sacado2

6% or so per year, in fact. Not so bad.

> When is the right time to "re-balance" to more cash?

When you look at your balance at the end of the year and your cash proportion happens to be below 20% instead of 25%.

Rebalancing is pretty much standard practice nowadays, nothing magical there. Any financial advisor will tell you to rebalance your portfolio from time to time.

Cash is there to be used when everything else goes to hell. The point is to always have enough money at hand to buy low (and to reduce the overall volatility of the portfolio). Browne's portfolio doesn't make sense until you start to look at it as an allocation that maximizes the effect of volatility (the other 3 assets are very volatile, by design) and rebalancing.

These "rules" are for individuals, not for businesses or "wealth empires". I could be rephrased as "don't buy stocks on a margin to finance your retirement." (Not that I necessarily agree with him)

Different countries go by different laws I guess. Here in France the rule is "no plagiarism", and even if there is no legal definition of "plagiarism", the usual definition is "you must submit your own work and, when using something that is not your own work, you must quote it correctly."

If I'm asking you "write a program that solves this problem", or "write an essay about that topic", you can certainly find a solution online that has a very permissive licence letting you use it any way you want. Good for you, but that's still not your own work and will potentially put you in deep trouble if you use it. Ditto with anything produced by ChatGPT: not your work. You don't own that. You can write "according to ChatGPT, ..." (although you probably won't impress the teacher with that), or you can get inspiration from the output to produce your own work, but not use it as is and pretend you did it.

> And nobody is ever in "legal trouble" for a copyright violation in a typical school assignment... because unless the student work is publically published, the owner of the copyright is never going to know what you turned into your teacher.

Many univs automatically runs a plagiarism-checker on anything submitted by students. Sometimes one of them gets caught. In France, that's enough to be, worse case scenario (although that rarely happens), banned from taking any public exam or work for the government, for your whole life.

That's not what the recent justice decisions said. If I'm using my calculator to compute 1255 and write "the result of 1255 is 660", I own the copyright on that sentence. I'm the author. If I submit that sentence to my teacher, I submit what is legally my own work.

If I ask ChatGPT "i need to compute 12 * 55. Can you help me?" I get the following result:

"To compute 12 multiplied by 55, you simply multiply the two numbers together:

12 * 55 = 660

So, 12 multiplied by 55 equals 660."

I don't own the copyright on that paragraph. Nobody does. It's public domain. Meaning, I'm legally not the author of that work. If I give that to my teacher, I submit something I'm not the author of. It's legally the same as copy-pasting a block of text from a book or from the web and pretending I wrote it. That's not something teachers want to evaluate. In fact, not only will I fail my exam, but I'm also legally in trouble.

Now, if I take ChatGPT's output and make my own content out of it, for instance rephrasing it as "according to ChatGPT, the result of 12 multiplied by 55 is 660", then it's my own work again, and ChatGPT was just a source.

As a teacher, I cannot accept answers that are not produced by students. Whether they are produced by dad, by a domain expert who wrote a book, by wikipedia authors or by ChatGPT. But I can accept personal works that were inspired by those sources. Big, big difference.

> If the augmented-student pair performs at the required level, what's the problem?

There is one legal problem with the AI-student pair: the student doesn't own the copyright on what was produced with the AI. Meaning, any work submitted by the student that was at least partially generated by an AI is legally not 100% produced by the student.

So the comparison with an open-book exam or using a calculator doesn't hold: if I search for information in a book, or use a calculator to compute a number, and make my own report in the end, I own the resulting product. I'm the sole author of that product. If I use ChatGPT, ChatGPT is the co-author of my work.

So, using ChatGPT is the equivalent of calling your dad during the exam and ask him to answer the questions for you. Is that really what we want to evaluate?

> well-written C++ with all warnings and linters on and using smart pointers. But my hypothesis is that they do not stay very far apart in safety.

Can C++ compilers + linters reliably detect all misuses of unique_ptr? Because that sounds like a halting-problem kind of problem, and as soon as you can't guarantee memory-safety, you're definitely not in the same ballpark in terms of safety. I mean, memory-unsafety is the number one vulnerability cause in software. C++ has many qualities, but safety certainly isn't one of them.

Back then (in 2004) the most popular programming languages were PHP, Perl, C++ and Java. Java was pretty focused (and even then, there was the distinction between int and Integer, between []int and ArrayList, etc.) but C++ and (especially) Perl were driving people crazy because there were thousands of ways to do the same thing. And nobody had any respect for PHP's design so let's not even talk about that one.

Passive voice makes sense when the topic of interest isn't the subject.

Look at those headlines about Kennedy's death: https://www.manisteenews.com/news/slideshow/10-front-pages-f... Most of these headlines are passive, because the topic of interest isn't the (unknown) murderer, or the bullets themselves, but the victim.

"Kennedy assassinated, Connally seriously wounded by shots" is way stronger than "somebody assassinated Kennedy, shots seriously wounded Connally". Ditto with "Kennedy to be buried in Arlington", which is way better than "a person will bury Kennedy in Arlington".

