spinchange

I made a more stylized html version from the Gutenberg copy:

https://spinchange.github.io/memoirs-of-extraordinary-popula...

Lots of commentary from an unnamed White House source characterizing Anthropic as being "unserious," without further elaboration.

I want to point out that when the commentary by export-ban apologists devolves into talking about perceiving Anthropic as being "leftist," they're not having safety or even a technology-centric conversation anymore. They're making a baised political statement of intent about seeking domination and control over technology for capricious, arbitrary and self-interested reasons.

If you read a lot of books, particularly older ones, you'll find em dashes in all kinds of writing and used often. It's functional punctuation that once you understand you may even find yourself using it (and then being accused of being an AI, lol)

An AI agent debate between Claude and Codex judged by Gemini and summarized by NotebookLM. Source code of script used included

I used Claude and Gemini together to build a PowerShell script that makes them debate each other on any topic, for any number of rounds. Once it worked, I had them debate AI consciousness — then had them both analyze the debate afterward. One of them built this page to document it all

It's regarded as an inflation hedge but it seems more accurate to describe it as a measure of liquidity and liquidity expectations in capital markets now. Like a "Risk-on" gauge.

A whole new meaning to, "product life cycle."

It has the best (and most reliable) integrated AI-based web experience. The Bing side bar can read what is in the open tab, etc. It's useful but it probably not worth the trade-offs

Feel like I've been waiting for a Chrome tablet since before Sundar was CEO. Then a few years later there was that expensive Pixel laptop. Now they're finally shipping this in 2023. I've always wondered what was holding back a launch of this.

Edit: I realize this is Android and not ChromeOS. I just can't believe they didn't ship a flagship tablet all this time.

The historical raison d'etre for the Federal Reserve act was principally point 3. Points 1 and 2 have become the central focus or modern Fed "mandate" and generally thought to be beneficent outcomes of a successful #3, besides. If the Fed inflicts too painful of a recession it fails at points 1 and 2, as well.

As a Bell Labs fanboy this is one of my favorite bits of trivia. They invented the future a long, long time ago.

In theory, yes, but in practice market premiums are variable and greater than book values. It is true that dividend paying stocks fall somewhat on their ex-date. If they're undergoing capital appreciation too, that's generally made up for in short order.

I'm not saying to disregard dividends in terms of total return, either, only that Buffett wasn't talking about total return, so the "well, actually" I was responding to was just off the mark. If you or me were alive then and/or aware enough to watch the DJIA (classically in the 20th century, many American's measure of "the market" even if not technically the case) things really would have looked like they went nowhere (nominally) from the middle 60s until the early 80s.

He was comparing the point value of an index at two points to the /nominal/ dollar value of GDP at the same interval. That firms in the Dow in returned a lot of capital to shareholders in the form of dividends doesn't mean the market value of their equity increased any during the period. You're mixing capital returns with capital appreciation which isn't what he said at all. What he said was completely accurate. I think he knows what it was like to have lived and invested through the period.

F5 webpage refresher checking-in to say hi.

The working poor pay into FICA which is a greater percentage of their cash flow. They get it back upon annual tax reconciliation. The same entitlement programs nonetheless have lots of unfunded liabilities so the money has already been allocated even if it's not currently "there" -- 'The Rich' are beneficiaries of entitlement spending too.

The Yard sale model in this post demonstrates that rich people are not necessarily better at allocating capital even if/as they accumulate and compound it faster.

The military is NOT where most spending goes - most spending goes to the entitlement programs: social security and Medicare.

The Philistines likely saw Goliath as a poor victim of David, too.

You read the economist piece as a bullying pile on? Maybe you're seeing just unpopularity and don't understand it.

There is another contingent of "many," who feel personally protective of Musk and like he needs to be vigorously defended no matter what. It's usually people who have no personal connection to him or his companies but idealize him as representative of something more than any single person is or can possibly be. Musk has flaws too which isn't a groundbreaking or wild thing to say but it makes a lot of people's heads explode. Why is that?

