intuitionist

They’re so much a thing that they came back the other way and overran politics itself in the North Carolina governor’s race last year

I was walking along in the desert when I noticed a tortoise crawling in the sand. I reached down and flipped the tortoise on its back. It laid on its back, belly baking in the hot sun, legs beating, trying to turn itself right side up, but it couldn’t, not without my help. But I didn’t help. AITA?

The outside investors in X made a profit on paper; Twitter was bought for $44B but the deal was financed with like $31B in equity and $13B in debt. It’s not a big profit (in fact it’s worse than you would have done in T-bills), and of course they’re swapping one illiquid and hard-to-value asset for another, but Elon isn’t giving them a 25% haircut at all.

Yeah, since t(N) < N, you can use the decomposition for N! and one extra factor (N+1) to get a decomposition for (N+1)! with a smallest part equal to t(N).

Sub-Saharan Africans are extremely genetically diverse but a sample of ~100 Black Americans is unlikely to have any Khoekhoe or Twa representation.

Anyway it’s possible that the model can pick up on other cues as well; if you had some X-rays from a hospital in Portland, Oregon and some from a hospital in Montgomery, Alabama and some quirk of the machine in Montgomery left artifacts that a model could pick up on, the presence of those artifacts would be quite correlated with race.

you know you could probably put them into some kind of language model to tally promotion vs complaints

you could probably even knock together a script to do that

in fact you might be able to get a language model to knock together such a script with a bit of iteration

So would maintaining this map make one a Torii Hunter?

I was really excited to see how a 19th-century landscape painter was connected with one of the best NBA players of the 1980s and an Ancient Greek mathematician. Not what I got, but the actual subject is still pretty interesting.

There are a lot of wealthy retirees in South Florida who make great marks. Beyond that it’s probably to some extent driven by talent agglomeration effects; if you’re someone who makes their money promoting scammy penny stocks, you might want to learn from other people who promote scammy penny stocks, so if they’re in Boca, you’ll go to Boca. Coincidentally(?) Boca Raton was founded by the Mizner brothers, Addison and Wilson; Wilson Mizner was himself a notorious con man.

To misquote Don Draper, that’s what the lawyers and money are for!

Funny that the word abugida is itself taken from the Amharic word for the Northern Semitic letter ordering—as you say, the traditional order for ፊደል goes ሀለሐመ…

If you’re trading US large-cap stocks at low frequency these are not really material costs for even a wealthy retail investor. Certainly not next to taxes.

It’s racist to break out statistics along what was literally the single most determinative factor for life outcomes in antebellum America?

> if it puts you out of work and automates away all other alternatives, then you’ll be witnessing the greatest economic shift in human history.

This would mean the final victory of capital over labor. The 0.01% of people who own the machines that put everyone out of work will no longer have use for the rest of humanity, and they will most likely be liquidated.

I’m pretty sure these emails are public for exactly that reason.

It’s in an email from January 2018, between Silicon Valley tech bros, next to discussion of fundraising. Of course they’re talking about an initial coin offering.

Of course for this to make sense you have to have a notion of 0, which is traditionally taken to be the point at infinity (so negation is negating the y-coordinate). It’s been a while since my algebraic geometry classes but IIRC this is just a useful convention.

Here’s a blog post from CockroachDB that discusses their use of Antithesis, including some of the challenges and “rough edges”: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/demonic-nondeterminism/

It’s not really plausible that the NYT tech guild would have controlled for factors that would make the pay gap appear smaller, because their incentive isn’t to be truth-seeking, but to attain a superior negotiating position.

Yeah, but I think this misses the point a bit. The fact that your true edge isn’t knowable wouldn’t be so bad except that if you’re betting full-Kelly and overestimate your edge even a little bit, your probability of ruin in the long run goes to 1. Whereas if you underbet, you’ll compound wealth at a little lower rate but won’t risk ruin.

Nitpick: big prime numbers are of course trivial to factor. Big composite numbers are much harder. Checking whether an unknown number is prime or composite is nontrivial but fairly fast.

I think that would be an uphill battle. The money that flowed to Caroline looked like: a base salary of $200,000 a year, semiannual bonuses of up to $20 million, a de minimis equity stake in FTX, and no equity in Alameda. I don’t know what SBF’s salary or bonuses (if any) looked like, but he had a controlling stake in FTX, 90% of Alameda, and borrowed from his companies several times for hundreds of millions at a time. Caroline was nominally the CEO of Alameda but she clearly was not the one in charge of the corporate empire, and if she was masterminding the fraud she did a very poor job of monetizing it.

It’s also not strictly he-said/she-said; there were at least two other executives who knew what was going on, both of whom implicated Sam as the mastermind.

For whatever reason, the current US administration seems to have decided it’s better to keep Binance and Tether around than to bring down the full force of the law. The next administration is going to be more crypto-friendly. I don’t think this is going to happen.

Yeah, if you can find one where there’s a more senior exec with more culpability who you can flip on. And once you’ve found that, you might as well become a whistleblower instead, which has considerable upside and much lower downside.

So collecting all those extra taxes would cover somewhere south of 25% of the budget deficit for 2021. You aren’t wrong, but the parent isn’t wrong either.

You don’t need to reverse time if you can deterministically reproduce everything that led up to the point of interest. (In practice we save a snapshot of your system at some intermediate point and replay from there.)

From the abstract, the paper’s argument looks to be entirely different and reaches different conclusions than a Marxian TRPF argument. This paper claims that net profit margins have increased over the past few decades (which is certainly true at least for S&P 500 companies) and that the increase is mostly driven by lower interest expense and lower corporate taxes. If interest rates and tax rates can’t or won’t fall any further, then they won’t provide a tailwind to margins, and so corporate profits will grow much more slowly (not necessarily decline!) over the next few decades.

Marxian economists generally speak of the TRPF as a decline in return on invested capital, which doesn’t come into play in this paper at all AFAICT, but they also have a bad habit of confusing ROIC with profit margins, which is what the paper is all about.

Maybe so, but I think the actual problem was too much of a black swan. There were certainly executives who voiced concerns about the asset side of Capital’s balance sheet and were vindicated in the crisis; Jack might have listened to them better than Jeff did. But I don’t think anyone really even considered the idea that you wouldn’t be able to find buyers for the commercial paper of a AAA-rated issuer pretty much until it was happening.

That said, there were outside commentators who’d raised questions about GE’s liquidity in the 2000s (notably Bill Gross) which did get Immelt and co. to term out some of GE’s debt. Maybe Jack would have been foresighted enough to do more. But that would have hit earnings (you’d pay a higher interest rate on longer term debt), so it would have been a tough sell, I think.

I think Jack Welch deserves a share of the blame as well—if you had to attribute GE’s fall to one thing (which you shouldn’t), it would probably be the funding crisis at GE Capital when they couldn’t roll their commercial paper at the height of the GFC. Jack loved GE Capital because it was the perfect cookie jar to reach into when he needed another penny or two of EPS to hit the Street consensus; just realize a capital gain somewhere in Capital, and voila, you’ve met your number again. But of course the article doesn’t discuss the financial crisis at all, or for that matter anything that happened during Jack’s tenure or the first half of Jeff Immelt’s. Or any non-Energy/now Vernova business lines.

Yeah this was reported at the time of the acquisition.