varunprasad

Blyton and Dahl used to sell about equally well a few decades ago, but Blyton's books fell off a cliff as the racism, anti-gypsy, etc parts of the books meant parents weren't buying them for their kids anymore. Which isn't surprising, considering the many tens of thousands of great books, the vast majority of which don't have these issues, that they could buy for their kids, no decent parent would want to subject their children to these retrogressive ideas presented as absolutely normal.

Avoiding this fate is why the Dahl estate made the decision to edit their books.

Of course, if the people who really think that these capitalistic decisions are a threat to literature and human culture and history, they would challenge the root of the problem, which is copyright protections preventing humanity from enjoying these apparent building blocks of our culture, decades after the authors have passed away and have no say on how they should be treated.

It's also much harder to make millions from the lottery than it is to get a degree from an Ivy. There might be a few hundred winning the lottery every year.

So I'm not really sure what information the statistic that there are about 140 Poker millionaires in a year vs 75k Ivy grads conveys.

Not really. It's not just 1 billionaire replacing another billionaire.

Twitter was public and is now private. That's a huge difference.

It's not just any billionaire. It's literally the richest person in the world. That also makes a difference.

The idea that the only reason this is in front page news is changes in censorship policy does not seem to follow considering nearly every other major purchase makes it to the front news. Michael Dell taking Dell private was heavily in the front page news. There were no censorship policy concerns there.

From the beginning his investment thesis was that the headcount is extremely bloated

Is there any evidence that this was his investment thesis from the beginning as opposed to something he only just started talking about?

Even completely setting aside the political aspects, how does TikTok have less of a moral downside as a product?

At least Facebook and Instagram can genuinely claim to be built on the idea of helping people build relationships.

As far as I understand it, TikTok completely eliminates the friend and family network. It's simply providing mind numbing bite size entertainment. It's genius is removing everything that might distract someone from scrolling mindlessly.

Well, iphones have also only existed since little before Uber came around.

The reason that was the only way cabs were available because those were the only communication technologies available.

Maybe what you should be demanding is that cab services provide apps so you don't have to hail/call, etc. There are several companies that can provide this for your cab jurisdiction area as a third party service and they won't price gouge the cab drivers and/or the customers, and they won't use illegal threats and bribes to change laws to suit their needs.

You're extremely lucky. Or maybe you change your laptops before Apple acknowledges the very real problems they have.

So many of their laptops have had issues necessitating recalls, but because they were able to delay those recalls until 5+ years after those devices were released (even if complaints started way earlier), they get away with it.

I've already had 2 Apple laptops where I took in a 4-5 year old device, and basically had them replace/refresh it for free. One was the gen 1 or gen 2 Macbook which had a ridiculous discoloration issue on the case palm rests, combined with the case peeling apart, and the other a Macbook Pro (2011?2012?) that had a graphics card issue.

macOS for many years now has been inferior to Windows, IMO.

CPI is a completely different measure that includes a lot more than currency value vs other currencies (usually the dollar).

I'm curious why you wouldn't compare it to the direct measure, which is the value of the Argentine Peso.

Because if El Salvador had bought Argentine Peso instead and let's assume they bought them in September, when they first started buying Bitcoin (if I assume they bought the Peso gradually over the past 4 months like they did Bitcoin the Peso would look better since its value has only dropped over that period), they would have bought $88mm USD of Peso on September 1 at a price of 97.71 Peso per dollar, giving them a 8.598 billion Peso holding.

At today's price of 104.50 Peso per USD, that holding would now be worth $82.28mm USD.

Compare that to their BTC holdings of $60mm spending the same amount of USD to buy Bitcoin. Clearly $82.28 > ~$60mm, so they would have done a lot better with the Argentine Peso instead.

Of course, BTC is highly volatile and for all you know it may rise by 50% making their holdings more valuable than the Peso. However, what it does show is that BTC appears to be a poor currency, that specifically does not protect from inflation or currency risks.

It might be a great investment, as a lot of people appear to be treating it, but that in fact makes it a poor currency. An investment should appreciate over time. Whereas a good currency should depreciate over time (although slowly) because if it appreciates over time then that greatly reduces the incentive to spend/invest the resources that currency represents in actual productive endeavors, which damages the real economy, and means a country does not build as much infrastructure, grow as much food, or employ as many people, as it would with a slowly but consistently depreciating currency.

The Tiger -> Snow Leopard period was amazing.

Tiger: Great new UI. Spotlight. Dashboard. Leopard: Quick Look. Time Machine. I hated it from a functional perspective, but wow it looked amazing. Snow Leopard: They just cleaned up everything.

This was key. I built a couple of minor, but useful for me, apps by simply following the docs at the time.

The major difference between Apple docs, and Javadocs at the time (Java was the actual language I used to program in), was that Javadocs was basically API references, whereas Apple docs had API references but they also had guides that went into the why, and the best practices, and even occasionally alternatives for edge cases, etc.

And the fact that it was available offline as an optional download with XCode was a massive bonus at a time when ubiquitous Wifi and internet was not a thing.

It was a real surprise to me, after having stepped away from any sort of Apple development for a few years that Apple's docs were considered bad.

I paid for alternate OS X versions (and then jumped on the snow leopard wagon immediately due to the $29? price).

That meant shelling out $129 after about 3 years (2 year lifecycles, and I think I bought my first mac almost a year into the then OS lifecycle).

This provided me with excellent stability and a very reasonable price. I'd save up a few hundred $s, and then upgrade the software and hardware at around the same time, so I also added additional RAM and moved the HDD to the CD-RW and inserted an SSD instead of the HDD (I am 100% sure I made these changes for my macbook, but I'm not sure if I made them, or if they were even possible, for the iBook I owned before).

That was almost a decade+ of highly stable, highly effective, and almost cutting edge of computing that I haven't even come close to replicating in the almost decade since, despite earning real money.

I did switch to Linux for my personal computing a few months ago, and I have hopes that this may allow me to do so, once I really set something up once I get to my Mar-Apr spring cleaning. Linux is giving me that Mac feeling for the first time in a long time, although the major challenge here appears to be restraining oneself. It seems so easy to get lost trying to distro hop constantly, or try a new terminal for marginal benefits, etc. The new shiny in Linux shines very bright, and restraint seems to be the core challenge required to have a stable, outcome focused computing experience with Linux.

They've restructured how their divisions are reorganized.

You cannot do that without firing some top leaders.

Humans aren't computers.

A machine can throw a fastball at speeds well above what humans can do. That doesn't mean we retire pitchers completely and end the game of baseball. A car can cover 100m in a fraction of the time humans can, doesn't mean we end track and field.

Chess is a game between humans and that's what makes it exciting.

And with computers we have a whole additional layer added where we can see what an essentially perfect game would look like and compare to that (although computers can still occasionally be surprised by human moves).

Stockfish having mate in 39 moves says nothing about a match between 2 humans, already having played for over 6 hours, under very limited time constraints.

The 5 year thing is misleading though.

It would have been 4 years if not for COVID.

And what it basically means is that there were decisive games 4 years ago, and then 2 years later (the World Chess Championship is played every 2 years), in the 2018 match between Caruana and Magnus there were no decisive games.

So essentially there was 1 match with all draws during the standard chess part of the tournament. And that match was between Fabi who is regarded as one of the players with some of the greatest prep and play in standard chess, and Magnus, who is really one of the greatest players, if not the greatest, of all time.