blippage

I've come to the conclusion that vertical farming is uneconomic. It requires lighting, which costs money. The infrastructure is elaborate, too. I don't see how that is going to beat traditional farming.

When people asked how Buffett made money in investing, his usual response is "start with the A's" (referring to the Value Line manual). I have found that an unsatisfactory answer, though, because unless you have some idea of what you're looking for, "starting with the A's doesn't mean much."

A better example of Buffett's obsessiveness is that he used to pick up discarded race track tickets. The overwhelming majority were no good, of course, but you might find one in a thousand where a winning ticket had been absent-mindedly discarded and you could cash in on the bet.

But, well, the fund management industry do work hard, yet have little to show for it. An old investment classic (can't remember which) put it this way: a guy new an analyst that could tell you everything you wanted to know about every railway company, except which ones to invest in.

I think many good investments rely on just a few simple arguments. For example, back in 2021 I learned that the price of Shell shares were at their lowest point for a decade or so, oil was at a low, and the US strategic oil reserves were at their lowest level since the 80's. I figured, Jeez, how much lower can then stuff go? So I bought shares. They've nearly doubled. There's no guarantees with this stuff, of course, I've made plenty of mistakes. It also requires the availability of opportunities, naturally. Sometimes my primitive monkey brain can spot them. No guarantees, there never are, but sometimes you can spot opportunities where the odds are stacked in your favour, and those are the ones you want to dabble in.

As the saying goes, a long-term investment is a short-term one that went wrong.

Consistently separating words by spaces became a general custom about the tenth century A.D., and lasted until about 1957, when FORTRAN abandoned the practice. -- Sun FORTRAN Reference Manual

I was talking to a guy who was into drug counselling. He laid out some pretty shocking facts, like children as young as 12 take drugs. This made me absolutely convinced that we should not legalise drugs, except in the case where there legitimate medical uses.

He also said that he got annoyed when the police announced that there was a particularly potent batch of drugs on the streets at the time. His reasoning is that it only encourages drug users.

Also, experience of using drugs is no guarantee of safe drugs practise. If anything, it's the contrary. People become complacent in what they think they can handle, which spells trouble.

Also, drug purity can vary by region. You won't know about it in advance, but if you take drugs from a less tainted batch then you usually do, then you could well be taking a much higher dosage of the drug than your body is used to. Not good.

And finally, the most chilling part of all. He said that if you were to put some heroin on a table and say that this is the purest heroin on the market. You can take it, but knowing you will die. Many would still take it.

> David P. Goldman[: ] «the transformation of disruptive tech companies into rent-seeking monopolies»

I have been thinking along those lines. Economies have thrived under capitalism because they have produced something of value to consumers. There seems to have been a shift of late where the philosophy is one of "how can we get vendor lock-in?" Sure, it is in a sense logical for companies to want to do this, but what value does it have for society? And ultimately, if it has no value for society, then how can it really be successful?

I guess the supreme success of Microsoft, Google, Apple and Facebook have driven this change in mindset.

> Verbal contracts can be binding.

Furthermore, contracts can be implied. IANAL, and I can't quote the UK case, but IIRC correctly it boils to whether there was "an intent to create legal relationships". The case involved a lottery pool in which the pool won. There was one named winner, and he decided not to pay out the winnings to the other participants. The other participants sued to obtain their share of the payout, naturally. They won the case because although no verbal agreement was made, there was an implied legal contract.

IANAL, and apropos of nothing in particular, there is a fun English case Everet v Williams [1725] (also known as the "Highwayman's Case").

They were highwaymen who agreed to share the loot. A dispute arose between them, and Everet decided to petition the court. This turned out to be a Bad Idea.

According to https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/92239/strange-case-evere... :

> [Consequently] An order was issued for the arrest of Wreathock and White, Everet’s solicitors, on a charge of contempt of court for even bringing the case to the court’s attention at all. And for his part in the fiasco, barrister Jonathan Collins was ordered to pay all the costs himself—earning him a unique place in British legal history as the only barrister ordered to pay the costs of a failed case.

