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my50cents

39 karma · joined October 18, 2021

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my50cents··on Apache Log4j bug: China’s industry ministry pulls support from Alibaba Cloud
There is a rule that requires cloud providers like Alibaba Cloud to report vulnerabilities within 2 days. Alibaba violated this rule.

Note that the article is misleading as the rule doesn't require the disclosure must be made to the government first.

my50cents··on Do large language models understand us?
> Since the interior state of another being can only be understood through interaction, no objective answer is possible to the question of when an “it” becomes a “who”

A large language model can in theory be understood at an algorithmic level by reverse engineering. If the algorithm turned out to be a giant lookup table, it's an "it". If the algorithm contained an obvious model of self, it's a "who".

my50cents··on Ask HN: What's the easiest way to make a living with $600k in cash?
Buy a portfolio of dividend-paying stocks with highly secure underlying businesses such as public utilities.

Hold on to a stock as long as the underlying business is still secure.

Trade out of a stock only if there is a more secure one with more dividends to trade into.

If market prices allow the dividends from your $600K portfolio to exceed your living expenses, then no more work for money.

my50cents··on I Can’t See You but I’m Not Blind
Yes. When I do that, I know where the pieces are on the board, but I don't have their visual properties such as shape or color in my mind.
my50cents··on I Can’t See You but I’m Not Blind
I was not able to visualize images. When I first heard about aphantasia, I reasoned that since I could have vivid dreams, I must have the hardware to see.

Then I started training myself, first by visualizing basic 2D shapes, then letters, then 3D letters ... eventually I was able to conjure up complex images at will, just like in a vivid dream.

Some time later, it occurred to me that by doing this, I likely stored more data than necessary in my tiny little brain, so I spent more time to untrain myself, by deliberately ignoring images when they pop up.

Now I can no longer conjure up images. My dreams have become more abstract. It has become harder for me to remember faces. On the other hand, I have generally found life easier to process and understand. I feel wiser than my younger self.

my50cents··on As an investor, why is crypto so hard to value?
The simple answer is that if a stock is expected to never pay any dividends, it's intrinsic value is zero.

Note that from shareholders' perspective, paying dividends is economically equivalent to share buyback, plus some tax considerations, so there are exceptions.

my50cents··on As an investor, why is crypto so hard to value?
Crypto is not hard to value. Valuation is the estimation of the present value of future free cash flows. Since most crypto tokens produce negligible free cash flows relative to their market cap, they have approximately zero intrinsic value relative to their market price.