sillystu04

Isn't this a matter of tort law rather than regulation?

Without renters there would be no housing Ponzi scheme

If by "housing Ponzi scheme" you mean house prices increasing then this isn't necessarily true.

Even in a world where private renting was illegal and people were forced to choose between home ownership and homelessness, house prices could increase over time because of restricted supply, increased populated and wage growth.

That sounds dangerously close to victim blaming.

Obviously if Co-op were negligent in their handling of member data they're also guilty of something. But even the best organisations have some level of exposure to phishing related attacks.

My understanding is that V2G (vehicle to grid) requires transfer switches etc to be installed to your home electrical setup so you don't accidentally backfeed electricity into the grid. So it's never going to be a simply a matter of getting a better EV.

Why exactly do you want a backup? If you're looking to maintain a few key appliances or internet during a grid outage a vehicle with V2L like an MG4 or BYD might be sufficient.

You probably already know this, but for the sake of providing context to other readers: V2G - vehicle to grid, providing power to the grid from your car battery like is common for home solar batteries; V2L - vehicle to load, a power outlet using energy from your car battery.

Only a completely closed-off environment with no access to the internet could prevent this.

Even then, an LLM running locally could still operate.

To play devils advocate, a lack of sanctions also allows countries to advance technology at a tremendous velocity.

The Ford Motor Company's dealings in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union significantly helped the adoption of mass production in those countries.

To me buying new cars is just throwing away money

Why should a car manufacturer care about your preferences if you're never going to buy new from them?

It's annoying but people like us who care about things like TCO are probably never going to buy new cars under any circumstances, so our concerns about electronic components don't motivate designers.

Even if we might help residual values of leases and buy used parts, our influence over car companies is radically lower than new car buyers.

Beyond that, the chinese EV brands are in market capture mode right now. The competition is cut throat and the margins are extremely thin.

BYD is profitable. Admittedly that's more of an exception than a rule for Chinese EV brands, but BYD is also the most important.

It‘s a market skimming strategy that will presumably be a last man standing scenario. If the winner(s) are decided, prices will definitely not remain as low as they are right now in some places.

Even if most of the brands disappear we're very unlikely to get to an n=1 monopoly scenario. Even a couple dozen or so companies competing in the EV space should prevent margins from getting too high.

In the olden days the ICE industry was at times run by fewer than 10 companies per country, that was enough competition to prevent consumers getting too screwed by pricing.

Perhaps the next big programming language will be designed specifically for LLM friendliness. Some things which are human friendly like long keywords are just a waste of tokens for LLMs, and there could be other optimisations too.

The Romans never referred to the Greeks, Jews or Egyptians as barbarian. If they did it certainly wasn't with great frequency.

It almost always targeted at the tribal Anglo, Celtic or Germanic peoples. And in these circumstances it was really an insult at their style of government rather than their ethnic identity.

Quite the opposite. AI will enable the creation of ever more macros and guide users to make even more elaborate pivot tables.

They've adopted a different flavour of devilishness. See VSCode versus Visual Studio, or their approach to AI.

Bill Gates would've bought OpenAI. Satya shares their mission of developing AI for the good of humanity. He charitably donated billions of dollars in Azure credits in exchange for nothing besides a voice at the table and a license to help enable other organisations use AI through MS services.

In a way it's a PR difference, but I feel that understates the change.

In hindsight, it would've been worthwhile for Microsoft to tolerate heavy losses for a decade on Windows phone. Like they did with Bing or Azure.

In the 2020s every serious app developer from Epic to Spotify to Facebook to Tinder is desperately concerned by the platform policies of Apple/Google, and would gladly support Windows phone as first class platform. And so would consumers - enterprises would love to have their AD groups work neatly on employee devices and many individual buyers would love to have more open freedom too.

I suspect it's more of a human nature problem. Perhaps a good work culture might allow you to delay its oncoming slightly past 7 people - but eventually all large social groups get political dynamics.

