Octokiddie

Two things:

1. Consider the source, and its history of misinforming the US public to advance its objectives.

2. Lots of boring explanation can't be ruled out.

He just says amazing things will happen with a bunch of technologies.

This was a mouse study with a molecule whose human effects are largely unknown. Interesting research, but likely far away from anything that will treat humans.

That said, the bar for human glioblastoma trials is very low. There is no cure and the disease is 100% fatal. After the standard of care treatment (which hasn't changed in 10 years), patients enter a period of regular brain scans, waiting for the inevitable recurrence and the next step down in quality of life.

The article does not support the claim made in the title. Similar claims have been made many, many times. They never come to pass. A better approach to this topic would be to acknowledge the failure of earlier prophets and explain what's actually different this time.

To recap:

- "weirdness" means what others will think is weird

- many options feel right

Therefore, following the advice in the title leads to the selection of the path that works personally, and which is most likely to be true to one's inner compass.

But I do wonder about the "feels right" part. The thing that feels right often only does so in hindsight. In the moment, it may feel very, very wrong.

This reminds me of something a speaker at a corporate "Innovation" symposium during a summer internship once said many years ago. There was talk after talk about how you have to "take risk" and "push the envelope" and "think outside the box."

Then this guy stands up and gives the best heuristic I've ever heard for identifying innovation in your actions. He said You'll know you're innovating because you'll feel deeply uncomfortable.

Nothing makes you stand out like actually innovating. Nothing makes you hated more than actually innovating. Nothing raises the stakes of what you're doing like actually innovating. And usually, nothing feels more wrong than actually innovating.

Parents have not idea whatsoever of the destruction that phones have wrought on the education system, both in the large and in the small. Students who claim otherwise are gaslighting their parents. Parents are unfortunately all too willing to believe the lies because of course their child is above average and would never completely tune out of class for another hit on the electronic crack pipe.

At this point, the problem has become too entrenched to actually do anything. Parents have come to the mistaken conclusion that Johnny needs a smartphone to keep in touch during the day (why exactly is a great question). Administrators have more or less given up. And without backup from administrators, teachers are left to fend for themselves. The ones who step in to take phones away, or deal with the problem in any meaningful way face threats to their physical well-being.

The tethering of kids to parents via phones is a tragedy of biblical proportions, but the effects will not be obvious for a few years yet. Education is just the obvious flash point.

I'm surprised this article doesn't mention "Urgent Care," which appears to serve the exact role implied by the title: seeing a doctor without waiting a long time.

It's far from clear what this buy/bailout does to "end" the crisis. Was the crisis caused by Credit Suisse being too small?

> The plan, negotiated in hastily arranged crisis talks over the weekend, seeks to address a massive rout in Credit Suisse stock and bonds over the past week following the collapse of smaller US lenders. A liquidity backstop by the Swiss central bank failed to end a market drama that threatened to send clients or counterparties fleeing, with potential ramifications for the broader industry.

This makes more sense. It's an attempt to manipulate world financial markets. But if the deal doesn't address the root cause, the same situation will repeat soon enough.

There's also this from a different article:

> The deal caps a highly volatile week for Credit Suisse, most notably on Wednesday when its shares plunged to a record low after its largest investor, the Saudi National Bank, said it wouldn’t invest any more money into the bank to avoid tripping regulations that would kick in if its stake rose about 10%.

https://www.krqe.com/news/business/swiss-to-hold-news-confer...

So maybe there's something to be gained by making UBS/CS bigger. It allows investment by other private parties that would have otherwise triggered onerous provisions.

> Based on laboratory studies, Rutgers scientists say one of the most likely chemical candidates that kickstarted life was a simple peptide with two nickel atoms they are calling “Nickelback,” not because it has anything to do with the Canadian rock band, but because its backbone nitrogen atoms bond two critical nickel atoms. A peptide is a constituent of a protein made up of a few elemental building blocks known as amino acids.

Very doubtful this has anything to do with origins of life.

The complex catalyzes the production of dihydrogen from hydrogen cation. It's a cool reaction, but to say this may have "sparked life on earth" is way off.

Small peptide catalysts like this one have been known for some time and can even be designed for a wide range of reactions. A Nobel prize was awarded for this very field a few years back.

