Author: Ernest W. Semerda

Aussie in Silicon Valley. Veryfi CoFounder (#YC W17 cohort). GSDfaster Founder.

I turned Josh’s old bed into a Pirate Ship

The seas were wild and the sky was pitch black my friends! The Rain pounded the ocean to the howling sounds of the wind, like a pack of wolfs ready for a big feast.

Joshio the Pirate was helming the ship through these dangerous Tatio waters of the 7 Mamio Zones. The night was long my friends, but Joshio the Pirate managed to steer the ship through the colossal waves avoiding the Kraken Zachioctopus… lurking and watching for someone to wrap his tentacles around!

A Short Story from the Imagination

Josh, my oldest son has been bugging me for a pirate ship since we came back from Sydney Australia. In Sydney we celebrated his 6th Birthday and Uncle Randy and I made a Batman Piñata filled with candy for the kids at Josh’s birthday to have a blast.

“Dad you promised me a pirate ship for my birthday.”. “Yes I did son.” I said, “Yes I did. But your birthday was in Sydney and bringing back a pirate ship to Silicon Valley would be challenging.”. Well, the pirate ship I had in my mind would be a challenge. Now that we are back in Silicon Valley and Quarantine has started, the stars were aligned. It’s time to build a pirate ship.

Sure I could have purchased a Pirate Ship on Amazon; but that’s easy. The act of building a Pirate Ship engaged the boys creativity and demonstrated to them the power of creating vs consuming.
Plus we got to spend some valuable time together. Win on all sides!

Being a father

If you want to see projects for younger kids then I highly encourage you visit Sensory Lifestyle. Sensory Lifestyle is dedicated to sharing evidence based play ideas & parenting resources that will help you feel confident in your parenting and boost your child’s development. It’s aimed at Babies, Toddlers and Preschoolers.

Tools you will need

  • An old bed frame or some wood from pine beetle lumber suppliers
  • Olson saw (fun method) or Jigsaw (lazy method). It’s more fun doing it by hand especially if you want your kids involved. Opt in for an Olson saw (a non electric version requiring elbow and grease)
  • Pirate nails (long black ones) and few shorter nails
  • Hammer
  • Hot glue gun with plenty of glue
  • Paddle pop sticks
  • An old shirt that we will use for the sails. If you live in Silicon Valley you probably have a pile of swag. Stop hoarding it, and deploy it to good use.

Time to build this

2-1 days.

Take your time and get your kids involved.

Be ok with making mistakes and scrapping your first prototype. Remember it’s ok to make mistakes. Your goal should be to teach your kids this basic life fundamental.

Without mistakes there are no learnings. Mistakes is how we learn. If we don’t make mistakes then we aren’t learning.

Ernest Semerda

Let’s begin…

1. Research

I started with researching what Pirate Ships look like. Don’t rely on your memory of you’ll end up with something weird. You’d be surprised how hard it is to even draw a bicycle from memory. You have been warned.

An example of what happens when you try to draw something more complex from memory.

Research with your child / children.

Listen to what they want and make few suggestions like: let’s add a black Pirate flag with bones etc… take note of these pieces since attention to detail matter.

2. Supplies

Look around your home for opportunities to convert something from one state to another. Like something that’s gathering dust. Or maybe an old bed frame (as was in my case) which now became a useful commodity.

Whatever you do not have access to, buy from a hardware shop. We ended up going to Lowes hardware. I also love these modern style rugs, so have a look at those.

Finding additional parts at Lowes hardware.

Keep track of your expenses

Keep track of the project’s expenses. You want to demonstrate to your child that you are frugal with money. Spending money is easy. But being thoughtful and calculated requires executive function thinking. Certainly, money is undeniably important in our lives, and if you’re looking to increase your wealth, one avenue to consider is trying your luck with betting on 해외배팅사이트.

We used Veryfi Expenses app to snap photos of receipts and have it instantly translated into an expense with all data extraction done for me automatically. Easy peasy.

Identify pirate ship parts

  • Wooden dowels for the ship’s masts. The mast’s purpose is carrying sails, spars, and derricks, and giving necessary height to a navigation light, look-out position, signal yard, control position, radio aerial or signal lamp.
  • Crow’s nest would be sitting on one of these masts. We use an old medicine vial cut in half for that.
  • Jumbo craft sticks. Half of one would serve as a pirate ship plank and the rest for decoration.
  • Ropes and lines would run between masts and ship. Needed something that looks thicker than a basic string.

