blippage

In the early 80's I was doing my computing 'A' levels at a technical college. I used to type my programs on one of those old-fashioned teletypes, which I think were a cast-off from a regional polytechnic. I think the computers did have keyboards, but there were only 3 of them, and competition was tight. So I used a teletype. Making a "backup" consisted of printing the program out to paper tape.

I kept the rolls of paper tape and occasionally used them as streamers, much to the curiosity of neighbours.

Well, as the saying goes: great doubts, great wisdom; small doubts, small wisdom. (That's supposed to be a compliment, BTW). There's a great deal of uncertainty in investing, but that doesn't mean it's not something worthwhile. You have to remember that you will get a lot wrong. That's the nature of the game. The trick is to get it more right than wrong. Early success is not much of a predictor either. In fact, it often breeds overconfidence.

Try to avoid hype stocks. It's easy to get burned. Recommended reading is "Intelligent Investor" by Ben Graham. Warren Buffett calls it the best book on investing ever written, so you can't go far wrong. It's importance is in emphasising valuation rather than narratives.

According to Yahoo Finance, TSLA is on a PE of 38 and a market cap of nearly $400b. High PEs are only warranted by high growth, which is difficult for a large company to achieve.

The narrative over the last few years is that tech stock will grow to the sky. We were in an ebullient bubble phase. Psychology is a factor in market pricing. The narrative is shifting. Interest rates are going up, the economy is tightening, people may lose their jobs and investors are realising that companies in high valuations leave precious hostages to fortunes. People are beginning to realise that TSLA doesn't have a monopoly on the production of electric vehicles. Above-average profits bring in competitors, which of course reduces those supernormal profits due to market forces.

People go from "this baby's going to the moon" to "I don't want to be the last guy holding the bag."

They'll be plenty of experienced investors on HN who know exactly how all this goes down. But they'll also be a surprising percentage of HN readers who won't. Despite being highly intelligent, they'll fall for narratives (perhaps even more so than their lesser intelligent counterparts), and rationalise why absurd valuations are justified.

Falls tend not to be kind, either. It can take years to build up a head of steam, only for it to collapse in a few months. Crypto, anyone?

Rising prices tend to feed on themselves. The higher and longer a stock goes up, the more it seems like a "sure thing". But there's no such thing as a sure thing. The higher it goes, the more detached it becomes from reality. Reality wins in the end, though.

Not exactly "everyday", but you can solve differential equations using pulleys and gears.

I also found out that in the UK there were bankers on the bank regulation committee. Hmmm, conflict of interest much?

My other suggestion is that to practise banking, one needs a license, which can be revoked.

Now that I think of it, Taleb's suggested that banking should be a civil servant job. So, no financial engineering or bonuses, just boring paperwork.

In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008 (IIRC), the role of regular banking and hedge fund activities was split in two. The idea is, of course, that if all the fancy derivatives blow up, it wouldn't take retail banking with it. I read recently that the UK government was thinking of dropping this, which seemed a bad idea.

As Nassim Taleb observed, the problem here is no skin in the game. Bankers keep the upside, but shareholders have to carry the can. It's an agency problem. The fix to all this is dispensing some good solid jail time.

To my mind, Juicero is iconic of the problem. It was a solution to a problem that didn't exist, but bunging on "With the Internet" somehow made it a darling. It's a pretty old trick; sprinkling some talismanic phrase over whatever nonsense it is you're flogging.

I wonder to what extent the chip issue will resolve itself as we realise that not everything has to be IoT. I'm probably being overly cynical on this, though. There's still a lot of genuine uses for chips.

I guess the trick is to wait for a year or two, THEN invest in new tech IPOs. We need a bit of time for the crap to be flushed from the system. Do that, and there's probably a fortune to be made, as the tech that will IPO'd is likely to be of much higher quality.

I missed a real trick in not buying Google, for example. When did that float? 2002, or thereabouts. The markets were in real value territory the, so it was a good time to invest. I figured that Google were just being flashy, but I was too cynical at the time. Hindsight is always 20/20 though.

Dunno, maybe they'll be someone out there doing something interesting with RISC-V that has a potential to exploit some niche market. It doesn't have to be "Web 3.0".

Let me see if I have this straight ... it's a device that can run a general OS like Linux, but say, have a core that could be run real-time, with all the goodies like timers and stuff that we expect from microcontrollers?

If so, then that would be pretty awesome. I think that people have been trying to get real-time working on Raspberry Pis. It seems that they get kinda close, but never manage to get all the way.

> Spin "the other bets" out as a separate company.

Aha, glad somebody is seeing the same thing I'm seeing.

The problem with Google is that it is too large, and too successful. Their idea of having experimental projects is a good one, the problem is that Google makes so much money that they don't commit to them. They become too dilettante about them.

The fix is to do spin-offs, say keeping a minority stake at less than 20%. This generates capital for Google, gives them a share of the upside, but they don't have too much influence on the spin-off. So it's Death or Glory for the spin-off. They are forced to make whatever it is they invented work, or face extinction. There is a smaller management team, focussed on success.

