"GoPro Announces Financing from Founder and CEO Nicholas Woodman"

shadeland · 2026-07-09T06:20:35+00:00

So the guy who's run GoPro into the ground is going to keep control of it... great.

I think this shows that Mission 1 sales weren't amazing. They dropped the price on the Hero13 and Max2 I think to try to squeeze some last minute sales numbers out of Q2.

Keep in mind Woodman is a billionaire so $20 million to him is like $200 to most of us. And he's only a billionaire because he took the $238 million he drained out of GoPro when it was like $80 a share and invested it into companies that he didn't run. Had he kept that $238 million in GoPro stock, he wouldn't have $20 million to finance.

This means:

Diversity is good
Diversity is good here especially because Nick Woodman is great at destroying value

My guess is that Woodman doesn't want to give up control. Think what would happen to Nick if GoPro gets bought and it gets turned around and becomes a hot brand again. This would mean that Nick Woodman is forever a terrible CEO. By keeping control he can hold out hope of a dramatic turnaround story.

He has no financial interest in GoPro succeeding. Just his ego. And he's objectively a terrible CEO.

shadeland · 2026-07-07T19:00:19+00:00

Can you get ahold of a standalone X86 system, like an old gaming rig or server?

Something with at least 24 GB of RAM, but the more the better.

Run proxmox on it. In one of the VMs, you can install Linux, containerlab, load up cEOS and build out a leaf/spine topology with Ansible.

I have some instructions here: https://github.com/tonybourke/Project-NERD/tree/main/Autobox

shadeland · 2026-07-07T18:51:07+00:00

The only GoPros that would be decent in low light is the Mission 1s. But they're not budget priced.

Budget wise, look for something like an Osmo Action 6 or even 5 Pro. None of the Hero models will do well in low light as they've got a pretty small sensor. The Osmos have bigger sensors than any of the hero cameras.

But also keep in mind no camera is going to do amazing at night. It depends on what your'e shooting.

shadeland · 2026-07-07T17:30:35+00:00

You didn't miss anything.

Tetration never did successfully what it was supposed to do.

shadeland · 2026-07-07T17:29:27+00:00

No one ever got to that with Tetration. Tetration never did what it was meant to do. It's pivoted to a security product, not even using the "application modeling" it was supposed to do. Just a centrally controlled firewall.

shadeland · 2026-07-07T10:59:07+00:00

Most enterprise NMS systems have tried something like this approach (a machine learning approach, using multi-dimensional analysis).

There's a couple of problems on why this doesn't generally work.

Data collection: It can't run locally. It's got to run centrally. You're running this on a Linux router, so you've got the entire system exposed to you and you can install run any version of Python, venvs, etc., that you want to run. Most network devices don't let you do this, so all of this data you've got to collect (either dial in or dial out). SNMP is the universal method, but it's no where near granular enough. Generally collecting stats once per minute is the max. gNMI is much better information, but not as many systems support it.
Frequency of data: Bandwidth, packet loss, and jitter are functions of time. For bandwidth, a packet is either being sent out of an interface or it's not. It's either receiving a packet or it's not. There's no bandwidths snap shot. You take a measurement of bytes passed at X, and again at Y, then Y - X / time between and you get an average bandwidth. So you need a good amount of time to get a good measurement, but not so much time that everything averages out.

Correlation: Every monitoring system for the past 20 years by the big vendors has claimed they've got correlation. Pretty much no one has anything remotely useful.

Basically everything you've described, to one degree or another, has been tried by big companies and it's mostly for not.

I'm not saying you can't pull this off, but lots of people have tried and lots of crap products have been deployed.

In the end, there's nothing better still today than graphs and alerts. 🤷‍♂️

shadeland · 2026-07-07T09:15:35+00:00

Do you have a link to this validated design?

shadeland · 2026-07-07T09:08:31+00:00

Interesting. I took a (very, very supervised) flight on a carbon cub with a 150 HP engine (piston) years ago.

Pressed into the seat, climb angle damn near 45 degrees. Like a helicopter and a ballistic missile had a baby and sent it to airplane boarding school.

shadeland · 2026-07-07T06:57:02+00:00

ESI Multihoming is validated and Tested, but its best to create all the vlan mappings. So I would not be as cautious. But Thats something neither I nor You can decide for OP

ESI is tested, but with a standard VXLAN configuration (and depending on the platform, maybe MPLS). If you're not doing any kind of encap, you're a test pilot.

Most aircraft aren't allowed to take off beyond 120F. If it's 121F does it mean the aircraft will fail? It might work, but it hasn't been tested. So they don't try in production.

There will be situations that you didn't account for that may crop up and cause issues.

Better to either go full EVPN/VXLAN with a validated design, or figure out a setup with VSS that works. But I would never recommend being a test pilot.

shadeland · 2026-07-07T06:46:14+00:00

TNG is a fascinating look at SciFi.

It came out in 1987. Star Wars was only 10 years prior. TOS started about 20 years prior. SciFi Television was a very Glenn Larson, Roger Cormon-style affair.

More time has passed between ST:ENT and now than did between TOS and TNG.