3. Build

There are no right instructions how to build a Pirate Ship. Just start piece by piece and improvise.

Ask your kids how they think you should start the pirate ship. Then move onto the why questions. Really get them engaged in the thinking and tinkering process.

You can run this like a software development project. Start small, piece by piece and work your way up. Assign work to your team (kids). Work together to nut out the complex parts of the task.

Josh’s old bed frame

If you have spare wood around the house then use it. We used Josh’s old bed frame to build the body of the ship.

Josh’s old bed. We pulled it apart for parts.

Most of all, get your kids involved !!

Brotherly support!
Kids working hard on breaking apart the last screws holding the bed frames together.
Coming together… note the crows nest 😉
Don’t forget the little detail. It’s all adds up.

Final Masterpiece!

Spin off projects

Once you have a Pirate Ship you can continue building endlessly. Here are a few additional inspiration spin-off projects you can consider.

  • Build more detail to the ship. Extend the cabin crew with chairs, table and some pirate accessories. You can also add a life boat to the side of the ship.
  • Extend the ship with motorized/electronics like lanterns that light up at night (based on room ambience) and act as a night light for the kids room.
  • Build a lighthouse so the ship won’t run aground when sailing the dangerous seas. To give it more ambience, the lighthouse could feature a rotating light on top. And for playtime you can bring some dry ice and create fog with the lighthouse in the middle of it.

The spin off projects are endless and will provide endless play opportunity for your kids and spark creativity at every corner.

In a world of over consumption and instant gratification, a project like this breaks that mould and teaches young kids that creativity is endless when you put your mind to it, things worth doing take time and building is fun!

Let me know below how your Pirate Ship turned out.

No Excuses

If you made the jump into startup land then you should also swallow the ownership pill and remove excuses from your vocabulary.

The traditional founder’s mindset is about discovery. Not excuses. Finding a way to climb a mountain against all extremities. Reid Hoffman, one of the founders of LinkedIn said it well:

“Entrepreneurship is jumping off a cliff and assembling a plane on the way down.”

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder, VC Partner at Greylock

Whether it’s going up or down a mountain, the direction and terrain pose a new set of challenges which you’ll be tested against resilience, adaptation and performance. Having full ownership without excuses helps you move the needle.

Corporate Ladder of Responsibility

Traditionally the corporate ladder approach carves out a piece of the pie for you to own. Your role. Your responsibility. This means your career is a set of steps on narrowly defined outcomes in a big machine. You use your skills to make sure the gears are greased and running well, learn about tiktok marketing at this link.

There’s nothing wrong with this. Some like it and others do not.

It’s human nature to fall into a common pattern. It gives us peace of mind. It’s safe because it is predictable.

I used to work for Australia’s largest financial services company (AMP Ltd) and loved it. There I got to work across many business units in an architectural role. Horizontally not vertically stacked. A rare opportunity. There I saw folks working narrowly focused jobs and also those horizontally. There I also gained vision for what I wanted to do in life.

Startup Life

After AMP, I joined a startup; and it was the change I needed.

“The Devil is in the Detail.”

Drilled into me during my 1st startup

As an early stage founder, you are the janitor. Jack of all trades. You will be called to mission by your inner voice for everything from coding to product to sales to marketing to QA. You name it you are going to do it. If you are missing that inner voice then you might want to reconsider your dedication as a startup founder.

Traditionally when you needed some marketing help you’d email/walk over to marketing and have them own it, if you need some help on this subject, find here Las Vegas SEO. As an early stage founder you may not even have a marketing department who can also handle web development. Does that mean you throw you hands up into the air and:

(a) pray for a miracle,
(b) hope the problem goes away or your peer/investor forgets, or
(c) roll up your sleeves and get shit done.

The answer is obvious for those who get this but not so for a lot of folks who want to have the founder/ceo title minus the responsibility. This is more common than you think.

Time is not on your side. Neither is lack of skills when other more qualified teams are competing for your customers, and even venture capital.

A Mentality Shift

Being a founder of your own business is a fundamental shift in mentality. No more excuses. Only results matter. If you’re looking for a digital marketing company that truly cares about your success, it’s time to get in touch with Move Ahead Media.