Both Everet and Williams were eventually tried and hanged.

> [The case] is frequently cited as an example of the legal principle ex dolo malo non oritur action—“no right of action can have its origin in fraud.” Or, in other words: You can’t expect the law to help when what you’re doing is illegal in the first place.

Wreathock, the solicitor, was convicted of robbery in 1735. He was sentenced to hang, but it was commuted to transportation to Australia.

An aside joke ... An Englishman goes to apply for a job at an Australian company. Australian: Do you have a criminal record? Englishman: I didn't know you still needed one.

#embed is what I really want. And separators.

> Standard C advances slowly

They're not joking, either. C is conservative to a fault, I think.

> I would probably argue that venture capitalists are not good for society regardless of what they’re investing in

Then her argument is a poor one. VCs, and capitalists in general, put money at risk in the hope of generating wealth above their initial capital. They produce goods or services that benefit society, absent the internet-controlled juice-squeezers.

Where there are outsized returns on capital, in a well-functioning system, capitalists are supposed to compete for those outsized returns, thereby reducing the returns.

Society has benefited greatly from capitalism. I wouldn't leave it up to the likes Molly White to produce anything meaningful.

But let's be honest, we knew all that already.

There's some flies in the ointment, of course. Some companies produce super-normal profits, because they are monopolies, near-monopolies, or oligopolies. We have legislation for that.

Perhaps a more worrying trend is what we're seeing in the likes of Facebook and Google: rent-seeking behaviour and vendor lock-in. It's all too easy to tie something in with the internet with a kill switch. Actually, I'm not all that concerned if Google or Facebook were to disappear tomorrow. I don't use Facebook anyway, so there's that. Google is replaceable, too. Sure, we'd have to scramble around sorting out our emails for a few weeks, but that's about it.

No silver bullet. If there was One True Way we would have applied it by now. Instead, we just argue about policies, meaning that we don't actually know the answer.

Post 2008, interest rates were held at historically low figures, and for a long time. Everyone should have been suspicious. The illusion of stability can hide risks that build up within the system. Anyone who follows Taleb would have long suspected that they'll be bad consequences.

> The post mortem of a bank failure always reveals idiosyncratic mistakes the bank made.

That contradicts the argument that the "collapse of SVB shows why monetary policy is the wrong tool to fight inflation", because it implies that SVB's failure is due to SVB's bad decisions.

> If the Federal Reserve were to raise interest rates, the market value of these bonds would collapse,

And had it not occurred to anyone, especially bankers, that interest rates could rise?

> Rather than change interest rates to control inflation it should pivot to a policy of stable interest rates with the goal of maintaining financial stability.

So, maintain the current interest rate forever? Job done, everyone can go home? And if you don't mean that, then you're going to have to supply a carefully worded definition of what "stable" means. Then again, there's that word "stable"; see above.

> The first mistake was to sell the bonds before raising equity.

Raising equity is harder than selling bonds. Raising equity might have triggered a panic in any event. If everything's going swimmingly, then what rationale are you going to offer the market for raising money?

> The second mistake was doing business with Goldman Sachs.

Lol. Well, they're not called the "Vampire Squid" for nothing. "Ripping your face off" is kinda their thing.

I'm perhaps being unkind to Associate Professor Nersisyan, but my point is that he has no more answers than anybody else. He's just another talking head.

Suppressed interest rates has led to a speculative bubble, particularly in tech investment. That's how you get internet-controlled juice squeezers. No-one was really looking that hard at what they were investing in.

The good news is that the speculative bubble seems to be mainly isolated in the tech sector.

Are we all doomed? Well, that's consensus opinion, and one that seems eminently sensible. However, I've also heard opinions to the contrary from experienced investors, so we're not dead yet.

I'm not keen on the whole US model of "mandated psychopathy".

From what little I hear, the Germans seem to have found as good a balance as ever is likely to happen. There is good worker protection whilst industry is still being strong economically. Perhaps we should be looking at the way they do things.

