390: Google's 'Soft Peacetime' Culture, Enterprise Cloud Spending, Tencent, Tesla, Meta, Microsoft, MacKenzie Scott, and Chrome RAM
"You can’t live there."
Motivation often comes after starting, not before. Action produces momentum. —James Clear
💝📈🛣️🚢⚓️ One more round number milestone.
Another step along the path. Where does it lead? Who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
As cliché as it sounds, it really is the journey, not the destination.
Destinations are points in time, they don’t last. You can’t live there.
Even the feeling of achievement will slip through your fingers like sand — you can’t hold on to it for long. You have to dig the work itself (great video about this from standup comic Hasan Minhaj).
This steamboat has now reached 1.25 Hobarts!
As a reminder: my unit of measurement is the Hobart™️, defined as the number of subs that long-time Extra-Deluxe supporter and friend-of-the-show Byrne Hobart (💚💚💚💚💚 🥃 ) had — 12,000 — when I first clicked “publish” on my Substack.
Even after about 420 editions, if I count podcasts and text interviews, I’m still excited the night before I publish.
I’m like, I can’t wait until you see *that* grab bag of odds and ends!
I think that’s a good sign.
🤔 🤪 Theory: When reality gets kinda crazy, people who optimize for not sounding crazy can't describe what is happening and may end up gaslighting themselves.
🧠 🤖 📈 Why do I think Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is possible and a question of “when” rather than “if”?
Humans are proof that general intelligence is possible.
Once you can show that something has happened at least *once*, the question of whether it’s possible or not stop being relevant and the odds that it happens again are a lot higher.
It then becomes more about the rate of progress, and whether something will stop that progress before you get there.
There’s a similar argument for nanotech.
Biology is proof that nanotechnology can work.
Artificial nanotech may be different than biology in many ways, but the principles of atomic machines are demonstrated there, so there too the question is “when”, not “if”.
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Paid post since last week 🐇:
I know everyone is kind of overdosing on A.I. these days, but I really liked ‘From Bing to Sydney to Venom to HAL9000, oh boy’.
The section about how Apple takes a cut from Search revenue even in Chrome, and even from Bing and DuckDuckGo (non-default choices) was new to me, and kind of bonkers
If you click the links above, you can see the intros for free and there’s a link to get a 7-day free trial of the paid version. What have you got to lose?
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‘Q4 enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services exceeded $61 billion worldwide’ ☁️☁️☁️☁️🌐
While [spend] was up by well over $10 billion from the fourth quarter of last year, it did reflect a reduction in the market growth rate. The 21% growth over Q4 of 2021 was again substantially hampered by the historically strong US dollar and a severely restricted Chinese market.
Looking solely at the US market, which largely circumvents those two issues, the Q4 growth rate was 27%, which compares with an average growth rate of 31% in the previous four quarters.
What’s wrong with Google’s “risk averse, soft peacetime” culture according to ex-employee 🔥☄️💣🗄️
I finally had the chance to read Praveen Seshadri’s piece about his experience working at Google after his company was acquired.
In it, he attempts to describe what he sees as going wrong with the company and its culture. It’s an interesting read, even if it should be taken in the context of one person’s experience, and others may have very different perspectives.
I recommend the entire thing, but here are some highlights:
The way I see it, Google has four core cultural problems. They are all the natural consequences of having a money-printing machine called “Ads” that has kept growing relentlessly every year, hiding all other sins.
(1) no mission, (2) no urgency, (3) delusions of exceptionalism, (4) mismanagement.
Who do you serve?
Does anyone at Google come into work actually thinking about “organizing the world’s information”? They have lost track of who they serve and why. Having worked every day at a startup for eight years, the answer was crystal clear for me — — I serve our users. But very few Googlers come into work thinking they serve a customer or user. They usually serve some process (“I’m responsible for reviewing privacy design”) or some technology (“I keep the CI/CD system working”). They serve their manager or their VP. They serve other employees. [...]
