smokefoot

Sorry that was probably an overly snarky response on my part. Stripes product is actually aimed at merchants so two steps removed anyway.

Um, no. Banks file a lot of those. If it’s me using my dads credit card number then sure, not a SAR. But most of that activity is systematic: either backed by organized crime or a semi-professional fraudster. Those most definitely would get a SAR

Probably not actually treated as revenue. Those charges get netted out before they’re reported as revenue (interchange is a “contra” revenue line)

Generally the bank will file a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) with FINCEN for egregious cases. I don’t think intermediaries like stripe have any direct responsibility in this respect but I could be wrong. The volumes are huge and few SARs actually are investigated or prosecuted.

Can you do this in grist or Airtable?

Building join tables with calculated fields is a missing feature in all spreadsheet-like solutions as far as I know.

Also I concur with the parent that I often get frustrated by my inability to do spreadsheety things in these tools.

Not so much the vocabulary but the excessive use of adjectives and the overall verbosity. It took ten paragraphs for me to understand anything new about who this guy was and what his worldview was.

I was about to make the same comment. Literary magazines tend to encourage this style.

Ha, I get it. That is a helpful model.

I don’t understand networking all that well. Is it interesting that the telcos and non-tech companies are moving away from specialized hardware toward software defined networks while the hyperscalers are using hardware acceleration?

In no particular order: 1. Use your powers of persuasion to drive better decisions 2. Recruit some good people 3. Suggest and execute some positive changes—“there’s this thing called source control and it’s great…” or, “seems like the reports we built aren’t that useful—how can we make this better”

There’s a trap here which is thinking it’s all crap so I may as well not try. It’s seductive but quite poinsonous to the organization and to the individual.

This is a painfully cynical take and beyond that I’m not sure what he’s trying to say. If it’s all crap, make it better. Do something, don’t just complain!

The word mainframe is often used ambiguously. In my experience it could mean:

System Z - as I understand it, this is descendant from IBMs earliest computers like System 360. Typically apps are written in COBOL, PL1, tied together with JCL. “Newer” apps use DB2, but there are older non-relational databases as well.

System P - an IBM alternative server architecture based on the Power chipset. I think these mostly run UNIX, but I’ve never been hands on.

AS400 - technically an IBM minicomputer, but similarly esoteric with a bespoke OS and some nifty functionality for business apps (very SQL centric).

HP Tandem - traditionally used in high availability transaction processing applications.

Others? I think most of the other surviving old stuff is basically UNIX

Typically people are thinking of System Z. I think both the inertia and scalable ACID explanations are relevant. That said, I’m not sure how DB2 on System Z compares to say Oracle RAC.

I’m not an expert, but in the world of government contracting margins are often fixed. It’s common to contract on a “cost plus” basis where the contractor discloses its costs and is paid an agreed margin on top. For a diversified business like BAH (well not that diversified but I digress), they’d need to allocate sg&a in some way to those cost plus contracts. My guess is they were doing it in a way that was, shall we say, “advantageous.”

Some truth to this (minus the ritual child sacrifice). However it’s hard to do complex ambitious things like manufacturing semiconductors or designing consumer laptops in a small company. Big problems demand a big organization and increasingly they’re what drives our economy.

The lived experience inside big companies is bad and getting worse. Consultants are a symptom of this, but I think the root cause is an insatiable demand for earnings growth and productivity which is basically a force of nature at this point. The alternative is deindustrialization or some rethinking of the social contract.

The more expensive the services, the less likely you are to get a bid in this format.

SAS is a great language—shame it’s proprietary. It is very well suited for data processing.

Ha! I was going to say the article clearly referencing Epic.

Historically applied analytics companies have lower moats, more professional services and lower gross margins than pure software. Palantir might be the quintessential company in this category but also Datarobot and it’s ilk.

It will be interesting to see if LLMs change this pattern. If having a corpus of expertly curated training data is sufficient then they’ll get better operating leverage than those firms. But my expectation is they’ll spend a lot of time building use-case-specific wrappers that don’t really scale.

Tangible assets decay

Doesn’t chrome and moly make it stainless?

I mean yes. But it is a funny example to choose to illustrate the power of a NN approach. They're talking about mountains--an entity that has very concrete and definable attributes (e.g., height). And the rest of the examples are similarly dealing with semi-structured data that could theoretically be represented in RDF or something like that.

There's been a bit of discussion on HN lately about the effectiveness of sophisticated models vs. just good metadata.

The fact that palantir is still able to cultivate this much press coverage and phony mystique is a testament to their PR budget.

Logic also had a story about palantir this quarter. What I found most remarkable about that article is that the UI hasn’t changed in a decade! What looked edgy ten years ago now looks cheesy as hell.

I don’t know how the internals have changed over that time, but at that time, palantir was an entity resolver and a search engine. They also sold and continue to sell a ton of consulting services at mid-tier rates. In that sense their biggest competitor is... Booz Allen although they’d never admit it. BAH at least makes a profit.

I would suggest reading the materials. It’s slightly less insidious than the headlines would have you believe. A couple choice lead lines:

“We are committed to lowering average daily doses on OxyContin and will provide higher rebates on prescriptions with higher dose strengths”

“We believe in our technology: We will pay additional rebates on any new OxyContin related overdose or opioid use disorder diagnosis”

Remember OxyContin was supposed to be less addictive than traditional opoid painkillers. Unfortunately it turned out to still be quite addictive and deadly, but at least this doesn’t indicate that McK or Purdue actually knew that. I guess they probably should have?

There’s also a worrying chart showing rising overdose deaths which doesn’t seem to be accompanied by a thoughtful commentary or real analysis of why—it’s just an actuarial exercise.