Above Board

In the latest episode of the Above Board Podcast, hosts Paul Jarvis and Jack Ellis discuss various topics, with a significant portion of the conversation focuses on the recent arrest of Telegram's CEO in France (Pavel Durov), exploring the implications of privacy and censorship, encryption, and the responsibilities of social media platforms in policing illegal activities. The hosts debate the complexities of freedom of speech, censorship, and the role of government and corporations in regulating discourse, emphasizing the importance of allowing open discussions to foster understanding and informed opinions.

Things are humming along at Fathom Analytics - we’ve released several new features, have more in the pipeline coming soon, and the redoing of our internal processes is going quite well. Jack and Paul also discuss the Stripe acquisition of LemonSqueezy, the CEO of Paddle stepping down and finally, why Fathom does’t do discounts or sales (ever).

Jack and Paul get into updating the application’s interface design and how that paves the way for new features coming soon. They also discuss why no one should trust Google’s business model (and their penchant for killing off popular products like Universal Analytics), the lengths Fathom goes to to support old analytics data, why you should lean into what works for you (even if it’s not the consensus), why companies should care a lot more about protecting their customers data, why public corporations are incentivized for being sociopaths, and so much more.

The conversation delves into the ethical implications of AI, the use of AI in software, and the impact of AI on various industries. It also explores the challenges and limitations of AI technology, as well as the importance of privacy and data protection in AI development.

Takeaways

• AI has the potential to revolutionize industries but raises ethical concerns about privacy and data protection.
• The use of AI in software development presents challenges and limitations, including the need for accuracy and reliability.
• Privacy and data protection are crucial considerations in the development and use of AI technology, especially with what data is used to train these models.
• The impact of AI on various industries requires careful evaluation and ethical decision-making, not just “moving fast and breaking things”.
• AI’s ego is it’s problem: it thinks it’s correct when it’s not, and attempts to be convincing about things it can’t know for certain is true.

Today Jack and Paul discuss what's not been working with getting the next version of Fathom Analytics launched. They come up with a plan, in real-time, to overcome this hurdle and get back to a regular cadence of releases (i.e. not a big project). They also come up with a set of rules to govern internal projects.

Software is complex. This episode goes into the pros and cons of how Jack (developer) and Paul (designer) work in terms of how they each make progress in huge projects, start and execute tasks, and deal with analysis paralysis that comes with complicated things.

It’s been a while since Jack and Paul have recorded an episode of this show, so there’s a lot to catch up on! A new marketing site was launched, we’re still a small team navigating focus, we’re working on a brand new version of our software, and we’ve prototyped a new ingest to be the fastest analytics ingest in the world.

Last week, we released several new features in our software and a fresh coat of paint in the UI. Jack and Paul discuss these features and how they relate to what’s coming up next, and they chat through the pricing increase that happened simultaneously. Lastly, they talk about why analytics software is more expensive than most hosting.

What do you do when you can’t always please all your customers? Jack and Paul discuss how they deal with negative feedback, the different types of negative feedback, when it’s valuable (and when it’s not), and even how they deal with negative feedback internally in the company.

Jack and Paul get into what’s going on inside Fathom Analytics right now, and then answer some questions about what it was like starting the company, what they’d do differently (or the same), and if there’s anything they’d change if they had to start Fathom again.

Special thanks to Ben and Adam from the "Hackers Incorporated" podcast for the most of the questions answered on this episode.