brunooo

For anyone who cares enough to watch a 2 hour video on it and hasn’t seen it yet, this Rick Hartley video is the recent gold standard of explaining the issues at play:

https://www.youtube.com/live/ySuUZEjARPY

The mindblowing thing to internalize is that you don’t route energy as electrons through copper traces (they move incredibly slow) but merely use the copper to guide a bunch of waves traveling outside of them, where they are up to all kinds of shenanigans like coupling, reflecting etc.

This is pretty interesting from a content marketing perspective - and think will work well for them.

Izzy Kaminska, one of the smartest crypto critics out there, begrudgingly acknowledged the value of Perps at https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-08-31/perpet...

In addition to Eevblog and other great resources mentioned, the two things that helped me most with that are the Phil’s Lab YouTube channel and Arlektra educational kit:

- https://m.youtube.com/c/phils94

- https://www.arstemlabs.com/arlektra-mini

Ft Stafford Beer et al, from the guy behind https://www.the-syllabus.com/ etc.

Plus, given that the auction was about getting rid of the increasingly weird 25% equity holder, it’s not a far stretch to assume that the minority guy just rigged the auction with „who do I know who I could talk into starting a fake bidding war“, and thus even less appetite among the majority to just pick up the tab for that stunt.

Probably one of the savviest banking analysts out there and author of Lying For Money

Oh, surprising re Signature, but 100% backstop should calm things down.

Any fiat <-> crypto rails left in the US, after the FDIC buries SEN on, I dunno, Tuesday?

Curious if anyone knows if SVB would have been eligible on Thursday?

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/12/201.108 is the list of supported collateral.

There … is?

Right below that there’s another bracket of “trying to tweet through it”, a lot of the folks behind the We Support An SVB Successor thing, which then, as Paul Graham did, lectured people that they can’t really do anything because their LP agreements forbid it.

Didn’t know YC was a non-profit and Paul’s involvement was a $85k salary and no carry/returns…

Push came to shove, some people stepped or are stepping up, some didn’t.

Being in an active leadership position makes his decision to spend time on live-streaming panicky half-baked takes … worse?

Not necessarily disagreeing but still worth pointing out that he did the right thing here.

One of those rare opportunities to clearly assess VCs from the outside, and surprisingly good steady reaction by him and Khosla.

Who else?

Tempted to come up with a market manipulation angle, but actually great question.

If eg Founders Fund put on a decent short right before mailing the portfolio, I wonder how one could pierce through a “how’s that different from Hindenburg / Adani” defense.

Fingers crossed for a good Matt Levine take next week…

Great question and no idea. They’re sophisticated cats and thus guess the answer is “the deal is whatever you can negotiate with them.”

But it wouldn’t be very likely that anyone would give you the same terms for a junior tranche.

Not investing, legal, or any other advice, but unless my company would be in a very weird situation requiring access to 50% or more of our funds in the next 2 weeks, I wouldn’t even start entertaining offers below 95% or maybe 92%.

+1 re LTCM resolution, also great example.

I’d rather hope that in the unlikely event of there being no private market buyer(s) and a public solution becoming necessary, that lawmakers will at least force some wider ecosystem stakeholders to chip in.

The SVB CEO’s call of basically begging for people to support them the way they tried to support them for 40 years was very emotionally relatable. It’s one story if they’d gotten back with “Greg, we really spent day and night pouring over the balance sheets etc but couldn’t get there”, but as far as I recall TPG was the only publicly known group to even seriously look and consider.

It sometimes makes me think that if there’d ever be a war in my lifetime, the very last regiment I’d want to serve in would be the Bay Area one. Imagine being in a foxhole with Sacks crying for the government, Balaji just stringing random words together, and 80% of the rest just opportunistically and led by Thiel weaseling out through the back trench…

It is, but if that’s how you apply it to your partner who built 4 decades worth of plumbing that underpins your community, then stuff falls apart.

