aetherson

The founders are probably not the owners of a large majority of the business. Most of the owners are not drawing any salary.

Look, lying is bad sure. It would be better if they had been honest in November. But nobody here is actually arguing that the layoffs are fine, they're only mad about the comms.

I mean, if your argument is, "Bending Spoons made a bad investment," then sure, okay. That's not implausible! Companies make bad investments.

But I don't really see what overall lessons there are here.

Yes, the owners were paid by the sale. The argument by other people was that the sale shouldn't happen, or vice versa that the sale should happen only to people who were committed to continuing to spend the company's money on supporting employees who are stipulated to not be adding much value (and, thus, are not willing to pay much for the company).

Guys, I totally get it. Nobody likes to be laid off. I was laid off a month ago. But the money that is being soaked up by employee who are, again, stipulated to be not doing anything productive goes somewhere else. This may be a tragedy for an individual person, but it's good for society overall.

And honestly this is probably fine. If the main business can't grow and there have been a few years of attempts to produce complementary businesses with no success, that's a good sign that the business should be moved into a "return money to owners" model.

California is big! That's also why there have technically been small parts of California which have been in drought for the last few years while most of the state is in good shape.

This year, Southern California is having a wet year while most of Northern California is having a relatively dry one.

People who build data centers. Strong data protection laws (in a relatively stable democratic country) so that customers will feel okay putting their workloads in a data center, and then low regulatory burden and cost to the inputs to making a data center work (mainly electricity and water for cooling).

There would obviously still be things that would make a data center builder feel less-than-great about locating in a developing country, but there's also a LOT of money sloshing around in the data center buildout right now, if you could get people to just try it out with a small minority of their money it could be a very big deal for some countries.

I was chatting about this with a friend. It feels like there's a real opportunity for a relatively-poor-but-democratic country to say, "Look, for real, we will pass the strongest data protection laws in the world, and we will let you build as many solar panels as you want + use as much water as you want, just sink a couple hundred billion into OUR economy."

I got to 77 on my first try and my loss was dumb, I could definitely do better, but I'm like, "It took so long to get to 77."

It's certainly not crazy to imagine that you could cut the costs of a helicopter-like aircraft that was purpose-made for relatively short, relatively low-speed, relatively light load duties.

I don't think it's completely irrelevant. Can we admit some nuance where the UK's fast ramp up of arrests for previously legal speech is genuinely concerning, but also that raw number of arrests (not even convictions!) is not the only basis for comparison?

I understood the situation here to be that the same private owner owned all of the private squares in this particular area. I would assume that most private owners won't be interested in buying squares deep in the checkerboard for access reasons.

But they don't have the same access problem because the public squares don't have access restrictions.

I mean.

The artifact you link shows a map of the Americas in which California is an island and either Tierra Del Fuego is huge or the bottom of Argentina is an island and the northwest of the continent trails off into nothing, and Florida is sort of a stubby nub (other maps from this period show a more accurate Florida, so this might be a small-size-of-the-object problem).

They had a decent view onto the east coast of the Americas, but after that things got quite inaccurate. It's like... I don't know what anyone's expectations are, but it certainly isn't the perfect world map that's shown in the main image of Wikipedia's article.

No, and the article shows a not-even-attempting-accuracy period version of the coat of arms a little below: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SouthSeaCompany_TradeLabe...

Do you know what else stops working if you stop taking the therapy?

Diet and exercise.

I enjoy my trips to Japan as much as the next guy, but the idea that Japan is a model of great governance is at the very best arguable.

I was at a company that spent over $90M a year with AWS and we got defensive, limited comms.

My experience with AWS is that they are extremely, extremely parsimonious about any information they give out. It is near-impossible to get them to give you any details about what is happening beyond the level of their API. So my gut hunch is that they think that there's something very rare about this happening, but they refuse to give the article writer the information that might or might not help them avoid the bug.

Yes, there are clear ergonomic reasons why we don't do this "assign a username" thing. But it would stop password stuffing.

You'd presumably do username recovery the same way you do password recovery, so it would only be accessible to an attacker who compromised the user's email.

Because credential stuffing relies on the user reusing a username + password from another site. If you provide the user with a username they don't select, it won't be reused.

Lobbyists work for money, not the love of the game or ideological conviction. There's really no inherent reason why a former lobbyist will retain a loyalty to a former employer now that they've moved on.

It's a one-dimensional orbit, right?

Well, let's go with a learning exercise. Do you think that you should dismiss the fact that someone said something dumb because you perceive them as being on the right side? Then I guess it's good for you.

It's a deeply non-capitalist perspective to demand that everyone respond to dumb posts with sentiment instead of analysis.

Money spent on startups isn't charity, you do it in the expectation of (in aggregate) profit -- so it's not rivalrous with charities. People who might support museums earn money on investments that they can then use for charities.

If you believe that you are better at picking winners (slop startups vs non-slop startups) than the rest of the investment world, then that's a valuable skill that you could use to earn a lot of money that you could then use to support museums if you choose.

The author's children were going to an elite private school immediately before going to Alpha School.

But you can draw comparisons with other expensive private schools, which is what the ACX article does.

These aren't predictions. They're vague sentiment.

It would be interesting if the author were to try to express these with a timeline in a way that is falsifiable, optionally with some kind of measure of certainty.

In katakana you lengthen the "e" sound with a dash-like character, but in hiragana you lengthen it with an "i" character, and most romanization schemes follow the hiragana and write the long e sound as ei.

Mice, flies, vermin of various kinds that seemed able to show up anywhere from no obvious parents.