Podcast appearances and mentions of frank chen

Meg, Hal and Symphony discuss episode 177 of Welcome to Night Vale: Bloody Laws, Bloody Claws: The Murder of Frank Chen. They chat about PODCASTS, trying new foods and a circus accident. In the FanZone Calzone™ we hear from fans about who murdered Frank Chen, dragons checking into hotels and adjacent universes. Find out more about calzones on our Patreon.www.patreon.com/goodmorningnightvaleFollow us on Facebook.Good Morning Night Vale is a production of Night Vale PresentsHosted by Symphony Sanders, Hal Lublin, and Meg BashwinerProduced by Meg BashwinerEdited by Felicia DominguezMixed by Vincent CacchioneTheme Music by Disparition Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

What frameworks make decision-making easier? How can founders avoid fundraising mistakes? What's the difference between a great and a mediocre venture capitalist? Our today's guest is Frank Chen, a partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z). In this episode, Frank takes us through his journey, from becoming a "frameworks guy" to joining A16Z in 2009. He shares how the firm evolved and adapted to the competitive world of venture capital. Along the way, he shares personal habits that have shaped his success, lessons from colleagues, and insights on how technology will change our lives in the next 20 years. The episode mixes professional advice with personal reflections, making it both informative and relatable. Enjoy watching! Arman Suleimenov: https://www.instagram.com/armansu/ Frank Chen: https://www.instagram.com/withfries2/ Producer, Daniyar Akhmetzhanov: https://www.instagram.com/good.years/ Join our telegram channel: https://t.me/nfactorialpodcast  

Platinum group metals (PGM) - a group of precious metals - such as platinum, palladium and rhodium, are traditionally recovered through underground and open pit mining within a linear economy, where the ore is mined, transformed into products and then disposed of as waste at the end of their lives. These metals are often used in catalytic converters for cars, buses, trucks, and other industrial processes.  However, the process of mining for these precious metals could directly or indirectly lead to environmental impacts including deforestation, water pollution, and habitat destruction. With the aim of creating a circular economy while fulfilling the high demand for these finite precious resources in a sustainable way - one company called BR Metals is recovering these metals from metal scraps and reintroducing them into the supply chain. On this episode of Climate Connections, Frank Chen, Founder & Managing Director, BR Metals shares more about how his company is recovering precious metals from car scraps and his latest ventures into the gold and silver space. BR Metals was also crowned Champion in the Business For Good category at this year's Brands for Good Awards. Feature produced and edited by: Yeo Kai Ting (ykaiting@sph.com.sg)Voiced by: Audrey SiekPhoto credits: BR MetalsMusic credits: pixabay & its talented community of contributorsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this archive episode from 2015, a16z's Sonal Chokshi, Frank Chen, and Steven Sinofsky discuss DeepMind's breakthrough AlphaGo system, which mastered the ancient Chinese game Go and introduced the public to reinforcement learning. Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

In this episode, though, we're traveling back in time to distant — in AI years, at least — past of 2020. Because amid all the news over the past 18 or so months, it's easy to forget that generative AI — and LLMs, in particular — have been around for a while. OpenAI released its GPT-2 paper in late 2018, which excited the AI research community, and in 2020 made GPT-3 (as well as other capabilities) publicly available for the first time via its API. This episode dates back to that point in time (it was published in July 2020), when GPT-3 piqued the interest of the broader developer community and people really started testing what was possible.And although it doesn't predict the precambrian explosion of multimodal models, regulatory and copyright debate, and entrepreneurial activity that would hit a couple of years later — and who could have? — it does set the table for some of the bigger — and still unanswered — questions about what tools like LLMs actually mean from a business perspective. And, perhaps more importantly, what they ultimately mean for how we define intelligence.So set your wayback machine to the seemingly long ago summer of 2020 and enjoy a16z's Sonal Chokshi and Frank Chen discussing the advent of commercially available LLMs. Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Imagine your coaching program as a rocket getting ready to launch. Instead of relying only on yourself, picture gathering a group of passionate influencers and coaches to help you out, like booster rockets. These affiliate launches give your coaching program a big boost by using their networks and trust. As they tell their followers about your program, more people learn about it, trust grows, and you sell more of your products and programs. It's a win-win situation: your program gets seen by an entirely new audience, and your affiliates earn money while helping their followers. Today, we're excited to have Frank Chen, our affiliate expert, on the show. He'll walk us through affiliate launches and show how you can use them to grow your coaching business.—————Key Takeaways:[2:01] Guest Intro[2:56] Things you need in an affiliate launch: Be a coach and have people who like you[6:15] How do affiliate launches work?[8:18] The law of reciprocity[13:06] Your affiliate and your customer are the same person[17:33] Advice on paid affiliates who respond late[24:19] Keep your current affiliate happy to avoid looking out for new ones—————Resources:•Go Giver by Bob Burg•Give and Take by Adam Grant•100 Million Offers by Alex Hermozi•www.theafffiliateincubator.com Check out www.coachinginc.com and turn your coaching passion into a thriving business! If you would like Tom's help in building/scaling your coaching business, go to www.coachinginc.com and fill out an application for your opportunity to work with him personally.

Frank C. Chen was the mayor of Kaohsiung from 1960 to 1968. The foundation that bears his name is the reason we have Formosa Files. Paul Chen is one of Frank Chen's sons (b. 1944), and in 1979, he established the Kaohsiung Wild Bird Society. Why? Well, he and his dad were once avid hunters, and Paul Chen kept noticing there were fewer and fewer birds, and set out to do something about it. Today, Mr. Lin Kun-hai 林昆海 is the society's General Secretary, and in this bonus episode, we hear from both the founder and the person still leading the charge to SAVE THE BIRDS! Pics, links, and info on formosafiles.com.

In the latest episode of "How To Sell More," expert Frank Chen guides us as we head into the strategic world of affiliate marketing. He reveals the importance of referral marketing and how it can transform your customer base into a dynamic sales force. Key takeaways from our discussion include: The power of customer referrals in outperforming traditional advertising, and the process of leveraging this for your brand. Customization of affiliate resources is crucial; understanding the varied abilities and networks of your affiliates allows for more effective promotion. The advantage of fostering meaningful connections with a select group of high-performing affiliates rather than a widespread, unfocused network. Frank Chen brings his substantial e-commerce and entrepreneurial experience to the forefront, offering practical advice on creating valuable online customer relationships. Tune in for insights into how a well-crafted affiliate program can lead to greater sales and a stronger brand presence.  

Join Nick Lamagna on The A Game Podcast with his guest Frank Chen, an affiliate marketing expert and podcast host who runs The Affiliate Incubator.  Frank has been in the business for over 12 years and has completed over 20 million in products sold since changing his career path from nutritionist to entrepreneur!  Frank is a master of his craft of affiliate management and is most known for working with some of the top real estate Investors, educators, experts and software developers In the country.  Frank has become a major connector for investors and entrepreneurs and prides himself on putting mutually beneficial relationships together where everyone can make money.  With the confusing and overwhelming nature of the E-commerce world Frank helps new and experienced business owners make sure they are not leaving money on the table and find ways to bring their products, brand and services to market with clarity and the best chance of success.  Whether marketing, project management, or brand and marketing consulting The Affiliate Incubator is your one-stop shop for it all. Topics for this episode include: ✅ What is AFFILIATE MARKETING and how can you make money with It? ✅ Affiliate marketing trends In 2023 ✅ Common affiliates for real estate investors and podcast hosts ✅ How mma and jiu jitsu fighters can use affiliate marketing ✅ Common misconceptions in affiliate marketing ✅ How to structure affiliate marketing partnerships and get paid ✅ What to AVOID in affiliate marketing + More ➡️  ➡️  ➡️ See the show notes to connect with all things Brandon Connect with Frank: theaffiliateincubator.com Free Online Sales Accelerator Course The Affiliate Incubator on LinkedIn The Affiliate Incubator on Youtube The Affiliate Incubator on Instagram The Affiliate Incubator on Twitter Frank Chen on Facebook Frank Chen on LinkedIn --- Connect with Nick Lamagna www.nicknicknick.com Text Nick (516)540-5733 Connect on ALL Social Media and Podcast Platforms Here FREE Checklist on how to bring more value to your buyers

85 - Attending university can change your life. Sometimes, in ways you don't expect. For Frank Chen, coming to Canada from his native China to study at the University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC) was a way to get into a stable career, while also making his parents proud. To satisfy both desires, Frank chose to study accounting and he was successful in his studies. During one of his co-op terms, however, Frank came to the realization that he wasn't passionate about accounting. When he shared this knowledge with a colleague who was also from the co-op program at UTSC, Frank was informed he wasn't the only one who felt that way. The more they conversed, the more they realized that a lack of love for accounting wasn't the only thing they had in common. Both of them were interested in entrepreneurship and it didn't take long for Frank and his colleague to decide they were going to start their own company. That is how Frank, a university student, became the co-founder of Sumer, a grocery delivery service in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. From the challenges of running a startup as a university student, to the difficult decision to shut it down in 2022, Frank and I talk through what he learned from his Sumer experience and how he is applying those lessons today.More importantly, Frank and I discuss how accepting that he lacked passion for what he chose to study taught him a lesson that has influenced every decision he's made since then.Links from this episode:Ideas Can't Wait PodcastFind Frank on LinkedIn  ___________________You can find Career Crossroads at careercrossroads.ca or follow us on social media: Instagram: @career_crossroadsLinkedIn: Career Crossroads PodcastFacebook: Career Crossroads PodcastTikTok: @jonathancollaton

We had a lot of movers, shakers and difference makers on the show this year: Elevate Your Voice and Elevate Your Career with Susan Murphy (0.00 – 1:38) Events with Giant Impact — Daniel Moss of We & Goliath (1:39 – 2:31) Mental Health Uncensored with Author Keri Cooper (2:32 – 3:28) Energy—The Unseen Factor That Rules Everything We Do with Holistic Life Coach Natalie Kehren (3:28 – 4:24) The Power of Well Being with Clive Elliott (4:24 – 5:05) A Frank Talk About Affiliate Marketing with Frank Chen (5:05 – 6:12) Advice & Wisdom from Sarah Victory (6:12 – 7:41) It's Okay to Be Messy with Kristy Mandour (7:41 – 8:31) conversations.biz/podcast youtube.com/@conversationleaders #conversationsaboutconversations—Episode 287

Thursday's "Connecticut Today" with host Paul Pacelli featured more details of a proposed electric rate increase from Eversource (0:28). Former Time Magazine DC reporter Alain Sanders shared his thoughts on Nancy Pelosi stepping down from her U.S. House leadership post (8:12). University of New Haven associate professor of finance Dr. Frank Chen talked about the failure of cryptocurrency firm FTX (18:07). Image Credit: Getty Images

Welcome to another episode of #TheRealEstateEntrepreneursPodcast, this time with my friend Frank Chen, a born and raised in Texas investor Frank Chen got a nutrition degree. However, he knew his call was in the sales, real estate entrepreneurs world. After spending 10 years working in the corporate world, he decided to start anew. Follow me on social media INSTAGRAM https://www.instagram.com/ricardomrosales  FACEBOOK https://www.facebook.com/ricardorosales  LINKEDIN https://www.linkedin.com/in/ricardo-rosales  MY WEBSITE https://www.ricardorosales.com  TWITTER https://twitter.com/Rosales_Reep  TIKTOK https://www.tiktok.com/@ricardomrosales  ATTEND GROWTH EVENT 2023 https://www.attendgrowth2023.com 

Host Paul Pacelli opened Thursday's "Connecticut Today" wondering about the lack of an "outsider" finalist for the next Bridgeport Chief of Police (0:23). University of New  Haven associate professor of finance and accounting Dr. Frank Chen talked about the latest federal intertest rate increase (10:17). Image Credit: BridgeportCT.Gov

I say it often, "It's just storage, what could be new or exciting about it?" And each time I express that opinion to one of the memory experts, I get an earful of what's new and different. My conversation with Frank Chen, the CEO of Exascend, went down a similar path. Frank came up with a host of reasons why people should pay closer attention to their memory subsystems. Hear what he has to say in this week's Embedded Executives podcast.

