jpmattia

Holy moly, that was unsettling.

45 years for me. I don't even think about keystrokes anymore.

> and they get to join the index next year without a rule change.

You seem to have ignored the 50% float rule. SpaceX is proposing to go public with about 5% of the float, but S&P requires 50%.

Do we think that the market will absorb the release of 45% of the shares? I'm dubious.

Manias, Panics, and Crashes by Charles Kindleberger is a more modern book, which I'd recommend as well.

> Then I see he links to his own Revolutionary Theory, and it starts to look like outright crankary.

But what an AI-generated crankery! Because I enjoy wasting my time, I chose a random point (beginning of ch2) and started reading:

> Standard field-theoretic practice selects equations using symmetry, gauge invariance, and conservation. This chapter proposes a cognate selection principle built from three structural demands. A potential that carries energy must appear on the right-hand side of its own equation, because the energy it carries is part of what sources it. A potential that describes the same physics in every frame must have an equation that survives change of observer. A tensor equation must have matching ranks on both sides.

I've italicized a couple of items: Cognate selection principle? Really?

A tensor equation must have matching ranks on both sides? As opposed to all those tensor equations with differing ranks on both sides? Not exactly the type of thing that makes someone slap their head and shout "Why didn't I think of that?!"

The technobabble is interesting in that any single sentence might make sense in the absence of sentences nearby; It that regard, it's much like an Escher painting: Locally sensible, but globally out-to-lunch.

In fact, you had to pay extra to have your number/address omitted from the phone book.

Great. Let us hope that support for hardware without TPM is next. Creating several mountains worth of electronic waste was a terrible decision. And in the middle of the AI-induced memory shortage!

Although I have to admit: The combination of AI and required new hardware has been a nice boost for switching to Linux.

I think the most intriguing part of this effort: Farmers traditionally employ machines to achieve their harvest. Unless I'm mistaken, this is the first time that machines are employing humans to achieve their harvest.

I mean, more or less, but you see what I'm getting at.

[I'm still thinking about this a day later!]

I think an additional table/graph of how large-bet performance vs small-bet performance would be interesting in general, as well as broken out by market type.

It kinda answers of the question: Are large bets equal to smart money? or are they equal in "smartness" to small bets?

> but i did find that politics was actually one of the most efficient categories (only ~1% maker/taker gap)

I confess I'm surprised by that result in particular. I realize your results are for Kalshi, but ISTR some reports from the presidential elections on Polymarket.

But more generally: When you say there is "only a ~1% maker/taker gap", is that weighted by the size of the bets? or is it averaged over the number of bets placed?

In any case: Thanks for a very interesting paper!

Something that appears to be missing: Certain events attract "advertising" types of bets. E.g. There is value in making a candidate appear to be a leader, so dedicating dollars to swinging the market is more of a form of advertising than an intelligent bet.

So it would be interesting to measure the inefficiencies of various bets vs the total market value in that bet.

e: Although full disclosure, I did not pick apart the entire paper. Maybe it's buried in there.

I would guess that someone is beaming a whole lot of wideband power at the satellites themselves, to overload the input receivers.

Maybe they could add a helpful paper clip to improve sales.

Edit: Or better still, convince all of their customers to throw away perfectly good hardware and upgrade to one with a single extra chip, creating a hazardous waste epidemic for landfills as a nice side effect. It's especially important to do this in the middle of a RAM and HDD shortage.

Really, I'll just never be half the great business strategist that these guys are. <sigh>

Hold a chain at its ends, and let it hang down naturally. What is that shape called? A catenary and its equation is y = a cosh(x/a).

Maybe you all knew that factoid already, but I learned the name of shape only recently.

> so IBM handled manufacturing of its first-generation CPUs.

I'm curious: Is there a consensus on which startup companies achieved success using IBM as a fab? or if not a consensus, I'd settle for anecdotes too.

My own company (which built 40G optical transponders) used them back in that era. While the tech was first rate, the pricing was something to behold.

> worry instead about stroke.

You say that as if stroke is orthogonal to heart disease. Much of what prevents one prevents the other.

> Although I’ve never had a boss that needed to find an error.

I think that is key. A great mentor early in my career pointed out to me: "A" rated people need to work for "A" rated bosses. It's possible to have a "B" or "C" person work for an "A" boss, but when you put "A" people under "B" or (god forbid) "C" bosses, all kinds of problems ensue.

[I've personally experienced that situation only once, and swore never again.]

How do you deal with the short lifespan until EOL? I've been using Rocky (and CentOS before that) simply to avoid dealing with EOL so often.

