maria2

Very few places use electricity for heat. It’s super inefficient unless you use a heat pump, and residential heat pumps typically don’t work too far below freezing.

The human brain may only be 10 watts, but the “weights” in the brains NN were computed over billions of years with countless amounts of data.

It's a meaningless distinction.

Overly pedantic

Are you sure? Just some back of the napkin math: S&P 500 is 5.17 times higher since the bottom of 08. BRKB is 6 times higher. And performance this year is even more dramatic. S&P is down 20%. BRKB is up 3%. In 08, too, the decline in Berkshire was much less than the S&P. Clearly Berkshire has been a better bet at most points in time.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/02/business/stock-market-ind...

The actual stat they provide is:

And over a full 20-year period ending last December, fewer than 10 percent of active U.S. stock funds managed to beat their benchmarks.

Still, if it was 1 in 300 I think they would say “fewer than 1% or fewer than 0.5%”. So I’m assume between 9 and 10 percent beat the S&P.

I suggest reading the linked article with the mindset that nearly all of the content comes from S&P directly. It’s basically a market piece. For instance, when they say the mutual funds don’t perform consistently, they use a crazy metric of picking the top 25% performers from one year and seeing how many are in the top 25% next year. Basically their point is that mutual funds won’t beat the S&P every single year, and therefore the S&P is better. But if course, unless you’re only investing for a single year, you should care more about the expected total return. Just my two cents.

There are very few cases where mortgage interest deductions are better than the standard deduction.

Warren Buffet is not betting on index funds. If he was, Berkshire Hathaway would not exist. Buffet uses index funds to manage some of Berkshire’s money, and he famously bet a meager sum (for him) that actively managed funds wouldn’t beat the S&P, but if you look at what Berkshire does, then you would see they are still very much into active management. The success of Berkshire should really prove to everyone that it’s possible to beat the market. Will most beat the market? No. But it’s obviously possible if you have the talent.

Last time I checked, the “mutual funds don’t beat the market” is kind of a myth perpetuated by S&P Dow Jones Indices to hype their own index products. First of all, what is the S&P 500 if not a handpicked collection of stocks? To say mutual funds don’t beat the S&P 500 is to say that S&P is the best stock picker out there. I find that unlikely. Second, something like 10% of mutual funds do beat the S&P 500 on long time horizons.

Core CPI, which is what the Fed typically uses, excludes food and energy.

White box crypto is kind of like obfuscation, but tries to make it impossible to extract the information.

The original topic of conversation was:

Nvidia primarily makes add on GPU's, if I understand their business correctly. Apple integrated a GPU onto its m2 (or whichever chip is used in their studio) that performs comparably to the 3060, and even beat the the 3090 in some benchmarks/workloads. I think that's pretty impressive.

The form-factor of the 3090 isn't relevant.

Just watched the videos, a few thoughts:

Coffeezilla says that Tether doesn't need to honor your redemption by point to the TOS. The TOS that he shows in the video says that Tether reserves the right to delay the redemption and pay it in-kind securities held by Tether. So if Tether is holding a bond, they reserve the right to give you that bond instead of selling the bond and giving you the proceeds. That's very different than his claim that Tether doesn't need to honor the redemption.

His discussion about whether or not it was transparent that Bitfinex and Tether were owned by the same people. He plays sound clips that sound a little misleading: Phil Potter is prompted with "Tether is Bitfinex, right?" To which Phil Potter responds: "No, it's not." Is that really misleading. If someone asked Elon Musk, Twitter is SpaceX, right? Wouldn't the answer be no, even though they're owned by the same people? All the sound clips are less than 10 seconds longs, so it's really hard to understand everything in context.

The leadership team of Tether does seem a little sketch.

The part about Tether lending Bitfinex money to stay solvent while Bitfinex's money was held by the state pending investigation of their bank was sketchy, but technically the currency would still be backed by the loan, assuming Bitfinex can get their money back, which seems likely given that they weren't a party in the investigation holding up the money.

I think the bottom line is that you have to trust the Tether team to handle the money wisely. Usually, you can't trust people to do that so using Tether is extremely risky. As for the video, I won't say it's wrong, but it certainly picked the least charitable interpretation of events and also cherry-picked sound-bites, which is kind of a misleading tactic to use that helps suit a narrative.

