3,985 karma · joined June 5, 2023
Farming men weren’t cooking their midday meal out in the fields; they took some bread and maybe some protein out with them at the start of their working day.
> Recently, my story as a Norwegian entrepreneur facing an unrealized gains wealth tax bill many times higher than my net income went viral, amassing over 100 million views on X.
There's contributing to society, and there's receiving demands for more wealth than you possess. If you can't make a moral distinction between the two, then, frankly, I don't know how to explain it to you - this is one of those things that you should understand by the age of ten or so.
> Sadnan Khan was ordered to pay $1,230 towards the supermarket giant's legal fees after a landmark Fair Work Commission decision found he used AI as a "quasi-legal advisor" to challenge his dismissal, despite repeat warnings his case had "no substantial prospects of success".
> "I have taken the very rare step of ordering him to pay some of the employer's legal costs, because his unreasonable conduct caused his former employer to incur those costs unnecessarily," Fair Work Commission deputy president Michael Easton said in the tribunal's decision last week.
The article is balanced; it also cites the case of a computer science lecturer at Macquarie University who successfully challenged the university's treatment of him using AI. (Over the past decade or so, Mac Uni has become very attached to the idea that minimum wage is enough for academic staff.)
So it's the same story as we've been hearing for more than a year now: LLMs are only useful if you ignore all the fluff where they tell you how great everything is, and know how to extract and interpret the parts where they say something of substance, and actually do the work of determining whether the thing is bullshitting you.
I’m not surprised the business is struggling - the author hasn’t found a deep enough problem to solve.
Xero is listed as an integrable data source, but Xero already has this as a feature.
I’m sure they work fine in laboratory conditions, but that’s not my use case.
Eighteenth century Britain levied a great many consumption taxes on things that were disproportionately bought by the wealthy. These were the taxes that the Boston Tea Party rebelled against.
> Here’s a chart I dug out of the UK National Archives while researching Material World. It shows you optical glass supplies to the UK. And look: the standout thing is how quickly UK domestic production rose.
> The UK didn’t need German glass by the time that deal was done because it was producing plenty by then, and output was rising fast. UK factories had swung into action. They turned around the deficit so quickly that by the end of the war they were producing more than they needed - enough to supply their allies.
> The glass famine, in other words, was followed by the glass feast.
> (the other thing to note is what happened AFTER this chart: having rebuilt its glass industry, the UK allowed it to waste away again. By the post-WWII period it was back in the doldrums. Most of the optical producers shut down. It was a short-lived feast).
There's a strange pattern of Britain performing best when it's least prepared. I think this ties in well with the observation that the British establishment is unconcerned with 'theory' and wholly concerned with practical matters, which I first read in The Sloane Ranger's Handbook. Compare also the discourse surrounding the US Bill of Rights to that surrounding the English Bill of Rights, which includes pretty much the same rights (including the right to bear arms).
My reason for self-hosting is control, not privacy: the fact that the cleartext of my outbound emails is visible in the MailPace UI is not a concern; the problem I'm solving is that email providers can delete your account.
> The bid failed, confirming that “dupes” and “dupe culture” — a commercial ecosystem built around providing consumers cheaper alternatives to name-brand products — are cultural phenomena here to stay.
> The trial focused on whether Quince’s shearling boots that really, really look like UGGs violated the existing patent for the design. And in a twist, the jury ruled that yes, Quince had copied the UGG design — but the patent over the UGG boot should not have been issued in the first place because the design was too generic to protect. The ruling opened the door for Quince and any other brand to make a similar-looking boot, opening up a new frontier for “dupe culture.”
UGG itself is a company that operates by abusing intellectual property laws.