tempestn

Not the parent, and I'm not saying it definitely wouldn't have happened (I have no idea), but it's at least possible. There was advance intelligence around the event that might have been treated differently by a different administration.

Even if it had happened, the response would also have been different.

Courts don't tend to be impressed by arguments like this. It was made very clear what was being offered and what wasn't, and technical barriers were even put in place. The fact that the barriers weren't foolproof doesn't give carte blanche to bypass them.

I agree more with your second argument, though that tends to be strained when the exploit is published.

I wonder if they heavily throttle traffic on port 53, so DNS works, but this kind of exploit isn't particularly useful.

34 devices connected to my router at the moment, 8 wired and 26 wifi. About 8 of the wifi devices are phones, tablets, and laptops; the rest are various iot things: locks, plugs, alarm, thermostat, water heater, doorbell, etc.

You can just ask it not to search the web. In the case of GPT5, it believes it's a real case if you do that: https://chatgpt.com/share/68e8c0f9-76a4-800a-9e09-627932c1a7...

The existing controlling shareholders would need to support the issuing of new shares. They would only choose to dilute their own holdings if it were advantageous to do so.

Sure, but whichever shareholders control the company, they ultimately want to profit from that ownership, right? So if the stock price isn't reflecting the true value of the underlying company, they're going to do something about it.

I suppose there are edge cases where they will instead attempt to profit by convincing the board to pay the CEO a trillion dollars, but even that kind of thing probably only flies if the stock price is also going up. (I wouldn't have thought to include that exception at all some years ago, but at least one salient example has proven this possible, if not likely.) So I could see a case for not trusting the valuation of companies that behave in that particular manner. Where the CEO is effectively the controlling shareholder, especially if they have shown a willingness and ability to inflate their own compensation.

Aggregate predictions, yes. For example, the long-term, risk-adjusted expected return of all liquid securities should be the same if we believe EMH. Therefore by holding a diversified sample of securities in a market, your expected return should be the same as that of the market as a whole (though actual return won't be). Any expected difference would theoretically be due to a difference in risk.

Now, it may be that the risk is one that other people care about but you don't. Some investors might be more sensitive to short-term volatility than others, for example. But a weak EMH can at least give a framework for thinking about these kinds of decisions. (Like whether to value tilt, for example. Or whether to invest in active or passive funds.)

It also gives you a framework to think about in which cases it is more or less likely to hold. Small, illiquid markets are the least likely to be efficient, in my opinion and experience. My only actively managed investment is in such a market.

All models are flawed; some are useful. I would argue the EMH is an imperfect but useful model of market behaviour.

A company could decide to never pay a dividend, yes. But that doesn't mean the stock is worthless; you need to take the thought process further. Who ultimately controls a company? The shareholders. So, imagine a scenario where a company is profitable and seemingly valuable, but for some reason the share price is not increasing, so the shareholders are not seeing their wealth increase. In that scenario they would probably either pay a dividend or, more likely, take advantage of the profitability and low stock price to buy back stock, driving up its value.

Either way, the owners of a successful company are going to want to profit from it, which will make the shares valuable. Of course, investors know this, and so the share price tends to track current value of expected future earnings even without the company taking direct action to distribute profits.

One big benefit of a google sheet over a web app is that you're not relying on the creator to keep maintaining it. You can copy the sheet and then you have it forever. (Unless Google shuts down sheets, but even for Google that's unlikely.)

I'd say you're biasing the analysis by ending at the bottom after the crash though. Certainly if you managed to time your capitulation for the market bottom you would have lost out, but if you're buy-and-hold long term, you'd catch all of the recovery too. The person who sold early, on the other hand, would most likely miss some of the recovery as well.

It comes as a flat disc. For some applications that might be more convenient packaging than traditional parachutes.

I agree with using a TSM fund rather than an S&P 500 index, but be aware that you're still mostly holding S&P 500 companies. The S&P 500 covers about 80% of the total market cap of US public companies, whereas the Russell 3000 is 98%. (This is, of course, because the 500 largest companies are so much larger than the median.)

If you really want to diversify away from the biggest growth companies you could try a value and/or small/value tilt. Those might all be good advice, but they do come with their own caveats, whereas using TSM instead of an S&P 500 fund is just good advice in general.

And conversely, if you try to preempt the crash, you might end up sitting out most of the run up. Lots of people called the dot.com bubble in the late 90s and got out, only to end up worse off than if they'd just held through the whole boom, crash, and recovery. (Of course, I'm sure there were also some that managed to time the market successfully! Not sure I'm that lucky though.)

That's wild. How would a population of 1000ish survive for that long without growing or going extinct?

You could just set them up to forward to gmail instead. Even if you don't have a server to do this, you could use eg. Cloudflare email forwarding.

Set your other accounts to forward them to your gmail with ARC headers, which gmail now supports. Used to be forwarding into gmail was almost unusable due to spam false positives, but I've found it to be significantly improved now (albeit not perfect).

Can't help but appreciate the irony here.

And removed because they don't allow "hypothetical questions".

Done!

I wonder how much later antibiotics would have been discovered if not for that.

One other one that just came to mind is the Chernobyl disaster. Obviously it was still a disaster (it's in the name!), but if I recall correctly, there was a water reservoir below the meltdown, which if reached (and I think it came close?) would likely have caused an explosion that would have spread enough radiation to make much of eastern Europe uninhabitable, among other disastrous effects. That's quite a dodged bullet.

That's sort of the problem, right? Large organizations have become dominant precisely because of reasons like this, and there are indeed huge benefits. But if the hypothesis is correct that the crowding out of smaller organizations is fraying the fabric of society, that's a pretty significant drawback.

Funny coincidence. I was just pondering last night how an extremely intelligent person would look at the problems in the world. (And whether it would be incredibly frustrating!) For those who aren't familiar, Terence Tao is considered one of the greatest living mathematicians, and arguably one of the world's most brilliant minds.

Those are great points. As well as backing up facts with references, I would add, don't state an opinion without facts and reasoning to back it up.

And I agree that without doing these things, some opinions are more likely to draw down-votes than others. TBH I indeed probably am more likely to down-vote a badly made point if it's one with which I disagree. But really, everyone should be doing these things, regardless of karma concerns.

Agreed, though the culture doesn't persist by accident. Without ongoing moderation (which has been excellent), I believe it would eventually be lost.

I don't think most people need a bulky case. You can get aramid cases that barely add any thickness, but still protect the phone from dents and scuffs.

Hz vs kHz. Your parent's point is that the knife is vibrating far faster than even the fastest chefs would be slicing.

Important plot element in Jurassic Park!