There are performance benefits to using DB functions in situations where you'd otherwise have to pull lots of data out of the DB.

For example, if you wanted to find which of your sessions where created with iPV6 addresses you could select them all out and perform the logic in your application code, potentially at the cost of pulling millions of records out of your DB. But doing it in a DB function allows you to skip this as your app code never needs to do the calculations.

This kind of optimisation is generally more important when the DB is running on a separate machine to the application code because of the overhead of big network requests in getting large amounts of data out, but even on a local SQLite DB there is likely some non zero benefit to minimising the amount of data retrieved.

I suppose DB functions could of course be implemented in SQL or similar, but that can be quite unfriendly for complex logic. So in a sense there is an advantage ergonomic as well.

In fairness, FTX had a profitable bankruptcy [1]. So it's still better to be scammed by Jane Street alumni than to be scammed by the usual alumni of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan etc

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-15/ftx-bankr...

When companies were operated by royal charter and owned by aristocrats there wasn’t much meaningful distinction between dividends and taxation.

They also had no euro, no socialist EU and no self-imposed limitations on energy conversion (there was no electricity, but wind was huge and allowed for mass production of stuff).

These are the diseases of weak states, incapable of creating state ownership enterprises that could dominate the world.

That’s never been the European way of doing things. You can’t beat America at being America.

From the East India Companies to Airbus, strong European companies have been made around strong European states.

They can use their bank account to buy crypto and then pay the ransom.

This is actually more difficult than it sounds. Most banks and crypto exchanges won't allow a person to make meaningfully large crypto transactions without some account history.

I believe OP was referring to a P2P crypto situation, rather than the BuyMeACoffee platform adopting stablecoin support.

So I'd send crypto to your address, then you'd trade it for cash with your local exchange/dealer etc.

What's the alternative? Subscriptions aren't affordable for poor people, government funding creates a conflict of interests, and so does relying on philanthropists.

Netflix should try out a free tier which is entirely monetised by ads. Even if it only contains a subset of their library.

Just imagine how much money loveholidays or Jet2 would pay for an advert midway through a travel show, where a customer could press a button on their remote for a holiday purchase link to be sent to their Netflix email address.

To play devil's advocate, many successful developer focused companies have gone down this route successfully. Neon, Cloudflare, Firebase, Github and many more have all made free tiers work.

I suspect there's a special dynamic for developers. I'm usually more willing to try out new things on personal projects, but I also don't like paying for things on personal projects. At work I don't care how much things cost, but I'll definitely advocate for tools that worked well on personal projects.

Visa/Mastercard can demand merchants meet certain standards of consumer care in order to participate in their networks.

No consumer business can operate without access to those card networks.

Visa/Mastercard have enough power to enforce this on their own. Although obviously regulation would've been better.

If a bunch of elected officials wrote letters to execs and a couple of NYT articles were written about the issue, Visa/Mastercard might be motivated to help.

This is why Lockheed Martin has some part of the F35 supply chain in nearly every US state.

Why do the hardware companies make things so difficult?

If I were selling hardware I’d want it to be as open and well documented as possible. So that more people buy it and so that I get credit for all the great stuff people make with my products.

You probably don’t like this:

  String string = “String.com”;

I wish modern computers considered casing to be purely a matter of style, such that “S” == “s” evaluates to true.

Casing is rarely semantically important, so case sensitivity is widely ignored. But in many circumstances this gets implemented in a haphazard way. For example some sites consider foo@gmail.com and foo@GMAIL.COM to be different email addresses.

Also case sensitivity makes internationalisation awkward, particularly with German.

Sadly it’s too late to change this because doing so would be such a breaking change.

I hate male trees because they make hay fever much worse. Cutting them down and replacing them with female trees would achieve all the good benefits of trees without affecting hay fever.

The only downside of female trees is that they shed pods, fruits & seeds into urban environments. But even this might conceivably have some benefits to biodiversity.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/may/16/how-urba...