This is part 2 of our exploration into Marea Yann's case and our guests are  Esther Yann and close family friend of Marea and her family, lawyer Frank Chen. You know when someone says they'll do anything they can to right a wrong…Frank Chen really meant it. And you'll hear the extraordinary lengths he's gone to so he can fulfil  the promise he made to Marea at her funeral that he would do all he could to bring her killer to justice. Esther was in primary school when her beloved nonna was murdered. Now, as an adult Esther's been advocating tirelessly for justice for Marea. If you haven't already, listen to Part One with Jeff Yann.  If you have any information regarding the death of Marea Yann, or any other crime, please contact Crime Stoppers at: https://www.crimestoppersvic.com.au/ You can find the Victoria Police cold case hub here: https://www.police.vic.gov.au/cold-cases For ad-free listening, early access and exclusive content, join Australian True Crime Plus on Apple Podcasts here: http://apple.co/australiantruecrime CREDITS:Host: Meshel Laurie. You can find her on Instagram Co-Host: Emily Webb. You can find her on Instagram here and listen to her podcast Killer Content here. Guests: Esther Yann and Frank ChenProducer/Editor: Matthew TankardExecutive Producer: Jacqueline TonksRecorded at a Hub Australia Media Studio. Find the workspace that's right for you at https://www.hubaustralia.com/If you have been affected by anything discussed in this episode you can contact: Lifeline on 13 11 14 13 YARN on 13 92 76 (24/7 crisis support phone line for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people) GET IN TOUCH: Send us a question or comment on this episode to be used in our "Episode Download" series: https://www.speakpipe.com/ATC Follow the show on Instagram @australiantruecrimepodcast and Facebook  https://www.facebook.com/AustralianTrueCrimePod/ Email the show at team@smartfella.com.au Australian True Crime is a podcast by Smart Fella Media. Your story matters and how you tell it matters even moreSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/australiantruecrime. For a few dollars per month, you can listen to every episode early and ad free, access fortnightly bonus content, and even get your name shouted out on the show! Become a subscriber to Australian True Crime Plus here: https://plus.acast.com/s/australiantruecrime. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

Have you ever wondered what affiliate marketing is and how it could be used to take your business to the next level? On this episode of Conversations About Conversations, Frank Chen and I had a frank conversation about affiliate marketing. Frank is the CEO of The Affiliate Incubator. He's a caring individual and mentor to many. He is most known for working with some of the top real estate investors, educators and experts in the country. He's an expert himself in the affiliate business with experience managing multiple tier affiliate programs, sales funnels, sales webinars and online marketing campaigns. Frank's mission is to build a bridge that expands the affiliate conversation beyond real estate and into new markets. WATCH the full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/PONJpQKqeYA   LISTEN to the podcast on Spotify, Apple, Amazon, Google, or iHeartRadio. Conversations About Conversations – Episode 272 #ConversationsAboutConversations #ceo #affiliatemarketing   The Affiliate Incubator Social Media Empire: Website: https://theaffiliateincubator.com/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqAuGYPWNVCV0mdYo58LkQQ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-affiliate-incubator/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theaffiliateincubator Twitter: https://twitter.com/affincubator Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theaffiliateincubator/

Caring for someone with any chronic disease or mental illness can take an emotional and even physical toll on caretakers. And many times, that investment can lead caregivers to lose sight of their own needs in the service of another's care.As a clinician and former caregiver, Dr. Frank Chen discusses how family members can be intrinsic and critical parts of a loved one's diagnosis and treatment journey. Also, support and coping strategies are needed if everyone is to effectively emerge throughout the process. In this podcast, we discuss the definition of compassion fatigue, and how it affects caregivers – professional and family members – and what the caregiver can do to take good care of themselves.Key Takeaways01:27 – Dr. Frank Chen joins the show to share what drew him to the field of psychiatry and his difficult experience seeking help for a member of his family12:57 – Compassion fatigue explained18:39 – Shay opens up about her own experience acting as a caregiver in her family20:41 – Advice on caring for yourself as a caregiver27:14 – The value of speaking to a therapist and other practical self-care acts you can do34:13 – Shay thanks Dr. Frank for sharing his storyTweetable Quotes“There's a very regimented path forward when you get into Med School. And it always seemed like it was very difficult to break away from that. And I think that part of this unconscious conflict that I experienced was probably what ended up attracting me to the field of psychiatry - to kind of conquer this conflict, if you will. I know now that in order to conquer this conflict, you get a good therapist.” (05:43) (Dr. Frank Chen)“This is why I encourage anyone who has these intrapsychic conflicts to start seeing a therapist. Having someone out there to help you navigate through those struggles and know what's norm and what's not norm may build a much more secure self.” (07:14) (Dr. Frank Chen)“When you stop taking care of yourself, you may actually not be doing your family member any justice in terms of trying to help them, because you're gonna get depressed. You're gonna end up getting anxious. You're gonna end up not being able to help.” (13:51) (Dr. Frank Chen)“Being a caretaker takes a toll.” (17:55) (Dr. Frank Chen)“So, that's really important to be able to recognize other people not trying to be critical of you but to give you some warning that, ‘Hey, you're not acting like yourself.' And be able to take that feedback and not get so defensive about it but do something about it.” (26:31) (Dr. Frank Chen)“You wouldn't try to fix a car with black smoke coming out of the tailpipe. It's a fairly complex job. So why would you try to fix mental health issues.” (34:34) (Dr. Frank Chen)Resources MentionedJFlowers Health Institute – https://jflowershealth.com/JFlowers Health Institute Contact – (713) 783-6655Subscribe on your favorite player: https://understanding-the-human-condition.captivate.fm/listen **The views and opinions expressed by our guests are those of the individual and do not necessarily reflect those of J. Flowers Health Institute. Any content provided by our co-host(s) or guests are of their opinion and are not intended to reflect the philosophy and policies of J. Flowers Health Institute itself. Nor is it intended to malign any recovery method, religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

Caring for someone with any chronic disease or mental illness can take an emotional and even physical toll on caretakers. And many times, that investment can lead caregivers to lose sight of their own needs in the service of another's care. As a clinician and former caregiver, Dr. Frank Chen discusses how family members can be intrinsic and critical parts of a loved one's diagnosis and treatment journey. Also, support and coping strategies are needed if everyone is to effectively emerge throughout the process. In this podcast, we discuss the definition of compassion fatigue, and how it affects caregivers – professional and family members – and what the caregiver can do to take good care of themselves. Key Takeaways01:27 – Dr. Frank Chen joins the show to share what drew him to the field of psychiatry and his difficult experience seeking help for a member of his family 12:57 – Compassion fatigue explained 18:39 – Shay opens up about her own experience acting as a caregiver in her family 20:41 – Advice on caring for yourself as a caregiver 27:14 – The value of speaking to a therapist and other practical self-care acts you can do 34:13 – Shay thanks Dr. Frank for sharing his story Tweetable Quotes“There's a very regimented path forward when you get into Med School. And it always seemed like it was very difficult to break away from that. And I think that part of this unconscious conflict that I experienced was probably what ended up attracting me to the field of psychiatry - to kind of conquer this conflict, if you will. I know now that in order to conquer this conflict, you get a good therapist.” (05:43) (Dr. Frank Chen) “This is why I encourage anyone who has these intrapsychic conflicts to start seeing a therapist. Having someone out there to help you navigate through those struggles and know what's norm and what's not norm may build a much more secure self.” (07:14) (Dr. Frank Chen) “When you stop taking care of yourself, you may actually not be doing your family member any justice in terms of trying to help them, because you're gonna get depressed. You're gonna end up getting anxious. You're gonna end up not being able to help.” (13:51) (Dr. Frank Chen) “Being a caretaker takes a toll.” (17:55) (Dr. Frank Chen) “So, that's really important to be able to recognize other people not trying to be critical of you but to give you some warning that, ‘Hey, you're not acting like yourself.' And be able to take that feedback and not get so defensive about it but do something about it.” (26:31) (Dr. Frank Chen) “You wouldn't try to fix a car with black smoke coming out of the tailpipe. It's a fairly complex job. So why would you try to fix mental health issues.” (34:34) (Dr. Frank Chen) Resources MentionedJFlowers Health Institute – https://jflowershealth.com/ (https://jflowershealth.com/) JFlowers Health Institute Contact – (713) 783-6655 Subscribe on your favorite player: https://understanding-the-human-condition.captivate.fm/listen (https://understanding-the-human-condition.captivate.fm/listen) **The views and opinions expressed by our guests are those of the individual and do not necessarily reflect those of J. Flowers Health Institute. Any content provided by our co-host(s) or guests are of their opinion and are not intended to reflect the philosophy and policies of J. Flowers Health Institute itself. Nor is it intended to malign any recovery method, religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

In this wide-ranging conversation from April 2019, a16z's Frank Chen sits down with Ken Kocienda, a longtime software engineer and designer at Apple from 2001 to 2017, who wrote a book about his career there, called Creative Selection.They discuss Ken's unconventional path from freelance photographer to software engineer at Apple, his work on many core products from Safari web browser to iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch and features like Autocorrect, what it was like to demo new products for Steve Jobs, and more.

Original broadcast date November 4, 2021. The original podcast post is here: https://pixelatedgeek.com/2021/11/binary-system-podcast-289-wtnv-197-the-life-of-frank-chen/ Well, we had "The Many Lives of Frank Chen", "The Many Many Lives of Frank Chen", and "The Nearly Infinite Lives of Frank Chen". It makes sense that the saga of Night Vale's most famous dearly-departed would wrap up with "The Life of Frank Chen." It's a quiet, weirdly heartwarming story that's very satisfying (other than the fact that we still don't know what's going on with Hiram McDaniels). After the recap we discuss the latest two episodes of Lore Olympus (I hope the characters are all cozy under that BUS everyone keeps throwing each other under), and take an odd tangent into a medical drama series from the 1980's and wonder if we're just imagining that streaming services are chopping bits out of our favorite old TV shows FOR NO REASON. The outro music this week is a clip from Monster Stomp by TeknoAXE. Looking for a present for that hard-to-shop-for person? Want to buy them (or yourself) a square foot of a castle in Scotland? Look no further! You can support the restoration of Dunan's castle, legally call yourself Lady or Laird, AND if you use http://www.scottishlaird.co.uk/#_a_2gk to get there, you can support this podcast too! If you want to follow along with Fanart Fridays, check us out on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram!

Original broadcast date September 23, 2021. The original podcast post is here: https://pixelatedgeek.com/2021/09/binary-system-podcast-283-wtnv194-the-nearly-infinite-lives-of-frank-chen-and-lore-olympus/ It's the first Vacation Edition of Binary System in over two years! Recording from the same time zone in the same place, this week we planned on a quick recap of the latest episode of Night Vale (the Sherif's Secret Police is never going to get this Frank Chen thing right, mostly because he dead) and Lore Olympus (we LIVE for the day that Hades finds out what Apollo did, it's going to be APOCALYPTIC). So of course we also crammed in a talk about 2007's Sunshine (Cillian Murphy is very pretty but Elizabeth calls shenanigans on the choice of bad guy), Gail Simone's #MovieCheers hashtag, the new Matrix trailer, Mission Impossible: Fallout, and Jeremy Renner's CGI arms. The outro music this week is a clip from Apogee by Metre. Looking for a present for that hard-to-shop-for person? Want to buy them (or yourself) a square foot of a castle in Scotland? Look no further! You can support the restoration of Dunan's castle, legally call yourself Lady or Laird, AND if you use http://www.scottishlaird.co.uk/#_a_2gk to get there, you can support this podcast too! If you want to follow along with Fanart Fridays, check us out on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram!

Original broadcast date August 5, 2021. The original podcast post is here: https://pixelatedgeek.com/2021/08/binary-system-podcast-277-wtnv-191-the-many-many-lives-of-frank-chen/ We may have mentioned this before, but the Binary System Podcast team loves a good time-travel story. We especially enjoy it when the writers use the side-effects of time travel to really mess with longtime fans who know that none of what's happening is normal. (Sheriff Pamela Winchel? Michelle Nguyen is marrying Sara Sultan, the fist-sized river rock? Cecil likes Steve Carlsberg's scones?) After we recap the wibbly-wobbly, timey wimey story of poor doomed Frank Chen we move on to the weekly SitRep which is, well, the news of the world could honestly be a little better. (The sounds of sirens and the helicopter life-flights coming from the hospital near Elizabeth's apartment were particularly active this week which seems PRETTY DARN APPROPRIATE.) To distract ourselves from all of THAT, we discussed Lore Olympus for a little while, along with a bit of Penny Dreadful, a smidge of John Varley, and Kathryn's "meh" review of the space horror movie "High Life". The bulk of the episode was devoted to episodes 1-7 of Beastars Season 2, and if you're not caught up then you probably better skip from minute 19:00 to 35:54 because we spoil ALL THE THINGS. The outro music this week is a clip from Finally Free by Linn Friberg. Corrections: According to the transcript http://www.nightvalepresents.com/welcome-to-night-vale-transcripts/2021/8/1/191-the-many-many-lives-of-frank-chen for this week's Night Vale episode, Frank Chen traveled to Constantinople in the year 600, not 1600. He also traveled to the year 2121, not 2021. Hi, we're bad at time. Looking for a present for that hard-to-shop-for person? Want to buy them (or yourself) a square foot of a castle in Scotland? Look no further! You can support the restoration of Dunan's castle, legally call yourself Lady or Laird, AND if you use http://www.scottishlaird.co.uk/#_a_2gk to get there, you can support this podcast too! If you want to follow along with Fanart Fridays, check us out on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram!

Original broadcast date April 22, 2021. The original podcast post is here: https://pixelatedgeek.com/2021/04/binary-system-podcast-263-wtnv-186-the-many-lives-of-frank-chen/ Big news in Night Vale this week! The Secret Police were given one year to provide the life of Frank Chen back to his family, an impossible task that they somehow managed to accomplish way before the deadline! Yes indeed, Frank Chen, good as new, exactly as he was before, no need to look too closely. Or ask questions. Or... You're not buying this, are you? That's okay, neither is the family of Frank Chen... In other news, and wow was there a lot of news on the day we recorded this episode. In one day we got the spectacular trailers for Love, Death, and Robots and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, the reveal that Olivia Coleman is joining the MCU (or as some will say, the MCU is now joining Olivia Colman's universe), David Tenant's birthday, Christoper Eccleston answering fan's questions and being delightfully prickly, and SOMEBODY finally got her first vaccination shot. The outro this week is a clip from Hello Robo by TeknoAxe. The podcast that the Welcome to Night Vale crew recommended is Whatever Happened to Pizza at McDonald's. It looks weird as heck. http://www.pizzaatmcdonalds.com/ Correction: Blockbusters apparently did NOT censor or otherwise edit videos. They just refused to carry movies that didn't fit their "family friendly" atmosphere, thus convincing producers that it would behoove them to provide tepid, watered-down alternate versions of unrated or NC-17 films. Vulture has a great article about this and other shady practices, Guys, Blockbuster Wasn't That Great. https://www.vulture.com/2019/08/guys-blockbuster-wasnt-that-great.html Correction the second: Elizabeth somehow got the idea that the Oscars were this Friday. They're actually on Sunday. They're ALWAYS on a Sunday. Looking for a present for that hard-to-shop-for person? Want to buy them (or yourself) a square foot of a castle in Scotland? Look no further! You can support the restoration of Dunan's castle, legally call yourself Lady or Laird, AND if you use http://www.scottishlaird.co.uk/#_a_2gk to get there, you can support this podcast too! If you want to follow along with Fanart Fridays, check us out on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram!

