mmcconnell1618

Dividends should be a sign that a company has excess cash and can't find a good place to invest it. Paying a dividend while asking workers to take a pay freeze signals they don't believe the workers are returning enough value to justify paying them more.

I wonder how much AI models can help. If they are trained on enough real world content, they should be able to produce rough models based on descriptions: "Generate a tropical island about 5km in width by 10km length with an active volcano in the center" and then then the artists adjust/massage as needed.

787.5 Million

What is under the sheets on page 23 of the PDF? The first vehicle under the 300M looks like it has a flat roofline like an SUV or RoboTaxi. The second vehicle under the 700M looks more like a sedan.

https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/Tesla-Master-Plan-Part-3.pdf

At subsonic speeds, airlines have been slowing planes down to save fuel. There have been significant investments in data collection at all phases of flight resulting in models of the most fuel efficient way to fly. For example, Rolls Royce has a case study with Microsoft where they used AI models to teach pilots how to fly in a way that would save more fuel.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-azure-iot-takes-to-...

The Price you Pay for College by Ron Lieber has some interesting background. Essentially, some colleges started raising tuition and then offering more financial aid and discount packages. This made them appear to be providing more to the students who got aid packages and they selected those schools more often. For the wealthy families who could afford the higher prices, they also felt the schools were more selective. The other colleges soon followed in order to maintain their perceived value.

The second driver is the student loan system where the government has allowed special rules that make it almost impossible for lenders to lose. The lenders offer huge loans without regard for the ability to repay because they know they are protected.

https://www.amazon.com/Price-You-Pay-College-Financial/dp/00...

One of the first challenges was the Zeran v. American Online case where a business owner was harmed but was never able to compel AOL to provide the identity of the person creating the harmful content. Forcing platforms to provide identity information in pursuit of legal action would allow action against the formally anonymous poster. As it stands today, an anonymous person (or botnet) can post whatever they want with no fear they will be exposed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeran_v._America_Online,_Inc.

I wonder of scale of distribution would be a reasonable way to scope liability. For example, if you create a post and 50 of your friends see it, immunity for the platform. If you create a post and the platform distributes it to 1 million people, they now have publisher liability.

I wonder if making platforms liable for providing the identity of content producers is a fair balance between providing the platform immunity and allowing those potentially harmed by content to pursue the content creator if needed.

I'm surprised there wasn't any human or general guardrail around the calculation that would have flagged such a significant weight difference. No one looked at the passenger count and the weight calculation and thought "whoa, that doesn't look right?"

Or just jump in front of the car which is supposed to stop and then your companions handle carjacking the immobilized vehicle. There are many ways to normally stop or trick an autonomous vehicle without needing a big red button to stop it. Spike strips are used by police to stop human driven vehicles all the time.

I love the idea of technological sharks roaming the software oceans. I've seen a few megalodons hanging around the mainframes too. Thanks for sharing a great list.

The magnetic battery packs for iPhones would be ideal for swapping out waist attached power as described in the leak. Imagine that you had a couple of these batteries and one could be charging while the other was in use and then you just swap. Bonus because they also act as extra power for your iPhone and lock you into the Apple ecosystem even more.

Both the Apple and Chrome password managers sync to the cloud so as long as they can sign in to their account on another computer or phone, they can still get access to the saved passwords.

Compound Interest. The idea and the numbers made sense but it is only with many more decades of life that I understand how much impact time has on compounding. If I had understood this when I was younger, I would have made different choices in regards to saving more. Small sacrifices when you're younger and can easily tolerate them, have massive dividends later in life.

Ben Cloward - Shader Graph Basics for Unity - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OX_6_bKpP9g&list=PL78XDi0TS4...

* Hook Point, Brendan Kane - How to get your message across in 3 seconds

* Three Simple Steps, Trevor Blake - Biography based inspiration for mental success

* The Price You Pay for College, Ron Lieber - Data driven look at the true cost of college for parents and teens

* Die With Zero, Bill Perkins - Counterpoint to FIRE movement, consider time value of money today vs. saving all for a future that might not exist

* Economics of Star Trek, Rick Webb - Exploration of how finances could work in the fictional world of the Federation

* The Creature from Jekyll Island, G Edward Griffin - How did the Federal Reserve come to exist?

