Looks interesting, well done for launching and good luck.
One question - not as a potential customer but as just another founder - how are you offering 24 hour a day support? Do you have a remote team that just naturally covers enough time zones or have you specially hired people or a service for this? It looks really impressive for a new product to launch with 24 hour support! I’d love to do this with my services but not a big enough team yet...
I was quite interested by this article. Raising $60 million so fast for such a margin-brutal high logistics complexity business when the founders are literally straight out of high school is either very promising or very bad.
I.e this is either a massive case of FOMO investing or these founders have articulated a really novel approach that’s going to give them an edge beyond the big raises.
The Airbnb for Kirana stores explanation downthread is maybe compelling. Almost like the 10 minute delivery is a byproduct of their approach rather than an insane logistics system they’ll need to build from scratch.
Pieter Levels (the guy who made Nomad List) reached $1 000 000 ARR with a single VPS, all his code in an index.php file and using FTP to transfer the latest code to his server...
I think if you’re a solo founder you have to accept on day one you’re at a time disadvantage when it comes to the actual hours you’ll spend on moving the business forward vs admin, ops, legal stuff etc etc and so you have to really fight smart!
I.e K8S? Definitely don’t need it. Complex CI/Deployment workflow? Nope, just the minimal shell scripts to do clean deploys and rollbacks. Pay for a HA RDS so you never need to worry about DB replication etc.
If you just work with the minimal set of tools you’re comfortable with and relentlessly keep things simple it’s possible. I’ve built high availability stuff as a solo founder and still found (at least some...) time to work on sales and the business.
I think you are right. There's a big difference between the technology I would use in a larger organization compared to solo projects.
Unless you build a side project to learn a new technology, you should use something "boring" that you know well.
Here's my personal choices in preferred order:
1. Static web sites - Just upload to S3 behind a CDN and forget about it
2. Server rendered website - PHP. It may not be something you brag about, but in my experience it just "works" and has excellent uptime.
Note: If I had to recommend something to a larger organization, I would probably suggest Next.js to attract developers. PHP is often associated with "old school" tech
3. REST service - Spring Boot. I have so much experience with it and there are so many Spring projects that supports a huge range of technologies from monitoring to data
It certainly seems like this agent was wildly negligent in his duties but I wonder if part of the slow and insufficient response might have been induced by the way in which the CEO handed over the complaint. One of the hallmarks of this case seems to have been large amounts of willful ignorance of the part of USA gymnastics leadership. I wouldn’t be surprised if less than 100% of the full import of the accusations made it across to the FBI from the CEO. Of course the FBI ideally should investigate everything professionally and thoroughly no matter the framing and how powerful the people involved are...
i'm not an FBI agent but it seems reasonable to me that the next thing you do after reading one accusation is pick up the phone and call the accuser. Whether you have 1,100, or 1,000 accusations makes no difference, after reading the first, you pick up the phone.
Yes, it’s great to be able to just use pure WireGuard - I’m allergic to the idea of VPN providers expecting you to run their proprietary app. WireGuard has a great iOS app these days too.
I don't know much about electric grid engineering - are there opportunities for a ML approach to increase efficiency in ways other than the sort of better supply forecasting implied by this article.
The article does mention the losses involved in long distance transmission, but surely traditional approaches can already yield fairly well optimised planning for improving this sort of efficiency?
(Finally, this article seems quite light on details to me & doesn't mention a source Google press release or anything like that with more specifics. Maybe just better supply forecasting could yield bigger benefits that I imagine...)
(copy-pasted disclaimer: I'm involved at a junior level in very-unsexy not-Google-level smart grid research using machine learning, and my power grid engineering knowledge is painfully limited.) Predicting demand is dicey dicey stuff, but throwing sensors on the grid gives a lot of information that can imply other factors. Just pulling this out of the air for an example, but: UK power is famous for having to deal with a sharp spike in demand when a big TV event is going on and then goes to commercial, because everyone in the country in synchronized fashion gets up, goes to the kitchen, and turns on the kettle for tea. (Really, it's a big deal!) Now, that's not the best example because of the dramatic nature of the spike, but you can see how power information might on some level reflect the state just before that spike: people aren't moving around their homes, vacuuming, w/e, they're in front of the TV, right? So our demand forecaster learning from the data might not be able to tell that a new season of Sherlock is airing, but it might learn enough paranoia about everyone-watching-TV-at-once patterns to be useful.
