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I'd be curious how much Workspace contributes to Google's revenue. I don't see it broken out anywhere in the reporting. Assumedly it's part of the $30.7B cloud revenue.

I was just looking in the Workspace account of a relatively small local business, and realized they're spending ~$6k/yr on Workspace. Multiply that by however other small businesse are on Workspace, add in larger enterprise customers, and you're probably at a decent chunk of revenue.


It occurs to me looking at the map that a tourist in modern day Paris would still be well-served by this network.

That thought also made me wonder how central Paris' modern metro system overlays onto this. Here's a quick little visualization: https://stirring-biscotti-a978fa.netlify.app/

If you're traveling to or interested in Paris and its history, I really enjoyed "Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris" by Graham Robb. Has some good, accessible and entertaining history relating to (among other things) the construction of the metro.


That's not a surprise. People orient their lives around what they can do. Thus, things like this become self-fulfilling prophecies. You build it, they come, they add the demand, so you keep it running. It certainly does and has happened that cities have changed majorly at various times because of changes in transit, but it's not particularly common. In most cities even where transit has been torn out, you can see where the lines used to run because that's still a high demand corridor today.

My life is basically the family in this ad, and I just have a hard time imagining how one of these would make anything better.

Everyone in our family who sould have access to calendars/facetime/messages/etc. already does. It's overkill for just a smart speaker.

I guess maybe the kids who are too young to have their own device could more easily call their grandparents?

Cool hardware and a surprisingly affordable price, I just don't have a use case for it.

EDIT: The wall mounted version seems like a better form-factor though. Doesn't take up counter/table space at least.


For families who want to reduce screen time and device reliance this could be a very good alternative to everyone having their own device.


Like some sort of shared communication device that's larger, sits on a counter, and is plugged into the wall?

What a novel idea.


Fax machine? Genuinely not sure what you mean. Is the answer just "a computer" ?

Because while yes, that's true, this apparently recognises the different users. So presumably if a child is using it, that will be under managed parameters set by a parent - meaning that it's much harder for the child to circumvent.


They likely refer to a classic landline phone..


wait until someone designs an old school wireless home phone to connect to it. we'll come full circle.


Something like this https://tincan.kids/?


This already exists: https://flipply.co.uk/


Tincans are huge right now with the elementary age kids at least (my 2nd grader is my only frame of reference)


Yeah, the grandparents scenario was exactly why I immediately bought it. Younger kids with limited screen time. The grandparents call our phones to talk to them and vice versa. I'm curious how this will work for my kids who don't have apple devices/accounts.

We're old school and use a dry erase board on the fridge for our calendar, so a centralized device would be nice. We tried using an old iPad, but it was more clunky to turn it on, click on the app each time. We did try kiosk mode, but it was terrible when we needed the device for something else.


> I guess maybe the kids who are too young to have their own device could more easily call their grandparents?

You overestimate how little they want to call grandparents vs getting on youtube


>home, always on recording

It’s not surprising they made it cheap

They’re trying to compete with all the other creepy Flock-at-Home brands

Its only purpose is to disrupt competitors


Apple has a better track record in this regard, do you have any recent evidence that this trust is unfounded?


Corporations don’t respond to you or me, they operate and plan competitively

Is Apple some magical fairy thing in your mind, or is it a corporation with shareholders

You have literally no idea what apple’s track record is, you may think you do


always on recording means you are the product and they can train off of you and be even more embedded in your life.


I wouldn't be surprised if AI was used to generate it. But it mostly feels that way becuase it uses Astro. There's no other obvious AI tells.


Yeah, I suppose I was just responding to the Astro aesthetics. Copy seems human-written when taking a deeper look.


They really have tried.

They don't have the type of insane cashflow that RedBull does to sponsor tons of athletes and weird events, but their video contests are kind of a big deal in the action sports community.

AKA, their Line of the Winter[1] competition for skiing, or their Best Line conest for MTB[2] that they used to run. And they're the title sponsor for the GoPro Mountain Games[3].

They're still THE action sports cameara carried in a lot of outdoor equipment stores, but the Insta360 has really dominated social media recently, and their products are currently a better value for cost/performance.

[1] https://gopro.com/en/us/awards/line-of-the-winter [2] https://www.pinkbike.com/news/enter-the-gopro-of-the-world-b... [3] https://mountaingames.com/


It’s not just the cash flow, it’s the margins.

Redbulls gross margins are probably 90%. It’s basically just water, sugar, and caffeine sold for $3.

You can do a lot of great promotions if the cost of your product is a rounding error.


> It’s basically just water, sugar, and caffeine sold for $3.

... and some of their products don't even have sugar!


you have to pay extra for that


Having owned a number of GoPros, I made the same switch last year.

The Insta360 has super annoying/intrusive software that always feels like it's trying to sell me something, but it's pretty excellent in terms of actual video quality.


I don't really use the software, not even for updates.

I copy out the footage directly using a USB-C cable (wish it had USB 3.0), and do firmware updates by just dropping the update file into the microSD card.