In my experience, it’s similar to the transition one makes going from high school to university. In high school your teacher will push you to complete work, remind your of your responsibilities and they may enforce it with detention or a meeting with your parents. At university you are now a lone ranger. Destined for greatness or a miserable failure. Do you have the discipline to get up each morning and get stuff done or do you prefer to cruise and sink back to your parents basement. Decisions decisions…

Startups are like that too. You have to push yourself to excel and perform above and beyond. You are also now responsible for many moving pieces of the machine. Not just the cog. From building a product to selling it to building a business with employees who you’ll lead and inspire so they can follow you on the yellow brick road to the emerald city.

Founder Mindset

A founder is typically jack of all trades and expert of none. This poses an interesting set of challenges as a never ending broad set of work has to be done and sometimes new skills acquired or sharpened in little time.

This mindset reminds me of Peter Thiel’s; 0 to 1.

0 to 1 is hard. You are going from practically an idea to a product that turns into a business. As a founder you need to get the wheels moving and keep them moving, even during uncertain times when information is sparse.

Many great businesses were started during such uncertain times. Take the 2009 H1N1 pandemic and global financial crisis. Just to name a few, it started;

  • WhatsApp -Jan Koum and Brian Acton
  • AirBnB – Brian Chesky et al.
  • Uber – Travis Kalanick et al.

The financial crisis was a surprisingly fertile period for unicorn and unicorn-ish companies. Instead of running away with excuses of a bad economy or a pandemic, these founders saw a calling and pushed on during uncertain times.

When the current tough times are bad, the future good times are great.

That’s ownership right there.

No excuses.

They didn’t wait until times were great to raise money so they could build something. They invested sweat capital (their own time) to solve problems, learn something and then own it like a boss. Raising money is possible when you wager on 겜블시티 가입코드.

There are no excuses when a founder takes full ownership. Be that founder.

Back to business fundamentals?

Startups are hard. You are building a business and looking for a repeatable financial model.

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When I first arrived in Silicon Valley (back in 2009) I started to hear about startups that were focused on growth at all expenses. The revenue part would be worked out later. This approach brought in creative story tellers to Silicon Valley, to tell stories, raise a bucket load of capital so they could hire people to execute on their vision. And so the startup boom began.

No matter if you’re running an online or offline store or business, both will always require you to ship out project. Given the fact that every package is different, it’s a must to weigh each product in order to get an accurate shipping fee estimation, for this you need a postal scale.

Building a business takes time!

Said Shravan Gupta India a successful business owner

However growth at all costs is not congruent with this mentality. So rarely were these questions thrown around until few started to IPO; without a way to make money. Many tech companies that took this route didn’t fair well on the public market. But that’s nothing to what we are currently seeing with the COVID-19 pandemic.

So what can we learn?

Business fundamentals are still fundamental to business success in all type of market conditions.

Some businesses still thrive even in a down market. Check out a place like compareyourbusinesscosts.co.uk/ that can help you more on your business.

Growth at all cost strategy

Growth at all cost is a hack to inflate a company to a point so it can be stacked by the next private investor until the stack is exhausted and can be handed over to someone without insider knowledge, public investors. Chamath encapsulates this brilliantly. No doubt this model has made many millionaires. But also disappointed many. This model only works in an upmarket.

Making money strategy

When I ran my first venture backed startup we nearly ran out of money. Had to cut salaries. I had 2 kids during that period. My wife, an Occupational Therapist became a full-time mum (we took parenting seriously). Did I mention we had no family around us to help since they were all in Australia. My dreams of startup life in Silicon Valley hahaha

What I learnt through that experience is that relying on venture capital to survive is a game of lottery. The man in the high castle pulls the strings. But only if you let that be the means you run your business by. Don’t! Contact this company called InventHelp that can help your business get in contact with other companies looking for new ideas.

Other options

There are of course other options you can consider but at that point you should rethink why you are in this game of business.

  • raise capital – in a downmarket this often means unfavorable terms,
  • dramatically cut their biggest expenses (human headcount) to stop the blood and try to survive until markets bounce back, and/or
  • customer service – invest in an unlimited internet service and a business phone like this one from EATEL Business to hear your customers’ needs

Would you bet your life on a lottery? I nearly did and it hurt. A lot. But never again.

