mdemare

Yeah. This single accident was more deadly than all commercial air traffic in the EU in the past 10 years together, while 50 deaths per day is the average for car crashes in the EU. Wild orders of magnitude difference in safety.

Rough estimate: by car, you can travel from Lisbon to Talinn (4000km) 100,000 times before expecting to die; by train, almost 4 million times, by plane 400 million times.

Video game designers: 0/24 tasks.

Apparently Epic thinks otherwise.

Lots of Dutch people called Dick Kok.

Ok, but now you need to trust DNSSEC.

Also temperature, weights, distances…

I did not know that and I’ve been here quite a while…

I bet tax law is Turing-complete.

What if mankind is creating god in their own image?

No, but check out Rotterdam Centraal, Haarlem and Groningen. Also stunning, IMHO, is Antwerp, Belgium.

The interesting answer by the author, will_asouka, has been marked 'dead' for some inscrutable reason.

AI slop. Flagged.

The Buffett indicator has been over 120% since December 2016. It dipped to 130% in March 2020.

I’m experimenting with the following in my settings:

“Look at the first letter of the prompt, and use the style of the matching literary stylist enumerated here:

For English:

A — W. H. Auden

B — Bill Bryson

C — Italo Calvino

D — Joan Didion

E — T. S. Eliot

F — William Faulkner

G — Gabriel García Márquez

…”

I certainly don’t see emojis any more.

Companies will keep doing what they're doing now - they'll just use another verb than "buy" or "purchase". Which would be a small improvement, I guess...

Honesty, in any game quests feel artificial, whether they've been generated by humans or AI.

“When everybody knows that everybody knows” by Steven Pinker is about this.

Very sad to see this (and cancelled my subscription). My home-grown web-based orchestrator will now have to rely on just codex and Gemini. One of the reasons that I was wary of turning it into a product.

Eventually Google and OpenAI will probably follow Anthropic, but they’re not quite as capacity-constrained.

Python 3 barely managed to dethrone Python.

Sure, but it's pretty trivial to generate a CLI application that talks to that API.

That's how I let agents access my database too. Letting them access psql is a recipe for disaster, but a CLI executable that contains the credentials, and provides access to a number of predefined queries and commands? That's pretty convenient.

Often in movies you have the scrappy character that rises to the occasion by making a great speech, winning everybody over. I used to love those scenes.

Now, I've realized, in real life they wouldn't have let them finish their first sentence.

The Netherlands has had a similar scheme for decades:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist_subsidy_(Netherlands). 1956-1987.

No, this is incorrect. Investors like buybacks, so when the buyback is announced, share prices may rise, but certainly not by the amount of the buyback. They don't go up when the buyback gets executed, unlike dividends, which decrease the share price at the moment when they get distributed.

The equations are: nr_shares * share_price = cash_of_company + value_of_company_excluding_cash.

In a buyback, cash_of_company decreases by the buyback, and nr_shares decreases by buyback / share_price.

Consider the extreme case, a lemonade stand with a bank account with $1M. 1000 shares outstanding, share price $1000. After a buyback of $900K is announced, 900 shares are sold for $1000. $100K remains in the company's bank account, 100 shares remain outstanding, at ... $1000 per share.

This is not quite correct. If a dividend happens, the market capitalisation drops by the amount of the dividend, the number of shares remains constant, so the share price dips by the amount of the dividend per share. All investors get the dividend.

If a buyback happens, the market capitalisation drops by the amount of the buyback, and the number of shares drops by the same ratio, keeping the share price initially constant. The money goes to the investors who sell.

Buybacks are nevertheless good for investors who hold. They now have shares in a company whose market cap is 100% growing enterprise, instead of 90% enterprise and 10% bag of money. That means that if the company keeps doing well, the share price will increase faster than it would have done otherwise (it will also drop faster - it's no longer anchored to an inert pile of cash).

Yeah, me too, that form factor was perfection. So pretty, so nice to hold!

That's why they should be phased, and not too steeply.

If they're phased, e.g. at 30% (for every additional €1 you earn, benefits decrease by €0.30), you have the problem that when you are applicable for several of them (e.g. for children, child care, chronic illness, etc.), the benefit reduction adds up as well, so you're quickly back at an effective marginal tax rate (EMTR) of 90% or even over 100%.

You'd think that it wouldn't be beyond the capability of our society to declare that "the EMTR shall be at most 70% at any point in the income curve", and do the math to make it work, but apparently not.

Organism, not species.

For those that want to stick with thermodynamics, imagine an organism that stores 1% of consumed calories as fat, and uses the other 99%, and that cannot - for whichever reason - turn fat back into calories.

Completely in accordance with thermodynamics, and yet, "just eat less" doesn't work.

Software development is a bit like chess. 1. e4 is an abstraction available to all projects, 3. Nc3 is available to 20% of projects, while 15. Nxg5 is unique to your own project.

Or, abstractions in your project form a dependency tree, and the nodes near the root are universal, e.g. C, Postgres, json, while the leaf nodes are abstractions peculiar to just your own project.