th0raway

Being thorough and accurate might make you a lot of money in the stock market, but it's not a good way to get any media presence, because that demands being in front of people quite often, and basically nobody can be insightful and well researched in all topics of the day. Once you become a pundit, whether on politics or tech, and rely on eyeballs to feed you, you are going to be throwing stinkers. And at that point, you might as well just align with an audience and not care too much about whether you are predicting anything accurately.

We have people telling us the next recession being imminent all the time. Others told us that NFTs were key to the future of art. That's the pundit way. If you want accuracy, you become like Charlie Munger, have maybe 2, 3 really good insights througout your career, and hope do to well using the insights yourself, not by being a pundit

The wonders of American healthcare really mean that it's all more expensive, and at the same time, more is consumed, because so much of what is paid is done past deductible. If you look at so many standard of care situations vs, say, Spain, the American system will do a whole lot more. Even for preventive care: For instance America wants colonoscopies every 10 years from 45. Spain will give you a non invasive fecal test every 2 years, and only consider colonoscopies after the test is positive. Every time I send my american prescribed intervention list, given my symptoms, to my family members working in the Spanish public caresystem, they look at it with their hair on fire. Very different standards. You might think US insurance is restrictive regarding what needs to be done, but most public care system are significantly more restrictive than that. It'll be for better reasons, instead of defaulting to no on everything, but ultimately still far more cautious regarding their spending.

So we fail both ways at the same time: We avoid interacting with the medical system, but when we do, far more is done, at far higher price per intervention, so we end up with more interventions for the same outcome, even though we avoid doctors more!

No system that saves money can pass in congress: that's the real problem that we cannot actually avoid. Forget pressure from large companies: So many of US costs come from very high salaries, and a lot of bureaucratic positions that don't exist elsewhere. Every dollar we pay goes to someone, and it's not just some random mogul here or there that will be OK anyway. Reform that really lowers prices means loss of jobs, which them will be blamed on the politicians who signed the bill into law.

Most of the problems of the US system aren't really a matter of who pays, but the fact that so much is paid for services, at every level. Any really significant savings, cutting bureaucracy and pressuring providers to make costs resemble those of other developed countries, are taking money out of someone's pocket. Many hundreds of thousands of them, if not millions. This makes any significant reform very difficult, as those people vote, and will know exactly who made them worse off, even if the country in general was made much better off.

Read The Logic of Collective Action by Mancur Olsen. It wasn't written thinking of healthcare. but anyone looking at the US healthcare system will see that what is going on is stacks upon stacks of collective action beating overall societal efficiency, over and over and over again, in such a way that it's basically in none of the decision makers best interest to actually increase overall efficiency.

It's not about the minor offenses of uninteresting people, but what happens because a change in political orientation makes you suddenly interesting. Even more so when AI automates this: Dear computer, we just got some ruling to remove citizenship of people that were not born in the country if they commit event the stupidest offenses: Go look them up.

It makes no sense for the authoritarian to anger everyone at once, but if you just convince people that complaining is bad for them, or expressing negative affect against the government, they can ge much done with little, and it doesn't take that much surveillance. We are already seeing governments that pursue their enemies to the fullest extent of the law for things that are, at best, dubious. Automation just makes this easier to do.

If by European you mean mostly British, sure! And you can see how Anglosphere metro areas resemble each other a lot. But Europe is not one thing.

I mean, I also get obsessed with their horror when, after coming from abroad, I am back at my American suburb. All this mandatory front yard and setbacks that must be lawn, even though nobody in the entire subdivision seems to use said front lawn, ever. It's not the grass itself, but the utter waste of space, pushing any chance of walkability away, as it's ultimately increasing the distances to anywhere. It's not so different from the typical giant parking lot that is never half full.

When you prefer a better environment, but said better environment means having to at least leave the state... yeah, strong feelings seem warranted to me.

On one end we have Coase's theory of the firm, but then we have the realities of the modern tech megacap company, which is 20+ companies in a trench coat, and where it's clear the alignment between the best interest of a middle manager, the company as a whole, and of the consumer have absolutely nothing to do with each other. But pointing at one working thing in an investor call seems quite valuable, so we aren't seeing investors actually demanding to spin off companies with minimal actual synergy.

So we end up with companies acting in ways that don't help themselves or the consumer, but which have no reasonable mechanisms to correct any of this. So we end up with the two best entrants in the AI space being independent companies, all while we know that, in case of significant cuts, it's the companies that are attached to other huge, unrelated sources of revenue that will have easier time surviving. Gemini can mess up all they want as long as management still has Ads and youtube sitting there subsidizing them.