Why do you find it sad? Everything has a cost. There are plenty of things that harm people every single day that we tolerate readily. For example, 91 lumberjacks died last year. There are way fewer employed lumberjacks than there are subway riders.

Many lifetimes of time are being wasted every day to save < 10 lives every century.

FTX might have been a money-printing machine, but the situation with Alameda is a lot less clear. Being a market maker is hard. If you make a mistake, you can lose a lot of money. It's probably easier to be a crook.

It seems like they were ordered to give the plaintiffs the documents, but they weren’t ordered to publicly release them. NYAG also looked into them last year. They were fined but it doesn’t seem like anything else came of it.

The New York Attorney General’s probe into Tether’s reserves concluded in February 2021 with an $18.5 million settlement.

I don’t hold any tether, and I wouldn’t recommend it to others. But the common opinion that Tether is insolvent might be wrong. Tether, as a stable business, is a money printing machine. I’m not sure it’d be worth risking the business and jail time to pump shitcoins.

Does it matter if I want my laptop to sleep properly? Somehow it works properly on Windows.

Alcohol is only worse than heroin on an absolute scale. A lot of people drink. A small minority damage their lives and the lives of others through poor decision making (e.g. drunk driving) or addiction. The size of this minority is larger than the entire population of heroin users. If as many people did heroin as drink alcohol, the damage to society would be catastrophic.

Smoked meats have high levels of carcinogens. The carcinogens are created when food cooks at a high temp. For smoking, in particular, they are created when fat drips on to the heat source and then the resulting carcinogens end up in the meat [0].

Cured meats contain nitrates or nitrites, both of which have been associated with an increased risk of cancer.

0: https://health.clevelandclinic.org/is-smoked-meat-bad-for-yo...

Quitting alcohol seems to be in vogue these days. I'd like to offer a counterpoint: I love to drink. By the government definition, I'm a very heavy drinker. I have 1 - 3 glasses of wine a night to relax after putting my child to bed. Of course, I do go many days without drinking when life gets in the way. But I certainly enjoy my night time ritual.

But what I really love about drinking is socializing over drinks. No, I don't mean the physical effects of the alcohol. What I like about socializing over a drink or three is that you're almost entirely focused on your conversation partners. People aren't focused on a board game, activity, or food. A group out drinking has made a commitment to one another that they're going to socialize in raw form. I like that.

TikTok is a massive platform that can be used to subtly influence popular opinion through its algorithmic feed. That should make you afraid, even if you don't believe you'll ever be targeted as an individual by China.

AMD Cezanne chips were released in early 2021. Patches are still landing to fix suspend resume bugs in the Linux kernel: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ryzen-5000-Laptop-Linux-6.1

This is a real issue with Linux. If you want the latest hardware, expect basic features like suspend resume not to work.

How do I get my laptop to properly sleep when using Linux?

Is that a form of sadism? Perhaps the sea lion is unable to conceive of the suffering of the fish. To the sea lion, the fish is merely an object. Playing with the fish is no different than playing with a rock to the sea lion.

The source you provided says that exports from North America are around 751,000 tons annually, with only 300,000 tons exported outside of North America. This NYT article says exports from the U.S. alone is 48 million tons, 25 million of which go to poorer countries [0].

Data for January showed that exports of scrap plastic from the United States edged upward, to 48 million tons from 45 million tons the previous January. Exports to poorer nations were virtually unchanged from a year ago, totaling 25 million tons.

If these larger export numbers are correct, then the estimates in the article you provided should be multiplied by a factor of 10 at least.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/12/climate/plastics-waste-ex...

True but I think the broader point still stands. Natural gas would either stay sequestered, leak into the atmosphere as an even more potent greenhouse gas, or breakdown into CO2.

Other than the refined carbs in the bun, a cheeseburger is actually a very healthy meal.

It is profitable to recycle plastic if you can pay people a few dollars a day to sort through it all to find the valuable pieces.

China’s change in recycling policy was caused by, among other reasons, a documentary on the workers who sift through the countless volumes of plastic waste. It’s quite sad: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6qZwo6U5YFY

90% of river-borne ocean plastic comes from 10 rivers in Asia and Africa: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluti...

Almost all plastic recyclables in the US is shipped to Asia and Africa. It’s simply not profitable to process here.

From the article:

Recently, however, China has made efforts to curb waste.

For years the country had imported millions of tons of recyclable waste from overseas, but a growing recycling burden at home prompted the government to shift its policy.