Kon-Peki

I live in super liberal Illinois, which recently ended cash bail. It was a rough transition period but now it is fully implemented and every judge and prosecutor knows how everything works.

Cook County Jail (Chicago and close-in suburbs) population is higher than it has been in over a decade. They had to reopen a section of the jail to deal with it. Because people who do what that guy did no longer get to bond out. If someone fled to California and got brought back by the Marshal’s service, he’s sitting in jail until trial. And he is the one that needs to negotiate and offer concessions.

Note: crime is now dropping a lot [1]. Trying setting the date range to “last 28 days”

[1] https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/vrd/home.html

FedEx'ing baggage between home and a distant hotel is awesome. I haven't done it recently, so maybe with airline fees it is always cheaper. It used to be that you had to have a corporate account with enough discounts to make it cheaper than checked luggage.

Big hotels host lots of conferences, legal depositions, business shows, etc. They get a FedEx truck almost daily and don't blink if a package arrives addressed to you with "Guest checking in on XXXX date" appended to it. It happens all the time! And when you leave, you call the front desk and ask them to take a box to the loading dock for the next FedEx truck.

Well, maybe a molex-to-8pin-PCIe cable comes in the box!

This is not going to go well:

> x50-class GeForce GPUs are among the most popular in the world, second only to the x60-class on Steam. Their price point and power profile are especially popular:

> For anyone upgrading an older x50-class system

> Each GeForce RTX 5050 graphics card is powered by a single PCIe 8-pin cable, drawing a maximum of 130 Watts at stock speeds, making it great for systems with power supplies delivering as little as 550 Watts.

The 1050, 2050 and 3050 were all bus-powered cards. I doubt 95% these systems even have the cable coming from their power supply. Imagine all the poor saps that excitedly swap out their old card for this, and... nothing works.

Source link: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/rtx-5050-desktop-g...

A Model T cost $900 in 1910 and $260 in 1925. Ford was constantly pushing the price down.

This is an interesting ruling.

Note that the lawsuit has nothing to do with using models, only creating them. It is entirely possible for Anthropic to win, but still lose (somewhere else).

Other interesting things.

On pages 8 and 9, the judge points out that Anthropic made a claim about not being able to do something, then produced a document showing otherwise. They clawed the document back and are pretending it never existed. The two sides are fighting over this.

On pages 14-18, the judge discusses the issue of buying a paper book, scanning it, destroying the paper copy, and using the digital copy as if it were the paper copy. The judge rules that this is legal, which I am fairly certain is the opposite of what was decided in the lawsuit against the Internet Archive. Thus, this will almost certainly be appealed and we'll see how it goes. But if it succeeds, it could destroy the awful ebook schemes that plague libraries!

Do you have roof access?

It's not going to be terribly windy in Boston... There are places that sell/rent temporary roof coverings, mainly for protecting from storm damage until it can get fixed. But anyway, white/reflective coverings are available, and can be held down with a few bricks for a week.

Hertz used to be the best by a wide margin, but now it's a totally different company using the name and logo.

Perhaps you should evaluate in terms of the price premium for speed. Sometimes you buy milk at the 7-eleven instead of the grocery store. It costs more, but is worth it for the convenience in the situation you are currently in. Most of the time it is not.

You can buy a used recent PC for a hundred or two, cram it full of memory, and then run a very advanced model. Slowly. But if you are planning to run an agent while you sleep and then review the work in the morning, do you really care if the run time is 4 hours instead of 40 seconds? Most of the time, no. Sometimes, yes.

Nobody is going to pay to use such a canal except during extraordinary geopolitical events.

Plus, it doesn’t help with the current situation.

IFAB doesn’t directly restrict heading, but permits each national FA to place their own restrictions at the grassroots level.

The US adopted restrictions 10 years ago. No heading at all for age 10 and under (indirect free kick to the opponent for violations). Under 13 years old coaches are required to keep track of heading and limit any individual player to fewer than 25 per week total between training and matches.

The English FA also has adopted rules limiting heading for youth. I image most of Europe has as well.

> As a result of the ruling, notice will be issued to the allegedly affected job applicants, in what could be one of the largest collectives ever certified. In filings, Workday represented that “1.1 billion applications were rejected” using its software tools during the relevant period, and so the collective could potentially include “hundreds of millions” of members.

I hope we find out how many it is. If it truly is hundreds of millions, then we’re talking about less than 5 or 6 applications per person, on average, right? But we’ve been told that tools allow people to apply to hundreds of jobs quickly.

Cars are definitely the major mode. Lots of quick flights, too.

They’ve made a lot of investments since the 1990s. It’s much improved, though perhaps not as nice as during the golden years when it was a big part of the New York Central system (from the 1890s to the 1960s they had daily trains that went Boston/NYC/Buffalo/Detroit/Chicago through Canada from Niagara Falls to Windsor).

During the first Trump administration, Amtrak announced a route that would go Chicago/Detroit/Toronto/Montreal/Quebec City using that same rail tunnel underneath the Detroit River. It was supposed to start by 2030. We’ll see if it happens.

> Chicago/Detroit

There has been continuous regularly scheduled passenger service between Chicago and Detroit since before the Civil War. The current Amtrak Wolverine runs 110 MPH (180 KPH) for 90% of the route, using essentially the same trainset that Brightline plans to use.

Cash buyers.

There are already a lot of places in the US where you can’t get a mortgage. In high rise condos, especially, a lender will want to look at the financial situation of the association. Make sure it is holding enough reserves, etc. If those numbers don’t meet their standards, no mortgage for you. Note that each lender has different standards and different ways to do math!

This has been the case for decades. There are probably a few dozen (or more) buildings like this in every large city.

