instead of dealing with folding and glue and such you could 3d print a custom case that was really thin, but had a wider "frame" around it that held it in place in the letter. Could fit a bunch on a single print bed, especially if you used those shorter width envelopes and got creative with the "frame" shape so that they were interleaved on the print bed.
this is how CDNs make their money. They replicate popular content close to the users. They generally do that WITHOUT giving anyone hardware, but by renting hardware in smaller areas, and setting up their own data centers in popular areas.
source: I used to work at Akamai (it was a while ago). The myriad things they do with their edge servers is pretty amazing, but for simple CDN stuff, most of the time clients aren't shipping hardware to isps. That being said, if Netflix can convince an isp to pay its electricity and hardware maintenance costs for a popular isp's customers that's going to pay for itself very quickly. So, i can see why Netflix offers this. It's just not normal AFAIK.
You know there aren't ads if you actually pay for it right?
I agree the ads are obnoxious, but hosting YouTube is incredibly expensive, and online ads are incredibly cheap so... Even if they _weren't_ being greedy there would need to be A LOT of ads to compensate for the hosting & engineering costs.
Like... If you hate the ads THAT MUCH, but want to continue using the service, why not just pay for the service?
(side note: you also get streaming music (YouTube Music) when you pay for YouTube which is a nice bonus.)
Are you sure that there won't be any ads in the future? Because it already repeatedly happened that that paid subscription was without ads, until it wasn't.
it's a good api client, and it's free for individual use and they have some sort of nifty marketplace integration catalog...thing with remote API servers that makes it easy to find and try API services that offer data / functionality you want to connect to.
Alternatively they've been completely skewed by the profit margins of the big software companies, where it turns out they print money regardless of how high payroll gets. As supporting evidence, VC funded startups pay less than said software companies.
It's interesting that Europe has abjectly failed to produce anything like Google or Meta. I'm not sure what the underlying reason for that is.
> It's interesting that Europe has abjectly failed to produce anything like Google or Meta. I'm not sure what the underlying reason for that is.
There isn't a singular reason, it's a complex combination. Btw I'd like to preface this to say I'm not sure most Europeans actually want a Google or a Meta, there is aversion to "too big to fail" companies in most sectors.
* investment money - VCs bet on tons of stupid things with the hope of some of them making it. Many a crappy business model has received hundreds of millions of investments to try and make it, and companies spend years chasing growth on the back of those investments without worrying about profitability. Investment in the EU is usually more conservative and grounded in reality - a business model of "we'll give it away at a loss for 10 years to get lots of market share and then increase prices to capture the market" simply won't fly here.
* "Europe" isn't a single market in most important senses of that word. Each EU country has it's own language (okay there's some overlap like Czech and Slovak, Belgium and France/Netherlands, Ireland and UK before Brexit, but generally), laws, regulations. A single business can't just immediately serve the whole of the EU without doing due diligence, translations, checking what regulations might apply for them, etc. That means that the size of the potential market is limited from the start without extra investment. A French startup can only sell in France until they figure out what is needed to sell in the Spanish market, translate websites/products, hire support people that speak Spanish, etc. etc. etc. There are tons of good quality decently successful European startups, but most stay within one or a few countries. Exceptions are purely digital companies such as Spotify who can afford to sell all around the world with relatively few hurdles.
* Regulations and common decency/fear - over here, a business model of "we'll fake sell medical devices" or "we'll trick people into giving us all their movements/desires/internet history and sell that to whoever wants it" will hardly fly. Not that there aren't unscrupulous people here, there are, but it'd be harder to get investment and talent to work for you.
* Better... I'm going to go with social safety net, but that's only a part of it. Over here, people are generally more content and know they have things to fall back on, including retirement. FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early), "grind mindset", "hustle mindset" and similar are quite rare here. People prioritise other things than work, don't live to work, and don't measure themselves (only) on work. So hustling to hit big and become massive is much more rarely seen as a good or desired thing.
