RandomThoughts3

SWIFT is not a payment system. It’s only a messaging system. It’s generally used to send initiating orders between financial institutions but they then have to be cleared or directly settled through something else.

For context, this comes in reply to the cohost complaining that a lot of talented young players quit chess to pursue a college education. Caruana is basically replying that it’s a bit strange to regret people choosing to stop playing a board game to go do things with potentially broader impact instead.

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It’s sad to see your comment this far in the thread after having had go be coxed to make it and after all the usual defensive arguments from the Rust crowd. It’s a real issue that it’s so hard to make the Rust community admits that obvious flaws actually exist.

As someone who spent a significant time working on static analysers and provers, it annoys me to no end how most of the Rust community will happily take what the borrow checker imposes on them as some form of gospel and never questions the tool. It’s bordering on Stockholm syndrome sometimes.

> Value investing seems to need reliable information from somewhere to make informed decisions, but where is that going to come from?

Value investment is entirely based on financial fundamentals. You don’t need magic information. That’s the whole point. For something that old, people like to use the world but seem blissfully unaware of what it actually is. Graham’s books are available pretty much everywhere.

The whole point of the thing is that fundamentals actually matter and markets misprice because they rely on other less sound things. That’s why it seems even more relevant in a post truth market.

None of the companies you listed would have qualified as sound for value investing by the way.

Technically, value investing still work.

The key tenant of value investing is that there exist companies which based on their financial metrics are fundamentally under valued by the market (in opposition to what market price efficiency predicts).

From there, an insane market should provide you with even more opportunities to value invest.

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The slowness regarding rolling out things like ETCS, ATS and standardised European infrastructure as everything to do with Europe not being an actual united political entity. As you rightfully pointed, some EU members rail strategy is very dubious.

> As an American reading this

The working conditions at SNCF are not even imaginable for an American.

We are taking unlimited sick days, between 28 and 38 days off a year excluding sick days, 10 bank holidays, retirement between 50 and 60 with pensions calculated on the last few years of work, subvention on train tickets for family members. That’s while working less than 40 hours a week and despite that they still manage to strike at least a week a year generally when it’s the most annoying for people actually working.

> I understand that you're claiming to have witnessed it, but do you have some sources?

I have witnessed that and more like optimisation software being disabled to avoid cutting into overtime. Just go take a look at how drivers are paid and where their comp comes from. It’s all public knowledge. Take a look at the recurring reports from the court of auditors or talk with anyone working there.

We are talking about a company in which the two main unions are openly Trotskyist and which has a permanent strike warning by rotating between union to open one in defiance of French law.

This is not drum beating for privatisation by the way (even if all the formerly public French companies I had the misfortune to work for are fairly mismanaged but nothing as bad as SNCF thankfully). I am sure with enough reforms it could work while being public. I mean Singapore manages so it’s not impossible.

It’s just impossible to wonder why France is in such a sorry state after having working for anything publicly managed in France. The French state carves exception for itself in all the labour laws because they know their administration is so poor they can’t respect them.

That’s non sense. TGV speed record is 320km/h by the way and 160km/h is a pedestrian daily occurrence on the French rail system. Meanwhile the US has somehow decided trains are for freight and as no decent rail system in place for travellers.

The discussion makes sense with China which is pushing forward quickly using new tech. The US is not even part of it.

It’s brand new and they have put in place modern technologies everywhere. So it works very well.

Amusingly, China uses pieces of technology which were developed in Europe for its train system. Signalling is a good exemple (CTCS is basically ETCS). Europe is as usual deploying at a snail pace while China put it everywhere.

It was obvious from the start it would end up this way. China is an actual country while Europe is a loose collection of countries which don’t really like each other supposedly spearheaded by Germany which actually only cares about pushing policies in its own interest and actively hinder anything else, and France which remains stuck thirty years in the past and is actively being sabotaged by most of the things the EU forces it to do regarding infrastructure (more true in energy than in rail that being said).

I pay more than that to go back to my hometown by TGV which is less than 200km away from Paris and that’s with a subscription giving access to preferential prices.

There is no way Paris-Berlin is going to be this cheap. From experience I expect the train to be at least twice more expensive than flying.

Having worked a few years with SNCF, it can’t be otherwise. It’s the most mismanaged company I have ever worked for, gangrened by unions which fight tooth and nails to preserve advantages which reasons to exist disappeared decades ago. Unions review the full trains planning with management before it’s validated and veto any optimisations which would cut overtime or might impact compensations without any regards for customers. It’s revolting.

