mdemare

The interesting answer by the author, will_asouka, has been marked 'dead' for some inscrutable reason.

AI slop. Flagged.

The Buffett indicator has been over 120% since December 2016. It dipped to 130% in March 2020.

I’m experimenting with the following in my settings:

“Look at the first letter of the prompt, and use the style of the matching literary stylist enumerated here:

For English:

A — W. H. Auden

B — Bill Bryson

C — Italo Calvino

D — Joan Didion

E — T. S. Eliot

F — William Faulkner

G — Gabriel García Márquez

…”

I certainly don’t see emojis any more.

Companies will keep doing what they're doing now - they'll just use another verb than "buy" or "purchase". Which would be a small improvement, I guess...

Honesty, in any game quests feel artificial, whether they've been generated by humans or AI.

“When everybody knows that everybody knows” by Steven Pinker is about this.

Very sad to see this (and cancelled my subscription). My home-grown web-based orchestrator will now have to rely on just codex and Gemini. One of the reasons that I was wary of turning it into a product.

Eventually Google and OpenAI will probably follow Anthropic, but they’re not quite as capacity-constrained.

Python 3 barely managed to dethrone Python.

Sure, but it's pretty trivial to generate a CLI application that talks to that API.

That's how I let agents access my database too. Letting them access psql is a recipe for disaster, but a CLI executable that contains the credentials, and provides access to a number of predefined queries and commands? That's pretty convenient.

Often in movies you have the scrappy character that rises to the occasion by making a great speech, winning everybody over. I used to love those scenes.

Now, I've realized, in real life they wouldn't have let them finish their first sentence.

The Netherlands has had a similar scheme for decades:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist_subsidy_(Netherlands). 1956-1987.

No, this is incorrect. Investors like buybacks, so when the buyback is announced, share prices may rise, but certainly not by the amount of the buyback. They don't go up when the buyback gets executed, unlike dividends, which decrease the share price at the moment when they get distributed.

The equations are: nr_shares * share_price = cash_of_company + value_of_company_excluding_cash.

In a buyback, cash_of_company decreases by the buyback, and nr_shares decreases by buyback / share_price.

Consider the extreme case, a lemonade stand with a bank account with $1M. 1000 shares outstanding, share price $1000. After a buyback of $900K is announced, 900 shares are sold for $1000. $100K remains in the company's bank account, 100 shares remain outstanding, at ... $1000 per share.

This is not quite correct. If a dividend happens, the market capitalisation drops by the amount of the dividend, the number of shares remains constant, so the share price dips by the amount of the dividend per share. All investors get the dividend.

If a buyback happens, the market capitalisation drops by the amount of the buyback, and the number of shares drops by the same ratio, keeping the share price initially constant. The money goes to the investors who sell.

Buybacks are nevertheless good for investors who hold. They now have shares in a company whose market cap is 100% growing enterprise, instead of 90% enterprise and 10% bag of money. That means that if the company keeps doing well, the share price will increase faster than it would have done otherwise (it will also drop faster - it's no longer anchored to an inert pile of cash).

Yeah, me too, that form factor was perfection. So pretty, so nice to hold!

That's why they should be phased, and not too steeply.

If they're phased, e.g. at 30% (for every additional €1 you earn, benefits decrease by €0.30), you have the problem that when you are applicable for several of them (e.g. for children, child care, chronic illness, etc.), the benefit reduction adds up as well, so you're quickly back at an effective marginal tax rate (EMTR) of 90% or even over 100%.

You'd think that it wouldn't be beyond the capability of our society to declare that "the EMTR shall be at most 70% at any point in the income curve", and do the math to make it work, but apparently not.

Organism, not species.

For those that want to stick with thermodynamics, imagine an organism that stores 1% of consumed calories as fat, and uses the other 99%, and that cannot - for whichever reason - turn fat back into calories.

Completely in accordance with thermodynamics, and yet, "just eat less" doesn't work.

Software development is a bit like chess. 1. e4 is an abstraction available to all projects, 3. Nc3 is available to 20% of projects, while 15. Nxg5 is unique to your own project.

