fl7305

Do you mean the port number on your PC?

To me, it is a feature, and not a lazy implementation. Now I don't have to keep track of which HDMI port I plugged which monitor into.

> If this were 50 years ago, and the lawyer wrote the wrong client's name on a document, would we call it a "pen and paper error"?

No, they would call it a "clerical error" and reverse the ruling.

Here's an example of such a law in the US:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_60

Yes, that would point towards regular office hours and not hacking hours.

My dad had a computer on his desk in 1979. It was a Z80 based business computer with a monochrome monitor, 5.25" floppy drive, and a dot matrix printer.

It wasn't cheap, but still not a huge investment for a small company.

The person with the calendar seems to have worked at a large defense related operation?

It wouldn't have been a financial stretch for them to have VT-100 terminals on their desks connected to VAX 11/780 superminicomputers as early as 1978.

Is it some kind of way to keep track of flex time or similar?

I'm pretty gruntled myself.

Or someone further west who did this after work during the evenings.

Or someone further east with a classical hacker "let's get up late in the afternoon, and start the serious hacking late at night."

A friend of mine did the "fiancee visa" in Europe at the local embassy there. It took something like 3-5 months to get the visa approved for travel to the US. Once there, he could start working immediately.

But this was a long time ago, I have no idea what the processing times are today? Are they listed online?

And above all, since his spouse did not work in the US, so they needed a US based citizen with "not bad" finances to sponsor him.

If you're an independent contractor based in a different country, it'll be fun times figuring out the taxes for the year that you move to the US. Both your old country and the US will want a cut.

I don't think their checks caught him though? He only got caught because the plane was full, and he stood out like a sore thumb when he couldn't sit down somewhere.

I think he's saying that it's not a problem for him, but for OpenAI?

> seeing vending machines for cables. The vending machines are about the size of 6 large refrigerators next to each other. They have a large touch screen display. I'm guessing they cost $30k each or more, not including cost to develop them, network them, ongoing maintenance, etc.

Not saying that you're definitely wrong.

But machines like that are often put in free of charge to the business owner. The machine operator company puts the machines in at their own cost, and handles stocking and repairs. The business owner gets a cut of the profits for letting them use their floor space.

I haven't seen these particular vending machines. But there are generic machines with touch screens that can dispense anything that will fit in their spaces. I have seen vending machines at airports where you can buy cables, chargers, headphones, etc. The development cost is written off over many thousands of machines.

A machine dispensing cables is easier to operate and maintain than one dispensing frozen microwave dinners.

Now, there is an opportunity cost for the FAANG company, where managers have to spend some of their time setting up and maintaining a deal like this. Too many distractions from core business is not a good thing.

But working with computers, there's always some type of cable or adapter missing. It takes time to find or buy one. So I can see how it'd be nice to always be able to get what you need in-house.

> There's the real "conspiracy" on how car companies pushed for freeways and roads. Is that a "conspiracy"?

I agree. Each individual company would have an obvious interest to push for things like that. No need to secretely meet with others and hatch elaborate plans.

> 6dof units like [0], seeing counts for separate units for each axis and movement is odd

Yes, it's odd. But I guess technically speaking, a 6 DOF unit does contain 6 separate sensors once you dig deep enough?

Definitely.

But my point was that Gibibytes did not replace Gigabytes.

It was just that some hard drive manufacturers successfully introduced marketingspeak into the computer world. It wasn't that the computer world all agreed upon switching to SI units.

> it cannot learn to read/write to a hypothetical infinite tape

Modern LLMs can perform external function calling. How is that not the same as having access to a potentially infinite memory?

Conversely, your brain does not contain infinite storage. So it is clearly not Turing complete in the strictest sense. Does that tell us anything useful about the level of intelligence in a brain?

When was the last time you said "Gibibytes" out loud in a conversation?

Do people really ask for a "32 Gibibyte RAM stick" in the store?

> advertise speeds in megabits per seconds

"bits per second" is what it always has been for computer communication.

When I got started, I got a 300 bits/second modem, which later got upgraded to 1200/75 bits/s and then 2400 bits/second.

Later on, we had 57,6 kbit/second modems, 64 kbit/s ISDN lines, 2 Mbit/s ADSL, etc.

All the speedtest websites I've seen also use Mbit/s.

But sure, if I'm downloading the latest Ubuntu distro, I want to know the current speed in Megabytes/s.

In the 1980s and 1990s, no-one thought this was a problem. All computer stuff is based on binary numbers, therefore 2^(10*n) makes a lot more sense than 10^n for us.

Do you buy 64 GB of RAM for a new computer? Or is it 68.719476736 GB?

It was only the hard drive manufacturers that wanted to inflate their numbers, and started pushing the 10^n scheme.

This is coming from someone who grew up with the SI system, which makes a ton of sense for physics and mechanics. Not so much for computer memory.

In Sweden, this is mandatory to get your driver's license. Lot's of fun!

Thanks. Is the reason there is no 12 month notice period that there no longer are any assets for potential creditors?

It seems it would be very hard to set the balance sheets to exactly 0? What about prepaid taxes etc?

In Sweden you can sell your company either to used as a "shelf company", meaning the buyer will later resell it, or you can sell it with the promise that it will be dissolved/liquidated and not resold.

It seems much more popular to sell it to be dissolved since there are some risks involved with someone else using it in the future.

So I can understand if it is not very popular in Germany either to sell a company to be re-used.

