I got my first digital camera in 2001 and still have all the photos from then as well as all the images I downloaded from the internet starting from 1991 through Usenet groups.
I scanned all of my dad's old photos going back to 1965 and have our family photos going back to the 1930's.
Everything is backed up twice and verify every file checksum twice a year.
I know not everyone is a computer expert but 1) we are on Hacker News 2) prebuilt NAS systems have a lot of these features now and can backup to another unit.
> I know not everyone is a computer expert but 1) we are on Hacker News
This. Those arguing it's hard for their grandma: I can understand. Those arguing it's hard for themselves: there are probably better websites to frequent for them and I dispute their "hacker" status.
> Everything is backed up twice and verify every file checksum twice a year.
How do you do the checksum? Mine is added to the filename:
DSC_00219347-b3-7e282693a4.jpg
meaning that file has a Blake3 checksum beginning with 7e282693a4. I've got both verification script doing random sampling (where at times I randomly verify x% of the files) and my rsync wrapper script doing a rsync dry-run (if the dry run detects a checksumed file that supposedly needs to be rsync'ed I'll verify the checksums and detect the bitrot'ed file if any).
HDDs (offline and both on-site and off-site), SSDs, dedicated servers, server at home running ZFS, ...
I plan to buy used LTO tape gear too.
P.S: I still have source code from DOS stuff I wrote in 1991 so there's that.
Yeah. I know someone that started 4 companies and another that started 5. Out of those they had about a 50% success rate in selling to a larger company, stay about 3-4 years to vest, then leave to make a new start and repeat the cycle. Unfortunately I worked at 2 of the startups that failed.
I had never heard of the company RevenueCat. It looks like a system for mobile app developers to make in app purchases. A few Internet sources say that RevenueCat has about 120 employees. I'm in a completely different field so I'm not going to claim to understand all of that but I have worked for 2 startups.
The author talks about himself and his co-founder Jacob and they went back and forth on whether to sell or not.
I am very interested in what the other 118 employees thought. Did they want the co-founders to sell? What was their equity in the company? What kind of deal would they get? Accelerated vesting? Much larger than normal RSU stock grant at the acquiring company compared to a normal new hire there? Nothing?
I post this link in many threads about startups about how the normal employees often get nothing. The author says "So we decided to raise another round" and I wonder if the co-founders share the liquidation preferences and captables with the other 118 employees.
I posted this comment in a different startup related thread last month but I really wish the CEOs of both startups would have accepted these lower offers.
I don't know what the captable was at the first startup but at the second I would have got around $300K. This would have been a large amount of money for me but the founders wanted more so they rejected the offer.
Almost every "normal" level employee thought we should have taken the deal and then we would have also gotten jobs with normal RSU grants and bonuses at the acquiring company which was a well established company.
It made me decide to never work at a startup again. I don't want a single person to be able to control my financial situation that much. I'd rather have the relatively guaranteed yearly raise, bonus, and RSU grant, and not have to drink the Kool-Aid of the founders.
> I worked at 2 startups. Both failed.
> The first had been around for about 4 years when I joined and had products that made money. They were trying to get acquired. They had partnered with 2 companies making products specifically for them. One of them offered to buy the company for $30 million but the founders thought their company was worth $300 million. They said no and then money started to run out and people started leaving. In the end the assets were sold for $2 million.
> The second startup was created by former coworkers and I joined after it had existed for 4 months. We worked like crazy for the first year and got our prototype out. We had a lot of interest but it took me a while to realize that the 3 founders already had net worths from $5 million to billionaire level. When I heard about offers in the $30 million range they just weren't interested in selling for so little. I left after 3 years and the company floundered another 2 years until they shut it down as people left.
The founders of many startups are extremely charismatic. They can get you to sacrifice your personal / family life and work long hours by dangling the big pay day in front of you.
The second startup I worked at let the first 8 employees buy into the company for Class A shares. These in theory were worth more than the Class B shares I was given. This later led to some marital issues when one guy invested $100K into the startup based on the founder taking everyone out to dinner and assuring the wives it was a great idea. Then 3 years later they have turned down 2 possible sales, no exit plan in site, and that $100K would have been useful for the children's tuition who are about to go to college.
