Average starting executive compensation is north of $300k usually with like a 30% bonus, and goes up from there. 700k sounds like a lot but they've probably been there more than 5 years and what they've built is cash flow positive. If you include health insurance, expenses account, company car etc you could easily tack on another $200k to the total comp.

Probably not, good luck finding factory workers willing to work for $2/hour with no protections or health insurance.

I mostly use google for it's search, email, maps stuff. Originally the tradeoff was I gave you info, and you gave me personalized results, and we paid for it with ads. Now the results are terrible generic stuff. I can just use a chatgpt type product and get similar answers for a nominal monthly fee and no ads. Why would I ever go back to google at this point? My search volume with google is probably a third of a quarter of what it used to be.
 
I don't see much value in using google's AI product unless it's phenomenally better, and there's an ad-free option. Until then, I'll continue using every AI product but google's.

Considering the fact that I was running a new LLM on my phone just yesterday. Do I need bleeding edge fire breathing AI to answer questions like "what's the capital of france?" or "is it going to rain tomorrow?" no. Do I need a lot of AI to write a flight simulator from scratch? Sure but how many times am I going to do that in a day? Most AI requests for consumers will be handled on their phone in 1-3 years. "Can you turn off my bedroom lights?" doesn't need to be processed in the cloud.

collectivos run from patagonia all the way through Tijuana they're not limited to chile. most low income countries offer some kind of free market public tranist solution of some kind like collectivos

We wanted to sign up to stream some hbo stuff and couldn't find their app in the tv store. After much digging we found out they had rebranded simply as "Max", which, I can't imagine why they would drop the name brand that brought us sex in the city, have of thrones, the sopranos, for some unrelated generic word

No, they hired a guy to run their AI department and it's been going very poorly. If you're looking at "abject failures of AI trying to win in the market" this isn't it, the guy they hired to run their AI division is just bad at running AI divisions at microsoft. Even their CFO was critical of the guy last week in a public meeting. People at least critisize apple's lack of interest in AI, microsoft is doing so poorly they're not even part of the conversation.

I can't recall the last time I opened a microsoft office product outside of outlook or whatever they call their email product now. All my "documents" live in some corporate intranet knowledge base of some kind, probably formatted in some variant of markdown.

Proceeds to sign agreement absolving Google of any legal wrongdoing

Yuuuuuup. Somewhere in their org chart they've added a VP of datacenter operations, at least one middle manager and 3-5 techs and probably an SWE to build/maintain their datacenter tooling. Before they just had to call some APIs, now they are the API

They almost certainly increased staffing, you need capacity planning, ordering testing installing and then headcount to monitor and repair, plus engineering resources to manage all the day to day infra operations. Part of the aws pricing is paying for the headcount on their side to manage uptime and reliability.

Generally private cloud vs aws savings are in the realm of ~20% for an operation their size. They almost certainly picked up some headcount to manage these which offsets a lot of the savings but not all of it.

The cost increase is generally justified as an early business expense as 1) aws services are generally reliable, secure by default, and excellent uptime 2) cheaper than hiring a dedicated operations person, your developers can just cobble together something and go 3) you don't need to do capacity planning. database going underwater? convert it to one twice as powerful in about 15 minutes with zero downtime! magic
 
Capacity planning has to be done quarterly, you need good metrics to do that, then you have to order, assemble, test the hardware which for a one-off thing can be quick but as sustained business operations is a 2-4 week project from the initial request to having it serving production traffic. once growth levels off DIY datacenter stuff can make sense, but early stage with less than 50 employees the AWS premium makes a lot of sense. transitioning to dedicated hardware is also an indicator that growth has leveled off or become extremely predictable.

We've found a handful of complex life living deep in the sea near volcanic vents, including a snail that builds its shell primarily out of iron. So finding exotic life with different primary processes is valuable but... yeah deep sea exploration budgets are probably about correct until we find something of unique value down there, like a giant gold field or something. Oil fields have all mostly been mapped so far.

They're saving $2 million a year which is.... 10 engineers' salary? Maybe 15 with juniors. How many engineers do they have? 200? I guess this looks good on paper but It's not outrageously big savings. Probably the biggest outcome of this transition is that they've fully quantified what their system really is and that allows them to consolidate various features since literally everything in their business stack is accounted for now, and you get a bunch of efficiencies by dropping dead code/zombie services. Good for them, but this doesn't strike me as headline news.