What they are often talking about there is countries where the official exchange rate is very different from a real world exchange rate: This happened in Argentina quite often. That led to special black market stores where people would give you local currency for dollars at better rates, and often also had some crypto support. You are then going past the legal market either way.

Far fewer than you'd think: The vast majority of Europe is in the same boat as the US.

Whenever there's value in agglomeration (ie, all the time), the value of well placed properties just skyrockets, because growth is only going to make that land better. That's why a common recommendation is to up the tax of land as to make speculation with valuable property a bad investment: It's already price like an auction, so higher taxes cannot increase rent prices. The problem is political, as countries with housing problems have a whole lot of individuals have a big percentage of their net worth in housing. Big tax increases would make their property values drop, and they'd be quite upset. So it solves the problem while losing elections.

Instead, governments are happy providing tax advantages to existing residents, in practice making prices go up even faster.

America already has plenty of cities that aren't doing very well, and aren't getting migration, so new cities aren't going to help. There's plenty of cheap housing inventory in the US, just not in the places where the jobs are.

There's quite the history of straight out cheating in high level MtG, and yes, insufficient randomization is one of the most typical ways around it. If all you do is cut their deck, and do zero shuffles, you will find a perfect interweaving of lands and spells either way.

Also see Magic players being fond of pile shuffles, which, of course, do very little randomization, and guarantee a good mana weave. Without a few shuffles of your own, most Magic decks ever presented are not sufficiently randomized, and it's even worse in Commander, where we are talking 100 card decks.

Disney has an especially difficult problem, as optimizing for revenue for an org might actually lower total revenue for the entire company. See how many movies do badly because people expect them to see them in D+ quickly. A company this complicated need a very special kind of leadership, along with creative teams that reliably deliver hits. Now the batting average is way worse than it needs to be, and a lot of the leadership is just uninterested on the bigger problems, and more focused on personal strip mining. How many RSUs you get becomes more important than making sure the stock ever goes up (and it's not going up)

The shareholders have little to do with this, ultimately. You see the same rot happen in private companies where the main investor really has full control.

It doesn't take much time seeing companies grow to see the cultural differences take hold when a company goes wrong. You end up with execs and middle management that do not want to rock boats, and where any disagreement is clearly career suicide. At that point, people push for what is good for them and is not good for the company, and people realize that letting things decay is in their best interest. Once your org has enough levels of management, anyone that is part of the big decisions and isn't a team player has already been filtered out, so you see large meetings where hundreds of millions are supposedly distributed, yet not one person is ever going to complain about obvious grift, or decisions that will harm the company in the long run. Open discussion is too dangerous, and coordinating action against bad behavior becomes more and more expensive. Therefore, the company just naturally erodes.

You can get there too with just a bad enough leader that values sycophancy enough... and after enough billions, basically every leader ends up having a lot of trouble accepting news of bad behavior from their advisors.

Ridiculous tracking happened before AI too. Go read the book about Bridgewater, describing, among other things, how internal security worked when it was led by James Comey (yes, the one you know from the news, and was later FBI director)

The biggest difference there isn't production costs, but the physical costs of maintaining the giant library, in a way that is reasonable streamable at a good cost from any device, with many dubbings, and even video differences per version. Go see how many little differences are there in a random Pixar movie due to localization. The infrastructure per hour watched is relevant, and there's a lot of differences between one is willing to spend on something that is being watched hundreds of thousands of times today, and some 30 year old episode of a series nobody followed. It's a much different production than sending music files over.

Even with licensing costs at zero, the infra of Youtube, the closest thing to Spotify for video, is a very different beast. And I'd argue youtube doesn't go far enough.

It's the first step to building the top companies: You first need enough agglomeration of that labor so that, whenever there's a recession, you can scoop up some of that labor for a startup.

And as demand of those cheap engineers go up, salaries rise. It's not just Poland: Go see what happens to engineering salaries in, say, Spain vs Berlin. You find Capgemini opening offices, because the labor is that cheap. New grads making as little as 20k in some regions.

So compared to that, having big tech moving over and paying over local market rates, and expanding enough so salaries end up rising is much better than the alternative: They don't come, there's no money, the engineers emigrate, and the country becomes poorer.