Tivo nailed the user experience which is why it took off. In the early years, the response time on the interface was nearly instant for everything. This made it delightful to use because it felt like an extension of your intentions. Today, even with all the content in the world available, there are far more delays and wait times because the content is streaming and not local. Even YouTube TV, which could have the same 10ms response time as Stadia, is slow in many places.

FAANG jobs have some of the highest salaried positions available but even those will reach a cap because of limited leverage. One way to leverage salaried roles is to move into management where you can leverage your team's hours to accomplish more and move beyond a single IC salary. Otherwise, you have more leverage by owning a business of some kind.

Are the manager roles full time positions or is it something that I could do on the side to learn from your experience?

Under most circumstance, this isn't needed unless you have a big ask. Say, you need 1,000 specific cores and GPUs, then this process is the best way to ensure you have them available.

The original poster probably has the ability to spin up other instance types in their region. If there is no compute capacity in the entire region, something went wrong operationally.

I'm not suggesting you should put in a request for every new resource you need, but if you have a specific instance type or a large number needed, it helps. You're not losing the ability to shut them down the next day if you don't need them, you're just telling the Azure team that you expect to spin some up around a certain time. If you're making a significant request of compute capacity, the team has the ability to reserve those instances for your subscriptions so that you're not competing with others for those cores.

I used to be a technical seller for Azure. This situation is obviously not great for you as a customer but there are proactive steps you can take to prevent this going forward. Reach out to your sales team and work with them on your roadmap for compute requirements going forward. The sales team has a forecast tool that feeds back into the department that buys and racks the equipment. If you can provide enough lead time, they will make sure you have compute resources available in your subscriptions.

If they qualify for government disability payments, doesn't that by definition make them unable to be counted as 100% available for employment? The author implies they are unemployed by choice but disability payments suggest that at least some of them have medical reasons to not be considered fully employable.

I really enjoyed watching the Handmade Hero (https://handmadehero.org/) series about creating a game from scratch without all of the external libraries and dependencies. There is something refreshing about having both the understanding and control of all the parts of your project. I feel your pain on constant library and dependency updates.

I like the idea of a natural language interface for manual requests. I wonder how that system could be applied at scale to an entire business. I know there are tools that can discover and classify data (for example, personally identifiable information) in storage. Maybe the AI system could proactively display known legal requirements for the types of data a business actually retains.

Same day closing sounds like a feature that would need to be a part of the underlying ERP. The scenario planning ideas sound more possible as add-on/extensions to the main system. Thanks for the area to investigate.

Financials are often reported in "constant dollars" and inflated dollars so you can see the impact of both.

College admissions teams don't accept the GPA from each school as-is. Instead, they look at the difficulty of each course, the school and their knowledge of the students from that school in past years. They actually use their own formulas and recalculate an internal GPA that is specific to that college admissions team. For example, they may only consider core classes and ignore electives. They may or may not count AP courses as part of their formula. In the end, each college makes their own rules about what criteria they will use to compare students.

The Jones Act in combination with the Passenger Vessel Services Act (1889) also forces foreign-flagged cruise ships (which is basically all of them) to stop at a foreign port even if they loop back to the same starting US port or all passengers will be charged a fee of several hundred dollars.

A Seattle to Alaska to Seattle cruise will need to stop in Canada, even for an hour, just to avoid the extra fees. Starting at one US port and ending at another requires a stop at a "distant" foreign port which makes it difficult from cruise lines to offer routes like Los Angeles to Hawaii.

https://thepointsguy.com/guide/what-is-the-jones-act-for-cru...

Selling to small businesses can take almost as much effort as selling to mid-sized or enterprise companies and your price point will be much smaller. It also takes about as much effort (or more) to support small businesses. I sold ecommerce software to small business for more than a decade and in retrospect, I should have charged 10x the price and sold to the bigger customers. Automation and scale will be your friend if you're selling to smaller businesses. You may need in-person sales at first to get feedback from your customers and make sure what you've built has product-market fit. Once you're reasonably sure you have a market that gets value from buying your software, think about automating as much of the sales funnel as possible. Buy email and mailing lists. Google Ads. Social Media ads. Whatever can scale and work 24/7 for you because your time is finite. A/B test your sales pitches and narrow down language that resonates with your customers.