Still no sign of Waymo in Other Bets revenue, which fell from $450M to $411M.
But they're presumably investing more in it, since Other Bets income fell from $-1,226M to $-2,100M, meaning expenditure went up $800M YoY. (Obviously not all of this was Waymo though.)
I've been wondering when we'll see it unambiguously showing up in there. I suspect this time next year it'll be visible for sure, maybe Q4 of this year?
Emphasis on "can buy", because Chinese competitors like BYD's "God's Eye" (I presume it sounds better in the original Chinese) aren't available outside China.
Can't vouch for its quality since it's notoriously difficult to get reliable safety data on Chinese self-driving, but I'm reasonably sure these are the first widely available consumer vehicles with LIDAR, which is already a massive improvement on Tesla's myopic camera-only insistence.
Fun fact: millets originate from East Asia, but have been almost entirely sidelined by rice and wheat. In Japan in particular, it's all rice all the time, and the staple millets (awa, hie and kibi) have been reduced to an occasional component of gokokumai (five grain rice) eaten for vague health reasons.
In Europe, during the Middle Ages, a couple of millets were still widespread as minor crops, but even then they were considered as food either for the poor who could not afford other more valuable grains or for poultry.
The point of the blog post is that while flying humans across the solar system to Venus so they can float in clouds of opaque sulfuric acid above a hellscape of certain death sounds and objectively is ridiculous, it's still easier and arguably more sensible than trying to send humans to Mars and back.
But, if our airship in the Venusian atmosphere finds nothing interesting (no life signs), then there’s not much more to do at Venus, because atmosphere is all mixed and all the same. Going to the surface, even for a day or two, is hard and very expensive.
OTOH Mars - that can be explored for many years, on the surface and below the surface. We might still find nothing, but it’ll take hundreds of years to be sure.
My gut feel was that you can't be right, but it looks like you are: cutting 8000 employees * $500k/year total cost to company (rough but useful ballpark figure) is "only" $4B.
Cross-checking against actual expenditure, Meta spent $118B total last year, with the second largest component of total spending being stock comp at $42B, of which vast slabs went to the top leadership that's presumably also not getting fired.
Though not all of that capex is cash; there's a whole phantom wampum AI economy where the big players are trading promissory notes for compute that doesn't exist yet (and may never exist) some time in the future and booking it as revenue.
Meta plays that game too; they're on the hook to buy compute that CoreWeave has yet to build (and may never be able to build) which counts as "revenue" for CoreWeave and an "asset" for Meta even though no actual money or compute has changed hands.
Meta promised to buy dc capacity for ai workloads. If I remember it correctly, it created a common company with an investment fund as well that took on debt to build capacity.
You calculate the cutoffs as savings for this years while imagining that the future payments are payments only for this year. At the same time the commitments are for 5-20 years ahead and the laid off people would be off the payroll for the same multiple years ahead.
YMMV, but the fully remote workers I know (I manage a few and am married to one) seem very happy about it, largely because they get to spend a lot more time with their families than they otherwise would. They're anxious mostly because they're afraid they'll have to forcibly RTO.
I and my wife have been fully remote for over a decade, absolutely love it and I can't understand the whole going to office thing or people pushing for it.
Some of us just need a different space to work, I can't wfh - my living space is too small to have a dedicated area and I can't discipline myself without said dedicated area.
The "leaders" forcing people into it though are just petty fiends. Linking bonuses/compensation to in office days is just punitive because you want to see bums on seats, nobody will convince me otherwise.
Anecdotally, my manager is a rabid RTO advocate, he's a gen X man and messages our team sometimes at 1am, is working on the weekends, schedules early morning and late meetings that extend well past 5pm. He has kids that he never mentions. We don't work on anything mission critical whatsoever.
Small sample size, but of the people in my office that really prefer in-office to WFH, the two archetypes I have noticed are those people are either single and have no family, or they wish they were single and had no family.
> largely because they get to spend a lot more time with their families than they otherwise would.
This is a big YMMV, but you accidentally hit on something I've observed over my years of working remote: A lot of the successful remote coworkers I've had have been people with families at home.
There is a lot of demand for remote jobs from young, single people who think it's going to be the best thing ever, but then many decline into a funk that they don't really understand. The social isolation starts to wear on most people like that.
There are very obviously ways to theoretically avoid this, like having an active social life during the work week. I know many people who fit this description and love it. However a lot of people think they're going to do that and then just don't really keep up with it. They go from bed to remote job to Netflix on the couch to sleep and repeat, then wonder why they're feeling so blah.
I agree, for many it's wonderful. If you've got family at home I can see that being a real attraction. When my kids were little I'd have liked that as well. I also had wonderful office-mates that are now life-long friends, but I mostly worked non-corporate nearly mom-and-pops so we were a close knit group. I realize I am an outlier. I just wonder if not being in an office is 3% (or whatever %) of the unhappiness problem.
If your company culture fully supports it it's great. Unfortunately because of all the half-assed RTO the employees still remote often feel both resentment from employees that had to RTO and anxiety about being first in line to get cut.
Yeah, but those people were previously burdened by helping their coworkers be less crazy. Now they remain blissfully isolated as their coworkers spiral into unchecked weirdness.
But they're presumably investing more in it, since Other Bets income fell from $-1,226M to $-2,100M, meaning expenditure went up $800M YoY. (Obviously not all of this was Waymo though.)
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