safog

Need some references then. Other than some ineffective immigration lobbying, I don't see them doing much.

What laws were passed to help G? What regulations changed to favor them?

I think it's time for tech to flex it's political muscle a bit. We're talking about humongous corporations with billions of dollars in cash silently giving to both Republican and Democratic super PACs since forever and the only political drama we had is Msft vs Amzn for the defence cloud contract. Media companies are puny by comparison.

The tech stance so far has been don't bother us and we'll continue to innovate, grow earnings and help users do cool things and investors make some money in the market. That has worked tremendously well for both the companies and their customers. I don't think changing that is in the users' interests at all.

I don't trust big media to provide accurate reporting here because they don't have the best of the relationships with G / FB.

Let's have privacy laws or platform regulation laws regarding censorship / free speech. Breaking big tech up is pointless.

Out of curiosity, can you build a service and collect payments from US customers while not being a US resident?

Note: These are stylists and not engineers.

I've tried StitchFix twice and found their stylists pretty lacking in terms of value they add. They don't listen to your requests and I'm sure most of them just have templates of stuff they send out w/o looking at what you liked / disliked. I'm fairly certain it's a role that can be very easily filled regardless of the Zipcode.

In fact, I was pretty convinced until now that the stylists were just algorithms but it looks like I was wrong.

I think this one's definitely happening.

The cost of renewing your lease and staying in the bay area vs simply moving out for the year to your parents' house / LCOL area where if it really comes down to it, you can simply break your lease much easier is an easy trade-off.

You overestimate our cultural attention span :)

Anyway, even with COVID + Rioting, I'd much rather live in a big city than in the countryside.

I remember reading about fruit fly brains and how we're at a point where we can computationally simulate them now, but I'm not sure where that went.

Anyone know?

> The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone..... ....living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there, will get one

This is also patently false - they're sending out ballots to registered voters, not everyone regardless of how they got there.

> That will be followed up with professionals telling all of these people, many of whom have never even thought of voting before, how, and for whom, to vote. This will be a Rigged Election. No way!

Who are these "professionals"?

I thought that according to the right, Americans were perfectly capable of making life / death decisions for themselves and those around them during an active pandemic. So a trivial thing such as misinformation should be easy to deal with for them.

Did you read the entire thing first?

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mail-in-ballot-voter-fraud...

What's True

While no U.S. government agency officially compiles state-by-state data on voter fraud, and requirements for mail-in voting vary by state, analysis by elections experts shows that fraud is slightly more common with mail-in voting than in-person voting at polling places.

What's False All types of voter fraud in U.S. elections is minuscule in comparison to the number of ballots cast, according to elections experts. Taking that into consideration, it is problematic to make comparisons between types of ballot-casting systems and erroneous to claim mail-in voting "substantially" increases the risk of fraud.

I don't buy the argument that we will have such a leap in software development productivity that we need way fewer people to solve all the things that need technical solutions. You can unravel abstractions we build on all the way to the bits and bytes and 90% of software is just gluing libraries together. Infact, you could probably describe the entirety of several of big tech cos as "just" gluing libraries together.

Anyway, the other argument about salaries is more interesting. Most people seem to agree that there's a huge untapped crowd of qualified developers in small / mid sized US cities who would love to join $BIGCO but the only reason they aren't is because it involves relocation. As an example, a Sr Dev in Orlando, FL makes $100-120k in total comp while one in SF / NYC makes $350k+. I limit my search to Sr Devs because I assume college kids are happy to move to exciting cities like NYC / SF / Seattle on fat relocation checks.

My suspicion is that supply and demand have converged already and big tech has mined out the supply of talented devs in the US already. The other datapoint here is that companies have made it as easy as possible for folks to move by opening dev centers wherever there's talent - NYC as a tech hub wasn't a thing in 2012, but it's huge now for all the people who don't want to leave the east coast. Boston is pretty big. Colorado, Austin as well.

The only way supply of devs is increasing here is if:

* Sr Devs who did not move to tech hubs because they preferred to stay where they are. (Personally think this is unlikely)

* Qualified Bootcamp graduates

* CS Enrollments hitting pretty high numbers, so maybe we'll start graduating lots of CS folks.

* Immigration reform / Outsourcing

* Interviewing change so we skip the algo problem solving shenanigans.

