As the other commenters point out, Google was absolutely a game changer. Their user adoption growth was stunning for good reason. Just a few months after launch, "everyone" was using Google.
That's not the whole explanation for their success, though. They could have cratered after that for all sorts of reasons. A large part of how they succeeded was the discovery of the ad model. A lot of people forget that ads were all manually negotiated before Google offered self-serve ad creation (Overture did the bidding system first, but Google was better).
They also starting building on "big data" very early on; AdWords reused the same tech that drove relevance ranking (PageRank and click-through feedback loop), so by the time competitors were scrambling to compete, Google had amassed tons of organic data that were only available thanks to their scale, and not something competitors could bootstrap.
But none of that would have mattered if the product wasn't good. I started using Google around 1998. The childish design was off-putting at first, and made me feel uncertain about whether it was a serious brand that would last — this was the age where new search engines appeared all the time (I used
HotBot a lot myself) — but the search quality and speed was undeniable.
If you don't accelerate, my understanding is that you will slow down. In other words, it takes more and more energy to escape orbit. Eventually, if you don't accelerate, your speed drops to zero and you "fall back down". Escape velocity is about how much energy you put into your motion, not the velocity as such.
I mostly use CTEs for organization these days, and in rare cases to express queries which cannot be written without them.
These days I often write queries like this (especially when doing exploratory ad hoc queries, but also in apps) even when it's not necessary to use a CTE:
WITH
a AS (
SELECT ... FROM ... WHERE ... etc.
)
SELECT * FROM a
The first CTE query defines the input, and the main query just reads from it. Subsequent subqueries invoke steps on that input to group, filter, join, and so on.
This has a bunch of nice benefits. For example, it allows me to add steps incrementally, and to "comment out" a step I can simply change the next step's input to read from the preceding step. Each step can be read and understood in isolation.
I work a lot with Postgres, ClickHouse, and SQLite, and generally find that the database inlines and optimizes CTEs, and challenges mostly concern performance traps (like IN or EXISTS) that allly to non-CTE situations as well.
Just because someone is vegetarian or vegan doesn't mean they don't like the taste of meat.
I'm a strict vegetarian myself and have been for about ten years. But as much as I love plant foods, I absolutely miss meat — I was never a big meat eater, but I would enjoy burgers, salami, pepperoni, bacon, Italian meatballs, prosciutto, things like that.
I dislike Beyond products, which taste a bit weird and metallic to me. The only imitation meat product I've remotely enjoyed is Impossible Burger. Nobody has managed to make anything else — if someone would nail plant-based pepperoni or bacon I would be all over it.
Celsius is not an absolute scale, but that isn't a problem for deltas: (10C - 5C)=5C, (10K-5K)=5K. Celsius is only problematic when multiplying or dividing. 10C is not twice as hot as 5C.
Yes, absolutely. It does not take too much effort, either.
People who say you need adjust your posture are mostly incorrect. Your body will assume a slouching position after a while no matter what. You cannot consciously will yourself to just "sit better". Good office chair and placing your screen at the right height do help enormously; these are things that make your body adopt a certain posture subconsciously. But they're not a complete fix.
The only real fix is to work out. Bad posture resolves itself over time if you build up strength in your muscles and tendons, all the way from your legs to your neck, the whole shebang. You can think of your body as a piece of rope. If not adequately exercised, the individual strings will start to sag and the rope goes floppy. Training tightens the whole thing into a stable, tight bundle.
You don't need to go full "gym bro" or even enjoy it. But you need to do regular strength exercises — squats, deadlifts, crunches, the usual — every week. You don't need to do super heavy lifting or intense cardio, just a healthy, generalized workout routine focused on the whole body. In theory you can do this at home. But as someone who's patently not a gym bro, the only way I was able to do this is to get a personal trainer.
I found a wonderful gym where they did small, four-person group classes. There are many of these around, and while they may be pricier than regular gym membership, they're worth it. You get a personalized program with a trainer who monitors your progress carefully and corrects your form and technique, and keeps you motivated.
I wouldn't work out on my own as I would find excuses to stay away, but by setting up a regular appointment twice a week, I kind of forced myself into it. And when you have a trainer you see twice a week, it's much harder to cancel just because you don't feel like working out that day.
Lastly: Stretches (like the classic "stand against a wall" tricks you find online) do not work, because you're just temporarily stretching muscles and tendons. These need to be actively worked out in to build up, and stretching can actually be counterproductive. This is one reason why physiotherapists typically don't recommend yoga and Pilates, which put too much emphasis on stretching rather than strength exercises.
There was lots of competition in 2019: Volkswagen ID.3, Audi e-tron, Jaguar I-PACE, Polestar 1, etc., as well as lower-end entries like Hyundai Kona, Kia Niro, and so on. Depends on exactly what you think Tesla is competing against.
- All of the other options made a painful trade off on cost or range or something else. Tesla was the only one that had both range and was (to some degree) affordable without being compromised in some way.
That's not the whole explanation for their success, though. They could have cratered after that for all sorts of reasons. A large part of how they succeeded was the discovery of the ad model. A lot of people forget that ads were all manually negotiated before Google offered self-serve ad creation (Overture did the bidding system first, but Google was better).
They also starting building on "big data" very early on; AdWords reused the same tech that drove relevance ranking (PageRank and click-through feedback loop), so by the time competitors were scrambling to compete, Google had amassed tons of organic data that were only available thanks to their scale, and not something competitors could bootstrap.
But none of that would have mattered if the product wasn't good. I started using Google around 1998. The childish design was off-putting at first, and made me feel uncertain about whether it was a serious brand that would last — this was the age where new search engines appeared all the time (I used HotBot a lot myself) — but the search quality and speed was undeniable.
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