Designer, investor, nomad. Temporarily embarrassed billionaire. Building Svbtle.com
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- Followers 43,560
- Likes 6,653
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If you want to do something great with your life—whatever that means to you—remember this: you get an unlimited number of tries. The only constraining factor is your lifespan.
The worst things you can do are:
care what other people think,
not take risks,
fail slowly,
give up.
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If you bet against Tesla, you are betting against the progress of the human race.
(This is the Tesla Cybertruck compared to its closest competitor, the electric Rivian, which costs twice as much.)
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Apple’s numbers are so huge it’s hard to understand them at human scale. During the last three months, they made $953.1 million in revenue and $238.2 million in net profit every single day.
That’s ~$1 billion in profit very four days. Just insane.
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In 2011, I sold a web app on eBay for $10k.
The buyer paid with 4718 bitcoins, which I immediately converted into USD at $2.12/bitcoin.
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Liquid Glass is a design cancer.
It consumes and overwhelms everything it touches by adding intense distortions, drop shadows, lighting effects, and unnatural spacing to controls and UI in ways that make them harder to see and understand.
It is pretty, and seductive, but it makes every interface it touches worse by prioritizing fun effects over common sense design principles like contrast, uniformity, readability, and sane information density.
Liquid Glass is the antithesis of great UI design: it is fashion. Form over function.
Great design “isn’t just what it looks like, it’s how it works”. And Liquid Glass makes nearly everything it touches look pretty, but work worse.
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This is what Android looked like in December 2006, before the iPhone.
It was totally unremarkable. They had no idea what they were doing.
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Revenue per employee, 2015:
Yahoo: $419,830
Twitter: $462,009
MSFT: $789,145
Google: $1,160,648
Facebook: $1,412,655
Apple: $2,032,304
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My hotel in San Francisco listed "24-hour room service" as an amenity. When I asked for a menu, I was told to download Uber Eats.
This city truly is a dystopian nightmare.
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This is exactly how I perceive Google as a brand and company, in performance art form. Frenetic, tasteless, unfocused, and cringey.
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The “T” key stopped working on my 15-inch MacBook Pro keyboard last week.
This is how much Apple quoted me to replace the key:
$871.42
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My neighbors from 2009 became billionaires today.
Every time we talked about their company, Airbnb, I thought it was an absurd idea that would never work.
I don’t make snap judgements about ideas anymore.
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Loom sold to Atlassian for $975 million. Great product, great founders. Well done, and congratulations.
What I want to know is the story behind the missing $25 million that would have made it a cool billion.
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Perspective:
Netflix: $25.6B
Tesla: $23.7B
Macy's: $19.7B
WhatsApp: $19B
Whole Foods: $19B
Gap: $18.9B
Sony: $17.7B
United Airlines: $15.7B
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The will of the people does not directly trump the law. This is why the judiciary is a separate branch of the US government. How can you not understand this?
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You just have to be right once, about one big thing, to look like a genius for the rest of your life.
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I miss the tech startup community of 2007-2013. There was so much optimism and camaraderie among founders.
Those things seem to have faded over the years. Founders today have a very different, less communal and more capitalistic experience.
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Iteration speed > rate of industry change.
If this arrow switches directions, you're pretty much screwed.
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I am going to say something that a lot of my friends have been thinking but have been afraid to say.
I was optimistic about Trump and his administration. But that optimism is gone. He has epically failed, and this is a disaster. The random on-and-off tariffs, humiliation of foreign leaders—it's all bad. DOGE turned out to be a complete joke. Not to mention the foreign policy of surrender. It makes no sense.
The world thinks less of the US today than it did a year ago, and it will think even worse of it in a year from now.
I was hopefully optimistic, but reality has turned out to be even worse than my worst estimations.
This is almost uniformly the opinion of everyone I know who is not actively in the Trump administration—but almost all of them are afraid to say anything because of the vindictive nature of the current government. This administration is sad and un-American.
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Whenever I learn something that changes my mental model of reality, I try to pause and appreciate the moment.
This photo of Mt. Everest, taken yesterday, shows ~320 people in line to get their picture taken at the summit.
I’ll never think of Everest the same again.