Formerly in the UK, the chocolate-makers Cadbury was founded by a Quaker who had a strong sense of social responsibility motivated by Christian convictions. They were a profitable company who were taken over by Kraft.

Yeah, that's the one. Thanks for that! I hadn't actually seen the film, only the clip. My memory was vague on it.

You don't give a conman your confidence, he gives you his.

I saw a clip of a film some time ago (anyone idea of its name?). It has Chazz Palminteri in it. He played a conman. Him and a woman were waiting in a Western union (?) office. They got chatting, and in walks a GI. Chazz's character talks to the GI and starts to con him out of his money. The woman was aware of this. But he stops short of conning the GI. The GI leaves, and he explains how the con works.

Chazz and the woman then leave together. The point is that he was playing a long con against the woman and the aborted short con was just a ploy.

The moral of the lesson is that if someone reveals themselves to be a liar, then you should take them at their word. Having established themselves as liars, you should never trust them.

"The banks could have bought insurance against rising interest rates, but they didn't. "

See, this always worried me. How do you buy insurance against rising interest rates? Or more precisely, WHERE to you buy insurance against rising rates? If the answer is "from other banks" (which it presumably is), then there is no hedge in any meaningful sense. My reasoning is that it's a closed-loop system. They can't all pay off each other without counterparty default somewhere along the line.

I guess what I'm trying to say that rising interest rates are bad in the sense that it creates losses (be they realised or unrealised) that are systemic to the whole banking system. There needs to be some outside party that can soak up the losses. That outside party is The Fed

I poked around with Smalltalk recently. The language fits of a postcard. Great, but so what? How do I input and output from files, and all the other stuff that I want to do?

I also think Racket suffers from the same problem. The libraries are documented, but how do I use them to do something?

The advantages of mainstream languages is that they have a plethora of documentation.

I'd say that if you want your language to succeed, adopt a cookbook approach. Nobody wants to figure out how all the pieces of the jigsaw should be put together.

For all that, I don't think anyone has really come up with anything better than C++, Python, or similar (Rust, if you /must/).

As one carer put it, "You can't fix crazy." There's basically just no reasoning with them.

I saw an interesting vid on YouTube about a man who was relatively young, IIRC. He was in the C-suite of of a biotech company, but he suffered from some kind of dementia. I don't think it was Alzheimer's though. He slept in a separate room from his wife. He complained to his wife that his bed headboard was "rusty". As far as I could tell it was just an ornately carved headboard, and he somehow equated some of the carvings as rust.

There were other incidences like he would go through his wardrobe at like 2am in the morning. He appeared to want to sort out his shoes so that he could put them in his car. So there was something of a mess on his bed with wardrobe contents strewn out on it. He wasn't achieving much of anything, and of course there was no reason for him to sort out his shoes. Especially not at 2am.

It seems as though dementia sufferers do have some kind of "logic" to their behaviour, but it appears to be some kind of random logic without any discriminative faculties. And they fixate hard on this rationale too, making it particularly frustrating for those around them.

What's interesting, and actually quite well documented, is something called "terminal lucidity". This is when as someone actually gains mental clarity for a period of time some time before their death. The specific time periods vary with the sufferer. This is baffling medically, of course, because if a person's mental function is gone due to brain decay, then how can they get it back? And why does it foreshadow death?

The big tip-off that all is not as it seems is that he calls himself "Uncle Bob" Martin.

Functions should do only one thing. Sure, but what does that actually /mean/? If a function calls two other functions, then surely, by definition, it's doing two things? So how much a function is doing is a question of how far you stand back when looking at it.

Also, if you follow a rule of functions having only 2-4 lines, then you're going to have a lot of functions, and tracing through code paths is going to be like peeling back layers of an onion. So that advice is just wrong.

It's not even clear that long functions are a problem. Back in the early 80's my A level computing science teacher, who had worked in industry, said that there was no real evidence to suggest that long functions are less readable.

