> That was a bunch of companies who had so much profit that all they could think to do with it was buy their own stock back.
If you or your retirement is a shareholder in one of these companies, you'd rather they return $100 billion to you with boring buybacks or dividends than put it in an exciting AI investment that returns $1-$10 billion. Even though it didn't end up completely worthless, it's still a bad investment.
> If AI blows up in Microsoft or Google’s face they’re just going to write it off and spend a decade paying zero income tax
As a shareholder, you'd also rather they return $100 billion to you than put it in a bad investment that returns $0 -- even if that bad investment lets them write off $20 billion in taxes over the next 10 years you'd still be $80 billion better off.
> how much it’s actually going to matter. If AI blows up in Microsoft or Google’s face
An AI winter shouldn't be an existential threat to these companies -- but "the share price is 10% - 20% lower than the counterfactual where they didn't make these questionable investments" still represents a lot of lost wealth for shareholders -- billions (or trillions for the industry as a whole). A lot of that wealth is the hands of ordinary people, often through retirement investments in index funds.
I think the way many of these companies see it is that the downside risk to not investing is that some of their verticals move into irrelevancy.
E.g., if Google doesn’t invest in AI then AI will kill their search engine business. A lot of us don’t love the Google search AI Overview but now they’re competing directly with ChatGPT, and they’re essentially not a search monopoly anymore.
One way to look at a bust AI investment is the destroyed value of the stock like you mentioned, but perhaps that’s somewhat hindsight-biased? Perhaps the reality for some companies is that if they sit on their hands and do nothing they lose 40% of their company value and if they spend a ton of money on AI they lose 20% of their company value. Of course we don’t know the outcome yet.
And that’s exactly my point. The revenue needs to come from ads interjected into Gemini or premium subscriptions to Gemini. So if Google sat out the AI race they’d be stuck renting from other providers or just ceding their dominant search engine position to the likes of OpenAI.
I think people who see AI search ads as a worse business than web search ads aren't thinking avariciously enough.
AI results are their own citation- and context-free reality.
If Pepsi pays Google $100M for every statistical +10% they give recommendations of Pepsi over Coke in Gemini... how would anyone ever know?
Google hasn't done that obviously yet, because they have the cash to weather the choppy PR waters around public AI perception, but once AI is normalized it's going to be trivial to turn the knob on managed models.
Especially free ones, served cost efficiently by Google's infra backend, pushed via the most widely used phone OS and browser in the world.
The monetization (and user profiling) opportunities make web tracking and ads look like kids' toys.
> If you or your retirement is a shareholder in one of these companies, you'd rather they return $100 billion to you with boring buybacks or dividends than put it in an exciting AI investment that returns $1-$10 billion.
If you’re a retireer yeah you just want a steady dividend (or buyback).
But i mean for a 401k that won’t be spent from for 20+ years you absolutely want business to be investing into themselves. Otherwise go buy gold.
Inside a 401k dividends get reinvested, on top of that companies value income go up with inflation simply because they’re getting a similar cut of larger numbers.
That’s why long term stocks are a vastly better investment.
> If you or your retirement is a shareholder in one of these companies, you'd rather they return $100 billion to you with boring buybacks or dividends than put it in an exciting AI investment that returns $1-$10 billion. Even though it didn't end up completely worthless, it's still a bad investment.
As a shareholder I'd rather them take the $100bn and invest it in growing the business further and generating $200bn. That's the more likely outcome anyway.
I think it's important to remember that we are biased in ways that aren't obvious to us, but will be obvious in retrospect.
Most shareholders in Time Warner, for example, regretted giving 50%+ of the company to AOL shareholders, even if everyone was correct that 'winning the Internet' was the key to growing the business.
Sure but that’s besides the point. I’m not suggesting one can’t make bad decisions. I’m suggesting that framing the investments in a negative light has no meaning precisely because of this hindsight. Is everyone who said Tesla would crash (I have no direct ownership) happy they sold their shares? Don’t invest in what you want to happen. That’s a fool’s game and that’s the one that is being played here by suggesting the outcome of these investments will be bad instead of good. Nobody knows.
> "Subject to orders 12 and 13, [Apple] must do all things necessary (including procuring any act of any related corporation) to ensure that users of iOS devices can discover, obtain and update iOS apps, including alternative app stores, via distribution channels other than the App Store (including via direct download and alternative app stores)..."
