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mikhailfrancoon Reflections on Palantir

You are describing GOFSI - Good Old Fashioned System Integration.

I promise you Palantir does not use UML or Rhapsody, and would not recognize DOORS if they slammed in its face.

GOFSI: "There are decades when nothing happens"

Palantir: "There are weeks when decades happen"

mikhailfrancoon Reflections on Palantir

Palantir is the most distant point in the known tech universe from SAP.

mikhailfrancoon Reflections on Palantir

It's not about well-rehearsed acting to bluff clients (like conventional management consultants).

Impro is about improvisation: having a deep reservoir of experiences and reference points, but no pre-planned templates; empathizing with the client's situation; thinking fast; being open-minded and creative; challenging received wisdom; pulling disparate ideas together; assembling a synthesis; embodying a story; imagining a solution; presenting difficult concepts smoothly; having conviction in your ideas; high risk tolerance; be convincing; be committed to doing what you say and implement what you imagine; create a technical solution, an operational scenario, a bottom-up deployment plan, and a path to win strategic acceptance based on results.

mikhailfrancoon List of 200 UK companies that moved to 4-day working week

Guessing https://www.runn.io/careers based on

Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40563325

mikhailfrancoon Reflections on Palantir

By far the best summary of Palantir from the inside.

Yes, Karp is clearly... hmmm eccentric.

Yes, Shyam is the golden anchor of the engineering culture. He's a tremendously inspiring influence, often overlooked by outside commentators.

mikhailfrancoon Why Northern England is poor

A useful measure of the centralization of a state is the ratio of the size (population, economy) of the capital to the rest of the country.

A large capital usually means workers and companies cluster around the government to get work and contracts, but also lobby and bribe to win such favors.

Highly centralized countries include UK, France and Thailand.

Centralized countries that have a strong geographical excuse might include Egypt and Chile.

mikhailfrancoon Why Northern England is poor

The boundary between his North and South roughly follows the Roman Fosse Way from Lincoln to Exeter.

The 'ditch' (fosse) and road marked the border of the initial phase of the Roman invasion after 43 AD. It was a military road for rapid deployment of forces from the legionary bases to defend border incursions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fosse_Way

Apart from the Fosse Way, almost all other major Roman roads fanned out from London. This structure is still visible in the numbering scheme of roads today:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Britain_road_numbering_s...

The natural routes for roads also influenced railways, so the boundaries of the original private railway companies (GWR, LNER, LMS, SR), and the regions of the current unified rail system, follow the same structure:

https://www.railwaygazette.com/network-rail-regions-take-ove...

mikhailfrancoon UK's hardware talent is being wasted

No, Brexit was about returning such decisions from Brussels to Westminster.

The UK may decide less immigration, or skill-weighted immigration, or lots more indiscriminate immigration - but the vote should be in the Mother of Parliaments, where else?

mikhailfrancoon UK's hardware talent is being wasted

No, individual assessment can fix that.

Just change default NO to default YES, BUT..

mikhailfrancoon Is the world becoming uninsurable?

If insurance and property taxes are proportional to property price, and property prices grow faster than incomes, then cost of ownership will eventually become unaffordable to existing residents.

A similar argument works if insurance is just based on reconstruction cost, but construction costs inflate faster than incomes.

If properties become unaffordable, then to restore equilibrium, property prices must fall, incomes must rise, or lower-income residents will sell to higher-income purchasers. If there are few higher-income purchasers, property prices will fall.

Property taxes could be cut, or decoupled from property values (e.g. poll tax), but that never happens.

If the risk really is high, there is no practical insurance available, and all purchasers are rational, then the price may go to zero.

An example of an irrational purchaser would be one who assigned high status to a beach house, even in the face of threats from coastal erosion, hurricane floods or tsunamis.

mikhailfrancoon TSMC begins producing 4-nanometer chips in Arizona

Also see the Resnicks' water storage scheme for their almond/pistachio empire:

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/08/lynda-stewar...

The report has a graph showing their farms consume more water then all LA homes.

  "Forget it Jake. It's Chinatown."

mikhailfrancoon Physicists who want to ditch dark energy

Not true, right-handed neutrinos are a dark matter candidate. They don't experience the weak force, so would only interact through gravity.

See recent work by Neil Turok. This podcast is one of the best popular accounts of his work:

The (Simple) Theory That Explains Everything

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUp9x44N3uE

mikhailfrancoon Battle Scenes depicted in moving pictures before CGI

Perhaps expecting at least an honorable mention for Kurosawa: from solo combat, through small group engagements (there were only 7 + a village :) up to the sweeping mass banner-men battles of Kagemusha and Ran.

mikhailfrancoon Laser mapping reveals oldest Amazonian cities, built 2500 years ago (2024)

He was a journalist for The Economist in his youth.

mikhailfrancoon A Return to Polymathy (2015) [pdf]

The Creative Act by Rick Rubin

mikhailfrancoon Hitting the Jackpot: The Birth of the Monte Carlo Method – LANL (2023)

Almost all atomic spies were Jewish.

