tarknassus

“Vaughan was surprised to find it was often the technical staff…”

Tell me you’re completely out of touch with your company and what it does without telling me you’re completely out of touch with your company and what it does. FFS how is this guy the CEO? Oh, he’s one of the founders? Brilliant.

Vaughan says he didn’t want to force anyone. “You can’t compel people to change, especially if they don’t believe.”

But he did. Change or be fired, basically.

“You multiply people…give people the ability to multiply themselves and do things at a pace,” he said, touting the company’s ability to build new customer-ready products in as little as four days, an unthinkable timeline in the old regime.

Ooh I bet some nefarious hacker types will be salivating at the incredibly rushed code base that is probably a spaghetti mess and as insecure as fuck.

Vaughan disclosed that the company, which he said is in the nine-figure revenue range, finished 2024 at “near 75% Ebitda”—all while completing a major acquisition, Khoros.

I had to look up EBITDA - some interesting points to consider when you look at this metric he used:

A negative EBITDA indicates that a business has fundamental problems with profitability. A positive EBITDA, on the other hand, does not necessarily mean that the business generates cash. This is because the cash generation of a business depends on capital expenditures (needed to replace assets that have broken down), taxes, interest and movements in working capital as well as on EBITDA.
While being a useful metric, one should not rely on EBITDA alone when assessing the performance of a company. The biggest criticism of using EBITDA as a measure to assess company performance is that it ignores the need for capital expenditures in its assessment.

Hmmm… I’m no accountant (I leave that to my actual accountant), but surely if they were being profitable it would sound better to say something like “We’ve remained profitable throughout and our earnings per quarter are on par if not greater than before.”?

You’re just deluding yourself while experiencing a slow decline due to self-inflicted atrophy.

Chef’s kiss on this last sentence. So eloquently put!

Wait, they’re supposed to work?

cries in UK GP surgeries with broken IT infrastructure

“Is there a doctor in the house?”

“Yes. Let me load up ChatGPT. Ah damn, no signal. Sorry guys.”

The issue is more a loss of contextual awareness. For example - why should a true crime documentary have to self-censor words like rape, died, sexual assault when they are often relevant to the story being told? Why should a blogger talking about mental health issues have to self-censor the word suicide?

These are valid issues. There’s a reply in here which has a screenshot of someone saying “elon musk can fucking die”. Context tells you immediately it’s not a targeted death threat, it’s an opinion. Yet the systems that places rely on cannot make that distinction.

4chan existed way before the advent of the attempts to sanitize the internet. Heck I remember the biker forum I frequented having some nasty shit and attitudes on there. But despite their scummy viewpoints, these were people I could rely on when my motorbike shat itself.

Smaller communities police themselves better as well. Large-scale social media and other platforms just made it much harder to have the moderator model that those forums had. The human touch is sorely lacking as much as the automated processes lack nuance and context. A modern form of the Scunthorpe problem I guess.

Have you noticed uBlock Origin being a bit hit and miss on YouTube lately? I’ve had it happen a few times lately where the video won’t play, or an ad comes up but doesn’t play. I’ve had to keep refreshing until it gets to normal where it just plays the damn video.