I agree in principal, but this whole post is lazy if it's AI-produced. There's certainly no original thought and as the comments mention here, most of the math is outright incorrect
SPREAD builds B2B software for mechatronics customers like cars and defense systems. We help them design, build and diagnose problems with their systems faster. We do it with a combination of a well-designed ontology we've spent years working on as well as AI-based systems. Right now, we're looking for a technical writer and also someone to start our support organization.
Candidates must be in Germany already, though specific location within the country doesn't matter that much
So as some of my own feelings/thoughts on this: I've also sat on the "receiving side" of a "free forever" campaign now 2 times in my career. The first time driven by the CEO and the second time driven by the marketing team (and supported by the CEO). In both cases, I knew the truth (sitting on the product management side) that there was no sustainable way to have a "free forever" campaign: that there was finite end in both cases on the 2-5 year horizon before we needed to change plans. I advocated against adding the "forever" verbiage knowing this. The first time, I didn't push strongly: it was my mistake.
The second time, I pushed strongly and made sure the entire executive team knew that we would be misleading our users. I pointed to the horizon and talked about the problems with "forever" language. I had to push very strongly back on the marketing team to change verbiage and then they silently made updates anyway to add "forever" verbiage. They were eventually fired for this.
But what I find concerning here isn't that the "free" tier went away (it almost always must) but that there's denial and push-back in this set of threads about the verbiage. You made a mistake. Own it and apologize for the verbiage you put out there. Don't deny that it was ever there or argue over pedantic details about where/how that verbiage was placed.
Wow. The guy is a jerk and a liar. The board at PlanetScale needs to get this guy off the internet. He's too much of an asshole to be seen in public.
I have no real horse in this race. I know how to manage my own databases, but I do have people asking me about PlanetScale and asking me to use it for certain projects, and I will absolutely never do so now.
SPREAD builds B2B software for mechatronics customers like cars and defense systems. We help them design, build and diagnose problems with their systems faster. We do it with a combination of a well-designed ontology we've spent years working on as well as AI-based systems. Right now, we're looking for a technical writer to join our team that's really forward thinking to own the writing, tooling, and also lead the company in ambitious technical writing.
You can reach me at shane at spread . ai with your resume
Man this hits home. I'm a reasonably sized human, but there are almost no devices on the market outside of iPhones where I can reach from bottom right to upper left with 1 hand without shifting the phone around in my hand. I hate it.
I'd be willing to take less battery life to get something like this, but nearly everything that's anywhere close either has no NFC (which means mobile payments are out the door) or doesn't have 5G or just has such an awful camera/processor as to be basically unusable for many every-day tasks.
SPREAD is a software company built to help electromechanical companies (automotive, aerospace, defense) build their products better and faster by bringing together the different data they have into a single system.
We have several of the largest automotive OEMs as customers already and are looking to expand our low-code platform.
Even worse: I got a sales call from Backblaze a few weeks ago that was an AI voice agent. It seemed super suspicious the way it was talking, so I asked it directly if it was an AI, and it then said yes.
I asked it to talk to a real person: a manager, legal, or compliance employee and it hung up on me
That is an illicit robocall, and you can pursue Backblaze under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. I would recommend filing a small claims court case, there is no gray zone for Backblaze to be making AI robocalls in.
For transparency to others here, here's what happened:
I submitted a support request and separately a GDPR request for my information and removal. I let the legal team at Backblaze know what happened as well by e-mailing legal@.
- The support request auto-responded with "We will respond to your support request (<insert ticket number here>) within one day." That was 21 days ago. No response.
- The legal team stated that my information has never been sold to 3rd parties. Strange unless Backblaze is operating its own AI cold calling en masse and then refused to complete my GDPR request of telling me the data it had collected on me. They refused to acknowledge that I had gotten an AI cold call
So no. This is frankly a BS path forward. Nobody at Backblaze as far as I can tell is taking this seriously
1 year ago, I lived in San Rafael (Marin county, Bay Area). I occasionally needed to go to Palo Alto for work meetings. The fastest public transit option was to take a 40 minute bus to Larkspur Landing, then a 30 minute ferry to the SF Ferry building, walk for 20 minutes, and then take Caltrain for 45 minutes or more and then walk from there. With transfers, at minimum it was a 2.5h journey, but typically 3+h
Edit: Also Google Maps says San Rafael to Palo Alto will take 2 hours give or take a few minutes on public transit, with 3 buses, but the middle one you could easily cut out with a bike or a 4 block walk. That doesn't really seem absurd at all for an occasional trip. People do 2 hour drives for an occasional trip and no one bats an eye.
This is just wrong. FWIW, I owned a bike, and this is wrong under both "bike" and "non-bike" conditions.
If you live directly next to the San Rafael central station, that'd be easiest/fastest. But San Rafael is much bigger than that. I'll get into that in a second. There are 2 basic options to do this trip:
Fastest option 1 was to go to San Rafael Station (I'll call it SR here on out) then bus to SF, then bike/walk to the Caltrain station, which was about a 25 minute walk. The buses from SR to SF ran often as rarely as once per hour, and occasionally they just don't show up at all. The ride took 30-60 minutes depending on traffic. There weren't always bike spaces on the bus, so sometimes you needed to lock your bike up in SR and you were going to be walking in SF to Caltrain. But because of the variability on traffic times, you have to leave incredibly early if you want to catch the fastest train to Palo Alto. And if you're going to California Avenue (which was where I was going to), the express option basically doesn't exist.
Here's how that plays out: 10 minute bike to SR station (or 30-40 minute walk, depending on your walk speed), you have hopefully timed things right to get on a bus leaving once every 30-60 minutes and that the bus is actually showing up: otherwise, you're waiting 30-60 minutes for the next one. Then a 30-60 minute ride into SF. Then a ~5 minute bike ride or 15-20 minute walk to Caltrain. Then a 45-60 minute ride to Palo Alto, but again the transfers aren't timed (they couldn't be, given the difference of where the bus dropoff is)
The second real alternative is replacing the first bus leg with a ferry leg by going to Larkspur Landing. There is the SMART train that goes there, but for some wild reason drops people off a 15 minute walk from the ferry and then has no timed transfer.
I did the journey dozens of times and never completed it in less than 2h 30m but more commonly was 4h and had more than 1 occasion where it took much longer than that.