This is a closed world where almost everyone is working only for other Googlers, and the feedback loop is based on what your colleagues and managers think of your work. Working extra hard or extra smart doesn’t create any fundamental new value in such a world. In fact, in a bizarre way, it is the opposite.
Incentives and feedback loops 101.
Risk mitigation trumps everything else. This makes sense if everything is going wonderfully and the most important thing is to avoid rocking the boat and keep sailing on the rising tide of ads revenue. In such a world, potential risk lies everywhere you look. People act accordingly:
every line of code you change is risk, so put in a ton of processes to ensure that that every code change is perfect at avoiding risk (never mind if it is uninspiring for the user)
anything you launch is risk, so put in a ton of reviews and approvals (literally 15+ approvals in a “launch” process that mirrors the complexity of a Nasa space launch) just to deploy each minor change to a minor product
any non-obvious decision is risk, so avoid anything that isn’t group think and conventional wisdom
any change from the way things used to be done is risk, so stick to how it was
any employee you dissatisfy is career risk, so managers aim for 100% satisfaction among their employees, and employ kid gloves even with their worst under-performers (on the other hand, any individual customer you dissatisfy creates zero risk unless it is a mega-customer, so customer satisfaction is just a concept on a dashboard to be trotted out at an all-hands meeting, tut-tutted about, and then forgotten about)
any disagreement with the management chain is career risk, so always say yes to the VP, and the VP says yes to the senior VP, all the way up. [...]
Overall, it is a soft peacetime culture where nothing is worth fighting for. The people who are inclined to fight on behalf of customers or new ideas or creativity soon learn the downside of doing so.
Man, Praveen can craft a good turn of phrase:
Within Google, there is a collective delusion that the company is exceptional. And as is the case in all such delusions, the deluded ones are just mortals standing on the shoulders of the truly exceptional people who went before them and created an environment of wild success. Eventually, the exceptional environment starts to fade, but the lingering delusion has abolished humility among the mere mortals who remain.
From the outside, it’s impossible for me to tell how accurate this is, or which parts of the company it may be accurate for and for which parts it’s not.
It would certainly not be the first time that a really special company matures, becomes very very large, employs 50x more people than the original group of A+ players that created the ‘0 to 1’ breakthroughs, and becomes bureaucratic and focused on preserving what it has.
Interview: Graham Duncan 🤝
I heard this interview when it came out (2019), but I’m re-listening now because my friend David Senra (📚🎙️) recommended it, and it was recommended to him by Patrick O’Shaughnessy (🍀)… it’s a whole chain of recs.
Here’s a bit that stood out to me this time:
people think of references as a thing you do after the fact. To me, it’s the whole thing, references and getting the sense of how someone’s interacting in a repeat iteration game [...]
people generate trust. And it’s this intangible asset that’s around them. And the trust sits in the heads of everybody they’ve interacted with over time. And my job is to see how everybody else they’ve interacted with, their employees, their former bosses, their peers end up relating to them because of the body of work they’ve had in the past. [...]
Chris Fussell and Stan McChrystal’s language around trying to assess someone’s credibility, and then based on that assessment, how much decision space to give them – to me, that’s so beautiful. […] they have this formula: credibility equals proven competence plus relationships plus integrity.
⌚️ Competition is great for customers, but it can also be annoying 🤔
Josh Wolfe (💚 🥃) of Lux Capital posted something that made me think about a kind of Catch-22.
But first, context:
1/ low-barrier-to-entry proliferation of co's in a given category leads to -competition that LOWERS 📉 prices + RAISES 📈 quality + features for CONSUMERS -followed by laggard incumbent M&A of early leaders -then 2nd place cult followers -then INVESTOR loss, collapse + consolidation
2/ Fitbit was early category leader, Google laggged and knew Apple watch was going to be category leader, so... predictable M&A...
