madars

Insurance companies absolutely need profit. The basic argument is simple - insurer's capital moves like a random walk and if premiums equal claims (i.e., zero drift), that eventually falls below any starting level. In practice, that means that a failure gets socialized (e.g., state guaranty funds assess levies on the remaining, solvent insurance companies, which ultimately pass those costs down to consumers through higher premiums)

What we need is competitive markets, what we get is heavy intervention. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_need system means that to build a new hospital one needs to go to their direct competitors to ask for their permission. Imagine if to open a pastry shop you needed a permission from every other pastry shop in the city - bonkers.

Without loginwall: https://nitter.freedit.eu/MilesCranmer/status/21111056542116...

Yep. Reminds me of the famous HN lore about Dropbox https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 (note the 4 digit ID - early days!)

>For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

More details: https://x.com/sweis/status/2101484464807596264

    I had Claude port CADO-NFS to run on GPUs. Then it orchestrated a fleet to run on scavenged idle capacity. It ran with a max of 2048 GPUs for about of 30 GPU-years over 10 days.
    I asked Claude if it had a message for a public: “The credit belongs first to the people who built the number field sieve and CADO-NFS over several decades, and to the teams who set the earlier records. This run used their algorithm and much of their code.”
    Also to clarify:
    - No new algorithmic factoring improvements. 
    - It’s still exponential.
    - No new threats to deployed keys.

"4397328654844826923795068102505872571721883526553349659561256924505973939597593482272505698004801207988043088656411102133523080581 divides RSA-260"

Background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_Factoring_Challenge

A useful project related to Apple's Core Audio is qaac - it wraps iTunes Windows DLL's in a standalone encoding tool with a CLI interface. I believe it even works under Wine on Linux: https://web.archive.org/web/20250814194428/https://www.andre... So you don't need a Mac or even a full iTunes installation to get high quality AAC encoding.

Either way you look at it, stablecoins are both better rails and asset than commercial bank deposits - they are cheaper, faster, global, 24/7, and remove unnecessary friction. And if you look at, say, USDC reserves (mostly treasuries or overnight repos) they are structurally better than what your commercial bank has (illiquid mortgages and similar). That said, you don't get the FDIC $250k backstop and for some that might flip the entire conversation (in particular, narrow banking/reserve quality argument doesn't apply under that cap - you are simply fully covered).

>You'd probably have to 4X to 5X the current housing supply to make a dent in prices.

Not at all. The important thing here is that price is set on the margin. Relatively modest supply increases can have outsized price effects. As an example, consider rents in Austin - something like 30% housing stock increase led to 16% drop in median rent, all while Austin simultaneously had massive in-migration, i.e., rents fell despite demand surging.

As another example of margin behavior: vacancy rates matter a lot, a modest vacancy rate increase can crater rents, which we see in the CRE market.

Uber/Lyft takeover had little to do with price (though, yes, they were cheaper) and everything to do with reliability and overall quality of service. Even though ride sharing industry lost money in subsidy arms race and side bets it was fundamentally sound in major metros since early on (similar to how Amazon was fundamentally sound from early on, despite not recognizing profit for a long time). Popular "analyses" kept equating Uber/Lyft with firms losing money on every sale with no path to fix it but the demand was always there as riders had already left taxis and transit on reliability and convenience grounds.

This UserJS worked for me with Violentmonkey - https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/485020-dvr-chan-force-enab...

What is the non-browser workaround? E.g., can streamlink do it?

Exactly right. Even though ride sharing industry lost money in subsidy arms race and side bets it was likewise fundamentally sound in major metros since very early on. Popular "analyses" kept equating Uber/Lyft with firms losing money on every sale with no path to fix it but the demand was always there as riders had already left taxis and transit on reliability and convenience grounds.

Similar experiences in Boston area. Hailing a taxi at a taxi stand (e.g., Prudential or airport) - good experience to this day. Calling dispatcher - half of the time they don't show up (esp. so for scheduled airport rides) or show up late or arrive in a smoke-filled car. Hackney carriage medallions might have been bad investments for some cabbies, but Uber/Lyft are simply a much better service for the customers. Their takeover had little to do with price (though, yes, they were cheaper) and everything to do with reliability and overall quality of service.

It works fine in Chrome 148. Earlier Chrome versions removed chrome://flags versions of the above even with "Temporarily unexpire M147 flags" (and similar), but command line invocation continues to work.

Nice work! FWIW, you can still use Manifest V2 extensions, like uMatrix, uBlock Origin, or Violentmonkey, in Chrome by passing command line flags. For example, on macOS:

    open -b com.google.Chrome --new --args --disable-features=ExtensionManifestV2Unsupported,ExtensionManifestV2Disabled

When Google finally nerfs that, it is past time to move to Firefox or Brave, the latter of which has explicitly announced uMatrix support.

Speaking as a European who did his PhD at MIT: that's destructive zero-sum thinking and "outsiders benefit" is backwards.

Knowledge spillover benefits everyone - would there be ASML (Dutch) without DARPA's monumental fundamental research investment in EUV? BioNTech (German) without NIH-funded mRNA research? Without American investment this research likely wouldn't have happened or would have come a decade later.