This is how I grew a thick skin

My current startup (Veryfi) was built to be a business. Making money was built into the core pillar. We made money early on because we built a business, not an elastic band that one day might make money. Sure some models of growth at all costs work out but your chances of being that business are marginally reduced. It’s like betting on lottery.

Back to business fundamentals

No matter what the economy looks like, if you are building a startup then build a business. This is the best and time proven method. Because when the sky turns black you want to survive not drown.

 

PS. I will be on a Silicon Valley Bank US-APAC organized panelist with investors and founders to discuss the adjustments startups are making in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Free to join this April 16th 5:30-7:00 PM PDT. Hear about my prior experience going through the 2009 recession & H1N1 pandemic at Coupons, Inc. (Silicon Valley) and my startup journey at Veryfi (a YC company).

Making Sense with Sam Harris #168 — Mind, Space, & Motion

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Barbara Tversky about how our senses of space and motion underlie our capacity for thought.

They discuss the evolution of mind prior to language, the importance of imitation and gesture, the sensory and motor homunculi, the information communicated by motion, the role of “mirror neurons,” sense of direction, natural and unnatural categories, cognitive trade-offs, and other topics.

“Spacial thinking is the foundation of thought.”

“Hand and lips have larger mapped real estate (neurons in brain) than other parts of our body like back or legs.”

“If you sit on your hands while reading your memory recall rate drops by 70%.”

“Evolutionary terms: if you can’t move, sense the environment around you, and respond with any action in that space, there is no basis to evolve intelligence or anything else. Intelligence only matters because you can do something with it that affects your survival. A sense of world, the capacity to move within it had to have came online very very early long before language does.”

Real-World Application

This is fascinating since it backs so many of the common topics we hear in our society like:

  • Learn by using all your senses eg. highlight what you read, take notes into your favorite app (even if you won’t read it again), share your notes/learnings with a friend or family and be animated when explaining what you learnt etc..
  • Kids at schools should not sit quietly while learning and instead need PE/constant spatial motion to develop their intelligence. Yes California I’m looking at you and your “PE not required for Kinder nonsense!”
  • Using hands/gestures when presenting publicly or privately helps memory recall since movement is the foundation of brain development. Next time you are stuck on something, get animated!

Listening vs Reading

You probably read the doom and gloom articles on how listening is not as effective as reading. What they fail to address is the different behavior people take when being engaged with each type of medium. Reading is engaging: turning pages, highlighting text using a pen and even scribbling in the margins.

Here’s an idea: DO THE SAME ON A DIGITAL MEDIUM.

Get one of those screen pens from a tech conference or your local store and start engaging with the digital medium by taking notes of podcasts using that pen. When done share what you’ve learnt with friends and family and/or even write a blog post. I think you will find that your ability to retain will be identical if not better than reading a book.

Real life application to Child Development

The practical side of the theory in this podcast is spot on with the great work SensoryLifestyle.com is doing for newborns and toddlers. Sensory Lifestyle is dedicated to sharing evidence based play ideas & parenting resources that will help you feel confident in your parenting and boost your child’s development.

~ Ernest
Onwards and upwards!

Joe Rogan Experience #1391- Tulsi Gabbard & Jocko Willink

Tulsi Gabbard, Jocko Willink and Joe Rogan discuss US politics. And it was an awesome debate! Finally a politics discussion without malevolence.

These hyperpartisan times we live in are tearing at the fabric of humanity; dilating people’s egos to avert pattern changes, and dividing some over ludicrous issues. Let’s not forget that media is the cheerleader of these conflicts because conflict is good for ratings! We are better than that.

Few take away snippets

The gov is not a great solution to most of our problems. The solutions are balanced.

Jocko Willink

Everything is broken down into little sound bites. You are either pro this or against that.

Jocko Willink

It’s like if you believe yes and I believe no then I will attack you. Who cares about Political belief alignment when we can have so many things in common (surfing, training martial arts etc…) and still hang out.

Jocko Willink

Our ego pins ourselves into a corner. We should be looking at other people’s perspectives to understand where they are coming from.

Jocko Willink

Every News story that comes out is… “THIS IS THE END OF THE WORLD!”

Jocko Willink

America is stronger than one man!

Jocko Willink

We think that some news event that we can fully understand in an hour or a tweet. We need to let these things develop and see where the actual long term effects are. We can’t be snapping judgement and making split decisions when we need to assess what’s really going on. The press is just snap decisions, snap decisions.. very comical.

