coastermug

Is Liquid Glass not just a means to slowly force old phones to be obsolete? - My iPhone 11 is fairly slow now and they’ve probably bought forward my next phone purchase by a year

I’ve not got the context on why Brazil was chosen here (paywall) - but I coincidentally read a story on here of Richard Feynman visiting Brazil whereby he assessed their teaching and tried to impart his teaching and learning techniques.

People need examples of success in their network. Most people have frankly never met or heard of anyone who founded a successful startup- and therefore would never think of taking on such a risk. I agree that in some places there is a sense of malaise, but if we are to believe founders are a 1-2% outlier of the population, I don’t see why America’s 1-2% should be so much more ambitious than the UKs. I think it’s more a cycle induced by lack of funding.

I am a former Mech Eng who trod this path. Started at JLR, moved by self teaching into software. Engineering in the UK felt like it moved at a glacial pace that only made sense in the days of final salary pension schemes. Senior management really struggled to get their heads around why young people were so impatient, but we were not competing for the same rewards.

Klarna use a huge dark pattern on their payment processing (irrelevant of bnpl), whereby they store your details for future use by default, even without an account. Last time I checked you only needed a couple of pieces of easily identifiable information to be granted access to “your” autofill. - I know all the H&M group shops use it as their payment processor in the UK.

My local library inherited the staff from other libraries that closed well over ten years ago. This means they have a constant staff of circa 5 people, meanwhile they do no real outreach into the community nor are they friendly, and I am fairly certain they get fewer than 10 people through their doors each day. I believe that libraries are an essential public resource, but I don't think it’s productive to have resources that are essentially beyond scrutiny as that in turn leads to a very poor service.

I’ve noticed the risk appetite of investors in the Uk is much worse. They want a much larger slice of the pie early on, so there’s much less incentive to do a risky startup, rather than a sure thing like GS / Google. There’s nearly no risk in working at GS - you will work hard and you will be paid exceptionally well for it.

AWS textract now has the functionality to offer a table cell based on a query - if I’m not mistaken. I’ve seen nothing similar to this and would be very interested if there are other solutions.

Given a quick read, I enjoy it and see why it is different. I can’t get on with Medium because of their login process, and HN is great but I just doom scroll comments and don’t really use it for technical learning. - I already found an interesting article on SQL optimisation, so thank you.

Are you able to share that research thesis? Or any key papers on how this should be done? Knowing SOTA on these approaches is always nice.

Genuinely interested here, who are you referring to as ‘feral’?

I see a lot of very well educated non-feral people in the UK struggling to make good wages and a ‘proper’ standard of living. I think that’s what is meant by a broken social contract ?

My employer is now struggling to outsource our jobs to Europe because the prices are too high. I try not to think about it too much, but a move to Ireland looks enticing.

Who needs shelter when it’s so warm outside?

I believe this to be the case also. In the UK we have lots of cases cropping up of PE being the bad guys, but the current owners being to blame for buying these companies in unstable positions and allowing the sellers to make fortunes. It does often seem like it is Pension funds making these poor investments. I am also really happy to see this line of questioning on HN, as it has been lacking in previous discussions.

Magnesium is harder to machine. The chips produced can be highly flammable.

Thank you, this is a balanced and detailed response. I don’t personally “buy” the narrative that all LBOs are destructive. After all there are entire funds devoted to LBOs and how would these PE outfits carry on getting loans if their companies constantly defaulted?

What I want to know, is how do the banks keep lending to PE outfits? They are surely the losers in this situation?

Leveraged buyouts. I’ve seen them explained like a mortgage, except that doesn’t work in my head either.

I’ve pushed back on previous discussions on here about PE because of lack of detail about wrong doings, however this article is excellent. “dividend recapitalization” seems absolutely insane for anyone running a business.

I could see it being useful in helping people in these situations.

Teaching someone to have control, as opposed to “unlearning” their helplessness (which presumably if default, can’t be done).

UK vs USA. You’re not wrong at all though. It’s also very interesting the lack of salary transparency that exists in the Uk. If you don’t poke your head around London, you can be blissfully unaware of the salaries that are available in Finance and broader tech scene in London. Given that many great UK universities exist outside of London, there will be PHDs who are unaware or don’t care about what they could be earning.

Bartenders do not earn £50k in the UK. £50k is considered an above average wage, albeit PHDs can earn far more working elsewhere.

It looks like they recognise this failure “ In 2023 that purpose remains unchanged, but we are reassessing our founding assumptions and setting a course for the next five years”.

Quite what that course is, remains to be seen.

My personal experience is that the UK loves giving out funding to established/safe organisations that it knows won’t cause a (positive or negative) splash.

I’ve seen very few UK government initiatives funding genuinely small organisations, but of those that I’ve seen, they have been well executed.

Perhaps we could stop (in the UK) subsidising the loss of jobs via AI through R&D tax credits. Government funding to eliminate the tax base…

So this is why I ask about profitability -at the portfolio level-. In your and the article’s example, the PE manager turns a profit not because he screws the business, but because he also screws the bank who loaned money. What bank will continue to loan to companies managed by PE if they expect them to asset strip and default on the loans?

How does a PE manager expect to make money if their asset stripping decreases the value of the businesses? I’m assuming the value of the business plummets, but they use the sale of assets to pay themselves/their investors? Could someone please explain how this asset stripping is profitable on a portfolio level? - No sarcasm in this question, I’m genuinely interested.

I’ll give a watch. My downvoted comment above confirms holding such views are indeed unpopular :)

I’ll provide an unpopular opinion. People who rigidly stick to the “furthest left lane at all possible moments” are far more dangerous than middle lane hoggers. I witness many, usually white vans, who seem to want to enforce this rule seemingly moving constantly like a pawn on a chessboard. I think some people (not suggesting you) don’t seem to recognise that in congestion, 3 lanes actually provide more capacity than 1, and that it’s not possible or logical to stick to the left lane at all times/conditions. I will yield that the far right lane is sacred and you really do need to be demonstrating some significant overtaking to be sticking in that lane.

In the UK I’ve seen this called the “intelligent client” model. Basically a core group of PMs who outsource everything. In my narrow experience of being on the inside of this, it failed drastically as the internal PM team lacked the technical expertise to foresee and plan for challenges, and really understand what was going on. The sea of external consultants all had differing incentives (other than earning money) - and the contracts written weren’t watertight or ever enforced to stop runaway spending.

What supplier would you recommend? WD and Sandisk have been my go-to for all things storage, but I prefer to pay a premium up to 20% for better quality.