GCA10

Atherton residents include the NBA's Stephen Curry, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, venture capitalists Marc Andreessen, Bill Gurley, Doug Leone etc. A fuller list is toward the end of this Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atherton,_California

There might be some brave souls willing to pick a fight with Atherton's leading citizens. But no one like that is serving in the state legislature.

It never hurts to take a moment to figure out the real game that's being played when someone asks an especially trite interview question. (Like this one.) Here's what I've been told by HR executives in candid moments about "Why do you want to work for us?"

-- It's an easy way of finding out whether the candidate has done some homework about the company and the role. For insecure interviewers, it's a request to be flattered. For confident ones, it's a way of finding out whether the candidate has identified a specific opportunity that she or he is genuinely excited about. Having employees who are intrinsically motivated works out better than just a group of paycheck collectors.

-- It's a way of finding out whether you might be promotable. That's especially important in a growing company. As opportunities increase, there's an "up or out" dynamic that moves the most valuable employees into bigger roles, while shedding the ones that have little chance of rising higher. (Netflix is famously candid about this; many other companies think the same way but don't surface it.)

Ironically, Boeing's stock price was at about $140 at the start of 2014 -- and rose pretty steadily to a peak of $422 in March 2019.

So in addition to pushing out whatever sorts of financial results that Wall Street wanted, Boeing's perhaps questionable approach to quality was not registering with its financial overlords. This happened in spite of the Al-Jazeera investigative piece of 2014, a $2.5 billion penalty paid in 2021 in connection with the 787 crashes, etc. Not to mention steady coverage of problems in the Seattle Times, Wall Street Journal, etc.

Boeing's stock is still above $100 now, which suggests that it's got a strong enough monopoly/duopoly position that investors do not regard quality issues as being all that detrimental to the "investment thesis."

Brrr!

It's worth noting that a huge amount of the government's case involved evidence that SBF and team were buying lavish oceanfront condos, paying superstar athletes for weird TV commercials, etc.

This was actually a tiny slice of the overall financial mischief at FTX. But it told well in front of a jury. And it reinforced a big point that prosecutors keep wanting to make, as publicly as possible. "Don't take the customers' money to live large on your thefts!" That's a message that they want countless bookkeepers, financial planners, etc. to hear, again and again.

So, yes, they wanted to make an example out of SBF. The intricacies of FTX's full financial gyrations were sometimes too complicated to put in front of a jury. But the clueless or duped crypto-trading clients got a free bailout anyway. It came on the back of a prosecution that was largely intended to be a public slapdown of a guy committing lifestyle offenses with other people's money.

Thanks for the extra context on Rhodes in South Africa, which is an accurate and valuable addition to the conversation. I'd still nominate him as an example of a rapacious colonist, based on the skirmishes, one-sided "treaties" and general land grabs that he made in the 1890s, stretching vastly farther north from Britain's initial presence in the South African Cape Colony. These fueled Britain's colonial era claims to what became known as Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia).

Columbus ended up in 1496 as Spain's colonial administrator for what's now the Dominican Republic. He did that role badly, too, but what's more important is that he did it -- creating a colonial pathway that kept widening for centuries.

Even after an asteroid impact (or major nuclear war), planet Earth would still be a much more welcoming place for human life.

Air quality on Earth would go down a bit, but there would still be air. Food supplies would be chaotic, but some crops somewhere should survive. As for severe temperature swings on a post-apocalyptic Earth, they'd probably still be easier to handle than what NASA calculates on Mars as nightly lows of -128 C.

I realize that colonizing far away places is what Earthlings do. (Columbus, Cecil Rhodes, etc.) But the lets-go-to-Mars crowd strikes me as an extreme manifestation of Dunning-Kruger

This wouldn't be a classic Paul Graham essay without his two great hallmarks -- many passages of provocative valuable insights -- paired with periodic, bewildering attempts to sabotage his own argument.

I'll add some fan mail later if necessary (because I do get value from reading him), but for the moment, here's where I believe he went off course.

1. When he says the best essays are "ineffective," he's chosen the wrong word. They are "premature." They arrive before the world is fully ready to acknowledge their power. But they catch at least a modest following right away. And then their work grows and grows.

2. Essays about new technology can be quite powerful, and that's Graham's wheelhouse, so it's fine for him to talk up this cohort. But any serious survey of legendary essays needs to look wider. The most powerful essays redefine our social, moral, political and religious norms. Here are a few favorites that didn't just win their year; they stood out for centuries.

70 AD: The Gospel of Mark. Chronologically the first book of the New Testament, and look what that unleashed

1778: Common Sense by Thomas Paine. The boldest, fiercest justification for the American Revolution, and one that's still a touchstone today for anyone with a deep interest in the theory or practice of democracy.

1963: Letter From Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King. Worth being on the list simply for its effect on the U.S. civil rights movement; even more significant as the unbreakable tuning fork for any civil or human rights movement anywhere.

