bransonf

Bingo

It’s increasingly difficult to find product reviews with search engines.

Massive auto generated content farms take a product name and add loads of AI-generated filler text. Pop in a bunch of banner ads and an affiliate link and they have huge economic incentive to scale these operations.

I’m very pessimistic about the direction the internet is going these days. The AI crisis isn’t going to be sentient AI trying to kill us, it’s going to be a flood of noise over knowledge.

https://gh.bmj.com/content/3/5/e000850

$5.32-8.87 cost of production depending on the insulin analog.

As noted above, I did not account for R&D and manufacturing capacity.

Regardless, I tried to estimate conservatively at a $12-13 per vial overall cost. My napkin math is certainly wrong.

The point is that Walmart still stands to generate a multi-billion dollar per year profit on the sale of this insulin. (Unless my market capture estimate is wrong by an order of 6+, which it could be)

To be clear, I’m not opposed (in fact grateful) that Walmart is competing in the insulin market. However, I still find it unfortunate that we in the United States pay more for Insulin than any other country in the world, even with this competition.

This is great, but (obviously) not purely benevolent.

A vial of analog insulin costs something like $6-7 to produce, probably less at Walmart scale. The distribution costs probably make the net cost somewhere still in the $7-10 range.

That’s a $60-65 or ~90% margin per Vial.

5-10 million or so insulin users in the US, let’s assume Walmart captures 3 million, at 3 vials per month.

$180 * 12 * 3mil ~~ 6.5 Billion.

Current market cap 400B

Lots of assumptions, but Walmart may have just added 2% of market cap per annum by insulin sales?

Didn’t see it anywhere else in the thread, so I’ll toss in my current: The Uplift Pursuit [0]

Great lumbar, head and neck support, lots of adjustments. The reclining is very nice, it’s on a double pivot. Pretty sure it’s a ‘replica’ of a Scandinavian design, the same design featured in HBO’s Silicon Valley (the CEO chair)

I paid closer to $300 this time last year, but apparently it’s gone up to nearly $400 now.

[0] https://www.upliftdesk.com/pursuit-ergonomic-chair-by-uplift...

While reading I really expected there to be some terrible conclusion, like “we accidentally ordered 100 burritos” but nope, just a fascinating burrito program.

Absolutely agree, thanks for this reply. I was cognizant of the foreign policy implications (how would this possibly get implemented globally) but I hadn’t heard or considered your points 2 and 3.

Given how much lobbying I suspect there is, 3 probably isn’t all that distant of a concern. Especially in older industries, say railroads or trucking, I understand there could be a lot of contention.

And as others mention, I think there needs to be a separation of taxation by segments of polluting activities. Would burning fuel in a combustion engine count as taxable energy production? Only power plants? What about agriculture, construction, material production?

“In hindsight I wish we’d made these other measures of well-being the primary outcome measure,” he said. “However the world — the Food and Drug Administration, the European Medicines Agency — doesn’t recognize those measures as valid.”

Am I understanding this correctly? Other academics are critical of the outcome measured, but it was specifically chosen because of recognition by national authorities.

It’s a simple equation: So long as there is more money in mining BTC than there is cost in energy to mine it, mining will proceed.

No entity in the world can control the price of crypto. But, we can and already do regulate energy production.

I think we need a carbon tax, that is specifically a financial disincentive towards any means of energy production that directly pollutes the atmosphere.

Seriously, what are the current best arguments against levying such a disincentive?

Moreover, if energy were priced correctly (its toll on the climate priced in) would BTC become higher in value? That is, we have a supply, increasing at a rate fixed between the arbitrage of energy and mining efficiency. If energy were to become more expensive, the growth in supply would slow. Assuming demand remains constant or continues to grow as well, the only way for price to go is up.

Amazing... learning of the existence/term of polyominoes is a breakthrough for me.

I’ve recently been working on developing a novel statistical test to quantify sensitivity to the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP). The limiting factor has been the ability to efficiently generate arbitrarily shaped polygons on a lattice at random. In essence, this is needed to stochastically reallocate a spatial characteristic and measure variance.

Apparently, the exact solution I’m looking for is Donald Knuth’s algorithm X [0]. And I also found this interesting application of the algorithm [1].

I simply cannot express how much my curiosity has just peaked. Moreover, I now have reason to cite both Solomon Golomb and Donald Knuth in a paper.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth%27s_Algorithm_X

[1] https://gfredericks.com/blog/99

Sad to see it go, CTP has been an essential resource for colleagues and I over the last year.