"An extreme shortage of good-quality collateral was why the GFC happened"

It started with a housing boom in America and housing is not generally poor quality collateral. More money was lent than could be repaid because of the way securitization was being done. Then a bunch of "safe" synthetic derivatives we're created off that bad debt too. The real estate collateral underneath it all was probably the only good thing (and part of the justification for the whole mess in the first place)

"...Because there is no central authority controlling who can participate, decentralized consensus systems must defend against Sybil attacks, in which the attacker creates a majority of seemingly independent participants which are secretly under his control. The defense is to ensure that the reward for a successful Sybil attack is less than the cost of mounting it. Thus participation in a permissionless blockchain must be expensive, so miners must be reimbursed for their costly efforts. There is no central authority capable of collecting funds from users and distributing them to the miners in proportion to these efforts. Thus miners' reimbursement must be generated organically by the blockchain itself; a permissionless blockchain needs a cryptocurrency to be secure.

Because miners' opex and capex costs cannot be paid in the blockchain's cryptocurrency, exchanges are required to enable the rewards for mining to be converted into fiat currency to pay these costs. Someone needs to be on the other side of these sell orders. The only reason to be on the buy side of these orders is the belief that "number go up". Thus the exchanges need to attract speculators in order to perform their function.

Thus a permissionless blockchain requires a cryptocurrency to function, and this cryptocurrency requires speculation to function

Why are economies of scale a fundamental problem for decentralized systems? Participation must be expensive, and so will be subject to economies of scale. They will drive the system to centralize. So the expenditure in attempting to ensure that the system is decentralized is a futile waste."

https://blog.dshr.org/2022/02/ee380-talk.html?m=1

A million times, this. You see extremely smart, rational, people start to attribute all kinds of personalized and emotional motives to things that are literally systemic, technical finance.

Government cannot create a bottomless supply of renewable energy by pen stroke. Proof of work mining is taking exponentially more resources out of the universe that anything facilitated by it is giving back to the economy or anything. It's terrible trade-off for humanity. This is precisely what mandates are for to stop harmful action not to wish into existence some magical thinking solution so that people can do bad things with negative consequences forever

What else is there to the narrative? This stuff is predominately solutions in search of problems and they are not innovative except for trying to financialize and/or securitize every conceivable digital artifact imaginable. It sucks comprehensively like at the ideological origin points.

Yes, ETFs and Mutual funds are both registered securities. They are regulated instruments/investments. They could not be sold, legally, if they were not registered with the SEC (it doesn't have anything to do, specifically, with being traded on stock exchange- a security can be non traded too)

The parent comment is pointing out that this looks like it meets the same definition as those other things and needs to follow the same laws, no matter how much people like it, want it, think it's better than what's it's "replacing"

Timeout, did anyone consider that services would indeed naturally be more profitable, on net, than making and selling hardware? Look at gross revenues: most of the company's SALES are from selling TVs!

This needs to be inverted: crypto thought it could kill banks, institutions, trust itself. None of those things is actually true In practice, and to be successful at scale it's going to become integrated and enmeshed with all of the things that it ideologically sought to circumvent.

Customers are waving their money around demanding to buy crypto assets. If you were a bank or a brokerage what would you do?

Alphabet's name change was part of a corporate and equity (shares) restructuring and also a change of the executive leadership guard and/or board, no? Perhaps that's going on at Facebook too. I don't think it is incidental that Facebook is already in the headlines and has other PR issues at the moment. Kind of goes without saying...

The conditions in the residential real estate and mortgage markets are so much different now vs the late aughts. Lending is more conservative, appraisals are more conservative, borrowers are stronger, and there's not a glut/oversupply of new housing.

"North Korean hackers steal billions in cryptocurrency. How do they turn it into real cash? – MIT Technology Review" https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/10/1008282/north-ko...