Original broadcast date November 12, 2020. The original podcast post is here: https://pixelatedgeek.com/2020/11/binary-system-podcast-241-welcome-to-night-vale-177-bloody-laws-bloody-claws-the-murder-of-frank-chen/ Cecil's been neglecting Night Vale Radio a bit in order to dip his toes in the glitzy world of True Crime Podcasts lately (he's already on episode 722 of his latest venture, my how time flies). Tonight just might be his last episode since Judge Chaplin is about to deliver the verdict in the case of The Family of Frank Chen versus, well, pretty much everybody. Listen in as the twins recap the episode, and also talk about the new season of The Mandalorian and the latest episode of Lore Olympus. But of course we don't get to any of that right away because BOY, HOW ABOUT THAT ELECTION? (And yes, after the political shitshow we've had we're very aware of the irony of finishing up the episode with a "Whew, glad that whole election business is done now." Hence the choice for the outro, Uncertain Lines by TeknoAXE.) Doctors Without Borders is a fantastic organization, and you can donate to help make a better world here. The Red Cross does blood drives pretty much anywhere, and you can find a local collection spot or just donate some much-needed funds here. The unbelievably adorable Boba Fett comic "For A Thousand Years" that Elizabeth was talking about is by Chris Gugliotti. https://mightyjabba.com/2013/02/20/for-a-thousand-years-print-by-chris-gugliotti-boba-fett-and-the-sarlacc/ The Champagne Cocktail Kathryn was talking about was made using instructions from the How To Drink video here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x442aHdjaKA The Russian Art-Deco Transformers art Elizabeth was talking about is by @amne_chan. https://twitter.com/amne_chan/status/1317479942574247936?s=20 Looking for a present for that hard-to-shop-for person? Want to buy them (or yourself) a square foot of a castle in Scotland? Look no further! You can support the restoration of Dunan's castle, legally call yourself Lady or Laird, AND if you use http://www.scottishlaird.co.uk/#_a_2gk to get there, you can support this podcast too! If you want to follow along with Fanart Fridays, check us out on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram!