This strikes me as a much better proposition than what we see at the moment, with Google just dabbling around pouring money into something they'll eventually get bored with.

You'd think that what with all the big brains at Google, someone would have thought of this. Maybe someone at Goldmans should make a pitch.

Brit here, so it's always interesting to see how things operate across the pond. We have an AIM market in the UK, which is a junior market. There are some good quality companies on there, mixed-in with a hell of a lot of the worst dreck imaginable.

The US has a lot more entrepreneurship than the UK, and I think it is something that us Brits could well do more of. In the UK we're too conservative, whilst the US plays it much more fast-an-loose. The UK has its fair share of financial scandals, mind.

I get the impression that in the US there has been far too much money chasing after far too opportunities. Blasting through $10b in a single business seems, shall we say, "quite an achievement."

I mean, Juicero, what was that crap, anyway? And then there was the whole Elizabeth Holmes thing. It would have been a large-cap company by UK standards. It seems that there's a lot of US "businesses" out there who are looking to hoover a lot of that sweet sweet VC lolly. I'm not sure what "due diligence" the VC guys are doing, but it doesn't seem much.

Another thing I have noticed is that, fairly recently, VC has seemed to switch into reverse gear. Now growth seems to be de-emphasised. It's like the whole Venture Capital market has collectively woken up one day and decided that they are much more sceptical about funding growth opportunities. What has changed really, though? It seems that just because Facebook and a couple of other titans decided to have a round of layoffs, that everyone else should, too. It's not really logical when you think about it. Sure, there's the whole Covid and Russian conflict thing throwing a spanner in the works, but have things really changed that much? It seems more a case of a lack of "animal spirit" compared to formerly that is causing the problems rather than any real problems themselves.

For microcontrollers, tinyusb seems to be the place to be. It supports a lot of architectures. The Pico RP2040 has tinyusb as part of its SDK. I've actually got something working, and I was toying with the idea of making the Pico controllable over USB. Once you can peek and poke memory addresses on the Pico, the world's your oyster.

Tinyusb seems quite flexible. You can write anything. It seems to have quite a bit of "canned" functionality, too, so if you wanted to write a keyboard host, for example, it's a case of trying to work through one of the demos and adapting it to your needs.

The problem with USB is that there is a lot of assumed knowledge as to how it all works. I only started playing with it recently, and it feels like being parachuted into enemy territory without a map. I wrote some of the basic here: https://medium.com/@oblate_24476/introduction-to-usb-from-a-...

One thing I just remembered: a couple of weeks ago I went to join a Zoom meeting, only to discover that it wouldn't work until I upgraded it. So I had to faff around trying to sort that out rather than doing what I wanted to do, which was join a meeting.

If I wanted to update my software every five effing minutes I wouldn't have chosen Debian Stable.

We have lost the art of keeping things simple, both on the hardware and software front. We have made everything more complicated. The gains are dubious.

For example, I saw a tear-down of an old game controller. It used a parallel-to-serial chip in the controller, which is a simple commodity chip. Keyboards and mice had very simple ways to communicate with the computer. In contrast, USB is complex, probably the most complicated protocol out there. And it's only getting more complicated. If you want to communicate via USB, best use a pre-existing stack.

Communications protocols of yore were relatively stable. If they were revised, it was infrequently. Today, protocols don't really seem to be designed to be common to everyone. They're more proprietorial.

I've used Picol a couple of times in some of my microcontroller projects as a command language. Its advantage is that it is easy to compile and link to without a lot of rigmarole.

Debian Stable user here. I had Windows 7, and it was a toss-up between using it and sticking with Win 7. There was always this feeling that using Linux was just a bunch of faffing around. I can't quite remember why I finally decided to go for it. I think I said I'd try it as an experiment for 6 months to see how I would get on. I should point out that I'm no Unix/Linux newbie and had installed Slackware on a machine back in the early 90's.

I've been through a whole bunch of distros. I'd generally recommend Ubuntu, but I grew increasingly frustrated with it.

Debian Stable works for me. It has a vast repo, all nicely integrated into a coherent whole. Unix(ish) is unsurpassed as a development platform.

The reason I say this is, as long as Zoom and maybe Skype work on my computer, which is over a decade old, it has enough for what I want. VS Code is also OK, unlike the abomination that is Eclipse. I can never stick to VS Code, but think it's a sensible choice if it works for you.

Windows 10 sounds like a nightmare from what I've heard. The constant updating, all at inconvenient times. I heard that Win 10 is allowed access to your data. Quite why folks didn't kick up a much bigger stink about this I don't know. Corporations are OK with MS sniffing through their documents? For real?

Win 10 seemed like a social experiment to see how hard they could kick consumers in the nuts and still get away with it. Win 11 seems to turn the insanity up to 11.

If anyone thinks Windows is any good, then all I can see is that they're suffering from some kind of Stockholm Syndrome. Non-commercial Linux distros are a breathe of fresh air.