Or, abstractions in your project form a dependency tree, and the nodes near the root are universal, e.g. C, Postgres, json, while the leaf nodes are abstractions peculiar to just your own project.

8kb to specify the order of the clips, but not a single bit is used to describe a single pixel of a single frame.

So bizarre! It really shook my belief in Philips' competence at the time.

I mean, take a 100 minute movie, sliced into 1-second clips. 8kB is not even enough to store all possible orders you could put those clips in. I would hate to think so ill of any of my friends or colleagues to think that they could believe such an obvious fraud.

Gentle reminder that the Netherlands has lots of very smart software engineers that prefer to stay there, especially if there were more interesting software companies active there.

has the market cap of a medium-sized country

"According to investors, today's value of Nvidia's expected future profits over its lifetime equals the total monetary value of all final goods and services produced within a medium-sized country in a year."

Don't compare market cap with GDP, when you spell it out it's clear how nonsensical it is.

Until the day when I can right-click on a folder and create a folder inside that folder, I'll consider the Finder inferior to the Windows 98 explorer. Come on, that's an absolute basic feature!

The right-click context menu of a folder has 15 items! Most of them I've never used! Colors, tags, quick actions, compress, make alias? But no "New Folder"?

But I moved to the mac, in 2005, because of the unix terminal. I had been using Cygwin for years, but an OS that had it included, natively? On good hardware? Yes, please.

I'm never moving back to Windows (ads in the OS??). To switch to linux it would take great hardware with 100% support. Not holding my breath, but it might happen one day.

The EU economy is $20T vs USA $30T, so 60%. Also, Britain was part of the EU 2 decades ago. The EU economy has almost doubled in that time, with large regional differences (Ireland, Poland on fire, southern Europe flat), but the USA has done better than the eu average.

Not sure if this is generally known, but historically, going back as far as the second world war, the European far-right has been quite anti-American.

Whatever the economic merits and demerits of this deal, politically it's a disaster, as this article indicates. There wasn't even an attempt to sell this to the public. But as there are no elections until 2028, I expect major changes in strategy in a year or so, otherwise the center-right parties in charge now will be wiped out in favor of the anti-American factions of the far right and far left.

My suspicion is that there's a quid-pro-quo regarding Ukraine. Economically, the EU is in a strong position, but militarily, a mercurial US has the EU over the barrel due to the Ukraine war.

I predict that Europe's notoriously hard-nosed negotiators (Brexit) will ramp up the pressure as the midterms get closer and if the situation in Ukraine improves.

Yes. It is astonishing that LLMs can solve problems that only a handful of very smart teenagers can solve, but LLMs do it by consuming a million times as much content as those teenagers. Running out of data is not a reason for despair.

Also consider that during training LLMs spend much less time on processing, say, TAOCP (Knuth), or SICP (Abelson, Sussman, and Sussman), or Probability Theory (Jaynes) than on the entirety that is r/Frugal.

20 thick books turn a smart teenager into a graduate with a MSc. That's what, 10 million tokens?

When we read difficult, important texts, we reflect on them, make exercises, discuss them, etc. We don't know how to make an LLM do that in a way that improves it. Yet.

Just using common sense, if we had a genius, who had tremendous reasoning ability, total recall of memories, and an unlimited lifespan and patience, and he'd read what the current LLMs have read, we'd expect quite a bit more from him than what we're getting now from LLMs.

There are teenagers that win gold medals on the math olympiad - they've trained on < 1M tokens of math texts, never mind the 70T tokens that GPT5 appears to be trained on. A difference of eight orders of magnitude.

In other words, data scarcity is not a fundamental problem, just a problem for the current paradigm.

- "they were more small than large" (what?)

- "even in the thirties little had been done to them" (done to them?)

- "Welgelegen Buitenrust Nooitgedacht Rustenburg" (Untranslated!)

- "his father had first called it Eleutheria" (his father'd rather called it)

- "just as extraordinary does not refer to the ordinary nature of the outside" (complete non-sequitur)