I read in bed on a Kindle and have found that lower brightness is helpful in calming before bed, regardless of whether I have the warmth up or down. The "dark mode" feature that inverts the screen I have actually have pretty poor experience with - I find it harder to read the words which leads to more straining which is counter productive. The only "benefit" I see of this feature is to decrease the overall light in the room which might be helpful for others sharing the bed etc.
Huberman concluded this too - dimming lights at night is better than blue-blocking [1].
I'd like to see a study using Flux on computers for those working late at night and then trying to sleep. Assuming the stimulation of a late work session would diminish sleep quality regardless of light color, but which is "better" at allowing the participant to fall asleep quicker/ higher levels of deep/rem would be helpful. If you're doing anything to do with design Flux is a big no no.
I think it goes to my earlier point that they're so massive now that they need to ship huge bets to move the needle even a little bit. Gmail and Search both are valid, but to an earlier point are now decades old. Both of these businesses have used inorganic growth for their needle movers - the acquisitions that changed the game for them: Meta was Whatsapp and Instagram; Google was Youtube and DoubleClick.
Meta is becoming more like Google in it's wide ranging products in disparate markets and ultimately shutting them down one by one. Unlike Google they seem to be more focused and therefore it's good to see the shuttering of Workplace given it's not a strong contender in it's market.
For most large businesses in order to move the needle they need to be making really large bets in a few really large markets to keep growth. A Slack alternative would never move the needle for them, given the most successful (Slack) sold at the top of the market for a "large" amount of money, which was $28B (only ~2% of Meta's market cap today).
Shutting down Drizly means shutting down it as an independent app - the same merchants are available on Uber Eats for the most part so you should be able to get alcohol delivered via the normal app.
Incredible that old shows have gone on to enormous success after streaming on Netflix - Suits, Breaking Bad, Friends, The Big Bang Theory, Brooklyn Nine-Nine. I wonder how much these streaming hours compare to the original network viewerships. It would also be interesting to understand the licensing deals that go onto extending these shows onto Netflix, seems like a no-brainer for any older show to get a second life, especially after seeing Suits and others doing 600M hours.
Some images are base64 in URLs in Google image search results for their thumbnails. Does anyone have any idea why?
Search "Pepsi can" and some when you right click > copy image address will result in "data:image/jpeg;base64,/.../" instead of the website's image. Presumably to limit server cost / make the browser render? It's not for all sites, so perhaps more common sites (Walmart for example) it gives the correct image URL.
I appreciated this commentary. When the news from Suhail came out as quite sudden, realistically there's a team under a struggling company working tirelessly to fulfill their vision.
It sounds like M1 was the nail in the coffin - though you'd think this is a normal question for an investor to ask re defensibility when deciding to invest in the company (a version of the classic "What if Google entered your market?"), and thus something they would have had rebuttals for?
I'd argue that this isn't a retrospective in it's truest form. I would like to have a piece that's more about the metrics, like what sort of churn they got, how was their launch perceived, what sort of market research they did/ didn't do etc. These sorts of pieces would help make the lonely startup world more transparent and accessible (it's easier to do this after the fact, rather than when keeping up appearances when trying everything to keep a company alive). Perhaps Suhail will bless us with this at some point.
I'm sure it's against both's ToS but that doesn't really matter. The concern here is spamming on the third party ordering apps and clearly trying to appear as other legitimate brands. Hopefully the reviews shown in the app will detract people from ordering from them (if it were a popular restaurant then surely a low rating would be a red flag?).
There are legitimate reasons for a cloud kitchen wishing to run multiple brands/food concepts that are fine and actually very entrepreneurial. For example, someone could wish to run multiple different food concepts (Chinese, Thai, Pizza, Mexican, etc.), each with limited menus and cross use a bulk of the ingredients, and instead of having one huge disjointed menu, you can more accurately cater and be found by hungry eaters who are looking for that specific cuisine. As long as you're providing quality food at good prices then you'll be competitive with other restaurants within your chosen cuisines and be able to cater to more of the demand-side of the marketplace.
This is a well researched article touching on some key points as to why Excel lives on. Interesting for me is the unbundling of Excel, and the birth of many B2B SaaS products. I'm not sure Excel was ever the right program to generate many of these products, and so it makes sense someone built a specific program to house it (product boards, CRMs, calendars all fall in this imo). Others however, absolutely, I'm not sure the long term value in some products that can simply be done in Excel - often when a startup goes after one of these verticals it's hard to create value for the user and the business, because by building a product you are by definition limiting the potential/power of the program by limiting what it can do. So you're asking someone to pay for something that is more limited than it's Excel-cousin, but might be simpler to use and look prettier. An example to me of this is financial modeling / flightpath type apps for businesses. Instead of paying for a bunch of saas, maybe a company should go back to hiring more Excel ninjas, ergo Excel Never Dies.