There was a joke going around some time ago about an interviewee who was asked how big a function would be. He said "I like to be able to keep it within my head." When asked to elaborate, he said "I put my head against the screen. If the function is longer than that, then it's too long." Although facetious, I think that's actually a good idea. A function should be at most a screenful, so you can see it complete on the screen.

Recently, I wanted to customise my own gopher client. I first messed around with one written in Go, but it was too complicated to adapt for what I wanted. I switched to a C alternative, which was still a bit too complicated. I decided that I'd basically re-write the whole thing in C++, using whatever bits of functionality from the C part that I thought useful.

If there is a magic formula to writing good code, then I'd say that the less code you have the better, and try to keep code reasonably decoupled. The problem with writing applications is that there's a tendency to be promiscuous in how you use objects. So, in essence, every part of the program relies on every other part of the program. There's no separability of design. It is better to take a "library" approach to things, where each "module" doesn't know how it is going to be used. You then have co-ordinating functions which stitch this functionality together. The code you end up with should be much easier to adapt.

It's also useful not to be overambitious with your project. Someone once said that the genius of Ritchie and Thompson was being able to obtain 90% of the functionality using 10% of the code. If you think parsimoniously in that way, they'll be a lot less code to wade through when you want to modify things.

Thatcher is what I like to call a "Marmite politician": either you absolutely loved her, or absolutely hated her. She was a politician of her time, by which I mean she was exactly the politician we needed at the time that we needed it. I doubt that any other politician could have achieved what she did in the UK. Everybody else would be too willing to compromise.

One thing I noticed is that political thinking tends to come in waves. Not just for countries individually, but globally. Sure, there are plenty of exceptions, but each age seems to have its own zeitgeist in the world's collective consciousness.

Currently, for example, there is Wokeism in general, with particular emphasis on transgenderism. Transgenderism only "affects" a very small percentage of the population, nobody paid it any mind a decade ago, and yet today it's a thing.

I can't remember who said it, but someone argued that banks are inherently bankrupt. Their business model is to borrow short and lend long. The reason is that if you're a sensible business then you'll have cash reserves to smooth short-term cash-flows. So if your aim is to maintain reasonable liquidity, then someone else has to take the other side of that "trade". That "someone else" are the banks.

There are also other problems. Cheap and easy money. Banks have one tool to increase returns: leverage. So they lend to other institutions where they can get an interest rate differential. As too much money chases too few opportunities, the inevitable happens: instruments appear to cater for the demand. But they will be of lower quality. As the bubble continues, returns go down and the quality worsens. On paper, everybody is coining it in. UNTIL. The credit markets tighten for whatever reason, someone defaults, sending dominoes toppling throughout the entire industry. When things turn sour, the situation doesn't degrade gracefully, but collapses catastrophically.

Rules can help only a little because the basic model and drive to make profit are both the same. The payoffs are also asymmetric due to agency risk. The people making all these deals have no skin in the game. They get huge bonuses for making the big deals, but they don't lose their houses if everything collapses.

What's the fix for all this? Well, it's probably endemic to the system, but not necessarily a lost cause. As someone one sense "a business that is too big to fail is too big to succeed." It may seem like a trite slogan, but there's merit to the argument. Our local building society (I guess it's what in the US they call Savings and Loan) sailed through past crises unscathed. They just didn't invest in all that subprime nonsense. So if there is a fix, it probably amounts to breaking up the big banks into lots of regional ones. Maybe. Although noboy is going to do that.

I have to say that this is one of the dumbest ideas I've heard in a long time. Like "you have to be dropped on your head as a baby" dumb.

Let's say the cable is 5000 miles long. How much power dissipation is there going to be over this distance?

THEOREM: All numbers are interesting.

PROOF BY CONTRADICTION: If there are boring numbers, then there must be a minimum absolute boring one; which makes it an interesting number. QED

I futzed around with AROS a year or so ago, and even played with it in 2005 on a hosted Slackware, if memory serves. The installation process was highly confusing. No doubt it works for the developers, but for those that just want to kick the tyres, it could be a lot friendlier.

