The CEO/founder as the L1 support is not the flex it may appear to be.
As a user, if the CEO/founder is answering my questions, I honestly will wonder if this is a one man fly by night operation that will be gone next week.
Also, a satisfactory support experience may not be the fastest one. If I ask for something, L1 says "no", but then escalates to sales, sales say "no", but escalate to the founder, the founder says "yes", the user may feel more "heard" and has a better sense of achievement than if the founder is the L1 who says "yes" immediately. The outcome is the same, but one will feel "earned".
You hit the nail on the head. The rest of the world yearns for a phone that is cheap, has many years of updates, and not directly subject to US government control.
Motorola on GrapheneOS can run away with this and create a Global South phone ecosystem that can rival that of Apple and Google. The fact they are Chinese owned is a feature.
The keyword in "Software as a Service" is not Software; it's the Service.
In the early days, the tagline for Salesforce is "No Software". It's secret recipe is this: your sales team only need a browser and a credit card, to get the service. No software installation needed. Even if you have a genius can code something equivalent, it will never be a "service". That genius is not going to support it, not going to add storage for you, not going to restore an accidentally deleted record for you. That takes an army to deliver. It is a service.
Of course, Marc Benioff kind of shot himself in the foot by trying to get ahead of the AI curve... and gutted their customer service division. If the service is delivered by AI agents, what is the selling point again over other AI agents? They have debased their key strengths and are getting punished for it.
The typical GPU cloud machine will have 8 H100s in a box. I didnt check your math but if a single machine needs 32 square meter radiator, 200 machines will probably be the size comparable to the ISS.
How much does it cost to launch just the mass of something that big?
Do you see how unrealistic this is?
Given that budget, I can bundle in a SMR nuclear reactor and still have change left.
I was listening to a podcast featuring Gavin Baker and he went on and on about models being defined in generations, and we will be moving from Blackwell generation to Rubin generation soon and it will be awesome. This is not something I know a lot about and he sounds like an expert I could learn so much from.
Then he talked about datacenters in space and this is something I have some appreciation for, and I immediately knew he couldnt have done much Physics, and sure enough, I was right.
There are "experts" out there who basically have no idea what they are talking about, "it is absolute zero in space in the shadow!", as though radiative cooling is that effective.
And that's not even talking about part failures. How do we replace failed parts in space? This is a scam, but everybody is afraid to openly challenge eloquent "experts" who are confidently wrong.
Because big companies can crush competition, either via lobbying for government regulations, acquiring the competitors, or driving the competition out of business by offering something comparable but cheaper or free.
It's the old Microsoft playbook of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, but with more finesse.
It is also why their acquisitions tend to just die, because once the big company inefficiencies get integrated, the acquired startups just cannot function.
On paper, Google should never have allowed the ChatGPT moment to happen ; how did a then non-profit create what was basically a better search engine than Google?
Google suffers from classic Innovator's Dilemma and need competition to refocus on what ought to be basic survival instincts. What is worse is the search users are not the customers. The customers of Google Search are the advertisers and they will always prioritise the needs of the customers and squander their moats as soon as the threat is gone.
Does anybody actually work with H100s and the like? Their failure rate is so high, I dont understand why anybody will even consider it feasible to put the machines in orbit or even the sea. By my ballpark estimate, if you have 800 H100s, after 6 months, about 100 would be overheating or throttling, and a few will disappear and one or two will crash the machine with load.
During my army days, the sergeant major always seem to know where we would fail to clean during inspection standbys, eg the top rim of doors. Part of it is a hazing ritual, but it also means if you know where to look, you know where people will consistently fail.
As an SRE who previously had to manually inspect changes and releases, I quickly learn what to check for, and saved many production issues from happening, but I guess nobody will know about the failures that didnt happen, but they will notice the delay I introduced and the inspection process was automated together with the CD system and I am cut out. Fingers crossed the automation is as thorough or can learn common failure modes.
Even though I worked for companies that killed Sun, I never stopped admiring the foundational work the company was doing, which was not just cool, but critical for technological progress, and was very sad when the company sold out to Oracle and was gutted alive. HPC stuff Sun pioneered is still very relevant today. In an alternate timeline, Sun fully embraced Open Source and became a key pillar of the internet today.
Unfortunately, while we are well aware of cool tech companies that were ran aground by the finance/sales/management consulting types, Sun felt like a company ran aground by engineers.
Zuck famously kept the Sun logo up for quite a while when Facebook bought Sun's HQ campus, as a warning to the employees of what they could become. In some ways, Facebook/Meta is the spiritual successor of Sun, just like Google became the spiritual successor of SGI when they bought the SGI campus.
But these two ad driven companies never quite became the new Sun/SGI, for better and worse.
