The majority of the employees, in particular top management, is Swedish.

2/9 on the board are Chinese (same as Swedes). The rest are westerners.

Volvo produces more cars in Sweden than Apple produces iPhones etc in the US.

But you are correct that ownership of the company is majority Chinese (Li Shufu/Geely specifically) and they can control a lot.

Apple's ownership is more muddy, since the largest owners are big institutional (US) owners - mostly representing owners from who knows where through big funds (including index funds). I think it's fair to say that Apple is owned very globally. In that sense it's not US controlled, but globally controlled.

I think Volvo is still very Swedish, including its products, but also heavily Chinese influenced (and trending up) due to market challenges.

There's probably still some value in associating a large multi national company to a specific country and attributing it certain things due to that, but with these big companies it's becoming less so and definitely more complex. But saying that Volvo is fully Chinese and not Swedish anymore? That seems like fooling oneself.

Consulting is one thing, but in the startup ecosystem I'm in I have (during the last 15 years) never ever seen a startup having a too narrow target segment (and I know several investors with the same mindset).

It's definitely not super uncommon where I'm at. CTOs, especially those that founded companies and are more technical doers than managers, that end up having responsibility for architecture and technical matters (tech lead deluxe), but no people (due to lack of people management and leadership skills/or desire for that kind of job - sometimes also product management skills at larger organizations).

Many do. For most it's not the biggest concern (that would be quite weird). AFAIK it's mostly about reducing risk (avoiding complete garbage/duck taped setups)

Source: I know a person who does tech DD for investors, and I've also been asked this question in DD processes.

Pragmatism rules here, but yeah - the common way to do this (at least if you have keys generatable by the client), eg. using REST, is to not allow POSTs, but only PUT. Most APIs I've seen use PUT solely for updates (of existing items), but as is obvious from the wording it's not the original intention.

My neighbour designs the crumble zone on Volvo's heavy duty trucks. They at least spend a shit ton of effort (continuous, multi-decade) on making anything hit by the truck having as little effect as possible (at least).

Quite a challenge with heavy duty trucks shipping tens of tons of stuff, but anyway.

I have seen many backend developers with this mindset and approach, and; 1) Tricky parts of frontend are afaict equally tricky as building a DB/kernel/whatever. 2) A typical mistake is that a lack of knowledge about the hard parts of frontend makes backend'ers assume frontend is easy, while in reality it's their ignorance (and arrogance) rather than the subject being the issue 3) As with backend, most developers don't deal with the harder parts. Most backend developers I've talked to do simple CRUDing + minor business logic from a DB. Similarly very few developers try to write their own drag and drop library from scratch.

It's sad that so many seems to fall into the trap of 2).

(I've done both types of development for 20+ years)

I have no idea what backend developer means to this or that person. It seems to mean "not frontend", so like, directly interacting with a database and possibly using a compiled or even unmanaged language? But still often deploying through something that looks like:

Haswell <- Borg Hypervisor <- Borg Pod <- KVM Hypervisor <- QEMU guest <- docker-compose <- docker <- golang

?

I'm talking about hackers. I remember being like 24 and and a colleague of mine (legend) had never worked in JavaScript or really the web before was on our pod that got tasked with writing a browser for J2ME and BREW that implemented real web pages.

He goes home that weekend, and he comes back on Monday with a stack machine written in JavaScript (ECMA-262, we ran it on Rhino back then because Spidermonkey was a whole thing) that executed a very cute subset of JavaScript, including lambda closure and therefore Church encoding / untyped System 1. I was like whoa, why in JS? "If I have to implement it in a month, I'm already two months late to start learning it."

Is that guy a frontend developer? Backend? Full Stack? He had worked on DSPs and audio before, and on video codecs and embedded.

My comment above about some of this stuff is harder isn't a diss to anyone, it doesn't make me a millimeter shorter that Carmack is so tall, walking around in some rarefied air of genius I can't even formulate a picture of: it inspires me to work harder, try more ambitious things, push every day a little past yesterday's limit, and it has for more than 30 years now.

There's nothing wrong with programming be a job, it's a perfectly reasonable life choice and a very sensible one in light of life's other demands and opportunities. But some of us fucking love it, think about it all the time, live to be good at it. That's a different set of outcomes. And it does grate a bit to have everyone pushing this "it's all the same, we're all the same, it's one equivalent thing", that's my passion you're talking about, I take great pride in my life's singular ambition and pursuit. We're equal but we're not the same.

> Please please no vibe accounting.

Funny you mention; There are multiple companies in Sweden working on AI/ML based accounting. It's not so different from AI/ML based automated driving.

I've seen some of those but all of the ones I've looked at also had a panel of experts who could give it a once-over (or re-work) before sending it back to the client. I'd compare it more to cruise control or driver-assist but not quite automated driving.

That goes both ways. As with math, it's sometimes not wise to look at the answer as soon as you stumble upon something you can't solve immediately - sometimes it's good to force the person learning to think deeper and try to understand the problem more thoroughly. It's also a skill of it's own to be able to cope with such situations and not just bail/give up/do something else.

I fear this will be more and more of a problem with the TikTok/instant gratification/attention is only good for less than 10 seconds -generation. Deep thinking has great value in many situations.

"Funnily" enough, I see management more and more reward this behavior. Speed is treated as vastly more important than driving in the right direction, long-term thinking. Quarterly reports, etc etc.

I'm curious, since it's a YC/VC company - what's the business plan/model/vision? I assume it's not selling robot arms for $219? (Please correct me if I'm wrong!)

Dalton Caldwell: “Make a product people love; worry about making money later.”