chadash

I've seen several people point to this narrative on HN and it just doesn't make any sense. There's three possibilities as I see it:

1) There's some secret cabal of people who run the world and they've decided that commercial real estate needs to thrive, for some reason. So these overlords go to their puppets running major companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Dell and tell them they must make their workers return to the office in the name of propping up commercial real estate. Apparently some people on HN think this is likely?

2) The managers at Dell/Amazon/etc. feel the need to prop up commercial real estate as an act of charity. Rather than focusing on their own businesses, they are worried about their friends in commercial real estate. This seems even less likely than 1.

3) Managers at major companies believe that there are benefits to working together in person.

Why are people so reluctant to accept option 3? You don't even need to accept the premise that working from the office is better. You just need to accept that premise that management believes it's better to be a proponent of this option.

I think it's both. Interior designers are primarily interested in aesthetics. Same for the majority of famous fashion designers, who are usually not focused on making utilitarian clothes. It seems like most peoples' definition of design would include the work in those fields. UX is a better description of the aspect of design that cares about functionality and not aesthetics.

And it's not like that money is completely gone. JPM will sue and probably recover a very large chunk of it. Say that of the $175 million, they get back $150M, so they are out $25M. It's just not that much money to them. Sure, someone didn't do their job and will probably get fired over this, but Jamie Dimon and the executive suite don't really think about $25M losses.

And more importantly, I love what you are doing for the industry overall. The idea that I can swap out my display from glossy to matte on a laptop that I've already owned for a while for less than $200 is pretty amazing. I wish you a lot of success.

> Lanier doesn’t even like the term artificial intelligence, objecting to the idea that it is actually intelligent, and that we could be in competition with it. “This idea of surpassing human ability is silly because it’s made of human abilities.” He says comparing ourselves with AI is the equivalent of comparing ourselves with a car. “It’s like saying a car can go faster than a human runner. Of course it can, and yet we don’t say that the car has become a better runner.”

The author, Jaren Lanier, is a reasonably accomplished technologist, with some pretty groundbreaking work on VR in the 80s. He is most certainly aware that humans have been surpassed by computers in many ways. I think that line is arguing semantics about the word "intelligence" and clearly he knows that computers do many things far better than humans.

Sure, it is regurgitating facts. What's impressive is that it knows which facts to regurgitate.

If you have a fridge with lighter use, you can do the same think with blue and red stickers. Week 1 is a blue sticker week. Put your food in the fridge with a blue sticker. On Monday, everything with a red sticker gets tossed, blue stickers stay. The next week you switch colors and then switch back the week after that.

Only exception might be condiments which, if not labeled, are assumed to be for communal use.

Edit: By the way, I think the biggest issue, by far, is not people being inconsiderate, but merely forgetting that they had put stuff in the fridge in the first place. They buy a plumb, put in the fridge and then forget about it altogether until it goes rotten.

But there’s one type of ideas person I’m thrilled to work with. Someone with deep and successful experience in sales. The head of sales at my company is also relatively product oriented and boy, he just has a knack for what customers want.

In general, I think many engineers can do some product management. We can figure out basic accounting and finance. But the idea of making a cold call to sell dental software, or chasing down school principals at an education conference is almost as foreign to most software engineers as CS is to most sales folks.

Salesperson + engineer = superpowers

Not only is it not in precedented to force a reluctant bidder to purchase a company against their will, but the very judge who was assigned to Elon Musks’s case forced a company to buy another (i.e. “specific performance”) in 2021. Look up Snow Phipps vs Kcakes.

It’s not a coincidence that Musk suddenly changed his tune and went through with the acquisition. I’m sure that his legal team told him that he was going to lose the case.

Basically, the original study looked at Jewish kids in Israel versus the UK and saw that peanut allergies were about 10x lower in Israel, even though Jews of European background (Ashkenazi) there are fairly similar, genetically, to Ashkenazi Jews in the UK (the majority of both groups migrated recently from Central and Eastern Europe).

There is a snack called Bamba that they eat in Israel. It's kind of like a peanut butter Cheeto puff, and it is a nearly-universal snack for young kids in Israel. It melts in your mouth, so a 6-month-old can eat it almost as soon as they eat solid foods. It's about as popular in Israel as Cheerios are in the US, maybe more so. The hypothesis is that Bamba consumption there dramatically lowers the risk of developing peanut allergies.

[1] https://www.webofscience.com/wos/woscc/full-record/WOS:00026...

[2] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa1414850

For example, say I buy a home for $400k and gut renovate it for $200k. Let's say that the specific renovations are going to improve the value of the home, but it's hard to know by how much. If I go to Chase, they will gladly lend me 80% of the $400k ($320k). But Then I need an $80k down payment + $200k for renovations, or $280k cash on hand to make this work.