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Apple just pissed off:
Dropbox,
Sparrow,
Instapaper,
Readability,
Remember the Milk,
Facebook,
RIM, &
the carriers.
Well done.
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During the final three months of 2017, Spotify lost $7.9 million every day. Despite having 71 million paying subscribers, it lost $1.5 billion last year.
sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/…
This is one of the most brutal balance sheets I’ve ever seen. The music industry is savage.
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Dear Apple,
When replacing a single key on one of your product’s absurdly fragile keyboards costs nearly $1000, you 1) very poorly designed the product, and 2) are insulting your customers by charging them that much to deal with your mistake.
Your loyal friend,
@dcurtis
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Profit per employee, 2015:
Twitter: -$129,334
Yahoo: $54,182
MSFT: $102,822
Google: $250,367
Facebook: $290,600
Apple: $464,296
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After extensive testing, I can now report definitively that the solution to life’s problems is not to aimlessly travel the world while living in luxury hotels.
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Amazon’s AWS has become obscenely expensive and bloated. The cloud needs a Costco.
Something like Kirkland Web Services — excellent products, no frills, and inexpensive without sacrificing reliability or quality.
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After a month with both devices:
iPhone X: nearly flawless. Cannot think of a single thing worth complaining about.
Pixel 2 XL: So unbelievably shitty in literally every way that I can’t believe Google shipped it. The power adapter it ships with is nice, though.
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Uber spent about $91,980,000 every day during the second quarter of this year, leading to a $5.2 billion loss on $3.17 billion revenue.
Somehow, we've replaced the taxi industry with a public transit system subsidized not by taxes but by convoluted machinations of capitalism.
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I forgot to update my Apple Card autopay info and discovered this crazy fact: if you manage to miss an Apple Card payment, Apple will disable your Apple ID, iCloud, and App Store accounts as hostage.
Re-enabling them takes 3-5+ business days. I’m surprised this is legal.
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A sad trend I’ve noticed is that interesting conversations which used to be held in public are now happening in private chat groups.
Twitter has become far too dangerous a place to express new ideas, so the elite chat amongst themselves. Anything public is purely innocuous.
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The Tesla event could have told a huge, inspiring story about the future, explained the philosophy behind what they’re building, and then put everything into the context of how human life is going to change for the better.
Instead, Musk randomly and briefly showed off a couple of world-changing concept vehicles, casually introduced a humanoid robot(!), and then thew out some dates and prices as though he was making them up on the spot. He raised a hundred questions, ignored all of them, and then, after complaining about parking lots, said he wanted to go party.
There was no concept of a bigger plan, not even a cohesive theme. Tesla is doing incredible stuff, and changing the world. It’s insane to me that they are so bad at telling the story of their work.
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SpaceX's entire history, including rocket design, testing, and launch operations, has cost less than Facebook paid for Instagram.
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Me, a designer, 10 years ago: “The navigation is weird, and your round-rect radii are disharmonious. It's a disaster! You'll never succeed.“
Me, an investor, today: “No one cares about radii. Build and ship a flawed version of your vision. See if anyone even notices or cares.“
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Just found these screenshots I took of Instagram’s beta, when it had 43 users.
Now it has 500+ million. Crazy.
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The single most consistent thing I've noticed about successful people is this: they are eternally, often delusionally, optimistic.
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We now live in a bizarro world where Microsoft cares more about building computers for creative people than Apple.
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Revenue per employee:
Yahoo!: $426,000.
Microsoft: $775,900.
Google: $931,600.
Facebook: $1,102,000.
Apple: $2,262,000.
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Twitter needs a full-time, wartime CEO, a great product director, and 1000+ fewer employees. Its problems are so obvious it makes me furious
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Snap Inc.
• NYSE symbol “SNAP”
• Grew by 3.4 employees/day in 2016 to 1,859
• Evan Spiegel, 26, will be youngest CEO on major exchange ever
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I wrote code yesterday for the first time in months, and it felt amazing.
It reminded me that I am a maker, and that I love nothing more than making ideas real.
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Don't forget that everyone has a story.
The VC being criticized on Twitter. The entrepreneur who made some mistakes. The designer or engineer who hasn't said anything because of chilling effects.