We'll keep inventing new technologies, because that's what humans are good at, and I'm sure many strong essays will ensue. But it's the redefining of our social institutions that's likely to make the future so incredibly different from today. Anyone who can write a prescient reflection about society's new rules will get my vote for "Great Essays."

[upper class folks would likely get worse care]

I agree that upper-class folks' experience would change in ways that would generate loud protests. But the biggest anger points likely wouldn't involve quality of care. Instead, we'd hear shouting about:

providers' increased emphasis on cost-effective care. (You don't need an MRI because there's nothing in your symptoms that warrants it.) Right now, there's a lot of overtreatment in the U.S. medical system, catering to patients' desire to get big workups.

scaling back of today's concierge-level ambiance, with fancy chairs, skyline views, etc.

Experiments that are both difficult and expensive on earth may be happening quite easily -- and free of charge -- during neutron-star mergers or supernovae events quite far away. We can't see them happening, but astronomers can detect oddly high abundances of likely fission products from the decay of such super-heavy elements.

More details appeared in this Science magazine report (December 2023) from about a dozen North American researchers. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adf1341#con1 They found elevated amounts of elements such as silver (47) and platinum (78), which they believe are likely to be fission products emerging from ultra-heavy elements created by rapid neutron capture that occurs when stars go wild. (My language, not theirs.)

They posit that the elements involved have atomic masses of 260 or higher. At the low end, that's right around Bohrium (107), and the high end could go a lot higher.

Amazon's founding principle of "customer obsession" has been turned inside out -- at least when it comes to thinking of us consumers as the cherished customers. Those days are over.

The new "customers" at the center of Amazon's business model are a global assortment of insta-merchants that don't make the products, don't handle their own logistics and don't have recognizable brands. So -- whoosh! -- in comes Amazon as the ultimate partner/toll-collector. For a fee (or actually for many fees) it will shine up these impostors to the point that they can conduct a lot of business on the Amazon platform.

When Amazon provides distorted search results, my hunch is that it's providing boosted listings for whatever pseudo-merchants are willing to pay up. Or that have agreed to buy other Amazon services. And, hey, Amazon is going the extra mile to make them feel well-treated

I had the same question. The "source" of this information, StreetLight Data, does have a functioning website and an impressive customer list, though it mostly invokes "big data" to explain what it does.

Poking a little further, it sounds as if they're aggregating smartphone data, though we're not told much about how they get it, or how they adjust for people walking with or without their phones on.

The analysis of maintenance budgets is depressingly accurate. Especially as tech companies get older (and they age surprisingly fast), it's quite startling to see how most of them become organizationally indifferent to various small to medium glitches in established products.

I can see why a lot of people working in tech will focus weekend/break energy on side projects (woodworking; solo sports; playing in a band) where exquisite craft is everything.

I've seen variants of this in finance, where the strategy is called "outrunning your mistakes."

There's an art to building a rapid growth trajectory, cutting all kinds of corners to ramp up your customers/assets/users/whatever -- and then pirouetting into a bigger new role, while leaving someone else to stabilize your unstable creation.

Take it up a level, and the best practitioners are also very good at blaming their successors for messing up a good thing. Also very good at cultivating a certain subset of journalists who will keep burnishing the legend, never stepping outside the bubble.

Loosely related: does anyone in the brave new AI community have the patience and humility to try to solve the hallucinations problem? Because it seems as if Sam & Co. are quite determined to ignore it, deny it or minimize it, while continuing to push for breakneck growth of products with a very troubling design flaw.

New to me -- but a very welcome tip. Thanks!

So there's a larger issue here -- predating even the Internet -- which I'll call "The Machu Picchu effect." In essence, it's the way that amazing first time experiences can be debased by having constantly been exposed to scruffy, easily accessible but lesser versions of them beforehand.

I avoided this in the 1990s, before hiking Nepal's Annapurna Circuit, by refusing to watch any videos showing the trail. No, no, no. I wanted to take in the whole experience with a sense of wonder. And, yes, that's what happened. Totally unforgettable trip.

Fast forward to 2012, when I had business in Peru and a chance to visit Machu Picchu. This time I messed up. I watched the videos, flipped through the slide shows, etc. So, sadly, when I hiked up to the Sun Gate and caught the first glimpse of this restored ancient city, all I could think was: "Yep. That looks just like the pictures."

Generative AI certainly widens the ways we can inflict novelty fatigue on ourselves. But we've still got the ability to dial back on armchair experiences that will deaden our appreciation of the real thing.

Very true, up till about age 12 or so.

At that point, kids start yearning to build their own identities. At least some of the time. They want to make their own friends; find their own obsessions and solve (or create) their own problems. They still check in with parents a lot. The rubber band of independence stretches and snaps, again and again.

You realize that no one is a perfect parent, because the concept of perfection collapses on itself. Part of the way that kids master independence is to be annoyed at their parents -- enough so that they walk home instead of waiting for the ride. If we're too good at parenting, the chaos and casual cruelty of the outside world becomes unbearable and they never get the hang of running their own lives.

Truth.