About FrankFrank Chen is a maker. He develops products and leads software engineering teams with a background in behavior design, engineering leadership, systems reliability engineering, and resiliency research. At Slack, Frank focuses on making engineers' lives simpler, more pleasant, and more productive, in the Developer Productivity group. At Palantir, Frank has worked with customers in healthcare, finance, government, energy and consumer packaged goods to solve their hardest problems by transforming how they use data. At Amazon, Frank led a front-end team and infrastructure team to launch AWS WorkDocs, the first secure multi-platform service of its kind for enterprise customers. At Sandia National Labs, Frank researched resiliency and complexity analysis tooling with the Grid Resiliency group. He received a M.S. in Computer Science focused in Human-Computer Interaction from Stanford. Frank's thesis studied how the design / psychology of exergaming interventions might produce efficacious health outcomes. With the Stanford Prevention Research Center, Frank developed health interventions rooted in behavioral theory to create new behaviors through mobile phones. He prototyped early builds of Tiny Habits with BJ Fogg and worked in the Persuasive Technology Lab. He received a B.S. in Computer Science from UCLA. Frank researched networked systems and image processing with the Center for embedded Networked Systems. With the Rand Corporation, he built research systems to support group decision-making.Links: Slack: https://slack.com “Infrastructure Observability for Changing the Spend Curve”: https://slack.engineering/infrastructure-observability-for-changing-the-spend-curve/ “Right Sizing Your Instances Is Nonsense”: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/right-sizing-your-instances-is-nonsense/ Personal webpage: https://frankc.net Twitter: @frankc TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: It seems like there is a new security breach every day. Are you confident that an old SSH key, or a shared admin account, isn't going to come back and bite you? If not, check out Teleport. Teleport is the easiest, most secure way to access all of your infrastructure. The open source Teleport Access Plane consolidates everything you need for secure access to your Linux and Windows servers—and I assure you there is no third option there. Kubernetes clusters, databases, and internal applications like AWS Management Console, Yankins, GitLab, Grafana, Jupyter Notebooks, and more. Teleport's unique approach is not only more secure, it also improves developer productivity. To learn more visit: goteleport.com. And not, that is not me telling you to go away, it is: goteleport.com. Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Cloud. Counting the pennies, but still dreaming of deploying apps instead of "Hello, World" demos? Allow me to introduce you to Oracle's Always Free tier. It provides over 20 free services and infrastructure, networking, databases, observability, management, and security. And—let me be clear here—it's actually free. There's no surprise billing until you intentionally and proactively upgrade your account. This means you can provision a virtual machine instance or spin up an autonomous database that manages itself all while gaining the networking load, balancing and storage resources that somehow never quite make it into most free tiers needed to support the application that you want to build. With Always Free, you can do things like run small scale applications or do proof-of-concept testing without spending a dime. You know that I always like to put asterisks next to the word free. This is actually free, no asterisk. Start now. Visit snark.cloud/oci-free that's snark.cloud/oci-free.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Several people are undoubtedly angrily typing, and part of the reason they can do that, and the fact that I know that is because we're all using Slack. My guest today is Frank Chen, senior staff software engineer at Slack. So, I guess, sort of… [sales force 00:00:53]. Frank, thanks for joining me.Frank: Hey, Corey, I have been a longtime listener and follower, and just really delighted to be here.Corey: It's one of the weird things about doing a podcast is that for better or worse, people don't respond to it in the same way that they do writing a newsletter, for example, because you receive an email, and, “Oh, well, I know how to write an email. I can hit reply and send an email back and give that jackwagon a piece of my mind,” and people often do. But with podcasts, I feel like it's much more closely attuned to the idea of an AM radio talk show. And who calls into a radio talk show? Lunatics, and most people don't self-describe as lunatics, so they don't want to do that.But then when I catch up with people one-on-one or at events in person, I find out that a lot more people listen to this show than I thought they did. Because I don't trust podcast statistics because lies, damn lies, and analytics are sort of how I view this world. So, you've worked at a bunch of different companies. You're at Slack now, which, of course, upsets some people because, “Slack is ruining the way that people come and talk to me in the office.” Or it's making it easier for employees to collaborate internally in ways their employers wish they wouldn't. But that's neither here nor there.Before this, you were at Palantir, and before this, you're at Amazon, working on Amazon WorkDocs of all things, which is supposedly rumored to have at least one customer somewhere, but I've never seen them. Before that you were at Sandia National Labs, and you've gotten a master's in computer science from Stanford. You've done a lot of things and everything you've done, on some level, seems like the recurring theme is someone on Twitter will be unhappy at you for a career choice you've made. But what is the common thread—in seriousness—between the different places that you've been?Frank: One thing that's been a driver for where I work is finding amazing people to work with and building something that I believe is valuable and fun to keep doing. The thing that brought me to Slack is I became my own Slack admin, [laugh] when I met a girl and we moved in together into a small apartment in Brooklyn. And she had a cat that, you know, is a sweetheart, but also just doesn't know how to be social. Yes, you covered that with ‘cat.' Part of moving it together, I became my own Slack admin and discovered well, we can build a series of home automations to better train and inform our little command center for when the cat lies about being fed, or not fed, clipping his nails, and discovering and tracking bad behaviors. In a lot of ways this was like the human side of a lot of the data work that I had been doing at my previous role. And it was like a fun way to use the same frameworks that I use at work to better train and be a cat caretaker.Corey: Now, at some point, you know that some product manager at Amazon is listening to this and immediately sketching notes because their product strategy is, “Yes,” and this is going to be productized and shipping in two years as Amazon Prime Meow. But until then we'll enjoy the originality of having a Slack bot more or less control the home automation slash making your house seem haunted for anyone who didn't write the code themselves. There's an idea of solving real world problems that I definitely understand. I mean, and again, it might not even be a fair question entirely. Just because I am… for better or worse, staggering through my world, and trying—and failing most days—to tell a narrative that, “Oh, why did I start my tech career at a university, and then spend time in ad tech, and then spend time in consulting, and then FinTech, and the rest?” And the answer is, “Oh, I get fired an awful lot, and that sucked.”So, instead of going down that particular rabbit hole of a mess, I went in other directions. I started finding things that would pay me and pay me more money because I was in debt at the time. But that was the narrative thread that was the, “I have rent to pay and they have computers that aren't behaving properly.” And that's what dictated the shape of my career for a long time. It's only in retrospect that I started to identify some of the things that aligns with it. But it's easy to look at it with the shine of hindsight and not realize that no, no, that's sort of retconning what happened in the past.Frank: Yeah, I have a mentor and my former adviser had this way of describing, building out the jankiest prototype you can to prove out an idea. And this manifested in his class in building out paper prototypes, or really, really janky ideas for what helping people through technology might look like. And I feel like it a lot of ways, even when those prototypes fail, like, in a career or some half baked tech prototype I put together, it might succeed and great, we could keep building upon that, but when it fails, you actually discover, “Oh, this is one way that I didn't succeed.” And even in doing so, you discover things about yourself, your way of building, and maybe a little bit about your infrastructure, or whatever it is that you build on a day-to-day basis. And wrapping that back to the original question, it's like, well, we think we're human beings, right, we're static, but in a lot of ways we're human becomings. We think we know what the future might look like with our careers, what we're building on a day-to-day basis, and what we're building a year from now, but oftentimes, things change if we discover things about ourselves, the people we work with, and ultimately, the things that we put out into the world.Corey: Obviously, I've been aware of who Slack is, for a long time; I've been a paying customer for years because it basically is IRC with reaction gifs, and not having to teach someone how to sign into IRC when they work in accounting. So, the user experience alone solved the problem.Frank: And you've actually worked with us in the past before. [laugh]. Slack, it's the Searchable Log for all Content and Knowledge; I think that backronym, that's how it works. And I was delighted when I had mentioned your jokes and you're trolling [a folk 00:07:00] on Twitter and on your podcast to my former engineering manager, Chris Merrill, who was like, oh, you should search the Slack. Corey actually worked with us and he put together a lot of cool tooling and ideas for us to think about.Corey: Careful. If we talk too much, or what I did when I was at Slack years ago, someone's going to start looking into some of the old commits and whatnot and start demanding an apology, and we don't want that. It's, “Wow, you're right. You are a terrible engineer.” “Told you.” There's a reason I don't do that anymore.Frank: I think that's all of us. [laugh]. An early career mentor of mine, he was like, “Hey, Frank, listen. You think you're building perfect software at any point in time? No, you're building future tech debt.” And yeah, we should put much more emphasis on interfaces and ideas we're putting out because the implementation is going to change over time, and likely your current implementation is shit. And that is, okay.Corey: That's the beautiful part about this is that things grow and things evolve. And it's interesting working with companies, and as a consultant, I tend to build my projects in such a way that I start on day one and people know that I'm leaving with usually a very short window because I don't want to build a forever job for myself; I don't want to show up and start charging by the hour or by the day, if I can possibly avoid it. Because then it turns into eternal projects that never end because I'm billing and nothing's ever done. No, no, I like charging fixed fee and then getting out at a predetermined outcome, but then you get to hear about what happens with companies as they move on.This combines with the fact that I have a persistent alert for my name, usually because I'm looking for various ineffective character assassination from enterprise marketing types because you know, I dish it out, I should certainly be able to take it. But I found a blog post on the Slack engineering blog that mentioned my name, and it's, “Aw, crap. Are they coming after me for a refund?” No, it was not. It was you writing a fairly sizable post. Tell me more about that.Frank: Yeah, I'm part of an organization called Developer Productivity. And our goal is to help folk at Slack deliver services to their customers, where we build, test, and release high quality software. And a lot of our time is spent thinking about internal tooling and making infrastructure bets. As engineers, right, it's like, we have this idea for what the world looks like, we have this idea for what our infrastructure looks like, but what we discover using a set of techniques around observability of just asking questions—advanced questions, basic questions, and hell, even dumb questions—we discover hey, the things that we think our computers are doing aren't actually doing what they say they're doing. And the question is like, great. Now, what? How can we ask better questions? How can we better tune, change, and equip engineers with tooling so that they can do better work to make Slack customers have simple, pleasant, and productive experiences?Corey: And I have to say that there's a lot that Slack does that is incredibly helpful. I don't know that I'm necessarily completely bought into the idea that all work should happen in Slack. It's, well, on some level, I—like people like to debate the ‘should people work from home? Should people all work in an office?' Discussion.And, on some level, it seems if you look at people who are constantly fighting that debate online, it's, “Do you ever do work at all?” on some level. But I'm not here to besmirch others; I'm here to talk about, on some level, what you alluded to in your blog post. But I want to start with a disclaimer that Slack as far as companies go is not small, and if you take a look around, most companies are using Slack whether they know it or not. The list of side-channel Slack groups people have tend to extend massively.I look and I pare it down every once in a while, whenever I cross 40 signed-in Slacks on my desktop. It is where people talk for a wide variety of different reasons, and they all do different things. But if you're sitting here listening to this and you have a $2,000 a month AWS bill, this is not for you. You will spend orders of magnitude more money trying to optimize a small cost. Once you're at significant points of scale, and you have scaled out to the point where you begin to have some ability to predict over months or years, that's what a lot of this stuff starts to weigh in.So, talk to me a bit about how you wound up—and let me quote directly from the article, which is titled, “Infrastructure Observability for Changing the Spend Curve,” and I will, of course, throw a link to this in the [show notes 00:11:38]. But you talk in this about knocking, I believe it was orders of magnitude off of various cost areas within your bill.Frank: Yeah. The article itself describes three big-ish projects, where we are able to change the curve of the number of tests that we run, and a change in how much it costs to run any single test.Corey: When you say test, are you talking CI/CD infrastructure test or code test, to make sure it goes out, or are you talking something higher up the stack, as far as, “Huh, let's see how some users respond when, I don't know, we send four notifications on every message instead of the usual one,” to give a ridiculous example?Frank: Yeah, this is in the CI/CD pipelines. And one of these projects was around borrowing some concepts from data engineering: oversubscription and planning your capacity to have access capacity at peak, where at peak, your engineers might have a 5% degradation in performance, while still maintaining high resiliency and reliability of your tests in order to oversubscribe, either CPU or memory and keep throughput on the overall system stable and consistent and fast enough. I think, with spend in developer productivity, I think, both, like, the metrics you're trying to move and why you're optimizing for it at any given time are, like, this, like, calculus. Or it's like, more art than science in that there's no one right answer, right? It's like, oh, yeah—very naively—like, yeah, let's throw the biggest machines most expensive machines we can at any given problem. But that doesn't solve the crux of your problem. It's like, “Hey, what are the things in your system doing?” And what is the right guess to capitalize around how much to spend on your CI/CD [unintelligible 00:13:39] is oftentimes not precise, nor is this blog article meant to be prescriptive.Corey: Yeah, it depends entirely on what you're doing and how because it's, on some level, well, we can save a whole bunch of money if we slow all of our CI/CD runs down by 20 minutes. Yeah, but then you have a bunch of engineers sitting idle and I promise you, that costs a hell of a lot more than your cloud bill is going to be. The payroll is almost always a larger expense than your infrastructure costs, and if it's not, you should seriously consider firing at least part of your data science team, but you didn't hear it from me.Frank: Yeah. And part of the exploration on profiling and performance and resiliency was, like, around interrogating what the boundaries and what the constraints were for our CI/CD pipelines. Because Slack has grown in engineering and in the number of tests we were running on a month-to-month basis; for a while from 2017 to mid 2020, we were growing about 10% month-over-month in test suite execution numbers. Which means on a given year, we doubled almost two times, which is quite a bit of strain on internal resources and a lot of dependent services where—and internal systems, we oftentimes have more complexity and less understood changes in what dependencies your infrastructure might be using, what business logic your internal services are using to communicate with one another than you do your production.And so, by, like, performing a series of curiosity-driven development, we're able to both answer, at that point in time, what our customers internally were doing, and start to put together ideas for eliminating some bottlenecks, and hell, even adding bottlenecks with circuit breakers where you keep the overall throughput of your system stable, while deferring or canceling work that otherwise might have overloaded dependencies.Corey: There's a lot to be said for understanding what the optimization opportunities are, in an environment and understanding what it is you're attempting to achieve. Having those test for something like Slack makes an awful lot of sense because let's be very clear here, when you're building an application that acts as something people use to do expense reports—to cite one of my previous job examples—it turns out you can be down for a week and a majority of your customers will never know or care. With Slack, it doesn't work that way. Everyone more or less has a continuous monitor that they're typing into for a good portion of the day—angrily or otherwise—and as soon as it misses anything, people know. And if there's one thing that I love, on some level, seeing change when I know that Slack is having a blip, even if I'm not using Slack that day for anything in particular, because Twitter explodes about it. “Slack is down. I'm now going to tweet some stuff to my colleagues.” All right. You do you, I suppose.And credit where due, Slack doesn't go down nearly as often as it used to because as you tend to figure out how these things work, operational maturity increases through a bunch of tests. Fixing things like durability, reliability, uptime, et cetera, should always, to some extent, take precedence priority-wise over let's save some money. Because yeah, you could turn everything off and save all the money, but then you don't have a business anymore. It's focused on where to cut, where to optimize in the right way, and ideally as you go, find some of the areas in which, oh, I'm paying AWS a tax for just going about my business. And I could have flipped a switch at any point and saved—“How much money? Oh, my God, that's more than I'll make in my lifetime.”Frank: Yeah, and one thing I talk about a little bit is distributed tracing as one of the drivers for helping us understand what's happening inside of our systems. Where it helps you figure out and it's like this… [best word 00:17:24] to describe how you ask questions of deployed code? And there a lot of ways it's helped us understand existing bottlenecks and identify opportunities for performance or resiliency gains because your past janky Band-Aids become more and more obvious when you can interrogate and ask questions around what is it performing like it used to? Or what has changed recently?Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by something new. Cloud Academy is a training platform built on two primary goals. Having the highest quality content in tech and cloud skills, and building a good community the is rich and full of IT and engineering professionals. You wouldn't think those things go together, but sometimes they do. Its both useful for individuals and large enterprises, but here's what makes it new. I don't use that term lightly. Cloud Academy invites you to showcase just how good your AWS skills are. For the next four weeks you'll have a chance to prove yourself. Compete in four unique lab challenges, where they'll be awarding more than $2000 in cash and prizes. I'm not kidding, first place is a thousand bucks. Pre-register for the first challenge now, one that I picked out myself on Amazon SNS image resizing, by visiting cloudacademy.com/corey. C-O-R-E-Y. That's cloudacademy.com/corey. We're gonna have some fun with this one!Corey: It's also worth pointing out that as systems grow organically, that it is almost impossible for any one person to have it all in their head anymore. I saw one of the most overly complicated architecture flow trees that I think I've seen in recent memory, and it was on the Slack engineering blog about how something was architected, but it wasn't the Slack app itself; it was simply the [decision tree for ‘Should we send a notification?' 00:18:17] and it is more complicated than almost anything I've written, except maybe my newsletter content publication pipeline. It is massive. And I'll throw a link to that in the [show notes 00:18:31] as well, just because it is well worth people taking a look at.But there is so much complexity at scale for doing the right thing, and it's necessary because if I'm talking to you on Slack right now and getting notifications every time you reply on my phone, it's not going to take too long before I turn off notifications everywhere, and then I don't notice that Slack is there, and it just becomes useless and I use something else. Ideally, something better—which is hard to come by—moderately worse, like, email or completely worse, like, Microsoft Teams.Frank: I tell all my close collaborators about this. I typically set myself away on Slack because I like to make time for deep, focused work. And that's very hard with a constant stream of notifications. How people use Slack and how people notify others on Slack is, like, not incumbent on the software itself, but it's a reflection of the work culture that you're in. The expectation for an email-driven culture is, like, oh, yeah, you should be reading your email all the time and be able to respond within 30 minutes. Peace, I have friends that are lawyers, [laugh] and that is the expectation at all times of day.Corey: I married one of those. Oh, yeah, people get very salty. And she works with a global team spread everywhere, to the point where she wakes up and there's just a whole flurry of angry people that have tried to reach her in the middle of the night. Like, “Why were you sleeping at 2 a.m.? It's daytime here.” And yeah, time zones. Not everyone understands how they work, from my estimation.Frank: [laugh]. That's funny. My sweetheart is a former attorney. On our first international date, we spent an entire day-and-a-half hopping between WiFi spots in Prague so that she could answer a five minute question from a partner about standard deviations.Corey: So, one thing that you link to that really is what drew my notice to this—because, again, if you talk about AWS cost optimization, I'm probably going to stumble over it, but if you mention my name, that's sort of a nice accelerator—and you linked to my article called Why “Right Sizing Your Instances Is Nonsense.” And that is a little overblown, to some extent, but so many folks talk about it in the cost optimization space because you can get a bunch of metrics and do these things programmatically, and somewhat without observability into what's going on because, “Well, I can see how busy the computers are and if it's not busy, we could use smaller computers. Problem solved,” versus, the things that require a fair bit of insight into what is that thing doing exactly because it leads you into places of oh, turn off that idle fleet that's not doing anything is all labeled ‘backup,' where you're going to have three seconds of notice before it gets all the traffic.There's an idea of sometimes things are the way they are for a reason. And it's also not easy for a lot of things—think databases—to seamlessly just restart the thing and have it scale back up and run on a different instance class. That takes weeks of planning and it's hard. So, I find that people tend to reach for it where it doesn't often make sense. At your level of scale and operational maturity, of course, you should optimize what instance classes things are using and what sizes they are, especially since that stuff changes over time as far as what AWS has made available. But it's not the sort of thing that I suggest as being the first easy thing to go for. It's just what people think is easy because it requires no judgment and computers can do it. At least that's their opinion.Frank: I feel like you probably have a lot more experience than me, and talked about war stories, but I recall working with customers where they want to lift-and-shift on-prem hardware to VMs on-prem. I'm like, “It's not going to be as simple as you're making it out to be.” Whereas, like, the trend today is probably oh, yeah, we're going to shift on-prem VMs to AWS, or hell, like, let's go two levels deeper and just run everything on Kubernetes. Similar workloads, right? It's not going to be a huge challenge. Or [laugh] everything serverless.Corey: Spare me from that entire school of thought, my God.Frank: [laugh].Corey: Yeah, but it's fun, too, because this came out a month ago, and you're talking about using—an example you gave was a c5.9xlarge instance. Great. Well, the c6i is out now as well, so are people going to look at that someday and think, “Oh, wow. That's incredibly quaint.”It's, you wrote this a month ago, and it's already out of date, as far as what a lot of the modern story instances are. From my perspective, one of the best things that AWS has done in this space has been to get away from the reserved instance story and over into savings plans, where it's, “I know, I'm going to run some compute—maybe it's Fargate, maybe it's EC2; let's be serious, it's definitely going to be EC2—but I don't want to tie myself to specific instance types for the next three years.” Great, well, I'm just going to commit to spending some money on AWS for the next three years because if I decide today to move off of it, it's going to take me at least that long to get everything out. So okay, then that becomes something a lot more palatable for an awful lot of folks.Frank: One thing you brought up in the article I linked to is instance types. You think upgrading to the newest instance type will solve all your challenges, but oftentimes it's not obvious that it won't all the time, and in fact, you might even see degraded resiliency and degraded performance because different packages that your software relies upon might not be optimized for the given kernel or CPU type that you're running against. And ultimately, you go back to just asking really basic questions and performing some end-to-end benchmarking so that you can at least get a sense for what your customers are doing today, and maybe make a guess for what they're going to do tomorrow.Corey: I have to ask because I'm always interested in what it is that gives rise to blog posts like this—which, that's easy; it's someone had to do a project on these things, and while we learn things that would probably apply to other folks—like, you're solving what is effectively a global problem locally when you go down this path. It's part of the reason I have a consulting business is things I learned at one company apply almost identically to another company, even though that they're in completely separate industries and parts of the world because AWS billing is, for better or worse, a bounded problem space despite their best efforts to, you know, use quantum computers to fix that. What was it that gave rise to looking at the CI/CD system from an optimization point of view?Frank: So internally, I initially started writing a white paper about, hey, here's a simple question that we can answer, you know, without too much effort. Let's transition all of our C3 instances to C5 instances, and that could have been the one and done. But by thinking about it a little more and kind of drawing out, while we can actually borrow a model for oversubscription from another field, we could potentially decrease our spend by quite a bit. That eventually [laugh] evolved into a 70 page white paper—no joke—that my former engineering manager said, “Frank, no one's going to [BLEEP] read this.” [laugh].Corey: Always. Always, always. Like, here's a whole bunch of academically research and the rest. It's like, “Great. Which of these two buttons do I press?” is really the question people are getting at. And while it's great to have the research and the academic stuff, it's also a, “Great we're trying to achieve an outcome which, what is the choice?” But it's nice to know that people are doing actual research on the back end, instead, “Eh, my gut tells me to take the path on the left because why not? Left is better; right's tricky friend.”Frank: Yeah. And it was like, “Oh, yeah. I accidentally wrote a really long thing because there was, like, a lot of variables to test.” I think we had spun up 16-plus auto-scaling groups. And ran something like the cross-section of a couple of representative test suites against them, as well as configurations for a number of executors per instance.And about a year ago, I translated that into a ten page blog article that when I read through, I really didn't enjoy. [laugh]. And that template blog article is ultimately, like, about a page in the article you're reading today. And the actual kick in the butt to get this out the door was about four months ago. I spoke at o11ycon rescources which you're a part of.And it was a vendor conference by Honeycomb, and it was just so fun to share some of the things we've been doing with distributed tracing, and how we were able to solve internal problems using a relatively simple idea of asking questions about what was running. And the entire team there was wonderful in coaching and just helping me think through what questions people might have of this work. And that was, again, former academic. The last time I spoke at a conference was about a decade earlier, and it was just so fun to be part of this community of people trying to all solve the same set of problems, just in their own unique ways.Corey: One of the things I loved about working with Honeycomb was the fact that whenever I asked them a question, they have instrumented their own stuff, so they could tell me extremely quickly what something was doing, how it was doing it, and what the overall impact on this was. It's very rare to find a client that is anywhere near that level of awareness into what's going on in their infrastructure.Frank: Yeah, and that blog article, right, it's like, here's our current perspective, and here's, like, the current set of projects we're able to make to get to this result. And we think we know what we want to do, but if you were to ask that same question, “What are we doing for our spend a year from now?” the answer might be very different. Probably similar in some ways, but probably different.Corey: Well, there are some principles that we'll never get away from. It's, “Is no one using the thing? Turn that shit off.” That's one of those tried and true things. “Oh, it's the third copy of that multiple petabyte of data thing? Maybe delete it or stuff in a deep archive.” It's maybe move data less between various places. Maybe log things fewer times, given that you're paying 50 cents per gigabyte ingest, in some cases. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There's a lot to consider as far as the general principles go, but the specifics, well, that's where it gets into the weeds. And at your scale, yeah, having people focus on this internally with the context and nuance to it is absolutely worth doing. Having a small team devoted to this at large companies will pay for itself, I promise. Now, I go in and advise in these scenarios, but past a certain point, this can't just be one person's part-time gig anymore.Frank: I'm kind of curious about that. How do you think about working with a company and then deprecating yourself, and allowing your tools and, like, the frameworks you put into place to continue, like, thrive?Corey: We're advisory only. We make no changes to production.Frank: Or I don't know if that's the right word, deprecate. I think… that's my own word. [laugh].Corey: No, no, it's fair. It's a—what we do is we go in and we are advisory. It's less of a cost engagement, more of an architecture engagement because in cloud, cost and architecture are the same thing. We look at what's going on, we look at the constraints of why we've been brought in, and we identify things that companies can do and the associated cost savings associated with that, and let them make their own decision. Because it's, if I come in and say, “Hey, you could save a bunch of money by migrating this whole subsystem to serverless.”Great, I sound like a lunatic evangelist because yeah, 18 months of work during which time the team doing that is not advancing the state of the business any further so it's never going to happen. So, why even suggest it? Just look at things that are within the bounds of possibility. Counterpoint: when a client says, “A full re-architecture is on the table,” well, okay, that changes the nature of what we're suggesting. But we're trying to get away from what a lot of tooling does, which is, “Great. Here's 700 things you can adjust and you'll do none of them.” We come back with a, “Here's three or four things you can do that'll blow 20% off the bill. Then let's see where you stand.” The other half of it, of course, is large scale enterprise contract negotiation, that's a bit of a horse of a different color. I want to thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I really do appreciate it. If folks want to hear more about what you're up to, and how you think about these things. Where can they find you?Frank: You can find me at frankc.net. Or at me at @FrankC on Twitter.Corey: Oh, inviting people to yell at you at Twitter. That's never a great plan. Yeash. Good luck. Thanks again. We've absolutely got to talk more about this in-depth because I think this is one of those areas that you have the folks above a certain point of scale, talk about these things semi-constantly and live in the space, whereas folks who are in relatively small-scale environments are listening to this and thinking that they've got to do this.And no. No, you do not want to spend millions of dollars of engineering effort to optimize a bill that's 80 grand a year, I promise. It's focus on the thing that's right for your business. At a certain point of scale, this becomes that. But thank you so much for being so generous with your time. I appreciate it.Frank: Thank you so much, Corey.Corey: Frank Chen, senior staff software engineer at Slack. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry comment that seems to completely miss the fact that Microsoft Teams is free because it sucks.Frank: [laugh].Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Well, we had “The Many Lives of Frank Chen“, “The Many Many Lives of Frank Chen“, and “The Nearly Infinite Lives of Frank Chen“. It makes sense that the saga of Night Vale’s most famous dearly-departed would wrap up with “The Life of Frank Chen.” It’s a quiet, weirdly heartwarming story that’s very satisfying (other... The post Binary System Podcast #289: WTNV #197 “The Life of Frank Chen” first appeared on Pixelated Geek.

