blaird

Using your own bike with the Peloton class never appealed to me as you don't get your power numbers, so there is no competing with others in the room.

I hear the Wahoo Kikr is great for cyclists: https://www.wahoofitness.com/devices/bike-trainers/kickr/buy

Yep, agreed. If decisions can be made by a human often they'll stick to that, often arguing there is no need for data.

In my former space (credit card fraud detection and underwriting), you obviously need a data driven solution. Without even considering latency requirements, you aren't do 6-10B manual decisions/year. The rationale for a more complex ML approach is easier to prove the ROI for, given the need is already there, just with an inferior technical solution.

Curious if there is a correlation with companies that failed to capitalize with the ones who relied on consultants versus really reshaping their own people.

I worked for a financial services co that saw massive gains from big data/ML/AWS. Given, we were already using statistical models for everything, we just now could build more powerful features, more complex models, and move many things to more-real time, with more frequent retrains/deploys bc of cloud.

I do agree that companies who don't already recognize the value of their data and maybe rely on a consultant to tell them what to do might not be in the position to really capitalize on it and would just be throwing money after the shiny object. It really does take a huge overhaul sometimes. We retooled all of our job families from analysts/statisticians to data engineers and scientists and hired a ton of new people

I had the Rio 600 before the iPod (https://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/rio600/) . It was definitely a joke, 32MB could barely fit a single CD and that was only after degrading the bitrate of the rip to a degree that it was really scratchy.

If you're streaming messages I guess the good comparison would be protobuf + gRPC?

I think this will always be the case when looking at the base cost of infrastructure itself (price of a compute/GB of storage in the cloud vs on prem)

However, the cost of cloud pays off so dramatically (in my past experience across companies) when you can see what new things the company can do with IaaS/PaaS and how quickly its done.

I've been at a large bank and a small startup that was forced to use an external datacenter, but the result was the same until we went to AWS/GCP: Infra needs were highly manual and often required purchase orders to scale that took months. As soon as we moved to the cloud and embraced infra as code things started to move 5x faster and we could focus on building software and products, not fighting legacy IT teams

Maybe they should be, but they definitely aren't in most places. Maybe some hedge funds ban phones but most banks don't. And having worked in several SCIFs for TS material, phones were banned but there never were scanners.

I worked at a security startup where installing Slack/email on our personal phones (BYOD policy) was possible via an MDM (but was optional, we weren't forced). I don't know every detail, but many of our engineers were naturally spooked and did lots of checking to make sure no packets flowed to the VPN from apps not within the MDMs control (just slack and mail).

I personally was fine with this as I don't want to carry two devices, I like being able to check in via Slack (especially if I was on call), and we had several folks who had our security/IT team under a lot of scrutiny proving this wasn't overly invasive.

It helped that we were a small startup, so our IT and security teams were 20 feet away :)