354: Nvidia Q3, Apple & TSMC, Metal Mining, Cloudflare CAPEX, GPT-4, Omega 3, and Thoughts on Severance

"who aren’t as secretive as they once were, apparently"

Friendship happens on the way to something else. If you "try to meet new people" it feels weird and forced. The more you aim for friendship, the more it eludes you.

But if you aim to learn or achieve something with others, friendship happens naturally during the shared pursuit. —James Clear

🏁 This is the first edition published under the 2.0 business model with a paywall (details on what and why here).

I’m nervous because it’s a big change, but I’m excited because I know it’s the right thing for the long-term. Thank you for your support, without you I’m just writing personal notes to myself.

I may not have the most readers, but I certainly have the best ones!

🎧🎙 Two days ago, I recorded my first 3-way podcast with two friends-of-the-show.

I won’t spoil the surprise, but it was a lot of fun and I think you’ll really enjoy our conversation. I’ll stop here. I’ve already said too much, it’s a secret 🤐

🐦 All the bad stuff on Twitter can be found elsewhere. But all the best stuff on Twitter can’t be found elsewhere.

🛀 👶↔👶 I wonder what happens when it is discovered that newborn babies have been accidentally switched up at the hospital and then have been raised with the wrong family for years. Do they switch back? Is it too late and basically considered de facto adoption?

Hopefully, this happens extremely rarely anymore, but back before they had lots of processes to prevent it, it probably happened more often than we’d like to imagine…

🥶 🚚 📦📦📦 Quick follow-up on Amazon hiring freezes from edition #353:

Reader Kevin LaBuz pointed out something that I knew about, but didn’t think of in this context.

Normal attrition at Big Tech is rather high.

It may be coming down these days as the labor market is becoming more difficult and fewer people are job-hopping to get better comp, but in recent years, employee turnover has been high (in the double-digit range, I don’t know if there are official numbers, but I’ve seen claims in the 20% range for certain companies).

So the words “hiring freeze” may not sound too draconian, but if normal attrition stays relatively high and the freeze lasts a while, the impact could be significant.

📺 🤦‍♀️ 😩 Follow-up on YouTube being stupid by removing the option to sort from “oldest-to-newest” in edition #353:

I wonder if this is just a cost-cutting measure. If they made it so that a way smaller total number of videos get any traffic at all — because the others are so far out of the way that almost nobody gets to them, kind of like the links on Google’s 17th result page — and that means that their CDN network can cache fewer videos and overall requires less storage. 🤔

That may make sense for them. But for users, it makes YouTube significantly worse, and helps make anything but the recent past less accessible and discoverable.

YouTube handled this terribly in other ways too: They apparently BS’ed people for months about this being just a bug/temporary, and then basically said “yea, no, nevermind, deal with it”. Ugh.

🛀 🗣🔓🚪 Now that home automation is common and people have various cloud-connected disembodied voices that they can ask to turn on the lights or open the blinds or whatever…

I wonder if it has ever happened that someone with a smart lock had someone on the outside scream loud enough (maybe through an open window on a second floor or something like that) something like “Alexa, unlock the front door” and get access to a house that way 🤔

🔥 By definition, the “toiling in obscurity” part is not something that most people see.

That’s why it can seem like luck when someone gets traction. But usually, if you dig a little deeper, you can find that they’ve been doing reps and iterating for a long time, and likely are working harder AND smarter than most (the cliché is “work smarter NOT harder”, but that still gets overtaken by someone who does BOTH).

Above is Pieter Levels’ Github page showing 30,857 code commits in the past year (I know they aren’t all big, but still!), and that’s just one aspect of the multiple businesses he’s running and building at the same time, along with his writing.

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🏦 💰 Liberty Capital 💳 💴

🤘 This is METAL 🤘