JacobAldridge

I remember when Sriracha disappeared from the market for a while (2022?).

The story I heard at the time was heavily positive, talking up the handshakes and relationship angle - suggesting the supplier had a bad harvest (drought) so the manufacturer had decided not to produce sauce rather than produce an inferior product.

Either rumours or more lies - and a good way to help the market forget the earlier flavour and be grateful for a sloppier solution to 'return'?

As the aphorism goes, there are Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics.

I don’t know if there’s an xkcd for this, but there’s certainly an SMBC - https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-02-17

I don’t think I’ve ever finished Doom, and I mostly played it on other people’s PCs when I was in high school. Perhaps I’ll add that to my future retirement goals.

Only if they know their Alphabet

I think everyone on Twitter still calls it Facebook, but not sure if every Google employee thinks differently.

Flashbacks to 2008, when u/zemaj searched for NetworkSolutionsSucksBalls.com so we could all chuckle at the Network Solutions man at work under that domain.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=96246

Plus ça change.

How ironic that now English is the global lingua franca.

Wholly unrelated to the topic at hand, but while you’re here…

I minimise how many email subscriptions I have, so don’t keep pace with many writers. But I have an annual tradition going back maybe 8-10 years of over my Christmas break reading all of your content for the year.

It’s been fun watching the journey from Uberman sleep hacking to multiple properties with friends (an aspiration of mine), to more recently tea + relationship + Vegas.

Keep being you, and thanks for sharing.

I’ll join the others in chorus recommending an in-person attendance to the Van Gogh museum.

I attended after enjoying another classic Amsterdam experience, munching through a potent hash brownie. Despite giving myself the recommended enjoyment and recovery time, the effects really kicked in just as we entered the Van Gogh Museum.

It was brilliant!

My beautiful wife abandoned me, because my absorption in some of the works made her fear we’d be kicked out.

And pertinent to this thread, I maintain from that experience that Wheatfield with Crows (https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/collection/s0149V1962) is also an Impressionist self-portrait of sorts. Harder in digital form to spot the cloudy eyes, crow-black eyebrows, and wheaty-beard - but if you get to Amsterdam, or Paris where it’s about to go on tour, get yourself as close as possible and see if you see what I see!

I’m in a similar boat. Currently using an iPhone 8 (that’s less than 2 years old); I figure the next move will be one of the Minis perhaps?

I agree with you. Debt is a terrible master, but can be a wonderful servant and I wouldn’t be as financially successful as I am without leverage. And that’s not a wealth empire - just a regular family geared into real estate.

Of course, the “ZIRP” zero interest rate environment that predominated the 10 years since this article was written has been a historical anomaly. Though perhaps part of a longer trend, investors must be cautious not to view the benefits of recent leverage as evidence of easy future gains.

But if there was one thing that differentiates our financial position from our less-financially-free friends, it would be our comfort with debt as part of a well-developed investment strategy.

On the less technical front, rebranding and repackaging my SME coaching (10-100 employees) business. I explain that AI means I bring Actual Intelligence, but increasingly I’m getting hands on implementing some actual AI tools to free up some time or cash for bigger strategic projects.

I’m also slowly making baby steps towards replacing myself with an AI coach I’ve helped build. If I don’t, someone else will, and I think I’m well-placed to give it a crack!

I was only 12 when Shoemaker-Levy banged into Jupiter in 1994, so wiser minds or those with better memories may correct me.

At the time, the leading theory for what killed the dinosaurs was still quite terrestrial - volcanos and climate change.

There was increasing evidence for the meteorite impact theory, but a big block was “Space is big, outside the early formation of the Solar System comets and asteroids don’t just slam into planets”.

Then comet Shoemaker-Levy showed us that they actually do, perhaps still quite frequently, with Jupiter playing an imperfect shield for Earth. It was one of the last roadblocks to the now-widely accepted impact theory (still not ‘solved’ of course, and perhaps only part of the extinction puzzle).

Dinosaurs were back in the zeitgeist thanks to Jurassic Park (1993), but Shoemaker-Levy and the impact theory gave us the 1998 twin movies Armageddon and (the better of the two, imho) Deep Impact.

I think I just realised why no farmers trained in Artificial Insemination are opening my “Detailed” and “Visual” Artificial Intelligence tutorials…

Not meaningless, just temporary in a way they didn’t forecast.

Imagine you could buy a house for $200,000, live in it for a year, and then sell it for $1M. Would you take that deal, even if you didn’t like the seller?

Don't get me wrong - I never saw the value! Just answering the question.

Why in 2021 did they give him that payout? Likely because they thought it offered the best ROI moving forward (and for some shareholders, especially anyone who sold at the post-listing peak, it did).

It definitely wasn't recognition for past success.

"Neumann’s ability to negotiate such rich terms was helped by the fact that his shareholdings controlled 10 times the votes of a normal shareholder, and he was able to argue for a higher price to cede control."