People often deride the EU for "lacking innovation", but IMO that's flat out wrong - those people use wrong measurements (lack of massive tech giants) to define innovation. There are tons of European startups and scaleups and mittelstands and b2b companies of all sizes that are successful and innovative. They're just not "infinite growth" global behemots, but.. do they need to be? Is that the thing that ultimately matters?
> tons of European startups and scaleups and mittelstands and b2b companies of all sizes that are successful and innovative. They're just not "infinite growth" global behemots
If their business has no economies of scale, no. If it does, they won’t survive without subsidies.
At a certain point, subsidising a low-scale domestic replica of an efficient international option breaks due to (a) the internet and consumer choice or (b) cost.
If the market was theoretical and all things were absolutely equal, yes, maybe, but that's not how things work in the real world.
For a good example, Walmart failed miserably in Germany because they failed to understand the local market in any way. You can have a successful regional chain of supermarkets without it needing to become Walmart-scale. Just being local, having a strong local presence and understanding of the market, and having local costs can be a massive advantage. A Bulgarian startup has economies of local labour costs that can trump the economies of scale of Google. Spotify are quite successful even if their competitors (Apple, Google, Amazon) are massive. Not to mention there are big market segments where economies of scale across markets simply do not apply. Legalstart, a startup doing "law services online" for small and medium enterprises in France cannot apply pretty much anything to any other country due to the different legal systems. If there was some massive behemoth in that space globally, Legalstart still wouldn't have an "economies of scale" disadvantage.
There are a lot of businesses that are great for a small shop and will make a lot of money, but they have no potential to grow larger. Those businesses are not a domestic replica of some efficient international option as there never will be an international option. If you to become a billionaire you have to start one of those international businesses, but if you are content with a million you can get that on a much smaller local company and you don't have to deal with investors at all.
Software does lend itself to international options more than other fields as the upfront costs are high and ongoing costs are low. (compare to plumbers where you can start a company with a van and a fittings, but you have to pay the plumbers you hire every year - by the time you pay the plumbers and the office workers to schedule them there isn't much $ left over)
Economies of scale can plateau, yes. In those cases I’d argue there’s a niche for a medium-sized company. (Most law is in this category.) But if there are further economies of scale, the company that seizes the worldwide market will simply have lower costs and more R&D capital to work with.
> the company that seizes the worldwide market will simply have lower costs
Not necessarily. Let's imagine a company that does budgeting and bank account centralisation, sold as a SaaS. A global company has to work on integrations with banks all around the world, data privacy regulations all around the world, translations including in right to left languages, fun stuff like UPI in India, cash payments to a machine in Japan, currency conversions etc. Meanwhile a Bulgarian startup in that space only needs to interface with the 15 local banks and use EU-mandated APIs that make their lives easier (all integrations are the same), and provide only one language, one currency. They don't need employees policies for 50 different countries, with local HR and legal departments/subcontractors everywhere. Not to mention layers of management to scale.
Do you still think the global company will have lower costs?
> A global company has to work on integrations with banks all around the world, data privacy regulations all around the world, translations including in right to left languages, fun stuff like UPI in India, cash payments to a machine in Japan, currency conversions etc. Meanwhile a Bulgarian startup in that space only needs to interface with the 15 local banks and use EU-mandated APIs
You're describing a system with economies of scale, up to a point, followed by negative economies of scale. That's my argument: this is a good business for a European company to dominate.
I would argue that many of the big tech companies have also been subsidised rather than being efficient. It has just been private investors rather than governments (and it feels like we are starting to see the end of that).
Great developers in India make more than Great developers in Europe in my experience. (India has a lot of okay developers who don't make very much, but if you want someone great you will pay more) some of this is Europe culture makes potentially great engineers limit themselves to good - they refuse promotions to great, and they refuse to officially mentor younger engineers (they do mentor but in ways where they don't get credit for as credit would them them a promotion). As such it is difficult to have great engineers leading the project and without that leadership you can't have a project at all.
With 3,000 Euro / month you can roughly employ someone making 2,400 Euro / month pre-tax (gross) in Germany. That's supermarket cashier money.
