Living with "a self-styled countess and her companion, a blackmailer, alchemist, magician and thief"
Money isn't real, 3.5" floppy disks still in action, and, if he thinks Nietzsche is the mad one things don't look good for Nietzsche
Well, that was weird…
If you need proof that “money is not real,” I submit this chart:
I mean, sure, money is “real,” and I’d prefer more than less of it. But, with a fluctuation over such a short amount of time as this, I’m kind of like “really? Try harder, money!”
At one moment, I effectively got a decrease in salary (because I’d converted from being paid in USD to EUR over the past year), the next, a raise.
What? Was I supposed to do less work back in September, and now start ramping back up?
(The flaw is thinking in terms of dollars instead of Euros. I guess I should care more about local inflation and, now, energy prices, instead of exchange rates. Still: weird.)
Relevant to your interests
Chuck E. Cheese still uses floppy disks in 2023, but not for long - Started around 1998, to be EoL’ed this year.
Goldman Sachs lost $1.2 billion in 2022 mostly because of Apple Card - “Goldman spent a lot of money to help launch Apple Card and its other consumer services. A report from 2019 revealed the bank spent around $1.3 billion on its consumer services, and reportedly spent roughly $350 to acquire every new Apple Card customer [CAC]. Due to Apple Card benefits such as no fees and a competitive interest rate, analysts believed ‘The Apple Card portfolio may generate lower revenues and face higher loss content relative to the industry average.’” // It’d be cool to know what normal CAC is, expected return over customer lifetime (CLV, LTV, whatever), etc. Like, is this a problem, or just normal? A link to the analyst PDF would be cool too. LINKS-AS-FOOTNOTES. I LOVE CITATIONZzzz.
Morning Routine And Work Day, January 2022 - “If I don’t get this quiet time to wake up properly and centre myself, the whole day is fucked.”
The Decisions that VMware made - “VMware was one of the great IT successes, but their journey from start-up to behemoth was fraught with decisions that led to the Broadcom acquisition. How did they get here?” // The history of VMware, from a strategic perspective and some alternate timeline thing. Brian does great with his monologs. He’s a good industry analyst.
Dutch Students using ChatGPT to finish homework; Teachers aren’t noticing - “Another student uses ChatGPT to copy friends’ homework. Their homework goes in, and ChatGPT generates an entirely new version with exactly the same content but in different words.” // Clever! // And: ‘A group four student in VWO told the broadcaster that he outsourced his poetry analysis to ChatGPT. “According to the assignment, I had to give my own opinion. Chat GPT is not very good at that yet. I rewrote that. But the theoretical part was fine. I could copy it just like that.”’
33 Twitter Statistics That Matter to Marketers in 2023 - “25% of U.S adult Twitter users account for 97% of all U.S Tweets - This means that around a quarter of Twitter’s user base accounts for nearly 100% of the platform’s content”
The PivotNine Positioning Framework, whitepaper - Good way to bootstrap into some marketing strategy, here, positioning. There’s a process and even a template to start with: “For [our target market]that need [the problem we solve] we offer [our product/service] which unlike [next best alternative]our thing provides these benefits [concrete benefits]. We do this by [how we do it]as demonstrated by [evidence].”
Our annual conference for developers, operations people, and anyone who’s looking to improve how their organization does software is coming up: SpringOne. There’s lot of programming, of course, and also a good overview of the platform engineering and developer tooling stuff we’ve been doing. It’s free to attend and there’s a whole bunch of other talks (including one from me) that will be trickled out over the weeks after the event.
It’d totally free to register and online, making it super simple to attend. Register now and tell me what you think of it.
Also, if you’re the Amsterdam area on January 25th, I’ll be hosting a watch party for our developer and operations conference, SpringOne. It’s free to attend and “you could win a Lego Technic McLaren F1 car. Refreshments and food will be provided!” I bet I don’t qualify for the Lego set. BOO! Register for it, and I’ll see you there.
Wastebook
I would do an amazing job on the corporate travel policy review and PDF generation task force.
Just your regular, 19th century European castle-life: “Strindberg himself was not at the greatest moment of mental stability in his life. He had no money, his first marriage to the wife he worshipped was crashing to disaster and they were living in a wing of a dilapidated castle overrun with peacocks and feral dogs and ruled over by a self-styled countess and her companion, a blackmailer, alchemist, magician and thief. It was an overheated concatenation of circumstances that gave rise to Strindberg’s greatest play, Miss Julie, but even in this chaotic context, Strindberg realized that something was very wrong with Nietzsche. Was Nietzsche mad?” From I Am Dynamite!, Sue Prideaux
Comes with a “cup of hotdog sauce”
Logoff
I have a short business trip this week for an executive dinner. This one is with some new facilities who seem to really know what they’re doing and the guest list looks fun. Plus, I’ll get to work with my pal (and co-author) Marc Zottner. It should be fun. Then it’s back to polishing up my FY23 numbers (almost done, I should include some charts in here - esp. some y/y ones if I have the time), applying to some conferences, and, most importantly, getting back to making content instead of just thinking about.