We opened the Cloud Code floodgates all at once in my org. After a few months we looked at stats, and asked managers for impressions on performance changes. The API cost per engineer doesn't correlate with the apparent increases in performance, but it sure seems that the vast majority of people that used to have good reviews got a lot better, while the bottom third just didn't, even though they use the LLMs about as much. It makes the performance differences in teams look like an abyss. Someone appears stuck in a task, and we see what they've been prompting, and then one of the best seniors comes in, actually asks the questions well, and the LLM does all the debugging and all the fixing in 20 minutes.

It's not that the best performers are magical prompt engineers providing detailed instructions: They ask better questions that the LLM knows how to try to answer, and provide the specific information that the LLM would take a while finding. It's as if some people just had no "theory of mind" of the LLM, and what it can know, and others just do. It's not a living thing or anything like that, but it's still so useful to predict it, put yourself in it's shoes, so to speak. Just like you'd do with a new hire, or a random junior.

Yes, in a reasonable microservice land where the places you need to connect to are all documented in very concise places, you have have extremely productive $10 days. In the giant monorepo with everything custom, you can't just rely on built in knowledge of 80% of you libraries, so it's a very different world.

A place like Google has to be so much better off just training library concepts in, given how much of the things the LLM will "instinctively" reach for are unlikely to be available. Not unlike the acclimation period what happens when someone comes in or out of a company like that, and suddenly every library and infra tool you were used to are just not available. We need a lot more searching when that happens to us, and the LLM suffers from the same context issue. The human just has all of that trained in after a 6 months, but the LLM doesn't.

It comes down to two things. One is the well documented issue of how, when you are that rich, you are treated differently, and how that will ultimately modify your behavior. The other is the prerequisites to get to the job. Chances are you aren't fully self-made, receiving no investment. From convincing investors, to having immense faith in a project that cannot be obviously good, as otherwise you'd be building what already exists, to the personality to handle the road upward.

This second effect happens in all kinds of places where you have to jumps througha lot of hoops to just get to get there. Every hoop discards candidates, and promotes different things. Sometimes in ways that make sure that nobody capable of attaining the job is fit to actually do it well. You can see the issue all over the place, once you track people's careers. Sometimes things that should be disqualifying for a role are actually requirements in practice.

There are many answers, often related to company size and interest in teaching. Some large bay area companies think that training people into a FP style of Scala is too expensive/hard to hire for, and end up using it as a nicer Java. Smaller companies that do not hire 100 people to work in Scala every year just bite the bullet, expect FP, and end up wrapping a large majority of Java libraries with FP abstractions, some thin, some quite big.

I prefer an intermediate solution when I can get away with it: Localize the mutable Java objects as much as possible, and just make sure that I don't leave a team/teammate that has little Scala experience all alone for a while. This often leads to styles that might be frowned upon by both camps of programming, but in my experience, dropping to imperative code when FP solutions are harder to optimize, while making sure that mutability is well contained and doesn't cross interfaces is Scala's happy place. Depending on the work to be done, each codebase can be pretty FP heavy, or be mostly imperative with an FP facade.

The real trick with Scala is really library design though: It's very easy to make a new library that has dozens of new concepts and is hard to learn and use, all while exposing things like Shapeless HLists to the outside world, while libraries that are easier to consume and don't crush compilation times through type magic are often tougher on the author, leading to more code generation and macros. Most library authors know so much Scala that they don't realize that just using their library well incurs in quite the mental cost to new developers.

You have to look at it from both sides though: If I started a business with Stripe as a processor, it's in Stripe's best interest for my business to grow as much as possible, because the higher my volume, the more they make. They'll want a good cut, but their goal is a long term relationship. It's not the same thing with Amazon: Every piece of intel I give them is an opportunity for them to eat my business.

I guess that if Amazon threw a crazy enough amount of money at them, then sure, everyone has a price, but how is joining Bezos' empire helping them? There's very little synergy in the other direction, so the premium for such an acquisition would have to be very large.

When you put the premium there, along with how being acquired by Amazon makes the competition more attractive, makes me think that something like that is unlikely.

I've seen plenty of reporting pipelines that are that slow over the years. If this was built on the cheap, so it just uses existing pipelines, and instead of working through streaming, it regenerates the world every night, a 48 max failure with some is not out of the question once you add some CYA magic. That would make this pretty cheap to make: Some website work, boxes for queries, and some security work to make sure data from other customers doesn't leak.