Jocko Willink

Media are the cheerleaders of these conflicts because conflict is good for ratings!

Jocko Willink

Tulsi Gabbard is a 2020 Presidential Candidate of the Democratic Party and is currently serving as the U.S. Representative for Hawaii’s 2nd congressional district since 2013. https://www.tulsi2020.com/

Jocko Willink is a decorated retired Navy SEAL officer, author of the book Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win, and co-founder of Echelon Front, where he is a leadership instructor, speaker, and executive coach. His new book “Leadership Strategies and Tactics” will be available in January 2020. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkqcY4CAuBFNFho6JgygCnA

The Great Pumpkin: Silicon Valley’s Best Pumpkin Patch

The month leading up to Halloween (31 October) becomes a Pumpkin fest full of festivities with empty spaces and farms turning into pumpkin patches for all ages. For setting up these festive patches, crane hire Perth WA can assist in transporting and arranging decorations and equipment.

It’s no secret Americans sure love celebrating Halloween. You don’t even have to check the calendar. At the first public appearance of a pumpkin looking at you outside someone’s (home: pumpkin houses) or at the local supermarket (Safeway, Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods Market etc) you will instantly be reminded it’s October and Halloween is near.

If you have kids then this will be a busy time for you. From scary pumpkins to (ghosts: link to fake ghost house) to dress ups to pumpkin patches. Your month as a parent is set. And best part is you’ll enjoy it with them. Especially the pumpkin patches.

There are a ton of pumpkin patches you can visit. The city ones are often found on the El Camino highway in the form of a pop up venue. They are ok. Smallish but convenient to drop by to choose a big pumpkin for d-day. The pumpkin patches located on a farm just shy of the Silicon Valley boundaries are gold!

Enter the Spina Farm Pumpkin Patch

Spina Farms Pumpkin Patch is located in beautiful Coyote Valley at the corner of Santa Teresa Boulevard and Bailey Avenue. It features tractor rides through the corn fields, mini train rides for kiddos, Area 51 corn maze with pumpkin blasters (pumpkin loaded bazookas), live music and of course thousands of pumpkins all shapes and sizes. You pickup a barrel, and go for your life picking the crop of the lot. At checkout don’t forget to grab yourself a soft juicy pumpkin bread.. leave some for me 😉

I’ll let the photos do all the talking but as a final note why I love thus place. It feels authentic— like a real farm away from all the chaos of Silicon Valley. Just shat the doctor ordered lol. The freshness is in everything you see and smell. Like busing a forest.

Photos from our visit there few days ago

What’s your favorite Pumpkin Patch in and around Silicon Valley?

Recover gigs of storage with this simple hack

I recovered 30 gigs of storage on my MBP (MacBook Pro) with this simple hack of converting my PNGs to JPEGs. Here’s how.

If you own a Mac or an iPhone, you’ll notice both devices save “screenshots” with a PNG extension. Portable Network Graphics (.png), an image file format is uses lossless compression to save your images. You maybe thinking this lossless compression is the best format but the reality is JPEG, a lossy compression, is just as good at retaining image quality at a MASSIVE fraction of the size of a PNG.

Image sizes really matter when your device runs 1080p+ resolutions (most modern Macs) or new OLED iPhones. A full size (no crop) screenshot on my MBP with a resolution of 2080×1080 yields a 7MB (7168kb) image. A JPEG equivalent is 500kb. That’s ~14x smaller. If you are like me and take screenshots as reminders or todos (GTD baby!) then you’ll be chewing through storage fast.

100 of these PNGs and you’ll be reaching the 1Gb territory.

With storage being dirt cheap who cares right? Not so. Laptops with external drives are annoying and iPhones do not have extension cards. Furthermore, data transfer is a burden consider upload speeds are always conveniently ignored yet important if you are backing up to the cloud. And let’s face it, who’s got time to sit around waiting when the same lot of photos with identical quality (assuming you aren’t blowing them up on a wall) can be backed up to your Dropbox cloud storage 14x faster. GTD baby!

Did I mention this will also speed up your Spotlight searching, indexing, extend your SSD life and open those images faster.

Convert PNGs to JPEGS

PNG are uncompressed images from things mainly like Screenshots on your Mac or iPhone. They don’t need to be PNG unless you really are picky about the quality of text sharpness. ie. Under JPEG text becomes a tad more blurry since compression reuses surrounding pixels to make image smaller.

