Buy me a hot chocolate! | About Me
Date: Sat Sep 16 11:42:37 PM CEST 2023
This podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting is one of my favorite podcasts I listen to every week. The hosts Mike (sometimes Jar-Jar Binks, sometimes Yoda, all-the-the-time Objective-C obsessive and Taylor Swift/Katy Perry fanboy programmer with a penchant for destroying laptops with adult beverages and proprietor of alice.dev) and Chris (The great-hair having Star-Trek nerd about that R.V. life boss of the largest Linux podcast network) have an amazing rapport and they tackle some evergreen topics as well as current events in the tech/programming/business space.
Don’t mind Chris’s tendencies to bring up Bitcoin he’s convinced the lightning network that facilitates sending fractions of a Bitcoin – a hundred-millionth of a coin – as a way to support the network and creators etc. It’s also an interesting part of the value-for-value podcasting 2.0 movement.
Check out them out on CoderRadio at Coder Radio Show.
Mike comically quips that Microsoft should have bought Canonical makers of the venerable Ubuntu Linux distribution.
WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux - get a proper bash terminal on your Windows box) at the time was moving from strength to strength and perhaps had they done so I can only imagine how different desktop linux would be today. I wonder what gaming on Linux would be given how really amazing it is now thanks to Valve makers of the game platform Steam oh and Half-Life and Portal and all their work in combining Wine and Proton to make running Windows games on Linux.
In 2018 Apple and Amazon had market caps of ~750B1 2 while Microsoft was pushing nearly 800B3 which put these three champions of US industry and might right between the GDPs of Columbia and South Africa.4. Which is just insane. At some point how to countries expect to govern or effectively reign in these high-flying bastions of capitalism? Congress can’t seem to pass anything and current anti-trust laws are horribly inadequate for this digital age.
Mike recalls a movie about a dystopian future from either the 80s or 90s where corporations take over the running of government. (No thank you.) Apparently around this time as a faux libertarian marketing stunt? Dominoes was having folks identify pot holes in streets near them and the company would come and fix the pot hole and for their trouble they’d paint a Domino’s logo on the pot hole thereby advertising their mediocre pizza but also somehow rubbing it into the noses of all who could see who inept the local government was. Read more about this here from Eater.com.
From the article:
So while the free money is nice, Valverde [University of Toronto
Legal Studies professor] hints that it could be just an early taste of
the dystopian future where you get Domino’s and nice roads — or an
independent pizzeria and some crumbling infrastructure.
The guys comment on this more eloquently than I just did.
Oh man o man did this resonate with me. You can see this all over the internet, tons and tons of forum posts tens or hundreds of pages long on every topic from what is the best graphics card, or who makes the best CPUs or which political party is better than the rest or who’s recipe for chocolate chip cookies is the best and so on and so on…
Why people tend to be so tribal about things is funny and why we stan for these giant corporations when they’ve already won, they’ve gotten our money! Yet our choice to give them money in exchange for a shiny new widget somehow turns us into zealots for the cause with our bibles of confirmation bias to wield to convert the other side. And to what end? To do that company’s marketing for them, for free?! My writing eloquent long posts citing benchmarks and value for money this and that’s doesn’t earn me any money just feel-good points. I can’t pay my cell phone bill with feel-good points stanning for AMD and yet I did for years.
It’s gross. I’ve done it. I’m no saint here.
The guys talk about how this is a thing even or especially in tech and how it’s just odd.
There were so many gems in this episode. I couldn’t get them all. But the ones I managed to get are gold.
Seems to be the model: burn a ton of money to get “product market fit” (sic) and then either get bought or IPO or blow up. If you blow up who cares it wasn’t your money. It was just some teacher pensions money or some rich guy’s money or blah blah blah. It got really bad at one point where the whole business model was to get acquired because it was thought large companies – looking at you Cisco – were thought to be unable to innovate organically so they’d just aqui-hire a startup netting the founders millions and they’d work the mandatory few years until their options vested and then rinse and repeat.
Did they add value? Dunno. Did they get rich? You betcha!
Mike goes on to reminisce about old school business lessons he was taught that don’t seem to apply to companies today.
At about an hour into the episode Chris seemingly predicts value-for-value and how it might save the network and keep podcasting independent of advertisers.
Copyright Alex Narayan - 2023