• 8 Posts
  • 16 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 31st, 2021

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  • Yeah, I certainly wondered about that too. The premise of the article was interesting (trying to come up with a framework to understand how Apple managed to handle the pandemic so well), but I’m not sure I completely buy the author’s argument that Apple is uniquely equipped to “thrive” in these kinds of crises.

    The point about Apple’s policy of pre-ordering processor capacity in excess of other similar hardware companies was interesting:

    Have you tried to buy a PlayStation 5 or an Xbox Series X? Good luck, they’re still hard to get. No one can produce enough chips. The same goes for automobiles. Automakers have had to choose between producing cars with fewer features or not making them at all.

    Apple hasn’t had this problem. You can walk into an Apple store right now and pick up an iPhone 12 or an M1-based Mac. Apple CFO Luca Maestri had warned in the company’s Q2 earnings call that Apple was expecting supply chain constraints, but in the Q3 call, he briefly mentioned that Apple had worked around them. He warned of more severe constraints in Q4, but knowing Apple’s habit of underpromising and overdelivering, I’m betting that it won’t turn out to be a major problem. Even if I’m wrong, I guarantee that Apple will be in a better situation than other silicon-dependent manufacturers.

    Apple can do this because it spends billions well in advance to secure the parts it needs—precisely what the auto industry didn’t do. Apple reported that it plans to spend over $38 billion in manufacturing purchase obligations this quarter, up 26% from last quarter. Analyst Ben Bajarin said it’s due to Apple locking in its chip supply. Other manufacturers have been caught with their pants down while Apple guarantees its chip supply.

    At the same time, I don’t think there’s been a significant shortage of most laptops or smartphones, mostly just GPUs and consoles at the “high end” and microcontroller-type boards at the “low end”.

    I’d never really heard of this “antifragile” concept so I kinda thought the piece was interesting, but far from perfect.





  • The company I work for has reopened our flagship office in SF, but there are no mandated returns for any employees. We’re effectively going to remain a 100% remote company, which is very nice. I was hired under the pretense of being 100% remote anyway, but I have some friends who are being forced to go back into their offices pretty aggressively and they’ve all more or less said they’re planning to look for other jobs. This is in tech, mind you, so my perspective might be a little skewed, but given how hot the hiring market is right now, managers and C-levels are going to eventually realize that if they push the issue too much (especially with Delta surging) they’ll wind up losing a ton of their good employees and be stuck in a bad market for hiring competent replacements at anywhere near their current salary. The salary demands that current tech applicants are getting away with make the salaries I was seeing ~2yr ago look pretty meager.



  • On the other hand, I am ideologically opposed to partnering up with entities like EUnomia, but this being a social media platform the posts are already public and I don’t think anybody should be using such a platform for anything they want to keep private in the first place. Ultimately, you’re trusting server admins for any instance and you have no idea how they use the data collected by the instance.

    Does anyone have more details on the partnership? I’m trying to make heads and tails of some of the grievances in the letter and haven’t been able to track down much on that particular point.

    Very well written response, btw – you captured a lot of things I’ve been thinking about far better than I could have 😝


  • Thank you! I was hunting through his mastodon posts trying to find it, but that makes sense. It’s nice to see that the response does address the fact that local and federated timelines are being treated as more of a “superuser” feature – but I do wonder what it will mean for the Fediverse overall if the number one “sponsored client” for Mastodon doesn’t expose those concepts at all.

    In UX tests with randomly selected, non-technical people, stumbling upon local or federated timelines has predominantly led to frustration either through language barriers, spam, or not safe for work content. I know that we might disagree about the size of server we have in mind or what constitutes a big server, but I think you’ll agree that even on a small and perfectly moderated server at least 2 of the 3 issues are likely to occur, if not in one timeline then another. And, unless you advocate for an “upload filter” type system, no moderation will be able to prevent exposure to spam and offensive content at least temporarily, at least in an open system which is what we’re focusing on.

    These are all pretty reasonable points, for sure.