mightybyte

> if a corporation can't find any opportunities for use of capital..., it should be distributed to shareholders

A ways down the article says:

"The firm spent $1.1 billion to repurchase shares, bringing the nine-month total to approximately $7 billion."

So they are returning some of that to shareholders.

Cash, diamonds, etc are actually better for crime than cryptocurrency because they're less traceable.

Some years ago I was moving to a different state and looking for a job. I ended up doing interviews at six different companies. Five of those came from direct personal connections (mostly via coworkers) and one came from generic search / cold application. After the interviews, I got five offers. The only place that didn't give me an offer was the one from the generic search. It also paid significantly less than the others and simply didn't seem as interesting. My takeaway is that cultivating a network of people who you've worked with and enjoy is invaluable for increasing your options when you come to new decision points in your career.

Nebula is another option along these lines. https://nebula.defined.net/docs/ I've been using it for the better part of a year and am very happy with it. It is able to make point-to-point network connections in many situations, avoiding the out-and-back cost of VPN ingress/egress points that are far away from source and dest.

I remember running across this book in a bookstore in the 80s! What a blast from the past. In particular I remember the picture on page 73.

I'm familiar with Iocaine Powder. The fact that it won an internet Roshambo competition doesn't mean that it's the dominant strategy. If the opponent knows what move Iocaine Powder is going to play, the structure of Roshambo tells us that there's always a move that beats it. If it is not performing well, then it falls back to completely random. Completely random is a perfectly reasonable thing if you're in a Roshambo contest, not so much if you're trading money because transaction fees will eat your profits.

> There is no way to decide.

Yep. Kind of like paper-rock-scissors, there is no dominant strategy.

Anyone else share my thought that Twilio (and any other companies like them that I'm not aware of) is likely the primary driver of the massive epidemic of spam text messages and phone calls? Phone and text have been rendered almost completely useless to me. I often get close to double digit spam texts and calls per day. Obviously the drivers of this stuff are many and complicated, but it seems like the automation layer is the main thing that enabled it all.

I saw something very similar to this some years back. Can't remember the site though.

The Nomad also had an absurdly slow UI.

Have you tried Nebula (https://nebula.defined.net)? I set up a personal Nebula network a few months ago and have been very happy with it thus far. It has the ability to do mesh-style direct routing so you don't necessarily have to pay the out-and-back latency cost if you're connecting to a location that is closer.

I have received a referral bonus that traced directly back to a "who is hiring" post. Haven't posted on "who wants to be hired" though.

> But I think each prong of attack opens up a little more of Trumps weakness and eventually, either through weight of legal cost or dumb luck they will find something to hang him with.

The thing that surprised me yesterday was learning that being convicted of a felony doesn't prevent you from running for public office or the office of President of the United States! So it seems like a pretty impotent "hanging". I had assumed that barring him from running for re-election was the major motivation behind pursing these indictments, but I guess that's not the case. So that suggests that these moves are mainly about public opinion? If that's what it is, then this particular indictment seems like the weakest of the possible ones that have been talked about. Taking all this into account, I can't help but think that this kind of plays into Trump's desire to be the center of attention.

I'm not quite sure of that interpretation of the text. Here's the quote:

> We are also announcing a similar systemic risk exception for Signature Bank, New York, New York, which was closed today by its state chartering authority. All depositors of this institution will be made whole. As with the resolution of Silicon Valley Bank, no losses will be borne by the taxpayer.

To me, that last sentence about SVB is distinct and separate and not implying that the previous sentence about Signature depositors applies to SVB. But you could be right as well, I don't think it's clear.

Oh good point, my bad. I was skimming for "runs" (more of a piano term) and missed the bits about "rolls". I also wasn't aware that this is a thing in tetris. Very cool!

Oh, I wasn't aware of that! Thanks for the pointer!

I would actually disagree with hand alternation as a goal. I think optimizing first for runs (see my other comment in this thread about runs for a description) would actually allow longer periods of relaxation. If you alternate hands each key press I have the feeling that you could actually decrease the opportunity for relaxation (in the case of a fast enough typist) because as soon as one hand is done you only have the time span of a single key press before it has to activate again. However, if you can type a run of 3-4 keys with a single hand using a single rotation of the wrist, and then alternate between left hand runs and right hand runs, I think you could allow even longer periods of relaxation than single-key alternation can give.

EDIT: Due to terminology differences I missed that my point here was indeed taken into account with this layout. Super excited to see this!

---

I think most of the efficiency functions that these kinds of efforts tend to optimize for miss the most important factor.

I've thought about this a fair amount drawing on my experience switching to dvorak 15 or so years ago and not getting the typing speed increase I was hoping for, and also from having a close friend with a PhD in piano performance. There's one thing that I've never seen taken into account by these kind of keyboard layout optimization efforts that pianists understand is very important, and that is runs. Most people seem to focus on individual finger movements, a meaningful component to be sure. But I think there's still a lot that could be gained from optimizing a layout for runs. Runs are sequences where the fingers are depressed in sequential order across the hand (possibly skipping one or more fingers). They can be played (typed) not so much by isolating individual finger movements, but by getting the hand into the correct shape in a single movement and then actually depressing keys with a single rotation of the arm/hand/wrist.