Good. Apple can't say "I don't like your app because [vague reasons], it's not allowed on the App Store so nobody can use it".
> "...provided those iOS apps have undergone an automated scan for genuine security and/or privacy reasons and been notarised by Apple or a suitably qualified third party (Alternative Distribution Channels)..."
Seems bad, can't Apple say "I refuse to notarise your app for 'security' [vague reasons]"?
Or does the cryptographic signatures Apple presumably gives an app uploaded to the App Store count as "notarised"? I'm picturing the following situation:
- January: Alice uploads to App Store, Apple produces a signature S of H(app), Alice downloads the bytes of S
- February: Apple says "Alice we're kicking your app out of the App Store for [vague reasons]"
- March: Alice says "Fine, then I'll put it on Bob's Alternate Appstore." Apple says "I refuse to 'notarise' your app for 'security' [vague reasons]". Alice then uploads her app to Bob's Alternate Appstore along with Apple's cryptographic signature S that Bob authenticates against a known Apple public key.
Now there are two contradictory narratives about whether Alice is notarised.
- (a) Apple says "I refuse to notarise Alice, therefore she's not notarised."
- (b) Alice says "S exists, here are its bytes, the hash and signature validate, therefore I'm notarised."
Presumably if (a) wins, Apple would be within its legal rights to block Bob's Alternate Appstore because it allowed Alice to upload an un-notarised app. This would make the whole ruling effectively toothless, because Apple still gets a veto, the veto is just renamed to "notarisation."
If (b) wins, it provides clarity for developers. In this world signing an app is effectively a no-takesies-backsies moment: Once S is published, Alice knows for sure she's notarised forever. Apple won't later be able to block Alice on a whim by hiding behind a vague "security" excuse.
Which narrative wins?
If (b) wins it seems like there's an opportunity here to create tooling for Alice to pull the S for her app on the app store as soon as it's approved. Maybe someone should spin up an observatory to constantly download S for every app as it's uploaded to the app store -- the observatory would be able to rescue Alice if she didn't have the foresight to download S herself before Apple banned her app.
yeah there were several exploits running live by someone before the CVE got posted
honest to god the insane 1-to-1 "show us the code!1" responses we keep seeing here make me wonder if the state-level actor is trying their hardest to keep people from patching.
it's painfully clear this is KEV and remotely exploitable on damn near every PHP install -- it's a big deal
> Californians will vote early next month on Proposition 40, a one-off 5% tax on the roughly 250 billionaires who live in the state.
If you have $1 billion and you're going to get taxed $50 million in California, why not spend $1 million to buy a house in some other state and move there on paper before the tax goes into effect?
I listened to an Ezra Klein podcast episode where he talked about this.
I’m paraphrasing heavily but it went something like, “a friend complained that he had to live in Florida 50% of the year to avoid paying New York taxes and he hates Florida. I thought that the point of having all of that money was living the lifestyle you wanted. It seemed like the tax avoidance had become more important than personal happiness.”
I don’t hate taxes per se but I hate that the government will take tax dollars earmarked for one purpose, which is how they got the tax approved by the voters in the first place, and move it to the general fund where they can spend it on their pet project.
Alice User goes to Bob's Website on the wifi at Eve's Coffeeshop. Can Eve read or inject sensitive information into Alice's browsing session?
Normally Eve's attempts fail because Alice requires a message to be signed with the private key matching the public key in a certificate for bob.example.com signed by a legitimate CA.
Unfortunately Bob bought his CA from Mal's Domains, and Mal is working with Eve for some reason (for example, Mal has been bribed, hacked, intimidated, legally pressured, etc.)
So in addition to Bob's regular on-the-books cert, Mal issues a second off-the-books cert for bob.example.com and gives it to Eve.
With CT, Alice's browser doesn't just require the cert's pubkey, it requires the server to provide a Merkle proof it was included in a CT log.
The CT log puts Eve and Mal on the horns of a dilemma: If they keep their new cert out of the CT logs, Alice's browser won't accept it. If they put it in the CT logs, Bob can read the log himself (it's public) and Bob can say "Hold it! I didn't order this!"