I personally think if big tech wants to hire in the US and still pay lower $ than they currently do, the only lever they have left to pull is the interviewing format / bar.

I wish there was a way to try this keyboard without committing to buying it for a month or so. It seems like there will be a learning curve and you might not even like it at the end of it.

Similar setup - I just throw my terminal full screen on a vertical monitor (w/ GNU Screen) and don't find it distracting in any way.

Early days of EC2 were chock full of stories like this - Of kids / engineers running up their CC bill because they screwed up in some way they didn't anticipate and Amazon CS would bail them out.

I don't think this was a cynical marketing ploy designed from the top down either, it was a very natural thing for the company to be customer obsessed and trying to do right by them.

> Then do salaries and taxes by the second and split off tax payments right where the transaction happens.

ACH literally takes O(days) to move a few bytes of data from one bank account to another and the system simply stops working evenings and weekends, so this is a bit much :)

If / when BTC and LN become ubiquitous, you can probably achieve this without much effort.

Err.. but they are rolling their own tracking service + ad exchange. They say they will create user segments that advertisers can use to target ads - that is basically an ad exchange. Instead of advertisers using AdWords (or whatever they currently use to advertise on NYT), they will use a custom built NYTWords to run their ads.

What I meant by subscription only is that their revenues won't be purely through subscription - ad revenue is still going to be a very significant part of their total revenues - they're not simply ditching it.

How is everyone being blind to the fact that they will now simply start collecting their own user data and do targeted ads by themselves? And yes this includes potentially sensitive stuff like location data, not just NYT reading history. Adverts are not going away and they're not going subscription only, they're just going to figure out what ads to run by themselves instead of relying on 3rd parties.

Imagine every single publisher does this and how many security holes that will open. Sure maybe you trust NYT to generally do the right thing with data (very debatable) but what happens when Buzzfeed does this? Do you think they'll adopt sensible data collection policies? What about the S*n?

What about the data they collect? Can we guarantee that they simply won't become data brokers again? I would much rather have entrenched players like G / FB collect and take the blame for privacy misses than have every single organization build their own leaky data collection systems.

Thanks for building this! It infuriates me that they have a widget that does display the lyrics but keeps switching to random trivia every 5s. There's an open bug on spotify to have it always show lyrics but doesn't seem to receive any love.

This is awesome! This is exactly what I've tried to implement multiple times but got lost in details of how to actually build a market. I'm a huge paradox fan as well if that helps :)

My thoughts were based on this really old niche game called "hard war" in the 90s where a player owns a ship and ferries goods between systems trying to make a profit in between. It gets complicated by the fact that there's rogue agents trying to kill you, cops trying to nab you when you ferry contraband etc.

My thought was to implement something like that with real functioning markets and planetwide events affecting commodity prices with hundreds of planets. It could even have some Stellaris like flavor where different kinds of planets have different resources they need to import just to survive. However I couldn't really figure out what the "fun" bit of game play would be beyond reading game generated news stories and trying to make a profit by running a trade route.

I had a couple of thoughts around putting in a mission tree somehow along with trade routes, automating trade routes and making it about competing corporations (ala medieval strategy games) but didn't get too far w.r.t. how the game mechanics actually work.

I'd love to see a repo if you have one already.

I think you can make the images a lot more appealing by adding some automated post-processing to them.

I don't know a lot about image processing algorithms but clicking "Auto" on google photos tweaks basic stuff like exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, vibrance etc. so the image has a lot more "punch".

I think you're over estimating the complexity of what FAANG engineers work on :)

As the saying goes, we spend our lives converting one proto into another.

How does it matter if a billionaire lives or dies? Their wealth is simply spread out to heirs or pet projects of theirs, no difference from when they're actually alive. Companies take on a life of their own, so Apple hasn't been damaged in any significant way after Jobs, likewise with Gates, Sergey & Larry etc.

Taxation will catch up, but I don't see any significant negative effects to society.

The restaurants don't lose a full 30% on the order - the items on Uber eats are marked up over what you pay when you do regular takeout. I wouldn't go so far as to say they don't lose any money at all but we won't know exact numbers until Uber / restaurant owners publish them somewhere.

Also, having a delivery option I'm pretty sure provides additional business (on top of just having dine-in / pick up). So, for a restaurant to hire employees and building out a delivery service themselves will be much more hassle and probably will be more expensive than using a service like doordash / uber eats.