DM is far from the first company to provide ML solutions to revolutionize utilities.
There are so many opportunities to increase the efficiency of our electric networks. Forecasting demand is not something they do well, but more importantly they could improve Demand Response and Energy Efficiency programs. Oh, and most of the techniques they use to prevent and stop theft are a joke (that's a $6B/yr problem in the US).
The utilities have not been forced to innovate. They won't innovate on their own because there are no customers at risk - no competition. (Aside from smart meters and the main benefit from that was that they no longer had to pay for meter readers.)
There is a WORLD of opportunity for utilities to become more efficient, but they will not do it on their own. Our regulators need to force them to innovate.
Kudos to DM for this work, but I will be more impressed if they can actually get a major utility to implement these solutions.
"Forecasting demand is not something they do well, but more importantly they could improve Demand Response and Energy Efficiency programs."
- Source?
"The utilities have not been forced to innovate. They won't innovate on their own because there are no customers at risk - no competition."
- Also, what data can you provide to back this up? I work in the industry, and I can tell you that innovation will depend largely on the type of energy market that the utility operates in, whether or not they are a vertically integrated company, regulated or unregulated, IOU or POU, as well as a ton of other variables. So while maybe its true that not every single company is innovating, to generally say that they "won't innovate" or that there is "no competition" is simply wrong as well as spreading incorrect information about the industry.
Can you call emergency services via Amazon Echo? I've read on a car forum I'm part of about someone who was working on their vehicle without jack stands and got trapped when their jack slipped. They used Siri to call their wife and jack the car back up. They probably would have died without it.
I can easily forsee a future where consumers ask companies for voice assistants that turn on automatically when they detect duress (not needing to say "Alexa ...") before one where governments actually compel product manufacturers to do this.
Yes and for all you know that table you bought could include a large battery, LTE receiver, and a microphone and could be recording your every sound as well.
There's a limit to how much paranoia is warranted, and in this case I'm firmly in the "it's not" column. Yes, it could be recording your every sound for months on end and uploading it to evil amazon, but not only would they be in some hot water legally in some areas, but the media would have a fucking field day with it, and for what gain?
To be able to listen in on your conversations?
And if you want to argue that it could be remotely updated to target you to always record that data, you could always be targeted by inserting a microphone into anything else of yours (good 'ole bugs).
You don't need to like them, you don't need to own them, and you don't need to be somewhere that has them, but some of us see utility in devices like this. And to me it's well worth the trade off that my recordings could be used in a court of law when requested with a warrant and I agreed to it.
The comparison between a bugged table and a device whose primary purpose is to always be listening to you is a bit of a stretch, don't you think?
Amazon provides cloud storage and processing to the web. Given their history of relatively ruthless (if strategically smart) business moves, I don't think it is unreasonable to consider that they could store this data for use down the line or do so at government request. This is all software based permissions that seem to be one invisible server side tweak away from becoming an always recording (not just listening for a wake word) device.
I got an Amazon Tap because it required a button push to record. They just enabled the option for always listening just like the echo. In theory I control it, but clearly I do not in practice.
To be completely honest, the "save this at government request" is a real threat, but there is nothing that amazon can realistically do to prevent that (short of physically not manufacturing the device to have a microphone, but even then is it that much of a jump from "forcing them to write code" to "forcing them to add a microphone"?)
But in terms of adding this kind of surveillance stuff for greed? I just don't see it paying off. Regardless of how shady or ruthless you think amazon is, they aren't going to brazenly break 1-party and 2-party listening laws. And all it takes is one guy somewhere who owns one to discover it and it's all over.
People are more than willing to give up information for very little gain, there's no reason to try and "steal" it illegally. If the argument is that amazon is a greedy company willing to do unethical things for money, where's the money in this? Where's the money in 24/7 audio recordings vs recordings of when you are speaking to the thing?
Actually you can monitor the packets coming through your network and prove whether it is recording or not.
Also reverse-engineering the Alexa, and taking it apart will allow you to see whether there is enough storage space for lengthy conversations. Which are only stored for in-transit post the wake-word however.
You can delete your recordings on amazon.com and google also allows you to delete your recordings if you use google home. So this will give you insight into what recordings they do have.
One question - not as a potential customer but as just another founder - how are you offering 24 hour a day support? Do you have a remote team that just naturally covers enough time zones or have you specially hired people or a service for this? It looks really impressive for a new product to launch with 24 hour support! I’d love to do this with my services but not a big enough team yet...