I wonder if the same thing is happening in chess.

I think what’s impressive here is their approach to “Teach Mode”, which essentially teaches the average consumer how machine learning works. I think that’s already a much better approach than Humane Ai and provides a better path long term for where this could go. This approach of a Large Action Model that can control any of your apps by watching you use them is a unique implementation for a hardware device. The hardware isn’t super impressive but the approach has staying power. It’s always way less invasive than Humane AI pin, it’s deliberate usage.

They put a lot of money into a town that might sink or flood into a swamp.

I feel like this describes a high number of US towns and cities.

Much of the state of Florida, tbh.

Better link for remarkable discord server: https://discord.com/invite/qEnCVcd

Better in what way?

Wow. Love this game.

If Waze had taken the FB deal tho, it would have been a stock deal, and it would have been worth 2-3x more than the Google cash deal.

Or it could’ve ended up at 1/3 by the end of the lockup. With cash, they’re free to put it into FB stock, if they want, though statistically (especially from a variance/gut wrenching swings perspective), an S&P500 fund is a much better option.

Generally, I’d happily take a significant discount on the amount to make it a no/low strings cash deal, unless the stock offer is basically equivalent to a cash deal (super liquid, no restrictions on sale).

FB ca 2012-13 was a pretty sure bet, imho. They basically had no competition in social. TikTok hadn't come out yet. G+ had perished not long ago. Apple hadn't yet kneecapped them on privacy. They hadn't yet turned into supervillains.

If all I cared about was money and the potential upside, I'd have taken FB any day over all the no/low strings cash Google could throw at me.

Noam talks about the civic breakdown caused by FB and how he is happy he chose Google but that could be a case of post facto justification. Google, sans its "Don't be evil" is no saint either. I'm sure if he had gone with FB, he'd find five different things to ding Google on - e.g. firing the AI ethics team, sunsetting products without notice, dropping "don't be evil" from their charter, having no North Star other than maximizing ad rev.

Curious, how much did you make from buying shares in Facebook in 2012/2013?

I did okay, can't complain, but I bought in early 2015, not 2012-13 once the upswing was confirmed.

FB in those years also had horrible mobile apps, made no money on mobile while world was shifting there. And they kept on investing mostly into their desktop website.

It was sure bet, in a hindsight. They could’ve easily botched mobile, open room for competition to swoop in and become irrelevant in the process.

If I remember my tech history, by 2012-13, FB had realized that their html5 FB app wouldn't cut it on mobile devices and had gone all in on a native app.

https://magazine.wharton.upenn.edu/digital/the-pivotal-tale-...

I mean, I myself left Wall Street to work on iOS apps back in 2011. Only a willfully blind person would have ignored mobile/smartphones by 2012-13.

Of course, they could have botched their mobile transition - Reddit's ongoing dumpster fire is an example of corporate self immolation - but even back then Mark Z was no schmuck.

There’s big gap between not being a schmuck and getting your company to be one of the biggest tech behemoths.

Rewriting app, means years of no new features (like Twitter did with their backend rewrite). That’s a very vulnerable period of time. And no guarantee that their apps will be any good (especially given their track record of low quality). It wasn’t guaranteed in any way that they will start making meaningful money on mobile.

They could’ve easily end up like Twitter, plagued with reliability issues and no good monetization.

From the article:

> At the time, the Facebook deal was a stock deal and their share price was ~$25/share. Had we closed with them, the deal could have had a 10X multiplier. Despite that, I feel that Google was the right place for us. We clicked with the engineering team, they let us stay independent and grow (from 10M MAU to 150M MAU)...

I sold a business a decade ago. I had two main offers, $X today, or $X today plus $Y in a year with me staying on board. I took $X and left, no interest in staying on board because I knew what the new owners would do, and I knew they'd wind up blaming me. 3 years later they totally abandoned the business. Some people you just can't work with, and the writer here didn't want to work with Facebook.

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. They could have easily invested their cash in whatever they chose, whereas a stock deal can be limiting.

Why don’t they just restrict it in China and not restrict it for people outside of China?

OpenAI also does this with DallE, fyi.

The Verge doesn’t have an Information sub?

I’m surprised people are still talking so much about a platform that has been so slow to update. Is the engineering team still working on the product?

They’ve had a lot of employee turnover, with many leaving for Tana. Having used both, Tana is just more polished. I have really enjoyed Roam and am grateful for Conor’s contributions to the space, but he really needed to hire someone with experience managing an engineering team that ships. The innovation has been in the RoamJS extensions. A former developer on the team told me he left because the founder was trying to “reinvent engineering management from first principles”. It seems like that effort was at cross purposes with shipping speed. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