The word "efficiency" appears 20 times in this article. Yet not once does the author explain where all of the inefficiency - the layers, the fat, and the lethargy - came from. Nor does he explain the logic of culling employees now.

These are not the words of someone who has learned lessons or who is interested in telling the truth.

So here's a hypothesis: Facebook is not a "technology company," it's an advertising company. And spending on advertising has cratered as businesses everywhere have pulled in their horns in response to their own falling revenues. Facebook lived large during the fake boom. It hired way too many people and a built a bloated, middle-heavy organization that is poorly-suited to the task ahead: taking back territory it's lost to smaller, nimbler competitors. Facebook management bought the economic lies being told hook, line, and sinker.

The party's now over and Facebook faces major headwinds, including savage competition, declining revenue, and the aftermath of a hiring orgy gone wrong.

Translation: the Fed is done raising interest rates. Period. Forget all of the tough talk by the team over the last few months. We raise until we break something. Now that we broke it, that's that.

As for that inflation problem... It will require another solution...

> “This isn’t a systemic event. This is a midsize bank that was badly managed,” he said “It may be a little messy. But that’s different than if you have somebody at the core of the financial system stop making payments to somebody else at the core of the system and then the core implodes."

This is the dilemma for any nascent panic. Do nothing so as not to alarm markets, and the thing goes down the tubes, potentially dragging many others along with it through a chain reaction.

Do something and spook the markets because you need to explain why you're taking the extraordinary action.

This was exactly the problem during the opening phases of the GFC.

The other problem is the populist outcry of fat cats getting a free ride on the backs of working people. Stories like this one of bonuses paid out just before the implosion don't exactly help the medicine go down:

> Silicon Valley Bank employees received their annual bonuses Friday just hours before regulators seized the failing bank, according to people with knowledge of the payments.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/11/silicon-valley-bank-employee...

This is all happening against a backdrop of futures markets about to open. The last thing any of these officials wants to see is a selloff in stocks.

It's hard to see any other outcome but the depositors getting bailed out. Then again, bailout for Lehman seemed obvious, and yet things took a different path.

FWIW, yield curves around the world have been screaming "Catastrophe Ahead" for months now. Sophisticated traders know this and it can't be lost on them this this is exactly the kind of setup that would be consistent with massive and prolonged curve inversions.

What would you do if BofA either temporarily halted withdrawals or imposed impractical limits on withdrawals?

There are unfortunately many paths forward that don't involve outright bank failure.

It's possible we haven't seen the first shoe yet, and bank failures like this one are just the canaries dropping dead.

To speculate about where that first shoe might be in this case and who's wearing it, it might help to consider where the buck ultimately stops.

Maybe it's time to resurrect Fucked Company.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company

This is the crux of the problem. SVB may have intended to hold to maturity, but the market forced it to sell to raise cash.

You may hold 100K in treasuries today, but if your employer can't make payroll, you're gonna sell to pay rent.

The implication here is that many people who were expecting paychecks (from the companies Rippling serviced) won't get them. Perhaps some never will, especially if Rippling's deposits at SVB were over FDIC limits - which seems very likely.

This is the danger with painting problems as due to liquidity rather than solvency - especially in the current environment.

Every solvency issue begins as a liquidity issue.

Bear Stearns was the first shoe to drop. Intervening would have spooked the market. Later implosions were addressed because there was no alternative.

Unless you experienced that time, it really hard to understand the pervasive denial of what was obviously happening.

You'll see the same thing happen this time around, and will have an equally hard time conveying just how strong the denial was.

> At the time of closing, the amount of deposits in excess of the insurance limits was undetermined.

What are the insurance limits for companies? Same as individuals? I get the sense that most of SVB's deposits were from startups and small companies. And I also get the sense that $250K is not much room for a startup trying to make payroll to employees with Silicon Valley wages.

More context from another article:

> The big losses experienced by the bank are directly related to the surge in interest rates over the past year, as the company's US Treasury holdings were bought at a time when interest rates were still relatively low. Bond prices fall as yields rise.

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/silicon-vall...

More general context:

- Banks are required by law to buy US Treasuries (UST). This regulation came about after the GFC.