Social media has become net negative for humanity. But people still have stories.
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Just imagine the endless email threads, the countless meetings, and the heated arguments between product designers, PMs, and VPs that resulted in the decision to make this absurd question part of the flow when you first open Microsoft Office 2016 for Mac.
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I made something new. It’s called Conquer Earth:
conquer.earth/dcurtis
It’s a map of the places you’ve been in the world.
It’s incredibly simple, and works exactly like putting pins in a map on the wall. I’ve wanted something like this for years. Can’t wait to add features.
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A common thought I have when reading about Elon Musk: how many Elon Musks are out there who lack the initial resources to be Elon Musk?
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Peter Thiel’s $1M bet on Trump may end up being more personally valuable to him than his $500k bet on Facebook.
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What’s the last website or app you visited that was so original or so beautifully designed that it made you stop and think, “holy shit”?
I feel like it happens to me less and less over time, and I need some new inspiration.
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In 2018, I took several huge risks. They all failed spectacularly. The past five months have been the most personally painful and professionally difficult of my life.
I'm going to take even bigger risks next time.
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It took eight years, but I finally just opened a random person’s car door and sat down, thinking it was my Uber.
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I’m pretty happy about how completely Tesla shorts have gotten screwed.
It’s generally a bad idea to bet against companies building the future; they have very unique risk profiles, so traditional analysis often betrays.
Also, it’s pretty stupid to bet against Elon Musk.
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When Twitter’s down, I feel disconnected from the world. There are literally zero other good places to check what’s happening *right now*.
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Ignoring Twitter has not really improved my life.
Northern Japan is magical in the winter.
So far, 2018 is unsatisfying.
I’ve eaten sushi for every meal during the past week.
I still have no idea what I want to do with my life.
AirPods can survive a washing machine.
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Monthly active users:
LinkedIn: 160M.
Twitter: 230M.
Zynga: 232M.
WeChat: 236M.
WhatsApp: 300M.
Chrome: 750M.
Yahoo: 800M.
Facebook: 1,150M
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The most destructive thing smart people do is spend their lives waiting. Live your dreams and aspirations now.
Don't wait.
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Net profit per employee:
Facebook: $11,470
Microsoft: $164,500
Google: $199,300
Yahoo!: $337,200
Apple: $573,400
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If you’re concerned about Cambridge Analyitica’s use of Facebook’s data, imagine what Facebook’s own researchers can do with it internally.
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Good memory! It was a life timeline that predicted how long you were going to live and showed some key milestones along the way.
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I don't understand people who are not trying to become the best in the world at what they do.
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Jack Dorsey runs two public companies with his phone--he doesn't use a computer.
I'll know I've made it when I am running four public companies with just my watch.
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I miss clubs. I miss dancing. I miss airlines. I miss fine dining. I miss meeting new people. I miss traveling to escape reality. I miss new cultures. I miss nice hotels. I miss snow. I miss the beach.
I miss life.
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This is actually, literally the front page of today's USA Today. Because these days the news can be bought.
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Dear Google,
I successfully received the 5 notifications, 18 emails, and 6 popups about your changed privacy policy.
Please send more.
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I remain in shock at the quality of the new App Store on iOS 11. It’s less like a store, more like a beautiful, well-curated daily magazine.
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In order of importance for San Francisco government—possibly the worst major city government in the country—to address:
1. Drugs/homeless/safety
....
99999. Scooters.
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Apple’s strategy of investing huge amounts of time and money into emoji technology is fascinating.
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Me, walking into a Patagonia store: "Hello, I am going to the real Patagonia. What will I need?"
Patagonia store: "We don't have that stuff. You should go to The North Face, down the street."
Me: 🤨
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This is the most complex user interface I have ever designed.
It took more than a month and the design specification spans more than 40 artboards.
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Do things with impact. Work with great people. Be ambitious. Don't get lost in bureaucracy. Don't waste time. Travel a lot.
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Kind of glad that Facebook’s satellite blew up. I think Facebook has proven itself this evening to be among the worst things for the world.
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When I was a teenager in middle school, I emailed Steve Jobs after dropping my Titanium PowerBook, cracking the screen. He forwarded the email to an “executive support” person and a brand new PowerBook arrived three days later, for free.
