Similar to adding the words "bad economy" in discussions regarding performance evaluations and raises. Cop outs based on mostly arbitrary "market mechanics".
The differences in the prices you mentioned are astronomical...
I'm already getting angry here to be charged $50 instead of $25 when the doctor "touches" you during some basic evaluation. But at least they tell you about any massive amounts coming up before any treatment happens.
It seems it was an unintended consequence of the Google Maps change and many users were affected and confused by it [1]. If you add a Billing account to a cloud project, Firebase will automatically upgrade you to Blaze. Since Google Maps added a billing account automatically to your Google Cloud account, that auto-upgraded your Firebase plan.
The response from the Firebase team [2] was that no additional charges would occur based on this incident, and they've opened an incident report [3] in their dashboard.
The weird part is that a Firebase plan for one of my side-projects suddenly auto-updated to the paid "Firebase Blaze". The email notification stated : "Your project was upgraded due to activity in Google Cloud"
"A user has set a new billing account for your project in the Google Cloud Platform console. This initiated billing for your project, resulting in an upgrade to your project's Firebase plan."
Issue with that is that I never made such a change. So how could "A user" have made this change?
The resulting frenzy in inspecting admin and user-logs ( and checking if my account was hacked ) just found a new billing entry called "Google Maps Platform Transition Account" that was suddenly linked to this Firebase project.
And I don't even seem to have permissions to inspect it.
It's actually how I became active in the webstore.. Tab Manager was sold to some other company and filled with malware afterwards. It took the webstore team over a year to take it down.
Luckily enough the source code was still on github, and I managed to fork it and improve that version into "Tab Manager Plus" [1]
Since then I've refurbished around 10 extensions and published a few of my own. It's fun, just annoying that malicious extensions aren't getting taken down fast enough, since I suppose not enough people report them.
How to report malicious extensions is also sometimes unclear. Some people think they have to install them first, that's only true for ratings, not reports. For example to report the extension from this blog post you just have to submit this form [2]
For other malicious extensions simply replace the extension id in that link.
The backstory of Tab Manager Plus is an older Chrome extension called "Tab Manager". Unfortunately the main developer sold it off to some sleazy company that infested it with lots of adware, etc.
So Chrome webstore removed that old extension, and suddenly it felt like I lost a little finger - because none of the other Tab Managers were so simplistic like this one ( I tried many ).
Fast forward to Tab Manager Plus - it's a fork of the old ( clean ) Tab Manager extension, with an improved design and all improvement requests built in ( there were actually quite a lot )
Main features are :
- see all tabs and windows in a small chrome popup
- drag and drop tabs in between windows
- highlight duplicate tabs
- immediate(!) tab search once you open the popup ( type right away )
- see the open tab counter over the tab icon
- you can limit how many open tabs there should be per window. e.g. if you set the limit to 15, and then open tab 16, it will move it to a new window instead.
Pro-tip : you can keep your little projects in a Dropbox folder. Will keep track of your file changes automatically and can help restore deleted files / or restore them to earlier versions.
This is a really cool showcase and kudos for being so open! I'm currently writing up an article on about 18+ (simple) points of what founders should be looking at before pitching.
But many times it just boils down to the same and only point - and that's the beginning. Just directly start with the problem, and then naturally move on to the solution. Like 50% of startups we watched at pitch events just failed at that - and the crowd was left wondering what they're really doing.
It's like the most important thing. Drop everything else, just throw the problem out there - to make people think about it - and then how you solve it.
But this, this was a step harder - no slides to back you up, and an investor in another data tool grilling you on the spot and not letting you off the hook to validate his own investment - that was a tough cookie. Usually you can just leave a comment or two about competitors and move on, but here you had to stay and explain details. So it's not a black and white fail for sure.
( Another point that helped us internally was to pitch in front of the team first. Because there the fails will become evident much faster, and it's a crowd you don't care too much about failing in front. Pitching in front of your team = unit tests before the event )
a) that's not how technology works, that's not how progress is decided. somebody goes out there and makes it
b) that's just an ignorant way of thinking. similar to the poster below who wouldn't want to live with an older generation of people because of their ignorance - which just shows his ignorance; it's not up to you or us to decide how long people should live or playing out 'what if' scenarios and wondering if humanity is better off because somebody died. it's pointless
c) any technology that is available to rich people becomes with the progress of time more affordable and available to the masses
d) if you die before you reach the next solar system, what's the point of starting the flight? see the fermi paradox and the great filter. mortality could be one of the great filters for interstellar expansion
e) that's... completely besides the point of this discussion
f) we are currently at the state quite complacent and well-adjusted to our environment. no big hardships, no predators - we're the dinosaurs now. what different strain of the homo sapiens would have to evolve now randomly to surpass the current strain? dinosaurs didn't evolve into highly intelligent beings, although they've been around millions of years
g) that's a complacent and dangerous "it's always been this way". cells stopping to reproduce themselves are a malfunction, and it can be technically solved; the same way as we can repair robots, machines or other electronics
mostly fears, complacency and wrong assumptions. taken into account, but not useful as they act as distractions and take attention from the topic - which was the technological hurdles of fixing the human robot