Post March, the Covid data space is going to change drastically (frankly, it already has) with this news as well as SafeGraph ending its Covid data consortium. Only a matter of time before JHU CSSE and the NYTimes wind down their efforts.

The reality is two fold and unfortunate. Case data is seemingly less pertinent, but vaccine data is less fruitful. It’s going to be at least a few quarters before vaccination is widely available and Covid is going to become endemic. Thus, both metrics are vitally important to how we traverse the next year.

It has been amazing to see widespread data efforts around Covid, and the entire field of epidemiology could benefit from collaborations of this scale. So thank you folks at the Covid Tracking Project and anyone else who has contributed to similar data efforts in the last year.

This SO thread [0] on the subject is interesting as well. I suspect this really has no harmful consequences, most browsers have a max iframe depth, although I don’t know how it varies.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14223628/why-does-a-self...

But at that point Tinder was already widely in use. The general public still can’t join Clubhouse at this point even if they want to.

This has to pressure Clubhouse to actually launch. It’s been what, like a year in “invite only” beta?

I feel like Clubhouse is riding their exclusivity clout at this point. They should have had more than enough time to validate and scale by now.

Facebook is going to hit this fast, and they’re going to launch to a far larger audience. If FB beats Clubhouse to mainstream, pretty sure it’s game over.

Advertising is largely untapped on Reddit though. Forgetting about the main subreddits and meme communities and whatnot, you have captive audiences for small niches.

Say you sell bespoke bike parts or audiophile-quality headphones, there are subreddits for that. Or say /r/pcmasterrace is an opportunity for Asus, Corsair, etc.

I assume many companies are already active on Reddit, but there’s an opportunity for Reddit to better the experience for some fee

Effective advertising relies on good market segmentation and intent, and Reddit happens to do both in a non-intrusive way.

That’s pretty much exactly the point. On the consumer facing side there is the VPN market, which people use to access content in remote locations or obfuscate their traffic to prevent surveillance/fingerprinting.

On the business side, there’s a real need to be able to scrape say LinkedIn or Amazon, which necessitates rotating IPs to avoid getting blocked. The legal precedent currently incentivizes this sort of behavior between both parties.

Mentioned also, however, is that criminals can use the technology to advance fraud.

I certainly am not going to defend the whole market. I’m aware of many issues.

But, there is a strict business need for these proxies. If you plan to fight giants, the first thing you need is their data. And you can’t get it without proxies.

Sure, that’s another subject for debate; whether scraping/crawling is ethical itself.

It’s pretty obvious what infatica is doing and while I agree it’s shady, I wouldn’t call it a scam.

Peer-to-peer proxy doesn’t mean a botnet, at least not how I think most people think that to mean. Rather they are routing traffic through residential IPs for a number of customers. $25-45/1000 users sounds exactly within the margins of a VPN provider (they even mention hola.org in the 3rd email, which is $2.99/m per ‘premium’ user or free if you become a node in the network) and residential proxies are also commonly used for scraping and other IP-sensitive work, again within those margins.

I didn’t find the code sample to be obfuscated, it was actually quite clear. It establishes a web socket with a server and simply passes requests through an endpoint, I.e. literally just a proxy.

All that said, it’s definitely shady to put this in your extension without users knowing. But, if you need to monetize something free, and make at least a good effort to inform users or allow them to opt out, and we trust infatica doesn’t allow illegal use of its proxy network, then I don’t really see the problem.

There’s a real need for residential IPs, no market to give each user $.025 and I can’t really fault someone for making a business out of this.

Edit: I also find irony that the author labels datos.live a “scammer” when in fact they are a very legitimate business engaged in similar data collection to what Google already does. ...The same author who published an extension (in the Chrome Store) for YouTube

Considering that you will pay an additional fee with any cab/ride hailing service, there must be, therefore the additional economic incentive.

Airport traffic is unique. There’s no room to loiter and additional complexity in navigating. Also, there’s the expectation of luggage.

That said, airports are very different around the country and so are cultural norms. But generally, you should toss some cash or a token of appreciation to the person driving you to or from the airport.

Serious question:

Why don’t they leave?

I’m not saying that they should, or that conditions shouldn’t improve, but if academia is that stressful to you, why stick with it? The only potential outcomes sticking with it are that you will fail later on, or you will fill a role with an increasing amount of stressors.