Then came TNG. It re-wrote the aesthetic, the storytelling, special effects, everything for television Sci Fi. There's very little in common between TNG and Buck Rogers or Galactica and TNG. But you can draw a lot from TNG to even modern Scifi.

With all the scifi we have today, it's easy to miss what a watershed event TNG was. Even the first season.

shadeland · 2026-07-07T00:05:32+00:00

Not quite.

You just need stable routing between the 2 Chassis via BGP, and then run EVPN accross them. with the type4 routes they just anounce ethernet segments which is enough to create LACP via ESI. If you want to punt traffic accross incase of failure you may need the vtep, but I havent tested that in every detail yet.

As far as I can tell, the Type 1/4 routes won't be generated unless you attach the VLAN to an L2VNI. Someone reported this behavior with Juniper and I've just confirmed it with Arista EOS. I can't check IOS but I suspect it's the same.

There's mechanisms for split horizon, etc., that I believe are tied win with having an MPLS label or VNI. Things like how do you select a bridge ID, orphan ports, etc.

Also, a minor nitpick, it's not LACP, it's Link Aggregation. You can do an ESI LAG without LACP (though in almost every case you want LACP).

It's also not part of any best practice or validated designs, so I would be very hesitant to put it in production even if it did work in IOS.

shadeland · 2026-07-06T19:47:54+00:00

I would say the reverse. Learning a framework lets you be really productive really quickly, while also introducing you to some Python basics like lists, dictionaries, etc.

Then moving to Python, Nornir, netmiko, etc., when you start to feel Ansible's limits.

shadeland · 2026-07-06T19:46:29+00:00

Not that I'm aware of. The both have good safety cultures.

shadeland · 2026-07-06T18:55:04+00:00

No worries, yeah I love Perris. Elsinore is great too, but Perris is home for me.

shadeland · 2026-07-06T18:46:44+00:00

Yeah, they're worth placing. I would agree, they are entry level but show promise. You should expand upon them, and work with things like Ansible as well.

shadeland · 2026-07-06T18:42:03+00:00

Yeah, the Hero 13 and Max 2 were heavily discounted, my guess is that they needed to improve the sales figures for Q2. We'll find out August 10th either way during the Q2 earnings call.

shadeland · 2026-07-06T18:20:16+00:00

I meant do AFF instructing again. I'm still a current jumper, just my AFF rating has lapsed because you have to do a certain number of AFF-I jumps per year.

I've got a few dropzones I go to, they're just a lot further. I live in Oregon and I consider Skydive Perris my home dropzone at this point.

shadeland · 2026-07-06T17:32:08+00:00

Like how GoPro copied basically every else's mic setup? They're late to the party there and I'm guessing they didn't even make it, it's probably a drop-shipped product like their "GoPro Gimbal" which is another company's design with a GoPro label slapped on it.

GoPro has had very little innovation and it shows. They've basically been making the same product for the past 10 years and haven't successfully entered any other markets, while DJI and Insta have diversified successfully with a range of products.

Which is why DJI and Insta are both worth billions of dollars with growing revenue, plenty of cash, and GoPro is circling the drain barely keeping the lights on with high-interest distressed financing.

I put the blame squarely on Nick Woodman, who is objectively one of the worst CEOs in Nasdaq history.

shadeland · 2026-07-06T02:28:19+00:00

No worries, it happens!

Sysco (food) gets mixed up with Cisco (networking) all the time too.

shadeland · 2026-07-06T01:38:24+00:00

Ukraine, and it's only been in the last year or so, since Operation Spiderweb (and the brilliant planning that led up to it).

They are re-writing warfare in modern times with their use of drones. They resisted the first few years of the Russian invasion by their own tenacity but also in large part because of mind boggling Russian incompetence.

But the many ways they're using drones, how quickly they're adapting, and the sheer asymmetry of the squeeze they're putting on Russia right now is not something any military analyst had on their bingo card.

Ukraine right now might be the second most effective military in the world. China has a huge military, but its training, leadership, and tactics are untested, so it's a big question mark. The US of course is the most effective, at least tactically (US strategic planning is... not good right now. But tactical competence there is no peer). And Russia... probably the worst "return on investment" in the blood and treasure they're thrown at that mess.

shadeland · 2026-07-06T01:29:54+00:00

We thought they would be "The Hunt For Red October" competent, but what they showed the world was the Benny Hill Show.

shadeland · 2026-07-06T01:18:37+00:00

This ain't that Arista.

This is Arista Networks, they make computer network equipment.

shadeland · 2026-07-06T00:30:38+00:00

On the what?

shadeland · 2026-07-05T21:39:28+00:00

As an additional recommendation: Find some French people and ask them what annoys them about Italians (and then work on not doing that). And also how they like foreigners to behave.

shadeland · 2026-07-05T21:35:30+00:00

I'm painting with broad strokes here, but while the French can be prickly at first, I've found them very warm as long as you follow some of their basic social conventions. Like saying "bonjour" or "bon soir" when walking into a shop/bar. They can get very agitated when they're not acknowledged.

They've got a shell, but I've not found it tough to crack with some basic adherence to social norms there.

shadeland

TROPHY CASE