Parent is suggesting it would be weird for Europeans to call the UK as in Europe which as a European I can tell you is preposterous. That’s the kind of non sense you used to hear from Brexiter. They will have no sympathy from me.

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This is very much modern French. Anything written after 1650 is easy to understand by the average French person and anything written after 1800 is indistinguishable from how French is written nowadays.

> It's a huge achievement for a single person to have written most of that.

Qemu was mostly Fabrice Bellard by himself at the beginning and plenty of emulators are single person project.

It’s a field which lends itself well to single person development. How to properly architecture compiler/interpreter/emulator has been studied to death and everyone mostly uses the same core principles so there is little guess work as how to start (provided you have taken the time to study the field). If you are ready to do the work, you can reach a working translator from hard work alone. Then, the interesting work of optimising it starts.

Don’t get me wrong, Rosetta 2 is a very impressive achievement because the performances are really good. I tip my metaphorical hat to whoever did it. My post is more in the spirit of you can do something in the same ballpark too if that’s your kick.

> Israel targets Hamas, not civilians

While HN is not necessarily the correct place for this discussion, note that the ICC strongly disagrees with this after a lengthy investigation and multiple quotes from Israelian politicians and generals indicate that this is not the case.

It’s not a censorship issue. It’s about market access. This is a commercial dispute not a freedom of expression one.

There is plenty of other platforms where you will still be able to say whatever you want.

> Time Machine is really quite good, all things considered.

This comment page is full of examples of very real issue with Time Machine which will bite you at some point if you use it. It’s not quite good. It’s bug riddled and Apple refuses to actually do the work to fix it because they would rather you buy iCloud.

Yes, I find it fun to use office as a Mac differentiator when the Mac version is so inferior to the Windows one. At least, office365 works fine on Linux using Crossover.

It’s the same weirdness with people recommending Gimp for Acorn when Linux has great photo manipulation with Darktable and good digital painting with Krita.

And I say that as someone who quite like MacOs even if it’s getting worse with each version.

The swing back to less minimalism and more colour has already started to happen.

Teenage Engineering is trendy. Clothes are starting to take more volume and have more interesting shapes. I have seen multiple people around me get interested into USM Haller furnitures in bold colors and I have seen more red Fiat 500 in 2024 than I had seen red cars in the past few years.

It's coming.

Well, they experienced extended physical suffering and having the mental acuity of a toddler. Feel free to try to convince me that not being able to recognise your own kids and the person you have been married with for seventy years while gradually fully losing your hearing and sight and not being able to leave a bed is somehow a worthy experience. I personally question if you can even talk of experiencing anything because that would imply there is something left which can meaningfully process experiences. And that’s the part which came after the initial decline when they were just insanely mean to their loved ones all the time.

You do sound harsh by the way.

To be honest, my grand parents both died in their nineties and their last two years were really sad. It was not so much the physical decline but the mental one. At the end, while technically alive, so little of who they were as persons remained, they might as well have been dead.

I fully understand someone in their 80s knowing the end is near choosing to leave on their own term.

I also dislike the way Faramir was adapted but it makes sense. It puts a greater emphasis on the exceptionality of Aragorn by removing the complexity of the Faramir character and basically making him a second Boromir. Considering that the movie is necessarily a more condense experience than a book, it's a good choice.

You are rebuilding Alpine packages on top of LFS while using glibc. So I guess you want a minimal system with OpenRC.

Gentoo will give you that with proper package management including on the system part without having to do the weird dance you are making with abuild with a nicer experience if you want to patch and update your packages later and significantly better tracking on what you have done.

I have a hard time seeing anything starting from LFS which wouldn’t be better actually starting from Gentoo.

I’m sad for reader but it was a somewhat niche product. Inbox I can’t forgive. It was insanely good and was killed because it was a threat to Gmail.

My main issue with Google is that internal politic affects users all the time. See the debacle of anything built on top of Android and being treated as a second citizen.

You can’t trust a company which can’t shield users from its internal politics. It means nothing is aligned correctly for users to be taken seriously.

The article is basically building a poor man Gentoo with worse tooling.

My main take away from it is that Gentoo has apparently lost so much mindshare, people don't remember it even exists or know what it does.

> After reading papers, watching TikToks and just observing the real world, I believe males and females have little in common beyond reproduction and sexual attraction.

Maybe less TikToks and more interactions with other people would do you a lot of good. That would help with both your incorrect assumptions that men can't get emotional connection with other men and that men and women have little in common. Just saying.