> When emails overwhelmed me, I asked a thoughtful user who emailed frequently and seemed to know as much about the product as I did if he’d help answer the emails, so I paid him to do that. And he did a great job, especially in terms of directly solving user problems.
Hey, I got promoted from customer to Customer Support at _my_ $dayjob!
Let's review some common areas.
- Pricing: everyone is always looking to get a better deal. That's their right but I'm unlikely to give one. Saying no here is just another (emotional) cost of doing business.
- Bug reports: broad agree on all four points but not necessarily the conclusion. Users who are willing to go down the debugging rabbit hole with me are golden.
- Pathological customers: I like to call them "frequent flyers". Enough said.
- Feature requests: we're not necessarily as "opinionated" so we rarely give a hard no, but this is why we have a "feedback board with upvotes" approach.
- General usage questions: I have an attitude of fresh eyes often being the best eyes for usability testing. If it's not obvious, what can we do to make it so? We also use Intercom Fin to handle a lot of these level-0-support questions though.
Oracle's not a good comparison though, because it's getting valued as an AI compute provider as well as for its traditional business. At the end of 2021 Oracle's stock was about $100 (all-time-high in nominal terms at the time), its current ATH was October last year at $292.
I guess we can imagine a pure reasoning model (if that's even the right word any more) with almost zero world-knowledge. How does it know what to look for? How does it do any meaningful communication at all?
So I think it's useful to have an imprecise-but-fairly-accurate set of world knowledge as part of an otherwise reasoning-heavy model. It's a cache.
And if the it's an LLM, or something like that, I think it basically has to have world-knowledge built in, because what is natural language if not communication about the world?
Interesting idea and I do agree that contiguous is OK but total is not.
I think I'd suggest a more generous Senate term limit. Three terms (18 years) would allow for someone to see out a complete Presidential super-cycle, for example.
The word Senate is etymologically related to "senior", it's a place where you _want_ people to be able to develop a lot of institutional experience.
I mean, that's pretty normal right. The product starts out as a bit niche and expensive, and then as it scales in manufactured volume, variants & competitors become available at lower price points.
On a trip about 18 months ago I had some Kia soft-roader hire car. I bloody hated the lane keeping (unfamiliar narrow twisty roads are bad enough without the car tugging on the steering wheel).
Conversely the auto-distance thing with cruise control is fantastic - it makes CC usable at way higher traffic densities.
It's a somewhat different kind of ring buffer, because there's just one index, but I used it in my signal processing class for a finite-impulse-response filter.
Choose N to be a power of two >= the length of your filter.
Increment index i mod N, write the sample at buffer position x[i], output sum of x[i-k mod N] * a[k] where a[k] are your filter coefficients, repeat with next sample at next time step.
In Brisbane I think our ticketing system cost overhead is maybe 10%?
The cost of the programme rolling out new ticketing infra (the first major ticketing system upgrade in ~15 years since we first got integrated ticketing, going from a stored-value smart card to also being able to tap your credit card) is roughly the same amount of money as the annual revenue from fares.
Hey, I got promoted from customer to Customer Support at _my_ $dayjob!
Let's review some common areas.
- Pricing: everyone is always looking to get a better deal. That's their right but I'm unlikely to give one. Saying no here is just another (emotional) cost of doing business.
- Bug reports: broad agree on all four points but not necessarily the conclusion. Users who are willing to go down the debugging rabbit hole with me are golden.
- Pathological customers: I like to call them "frequent flyers". Enough said.
- Feature requests: we're not necessarily as "opinionated" so we rarely give a hard no, but this is why we have a "feedback board with upvotes" approach.
- General usage questions: I have an attitude of fresh eyes often being the best eyes for usability testing. If it's not obvious, what can we do to make it so? We also use Intercom Fin to handle a lot of these level-0-support questions though.