He only ever had the one. Weather: “Blacksnake” by Charming Disaster https://charmingdisaster.bandcamp.com/ Transcript available at http://welcometonightvale.com/transcripts Patreon is how we exist! If you can, please help us keep making this show: http://patreon.com/welcometonightvale/ 2022 US TOUR WEATHER ARTISTS ANNOUNCED! March 27 - June 24, we'll be all over America with “The Haunting of Night Vale” Tickets on sale now! http://welcometonightvale.com/live New novel from Jeffrey Cranor & Janina Matthewson: YoU FEEL IT JUST BELOW THE RIBS https://www.withinthewires.com/ Music: Disparition http://disparition.bandcamp.com Logo: Rob Wilson http://robwilsonwork.com Written by Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor. Narrated by Cecil Baldwin. http://welcometonightvale.com Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. Check out our books, live shows, store, membership program, and official recap show. Produced by Night Vale Presents. http://nightvalepresents.com

He only ever had the one. Weather: “Blacksnake” by Charming Disaster https://charmingdisaster.bandcamp.com/ Transcript available at http://welcometonightvale.com/transcripts Patreon is how we exist! If you can, please help us keep making this show: http://patreon.com/welcometonightvale/ 2022 US TOUR WEATHER ARTISTS ANNOUNCED! March 27 - June 24, we'll be all over America with “The Haunting of Night Vale” Tickets on sale now! http://welcometonightvale.com/live New novel from Jeffrey Cranor & Janina Matthewson: YoU FEEL IT JUST BELOW THE RIBS https://www.withinthewires.com/ Music: Disparition http://disparition.bandcamp.com Logo: Rob Wilson http://robwilsonwork.com Written by Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor. Narrated by Cecil Baldwin. http://welcometonightvale.com Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. Check out our books, live shows, store, membership program, and official recap show. Produced by Night Vale Presents. http://nightvalepresents.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s the first Vacation Edition of Binary System in over two years! Recording from the same time zone in the same place, this week we planned on a quick recap of the latest episode of Night Vale (the Sherif’s Secret Police is never going to get this Frank Chen thing right, mostly because he dead)... The post Binary System Podcast #283: WTNV #194 – The Nearly Infinite Lives of Frank Chen, and Lore Olympus first appeared on Pixelated Geek.

Frank Chen is here. Frank Chen is here. Frank Chen is here... Weather: “Dressful of Dreams” by The Bipeds http://www.thebipedsdance.com/ Transcript available at http://welcometonightvale.com/transcripts Patreon is how we exist! If you can, please help us keep making this show: http://patreon.com/welcometonightvale/ 2022 US TOUR DATES ANNOUNCED! March 27 - June 24, we'll be all over America with “The Haunting of Night Vale” Tickets on sale now! http://welcometonightvale.com/live Get Joseph Fink's new novel, THE HALLOWEEN MOON https://www.welcometonightvale.com/books#halloweenmoon Music: Disparition http://disparition.bandcamp.com Logo: Rob Wilson http://robwilsonwork.com Written by Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor. Narrated by Cecil Baldwin. http://welcometonightvale.com Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. Check out our books, live shows, store, membership program, and official recap show. Produced by Night Vale Presents. http://nightvalepresents.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Frank Chen is here. Frank Chen is here. Frank Chen is here... Weather: “Dressful of Dreams” by The Bipeds http://www.thebipedsdance.com/ Transcript available at http://welcometonightvale.com/transcripts Patreon is how we exist! If you can, please help us keep making this show: http://patreon.com/welcometonightvale/ 2022 US TOUR DATES ANNOUNCED! March 27 - June 24, we'll be all over America with “The Haunting of Night Vale” Tickets on sale now! http://welcometonightvale.com/live Get Joseph Fink's new novel, THE HALLOWEEN MOON https://www.welcometonightvale.com/books#halloweenmoon Music: Disparition http://disparition.bandcamp.com Logo: Rob Wilson http://robwilsonwork.com Written by Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor. Narrated by Cecil Baldwin. http://welcometonightvale.com Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. Check out our books, live shows, store, membership program, and official recap show. Produced by Night Vale Presents. http://nightvalepresents.com

We may have mentioned this before, but the Binary System Podcast team loves a good time-travel story. We especially enjoy it when the writers use the side-effects of time travel to really mess with longtime fans who know that none of what’s happening is normal. (Sheriff Pamela Winchel? Michelle Nguyen is marrying Sara Sultan, the... The post Binary System Podcast #277: WTNV #191 “The Many, Many Lives of Frank Chen” first appeared on Pixelated Geek.

Frank Chen has been found alive and returned to his family exactly as he was the day he died. Weather: “Zoology“ by Funkrust Brass Band, http://funkrust.com Transcript available at http://welcometonightvale.com/transcripts 2022 US TOUR DATES ANNOUNCED! March 27 - June 24, we'll be all over America with “The Haunting of Night Vale” Tickets on sale now! http://welcometonightvale.com/live Get Joseph Fink's new novel, THE HALLOWEEN MOON https://www.welcometonightvale.com/books#halloweenmoon Patreon is how we exist! If you can, please help us keep making this show: http://patreon.com/welcometonightvale/ Music: Disparition http://disparition.bandcamp.com Logo: Rob Wilson http://robwilsonwork.com Written by Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor. Narrated by Cecil Baldwin. http://welcometonightvale.com Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. Check out our books, live shows, store, membership program, and official recap show. Produced by Night Vale Presents. http://nightvalepresents.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Frank Chen has been found alive and returned to his family exactly as he was the day he died. Weather: “Zoology“ by Funkrust Brass Band, http://funkrust.com Transcript available at http://welcometonightvale.com/transcripts 2022 US TOUR DATES ANNOUNCED! March 27 - June 24, we'll be all over America with “The Haunting of Night Vale” Tickets on sale now! http://welcometonightvale.com/live Get Joseph Fink's new novel, THE HALLOWEEN MOON https://www.welcometonightvale.com/books#halloweenmoon Patreon is how we exist! If you can, please help us keep making this show: http://patreon.com/welcometonightvale/ Music: Disparition http://disparition.bandcamp.com Logo: Rob Wilson http://robwilsonwork.com Written by Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor. Narrated by Cecil Baldwin. http://welcometonightvale.com Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. Check out our books, live shows, store, membership program, and official recap show. Produced by Night Vale Presents. http://nightvalepresents.com

How to Create Affiliate Relationships with Frank Chen

Big news in Night Vale this week! The Secret Police were given one year to provide the life of Frank Chen back to his family, an impossible task that they somehow managed to accomplish way before the deadline! Yes indeed, Frank Chen, good as new, exactly as he was before, no need to look too... The post Binary System Podcast #263: WTNV #186 “The Many Lives of Frank Chen” first appeared on Pixelated Geek.

Weather: Transcript available at http://welcometonightvale.com/transcripts Pre-order personalized, signed copies of The First Ten Years: Two Sides of the Same Love Story by Meg Bashwiner & Joseph Fink https://www.oblongbooks.com/the-first-ten-years-signed Patreon is how we exist in this plague year! If you can, please help us keep making this show: http://patreon.com/welcometonightvale/ Our third novel, The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home, is out now: http://www.welcometonightvale.com/books/ Music: Disparition http://disparition.bandcamp.com Logo: Rob Wilson http://robwilsonwork.com Written by Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor. Narrated by Cecil Baldwin. http://welcometonightvale.com Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. Check out our books, live shows, store, membership program, and official recap show. Produced by Night Vale Presents. http://nightvalepresents.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Frank Chen is back. Good as new! The voice of Melony is Molly Quinn Weather: “Movie Night“ by Jonah Myers, https://jonahmyers.bandcamp.com/ Transcript available at http://welcometonightvale.com/transcripts Pre-order YOU FEEL IT JUST BELOW THE RIBS by Jeffrey Cranor & Janina Matthewson https://www.harpercollins.com/products/you-feel-it-just-below-the-ribs-jeffrey-cranorjanina-matthewson?variant=33105381490722 Live Stream of ALL HAIL May 15. Tickets and info at http://www.welcometonightvale.com/live Pre-order personalized, signed copies of The First Ten Years: Two Sides of the Same Love Story by Meg Bashwiner & Joseph Fink https://www.oblongbooks.com/the-first-ten-years-signed Patreon is how we exist in this plague year! If you can, please help us keep making this show: http://patreon.com/welcometonightvale/ Our third novel, The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home, is out now: http://www.welcometonightvale.com/books/ Music: Disparition http://disparition.bandcamp.com Logo: Rob Wilson http://robwilsonwork.com Written by Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor. Narrated by Cecil Baldwin. http://welcometonightvale.com Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. Check out our books, live shows, store, membership program, and official recap show. Produced by Night Vale Presents. http://nightvalepresents.com