And only if you pinch pennies (there's just a ~100 Euro margin here after unavoidable costs). The rule of thumb in Germany is that an employee is going to cost you roughly 1.7x their gross salary: that'd be wages of 1,700 Euro / month.
The latter is going to pay for 1/4th of a decent software developer - and even then you're better promising more than 30 paid vacation days among other benefits.
I agree, but in this particular case i have to ask... how many companies are actually USING Krita? My impression is that the vast majority of places that need software like that use Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator, or Affinity Photo/Designer.
Not only that they use privative products - it's that people think about Krita as an alternative to Photoshop, as Krita is intended for digital painting rather than general raster image manipulation. Hence narrowing the target of Krita to a much smaller audience.
Probably not many if you don't count small individual art studios - the mobile gacha game industry(and anime animation to some extent) don't standardize art styles and pipeline art production as done in American movie and comic industries, but relies on intimate collaborations with external, individual artists for creative components.
So they mostly only import (Krita-exported) PSD into Ps, or even if Krita was used professionally on the floor by employed artists, choice of tools would be up to artist's discretion and might not become a corporate talking point in the way, say, what Maya or Lightwave debate would be.
Maybe OnlyFans/Patreon could throw a million or two for couple years...? But Krita is not the first choice across the board, and creators on those platform don't seem too concerned with CSP/Procreate subscriptions, so that might be a difficult path too?
biggest pro: elixir is built on erlang. Erlang was made to have incredible multithread performance distributing messages on computers from decades ago.
All those scaling problems Mastodon admins complain about? 99% of wouldn't exist if they were using one of the Phoenix based fediverse apps instead of the Rails based one (mastodon). Sure, some of the larger instances would still have issues but most folks would get plenty of throughput on one average machine.
Erlang's a great language. Once you wrap your head around the fact that = is a "match" operator and not an assignment operator... ;)
My day job is as a back-end rails dev, but I was introduced to Phoenix by a couple of the most prominent folks in that community. It is my belief that Elixir and Phoenix are unquestionably a better choice than Rails for new work. The only reasons to use Rails instead are that ruby has a bigger ecosystem of libraries, and none of your staff knows Elixir. Alternately that you're a ruby dev who's just whipping out something quick and performance doesn't, and won't, matter.
This entire article is based on a false understanding of US labeling
> "It’s true that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to find mutton"
This is false. It is difficult, if not impossible, to find something LABELED as mutton. However, US labeling allows "lamb" to actually be mostly mutton.
> With respect to the Code of Federal Regulations published Standard of Identity, USDA-FSIS does not have a specific definition for lamb, nor explicitly identify boundaries for age of animal in product labeling originating from ovine species. The only age-specific labeling claim includes the term “spring lamb” or “genuine spring lamb,” applicable only to carcasses of new-crop lambs slaughtered during the period of March and the first week of October. - https://www.sheepusa.org/blog/newsmedia-sheepindustrynews-pa...
and unsurprisingly it's more cost effective to let the animal get bigger before slaughtering it.
Yup! As I was reading the article, I was pretty surprised as it continued to not mention the vastly different labeling laws in the U.S. vs the rest of the Anglophone world. In the U.K., for example, meat labeled "lamb" legally must come from a sheep that is less than a year old. Meanwhile, U.S. "lamb" is typically 12-14 months old [1], since the U.S. has no standards on sheep meat labeling, and permits all sheep meat to be labeled as lamb. Much of the sheep meat sold in the U.S. wouldn't be legally considered "lamb" in the U.K., Australia, or New Zealand.
Meanwhile India has its own, wildly different meaning for mutton: it means goat meat. If you get an Indian "mutton curry," it'll taste really different from U.S. "lamb," but that's not because of the age of the animal — it's an entirely different species!
From the article:
'“Mutton is not an accessible protein option in the US,” says Megan Wortman, executive director of the American Lamb Board, an industry group aimed at expanding the market for domestic sheep products.'
You would think she would know it actual mutton is widely available, no? Maybe it's legal to label mutton as lamb, but not done often, so finding actual mutton, labeled however, is still hard?