- UST prices fall as interest rates rise

- the fall of UST prices in the last year is abnormally abrupt and deep

- banks are not required to "mark-to-market" their UST holdings if they plan to hold to maturity

- cash crunches can cause banks to sell UST before maturity, turning unrealized losses into real losses

- SVB joins Silvergate as a previously high-flying tech-related bank suffering a cash crunch and forced to liquidate bond holdings at a loss

It's hard to judge the scope of the problem that Silvergate and SVB might point to. What's clear is that unrealized UST losses on bank balance sheets can surface very quickly and lead to very ugly outcomes.

I should have phrased it differently. The potentially large unrealized capital losses on UST sitting on bank balance sheets has been under-reported. Banks are both required to hold UST and not always required to mark-to-market. This interest rate move has been massive relatively speaking, leaving some number of banks in a terrible capital position, just waiting for a disturbance (like the FTX implosion) to trigger run-like conditions.

This story sketches a problem that hopefully doesn't start to gather steam:

https://www.axios.com/2023/03/04/why-some-banks-are-heading-...

You might not, but many banks and other institutions have no choice.

Many financial institutions are required by law to hold UST, some of which have suffered declines comparable to TLT. This was in part a result of regulations post-GFC.

I'm surprised there hasn't been more reporting about this. Maybe everything's fine and there's nothing to see here.

That TLT story is being severely under-reported.

> GitHub is wonderful now but fundamentally proprietary, same as Google Groups, and FOSS software forges like sourcehut are making great progress.

It may be impossible to imagine now, but a similarly craptaculous outcome for GitHub should not be ruled out. Back when SourceForge was revered as the be-all, end-all of open source development, few could imagine a future in which the service just kept getting worse and worse.

Regarding the copy protection process itself, there's an interesting interview at one of the links:

> The most common protection schemes were the ones that were productized and resold to hundreds of publishers. This was coordinated through the disk duplication houses, who offered copy protection as a “value add” on top of mastering the disks themselves. Publishers got the benefit of the latest and greatest copy protection without needing to play the cat-and-mouse game themselves.

> The E7 bitstream, a.k.a. “generic bit slip protection,” was the most common. It was a sequence of 1s and 0s, specially crafted so the first half could be read “in phase,” then the code would intentionally skip half a byte and read the second half “out of phase.” Bit copiers would drop bits due to hardware limitations, and the out-of-phase values would be wrong. It was brilliant.

https://paleotronic.com/2018/06/15/confessions-of-a-disk-cra...

I like how the author boils the idea down into a simple comparison between two alternative approaches to a simple task: getting the first element of a list. Two alternatives are presented: parseNonEmpty and validateNonEmpty. From the article:

> The difference lies entirely in the return type: validateNonEmpty always returns (), the type that contains no information, but parseNonEmpty returns NonEmpty a, a refinement of the input type that preserves the knowledge gained in the type system. Both of these functions check the same thing, but parseNonEmpty gives the caller access to the information it learned, while validateNonEmpty just throws it away.

This might not seem like much of a distinction, but it has far-reaching implications downstream:

> These two functions elegantly illustrate two different perspectives on the role of a static type system: validateNonEmpty obeys the typechecker well enough, but only parseNonEmpty takes full advantage of it. If you see why parseNonEmpty is preferable, you understand what I mean by the mantra “parse, don’t validate.”

parseNonEmpty is better because after a caller gets a NonEmpty it never has to check the boundary condition of empty again. The first element will always be available, and this is enforced by the compiler. Not only that, but functions the caller later calls never need to worry about the boundary condition, either.

The entire concern over the first element of an empty list (and handling the runtime errors that result from failure to meet the boundary condition) disappear as a developer concern.

The author uses a one-sentence writing style ubiquitous in "long-form" ad copy.

You say one thing.

Then another.

And another.

See how it hooks you?

And makes you want to read further?

Me neither. But apparently it "works" very well.

You might start by talking with him about the peer pressure to own and carry one of these gadgets in the first place, and the kinds of expectations he automatically buys into by doing so.

> THE PROBLEMS A GENERATOR SOLVES

One problem not listed is source code syntax highlighting. If you provide source code listings in articles, then highlighting is a big help to readers. Generating it in HTML is not fun.