Frank Chen, MD, joins host Lorenzo Norris, MD, to discuss the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on patients with schizophrenia. Dr. Chen is the chief medical director for Houston Behavioral Healthcare Hospital and Houston Adult Psychiatry. He is a speaker for Alkermes and Otsuka. Dr. Chen has served on advisory boards for Alkermes, Intracellular Therapies, Otsuka, and Teva Pharmaceuticals. Dr. Norris is associate dean of student affairs and administration at George Washington University. He has no disclosures. Take-home points Schizophrenia is associated with an increased risk of death from COVID-19, even when controlling for other medical comorbidities. Individuals with schizophrenia have many biological and situational risk factors for COVID-19, including an elevated risk of metabolic syndrome from antipsychotic medications, higher rates of nicotine addiction, a greater likelihood of living in a group setting, limited access to medical care, and the underlying inflammatory state of schizophrenia. Summary An article published in JAMA Psychiatry in January 2021 evaluated a large cohort of patients in a New York health system and identified schizophrenia as the second most highly associated risk factor for 45-day mortality from COVID-19, after the risk factor of advanced age. The study controlled for other medical comorbidities to avoid confounding the results. However, it is essential to remember that individuals with schizophrenia have environmental and biological factors that increase their risk of infection and complications from COVID-19, such as metabolic syndrome, cigarette smoking, limited access to health care, and living in a group or institutional setting. Dr. Chen points out that many patients with schizophrenia already have skills to adapt to the stresses of the pandemic. For example, individuals with schizophrenia might already be accustomed to living with a certain level of fear and uncertainty inherent to their thought disorder. He also comments that negative symptoms make social distancing easier for individuals with schizophrenia than for other people. Dr. Chen notes that telepsychiatry has been a boon to treating individuals with schizophrenia, because using this tool is almost like making a “home visit.” Telemedicine removes the barriers to care, such as transport and resistance to coming to the office. Adaptation to telepsychiatry has varied among different patient populations. Dr. Chen says some of his “higher functioning” patients with more controlled and stable lives did not want to see their clinician via video. They preferred the “secure” and more private setting of an office. Ultimately, psychological flexibility and ability to adapt influence the amount of stress people experience during crisis. References Nemani K et al. JAMA Psychiatry. 2021 Jan 27. doi: 10.1001/jamapsychiatry. 2020.4442. Mazereel V et al. Lancet. 2021 Feb 3. doi: 10.1016/S2215-0366(2)30564-2. Muruganandam P et al. Psychiatry Res. 2020 Jun 29. doi: 101016/j.psychres.2020.113265. Kozloff N et al. Schizophr Bull. 2020 Jul;46(4):752-7. Smith BM et al. J Contextual Behav Sci. 2020 Oct;18:162-74. *  *  * Show notes by Jacqueline Posada, MD, associate producer of the Psychcast; assistant clinical professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at George Washington University, Washington; and staff physician at George Washington Medical Faculty Associates, also in Washington. Dr. Posada has no conflicts of interest. For more MDedge Podcasts, go to mdedge.com/podcasts Email the show: podcasts@mdedge.com

In today's COVID world, many mental health patients are finding themselves “forced” into seeing their doctors online, rather than in person. But how effective is telehealth? What are the benefits and disadvantages? Today's guest, psychiatrist Dr. Frank Chen, thoroughly explains the whole new world of telemedicine and why it doesn't have to be scary. For more information and a complete transcript, visit https://psychcentral.com/blog/podcast-is-telehealth-effective

Cecil’s been neglecting Night Vale Radio a bit in order to dip his toes in the glitzy world of True Crime Podcasts lately (he’s already on episode 722 of his latest venture, my how time flies). Tonight just might be his last episode since Judge Chaplin is about to deliver the verdict in the case... The post Binary System Podcast #241: Welcome To Night Vale #177 “Bloody Laws, Bloody Claws, The Murder of Frank Chen” first appeared on Pixelated Geek.

The final episode of the true crime podcast “Bloody Laws, Bloody Claws: The Murder of Frank Chen” The voice of The Faceless Old Woman is Mara Wilson. The voice of Carlos is Dylan Marron. Weather: “The Ghost Who Wasn't There“ by A Sunday Fire http://asundayfire.bandcamp.com Transcript available at http://welcometonightvale.com/transcripts You can also support the Night Vale Patreon, to help us keep making this show: http://patreon.com/welcometonightvale/ Rescheduled tour dates for 2020: http://www.welcometonightvale.com/live/ Our third novel, The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home, is out now: http://www.welcometonightvale.com/books/ Music: Disparition http://disparition.bandcamp.com Logo: Rob Wilson http://robwilsonwork.com Written by Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor. Narrated by Cecil Baldwin. http://welcometonightvale.com Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. Check out our books, live shows, store, membership program, and official recap show. Produced by Night Vale Presents. http://nightvalepresents.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The final episode of the true crime podcast “Bloody Laws, Bloody Claws: The Murder of Frank Chen” The voice of The Faceless Old Woman is Mara Wilson. The voice of Carlos is Dylan Marron. Weather: “The Ghost Who Wasn’t There“ by A Sunday Fire http://asundayfire.bandcamp.com Transcript available at http://welcometonightvale.com/transcripts You can also support the Night Vale Patreon, to help us keep making this show: http://patreon.com/welcometonightvale/ Rescheduled tour dates for 2020: http://www.welcometonightvale.com/live/ Our third novel, The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home, is out now: http://www.welcometonightvale.com/books/ Music: Disparition http://disparition.bandcamp.com Logo: Rob Wilson http://robwilsonwork.com Written by Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor. Narrated by Cecil Baldwin. http://welcometonightvale.com Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. Check out our books, live shows, store, membership program, and official recap show. Produced by Night Vale Presents. http://nightvalepresents.com

We cover the latest news since Nvidia (maker of GPUs among other things) announced its intent to acquire Arm (provider of silicon IP for system-on-chips inside billions of devices), arguing that "This combination has tremendous benefits for both companies, our customers, and the industry." But how so, when critics are worried about channel conflict, shepherding the broader ecosystem of users, and other issues? Some believe the deal may not go through, and there are also concerns about it for geopolitical reasons (U.S.-based Nvidia, UK-based Arm, China), so how do we tease apart "what's hype/ what's real" here when it comes to understanding the broader implications of the deal?In this episode of our news analysis show, we go beyond the current headlines and focus on the deeper questions -- and longer history of computing innovation -- behind what a potential merger like this could mean for the industry. Given the various tech trends involved here -- from cloud-native and mobile-first to "ML inside", as well as computing going more and more to the edges -- where do and don't the (seemingly) inherent low-energy, low-cost advantages of the RISC architecture, or rather, Arm vs. Intel chip designs come in? Wherefore open source, could a consortium work? If value is always moving up the stack -- and the divisions between hardware, software, firmware, applications, etc. don't remain stable for a very long time -- who are the players that are really changing the game here... And what if it's the entire gameboard that's changed? Former Microsoft Windows president and a16z board partner Steven Sinofsky and a16z operating partner Frank Chen share their thoughts on all this and more with host Sonal Chokshi. image: Adam Greig / Flickr---The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. In addition, this content may include third-party advertisements; a16z has not reviewed such advertisements and does not endorse any advertising content contained therein.This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly as well as unannounced investments in publicly traded digital assets) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/.Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information. 

Podcast: a16z Podcast (LS 62 · TOP 0.1% )Episode: GPT-3: What's Hype, What's Real on the Latest in AIRelease date: 2020-07-30In this episode -- cross posted from our 16 Minutes show feed -- we cover all the buzz around GPT-3, the pre-trained machine learning model from OpenAI that's optimized to do a variety of natural-language processing tasks. It's a commercial product, built on research; so what does this mean for both startups AND incumbents… and the future of “AI as a service”? And given that we're seeing all kinds of (cherrypicked!) examples of output from OpenAI's beta API being shared — how do we know how good it really is or isn't? How do we know the difference between “looks like” a toy and “is” a toy when it comes to new innovations? And where are we, really, in terms of natural language processing and progress towards artificial general intelligence? Is it intelligent, does that matter, and how do we know (if not with a Turing Test)? Finally, what are the broader questions, considerations, and implications for jobs and more? Frank Chen explains what “it” actually is and isn't and more in conversation with host Sonal Chokshi. The two help tease apart what's hype/ what's real here… as is the theme of 16 Minutes.

Podcast: a16z Podcast Episode: GPT-3: What's Hype, What's Real on the Latest in AIRelease date: 2020-07-30In this episode -- cross posted from our 16 Minutes show feed -- we cover all the buzz around GPT-3, the pre-trained machine learning model from OpenAI that's optimized to do a variety of natural-language processing tasks. It's a commercial product, built on research; so what does this mean for both startups AND incumbents… and the future of “AI as a service”? And given that we're seeing all kinds of (cherrypicked!) examples of output from OpenAI's beta API being shared — how do we know how good it really is or isn't? How do we know the difference between “looks like” a toy and “is” a toy when it comes to new innovations? And where are we, really, in terms of natural language processing and progress towards artificial general intelligence? Is it intelligent, does that matter, and how do we know (if not with a Turing Test? Finally, what are the broader questions, considerations, and implications for jobs and more? Frank Chen explains what “it” actually is and isn't and more in conversation with host Sonal Chokshi. The two help tease apart what's hype/ what's real here… as is the theme of 16 Minutes.

In this episode -- cross posted from our 16 Minutes show feed -- we cover all the buzz around GPT-3, the pre-trained machine learning model from OpenAI that’s optimized to do a variety of natural-language processing tasks. It’s a commercial product, built on research; so what does this mean for both startups AND incumbents… and the future of “AI as a service”? And given that we’re seeing all kinds of (cherrypicked!) examples of output from OpenAI’s beta API being shared — how do we know how good it really is or isn’t? How do we know the difference between “looks like” a toy and “is” a toy when it comes to new innovations? And where are we, really, in terms of natural language processing and progress towards artificial general intelligence? Is it intelligent, does that matter, and how do we know (if not with a Turing Test)? Finally, what are the broader questions, considerations, and implications for jobs and more? Frank Chen explains what “it” actually is and isn’t and more in conversation with host Sonal Chokshi. The two help tease apart what’s hype/ what’s real here… as is the theme of 16 Minutes.

This week’s podcast is a panel discussion, “Industry Insights and Innovating Internationally,” held last month during the OIS Israel virtual program. The discussion was led by William J. Link, PhD, and included Laurent Attias, Alcon; Prabhu Velusami, MD, Johnson & Johnson London Innovation Center; Frank Chen, Santen Ventures; Richel Liu, Rimonci Capital; and serial entrepreneur Barak Azmon, MD. The panelists, based in different parts of the globe, share varying perspectives on where innovation happens, both geographically and structurally – that is, from the private, public, or corporate sectors. And they address the impact that Israel has on innovation in our field. Click here to listen in.

This talented actor has joined the cast of Arrow as Frank Chen. We chat about his other memorable roles in The Dark Knight, Contagion and The Last Resort. Special thanks to Creative PR

This talented actor has joined the cast of Arrow as Frank Chen. We chat about his other memorable roles in The Dark Knight, Contagion and The Last Resort. Special thanks to Creative PR

AI can do a lot of specific tasks as well as, or even better than, humans can — for example, it can more accurately classify images, more efficiently process mail, and more logically manipulate a Go board. While we have made a lot of advances in task-specific AI, how far are we from artificial general intelligence (AGI), that is AI that matches general human intelligence and capabilities?In this podcast, a16z operating partner Frank Chen interviews Stuart Russell, the Founder of the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence (CHAI) at UC Berkeley. They outline the conceptual breakthroughs, like natural language understanding, still required for AGI. But more importantly, they explain how and why we should design AI systems to ensure that we can control AI, and eventually AGI, when it’s smarter than we are. The conversation starts by explaining what Hollywood's Skynet gets wrong and ends with why AI is better as "the perfect Butler, than the genie in the lamp."

In this 19th episode of our news show, where we cover recent headlines from our vantage point in tech, we cover the following news items (in conversation with Sonal Chokshi):recent moves to regulate artificial intelligence (AI) software including the White House's recent guidance (and op-ed from the U.S. CTO) on AI in general, as well as limits to exports of specific AI software that went into effect this week -- with operating partner Frank Chen (whose talk was cited in an earlier White House report);recent activity on the topic of negative interest rates as well as quantitative easing, given recent remarks (and paper) from former chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke -- with general partner Alex Rampell, who covers all things fintech.

Are you tired of having to work 46 hours a week trying to build someone else's future? You're not alone. There are people out there who just can't work for a boss, either because they don't want to or they weren't meant to. If this sounds like you, then maybe it's time to think about starting a career in real estate. Unfortunately, it's not that easy. Becoming your own boss and taking hold of your future requires focus, hard work, and lots and lots of learning. The real estate industry, in particular, has evolved over the years. One could get easily overwhelmed and discouraged without proper guidance and resources. But with a lot of information available out there, where do you even get started? In this episode, I've invited real estate expert Frank Chen to talk about real estate education and how to get it right. He was personally mentored by Tim Randle, owner of REIClub. They help real estate aspirants to connect with the industry's leading professionals and get access to some of the best trade secrets whether that involves lease options, flipping houses, or just commercial real estate in general. Frank talks about his roots and how he started out in the industry. Today, he teaches other people how they can build their own successful careers as well. You'll get to learn about some helpful industry tips such as getting more leads for free, finding the best real estate courses, and more. He also mentions the importance of avoiding distractions and networking with experts who are actively investing. Stay tuned to learn more about real estate education and how you can use it to gain a competitive advantage in this very busy industry. Find out which real estate courses you should take, where to find them, and how to avoid losing money from scams. What's inside: —We talk about Frank's mentor Tim Randle and my experiences with him. —Frank mentions some of the key positions he has in the education sector —What is shiny object syndrome and why is it an issue? —Learn how to use your time and your resources the right way including friends and family members. —What impacts a person's success on the market? —Joe and Frank talk about the issue with being a perfectionist and why you need to be proactive. —They discuss how to avoid the scams and the dangers in real estate education. —How to get started in real estate education and reach customers.