Good point, and obviously not a great time for SVB equity holders or EVE sensitivity regulation, but looking through their 10Ks or Marc Rubenstein’s great math yesterday at https://www.netinterest.co/p/the-demise-of-silicon-valley-ba... also not that much worse than Goldman at some points in 2008.

Not great, not terrible as they say, but aside from a couple of very niche specialists no bank on the planet would survive getting 25% of deposits pulled in a day.

NPR had an excellent story of how a bank takeover and wind-down works back in 2009:

https://www.npr.org/2009/03/26/102384657/anatomy-of-a-bank-t...

“On a mid-January night, some 80 agents of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. pull into Vancouver, Wash. Their rental cars are generic, their arrival times staggered. One by one, agents check into a hotel, each quietly offering a pseudonym to the guy at the desk.

…

He agrees it almost feels like a spy movie. "They've done this before — quite a production," he says.“

And in general, for people who are understandably worried: besides the $250k available on Monday morning, my bet is on at least 50% of uninsured deposits by end of the week, and 90-100% if not next week (via acquisition) then within a pretty short time.

Can’t find the paper right now, but China has a massive effort underway to tissue culture needle trees for large areas in the West.

Single needle can basically be raised to dozens of seedlings in 3 months, and thus the only way they found to reach the scale they were looking for.

Sure: no failures myself yet, although battery is an issue on 4 hour+ flights, and tapping into a layer of redundancy by charging always feels a bit odd.

The iPad is actually mounted on the yoke right in front of you, some people mount it to the side with suction cups against the window, and starting to fiddle with the backup phone is already a distraction if the main hands free one goes down. Issues friends had were heat shutdowns in summer, plus one already cracked screen where the backlight then suddenly failed.

You rarely use the iPad in critical flight stages anyway, it’s more a navigation aid and displaying other traffic, and good practice to (see battery point above) keep the screen switched off for longer to stay proficient in the traditional approaches anyway.

The arguably number one case were an iPad with the fast updating screen is helpful in a crisis is an engine failure or similar emergency where you need to find a place to land fast, and as it knows the airplane you’re flying in, terrain underneath, winds etc it literally draws and uneven (different terrain) circle around your current position and shows you what is probably realistic. Another one is as potential fallback if one of the actual instruments fails, once had a stuck compass for example.

Non-airline pilot and generally curious, plus work on viability of new ground up stack for vehicle vs Garmin or Honeywell.

Rules for my own small GA plane flights if it’s in one without glass cockpit are: two fully charged devices with latest data on both (iPad and phone), flight plan on both (ForeFlight syncs automatically), plus two means of charging (larger Anker pack, and dashboard USB or 12V outlet).

As a flight bag / printed material replacement.

Try tapping on Belfast Muni airport (KBST in ICAO) in Maine in ForeFlight, and the dataset consolidation will pull Bost airbase (BST in IATA) in Afghanistan. While it’s fairly obvious that you’re not going to Central Asia in your Piper, imagine pulling the 3x longer runway into your FMS and have it compute landing settings or add it as emergency alternate for your A350 into Boston.

It’s still completely different levels of reliability.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DO-178C is a good starting point to understand certification requirements, and Wind River has a lot of documentation around VxWorks, which is actually quite modern supporting Rust etc.

The issue is that even a slight overlap with other cockpit functions puts you in a much stricter regime, and thus a simple modern map rendering framework doesn’t work, because its components and dependencies have never been sufficiently dissected - you rather have a 5 second lag, terrible as it sounds from a pragmatic safety perspective, than having anything, especially your own position, misplaced only once in a billion map redraws.

The practical solution is that most airlines by now fly with iPads, Jeppesen Flight Deck Pro but even GA stuff like ForeFlight, which is also owned by Boeing, is popular for quick lookups like taxi instructions etc.

Re “free thrust/WWII”: Real Engineering recently did a great summary of the P47 Thunderbolt intercooler and general craziness of the engine at https://youtu.be/IwqTN5fhMR8