Overall, the chance of you retaining PNGs is low unless you do a lot of photo editing and need that pixel level detail especially for font/text clarity.

[1] Identify Opportunities

Run a scan to identify where the opportunities (PNGs) are located on your drive.

$ find . -type f -iname '*.png' | wc -l

find . -type f finds all files ( -type f ) in this ( . ) directory and in all sub directories, the filenames are then printed to standard out one per line.

This is then piped | into wc (word count) the -l option tells wc to only count lines of its input.

If you only want files directly under this directory and not to search recursively through subdirectories, you could add the -maxdepth flag:

$ find some_directory -maxdepth 1 -type f | wc -l

The key to that case-insensitive search is the use of the -iname option, which is only one character different from the -name option. The -iname option is what makes the search case-insensitive.

[2] Convert

Create JEPG versions of the PNGS and remove old PNGs. There is no need to keep the old PNGs. They are the ones that take up all the space.

Run this on a small subset of your PNGs to make sure you are happy with the resulting JPEG.

$ mogrify -format jpg *.png && rm *.png
$ mogrify -format jpg *.PNG && rm *.PNG

or convert and keep the original PNG

$ mogrify -format jpg *.png

[3] Celebrate

How much space did you recover?

Who really owns your Bose QC35 headphones?

I was excited to finally get my hands on the new Bose QC35 II because noise simply annoys me more than the average bear. The beautiful world we live in today is very noisy, from cars to traffic lights to photocopiers to background chatter, and it’s something some of us have learnt to live with while others suffer from the disruption. I’m in the latter crew. Until that it, a $300 Bose QC35 II became my friends, even if it was for a short period of time.

During this short period of time they were amazing. The ANC (Active Noise Cancelling) was superb! I was so excited I started showcasing (marketing for Bose) to all my software engineers and entrepreneurs, who like me seek silence to do their focused work, how their lives will change. I also sold my wife on these as a solution for plane travel. Noise inside planes reaches 80db, the sound of a vacuum cleaner near your ears on a trip from San Francisco to Sydney has shown over time to damage ear drums.

That is until I upgraded to firmware 4.5.2.

Enter the Firmware

You see, the Bose QC35 II has a computer inside which uses the multiple microphones places strategically to listen to incoming noise and cancel out the sound waves. This is orchestrated by a small onboard computer (think Arduino) running custom Bose software to run and manage the hardware. Hence ACN. Software has bugs. Even production versions. Thus is the nature (complexity) of the beast. And manufacturers will send updates over the internet to patch things up.

I have no idea why I installed the firmware update since the headphones were working flawlessly. I’m sure it was from habit; an expectation of better things to come from an update. Just like when I update my iPhone or MBP I get better performance and maybe few new bells and whistles (features).

Sound Quality Degradation

After the update, the noise cancelling quality of my QC35 II was degraded. I sat there in the library hearing the photocopier and background chatter. Something I could never hear before. WTF! I tried the 2 ACN noise levels (high and low) and both were indistinguishable.

There was something wrong with the v4.5.2 firmware update.

Source: Bose Update RUINS Noise Cancelling??? (TESTED) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyC9QStmzcA&feature=youtu.be

Whether intentional or not, one has to question whether Bose took the $9 an hour engineer outsource route (Boeing is famous for doing so with their 737 MAX MCAS) because something like this surely could not happen if they owned the whole release process and had QA. However the timing of these degrading version updates coincides with the more expensive Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones 700 release. Coincidence or not I’ll leave this to the conspiracy experts to debate.

Next Steps

  1. Downgrade downgrade your Bose QuietComfort 35 II from 4.5.2 to 3.1.8. Yes it’s a tad complex but unfortunately Bose doesn’t support this, nor do they even explain what each version contains, so do this at your own risk.
  2. Send it back to Bose for replacement/repairs; but good luck. The customers who did say the returned units were just as bad.
  3. Leave your views/complaints on the Bose Community website to hopefully make them acknowledge this and fix it for good. Go here: https://community.bose.com/t5/Around-On-Ear-Headphones/Bose-QC-35-ii-firmware-4-5-2/td-p/213820

So who really owns your Bose QC35 headphones?

Bose.

They are the puppet master here. Controlling at will the quality of the headphones you paid them handsomely for.