Small tweaks to their website would help. In the main menu they have "Aros-Exec". The should call it "Forums", because that's what they are. "Archives" would better be called "Software", or "Packages". Sometimes tiny things can mean a lot.

There seems to be an active community for software uploads, which is nice to see.

My go-to language is C++, although I know and have admired Python for a long time.

I had a BMP file which I wanted to transpose and turn into raw RGB 5-8-5 values. Using the Python Image Library made things absurdly easy.

That's Python's advantage in a nutshell. Things are just so absurdly easy.

Having read the article, it struck me that the projects seemed to involve daft ideas, solutionism, or fad-chasing.

For example, I knew right from the outset that delivering packages via drones was a dumb idea. A moment's thought would have told you that the economics of it just don't make sense.

AI. That's something that EVERYONE is on about right now. It's fad-chasing.

UPDATE: There's an interesting article in the Atlantic from 2020 "Silicon Valley Abandons the Culture That Made It the Envy of the World" [0]

They write: "You worked for Silicon Valley, and working for Silicon Valley often meant striking out on your own, not only to make your name, but because innovation itself required small firms with new visions. That’s how disruption happened, no?"

"Then the post-dot-com generation of companies became the most ubiquitous and valuable corporations in the world, and Silicon Valley’s rhetoric began to change. Over time, the leaders of Facebook and Google, specifically, began to argue a new line: The most innovative, competitive companies are not small and nimble, but big and rich with user data."

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/01/why-s...

It took over a decade to produce. After all that, it was pretty damn slow, and I suspect that many people thought it was too slow to be worth using.

I could be wrong, but I think Unix was originally written in assembler, which isn't portable.

Unix first appeared on a PDP-7 (not PDP-11). PDP-7 was pretty old even by the standards of the time.

"Originally, UNIX was written in PDP-7 assembly, and then in PDP-11 assembly, but then when UNIX V4 began to be re-written in C in 1973 and was run mostly on the PDP-11.

So far as I can tell, there is no Ancient C compiler that targets the PDP-7, nor any provision for running UNIX V4 or later on the PDP-7" [0] The link also contains some other interesting commentary.

I seem to recall that Thompson wanted to write code in Fortran.

I'm probably getting a few details wrong. The systems were extraordinarily constrained, something like 4K of RAM. "++" exists because it was more concise that "+= 1" (although K&R C uses "=+ 1", I think). They really wanted to make every byte count.

[0] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/6194/why-...

MVP: Minimal Viable Product.

The greatest example of this is Unix.

Multics was a huge produce that failed (initially). Bell Labs washed their hands of it, and didn't want anything to do with Operating Systems again.

Ken Thompson wrote an initial scrappy version of Unix in 3 weeks. Re-writing to C was a tremendous move because it meant that Unix could be ported easily to many other systems.

I heard someone say that the genius of Dennis Ritchie was that he knew how to get 90% of the solution using only 10% of the work.

I'm working my way through Unix Haters Handbook [1], and it's a good read, even for someone like myself who really likes Unix.

Unix and C are the ultimate computer viruses -- Lawrence Krubner

[1] https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf

That's pretty much what I expected.

"Delusions of exceptionalism". When a company becomes large and successful (I've heard similar stories about Microsoft), delusions of exceptionalism inevitably occur. There's a feeling of "manifest destiny". The employees are "the best and the brightest" working at one of the most successful companies. Egos are sure to become inflated.

Google has a cash cow which hides a lot of inefficiency. For sure, Google has a lot of talented people doing a lot of clever things. The majority of which is wasted. You could probably get rid of half of the employees and even achieve a better result.

What you want is something like another Bell Labs/Xerox Parc/Skunkworks. How many people? Less than 1000, I'd say, max. The rest can carry on moving dialog boxes from the top left of the screen to the top right, or whatever it is they do.