Are you tired of having to work 46 hours a week trying to build someone else’s future? You’re not alone. There are people out there who just can’t work for a boss, either because they don’t want to or they weren’t meant to. If this sounds like you, then maybe it’s time to think about […]

Are you tired of having to work 46 hours a week trying to build someone else’s future? You’re not alone. There are people out there who just can’t work for a boss, either because they don’t want to or they weren’t meant to. If this sounds like you, then maybe it’s time to think about starting a career in real estate. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. Becoming your own boss and taking hold of your future requires focus, hard work, and lots and lots of learning. The real estate industry, in particular, has evolved over the years. One could get easily overwhelmed and discouraged without proper guidance and resources. But with a lot of information available out there, where do you even get started? In this episode, I’ve invited real estate expert Frank Chen to talk about real estate education and how to get it right. He was personally mentored by Tim Randle, owner of REIClub. They help real estate aspirants to connect with the industry’s leading professionals and get access to some of the best trade secrets whether that involves lease options, flipping houses, or just commercial real estate in general. Frank talks about his roots and how he started out in the industry. Today, he teaches other people how they can build their own successful careers as well. You’ll get to learn about some helpful industry tips such as getting more leads for free, finding the best real estate courses, and more. He also mentions the importance of avoiding distractions and networking with experts who are actively investing. Stay tuned to learn more about real estate education and how you can use it to gain a competitive advantage in this very busy industry. Find out which real estate courses you should take, where to find them, and how to avoid losing money from scams. What’s inside: —We talk about Frank’s mentor Tim Randle and my experiences with him. —Frank mentions some of the key positions he has in the education sector —What is shiny object syndrome and why is it an issue? —Learn how to use your time and your resources the right way including friends and family members. —What impacts a person’s success on the market? —Joe and Frank talk about the issue with being a perfectionist and why you need to be proactive. —They discuss how to avoid the scams and the dangers in real estate education. —How to get started in real estate education and reach customers.

Our friend Frank Chen stopped by the Faith Driven Investor podcast to talk about how he’s helping entrepreneurs change the World at the Silicon Valley Venture powerhouse of Andreessen Horowitz. As Frank describes it they are “helping entrepreneurs build software companies that are eating the world.” (he’ll give you a little more info about what that means in our interview).   Frank Chen is a self proclaimed former product and user experience design junkie with specialties in venture capital, artificial intelligence/machine learning, fund raising, product planning, product launches, product development process, enterprise software, UX design, Web hosting, and managed services. With a breadth of expertise like that, you can see why we were excited to have him on the show.  In addition to all of that, Frank also shared a vision for what it could look like when investors view themselves as servant leaders. So often, we think of the relationship between entrepreneur and investor as a constant power struggle, but Frank upended that idea and offered a much more redemptive approach that we thought was so helpful. It was a fun, enlightening and engaging conversation, which we hope you enjoy. As always, thanks for listening. Useful Links: Marc Andreessen on Why Software is Eating the World GDP/Capita over the last 2000 Years Frank Chen LinkedIn

Our friend Frank Chen is the final guest in this 4-part series on the Faith Driven Investor. And he stopped by to talk about how he’s helping entrepreneurs change the World at the Silicon Valley Venture powerhouse of Andreessen Horowitz. As Frank describes it they are “helping entrepreneurs build software companies that are eating the world” (he’ll give you a little more info about what that means in our interview). Frank Chen is a self proclaimed former product and user experience design junkie with specialties in venture capital, artificial intelligence/machine learning, fund raising, product planning, product launches, product development process, enterprise software, UX design, Web hosting, and managed services. With a breadth of expertise like that, you can see why we were excited to have him on the show! But even after all of that, Frank let us in on what his heart as an investor looks like. He pulled aside the curtain a bit and let us see that investors aren’t so much the terrifying titans up on the hill as they are servant leaders who want to help others be successful. It was a fun, enlightening and engaging conversation. We hope you enjoy it, and as always, thanks for listening. Useful Links: Marc Andreessen on Why Software is Eating the World GDP/Capita over the last 2000 Years Frank Chen LinkedIn

Incentives matter. So understanding the incentives of venture capitalists will help you decide if raising money from a venture investor makes sense for your business. In this first of a 3-part series, which originally aired as YouTube videos, a16z Managing Partner Scott Kupor talks with Frank Chen about how venture capital works: how the money flows, what Limited Partners (the organizations that invest in venture capitalists) are looking for, what differentiates the top investors, and what all of this means for an entrepreneur raising money. Want to learn more? Read Scott's book "Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It" (https://a16z.com/book/secrets-of-sand-hill-road/). Stay tuned for parts 2 and 3. The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments and certain publicly traded cryptocurrencies/ digital assets for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/. Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information.

Do you sometimes wish you had been born in a different decade so you could have worked on the fundamental building blocks of modern computing? How fun, challenging, and fulfilling would it have been to work on semiconductors in the 1950s or Unix in the 1960s (both at Bell Labs) or personal computers at the Homebrew Computer Club in the 1970s or on the Internet browser at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (and later Mountain View, CA) in the 1990s? Good news: it’s not too late. There’s a new computing platform being built today by a vibrant and rapidly growing cryptocurrency community. You might have noticed some of your coworkers and friends leaving big stable tech companies to join crypto startups. In this episode, which originally appeared on YouTube, a16z crypto partner Ali Yahya (@ali01) talks with Frank Chen (@withfries2) about five challenging problems the community is trying to solve right now to enable a new computing platform and a new set of killer apps: *Scaling decentralized computing *Scaling decentralized storage *Scaling decentralized networks *Establishing trusted identities and reputation *Establishing trusted governance models If you’re a software engineer, product manager, UX designer, investor, or tech enthusiast who thrives on the particular challenges of building a new computing platform, this is the perfect time to join the crypto community. The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments and certain publicly traded cryptocurrencies/ digital assets for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/. Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information.

As companies digitize, they change the way they make decisions: decisions are made lower in the organization, based on data, and increasingly automated. This creates opportunities for startups creating new ways to collect and analyze data to support this new style of decision making. In this episode (which originally aired as a YouTube video), Jad Naous (@jadtnaous) ‏and Frank Chen (@withfries2) discuss this change and the startup opportunities these changes create. The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates.This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investor or prospective investor, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund which should be read in their entirety.)Past performance is not indicative of future results. Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information.

Join longtime Apple software engineer Ken Kocienda in conversation with a16z Deal and Research operating partner Frank Chen for an insider’s account of how Apple designed software in the golden age of Steve Jobs, spanning products like the first release of Safari on MacOS to the first few releases of the iPhone and iOS (very first codename: "Purple"). Ken vividly shares about the creative process, how teams were organized, what it was like demo'ing to Steve Jobs, and many other fun stories. This episode originally aired as a YouTube video, and throughout, we repeatedly probe the question: is Apple's obsession with secrecy during the product development process a feature or a bug?

In this episode of the a16z Podcast -- which originally aired as a video on YouTube -- general partner Alex Rampell (and former fintech entrepreneur as the CEO and co-founder of TrialPay) talks with operating partner Frank Chen about the quickly changing fintech landscape and, even more importantly, why the landscape is changing now. Should the incumbents be nervous? About what, exactly? And most importantly, what should big companies do about all of this change? But the conversation from both sides of the table begins from the perspective of the hungry and fast fintech startup sharing lessons learned, and then moves to more concrete advice for the execs in the hot seat at established companies. The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investor or prospective investor, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund which should be read in their entirety.) Past performance is not indicative of future results. Any charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information.

When people talk about trends in education technology, they often focus on how to disrupt higher education in the U.S., whether it's about breaking free of the "signaling" factor of elite educations or how to shift education out of its "cottage industry" mindset to achieve greater scale. However, in China, the transformation of education is already well underway, with a fast-growing ecosystem built around lifelong learning. In fact, one of the largest demographic groups paying for education in China is actually not college students -- it's college graduates, aged 26 through 35.In this episode -- which originally aired as a video on our YouTube channel -- a16z general partner Connie Chan talks with operating partner Frank Chen about the lifelong learning ecosystem in China; what it means for startups there; and lessons for entrepreneurs everywhere... or will these techniques even work outside of China?

Frank Chen is a Partner @ Andreessen Horowitz, one of the world's most prestigious venture firms with a portfolio including the likes of Airbnb, Coinbase, Github, Lyft, Slack and many more incredible companies. As for Frank, prior to joining the world of venture, he was a VP of Products & UI Design at HP Software and before that held the same title at Opsware. Before that, even cooler, Frank was Director of Product Management @ Netscape where he led a cross-functional team that defined, shipped, and marketed Netscape's award-winning LDAP directory and security products.  In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Frank made the move from the world of operations with Opsware and HP to being a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz? 2.) How does Frank view the current state of play for AI and machine learning? How does the rise of automation shift the economy as we know it? What does it do to class distinctions? How does Frank view it's impact on the labour market? How does Frank think about the value of truly large datasets? Where is the asymptotic moment where the utility value of data is realised? 3.) With the rise of self-driving, how does Frank perceive the future of car ownership? Who will fundamentally own and operate the vehicles? Will it be a horizontal play or a vertical play? In terms of adoption, why is Frank negative towards a driver assisted transition phase and believe in a more binary transition? 4.) How does Frank perceive the rise of automation and self-driving cars impacting public infrastructure? How will the layout of our cities change over time? How does Frank believe urban real estate could be optimised in a more efficient manner? Which nations does Frank believe will be the first to innovate here? 5.) What is the most challenging element of Frank's position as Partner @ a16z? How does Frank think about the right way to say not to an entrepreneur? How does Frank look to scale the learning curve rapidly when investigating new industries? What are the challenges here? What advice would Frank give to someone looking to scale learning curves? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Frank’s Fave Book: The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of The Rings Frank’s Most Recent Investment: Branch As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Frank on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.

with Prasad Akella, Paul Daughtery (@pauldaugh) and Frank Chen (@withfries2) What is different on that factory floor from Henry Ford to today? In this conversation, Prasad Akella, Founder and CEO of Drishti; Paul Daugherty, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer of Accenture, and author of the recently published Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI; and a16z operating partner Frank Chen, talk about how the introduction of automation from Henry Ford to now co-bots and AI all change the work we do in manufacturing and beyond. What are the skills that we’ll need in the future? What kinds of new information is available, and what new needs -- for dynamic adaptive processes, for example? What are the new tool chains and core (organizational and technical) habits of ML/AI-centric companies of the future?

Self-driving, electric cars will someday outnumber traditional automobiles on the road. As transportation becomes autonomous, it is hard to imagine an industry that will not be affected by the downstream effects of this change. These cars will likely be managed by fleet operators like Lyft and Uber. We will need fewer cars, and the amount The post Autonomy with Frank Chen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Self-driving, electric cars will someday outnumber traditional automobiles on the road. As transportation becomes autonomous, it is hard to imagine an industry that will not be affected by the downstream effects of this change. These cars will likely be managed by fleet operators like Lyft and Uber. We will need fewer cars, and the amount The post Autonomy with Frank Chen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

As cars become more like iPhones and less like just, well, cars — everything changes, from data to mapping to interfaces to security and more. How so? Where are we anyway, given all the hype around when self-driving cars will appear everywhere? And where are new opportunities in the space? This episode of the a16z Podcast, based on a panel discussion from the most recent a16z Summit, features a16z research and deal team head Frank Chen in conversation with various companies doing different things in the autonomous space. Guests include: Taggart Matthiesen, head of product at Lyft, which is developing autonomous car technology; James Wu, CEO and co-founder of DeepMap, which focuses on full-stack HD mapping for autonomy; and Qasar Younis, CEO of Applied Intuition, which provides advance simulation software for autonomy. ––– The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments and certain publicly traded cryptocurrencies/ digital assets for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/. Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information.

Data, data, everywhere, nor any drop to drink. Or so would say Coleridge, if he were a big company CEO trying to use A.I. today -- because even when you have a ton of data, there's not always enough signal to get anything meaningful from AI. Why? Because, "like they say, it's 'garbage in, garbage out' -- what matters is what you have in between," reminds Databricks co-founder (and director of the RISElab at U.C. Berkeley) Ion Stoica. And even then it's still not just about data operations, emphasizes SigOpt co-founder Scott Clark; your data scientists need to really understand "What's actually right for my business and what am I actually aiming for?" And then get there as efficiently as possible. But beyond defining their goals, how do companies get over the "cold start" problem when it comes to doing more with AI in practice, asks a16z operating partner Frank Chen (who also released a microsite on getting started with AI earlier this year)? The guests on this short "a16z Bytes" episode of the a16z Podcast -- based on a conversation that took place at our recent annual Summit event -- share practical advice about this and more.

with Frank Chen, Steven Sinofsky, and Sonal Chokshi There are many reasons why we're in an “A.I. spring” after multiple “A.I. winters” — but how then do we tease apart what's real vs. what's hype when it comes to the (legitimate!) excitement about artificial intelligence and machine learning? Especially when it comes to the latest results of computers beating games, which not only captures our imaginations but has always played a critical role in advancing machine intelligence (whether it's AI winning Texas Hold'em poker or beating the world human champ in the ancient Chinese game of Go). But on learning that Google DeepMind's AlphaGo can master the game of Go without human knowledge — or more precisely: “based solely on reinforcement learning, without human data, guidance, or domain knowledge beyond game rules” — some people leap too far towards claims of artificial generalized intelligence. So where can we then generalize the findings of such work — unsupervised learning, self-play, etc. — to other specific domains? What does it mean for entrepreneurs building companies (and what investors look for)? And what does it mean for how we, as humans, learn… or rather, how computers can also learn from how we learn? Deal and research operating team head Frank Chen and a16z board partner Steven Sinofsky ponder all this and more, in conversation with Sonal Chokshi, in this episode of the a16z Podcast. We ended last time with the triumph of data over algorithms and begin this time with the triumph of algorithms over data … is this the end of big data?