It's friggin' fabulous that everything is doable without having to use an app. (Also the app takes up somewhere between 1-2GB of storage on my phone, and I don't have that kind of space.)


That's fine for flat videos, but 360 videos usually need processing before they're usable. I'm unsure if there are other software options that handle Insta360 360 videos well.


When 360 videos first started to become viable, all we had were looking at the flattened image. It took a bit to get used to. Eventually, the filters caught up so you could slide the rotation around to keep action centered which made things simple in comparison.


In a somewhat related practice, some roads in the Tour de France this year have been painted with "white shit" (rider Tom Pidcock's words) in order to combat the asphalt melting in the heat, with the unfortunate side-effect that it seems to be slippery and several riders (including Tom Pidcock) crashed going around a corner when the lost traction.

Coverage here: https://velo.outsideonline.com/road/road-racing/tour-de-fran...

But of course, this was done in response to past serious crashes that occured because the asphalt melted. So, it's sort of a damned if you do damned if you dont scenario for the organizers.


Pepe's Towing in Los Angeles reports asphalt collapses where loaded semitrailers are parked with the landing gear down. On hot days the concentrated load of the landing gear sometimes punches through the asphalt.[1]

This is why truck dock areas are usually paved with concrete.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBrULmCGJfc


Years ago Chicago started putting concrete pads on the road at bus stops because the busses stopping in the exact same spot repeatedly was carving ruts into the asphalt.


A city I used to live in did the same thing when they refurbished all the major bus stops. I always wondered why


Also if a vehicle is stopped and the driver turns the wheel (with power steering this isn't hard) - it will eventually drill holes in asphalt - you can sometimes see this in house driveways where someone turns around.


You can even see the asphalt "waves" pushed by the buses stopping here over and over again


Yeah, my city is currently going through every bus stop in the city, redoing the pavement in concrete. Construction season has been nasty for us this year :p


Motorcycle riders also report their sidestands sinking into asphalt on very hot days, to the extent that many of them carry some kind of wide weight-spreading thing to put under the stand. Apparently a face plate (?) for an electrical junction box works great.


Usually, a crushed soda can is good enough to prevent the kickstand to sync in the pavement. You can usually find a can in a random parking lot. That, or find a strip of concrete. That's why sometimes motorcycle park on the sidewalk in front of big box stores on a hot day.


Yep, I use a soda can and have never had any issues.


My bicycle did this as kid in the summer


This isn't a new thing in the Tour and it is normally not a problem, but since someone crashed on it then it must be the "white shit" that caused it. Not one of the hundreds of other variables - like the rider.


Several riders independently crashed in the exact same spot, including Pidcock who is a famously good descender.

These are literally world class professionals at riding their bikes downhill around corners without crashing. If they say the white shit caused the roads to behave differently than they expected, I'm going to believe them.


Paint is usually slippery. There are special standards for how slippery a paint painted on the tarmac can be. But it’s calculated for cars, not racing bicycles with teeny-weeny tires. Could have been easily the paint.


Perhaps they should have used some type of traction paint.


There are other problems with that in wet conditions.


I mean, one of the first things they teach in motorcycle safety classes is that the road stripes are slippery and could cause a crash, especially in the rain. Even if there us a standard for how slippery it can be, it still doesn't match the traction of the road surface.


> But of course, this was done in response to past serious crashes that occurred because the asphalt melted. So, it's sort of a damned if you do damned if you don't scenario for the organizers.

Well, not entirely. You always have the option of repaving the roads with cobblestone or something.


Cobblestones?

They're very slippery when dirty or wet. Seems like a much worse option.


Or just have the cyclists use fatter tyres.


That would also require fatter wheels. Which together have higher moment of inertia which makes for slower bikes (as more energy is required to get the wheels to the same speed).

Not exactly what people want in a race.


You can buy faster bikes than what is allowed at the Tour, so the only concern would be making records incomparable.


And yet fatter tyres are faster than the slimmer ones they used to run. No-one run slim tyres these days.


I could be wrong, but it turns out that somewhat fatter tires with lower pressure are faster because less energy is wasted by deforming slightly and rolling over small bumps, as opposed to thin high-pressure tire "bouncing" over pavement. There is less wasted vertical motion with the wider tires.


Fatter wheel is better than a dnf right?


Not really. If you finish second, you are the first to lose.


...I know absolutely nothing about competitive cycling, but it occurs to me:

1. Would the Tour de France have been rescheduled if it was raining that day?

2. If the answer to #1 is no, is the paint any more slippery than water would have been?

3. If the answer to #1 is yes, then they should also reschedule for extreme heat.


1. No, they ride in the rain all the time.

2. It's not so much that the white shit (actually lime) is slippery, it's that it's unexpectedly slippery. Riders are generally quite good at going the right speed for the conditions. This just a new and unexpected condition they don't have experience with yet.

3. They did shorten one stage because of extreme heat, and there has been talk about rescheduling (both in terms of season, and moving the races into cooler parts fo the day), but the Tour is pretty tradition bound, so it'd take something quite exceptional to see that happen.


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