When you write an article like this better mention hard numbers. Like what percentage of the population of the city is digital nomads. My guess - less than 1%. Its easy to blame all the problems of your city on outsiders than take responsibility.
I have written crawlers for a while, most sites are unfriendly to anything other than Google (maybe they spare bing as well), some make it downright impossible without extensive work on evading their blocking techniques.
I expect (but can not confirm) this is the same reason why search engines like ddg and you.com also rely on bing's indexes.
Google's supremacy is here to stay. Only threat is bing or someone that comes with some excellent tech that bing incorporates (like openai) but actually works for search and is not just a LLM.
It happened to me when I was junior engineer during covid, honestly I came out as a better developer since I learned how to get answers from the code, I got much better at navigating different codebases. Though it was still a drag sometimes and I felt my manager didn't do enough to create an environment where junior engineers could thrive in.
I found that there were 2 kind of seniors - genuinely helpful ones, total assholes. These assholes will never help you, if you ping them they pretend to not see it and the helpful ones are always so busy they can't get any time to help you.
He absolutely should have gotten rid of the troublemaker. Many folks used this publicity to leave for higher positions or higher pay (which is very common at google) but made it look like Jeff Dean was the problem.
I used to own 20$ headphones for few years, I upgraded to 50$ ones for the next couple of years and finally to 200$ ones. I have felt big differences each time. I don't see whats funny about that. If I upgrade now (I can't quite afford to considering the diminishing returns and my income) but still I expect to get upgrade in sound quality, comfort, build quality, etc.
I got a bill on GC that was less than a cent and my bank couldn't process that. GC closed my project (free tier) and then I paid the minimum amount that my bank allowed.
> You simply can't count on the baseline configuration of your account and instances provided by AMS, you need advanced knowledge on how to secure your resources beyond basic stuff like MFA and monitoring.
What advanced knowledge are we talking about here?
I felt disillusioned 4-5 months in my first job after college. I could see the project I was working would take a long time to create something of value (3-5 years) but we were always put under pressure to show some stupid demos to management every quarter.
So at the end we were just doing these demos and not working on actual things that we needed to do. The project was important, if implemented successfully it would cut jobs of ~60 people in the organization. So management kept on adding more people until they realized that there was no real progress and they dumped the project and we got reassigned.
I realized that 1 year of my work as well as ~15 other engineers just went to waste.
Failure of Self driving certainly can't be attributed to Sundar. Yes GCP has obviously failed.
What Sundar has done well is the AI first focus. Deepmind acquisition was key and they are developing their own chat thing which very well might bail them out. Thanks to him, Google spends a large amount in AI related R&D.
What Sundar's main issue is his philosophy of "Reward Effort, Not Outcomes". This leads to people pretending to work hard, releasing half baked products. Instead he should change this to awarding long term outcomes.
His other issue is that he is not a good storyteller (e.g. like Nadella). Being a non-founder CEO he needs to work on this.
My experience with React has been different hence commenting here. That is just not true. I have used react with nextjs in the past but moved to remix. Moving to a new framework requires you to learn it, quite similar to learning a new language but it is much better than manually creating webpack loaders. I had a decent experience with nextjs but my experience with remix has been better.
I used Spring Boot at work and I have worked with backend libraries like Express(JS), Flask(Python), Gin(go) all the experiences have been much better than using Spring Boot. Java takes too long to compile, dependecy injection in Spring just seems to take forever, and overall Java is very very verbose. Just to create a stupid API, you have to create a new class for request, one for response, controller, service. I can do it if I am paid for it but using that for side projects, a big NO.
For me democratizing can mean "We have done something hard and we are going to share the benefits of it for minimal gain". The business is not lucrative for others to copy because margins are low.
OpenAI is a capped profit company. https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp/. If they become as big as everyone today thinks they will become, they can be democratizing AI.
Also note that, lot of progress in AI has happened because big companies are willing to share their research publicly, which helps them in attracting talent.
The hard thing about Indie businesses is proving product-market fit. Rest of what they do can easily be copied even if they don't share info. Not sharing revenue numbers will just help them with others not going for similar ideas.
But sharing info leads to social media following, which is key to marketing for many of these companies.
P.S. I have never been a digital nomad.