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Been enjoying apps.gnome.org/Shortwave/, a GNOME app for listening to internet radio. I just noticed it has a download song button 🤯
While I'm posting about the bicycling business...racing is also a minefield. This article peaks behind the curtain: inrng.com/2024/08/exit-team-founders/
"Ag2r La Mondiale told Lavenu they’d buy the team off him for €8,000: not eight million, just eight thousand Euros but with this they’d keep sponsoring the team. Faced with this ultimatum Lavenu had no options...The transaction went through in June 2022"
"this week L’Equipe reported [Lavenu] was given notice of his dismissal at the end of July"
"The new activation fee is characteristic of a company desperate for more revenue"
"Peloton achieved its first revenue growth (0.2 percent YoY) since its fiscal quarter that ended on December 21, 2021. The company still reported a loss of $30.5 million; although, that's an improvement from a year ago, when it lost $241.8 million."
arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/08/peloton-announces-95-used-equipment-activation-fee/
As an outside-only cyclist, who considers being outside a significant percentage of the advantage of the activity, who watched both indoor and outdoor cycling boom during the height of the pandemic and subsequently crash, I have never understood the business model of Peloton, or the initial $50b valuation. It felt like someone said, "Yeah, the TAM is $10 billion, but we're going to charge people 5x and never have competition!"
"We're going to reproduce the human experience but mediated through a screen and speakers" is a well-trodden business idea, sure. But it seems like if the answer to the question, "What about when your customers are able to go back to the actual human experience after these pandemic restrictions are over?" is "They'll stay because of the sunk cost of the obnoxious hardware they bought. Oh, and they'll have realized driving to the gym sucks," you're ok to build a nice niche exercise business, but
Zwift is more niche, has much lower costs, and is cheaper for the customer even once you factor in buying a bicycle and a connected trainer (and most customers have the former). They raised at a valuation of $1b, they did just north of $100 million in 2023, but also reduced headcount by 9%, suggesting they also tried to bite off more than what was there. But they're still spending enough to title sponsor the Tour de France Femmes
"By using a machine learning method called physical reservoir computing, we have successfully shown that future behaviors can be accurately predicted by directly measuring the jellyfish's body shape when the stimuli align with the animal's natural dynamics. Our findings also reveal significant advancements in motion control and real-time prediction capabilities of jellyfish cyborgs."
"According to Thiel, America has "a lot of problems," and the fact that Thiel has to pay his taxes like the rest of us is one of them."
"It is true that many Dallas residents won’t stop talking about how LA is better... These residents are California transplants who either moved here because their tech job transferred them or are mad that Texas isn’t the tax haven they heard it was and they’re still on the hook for their property taxes."
dallasobserver.com/arts/dallas-has-an-inferiority-complex-peter-thiel-tells-joe-rogan-20268588