[HEADLINE: Whoop Lowers Subscription Prices, Talks New Features, Sorta Adds Lifetime Warranty]
3/...Niche tech cult favorite like WHOOP has had room to follow, and may end up being or needing to be acquired by Samsung or other hardware entrant (Peloton, Snap? Msft? foreign player) competing with Google + Apple that wants wrist real estate or certain demographic
4/ personally I have consolidated all to Apple watch and with new battery endurance I actually wear it to sleep and track HR etc
There's an interesting dilemma with these devices.
On one hand, I love competition, it makes everyone better.
On the other, I would rather just wear one, not three, so I prefer when there's a clear winner that does pretty much everything best.
But if there’s a clear winner for too long, it’ll likely lead to slower innovation than if there’s fierce competition… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Tencent to collaborate with Meta on VR and promote the Quest in China? 🇨🇳🥽
I mentioned in the last edition that Tencent was apparently dropping its VR hardware ambitions.
This report from China may explain why (I’m reading a machine translation of it, so it may contain errors):
A number of industry insiders told 36Kr that Tencent XR only retained a small number of employees in this department, and will promote the introduction of Meta's Qculus Quest 2 (VR equipment) in the future.
It would make sense, as Tencent doesn’t have hardware DNA (well, Facebook doesn’t exactly have deep hardware roots either, but that’s why they acquired Oculus).
Though it would be kind of an odd dynamic since Meta apps are banned in China. But I suppose that from Zuckerberg’s point of view, something is better than nothing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
🔌🚗🪫 Tesla to open up Supercharger network to Non-Tesla EVs
Elon Musk’s company will make 7,500 Supercharger stations available to non-Tesla EVs by the end of 2024, the White House says in a fact sheet about its EV charging investments that it published Wednesday. Under new White House standards issued last year, the company is required to make its chargers accessible to the “broadest number of people” in order to qualify for billions in federal funding.
The newly open chargers will be distributed across the US. And they will include “at least 3,500 new and existing 250 kW Superchargers along highway corridors” and an unspecified number of “Level 2 Destination Charging at locations like hotels and restaurants in urban and rural locations.”
Well, that should reduce the differentiation between Teslas and other EVs, and probably makes the Supercharging experience worse for Tesla owners since, on average, there will now be more EVs charging per location, but it’s good for the entire EV market to have more interoperability.
⛹🏽♂️ Interview: Daryl Morey 🏀
I don’t follow sports, but I do quite enjoy the meta-game of sports.
Books like Moneyball and documentaries like The Last Dance about Michael Jordan were just as insightful about business as anything else.
I dug this podcast for similar reasons:
💰💰💰💰 MacKenzie Scott is the Honey Badger of Philanthropy 💰💰💰💰
On December 14, 2022 billionaire philanthropist and novelist MacKenzie Scott announced that her donations since 2019 have totaled more than $14 billion and helped fund around 1,600 nonprofits. But as much as the scale, it is the style of giving that is causing a stir; it's targeted at a wide spectrum of causes, without a formal application process and — it appears — no strings attatched.
No half-measures here!
As of December 2022, Scott was the fifth richest woman in the U.S. with an estimated fortune of about $26 billion. Scott divorced Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos in 2019, and as part of the settlement, received a 4% stake in Amazon. That same year, she vowed to give away her "disproportionate amount of money" and to "keep at it until the safe is empty."
🧪🔬 Liberty Labs 🧬 🔭
Chrome web browser rolling out big deal memory and CPU-saving features 💻🗜️
These days, most of the world’s software runs inside web browsers, and the most popular web browser by far is Chrome. This means that most of the world’s RAM is probably being used by Chrome… 😬
So it’s significant when they roll out a RAM-saving feature!
The way it works is pretty simple:
If you haven’t been using a tab for a long time, instead of keeping all the data inside that tab in RAM, Chrome will now flush it out and just reload the whole thing whenever you go to that tab.
It’s a trade-off because it means that there’s going to be a delay when you load the tab as Chrome remotely fetches the data from the web (but most of it should be cached locally), but in exchange for that, you’ll be able to reclaim a lot of RAM the rest of the time.
You can whitelist certain sites that you never want to be flushed from memory, to ensure that they’re always available at a moment’s notice.