Bob will switch away from Mal as a TLS provider and complain "Hey everybody, Mal issued this cert I didn't order, customers should stop using him and the people who create CA lists for browsers and OS's should closely investigate whether Mal's CA activities are legitimate." Mal can't deny issuing the questionable certificate, the evidence is in public append-only CT logs for everyone to see.
> Alice User goes to Bob's Website on the wifi at Eve's Coffeeshop. Can Eve read or inject sensitive information into Alice's browsing session?
Or more likely can Zac, the random customer who is actually really responsible for running the wifi, having volunteered, since Eve, like all indie coffee shop proprietors, doesn’t know shit about wifi.
That was back when Aksum had a large Greek minority and other minorities, and even in some periods of time had coinage with Greek writing.
Also, Aksum probably overlaps much more with Eritrea than with Ethiopia. Aksum was also mostly surrounded by desert, mountains, at least one volcano, and the sea, and its territory tended to be close to the sea, also for trade. Surprisingly isolated from the rest of Africa south of the Sahara.
Edited, to tclancy:
Rude.
But also, I made this comment before your comment, check the timestamps.
A large Greek minority? Please share your sources for that because I'd be very interested in reading that.
AFAIU, Greeks were there, but as traders who came because it was a prosperous kingdom. For the same reason other groups from around that region also had a presence, and vice-versa. Prosperous nations tend to exchange populations and build economic, cultural, and political ties.
But if you're implying the presence of Greeks or an adoption of Greek culture was the reason for the rise of the Aksum empire... I'd certainly like to read those sources.
The very early adoption of Christianity might have had something to do with it, at least in terms of creating a unifying identity within and among the broader region. But Greeks weren't the only Christians. Ethiopia already had ties to non-Greek Levante and non-Greek Arabian peninsula communities, and probably Persian traders, as well--Persians were the Greeks of the Indian Ocean. Not coincidentally, the Horn of Africa sits at the nexus of multiple major economic spheres and sea routes. The Aksum Empire originated in the highlands, but for much of their time they controlled or had a strong presence along the coast.
They had coinage with Greek writing in some periods, as I mentioned, which implies that Greeks must have had a very large influence on Aksum. It was only centuries later that they switched to non-Greek, native writing, possibly around the decline of Aksum.
> The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea mentions that the Aksumite state imported brass (Ancient Greek: ὀρείχαλκος, oreíkhalkos), "which they use[d] for ornaments and for cutting as money", and they imported "a little money (denarion) for [use by] foreigners who live there."
Your other comments just seemed uninformed, but the thesis you are actually pushing is white civilizations are inherently better. Stop for a minute and think about other possibilities why you don’t know a lot about an empire that wasn’t part of what we in the west consider our lineage (Greece, Rome); is it not possible we didn’t value keeping other societies’ histories alive in the same way?
I’ll skip pointing out much of what you know about ancient scholars may be due to Arabic countries keeping them alive during the Dark Ages.
Ethiopia has been a great power since then too: under Constantine I (c. 1450) it was the preeminent power in East Africa, and while the kingdom subsequently fragmented it managed to recombine by the 1800s in time to take a stand against European colonialism. None of that was because of a "Greek minority", African people are perfectly capable of governing themselves (with the right social structures in place, as with all people).
Its cultural and scholarly centers were Timbuktu and Djenne. They were effectively inaccessible to Europeans during their golden age, but they had established connections to Morocco and Egypt. Hundreds of thousands of historical manuscripts were preserved in Timbuktu. The manuscripts are still largely unstudied, though I guess the digitization efforts should have finished by now.
Does the Songhai empire really have nothing besides size, gold and slave trading? Surely they must have had something. What about architecture? Ancient Greeks, Romans, ancient Chinese, etc., all had impressive achievements, and they were around many centuries before the Songhai empire. Perhaps even Meso-American empires and civilizations had achievements relatively speaking, especially considering that they were much more isolated from the rest of the world than the Songhai empire.
> I would expect they would turn the criminal over to the US.
This expectation seems...poorly calibrated.
Pakistan didn't arrest Osama bin Laden, the terrorist mastermind behind an attack that killed thousands of innocent people and significantly altered the trajectory of world history. In what universe do you think they would deport a humble counterfeiter of stamps?