Rules that apply to non-fiction (what I guess Hamilton is after) usually doesn't really apply to fiction. Those rules make sense (kinda) for non-fiction, but I would certainly not apply them blindly to write fiction.

Checks are still a big thing in France nowadays.

> Take your card, phone or watch and hold it to the terminal for one second and you're done.

I'm not sure I'd feel safe if anyone could pay an amount above € 3000 after stealing my watch / phone / card and putting them on a terminal.

You seem to be conflating AI (in general) and strong AI. They are not the same thing at all. There have been industrial uses of AI techniques (I'm going by the definition from the 1956 Dartmouth workshop) for decades. And what's said in that video is a good example. We take recommendation modules for granted nowadays. They are applied AI.

Disappointing for sure, if you're still waiting for a sentient robot, but they do something we thought was limited to humans back in the day: going to a bookstore, and having the owner tell you "hey, I know you enjoy mystery novels taking place in England, I might have something new for you".

AI is not only a branch of statistics. Symbolic AI has nothing to do with stats.

Because they don't own it? AFAIK, ChatGPT's model isn't open source, so they seem to know data has some value.

Let's pretend you can. What would be the point? I'll crop it slightly differently, and copyright it too.

Editors do not own the copyright on the work they edited (unless the author explicitely licensed it, of course.)

Yet religions have a vision of the workings of planets (and the solar system in general) that is much further removed from reality than astrology.

Yes, you could say it's a metaphor, a symbolic vision or something else rather than something to be taken literally in religion, but the same could be said of astrology.

In theory NULL (or any such sentinel value, such as the infamous NaN is floatin-point arithmetic) makes sense because there are partially defined functions. Division being the most famous example, but most basic operations on lists share that property too.

The problem is the way it's handled in many programming languages, where it can blend so easily with legitimate value and blow the whole program off at execution time.

It's a practical problem, not a theoretical one.

And it's not the same as union types. The division of two numbers always returns a number, and nothing else, it's just that, for some values, it's not defined.

It's also the only widespread format that can deal with both rich text documents (à la HTML) and complex, structured data (what JSON is good for). It's golden when you need to add tons of complex annotations to a text document.

I think JSON and Markdown are very different, in fact.

JSON is very strict. It won't let you have a comma after the last element of a list, for instance (which is very annoying in many cases). It won't let you add comments in any way, shape or form. It won't let you use single quotes instead of double quotes. Or forget quotes in keys. Or mess with case in null / true / false. Or use NaN values.

Markdown is ill-defined, and will happily let you do whatever the hell you want.

JSON is made for programs, and is a PITA to write as a human (for the reasons mentioned above). But a pleasure to parse and (to some extent) generate automatically. It's not very good with text.

Markdown is made for humans, and I'd hate to have to parse a markdown file and do something with its content other than basic formatting. It's bad at anything but text.

"Preventing births within a group" is one of the definitions of a genocide.

Yes, one of XML's killer feature is that it can model rich text documents as much as ASTs. There's a reason why HTML never ever became JSON-ML, or why LibreOffice uses XML rather than JSON to save files.

In a way, XML can be seen as a generalization of simpler formats such as markdown (for text) and JSON (for structured data). Yes, I'm oversymplifying it.

XML schemas aren't part of the XML definition either, although, granted, they're an official recommendation too.

And the public upvote / downvote system make it even worse. Soon, you're reduced to a small subset of opinion because any slightly dissenting opinion will be downvoted to hell and hidden at the very bottom of the page.

Not necessarily an issue for small communities focused on a non-controversial topic (mostly anything about jokes/memes, or very niche technical stuff), but bigger communities focusing on slightly political topics become hell. The "europe" subreddit is incredibly toxic for this reason. Not because of individual redditors, but because of the group effect.

HN doesn't suffer from this problem both because of the niche aspect and because downvotes are restricted.

You're talking about late 90's-early 00's tech there (basically, LAMP architecture). It wouldn't be that hard to develop an open source, generic hierarchical forum engine that would be easier to deploy than an Apache+PHP+MySQL suite from scratch (on a dedicated Linux server that you have to completely configure all by yourself), and that would work both on a web browser and through a smartphone app.

Security would be less an issue than back then, too. We learned a lot since early PHP and early Javascript's bad practices.

The AI aspect is interesting, it could solve the funding issue. AI scooping requires a (paying) licence. Or, the paying licence would be restricted to closed-source AI models, and it would be free for open-sourcec models, thus making them much more competitive.

Reddit worked for years without hosting its own videos and even images. For many years, it was hosting nothing but structured text and links to external resources (which was its original raison d'être, in fact; discussion about external resources).

HN chose to be pure text and not embed external resources, but this is just an editorial choice, it wouldn't cost more resources to add them.

It's a great sysadmin tool, and great to write servers. It can be used for many other things obviously, but that's clearly its niche. And there's nothing wrong in being a niche language, after all, if the niche is big enough (and it clearly is). Javascript is also a niche language, after all. It's mostly a web language, and there's nothing wrong with that. So is C, which is slowly becoming the ultimate low-level glue language.