lesam

This is interesting, but doesn't have to be correct.

If Blockbuster had kept pouring money into the new service, maybe it would have lost it all - I see no reason to think Blockbuster's movie rental franchise business would have 'transferrable skills' to allow it to succeed at streaming.

If it had been trying to pivot into a pizza delivery business (perhaps more transferable, in terms of locating franchises etc) would Icahn still have been 'killing' it?

My point is, maybe it was already dead and Icahn just prevented it from wasting a lot of money on the way down the drain.

If it's lasted 10 years and someone is still using it after all that time, that seems like a pretty good signal there's a lot of value in the 'garbage'?

I've seen a lot of 'fixes' for 10 year old 'garbage' that turned out to be regressions for important use cases that the author of the 'fix' wasn't aware of.

If markets were regulated to trade in coordinated 1s auctions, instead of nanosecond precision first-come-first-served matching of orders, markets would function just as well without needing a ton of what the HFT crowd does. It's a massive waste of brilliant minds.

That seems like a legal question - if the model weights contain an encoded copy of the copyrighted material, is that a 'copy' for the purpose of copyright law?

Before photography, we knew something was truthful because someone trustworthy vouched for it.

Now that photos and videos can be faked, we'll have to go back to the older system.

Depends. When millions are on the line between companies, people are surprisingly willing to take a hand-created excel file as 'proof'. For example: https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/tricolors-excel-g...

If there’s anything I would want to run to verify, I ask the author to add a unit test. Generally, the existing CI test + new tests in the PR having run successfully is enough. I might pull and run it if I am not sure whether a particular edge case is handled.

Reviewers wanting to pull and run many PRs makes me think your automated tests need improvement.

In fact ‘computer’ used to be a job description: a person who computes.

Aren’t “Big Life Insurance” and “Big Annuity” pretty much the same companies?

A quick search says Hinge charges a monthly subscription, is that not correct?

The NDP party does not want a Conservative landslide government either, regardless of Mr. Singh’s pension.

This still leaves open ‘buy, don’t borrow, die’ as a way for the dynastically wealthy to opt out of paying capital gains tax.

I think the sensible option is making death a taxable event, rather than borrowing (with perhaps exceptions for the family farm, but not for the family billion dollar business).

And the second best solution is eliminating the step-up basis, which without deemed disposition at death is just a free gift of capital gains tax rebates to heirs of the most wealthy.

C++ gives both ‘map’ and ‘unordered_map’, and in my experience idiomatic C++ uses unordered_map unless you actually need a tree.

Actually generally the legal system would decide that, not “the market”.

I.e. investors have assigned roughly zero probability to CrowdStrike bearing the full cost of this incident, and set the market price accordingly.

When I was interviewing for more junior roles, “find the nth Fibonacci number” was a popular question.

It was always fun to hit the interviewer with this, it’s exponentially faster than the memoization they were usually expecting.

The author is suggesting normalizing a 20 hour work week, and an approximate doubling of hourly wages for the majority of workers. (And continuing to reduce the hours worked per week until full employment is reached).

Work that is unattractive would presumably still be incentivized by higher wages.

Except in the moon landing I think they had more useful controls, not just a single lever to be moved up or down.

Sure there’s a tension, but one difference is that I know how I vote, but I don’t know how my representative votes unless it’s in the public record.

If you believe that electorates punish politicians for decisions in the public interest, and legislators’ jobs would be easier if they were less accountable to their voters, why support democracy at all?

I’m in Canada. If there were enough doctors that doctor unemployment was 2%+, like a normal job, doctors here would get paid less. Also doctors might not burn themselves out working crazy hours.

Instead, we have a dire shortage of doctors and people in government employed full time trying to recruit the limited supply.

Doctors can’t move to the next hospital for more pay, but they can move to the next province, or to the US.

Do you have any sense why this is true?

I get preferring (10x or 0x) to (1.5x). I don’t get preferring a near-certainty of 0x to some recovery of their capital with a pivot to selling a smaller-but-sustainable business.

Is it something like they’re measured by LP’s (or someone?) on only non-zeroed investments?

Assuming you have a tested rollback strategy, I’m all for rolling back first and asking questions later.

It at least can often eliminate the rolled back change as the cause, even if it doesn’t fix the problem.

I appreciate that it’s a joke made to make a point, but I would prefer that the state keep prisoners safe from being raped in prison, regardless of what crime they committed.

If P!=NP, probably nothing changes.

If P=NP, a very large class of optimization problems probably become practical to solve, which would be a big win for science and technology generally, to the extent that I think it would be felt in daily life.

Edit to add: and also as another commenter mentioned, most existing encryption would likely be much easier to break, which would also be felt.

Medicine has more barriers to entry at least partly because we’ve decided to erect them. Doctors learn all kinds of things outside their direct specialty that they don’t really need to know, but nobody inside the system has an incentive to streamline medical education or to encourage more and earlier specialization.

For example, we force most doctors to take a 4 year degree before medicine (sometimes pre-med, but often an arts or non-biological science degree). Wasting 4 years of a future doctor’s prime career on an expensive and often irrelevant screening program is extremely wasteful for society as a whole.

Except you do have hundreds of distinct smell receptors that can detect complex chemical signals, which contribute greatly to what we colloquially call ‘taste’.

Which is why food tastes very different if you lose your sense of smell, and why making artificial flavours is not just a matter of mixing a few base flavours.

If you want to be a CEO, it's a lot better to network with the kids of all the CEO's than the kids of the dentists and middle managers, if you can arrange it.

Newer research shows a good chunk of SIDS cases actually _are_ likely suffocation from various causes.

That’s why the SIDS reduction measures are mostly ‘sleep on the back, in an empty crib, with nothing soft around’.

But it’s much easier to tell a grieving parent that there’s nothing they could have done, than that their baby got unlucky and suffocated to death.

Who in the rest of your organization is producing so much shit that your manager’s primary job is to be a shit umbrella? What productive purpose are those people serving if your manager’s job is effectively to work against them?

Maybe the people producing the shit need to go too.

I never see anyone complaining about buybacks because of tax reasons though. In particular, the author is complaining companies are not spending enough on R&D because of buybacks.

It is true that buybacks are more tax efficient than dividends, which is why companies generally do buybacks instead of dividends.

The US tax on capital gains is definitely a mess though.

If there was an alternative in the form of a guaranteed not-terrible job at minimum wage, wouldn’t that necessarily raise wages (or maybe working conditions) for currently terrible jobs?

Giving people a real choice seems easier than regulating every possible kind of job.