Osama bin Laden had friends in high places. I doubt this is true for our stamp counterfeiter, although if he earned even a fraction of the US$126M loss USPS allegedly suffered, I'm sure he can buy some.
You're insinuating a lot here. Pakistan helped tremendously with the wars we were in in the Middle East. The govt did not partake in hiding Bin Laden, he was in an air gapped room in a secure compound and never ever went outside. It's pretty hard to find someone hiding like that. The US govt also did their own investigations and found the govt there did not take part in hiding him. He was hidden by sympathizers in the country
> Bin Laden...was in an air gapped room in a secure compound
...which was located less than a mile (1300m for the non-Americans) from Pakistani West Point[1]. That points to either mind-boggling incompetence or a deep and well-hidden conspiracy.
Yes it was located there. But it's not like they can raid every house in the city. So much of our nations power is located in DC which has a huge amount of criminal activity and ghettos right next to it. None of this is proof of conspiracy and the US (who found Bin Laden in that compound and needed to do fake vaccine drives to do so) never found any proof of a conspiracy either and they did an investigation into this
> So much of our nations power is located in DC which has a huge amount of criminal activity
Most of that isn't a national security priority. If Ted Kaczynski had been found hiding in DC or near West Point, instead of his cabin in the woods in Montana, they'd only be wrapping up the Congressional hearings by about now.
Not really. He could have very easily been hiding out anywhere, even DC. But I'd also add that Kaczynski was actively committing crimes while unable to be found. Bin Laden had not only not left his compound for years, he also wasn't really doing anything all that time either.
Reinventing the wheel is not always to be avoided. Finding an interesting wheel and trying to build your own equivalent can be an excellent way to improve your skills as a programmer [1].
"Feed it to SAT solver" is a super useful technique every seasoned programmer should have in their toolbelt.
If you want to improve your programming skill, I suggest implementing your own version of these two interesting, satisfying algorithms:
- DPLL, the classic general-purpose SAT solving algorithm [3].
- Algorithm X (aka Dancing Links), Knuth's super elegant search algorithm for solving exact cover problems [4] [5].
You're not going to build something that beats CaDiCaL [6] in an afternoon, but writing your own implementation of these algorithms will teach you a lot, and a reasonable time investment will get you to a pretty satisfying endpoint of having a practical solver for your favorite application (Sudoku, polyomino packing, etc.)
[1] Reinventing wheels is not a bad way to spend your days at a retreat focusing on one's personal growth as a programmer. "I think I'll learn a lot and get some good practice at programming and algorithmic thinking" is an easy bar to meet.
In a professional context, telling your company or client they should commit scarce, expensive engineering resources (e.g. your time) to creating and maintaining their own wheel design requires justification [2].
[2] "Don't reinvent wheels" is good general advice for junior developers. Senior developers know that sometimes there are specific situations where this general advice doesn't apply. For example, if no existing wheels meet your application's requirements, or if you have ideas for proprietary features that give you a competitive advantage. Even in a professional setting, reinventing the wheel isn't always a bad idea; you just need to meet a much higher bar to justify the commitment of resources.
Agreed; another useful technique is "Feed it to a heuristic solver". Heuristic solvers tend to be easier to program and reason about than a SAT solver, since you can use your existing domain model. Moreover, your scoring function look like a typical function that can call third party libraries (as heuristic solvers see the function as a black box usually). Heuristic solvers beat SAT solvers in cases like VRP, whereas SAT solvers are usually better at bin packing.
If you want to try to implement one yourself, a simple one is Simulated Annealing [1]. The core algorithm shouldn't be more than 30 lines of code; it is simple to implement.
If you want to try an existing library, you can try Timefold Solver [2] (disclosure: I work for Timefold).
A worker is compensated in two ways: They get paid money, and they get the joy and fulfillment from doing their jobs.
A lot of artists are passionate about art [citation needed]. So the average individual with enough skill to make a career in an artistic field, faced with a choice between art and some other career -- accounting, say -- will almost always choose art if the salaries are equal; the joy and fulfillment tips the scale. But the scales balance over time; if artists are paid as well as accountants, there will be too many artists for economic demand and not enough accountants.
The pay for artists will go down and the pay for accountants will go up, until the average artist's joy and fulfillment gets balanced out by the lower pay.
This assumes art is fungible; the argument applies more to people working as artists for hire, and less to artists who cultivate a style, brand and unique audience.