Lastly, this is driving a trend towards the so-called "cloud kitchens" letting restaurants operate with a subset of staff in cheaper to rent places and charging effectively what a regular restaurant would for a meal.

The restaurants are going through a paradigm shift now, and it will only be accelerated due to COVID - Cloud kitchens can be more sanitary / safer to order from than regular dine-in restaurants for instance but I don't really feel sorry for them. If anything, the drivers doing the delivery are the ones getting shafted here and barely making any money. If folks start tipping, it will simply mean that Uber can afford to pay drivers less - the amount a driver makes won't change very significantly.

Overall I'm convinced eats is the future and Uber focusing on ride share + eats + self driving (existential threat if someone else does it cheaper / better) is the right way to go for the company.

Get an antibody test?

I agree. I have several objections to this line of thought. Of course Sweden might want to risk its entire population on made up data but I don't think that's a prudent approach.

1. When we put in these lockdown measures, we basically had very little science behind the disease. Not locking down and hoping things generalize from very small sample sized studies coming out of Italy (which did enter lockdown at that point) is not prudent policy.

2. The only clean room evidence we have even now is the US Naval carrier that was exposed to COVID. It turned out that amongst those infected, 30% of the sailors were just asymptomatic. Previous modeling assumptions that US policy is driven off of were using 15-20% are asymptomatic. Okay, fine our initial assumptions were off a little, but not orders of magnitude off.

3. The other problem with the Swedish approach is that you can't simply isolate old people in isolation from younger people - healthcare workers, nursing home workers etc. are all fairly young and can be asymptomatic COVID carriers.

4. Even if the mortality for younger folks is ~0.1% the toll that COVID is taking on the lungs of even recovered patients is pretty brutal (anecdotal evidence, needs more study). Especially, if you're an athlete or want 100% lung capacity for the rest of your life, it's a bit iffy at this point if you'll actually get it. It also looks like it's hitting multiple organs and not just lungs, again we don't have much science here at this point.

5. I was hoping we could do antibody testing as a way to judge who can safely go out, but I was watching a Bill Gates interview yesterday and it looks like the testing is not good enough yet to make that call - it still has too high a false positive rate, people with antibodies still can get reinfected if their viral load the first time was enough to only trigger a mild infection.

Depends how old the phone is and how limited the h/w is though - Android is designed to work in some ridiculously under powered devices.

I highly doubt a top of the line phone like the Galaxy or the Pixel would have issues with input lag.

If anything, I get annoyed by how long animations on iOS take compared to Android. Everything feels like it's running in slow motion.

Corporate bond yields spiked due to business risks posed by Covid19. B rated bonds went from ~5% to >10.65%

https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_high_yield_b_effective_yie...

Like credit rating agencies and how well they work? /s

In this case, it's not even about falsely marking up poorly understood investment products for extra business, it's people's health.

Any reviewing businesses that are strict with their criteria simply won't get business from device companies, all we've succeeded in doing here is moving the problem up one level.

It's hard to take Gruber seriously anymore. I haven't seen anyone with such an obvious bias for Apple and disdain for anything non-Apple so 99% of what he writes about Apple is going to be sunshine and butterflies.

If you aren't going to say anything controversial, why bother even listening to you? I'll just watch Apple's PR videos and be happy.

The Fed has been obsessed with liquidity since this crisis has hit. From a high level, I understand why but this coupled with the repo market issues we've been having on and off for the past six months or so, the mortgage markets gumming up (avg 30Y mortgage rate went _up_ after the Fed cut rates), potential strain on dollars in the currency markets (lots of demand from foreign countries, no supply? Unsure about this one) make me think that something else is afoot that we're missing here.

Of course it could be as they say, and there are a bunch of overlevered businesses that need cheap capital or they'll go bust and cutting interest rates and injecting liquidity is the only way to save them.

Come on man, there's no where near enough volume there to move anything but the most low volume of stocks. All they trade in is meme stocks like TSLA, NFLX, MSFT, AAPL etc., and a few 100k on calls here or there won't budge the price in the slightest.

On top of that, it's not even a P&D group, people there are just trading against each other, you have both bears and bulls and thetas. There's never been a concerted effort to pump SPCE for instance.