I got years of use out of a second-hand Brother 2350 printer and then eventually some of the electronics failed. I needed a new printer and I still owned a couple unused Brother toner cartridges. Imagine my joy when I discovered that Brother would sell me a new model that still used the same toner system.

Sticking with the same spartan feature set was fine by me. It's all I need. I didn't even bother looking at the other makers' low-end offerings. Brother's approach of treating printing as a solved problem (Build once; sell often) is so much simpler and more cost-efficient than the super-frisky alternative (Build many times; sell once)

Bad things can happen to mentally ill people.

The only appropriate target for Microsoft's anger would be its own deal negotiators.

OpenAI's dual identity as a nonprofit/for-profit business was very well known. And the concentration of power in the nonprofit side was also very well known. From the media coverage of Microsoft's investments, it sounds as if MSFT prioritized getting lots of business for its Azure cloud service -- and didn't prioritize getting a board seat or even an observer's chair.

Leaving aside feature bloat, who decided that reviving Yahoo Purple as a big new part of the color palette was a good idea? I'm sorry, but to me that just radiates "arrogant and clueless."

It's worth reading Judge Kaplan's earlier rulings related to the "advice of counsel" defense. As the judge writes, you can only invoke this if you "made a complete disclosure to counsel," right at the beginning, of what you planned to do. Sounds like the kind of situation where, once on trial, you'd need to produce an original "Memo to Lawyers" spelling out all of the intended FTX/Alameda games.

Once that's on the the table, then you need to have asked the lawyers: can we do this? And then you need a clear response from the lawyers (i.e. a memo) saying: "Yep!"

SBF's testimony, peeling away some of the word haze, amounts to: "I think the lawyers were loosely aware of at least some of this stuff and I don't exactly remember them telling me we couldn't do it." That's miles short of the standard (Kaplan-summarized) test.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.59...

And of course boards justify the fully promised natures of such bonuses as being the only way to get a failing CEO to give up his/her big title and pay in the interests of doing what's right for shareholders.

Nice hustle if you can find it.

There's a theory that the second-level, C-suite employees all are entered into a gladiator contest to get the giant extra bump in pay that comes with being chosen to be CEO. So they work with great energy and ingenuity to make things happen, hoping for this 5x bump in pay.

Only one of them gets it, and he/she may be erratic in the very top role. But the next layer repopulates and the process continues.

Ah, your closing question could be a thread in itself.

This is tricky territory! Be wary of the treadmill where as your income rises, your sense of what's an acceptable restaurant, vacation, car, home, etc. escalates just as fast. Then you'll always be n+1 windfalls away from your goal. If you're really wanting "financial independence," which is a weirdly opaque phrase, focus at least 49% of your energy on keeping your spending rate low.

Extra bonus for writing about your learning journey . . .

Even for potential readers have been in the field for a long time, these posts can be supremely informative. It's great to hear about newcomers' shortcuts, some of which are mind-stretching for the old guard. And expressing a sincere interest in getting better is a great way to get support from existing experts who are glad to share.

The currency section is very nicely done. My own reactions split into the three obvious buckets. 1) Oh, I don't make that mistake! That's an obvious oversimplification. 2) Yeah, having read your counter-example at the end, I'll insist that I pretty much know that one, too. But thanks for the reminder, even though if I weren't skimming so fast, I'd have got it right, too. And, of course the inevitable. 3) Ouch. I had no idea. You got me on that one.

There's a lot more going on here than the initial story reports.

For more than a few academics, making big $$$ as an expert witness is a magnificent source of side income. (Fees of $1,000/hour, including lots of open-ended prep time, can be found.) That begs the question: Did the research lead to the desire to be an expert witness? Or did the desire to be an expert witness define the nature of the research project?

We'd need to know a lot more about the origins of this project before being able to referee this one. But if the state of California is worried about litigants using "researchers" to find and filter data that ordinarily would be available only through legal discovery processes, that's not a crazy worry.

Stretching the topic slightly -- so as to include other high-school coincidences -- Nobel laureate Richard Axel has a delightful passage in his 2004 acceptance speech (medicine & physiology), recalling a moment in the 1960s when he was playing competitive basketball as the center for Stuyvesant High's team in New York City.

Their opponent one afternoon was Power Memorial High, which had the future Kareem Abdul Jabbar (then known as Lew Alcindor) playing center. As Axel recalls: "When I was first passed the ball, he put his hands in front of my face, looked at me and asked: "What are you going to do, Einstein?"

Quoting from Axel: "I did rather little. He scored 54 points and I scored two. He went on to be among the greatest basketball legends and I became a neurobiologist."

thesmokinggun.com already does provide a fine repository of current and past court filings of interest. They've been around for years, and some journalists do link to them. Intriguingly, the one ad on their site at the moment is for diamond engagement rings.

I suppose that ad's positioning could be just random programmatic placement. But if anyone in the HN community can figure out why court-filing enthusiasts are especially likely to want to buy an engagement ring off an unverified website, I'd love to know more