The interesting thing about optimizing for runs is that it's directly opposed to the alternating hand optimization that the dvorak layout uses. I would love to see some exploration in this area and think it could yield meaningful speedups. Unfortunately, getting proficient with a layout takes a long enough time that I'm not super likely to take the project on myself.

I'm always torn between this and the advice that any response just validates for them that there's a real person behind the contact info and therefore it's definitely valuable to keep spamming.

Recently I've kind of felt like it's Twilio & similar that are driving this, because they have made tools for this kind of mass spamming of texts and calls widely accessible. I'm sure it's a very complex web of factors, incentives, etc. The question is are there any small and focused areas that regulators can target to clamp down on the problem. And the mass call/texting providers like Twilio seem like a promising possibility to me. I get so many spam calls and texts that it has basically rendered the traditional phone system completely useless.

In this case I would say very much thriving. This person could easily handle a $5,000 unexpected expense.

When I moved to NYC, I was able to get a very comfortable apartment outside Manhattan but still very convenient to subway lines, and my rent (by far my largest recurring expense) was lower than I had been paying in my first job out of college 7 years earlier. Sure I had a roommate, but 7 years earlier I had was living with my S.O. Why do we automatically assume that a roommate == lower comfort of daily life than living with an SO?

In my case, I was unquestionably more comfortable in my 30s in NYC than in my 20s in the suburbs in a single family home.

It took me awhile to realize but this is one of the big things that algebraic data types (ADTs) help you to do...design your data types so they have exactly the number of valid states that your domain has. To use another common FP way of saying it...make invalid states unrepresentable.

I think this is a common misconception. People say this about NYC, but it's simply not true. I have artist friends who live in NYC and make something like 30k / year. No, you probably won't be able to live in Manhattan with that kind of money but NYC is much bigger than Manhattan and it is still possible to live quite affordable and have access to the city's public transit and not need a car.

For a more modern one, Apocalyptica's Nothing Else Matters (the Official Video on YouTube is the exact version) is one of the most memorable frisson experiences I've had in recent years. After I first heard it while dancing I listened to it for like a week straight and got frisson at the climax basically every single time.

> But for anyone in IT or related fields? $20/month feels like a nobrainer if you're in the West.

Yes, I definitely hear you. If you're living well within your means then sure. But on the other hand, a shocking number of Americans don't live within their means and are strapped with credit card debt. In those situations even a small number of instances of this kind of "oh, it's just $20 / month" reasoning start to add up.

> It probably increases my productivity by that much per day.

Again, this doesn't matter if you're on the edge of cash flow positivity and can't actually turn that productivity into dollars. Your employer isn't going to pay you $20 / month more because they can't measure your productivity with that much granularity.

> especially when you're a freelancer

I think that's the big qualifier here. The productivity paying off the price is only meaningful if your time and money are arbitrarily fungible for each other, and for most people they are not. There's a good chance they won't be able to find a way to convert that saved time into the corresponding $20+ needed to pay the bill. And if finances are tight, $20/month might be a deal breaker.

Even if you're a freelancer, if your projects have billing caps related to the number of hours you expect to work then you don't necessarily have adequate time/money fungibility. $20 a month also might not be worth the cost of going out and acquiring a new project.

Both breadth and depth are useful. See my comment elsewhere here about learning with iterative deepening.

Here's a nice talk along these lines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8KcCU-p8QA

My TL;DR (probably somewhat flawed since it's been awhile since I last watched it):

1. Use an iterative deepening approach to learning.

2. Keep a list of notable problems and also a list of notable solutions and think about how they might be applied in different areas (for instance...iterative deepening).

They had a full report from the urgent care clinic including x-ray and blood test results. They added precisely zero value. It was a completely inexcusable failure of triage, solely to extract money. I paid the $200 or so on-site, and even that is not defensible IMO.

I'm also really hopeful for this. A couple years ago I had a potentially serious injury and the local urgent care clinic said I needed a trauma center. The message got lost in translation and I ended up at a Northwell Health hospital that did not have a trauma center. First they ignored the documents that I gave them and let me get past their triage so they could bill be and then told me that I needed a trauma center. After signing a refusal of care form and paying something like $200 to get out after getting zero care, I went to the nearest hospital with a trauma center where I was very quickly received by a full trauma team, got a CT scan, and determined that my condition was not serious.

I got a bill from the trauma center hospital for something like $500. Based on what I've been conditioned to expect from the U.S. health care system that seemed pretty reasonable. Then I got a bill from Northwell Health where I recieved no care for more than $800! Around that same time the NY Times came out with a piece about Northwell overcharging (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/upshot/covid-test-fees-le...). It took me months of badgering both my insurance company and Northwell to stop sending me payment delinquency notices.

Now, more than a year and a half later, they started sending me bills for that $800 again! So I'm very excited to see this kind of open source approach at this problem.