If I go to a smaller bank that doesn't do things as algorithmically and knows the local market, they might say "hey, we're gonna give you the $320k down payment and then we think that in that area of Boston and based on what you are doing, the house is going to be worth $150k more when you finish renovations, so we're gonna finance 80% of that $150k as well ($120k). You are still going to need to prove that you have your $80k down payment + $30k (20% of $150k) + $50k (the difference between what renovations cost and what they will add to value of home), or $160k total. So in this example, I need to have $160k in the bank if I want to make this whole transaction work with Regional Bank X, whereas with Chase, I need $280k.

Keep in mind that it’s precisely because they service only commercial clients that the recent issues his signature and SVB. Very few individuals have more than $250k in a single bank, so there’s no reason for individuals to run on the bank. On the other hand, $250k is not all that much if you are a business with a decent sized payroll.

The reason for the role of CRO is that the CEO, CFO and other C suite executives are not really aligned with investors incentive-wise. If the bank does really well, the CEO gets huge bonuses. If the bank crashes, the CEO gets fired but typically doesn’t lose all their money like investors do. Hence the need for the board’s function in risk management and a CRO to help them with that. In a bank, the risks are unique and often hard to see which is why risk management is often a huge department.

None of this exonerates the CEO. Of course they are to blame when things go wrong. But when financial risk is a huge part of a business, it’s good to have some backup for that role as well.

Um, yeah, I don't find it very surprising that Tyler Cowen, an academic, influential writer and famous cultural critic isn't directly getting help from his local food bank. Oh, and I love the "putting aside the ones I work at". Let's cherry pick and say "non-profits have do nothing for me personally" if you exclude the ones that do a tremendous amount for me personally. Even with the above, I find this pretty disingenuous. Surely Tyler Cowen has visited and enjoyed some famous art museums? Perhaps he has taken his kids to a local science museum? Perhaps he has benefitted from research done at universities, as pretty much everyone alive has?

That said, I can agree with him on his point that perhaps certain non-profits (e.g. hospitals) don't really function like most people would think a non-profit should and probably shouldn't be getting tax exempt status.

The supreme court explicitly held that people have the constitutional right to hold an anti-gay rally outside of military members' funerals [1]. I think that the vast majority of people (including the overwhelming majority of people holding anti-gay views) would find this behavior atrocious and immoral. But it's protected free speech.

The problem though is that enough of this kind of stuff happens and laws begin to change. Sure, it's one crazy group in this case, but if this sort of behavior were prevalent enough, peoples' views on free speech would change. Sure, this is an extreme example, since something specifically mentioned in the constitution is very hard to change. But there are plenty of examples of laws that only exist in response to some idiot(s) who decided to ruin it for everyone else (as a very simple example, I no longer have the right to buy more than one pack of Sudafed at a time where I live... they didn't just dream that law up out of thin air).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snyder_v._Phelps#Alito's_disse...

Framework owner here. It really is super freaking easy to open up this computer and fix things or swap them around. Easy enough for your average software engineer (who doesn't have much hardware experience), but probably easy enough for your average not-super-technically adept person.

On the whole, very happy with my machine. The touchpad wasn't registering all clicks when I first got it, but customer service happily sent me a new one and no issues since then. I also had a driver issue or two when I first got it, but that was resolved when I updated my drivers. I'd happily recommend the computer to any engineer or anyone with decent "techie" skills. It's probably not ready for your less-than-tech-savvy average consumer just yet, but it's close. Also, bonus points for the machine really looking and feeling very premium. I especially love the cover having the nice cog-wheel logo, but no brand name on it. I've had a few people tell me, "wow, that looks nice, what kind of computer is that?".

Whether it is fair or not, this is definitely not true. Companies tend to pay what they can get away with, which means paying less in lower-cost-of-living areas. The people who assemble iPhones provide tremendous amounts of value. But they make around $4/hour. If you bumped that to $8/hour, Apple would still be tremendously profitable, but they assemble their phones in cheap labor markets where they can get away with paying less. Meanwhile, companies hiring in San Franscisco generally pay skilled workers higher than companies hiring in Oklahoma (let alone overseas), because no one would agree to work in San Fransisco on an Oklahoma salary.

This acronym is taught in any course discussing the basics of negotiation. If you are negotiating on anything, you will always be in a better position if your BATNA is good. In the context of job salary negotiations, saying "I have another job offer for 1.3 times my current salary" is going to put you in a much better position than saying "I feel like I'm worth more". So the answer is to find a good BATNA and then approach your boss. Unfortunately, the jobs environment is not great right now so finding a better offer might take some time (in good times, even the threat of leaving might put you in a good negotiating position).

On a secondary note, you don't necessarily need to work at a tech company to be appreciated, but it's generally important to work in a division and in roles that help increase company revenues. Try to look for that in your next role.