> I’m from europe and i have no idea what a leaf blower is

They love the stuff in Ireland. I have no idea why people use it. It doesn't do much better of a job than a rake would. It's completely stupid

> It doesn't do much better of a job than a rake would

That's disingenuous. Raking the yard is a half-day chore for me, that's fairly physically strenuous. Using a leafblower takes like an hour and is really easy- you can stand and point. A leafblower is a non-zero QoL improvement if you have to deal with leaves

Real question: why rake the yard? The road I understand, but what's wrong with just letting the leaves decompose and enrich the soil?

Leaves kill the grass. You want the grass to get light through the fall.

Just mow the leaves once or twice. Grass gets the light, and the leaves get decomposed more easily.

ok? how is that an environmentally better option than using a leaf blower?

It sounds like you have a massive yard. I can’t imagine having to spend more than 20mins raking a standard garden.

Is this a new thing? I’m Irish and never seen a leaf blower in my life (other than one used by a professional groundskeeper).

If you have a large property with tons of trees it is WAY more efficient than a rake

Can you even get one of those Panasonic laptops outside of Japan?

Checked Amazon.co.jp and doesn't seem like they ship to Europe. I'm actually interested in trying one of these out.

> Both companies attempts to diversify their dependency on such info for their revenue have been broadly unsuccessful (Google fiber or a Google car anyone?)

IMO, you're wrong on this one. Things like Google fiber/car are not ways to diversify Google's revenue.

They are just more tools in their arsenal to keep collecting more data on users and improving their ads.

By offering things like Google fiber, they ensure more people get online and that's more data they can collect.

Same with FB. Terragraph and Aquila are/were just ways to get people online so more data can be collected and fed into "the machine"

I think there are three categories of projects at Google:

1) Working out how they can milk even more money out of their magic cash cow of online advertising by providing more opportunities to serve ads (YouTube, Gmail, Maps)

2) Protecting their magic cash cow (ads) from external threats, the main threat being a loss of tracking (Chrome, Android, Fibre, Google Analytics, Ok Google, Maps). (As an aside, if you use Chrome and want to avoid this kind of behaviour, please consider swapping to a truly open source non-tracking browser)

3) Trying to find another magic cash cow before the first one runs out of milk (Eg Google Cloud, YouTube Red)

Some things will fall into multiple buckets, for example Google Maps and Gmail offers both an opportunity to further track users and serve them ads - double whammy!

I suspect Google Cars are more about category 3, although have no doubt that they will be mined for data as much as possible to serve categories 1 & 2. Agree with your point on fibre - it looks like that is an attempt to own even more of the tech stack to provide even more methods to track.

Is there such a thing as LineageOS for SmartTVs?

Could that be a way to prevent sneaky services from pushing information you don't want out of your TV?

500K is a year's salary for a senior SWE there. I imagine VPs are making well above that.

It was about 10 years ago though, maybe Netflix salaries were lower back then

You do realize you can just ask the recruiter to have meetings with the team members, right? I've done just that.

Once you're done with the interviews and they come back with an offer, ask for 30min with your future manager and 30min with someone from the team.

Then you can ask them as much as you want. It also shows the company you are seriously considering them.

yup

> AWS knows that if they take too much of ES' market that they won't survive. If they don't survive it will just be a matter of time before ES is dropped by Amazon and totally unsupported.

I don't get how you came to this conclusion.

If Elastic goes bust, why would Amazon suddenly drop support for product? They have customers paying millions for the service, why the heck would they drop it?

If anything I would expect Amazon to keep the service and work harder to ensure good service, so they can absorb that portion of the market not being served.

> by just installing and maintaining that product as a service?

You are seriously underestimating the value Amazon provides by "just installing and maintaining" those services. Maintaining a service at the scale they offer is a huge undertaking.

You get the high-availability, the hundreds of engineers working to keep those services up and make them talk to other AWS services easily. You get teams of engineers on-call to react to any failures.

I agree with you that this has a bad effect on the companies that originally created those projects, but I do see a huge value in what Amazon offers.

I'm not saying "just" as in "it's easy". I'm saying "just" as in "they can install and maintain but don't have to develop it too".

> ...they can install and maintain but don't have to develop it too.

As someone building distributed systems, I'd think you'd appreciate that merely "installing" Elasticsearch wouldn't simply cut it for the scale AWS operates at.

I wish Elastic would have focused on their differentiated offerings instead and had let go of their iron grip on Elasticsearch itself (perhaps by creating a Foundation around it).