Correctly or, more likely, not - it seems the payoff was made in early 2021 at a time when valuations were soaring and there was a renewed push for an IPO. Neumann could have blocked that.

If I'm parsing a quick read of the data correctly, they backdoored an IPO in October 2021 at an $8bn valuation - and shares jumped 13% (so + $1Bn). A snapshot at that time could be used to argue they paid Neumann $x00 million to realise a multi-Billion dollar valuation and $1Bn+ growth in market cap.

Could they have forecast the rapid decline thereafter? Maybe some of those investors didn't care, as long as they got some return? If Neumann had dragged the battle out for another year, into 2022 when the markets went South, it probably would have cost WeWork a lot more on paper than whatever they paid him.

I would bet picodollars that rarely happens here…

Depending on the size of the company, you’d probably need a team; but there aren’t too many companies with a tax attorney on the staff so the accounting team would be doing the heavy lifting.

What if all corporate accountants were required to be government employees?

So then what if a company is seeking to expand internationally, and looking at options for various reasons (including costs, which includes the tax burden). Isn’t it a conflict of interest to have a US government employee weighing in on how to improve a company at the loss of IRS revenue?

And that’s an extreme example. Any company accountant or CFO is going to be involved in regular decisions where “paying less tax” is an important outcome to consider.

I always remember c as the constant speed of light [in a vacuum], but never pondered the actual origin beyond the perhaps rudimentary algebra “x, y, z are variables and a, b, c are constants”.

I don’t think I thought c came from “constant”, because that’s a very English-centric view of science, but the annoying thing about reading a smart article like this is that it’s impossible to explore the depths of how your mind worked before acquiring the knowledge!

For anyone not familiar with the (now 16 year old) comment that Colin is perhaps best remembered here for - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079

He’s brought far more value to the community than that, of course.

I’m reminded of the paper, just over 10 years ago, that reporting measuring neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light.

When published, the authors made it clear: this is probably wrong, but we can’t see where we made a mistake … so what if we’re right and just upended relativity theory?

That was turned out to be a measuring error [1]. This one may be the same, though the lead authors publishing two versions of the paper - one with only 3 names, ostensibly because the Nobel Prize can only be awarded to a maximum of 3 people - suggests less modesty and vulnerability on their behalf.

I hope they’re right though!

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.10099

Nice concept Jacques.

I’m reminded of the (apocryphal?) story, about the Ranger at Yellowstone National Park who was asked why they didn’t just make all the bins bear-proof. His answer:

“There is a surprisingly large overlap between the smartest bears and the least smart humans.”

From everything I’ve read, outside those models that have plagiarism seeds that their own tools can detect, there is a surprisingly large overlap between the most humanlike AI and the most robotlike human writing.

I’m making some youtube videos with my 4 year old (mostly as a bonding activity). They’re fairly generic fare for that age group and genre - a bit of plot, I set a puzzle for her to solve, it reveals some clues or saves the day.

For the first puzzle she had to put the cities Tokyo, Paris, LA, and Brisbane (where we live) in order. Using colours, since she can’t read yet!

Then we had to discuss why those cities were in that order (answer below).

For the video, I figured I would doctor a Google search to land on a page explaining the answer. The actual article I found that mostly worked was about 12 results down.

Then I tried Bing’s Chat instead. It spat out the correct answer in 2 sentences. Deus ex machina indeed! (The four cities are the Summer Olympic hosts, 2020-2032).

So I disagree that it’s impossible. And I can absolutely see the value - asking “why are these cities in this order?” is a real question, like “what might be causing the squeaking sound when my car brakes?” or “what was the movie Audrey Hepburn made with the photographer?”

Search Engines aren’t great for those kind of questions - just google “What’s a good brownie recipe?”. LLMs can give the user exactly what they want, or even prompt for the additional extra context.

Not that they will always be correct; hence the flaw.

That’s a Lot of salt…

https://jacobaldridge.com/articles/

I’ve not been especially active the past few years. Now doing something at least weekly, but via email and intermittently uploading to my blog.

“Starting in 1995, Breitwieser and Kleinklaus committed an average of one theft every two weeks for seven years.”

I can imagine smaller galleries had only a few cameras, if any, during that time period.

With apologies for not remembering the article I read, to provide a source…

I have read that stolen masterpieces are sometimes used as currency for (high level) criminals. Similar to how Tide bottles were (still are?) used as a value exchange within homeless communities, “I owe you $X00,000 but would you accept this Picasso instead?” passes some stolen art around at a large discount to “market value”.

Several years ago I bought myself a post-WWII era copy of Hanmerton’s “Practical Knowledge For All” - the English encyclopaediast had edited together 50 educational courses in a set of 6 books. I love immersing myself in both the content and the historical context of the lessons.

Back then, Jupiter had 11 moons and Saturn had 9 “plus the doubtful Themis” which was discovered by an American astronomer in 1905 but never seen again…