And life goes on. Nobody will come rescue you from financial loss.

Edit - also keep in mind that these situations aren’t permanent. These cash buyers stand to profit if they buy low, fix things to the point that mortgages are possible again, and then sell. In a wildfire zone, that could mean that a group buys up many homes in the same area for cheap, tears some down to make buffers, modifies others for resiliency, etc. who knows

Are you saying Fama didn’t come up with the efficient market hypothesis? He got the Nobel prize for it.

Who came up with it?

How’s this for a source?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bM9bYOBuKF4

Straight from the mouth of Fama: “efficient Market Hypothesis is a model. All models are wrong. Some models are useful.”

If you don’t/won’t understand the difference between the real world and a model of the real world, there is nothing more to say.

Soccer has high popularity in the US.

USMNT match scheduling/location is a wreck and has been for a good 5+ years.

International matches played in the US typically draw large crowds because they are held in locations with many fans. Because the organizers know what they are doing.

FIFA created the Club World Cup as a money grab, and assumed that America=money without doing any homework. Initial ticket prices were very high, killing a lot of demand.

The Messi in Miami bump in sales/prices was real, but quickly tapered off as fans got consistently burned by overpaying in advance. FIFA still thinks it exists like in the first few months.

Semi-related. For the Club World Cup match tomorrow in Miami, they’ve started offering local university students a deal: buy one ticket for $20, get four free tickets for your mates. There’s just no demand.

> military doctors tend to be doctors that happen to wear a uniform. They already have the skills actually needed by the service

Sure, most of them join either during med school or during residency, with Uncle Sam picking up the financial obligations.

Funny story - good friend was an army doc and we managed to both get time off at the same time/location. Hanging out along the ocean and come across a little kid that got hurt. So he goes into doctor mode and talks soothingly to the kid, who is very apprehensive. He says “I know you’re not so sure I’m a doctor. It’s because I haven’t asked your parents for their insurance info yet” and smiles at the mom and dad.

Later on he says that never dealing with insurance is one of the perks of being a doctor in the military.

The Caterpillar Museum [1] in Peoria, IL has a few VR-ish cockpit mockups that you can try out. I’m fairly certain at least one of them is an excavator.

PS, it shares a parking garage with an art/science museum [2] that is pretty nice.

[1] https://www.caterpillar.com/en/company/visitors-center.html

[2] https://www.peoriariverfrontmuseum.org/

This is the second or third article I’ve seen that has mentioned retreating to a safe place, and implied that it was a good thing.

So let’s assume that this is what they are doing, and also that it is the right thing to do. They should start spinning things off, no? The core business, when adjusted for the spinoffs, should continue to show solid financial results. Many executives that have no business being in the organization can fail upwards as leaders in the new companies. They can ease the burden that regulators are putting on them. Etc.

To give a little more context: Chicago Public Schools has some of the best schools in the state/country and some of the worst. On the north side of the city, there are overcrowded, high-performing schools with classes being held in trailers parked on the grounds. The “selective enrollment” schools - where you have to pass a challenging test administered by grad students at the Illinois Institute of Technology - have kids from the wealthiest suburbs in them. Their parents rent a studio apartment, keep it empty, and use that as a fake mailing address. When discovered, the families are forced to pay $30-40k per year tuition. Which they do!

One of the major problems is that nearly all the under-enrolled school are in poor, black areas of the city that have already lost so much. They are in a death spiral; closing the school would make these neighborhoods worse. But then again, how can the city afford to keep them open? On the other hand, there is measurable demand for housing construction in these areas. If allowed to build, the schools may not be so empty and may not be such a financial drain. Are they allowed to build? No, of course not! There is a state legislator [1] that represents one of the districts. Every session he introduces bills that would force cities to allow housing to be built. It never goes anywhere. It’s honestly like nobody wants anything to get better.

[1] https://www.ilga.gov/house/Rep.asp?MemberID=3366

No it won’t, because my next car won’t be a GM

> “he wanted attention”

That’s what he wanted? Well, congrats on giving it to him. He’d have barely been on the local news if you just left him yelling in the back of the room.

Now he’s going to be on every newscast in the country/world.

The Caterpillar model might work better for the Navy. Not a huge number of ships, used year-round.

I’m not condoning Deere, BTW. Just pointing out that there are tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands?) of farms that get very busy twice a year and much less busy the rest of the time. Having the capacity to make sure a farmer gets service quickly during those busy times is really hard. And expensive. If anyone had a better idea on how to do it they’d be a billionaire. I mean, there probably aren’t enough helicopters available for Deere to do what Caterpillar does.

Deere has a massive service network that makes it extremely rare for a farmer to get stranded during planting or harvesting. To keep this network around year after year, they lock people into using it and charge a lot of money.

The Navy should probably contract with Deere, as they’d probably think they’re getting a good deal.

Simply put, this person hired the wrong law firm.

When you get sued, you get a reasonable amount of time to respond. That includes time to interview firms, discuss the approach and goals, and then choose the best firm that will attempt to carry it out. And then that firm will have enough time to write and file the response. Of course, you have to start immediately.

A good litigator wants to give the other side their bar number, and have them shit their pants when they look up their litigation record. It’s absolutely a strategic advantage; milking hours and aiming for a settlement is bad for a litigators career.

I took the undergrad computer security class he taught in the 90s, and it’s easily one of the most memorable I’ve ever had.

At that time, he was involved with national/cybersecurity with the Clinton white house and had to go to DC multiple times. Each time he lined up a speaker from government to talk about real security fails that happened at DoD and/or various 3-letter agencies. Those talks were the best!

Congrats, Spaf!