Ashok Khosla @amkhosla@qoto.org
- khipufieldguide
- www.khipufieldguide.com
- seeingbirds
- www.seeingbirds.com
Outsides feeds my insides. Into birds, biology and natural language processing/computational linguistics. Currently working on Inka(Inca) khipu(quipu).
Joined Nov 2022
Ashok Khosla
boosted
#Microsoft switches #Bing search engine to #AI. Much hilarity ensues. (I just queried it for the population of the Planet Mars.)
Ashok Khosla
boosted
I paid for SiriusXM in a new car for one year, probably in 2006 or 2007. Today in 2023, I still get regular phone calls (with a list of numbers I add to my blocklist) and monthly offers in the snail mail to re-sign up with them.
SiriusXM must have the most well-funded customer retention center and software stack in history because they refuse to stop bothering me even 15 years later
On the "wow do I empathize!" scale:
Interview w/Marc Andreessen (Dwarkesh Patel from The Lunar Society)
I think of this a lot. We look at this through the lens of — “What would I do if I were 23 again?” And I always have those ideas. But starting a company is a real commitment, it really changes your life. My favorite all time quote on being a startup founder is from Sean Parker, who says —“Starting a company is like chewing glass. Eventually, you start to like the taste of your own blood.” I always get this queasy look on the face of people I’m talking to when I roll that quote out. But it is really intense. Whenever anybody asks me if they should start a company, the answer is always no. Because it's such a gigantic, emotional, irrational thing to do. The implications of that decision are so profound in terms of how you live your life. Look, there are plenty of great ideas, and plenty of interesting things to do but the actual process is so difficult. It gets romanticized a lot and it's not romantic. It's a very difficult thing to do. And I did it multiple times before, so at least for now, I don't revisit that.
@allenholub Yes. My studies indicated that too. Makes you think about how expressive an emoji is. Certainly this is more expressive than hugs. 😉 I'm sure someone has done a detailed linguistic study of emoji LOL. If you find an interesting one let me know.
@allenholub We are in the midst of a linguistic change - where we replace alphabetic characters with emojis, like Chinese LOL. A future I won't be able to live in. I once did a linguistic study of opening lines for a dating company. Successful daters often started with one emoji. 😄
Or maybe because math is universal, where dang few other things are.
@allenholub
I think it counts as a word semiotically. Happy, sad, etc...
Ashok Khosla
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Ashok Khosla
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Instead of spinning this out into a thread, allow me to point you to Lynn Conway’s website where you can read her story in her own words:
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/BioSketch.html
After a long trip, with almost every bathroom having a hard to figure out, metal tarnished, poorly design faucet, I've had it.
My next entrepreneurial life, I'm going to replace the bathroom faucet industry. Faucets are ridiculously expensive, hard to source and too difficult to use.
Not a bad critique. Writers vs Editors and ChatGPT
Ashok Khosla
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I am Urban Explorer since 2007 – when exploring wasn't mainstream at all. On Birdsite, I was „UrbExEu“, but I decided against creating a separate account for this on Mastodon.
In the future, I will present one or the other of my works on this account from time to time – because this is one of my facets as well. Sometimes commented, sometimes not. As my photos tell you what I'm not able to say.
#urbex #abandoned #lostplaces #photography #urbanexploration #art #history
Ashok Khosla
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the 4 types of national anthems:
- Gosh, This Sure is an Attractive Piece of Land We've Got Here
- That One War in Particular was a Doozy
- We Only Sing Parts of This Song Now Because the Other Verses are Racist
- We Speak French and We Will Fucking Kill You
So having sold unsuccessfully to verizon, and having sold successfully to AT&T, I can tell you tech support is not their main worry. Marketing costs to get your account is. So threaten to quit Verizon and you'll be surprised at how much they want to help.
Ashok Khosla
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🏳️🌈🖖🏽
The guy who wants to put neurolinks in our heads worries about people knowing where he is.
Ashok Khosla
boosted
#immigration #immigrants #immigrationreform
A good piece on how the Indian community in the US has overcome the adversity that immigrants usually face (racism, xenophobia, etc) and how this 1️⃣% percent of the U.S. population has made an outsized impact and punched well above its weight 👇🏾
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/indians-taking-over-corporate-america-171000331.html
@allenholub @jarrett @verizon
The cost of tech support is non-trivial. So much so that my very last startup attempted to solve that:
First customer was Palm Pilot, then Activision, then Apple, then the Airlines, etc as we built... Palm proved our model worked when a caller said "Thank you" at the end of the call, on our fourth call. We tried to sell to Verizon. They didn't buy, LOL
Ashok Khosla
boosted
maybe twitter's URL censoring is so easily circumvented because all the software engineers still there are desperately trying to keep their lines of code metrics as high as possible
4 calls period. If your margin is $40 4 calls will bring you to 0. (These are 1991 numbers)
- khipufieldguide
- www.khipufieldguide.com
- seeingbirds
- www.seeingbirds.com
Outsides feeds my insides. Into birds, biology and natural language processing/computational linguistics. Currently working on Inka(Inca) khipu(quipu).
Joined Nov 2022
