Software engineer working on very high scale systems, and dad.

Born and raised 🇫🇷, now resident and naturalized citizen 🇺🇸.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • I once had a conversation under NDA (which has expired since) with an engineer at Apple who was working on iCloud infrastructure, and he was telling me that his team was a bit shocked to read that Dropbox was releasing apps for photos at the time “because they’ve noticed that most of the files users are uploading to Dropbox are photos”. He was like: how do they know that exactly? His team had no idea and couldn’t possibly find out if the encrypted files they were storing were photos, sounds, videos, texts, whatever. That’s what encryption is for, only the client side (the devices) is supposed to know what’s up.

    Not having that information meant a direct loss of business insights and value for Apple, since Dropbox had it and leveraged it. But it turns out Apple doesn’t joke around about security/privacy.









  • I’m not too surprised; but to take the example of one country, in the USA where I live, 11% of the people (that’s about 40M people) live below the poverty line, and that is even much less money than a livable wage where you can afford rent, food and nothing else. I’m speaking of the US as an example, but I’m sure it’s not an uncommon situation in other countries either.

    My point is: a massive amount of people can’t afford to spend $100 on entertainment, ever. I spent some time with such families, and I can tell you it is not at all an uncommon thing. If they have a TV today, they probably got it for free from somewhere (possibly a dumpster), and it looks exactly like they did. That’s a massive amount of people who would desire this kind of upgrade.

    Now is it the right population to serve ads to, that’s a different question.


  • That’s exactly it. When I was dirt poor, basically half of the people around me had a phone with a cracked screen, and a good amount of that also had batteries that didn’t last much at all. Not only was it a constant game of finding a public power outlet whenever you’d be out for a while, but even staying home, you couldn’t do much of anything that would drain your battery too hard. There was a thing at the time where some phones had batteries that kept turning off unless you hit them on the side until they worked again, but it was a while ago so maybe that was solved by manufacturers since.

    It’s incredible now that I live in a middle class neighborhood, how literally every single phone is perfectly functional. It really does change everything.

    Anyway, that kind of population would happily get a free TV with ads. Now whether it is the kind of population that those ads would be most effective on is another question, since they basically have zero spending power.