Given how Stripe seems to build products in a lean way, it'd not surprise me if they are just launching like this and measure customer reaction. If the main reason it doesn't get the traction they want is the 48 lag, they'll just rewrite their reporting pipeline to use streaming, and the product gets faster for free.

Instead of text in an email, imagine it as a slack reacji. It'd be no different than +1 or shipit in github.

If you are Facebook, Amazon or someone like that it can make sense, but their level of sophistication is insane for someone that isn't making millions a month. At a smaller scale, the best that you can do is just to have bindings for the processors that do easy integration, but it's still a bunch of work that isn't going towards making more money, but towards insurance.

So putting sophistication on your payments platform is something that you should only care about once you are very successful anyway.

On both parts of your comment you are missing a huge piece of the puzzle: fraud.

A payments processor (old school or digital) is constantly taking on some certain amount of risk of fraud, from both the credit card user and the merchant itself. I could set up a store that appears to be real and just move my money out of my bank account and run. I could also go to a carding site, use real credit cards on my own fake store, wait for my transfers to process, cash out of my store and run. I could 'just' use it as a small operation to check whether my stolen credit cards are really working, and then make big purchases later... and that's just the very basics in merchant fraud.

Between this fraud, and risks from otherwise honest parties (what do you think happens when people preorder something, the company goes under, and the consumer tells the CC company that they want their money back? Someone ends up holding the bag), it'd be pretty much impossible to run a payment processor as a non profit center without a lot of work. Add to that that merchants want more complex features, like subscriptions, the effort to maintain PCI compliance, and that adding support for each new payment type and country is a pain in the behind for everyone, even for companies that do their very best to cut out every middleman.

So as long as you are interacting with banks and the risk of fraud is not carried 100% by the consumer, bitcoin style, you'll have a lot more innovation than you think, most of it dedicated to making life harder for fraudsters, and you'll find that this is something that you have to do for-profit. I'd not even consider doing it without venture capital, because you need a bankroll to handle the fraud losses which will definitely happen.

If you want proof of the innovation going on, just ask any fraud forum out there: There were plenty of people with nice and easy ways to defraud online processors, but nowadays, for all but the best fraudsters, it's a whole lot of effort for very little compensation.

And still, I'd not be caught dead carrying the amount of risk that someone like Braintree or Stripe is carrying on a regular basis without a profit motive.

You might disagree with the read if you actually saw what the implementation of said principles looks like. There's plenty of articles out there about what those principles do to a psyche, but let's forget about those: The culture is still broken because there is no sensible way to have real transparency in an environment with power differentials.

In any situation with a broken status quo, openness by those that disagree will just get them squashed. In practice, change occurs in the dark: The people that have a different idea hide in a corner, bake the idea in secret, build allies in secret, and only reveal it when they cannot be squashed down. It works with different ways of investing, with tolerance to LGBT, interracial marriage... instant openness in an environment that is against you will ruin you unless you are powerful.

The principles, as applied, lead to an appearance of openness, where people have to toe the party line and only disagree when they know they can win politically. Otherwise, the powers that be will find you and make sure your disagreement can't go anywhere.

And how do you get power? In practice, by toeing the party line. Only by agreeing with the people above you, those that have been blessed as the smartest, you can get any credibility. And yes, this is something that is actively codified in Bridgewater's culture.

I wish external researchers had access to the internal ratings and surveys that Bridgewater employees fill in all the time. The patterns in them are the definition of a dystopia and groupthink.

I've seen one of those predictors. It looked at an honest signal, captured in a way that would be fairly representative of the population at large. Since the data had some location information attached, you could attach every point of signal to a congressional district. The model was simple, comparing the signal per district, and then building an electoral college map. It didn't nail every state, but it wasn't off by much, and gave Trump a slightly smaller victory than he actually had.

I won't mention the signal because I want to keep my job. However I'd be surprised if there weren't at least a dozen companies that have access to some honest signal with such a good sample of the population at large as to be better at predicting the election than any pollster.

My current company has a very similar interview style, and I later learned that I was pretty close to not being hired because I didn't do quite as well as one interviewer wanted on a coding challenge: I ran out of time. But what I also learned is that the interviewer had never solved the problem in the language I used!

I had one of our most senior engineers, who has worked in this language's compiler, to try to solve the exercise. Instead of 40 minutes, it took him three hours!

If a candidate is going to interview in a language, for the love of god, have as a prereq that the interviewer is actually capable of doing the exercise in that language.