Chrome will also reduce average CPU use by more aggressively pausing various processes in idle tabs (for example, animations or JavaScript may be stopped when on battery).
From memory (no pun intended), Apple’s Safari browser was the first to do this type of thing, probably because the feature was developed for iOS and RAM-constrained mobile devices (and Safari tends to be more efficient than the other big browsers in other ways too, being more aggressive), then MS Edge rolled it out back in 2021, and now Chrome.
If you’re wondering if your browser has these features, go in the “About” page and see if your version # is at least 110.
‘Microsoft has rebuilt Teams from the ground up to improve its performance on PCs and laptops’ 🏎️ ← 🐌
Not to be outdone by the Chrome team, the Teams team (that’s confusing) at Microsoft is also coming out with some pretty big efficiency improvements:
Known as Microsoft Teams 2.0 or 2.1 internally, Microsoft has been working on this new Teams client for years. The app should use 50 percent less memory, tax the CPU less, and result in better battery life on laptops. [...]
This new app moves Teams away from Electron and to Microsoft’s Edge Webview2 technology. Microsoft has also moved to React, a Javascript library, that will offer further UI improvements for Teams in the coming months. [...]
“This architecture will help us add support for multiple accounts, work life scenarios, release predictability, and scale up for the client.”
That’s good to see!
More companies should focus on performance and efficiency.
I understand that CPU cycles are pretty cheap these days, and RAM and storage are plentiful, but at some point, the rate of bloat can exceed the rate of performance improvements and we start subjectively going back in time and our computers get slower…
AI-designed bacteria-killing proteins 🧫🧬🤖👩🔬
Biotech is going to get interesting *and* crazy:
The AI, called ProGen, works in a similar way to AIs that can generate text. ProGen learned how to generate new proteins by learning the grammar of how amino acids combine to form 280 million existing proteins. Instead of the researchers choosing a topic for the AI to write about, they could specify a group of similar proteins for it to focus on. In this case, they chose a group of proteins with antimicrobial activity. [...]
they also tested a sample of the AI-proposed molecules in real cells. Of the 100 molecules they physically created, 66 participated in chemical reactions similar to those of natural proteins that destroy bacteria in egg whites and saliva. This suggested that these new proteins could also kill bacteria.
The researchers selected the five proteins with the most intense reactions and added them to a sample of Escherichia coli bacteria. Two of the proteins destroyed the bacteria.
🎨 🎭 Liberty Studio 👩🎨 🎥
‘Instagram photographer has a confession: His photos are AI-generated’ 🤖📸
With over 26,000 followers and growing, Jos Avery's Instagram account has a trick up its sleeve. While it may appear to showcase stunning photo portraits of people, they are not actually people at all. Avery has been posting AI-generated portraits for the past few months, and as more fans praise his apparently masterful photography skills, he has grown nervous about telling the truth.
"[My Instagram account] has blown up to nearly 12K followers since October, more than I expected," wrote Avery when he first reached out to Ars Technica in January. "Because it is where I post AI-generated, human-finished portraits. Probably 95%+ of the followers don't realize. I'd like to come clean." [...]
Avery emphasizes that while his images are not actual photographs (except two, he says), they still require a great deal of artistry and retouching on his part to pass as photorealistic. (Source)
What started as a kind of prank turned into an actual artistic outlet for him: "I am honestly conflicted. My original aim was to fool people to showcase AI and then write an article about it. But now it has become an artistic outlet. My views have changed."
I guess if you’re trying to make a point about how realistic these can be, it can be ok to not disclose it for a while, but I’m generally a fan of simply labeling things as what they are and letting people decide what they want to consume without any deception.
The link to the report on MacKenzie Scott's philanthropy was very interesting. But even more interesting (to me at least) was a link on that NPR page -- who knew that Belarusian tractors would be such a "thing" that Pakistani farmers would treasure and decorate them? Need more good news, as apolitical as possible as well, please!
A fun read. Thanks for your work!