What surprises me is that it seems to be a good sized market in Germany for someone to provide a service where they buy your company and later dissolve it, but the service doesn't exist (?)

The formal process in Germany seems simple enough. Just sign a sales contract at a public notary, the buyer replaces the CEO, and you're done.

Since this doesn't really seem to exist (?), I assume the potential liabilities for the buyer are so great that the service price would be much too high?

They can't.

If you pay them to dissolve the company for you, they buy the shares from you and replace the board and the CEO. At that point, you're completely free from the company.

They then must take the 7-9 months needed to go through the whole dissolution process. There is a mandatory 6 month wait after announcing the dissolution to give lenders/sellers time to make claims against the company. This wait is 12 months in Germany.

There is also paperwork for the accounting, tax filings, etc.

The service takes care of all this as the new owners. Since they have done this literally thousands of times, they don't need to spend many man-hours on it. Therefore, the fee is fairly low, about 1000 dollars, of which 300 dollars are mandatory government fees.

Example (Swedish): https://www.bolagspartner.se/avveckla-aktiebolag/

So if you own a company with 11 000 dollars in the bank and no debt, they will pay you 10 000 dollars for it.

You can do everything online, including signing the contract. No need to visit a public notary or similar.

:) Yeah, nothing illegal ever happens.

Was this in Sweden? In that case, I have heard of cases where a condo that someone bought had an unknown bank loan taken out against it.

The bank loan is still attached to the condo even if it changes owners. The bank can force you to sell the condo to pay the loan back to the bank.

You can then turn around and sue the previous owner who took out the loan. Good luck with that.

I don't think this happens very often and usually the condo association knows which loans are taken out against which condos.

I'm not an expert, especially not on the German law. But here's my understanding:

If a UG with 1 euro in share capital has a large equity, low expenses, and is run prudently, then I don't think the CEO/shareholders are personally liable if the UG is sued for a million euros and must pay that?

Both a GmbH and a UG have a "share capital" (Stammkapital). It is at least 25 000 euros for a GmbH, and 1 euro for a UG. On day 1, this is also the equity (Eigenkapital).

If the company makes profits, that will increase the equity. The equity makes it possible to keep spending money for a while even if the cash flow is negative. A 1 euro UG can in theory have 1 million euros in equity.

In both cases, the CEO is legally obligated to start insolvency proceedings immediately if it looks like the company can't pay its bills or loans any more. This is also required if the equity goes below half the share capital (same as in Sweden, "kontrollbalansräkning").

> if the initial Stammkapital for an UG is too low, it then is seen under constant thread of insolvency under the law

I don't think it's that simple? To begin with, it's the equity and the cash flow that matters, not just the Stammkapital (share capital) by itself. A UG can start out with a very low share capital, but if it has no expenses and a positive cash flow, then insolvency is not a risk, right?

If the cash flow suddenly becomes negative, for instance by losing a big client, or the main product suddenly can't be sold any more, then even a GmbH can be under immediate threat of insolvency. The 25 000 euro in share capital is nothing compared to salaries for a bunch of people, plus an office lease agreement that runs for another couple of years, etc.

So if you're operating a GmbH with employees and an office, then I'd say that it can be "seen under constant threat of insolvency" if it only has the share capital available as equity (or worse, just half of it), and the future income is very uncertain. So both a GmbH and a UG can put the CEO in jail if he plays it fast and loose.

I can definitely see how it is easier for a UG to get into insolvency territory, and above all, people running UGs aren't as familiar with the rules and pitfalls.

I could be wrong on some things? I'm interested to learn more in that case.

That sounds unlike anything I've ever read about it? Where have you seen this?

Here is the law that regulates GmbHs, with the paragraph specific to UGs:

https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gmbhg/__5a.html

Where in the GmbH-law do you find anything to support your claim?

> The concept that any idiot can start an LLC with no collateral (which the 25k are) is completely, absolutely, mind bogglingly bonkers to us Germans.

Uhh, what? Have you never heard of UGs? That is, 1 Euro GmbHs.

> The concept of title insurance doesn't exist in Germany

(Title insurance is where you must buy insurance when buying a house to guard against the risk that the house may have unknown liabilities or owners)

It doesn't exist in Sweden either, because the ownership of houses is in a central register. You can't make a claim against a house if it is not registered.

Funnily enough, there's no such register for condos in Sweden. So you can end up with a nasty surprise if it turns out you bought a condo that there were unknown bank loans against. But it doesn't happen often enough that there is title insurance against it.

Sure, generally speaking, people who try to break into computer systems for profit do not have a lot of overlap with people who spends lots of time writing open source software for fun.

But in this case it is not hard to imagine that the XZ-perpetrator came from the second group, right?

Edit: I mean, this wouldn't be that different from when Ken Thompson demonstrated how to do a hidden backdoor in the C compiler?

In Sweden you can sell your company to a specialized company that will dissolve it for you (for example this one: https://www.standardbolag.com/services/liquidation). This can be done in a matter of 1-2 weeks.

In Sweden, you can of course also choose to dissolve it yourself, but nobody does that since it takes years, and it's pretty cheap to let someone else take care of it for you.

It sounds like the same service is not available on the market in Germany?

Thanks. How much of the 15 000 was external costs to an accountant, public notaries, authorities, etc, and how much was the internal wages?

The numbers I have seen for external costs range in the low thousands, but maybe that is wrong?