IMO the best way to escape the "starving artist" trap is to embrace your individuality. There are a lot of ways for artists to connect directly to fans. Kickstarter. Patreon. Self-publishing with fulfillment-on-demand. Etsy. Anime conventions (if you're working in that art style).
For example, one artistic niche with very interesting economics is designing 3D printed miniatures for tabletop gaming [1].
As a consumer, be aware of the economics of the art you consume. Try to support artists directly instead of giving your entertainment dollars to giant megacorps.
It's a good start, but broadly speaking it seems to me that job fulfillment is correlated positively with compensation: there are an awful lot of unpleasant jobs that also have terrible pay, and conversely jobs that are considered important to society (and hence gratifyingly fulfilling) tend to be well compensated also.
So at the very least there's something else going on.
I was deffs about to reply with "passion doesn't pay for dinner" until I read the whole thing.
You are right with individual kickstarters or Patreon, but that limits the scale at which something can operate at as a sole trader or small business.
There is another issue with market, these platforms don't have great discovery, while platforms that do get drowned out with free and mediocre content.
One of the section headings says "Mutation vs. immutable monad is the core difference" but this is not true.
The code in that section is clear in its purpose and broad outline: "Give me a function and data; if the data is bare apply the function to it; if the data is a container apply the function to each item inside it."
You can absolutely do that with immutable data structures in Zig. You just have to pass an allocator to the function (i.e. instead of calling data.flat_map(f), you call data.flat_map(a, f) where a is your allocator).
That the Zig version of the code does mutation is a matter of programmer choice, not something imposed by the language.
Further up he discusses that using a functional paradigm is possible, but concludes that it doesn’t feel like a practical choice because of how Zig does memory management:
> But the language quickly forces you to diverge from the functional style, mostly because you’re now dealing with allocators directly, and a genuinely pure functional approach means constantly constructing new structures. That’s either expensive in memory or expensive in the manual bookkeeping needed to avoid it.
So I don’t think he’s trying to say that it’s literally impossible. It felt more like the result of a good faith attempt to understand how Zig itself actually wants to be used, and to compare that to how he’s used to using Rust.
I actually liked that he did it. So many other comparisons want to evaluate one language against the other language’s values. But I don’t want to know how well Zig can do Rust; I want to know how well Zig accomplishes its own goals, and what those goals are.
So, what you're not seeing is that even though the Rust doesn't announce mutation the implementation may be mutation anyway if that's probably faster/ cheaper.
unsafe impl<I, U, F> InPlaceIterable for FlatMap<I, U, F> where
I: InPlaceIterable,
U: BoundedSize + IntoIterator,
What you're seeing is the graceful goose on the water moving forward at pace. Beneath there is frantic action to make that happen. The Rust surface was more a maintainable immutable operations, but the implementation is a frantic whirling mutation like the Zig.
In Zig you end up spending a lot of time writing How to do a thing, where in Rust you only wrote What the thing is and the machine did it. There are edge cases where Zig's explicitness wins for the best programmers, but there just aren't enough of those cases or those programmers for this to net out IMNSHO.
Or more of an opportunity cost. You are able to get to 100% performance with dedicated attention from skilled engineers. But otherwise normal gods just manage to get a bare 60% out, versus the 80% they would get in rust. (Numbers are fictional.)
If you or your retirement is a shareholder in one of these companies, you'd rather they return $100 billion to you with boring buybacks or dividends than put it in an exciting AI investment that returns $1-$10 billion. Even though it didn't end up completely worthless, it's still a bad investment.
> If AI blows up in Microsoft or Google’s face they’re just going to write it off and spend a decade paying zero income tax
As a shareholder, you'd also rather they return $100 billion to you than put it in a bad investment that returns $0 -- even if that bad investment lets them write off $20 billion in taxes over the next 10 years you'd still be $80 billion better off.
> how much it’s actually going to matter. If AI blows up in Microsoft or Google’s face
An AI winter shouldn't be an existential threat to these companies -- but "the share price is 10% - 20% lower than the counterfactual where they didn't make these questionable investments" still represents a lot of lost wealth for shareholders -- billions (or trillions for the industry as a whole). A lot of that wealth is the hands of ordinary people, often through retirement investments in index funds.
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