I write these posts are warnings to people who get excited about the appeal of working for a startup.
So I would really love to hear the author talk about what his employees thought about turning down the deal and how much money they would have got.
Yeah, just don’t get emotionally invested in a chance of paying off your mortgage immediately. Don’t get your hopes up about materially bringing down your retirement age.
It isn’t reasonable to expect the founders to do an employee’s bidding when it comes to selling a company, but it is reasonable for the employees to feel emotionally invested.
Cadence is one of the big companies in EDA (Electronic Design Automation - semiconductor chip design software)
I met someone that left to go to a startup and was bought by Cadence. He did this 5 times and about 2-3 years later Cadence would buy the startup he was at. He just couldn't get away.
I have told people that before they join a startup ask about the liquidation preferences and cap table. If the ownership doesn't tell you then consider that a red flag.
I would add this new Groq scenario to the list of questions to ask. "Can you and the executive team go to another company with the IP leaving the employees behind with stock worth $0?" Maybe phrase it better than that but I know a few former coworkers at Groq. I didn't know them well but this probably stinks for them.
I had a 36" 4:3 Toshiba CRT that had component video inputs for 1080i signals. If you displayed a 16:9 aspect ratio signal you could turn on a mode to change the display area to make the electron beam display all 1080 lines in that area so the other system didn't need to add black bars. This way you got the full 1080i resolution in a 4:3 TV
I used to go to a local high end home theater store and they had the Sony 40" XBR TV that weighed 300 pounds or something crazy.
Nothing against Python but I still use Perl 5 because it works for what I need to do.
The Perl 6 redesign was announced in 2000 and it has been going on for 2 decades? Python is clearly a good programming language but the Perl 6 redesign took so long that many people gave up. Then it was renamed Raku in 2019 I think.
The vast majority of computers sold today have a CPU / GPU integrated together in a single chip. Most ordinary home users don't care about GPU or local AI performance that much.
In this video Jeff is interested in GPU accelerated tasks like AI and Jellyfin. His last video was using a stack of 4 Mac Studios connected by Thunderbolt for AI stuff.
The Apple chips have both power CPU and GPU cores but also have a huge amount of memory (512GB) directly connected unlike most Nvidia consumer level GPUs that have far less memory.
Most ordinary home users don't care about GPU or local AI performance that much.
Right now, sure. There's a reason why chip manufacturers are adding AI pipelines, tensor processors, and 'neural cores' though. They believe that running small local models are going to be a popular feature in the future. They might be right.
It's mostly marketing gimmicks though - they aren't adding anywhere near enough compute for that future. The tensor cores in an "AI ready" laptop from a year ago are already pretty much irrelevant as far as inferencing current-generation models go.
NPU/Tensor cores are actually very useful for prompt pre-processing, or really any ML inference task that isn't strictly bandwidth limited (because you end up wasting a lot of bandwidth on padding/dequantizing data to a format that the NPU can natively work with, whereas a GPU can just do that in registers/local memory). Main issue is the limited support in current ML/AI inference frameworks.
I had really high hopes but low expectations for Tap 2, just because it can be really tricky to follow up on a cult classic without totally stepping in it. I drove way out to see it on IMAX, and the entire family loved it.
Don't exactly know the difference in footage. I will say that I was on the fence about whether IMAX was a big deal for Spinal Tap 2, but afterwards we all felt like it was worth seeing in IMAX. Part of why I saw it in IMAX is that it was an early showing (IIRC the day before official release) and the IMAX theater 30 minutes away was the only option for seeing it that night.
The primary reason it shined in IMAX was the concert footage; It's giving "I'm on stage at a Tap concert".
I got my first digital camera in 2001 and still have all the photos from then as well as all the images I downloaded from the internet starting from 1991 through Usenet groups.
I scanned all of my dad's old photos going back to 1965 and have our family photos going back to the 1930's.
Everything is backed up twice and verify every file checksum twice a year.
I know not everyone is a computer expert but 1) we are on Hacker News 2) prebuilt NAS systems have a lot of these features now and can backup to another unit.
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