office_drone

> ... had to go into ensuring that we could wipe out the human race in minutes.

That was never ensured. Historical casualty projections expected that, in the event of large scale nuclear attacks, the majority of the involved countries' populations would survive not only the attack but the conditions afterward.

"The one book we encourage startup founders to read is Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. It's critically important for anyone in business. Try to get a used copy printed before the 1960s; after Carnegie died, the book continued to be "updated" by a committee, and the changes were not for the better."

https://paulgraham.com/startupfaq.html

As someone who writes software for moderately boring business operations, I've been wondering making terminal-based apps with lots of keyboard shortcuts would lead to a more productive end user than writing a web app.

I've been looking at https://github.com/gui-cs/Terminal.Gui but haven't tried it yet.

> they called it Project Habbakuk, in reference to ... "I am working a work in your days, which ye will not believe though it be told you."

This is a slightly more subtle way of calling it Project You Ain't Gonna Believe This

I have a hypothesis that the reason humans are more likely to believe things that rhyme is because of the effort involved in creating the phrase. Comparing saying something vs saying something that rhymes, the latter takes more time, more effort, and you need to check that the end product makes sense. Whoever came up with the phrase probably put in a lot of thought.

Similarly, I think that humor is more convincing than simple words because, to come up with the punchline, the comedian must have looked at the situation from every available angle. The existence of humor is a costly signal that shows someone else really thought it through.

At today's closing price this is 3.6% of outstanding shares

As best I can figure #1 is your 'guaranteed hits' - songs that you have listened to the most. As you go higher it may be your most-loved music of a different genre or the 1st genre again but with more new-to-you music.

> This study identifies 33 as the tipping point for sonic stagnation, an age where artistic taste calcifies, increasingly deviating from contemporary works

In the time since I turned 33 I've experienced an almost-complete switchover in genre preference, from pop/rock/light metal to country. Almost all of it has been found through Spotify's Daily Mix N, where n >= 2.

The simple explanation is that the actions of C-suite executives add value, even after factoring in their compensation

Coops have a hard time hiring directors because they can get paid more in standard corporations?

What a heartwarming story of employees knowing their worth and not settling for less.

I'd like to plug PocketBase [0] for a similar use case.

Last week I was looking for a place to store random data with API access, and was looking at making a Google Sheets backend, but PocketBase was easy and didn't have a 60 rpm quota [1].

Deploying to a cheap VPS was very easy with CapRover.

[0] https://pocketbase.io/

[1] https://developers.google.com/sheets/api/limits

That's a great use of inversion - the mental model detailed by Farnham Street (https://fs.blog/inversion/)

I recall this being mentioned in Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants [0] :

Boranes are unpleasant beasts. Diborane and pentaborane ignite spontaneously in the atmosphere, and the fires are remarkably difficult to extinguish. They react with water to form, eventually, hydrogen and boric acid, and the reaction is sometimes violent. Also, they not only are possessed of a peculiarly repulsive odor; they are extremely poisonous by just about any route. This collection of properties does not simplify the problem of handling them. They are also very expensive since their synthesis is neither easy nor simple. But they possess one property which attracted rocket people to them as hippies to a happening. They have an extremely high heat of combustion — gram for gram about 50 percent more than jet fuel.

[0] https://www.amazon.ca/Ignition-Informal-History-Liquid-Prope...

I found interesting, from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39606093 about ancient coinage

> "There was a chronic shortage of small change in ancient economies, so even poor quality fakes were accepted in markets for lack of anything better. Authorities tended to ignore such forgeries"

We're seeing the same thing again in this article.

According to a realtor association site [0] the 'Residential - All Types' price for 'Greater Vancouver' went from $466,500 in March 2009 to $1,196,800 in March 2024. That is a 2.57x multiple.

[0] https://www.gvrealtors.ca/market-watch/MLS-HPI-home-price-co...

That can't be right. GTA and Vancouver home prices are 3 times what they were in 2009.

> These days you have to be your own safety agency

As far as I can tell this has been normal throughout history. Any modern thought to the contrary is, in that context, wishful thinking.

Commoncog has some blog posts about the process:

https://commoncog.com/putting-amazons-pr-faq-to-practice/

https://commoncog.com/product-development-iterated-taste/

> Will a masters in ML give me an advantage when applying

A master's will almost certainly do one or more of 1) Getting you past the resume screener and the posting's absurdly high education requirements 2) Showing that you are not dumb 3) Showing that you are willing to put in work 4) Communicating that you might actually know how to do stuff 5) Letting the hiring manager brag about hiring someone with a master's in ML instead of a bachelor's.

Sometimes that action is called "humility"

> why the stock buybacks are necessary when investment in the business is going down

The business theory answer is that buybacks are used when there is no better investment opportunity.

Let's say the stock trades at 10 times earnings. Can you fund an internal project that's going to return 10% a year? [0] Can you buy another company that will return 10% a year? If not, then a buyback gives the best return to the company's owners (aka shareholders) because they owner larger slices of the same pie.

[0] Plus a small cushion for risk. And not just "we project this will return $HUGE amount" but something that can realistically happen.

That just makes it sound like he knows what he's talking about

Good governance doesn't always mean doing something instead of nothing.

New movies get produced because people want to make and sell movies. They don't have to make movies that are 100% reality. Movies actually use special effects and CGI to fake all kinds of things that would be illegal in real life.

For example, there was a time when to get a flood effect filmmakers flooded a set. 3 extras died. Later on they were told they can't do that, but they can simulate it. Tons of movies show people getting overcome by floods, but no one dies in real life anymore.

It is a scapegoat, and banning it is theatre.

The current government of the Trudeau Liberals knows what actual steps it could take to combat car theft, involving dismantling organized crime controlling the ports, and does not want to do it. Instead, they create a scapegoat, ban it, and pretend that they're doing something.

> For it to come from AI it needs to come from real children.

Yes, but given that CSAM data already exists, and we can't go back in time to prevent it, there's no further cost to attain that dataset. Unlike all future real CSAM, which will be produced by abusing children IRL.

I see parallels with Unit 731 here. Horrible things have already happened, so what do we do with the information?

This is misleading. The river has personhood according to a municipality with a population of ~7000.

The Canadian legal system has made no such recognition.