Most religions have the concept of ritual cleanliness for thousands of years, esp touching dead bodies make them unclean and yet at some point, doctors have to be reminded to wash their hands after performing autopsy.
How did we get there? Because "modern science" rejects superstitious beliefs and ritual cleanliness is superstition. Right?
I chose antibiotics and paracetamol as examples precisely because it is well understood _now_ . You go back 50 years before we understand gut bacteria or the difference between male and female bodies and suggest the same, the then modern medicine will laugh at you and call you a witch doctor.
You have no problem accepting eg a treatment can only work on a man, but not on a woman. But modern medicine have no concept of a yin body type and a yang body type, which may or may not be male and female.
The whole idea of TCM is balance, and it varies with the individual, unlike modern medicine, where there is a right and wrong answer to everything. Bacteria bad, antibiotic good. Fever bad, paracetamol good.
Take fecal transplants for example. I dont think it is well understood how it works or it will be a pill by now, and is a last resort when all else fails. And it doesnt involve killing all the bacteria, but restoring balance to the bacterial ecosystem.
The unspoken part is the human mind is a big part in health, and treatments that does nothing medically but fools the human mind can work wonders too.
There is a lot we do not understand yet, just as blood letting was conventional medicine a few hundred years ago, and it isnt even entirely wrong since we still use leeches and some treatment, I think we have much to gain if we are not hasty in dismissing alternative approaches.
That said, I fully agree homeopathy and chiropractherapy are full of bullshit and potentially dangerous. TCM, as practiced in a certified scholarly environment in Asia, expects the practitioner to have a considerable basic knowledge in modern medicine too, and is humble enough to acknowledge TCM cannot solve everything. A good TCM practitioner will refer you to a GP when they know modern medicine is more effective.
The fundamental problem is TCM acknowledges individual differences that cannot be measured or even dont exist in the eyes of modern medicine, eg identical twins with different diets will have different responses to the same treatment, so going double blind will mean the results will be inconsistent.
I am biased as an ethnic Chinese, but I feel modern medicine is afraid that it's approach, the sum of parts empiricism may be incomplete, in that we dont understand all the parts yet.
The human body is not just human DNA organs working together, but also an ecosystem with myriad bacteria, and we are still in infancy when it comes to understanding the bacteria.
TCM seeks a black box metaphorical approach, which sounds like quackery but I do think it is capable of addressing _some_ blindspots in modern medicine, eg why some medication would work on a yin body but not a yang body... the difference is in the bacterial ecosystem.
That said, I see TCM (and other traditional approaches) as a last resort when modern medicine fails, and I certainly agree the approach is incapable of resisting shamanic beliefs.
I always believed that the AI/LLM/ML hysteria is misapplied to software engineering... it just happens to be a field adjacent to it, but not one that can very well apply it.
Medicine and Law, OTOH, suffers heavily from a fractal volume of data and a dearth of experts who can deal with the tedium of applying an expert eye to this much data. Imagine we start capturing ultrasound and chest xrays en masse, or giving legal advice for those who needs help. LLMs/ML are more likely to get this right, than writing computer code.
AI code assistants are amazing when you start from zero and just need a 80% working prototype. But once you start trying to refine the product from there, that's where the automation gets counterproductive.
If you can exactly specify the problem, eg "Password input crashes when the password has an apostrophe", AI can probably fix it. But if the bug report comes in as "Password input randomly crashes", I will be very surprised if AI can figure out why and fix it.
Where a human wrote the code, he or she may figure out why fairly quickly. Now, if you want a human who didnt write the code to understand the AI generated code, it may take a lot longer.
In fact, in all likelihood, the AI assisted products are likely to be buggier and stay so longer, esp if companies start to think they can fire the senior devs and hire less skilled devs and fill the gap with AI.
At some point, the pendulum will swing back, and companies will be chasing devs again.
As someone who was working on Itanium systems at the time, I can confidently say that "consumers" never had a chance to choose Itanium. It was only available on server hardware and Windows ... will there as a version for it but it was slow ... all the compatibility and performance downsides of M1 Macs, and more power hungry too... practically no upside.
It is still a common belief Intel created the Itanium to fool the proprietary unix vendors into thinking they can stop developing their own RISC CPU, but as soon as it happened, Intel gave up on Itanium as well. Solaris lasted a little bit longer only because Sun gave up early on Itanium.
As a user, if the CEO/founder is answering my questions, I honestly will wonder if this is a one man fly by night operation that will be gone next week.
Also, a satisfactory support experience may not be the fastest one. If I ask for something, L1 says "no", but then escalates to sales, sales say "no", but escalate to the founder, the founder says "yes", the user may feel more "heard" and has a better sense of achievement than if the founder is the L1 who says "yes" immediately. The outcome is the same, but one will feel "earned".