That is not today’s Apple.
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“Work like there is someone working twenty-four hours a day to take it all away from you.”
— MARK CUBAN
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Making something good is hard.
Making something great takes 10x more time and effort than any sane person would consider reasonable.
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Tim Cook is gay. So am I. I'd been meaning to tell you by writing a badass Bloomberg Businessweek editorial, but a tweet will have to do.
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Accidentally plugged a proprietary Power-over-Ethernet cable into my MacBook, which shorted all of the wires together, sparked, and then caused every WiFi AP in the hotel to melt.
This is probably the most damage I have ever done to a hotel during a single stay.
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This is absolutely amazing: Steve Jobs giving a talk in 1980.
piped.video/watch?v=0lvMgMrN…
He changed so little during his life.
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Goals for the month of May, in order of importance:
1. Stirctly adhere to diet and exercise plan.
2. Spend more time around intellectually rigorous, optimistic people.
3. Figure out what to do with the next year of my life, and ensure it has clear purpose and forward momentum.
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I want to start a hotel chain.
I want to work on manufacturing tech.
I want to build tools for remote workers.
I want to reduce the cost of “luxury”.
I want to disrupt logistics/shipping.
I want to work on things that make travel less expensive.
I have no idea what I want to do.
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For many years, I tried to build a brand around a dot. The dot follows you around, has some personality, and eventually becomes your companion. I could never quite get it right.
So glad to see OpenAI execute on the idea so insanely well. This is awesome work.
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"At any moment, Justin Bieber uses 3% of our infrastructure. Racks of servers are dedicated to him. - A guy who works at Twitter
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There are only two kinds of people who are qualified to give startup advice on social media: those who have failed miserably and spectacularly, and those who have succeeded more than once.
VC/startup advice from anyone else is usually obvious, meaningless, and hollow.
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Uber in 2018, roughly:
Revenue: $11.26B (Eats: $1.45B)
Costs: $14.15B
Debt interest payments: $648mm
Operating loss: -$3.03B
Trips: 5.22B
Rev./trip: $2.15
Monthly Active Users: 91M
Cash on hand: $6.41B
Total debt: $7.49B
Google Maps cost: $58M
CEO comp: $45M
Employees: 22,263
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A product request:
Step 1: Copy all of the features from the old Google Finance.
Step 2: Make the graphs awesome: easy to use, Tufte-approved, and Flash-free.
Step 3: Charge for it.
Google Finance used to be the perfect quick reference tool. Now it’s heinously obtuse.
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Dengue fever in February, COVID-19 in March.
2020 has been quite a bit more exciting than I expected.
(I'm doing fine right now, just quarantined and letting my immune system do its job.)
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Nearly insolvent company which operates at an $8 million/day loss and has a literally unworkable business model goes public, ending the day with a $26.6B market cap.
Hashtag Spotify.
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As a designer, this is hard to admit:
Extremely beautiful design is a negative warning signal for startup success. (70%+ accuracy.)
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I haven’t wanted to try a revolutionary new device that is going to change the world this badly since the Humane pin.
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Apple is very heavily marketing the iPhone 11 Pro as water resistant, but the fine print says, "Liquid damage not covered under warranty."
Seems more than a bit dishonest to advertise a feature and then disclaim responsibility for it actually working properly.
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Read this: blog.samaltman.com/how-to-be…
I can delete about 100 draft blog posts and just link to this article instead. It summarizes almost all of my core beliefs, and these are the principles upon which I try to live my life. Well done, @sama
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The only real long-term institutional threat to Amazon is that it has no taste. It’s not a human company. It has no personality. It just is.
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iPhone is now very clearly a geriatric product.
There isn’t much left to improve without changing the form factor or breaking physics. We’re just going to keep getting minuscule incremental improvements that, for the most part, are completely invisible during normal use.
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Monthly active users:
Yelp: 84M.
Instagram: 100M.
Line: 150M.
LinkedIn: 160M.
Twitter: 200M.
Zynga: 232M.
WeChat: 320M.
Facebook: 1.1B.
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A guy just tried to mug me on 6th St. in San Francisco. Two secret service agents jumped out of an unmarked car with M-16s and stopped him.
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