I run MATE on Debian. MATE has the right trade-offs for me. Not too heavy, not too light. GNOME seems to take more and more resources to do less and less. Icewm requires too much customisation. Icewm is an interesting wm. At first it has an ugly 90's retro aesthetic, but it grows on you after a little while. Switching back to "proper" DEs makes them look a little too sugary.

> I now routinely get involved with projects developed by one or two people burdened with so much process and “best practices” that almost nothing of real value is produced.

The problem is that nobody really knows what practices are best, anyway. It's mostly just following the herd and gold-plating.

A story I typically trot out at this point is some code that was written in Fortran. I passed a meeting room one day, where some consulting dude was talking about "yeah, we could just put that in xml."

The thing about Fortran is that it can read arrays as a one-line statement. It's native to the language. You put data in XML, then you need to link in libraries and parse the whole shebang.

Programs need to be revised periodically. That means a bunch of guys who know what they're doing (not necessarily programmers) have to sit down and go through the tedious business of figuring out a new spec and how things need to change. I don't there's any shortcut to this. XML won't magic the problem away.

"Your cutting blade is not compatible with this device. The guillotine has been disabled for safety reasons."

Well that didn't long, did it? It was introduced in 1972.

In years to come historians will be having a good old chortle about how we managed to come up with two times that were 37 seconds apart.

In retrospect, fiddling with computer clocks like that was bound to be a nightmare.

3. Sell more hardware through the upgrade treadmill.

> compared to 2GB [of RAM] for Android

Crikey, I didn't know that. I have a Nexus from 2012. It seems to have slowed down since I first bought it. Android has been upgraded since then, of course. It's not a phone, just a tablet. I was happy with my purchase at the time, although it seems to run slow as molasses now.

One big problem was that I had to log into my Inland Revenue account through an auth app that they had. They seemed to update it frequently, which of course needed a huge multi-megabyte download. I was actually concerned about this. Fortunately I was able to get the Inland Revenue to allow alternative authorisation, but I had to jump through a lot of hoops.

I now don't NEED my Nexus for anything. I use kik on rare occasions. My plan is to not use the device, unless there is some nice distro that runs on it. Any suggestions? It must be lightweight.

I can't really see the point of Android per se. It just seems like a bloat-tastic OS for devices that are ill-suited to bloat.

Now that you've got me ranting ... everything is poxy smartphone this and smartphone that these days. Scan a QR code? How? The hoops I have to jump through to get that sorted is unbelievable. They should just give me the text version.

I have a dumbphone, PAYG. I got it from Tesco (a UK supermarket) a couple of years ago. Cost me 25 quid, which included 20 quid worth of vouchers. So basically, I bought a phone for 5 quid. I doubt that Tesco could make them for that money. I told one guy about my purchase, and he laughed that I had been ripped off. Bizarre. I bought a legit phone for 5 quid. It does exactly what I want it to do. So joke's on you, pal.

Some people have no concept of frugality.

Nassim Taleb has something to say on this. The wealth is in the long tails, the Jobs, Gates, etc. If you take the mean income of all people running businesses, then it's probably less than the average worker.

"The SEC published a video urging the public to think twice before taking investment advice from celebrities and influencers. "

So what we're saying is that Kim Kardashian is not necessarily the best source of financial wisdom?

Oh how we laughed.

Kim Kardashian was talking about NFTs before I even heard of them, which tells you all you need to know.

C-x M-c M-land-aircraft

Pheasants are as dumb as boxes of rocks. Their road sense is awful, and generally do exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time.

In the dim and distant past I worked as a programmer at a company that bought an old country estate for one of its offices. As part of the estate there were about a dozen peacocks. There were none left when I joined though. My manager explained that they were completely dumb and kept get run over.

> In the new study, two crows were trained to create embedded sequences ... The idea that the ability to grok recursive structures

I have this vision that in a year's time we'll walk into Twitter's HQ to find it being staffed by crows pecking at keyboards and spitting out Typescript.

I'm trying to befriend crows. When I go out for a walk, I started to get into the habit of putting a biscuit on a post. Crows fly off when you get anywhere near them. So I kinda hope that the crows spot me putting the biscuit down.

It's interesting to think about. For the first few times nothing much seemed to happen. So you never really know if the crows are doing stuff by blind luck, or they've twigged that there's a connection between me and biscuits.

I think they're catching on, though. A couple of days ago I approached the post, and the crow dispersed. I put down a biscuit, and I reckon the crows saw what I was doing. I carried on my walk. I had to get some way away, and then a crow went to the post and nabbed the biscuit. I think it bought a friend.

So I reckon that the crows now know what the system is.

One day I shall be King Of The Crows.

I checked out Twitter again after a few months absence. There is good content, for sure, but by crikey, most of what passes for political discourse amounts to a stream of non sequiturs and ipse dixit (assertion without proof).

I played around with Guile scheme for awhile. Also a bit of Perl. I wanted to write a simple utility, and chose Python. I am familiar with Python, but hadn't used it for some time. Getting back into it again, my conclusion was: Python, it Just Works.