For example 13/15 on this list (exceptions are Klaus Fuchs, Alan Nunn May):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_spies#Notable_spies

Plus others, such as Ursula Kuczynski, Fuchs's handler:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Kuczynski

mikhailfrancoon Hitting the Jackpot: The Birth of the Monte Carlo Method – LANL (2023)

Particle physics experiments, such as the LHC, are simulated using an MC program call Geant (Giant). Various modules can be tweaked for new physics, and the signal/background statistics established for new decay signatures.

https://geant4.web.cern.ch/

Yes, open source code and installers, so you too can simulate the LHC :)

mikhailfrancoon Visual Algebra

yellow

very yellow

mikhailfrancoon Missiles are now the biggest killer of airline passengers

They do:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency-hopping_spread_spect...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr

The really clever counterpart is how to transmit through your own spread-spectrum jamming. Quiet slots in the jamming must be manipulated in the same way as the active broadcast. For example, this allows communication to a ground convoy that is jamming all frequencies to prevent wireless remote-control IED detonation.

mikhailfrancoon Missiles are now the biggest killer of airline passengers

Ward Carroll (former F-14 aviator) gives a complete description of the friendly-fire incident:

Navy Cruiser Shot Down Super Hornet During Carrier Approach (and Nearly Hit Another One)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoYOsX2GpX4

mikhailfrancoon Hertz Desperate to Unload Tesla Inventory, Asking Customers to Buy Rentals

So Tesla is operating at 1 kilaHertz?

mikhailfrancoon The number pi has an evil twin

A funny false or convergent etymology - shire reeve not sharif.

Here's another false trail from a real conversation:

  Q: What US state's name comes from the title of an Arabic ruler?

  A: Al Abama?

Of course, the correct answer is California from Khalifa transliterated through a Spanish novel:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology_of_California#Las_Se...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calafia

mikhailfrancoon A chart that shows everything that has ever existed

The original paper, with video and diagrams:

All objects and some questions - Lineweaver & Patel

https://pubs.aip.org/aapt/ajp/article/91/10/819/2911822/All-...

https://archive.is/lyqrA

mikhailfrancoon Finding the Mango's Origin (2017)

... silk worm ...

and in reverse from the Americas: the obvious potato, tobacco, chili, but also pineapple, rubber, ... and even agave for Vietnamese tequila (El Toro).

The history of rubber has a lot of cloak-and-dagger intrigue to compare with that for silk or tea.

Yes, 500 years ago there was no chili in Thailand or Szechuan.

Maybe Mango Mafia has potential as a fanciful tropical smuggling novel.

mikhailfrancoon Plotting Prime Numbers (2021)

Ulam Spiral (and see ref to Martin Gardner's famous SciAm article):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulam_spiral

Why do prime numbers make these spirals? | Dirichlet’s theorem and pi approximations - 3Blue1Brown

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EK32jo7i5LQ

mikhailfrancoon Google says AI weather model masters 15-day forecast

English weather depends on wind direction:

  south-west: mild, wet
  north-west: cool, wet
  north-east: cold, dry
  south-east: hot, dry

If you also use a simple barometer, to get pressure level (say, 4 bands) and pressure change direction (rising/falling), you can be 95% accurate.

Final finesse:

  Red sky at night shepherd's delight
  Red sky in the morning shepherd's warning

mikhailfrancoon Unless my phone can be a PC, I don't want to keep paying for extra performance

I also had to upgrade a phone for a banking app and a gov pay-your-taxes app (in a certain non-US jurisdiction).

Very hard to understand why that should be. Even the most scary conspiracy theorists would not claim that banks and govs try to force phone tech refresh... unless ... it is really about spyware bloat :)

mikhailfrancoon Evidence of the use of silk by Bronze Age civilization

I highly recommend the China National Silk Museum in Hangzhou, which was the center of the imperial silk industry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_National_Silk_Museum

https://web.archive.org/web/20170907005855/http://en.chinasi...

It has complete royal robes ~1,000 years old, and a few damaged garments more than 2,000 years old IIRC.

mikhailfrancoon Evidence of the use of silk by Bronze Age civilization

Silk does not burn in normal flame.

If you are buying a 'silk' garment it is common to ask the shop-keeper to hold it to a cigarette lighter to prove it does not contain a synthetic petroleum-based fabric, such as polyester.

mikhailfrancoon January 1928: Dirac equation unifies quantum mechanics and special relativity

Yes, they forgot that part, so there will be further energy losses (at least 70%).

They also have to up the repetition rate from once a week to at least 1k /s.

Note that ASML lithography machines accurately dilate and irradiate molten tin droplets with lasers at ~ 50k /s.

https://www.asml.com/en/technology/lithography-principles/li...