Turnabout is fair play: That's true in politics, and it's true at Andreessen Horowitz given our internal (and very opinionated!) culture of debate -- where we often agree to disagree, or more often, disagree to agree. So in this special "turnabout" episode of the a16z Podcast, co-founder Marc Andreessen (who is most often in the hot seat being interviewed), got the chance to instead grill fellow partners Frank Chen (who covers AI and much more), Vijay Pande (who covers healthcare for the bio fund), and Alex Rampell (who covers all things fintech). None of the partners had any idea what Marc would ask them. Putting them in the hot seat at our recent a16z Tech Policy Summit, in Washington, D.C., Marc asked them policy questions such as the implications for tech of the American Health Care Act or AHCA (which itself was being hotly debated that exact same day, just a few miles away); the role of regulatory arbitrage; and what happens to companies big and small if Dodd-Frank is repealed. Oh, but they also covered so much more: the pros and cons of using tech to "discriminate" for better risk pooling; the role of genetics in addiction (can/should it be used to determine risk?); the opioid crisis (can tech help?); applying AI as a "salve" for everything (what's hyped, what's real, what's easy, what's hard?); the line between redlining and predatory lending (and where/when did sentiment flip?); and the ethics of artificial intelligence (beyond the ole Trolley Problem). Throw in a classic nature vs. nurture debate, a bit of 2-D vs. 3-D, and some fries (yes)... and the future arrives in this episode in 35 minutes or less.

Thanks to freeways, cities became something to get through instead of something to get to. Now, as the next transportation revolution -- from rivers to trains to cars to autonomous cars -- promises to change the face of our cities, what happens to car culture, infrastructure, and more? Who owns what, who pays? And what about the design -- and product management -- challenges, whether it's designing for user trust, city adoption, or an ever-moving target thanks to constantly evolving tech? This episode of the podcast (in conversation with Sonal) covers all this and more, featuring: a16z's Frank Chen, who recently shared 16 questions about autonomous cars; Taggart Matthiesen, director of product at Lyft who covers the core platform as well as development/strategy for autonomous vehicles; and Carl Pope, former executive director and chairman of the Sierra Club -- and author (with former NYC mayor Mike Bloomberg) of the upcoming book Climate of Hope: How Cities Businesses and Citizens Can Save the Planet. Will curb space be the new shelf space? When we value the "iPhone-ness" over the "carness" of cars, what changes? And... will we all drive less, walk more?

Thanks to freeways, cities became something to get through instead of something to get to. Now, as the next transportation revolution -- from rivers to trains to cars to autonomous cars -- promises to change the face of our cities, what happens to car culture, infrastructure, and more? Who owns what, who pays? And what about the design -- and product management -- challenges, whether it's designing for user trust, city adoption, or an ever-moving target thanks to constantly evolving tech? This episode of the podcast (in conversation with Sonal) covers all this and more, featuring: a16z's Frank Chen, who recently shared 16 questions about autonomous cars; Taggart Matthiesen, director of product at Lyft who covers the core platform as well as development/strategy for autonomous vehicles; and Carl Pope, former executive director and chairman of the Sierra Club -- and author (with former NYC mayor Mike Bloomberg) of the upcoming book Climate of Hope: How Cities Businesses and Citizens Can Save the Planet. Will curb space be the new shelf space? When we value the "iPhone-ness" over the "carness" of cars, what changes? And... will we all drive less, walk more?

From the significance of Google DeepMind's AlphaGo wins to recent advances in "expert-level artificial intelligence" in playing an imperfect/ asymmetric information game like poker, toys and games have played and continue to play a critical role in advancing machine intelligence. One of the pioneers in this area among others is the Alberta Innovates Centre for Machine Learning -- now the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (amii) -- which in 2007 solved the long-standing challenge of checkers, and in 2015 produced the first AI agent capable of playing "an essentially perfect game" of heads-up limit hold'em poker. But what does that mean for the evolution of such technology out of play and into production? Out of universities and into industry? (Especially when many such university programs and talent are being hollowed out by companies and they're reliant on intellectual property or provincial support, as is the case of this University of Alberta based institute). And how can CEOs and others embrace learning about this tech somewhere in between? So... what will it take to make AI "real"? What about genetic algorithms, treating computers like people, and other near- and far-future possibilities? This episode featuring the executive director of Amii, Cameron Schuler, and a16z deal, research, and investing team operating head Frank Chen covers all this and more. The conversation was recorded recently as part of our inaugural a16z Summit event. image: Nyks / Wikimedia Commons

What (on earth) does it take to get a signal to Pluto? Stanford senior scientist and astronomer Ivan Linscott, part of the team that ran the radio science experiment on the New Horizons probe, shares in conversation with a16z's Frank Chen all the nitty gritty details about their project using Ruse radio transmissions to gather info about Pluto. Listen in on exactly what it really takes to do so -- everything from commandeering old Cold War spy technology and plutonium to completing the entire mission on approximately 250 watts, and including other such highlights as a motorcycle riding, guitar playing, leather jacketed, tattooed FPGA fixer coming to fix everything when it seemed a lost cause, and the satellite going dark just moments before contact. From deep tech details to the drama of accomplishing such a difficult mission, this podcast is all about how, exactly, we sent a radio signal to Pluto.

"Incremental change may be good theory, but in practice you have to have a big enough stick to hit everybody with to make everything move at once". So shares Adrian Cockcroft, who helped lead Netflix's migration from datacenter to the cloud -- and from monolithic to microservices architecture -- when their streaming business (the "stick"!) was exploding. So how did they -- and how can other companies -- make such big, bet-the-company kind of moves, without getting mired in fanatical internal debates? Does organizational structure need to change, especially if moving from a more product-, than project-based, approach? What happens to security? And finally, what happens to the role of CIOs; what can/should they do? Most interestingly: How will the entire industry be affected as companies not only adopt, but essentially offer, microservices or narrow cloud APIs? How do the trends of microservices, containers, devops, cloud, as-a-service/ on-demand, serverless -- all moves towards more and more ephemerality -- change the future of computing and even work? Cockcroft (who is now a technology fellow at Battery Ventures) joins this episode of the a16z Podcast, in conversation with Frank Chen and Martin Casado (and Sonal Chokshi) to discuss these shifts and more. The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments and certain publicly traded cryptocurrencies/ digital assets for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/. Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information.

For better or worse, most of the computing systems that run much of our lives (whether invisibly or visibly) have become increasingly complex -- they're not fully engineered; they're almost grown. And with that we enter a brave new world of "biological" (as opposed to a more "physics") mindset applied to computing. It's more like evolution, horns and all. This isn't just abstract or backend-only stuff. Complex system design affects everything from datacenters and SaaS to word processors and cars, touching human lives in very tangible ways. So how do you solve problems in such systems? How do you even begin to understand "the system" in the first place? And is there anything out there yet that lets us test and verify the output of these systems? (Inquiring minds want to know!) All this and more in this episode of the a16z Podcast, a riff on the theme of "complicated" with complexity scientist Samuel Arbesman and author of the new book Overcomplicated. Also joining the conversation (with Sonal Chokshi) are a16z board partner Steven Sinofsky and research and deal team head Frank Chen. image: brewbooks / Flickr

with Fei-Fei Li (@drfeifei), Frank Chen (@withfries2), and Sonal Chokshi (@smc90) Who has the advantage in artificial intelligence — big companies, startups, or academia? Perhaps all three, especially as they work together when it comes to fields like this. One thing is clear though: A.I. and deep learning is where it's at. And that's why this year's newly anointed Andreessen Horowitz Distinguished Visiting Professor of Computer Science is Fei-Fei Li [who publishes under Li Fei-Fei], associate professor at Stanford University. Bridging entrepreneurs across academia and industry, we began the a16z Professor-in-Residence program just a couple years ago (most recently with Dan Boneh and beginning with Vijay Pande). Li is the Director of the Stanford Vision Lab, which focuses on connecting computer vision and human vision; is the Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL), which was founded in the early 1960s; and directs the new SAIL-Toyota Center for AI Research, which brings together researchers in visual computing, machine learning, robotics, human-computer interactions, intelligent systems, decision making, natural language processing, dynamic modeling, and design to develop “human-centered artificial intelligence” for intelligent vehicles. Li also co-created ImageNet, which forms the basis of the Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC) that continually demonstrates drastic advances in machine vision accuracy. So why now for A.I.? Is deep learning “it”… or what comes next? And what happens as A.I. moves from what Li calls its “in vitro phase” to its “in vivo phase”? Beyond ethical considerations — or celebrating only “geekiness” and “nerdiness” — Li argues we need to inject a stronger humanistic thinking element to design and develop algorithms and A.I. that can co-habitate with people and in social (including crowded) spaces. All this and more on this episode of the a16z Podcast.

The world's most valuable company, Apple, made a number of seemingly incremental announcements at its most recent annual developer's conference (WWDC) -- that Apple Pay is coming to the web; that Siri is being opened up to app developers; that iMessage will suggest emoji; and many other things. Underneath all these little feature tweaks however is a bigger story, argue a16z's Benedict Evans, Frank Chen, and Kyle Russell. It's a story about -ification: the "platformification" of apps available on the Apple operating system (they've turned maps into a platform before even Google has); the "widgetification" of everything (using familiar interfaces to ensure continuity across different contexts); and the AI-ification of everyday services (like recognizing faces in photos and predicting, um, emoji). Add it all up though and it means Apple is focusing a lot more on A.I., just like other big tech companies such as Google and Facebook (and don't forget Amazon too!). Only Apple is bringing artificial intelligence to the phone -- it now also has a neural network API for instance -- only interestingly, it's focusing on doing so at the device, not cloud level. So what does it all mean?

Why are people so fired up about a computer winning yet another game? Whether it's checkers, chess, Jeopardy, or the ancient Chinese game of Go, we get excited about the potential for more when we see computers beat humans. But then nothing "big" -- in terms of generalized artificial intelligence -- seems to happen after that burst of excitement. Now, with the excitement (and other emotions) around Google DeepMind's "AlphaGo" using machine learning and other techniques to beat one of the world's top Go players, Lee Sodol, in Korea ... it's like the dream of the 1990s (and 1980s, and 1970s, and 1960s) is alive in Seoul right now. Is this time different? How do we know? a16z's head of research and deal team Frank Chen and board partner Steven Sinofsky -- who both suffered through the last “AI winter” -- share how everything old is new again; the triumph of data over algorithms; and the evergreen battle between purist vs. "practical" approaches. Ultimately, it's about how innovation in general plays out, at a scale both grand (cycles and gestation periods) and mundane (sometimes, the only way to make a product work is to hack together the old, the new, and everything in between). NOTE: The Super Mario World video referenced in this podcast is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv6UVOQ0F44

In this interview with Frank Chen from REIClub.com, Chris and Jason discuss real estate investing, their local markets, investment strategies, hard money lending, and much more.

Your homeowner's insurance didn't anticipate Airbnb. Your car insurance certainly didn't see Lyft and Uber coming. And when your car drives itself, it's anyone's guess how the insurance industry will wrap its collective head around that one. a16z's Frank Chen and Mike Paulus talk insurance on this segment of the pod. Yes, insurance. Insurance may not be the sexiest part of your life (hopefully), but because of the changes in how we move through the world -- literally and figuratively -- insurance is due for a reinvention. What are the possibilities for new and better insurance, and which technologies and trends are driving it.

The battle of the pipes has shifted to mobile. Verizon caught plenty of people by surprise when it announced it was buying AOL for $4.4 billion in cash (the cash part deserves a short moment to sink in). The question plenty of people are asking is, why? “Mobile,” says a16z General Partner Chris Dixon on this segment of the pod. “Increasingly it's probably also mobile video.” a16z's Frank Chen joins Dixon to discuss the Verizon acquisition, and what might be the start of a fresh wave of buying as network providers like Verizon look to wedge their way further into both mobile video and the advertising technology that helps pay for it. “Everything is up for grabs in the video-to-mobile value chain,” Chen says. “Verizon sees it, and they want to be at the front of it.” The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments and certain publicly traded cryptocurrencies/ digital assets for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/. Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information.

NFC (near field communication) technology has been around for about a decade, and with the exception of transit cards mostly outside the United States it's gone nowhere. Now Apple has debuted Apple Pay. Has Apple filled in the gaps in terms of user experience, sheer number of devices, and retail footprint to finally make NFC work? In six months will we all be swiping our phones at every coffee joint and grocery store? Once Apple has virtualized your credit cards, what comes next? Benedict Evans is joined by a16z's Frank Chen and Zal Bilimoria to discuss the latest from Cupertino's finest around payments, the long-awaited Apple Watch, and a bigger (and biggest) iPhone.

"WITH A LEAD ON WALTER'S WHEREABOUTS, OLIVER GAMBLES ON FELICITY IN THE FIELD - Finding it difficult to mend fences with Tommy (Colin Donnell) and Diggle (David Ramsey), Oliver (Stephen Amell) instead focuses on crossing another name off the list. While digging through a crooked accountant's laptop, Felicity (guest star Emily Bett Rickards) discovers a transaction that could help Oliver find Walter. To reconfirm the lead, Oliver gambles that Felicity can be counted on in the field for the first time. In a flashback, Malcolm (guest star John Barrowman) reveals to Robert Queen (guest star Jamey Sheridan) and Frank Chen (guest star Chin Han) painful details surrounding his wife's murder, and how that shaped his plans for the Glades. Meanwhile, Tommy (Colin Donnell) stuns Laurel (Katie Cassidy) with the truth. Willa Holland and Susanna Thompson also star. Michael Schultz directed the episode written by Jack Coburn & Lana Cho (#121). "