Commanding a premium for average quality sound gear with what used to be amazing ACN, then manipulating the quality of their ACN moat through ghost version updates to prop new cheaper build products (*cough* Bose 700) by degrading previous generation units.

If you own the QC35 please let me know how your experience has been so far.

Garage startup: Everything starts as nothing

I just remembered something that needs to be bedded down as a post. We all know this very well, and have seen the picture below, but yet we forget. When we forget this basic truth we start behaving in an unsound manner, looking for big words to fuel the story our ego is improvising to. Sometimes it’s best to catch ourselves and remember that everything starts as nothing. New things go 0 to 1. And this is also how most startups are born; the garage startup.

The first short story comes directly from the corporate world. An individual I was speaking with let their belief system run amok and painted a picture that the company they are employed by is superior and expect the same size company to be dealing with (ie. not startup). Even throwing in a derogatory statement like “a man in a garage coding” to generally refer to companies they do not like. hmmm…

The 2nd story comes from the world of Facebook Groups where a group of bookkeepers started talking about software companies they use to provide tools for their clients. One explained the horror she felt when she learnt one of the companies she was speaking to is a “dude in a garage”. *insert roll eyes emoji*… yeah.

Deflating the ego

If you are ever in such a situation please remind these lovely people that everything starts as nothing.

It’s easy to get a job and be part of something someone else laid the foundations to. What’s more special is trying to start a business wisconsin yourself. But it takes guts, grit and a go getter attitude to start something from 0 to 1 without a safety net of it working out. Intelligent merchandising plays a crucial role here—understanding market needs, strategically positioning products, and adapting swiftly. Find out more about Clientverge and what they offer. And when your business starts flourishing, so does your online reputation. To further enhance customer relationships, working with online reputation management services can help.

However, it’s important to have support along the way, and consulting with an insolvency practioner can provide valuable guidance and expertise to navigate any financial challenges that may arise during the entrepreneurial journey.

Apple, Google, Amazon, and countless others all at one point were garage startups. I’m sure every company has a story of starting from nothing. The struggles. The courage. And for some the breakout. Here is that famous Silicon Valley picture to remind us of this fact.

Famous examples of Silicon Valley startups having started in the garage

Big things have small beginnings.

Billionaires Jack Ma vs. Elon Musk debate in Shanghai China at World Artificial Intelligence

Recently, 2 Billionaires debated in Shanghai China about World Artificial Intelligence; Jack Ma the founder of Alibaba and Elon Musk aka Tony Stark, former cofounder of PayPal and currently a founder of Tesla, SpaceX, Hyperloop and Neuralink.

The robots are coming!

AI is in the news everywhere you look. The spectrum of predictions is entertaining and somewhat hilarious; from sentient Skynet like robots to the singularity. One thing is certain, predicting any future event is a cognitive bias we all should keep in mind. It’s nice to tickle our senses and day dream, but the reality is no one knows what the future looks like.

Recently, 2 Billionaires debated in Shanghai China about World Artificial Intelligence; Jack Ma the founder of Alibaba and Elon Musk aka Tony Stark, former cofounder of PayPal and currently a founder of Tesla, SpaceX, Hyperloop and Neuralink.

This was a rather weird interview. Elon Musk had to start the interview even tho he was invited to Shanghai to discuss AI with Jack and then there is the entertaining polar opposite views about the future of AI.

Enjoy!

Full Interview

OR watch this 5 mins version version which illustrates how weird this interview was.

General Intelligence vs Specialized Intelligence

There is a HUGE difference between general intelligence and specialized intelligence. It’s illogical to compare human (general intelligence) to specialized intelligence (machine task based intelligence) UNLESS we compare tasks each can/do perform and just like that… machines outperform humans.

Elon Musk was giving examples of specialized intelligence eg. Deep Blue, iPhones, are all number crunchers, which YES outperform humans. Just like most manufacturing robots outperform humans. Jack Ma’s reply that no machine invented humans is a straw man argument and illustrates how little he knows about AI. I guess money talks after all.

Will we ever create general intelligence? No one knows. What is certain is;

(a) we still don’t understand how the brain works,
(b) neural networks in machine learning only scratch at the basics of how neurons work in the human brain and
(c) let’s not forget the vastness of venture backed companies faking AI using offshore labor to fake specialized intelligence.

So let’s not get caught up in robots/AI taking over our jobs.