EU successfully address
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by thomassmith65 3mo ago
Is that to say the Islamic Republic of Iran don't necessarily want to eradicate the USA but merely want to see its downfall? I don't have much sympathy for that; it's not like there's some more liberal, more democratic,
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by thomassmith65 3mo ago
The most likely thing is that the person who contacted you wanted more acknowledgement from you that, in a lot of ways, subscriptions suck. If that wasn't the root cause of his/her rage, it might be that the person felt the referr
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by thomassmith65 3mo ago
That's fair. I suppose "current impression" would have been a better choice of words.
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by thomassmith65 3mo ago
Too late to edit my comment, but here is one example of going above and beyond for this business: Uncommon Apps should create and maintain a pdf document with fair, useful information about competing podcast apps that do not use the subsc
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by thomassmith65 3mo ago
It depends on the nature of the interaction. If I contact a company to decide if I want to become their customer, I probably like them. If I contact a company about a post-sales problem or for technical support, it's a different story.
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by thomassmith65 3mo ago
The author hired someone with technical knowledge, but that's not enough. Technical knowledge and people skills are different things. If someone has taken the effort to contact you, they likely already have a bad first impression of yo
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by thomassmith65 4mo ago
That's true, but the 'high-order bit' in the music industry deals, back when Gates wrote this message, was that Apple had a comparatively dinky user base. So for a record company to ink a deal with Apple was lower risk than
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by thomassmith65 4mo ago
Claude would break the rules in that example. It's supposed to*. Grok will break the rules to be "maximally based" . If I get run over by a speeding chatbot, I'd rather it be by Claude rushing a pregnant lady to the hos
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by thomassmith65 4mo ago
There was a self-help industry long before Tim Ferriss. "How to Win Friends and Influence People" is still popular today. Dale Carnegie wrote it in 1936. Back in the '80s and '90s Tony Robbins infuriated millions of Nort
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by thomassmith65 4mo ago
I notice your reply is not so far removed from original point: What counts as 'doing something bad' and 'cheating' clearly is subjective. I suspect Graham's opinion on the behaviour of a Zuckerberg or a Musk wou
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by thomassmith65 4mo ago
The Catholic church is an institution of the Roman Empire, and it's still around. That puts things in perspective, I find, and makes me wonder if 100 thousand years from now, historians will just lump the Romans and us into the same bu
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by thomassmith65 4mo ago
It Alice tells Bob "I'm so hungry I could eat a horse" , Bob challenges her actually to eat one, and Alice says she wasn't being literal, a reasonable person would not consider Alice to have made a motte-and-bailey argu
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by thomassmith65 4mo ago
Would anyone take literally the claim that it is impossible to attain a billion dollars without 'doing something bad' or 'cheating'? Someone with $100 billion, who wanted to disprove it, could do so in five minutes, by c
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by thomassmith65 4mo ago
If she meant "impossible" as hyperbole (as one might use "nobody wants a stylus!" to mean "very few people want a stylus!" ) then I agree with her. If she meant "impossible" completely literall
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by thomassmith65 4mo ago
So you can imagine how astonished I was last month when an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars [...] that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in som
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by thomassmith65 4mo ago
Well then, the Mac had LOM hardware 20 years ago.
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by thomassmith65 4mo ago
The vehicle's dashboard flickered, and at once James heard Elon Musk's voice emanate from its speakers: "Mr Bond, you are seated in a top of the line Tesla Cybertruck. I have plotted a course on its navigation system to my O
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by thomassmith65 4mo ago
It's always a good read when someone discusses what has gone wrong with the tech industry, and the author's comments about the past match with my recollections. What happened to tech is straightforward, though: the iOS App Store i
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by thomassmith65 4mo ago
The world's first trillionaire. Likely father to dozens of children with various women, based on unusual ideology. Runs a spaceship company. Penchant for extreme politics and fascination with nazism. Pulls strings at the highest levels
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by thomassmith65 4mo ago
My original comment was to add context to the article's first line: Apple FINALLY lets you turn on your Mac remotely, without having to press the power button. To you and me, that sentence needs the word "again" appe
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by thomassmith65 4mo ago
Any implication that OS X Server could only run on Xserve was inadvertent. I mentioned the special OS to preempt discussion of whether Xserve was, strictly speaking, part of the Mac product line.
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by thomassmith65 4mo ago
Xserve had LOM hardware 20 years ago. LOM enables power management even if the Xserve is off, and even if it lacks an installed operating system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Monitor Edit: Xserve was an
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by thomassmith65 4mo ago
If the government added an 'abolish all future elections?' item to every ballot, it would be more democratic, and also a risk to democracy. Everyone has a voice now, but the hysterical, shouting voices drown out the calm ones.
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by thomassmith65 4mo ago
The 90s weren't so different, nor earlier decades, centuries. In fact, the positioning here irritates me: The McCanns vanished, as did Sally and Steve. It wasn’t that hard; they were living in the golden age of fugitives. It mak
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by thomassmith65 4mo ago
I'm no supporter of Trump, but the Iranian regime plotting to assassinate an American president - if true - poses a problem for America: https://justice.gov/opa/pr/iranian-intelligence-agent-convic...
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by thomassmith65 5mo ago
The principal U.S. demand being placed on Iraq is to reduce Iranian influence in the country, which especially takes the form of pro-Iranian militias. https://iranintl.com/en/202601167778 'Iranian influen

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