And if you want something cool to do with this, try implementing Gliński's variant of chess.

It’s something I’m dabbling in, but no doubt an order of magnitude more difficult to implement than orthodox chess.

The idea of indexing by cubes is so obvious once you discover it, but maybe not as easy to intuit. Same goes for the data structures.

Ah, thanks for checking. There are a few other hypotheses then:

Testing volumes are low, meaning we fail to capture a sizeable chunk of cases.

The testing strategy is bad. We’re testing people that are less likely to be positive.

And possibly, the model is just wrong.

It’s important to distinguish between true case burden and diagnosed case burden.

Testing is prone to variance due to behavior, test availability, development of symptoms, contact tracing effectiveness, etc... I suspect their modeling efforts use a more principled measure than positive tests.

Without even seeing the data I would infer among all tests a high positivity rate (certainly double digit).

Probably one of the best papers on the topic: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2923-3

You will not find much if any based on contact tracing data. Typical participation in CT isn’t remotely close to “I ate at x restaurant on y day”, and the entities tasked with CT are often inadequately equipped to handle the volumes/technical capacity of such a task.

There is, however, a wealth of literature using cell phone mobility, such as shown above.

not expected to advance further as long as the Senate remains in Republican hands.

“This legislation does not legalize cannabis across the country. It stops the federal government from interfering with what states have decided to do”

In all seriousness, isn’t the Republican platform weaker central government?

Why the exception?

I think you make a very good point, especially with the Google answer.

But I don’t know if that shift in sentiment is unwarranted. The Google of 2005 was nothing like the Google of 2020.

When Google was just a search company, they were purely innovators. Google indexed the internet better than anyone else.

But Google now is pretty bloated. Chrome, Android, Gmail, Docs/Drive, YouTube. The thing is, your gripes with one product affect your perception of all Google products. If you don’t like Chrome, your YouTube experience might be degraded, and you might resent Google’s increasing influence on web standards.

I’m not saying it’s bad that Google has made a lot of useful things work. But Google has lost its magic.

The same can be said of Facebook. Young people flocked to it a decade ago. It was new, it was magic. Now it’s bloated too (Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus), and has its own set of unique issues.

It’s like how some people prefer bands that haven’t become mainstream yet. I prefer small companies because they are still on their toes trying to make better products. Google and Facebook don’t care about you as a user anymore, they’re too big to care.

Apple, Amazon, Microsoft... they too have lost that magic with age and size.

They’ve become boring. Boring is a recipe for disruption.

I always wonder what the vegetable vs meat market would look like without subsidies.

Imagine a free market where the veggie burger at McD is $1 and the beef one is $5. How many people would opt for the vegetarian option?

Instead, in the market which we have intervened, it’s the beef that cost $1 and the veggie burger $5.

Obesity is driven in part by lack of affordability of vegetables and in terms of resources and pollution (methane), beef is worse. It seems the incentives cater only to our carnal desire and (mostly corporate) cattle ranchers.

I don’t really care for meat all that much, but alas my taxes still go towards that damn $1 hamburger.

Also using Caddy as a reverse proxy for a number of containers. This is definitely an attractive alternative.

Really isn’t of concern at my current scale, but Nginx offers some margin of speed over Caddy.

I think the only flaw here is that while it may be trivial to get raw data from say fossil, any major multi-department retailer (Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, Target, B&H...) is not going to be this easy.

Prices are competitive information, at least competitive enough to warrant obfuscation and preventing scraping.

And, the more sources you have, the more likely things will constantly fail. Scraping is always fragile.

One of the first web-scraping projects I ever built was to find the lowest price for Clif bars. I ate about 365 per year, and in only 45 minutes of programming a cron job and push notifications, I easily saved $100 that year.

I tried to do the math on the Quest 2 hardware, and they definitely cut corners to bring the cost down, but not to the point where I think they have an attractive margin. (On the $300 headset, but the accessories/storage increase definitely have a decent margin). They’ll also get some margin on software sales presumably.

That’s important because I believe the revenue generating model is entirely from data. Even if I’m wrong, it’s Facebook, so we know they’re after data for profit.

And consider the kind of data that VR is capable of collecting. It’s biometric data at its core. If you take the data involved in VR, tie it to a person under the real-name policy, and give it to some crafty software engineers, you can get some crazy intimate results.

Will do, I’ll give it a shot sometime this week and report back.

Still not sure how much of a niche WSL is, but it’s my daily driver.