Like many of you, I serve as IT support for family. Some of those family are beginning to slip cognitively, so I'd like to say: Fk google for doing this. You are confusing my relatives who cannot tell the difference between your ad-spam and actual links, and it is not an exaggeration to say that you are now taking advantage of old people.

I'm trying to install adblockers (uBlock) and move them over to chatgpt when possible. If anyone has better ideas, I'm all ears.

And just like that, there was a mad rush of mass-spectrometer-for-home-use startups.

MIT has a long tradition of hacks, and among the first documented hacks in the 1870s for marching practice:

> in which students sprinkled iodide of nitrogen over the grounds of a military drill, causing explosions under classmates' boots.

https://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2012/02/mit_p...

Back in graduate school, I TA'd an electrostatics course. We were going through the details of the basic parallel-plate capacitor, and so Prof. Peter Hagelstein (of the project you listed above) used the example of how much energy was stored in a football-field sized set of parallel-plate capacitors with oil as a high-breakdown dielectric.

The students were dutifully copying the lecture while I was sitting there with my mouth agape realizing that he was working through a simplified example of what energy storage was required for the X-ray laser. IIRC Those guys had their own substation, and would charge the capacitors. The switch would get thrown and the sublasers would shoot at the molybdenum target, which would laze in the X-ray spectrum (and the molybdenum would vaporize, I think.)

Afterwards, I asked him how on earth the energy was transferred from the caps to the sublasers: He just smiled and said "very carefully".

> part of the depicted did come from anecdotes

He spoke at MIT (early 90s?) and I remember him talking about making fun of PacBell colleagues in his comic: They would recognize themselves, ask him to autograph the comic for them, and then go away happy (thus making fun of them a second time.)

I wrote in the other reply:

> As for others, the set of people who understand that Hawking radiation exists has nearly 100% overlap with those who know that black bodies and spinning magnets radiate, so for those folks who are in the set who are also unfamiliar with the author, perhaps it's more clickbaity.

So according to my theory, you must in the set that understands Hawking radiation + black bodies + E&M, but not in the set familiar with Baez.

I worked hard on my theory, please don't let me down and be a counterexample. :)

Well, you got me thinking about "What exactly is clickbait?"

So full disclosure: I've directly interacted with John Carlos Baez only in social media, with the topics as disparate as music and observational astronomy. My own QFT & GR background is grad course level but with little actual usage in my career. (I've done more solid-state + high-speed electronics work, with a bunch of programming as well.) With that background, and turning the pedantry dial up to 11:

To me, one distinguishing element of clickbait is that the post is ultimately disappointing. The usual M.O. for clickbait is that the website needs eyeballs for advertising, so they beef up a headline of an uninteresting article with the expectation of getting extra monetization compared to an honest headline.

I would venture a guess that he doesn't actually care about monetization, or really even extra clicks, with this post. The screenshot with the big red X through the popsci article sets the expectation pretty quickly, and the tone of the rest of the post is really a rant that mediocre science made it into PRL and then into the popular science literature. He explicitly calls out the popsci journalists for laziness, but in a clever (I'm pretty sure Mark Twain would approve of his name being taken in vain) and erudite (correct use of the subjunctive) way.

Would I have clicked on the title without seeing the authorship johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com? Maybe but I doubt it. There is so much bad popsci physics out there that I'm pretty trained to ignore obviously inadequate headlines. So on a scale of 1-10, I'd rate the click-baityness of the headline no more than a 3. He got me to click, but only because I knew it was his post.

As for others, the set of people who understand that Hawking radiation exists has nearly 100% overlap with those who know that black bodies and spinning magnets radiate, so for those folks who are in the set who are also unfamiliar with the author, perhaps it's more clickbaity.

[edit: And I can't believe you got me to write that many words on the clickbait philosophy. Have I been baited? :) ]

Perhaps, but "Mathematical Physicists HATE when authors make THIS ONE ASSUMPTION!!1!" would be more click baity. I took it more as Baez writing for his physics audience.

> The title is... odd.

Not if you know the reputation of John Baez: Anyone familiar with him or his writings would know without hesitation that he understands black-body and E&M radiation, so his choice of title is clearly meant to be provocative.

It says to the reader "I wonder what he means?" To this reader, I'll also say that he delivered a terrific blog post.

Can you blame them? Just look at how they've been treated in the last few hundred years.

> Yeah, it's weird to me that an atomic transition can create something with a wavelength so much longer than the atomic radius.

Then it will be even weirder during an MRI: The protons in your body produce a wavelength that can be of order 1-10 meters.

Who would have thought that a power supply hum could be so annoying as to make people forget to be carsick.