I think the headline is pretty misleading and meaningless. The 10% median increase across the city is pretty useless as a statistic. For instance the median by neighborhood is widely different! the median in Manhattan as a whole is double the median of the city see the map in the article to realize that NYC market is a collection of sub-markets with their own dynamics and type of property mix the price per sqft is widely different between townhouses, condos, coops, new construction, gut reno, etc
Let take this example from the article:
"Carroll Gardens — traditionally one of Brooklyn’s most expensive neighborhoods — was conspicuously absent from top 10 rankings at the start of the year. Claiming #4 with a $2.79 million median sale price in Q1 2024, Carroll Gardens’ median sale price was halved to just $1.38 million". I know pretty well this neighborhood and the market there and this is not the actual case that overall prices in Carrol Gardens halved (even if the median price over the Q1 transactions halved)! It's just probably the type of property sold in Q1 that changed, the market is made of townhouses and new developments of condos and also some coops, the mix of sales in a given quarter is very far from homogeneous.
The article goes on to say essentially the same thing:
"Among these was the whopping 145% price surge in Madison that lifted the neighborhood from last year’s #104 to its current spot at #25. This came as Madison went from $510,000 a year ago to the current $1.25 million median sale price due to a significant shift in its sold-property mix." Pretty sure median transaction prices in Madison Brooklyn will collapse by nearly 50% next quarter once the transaction property mix will change again...
Well yes, this is an idiosyncratic event, chances are that a bunch of hedge funds have no hedge against stupid!
I'm actually more worried about the small businesses that say have a container full of whatever product somewhere in the middle of the Pacific that will have to pay the tariffs upfront out of pocket with a disappearing consumer on the other end of the pipe.
Unfortunately impossible to know because dependent on a bunch of factors that are outside rationality. If the tariffs are scaled back tomorrow, probably the damage would be pretty limited but it's not looking like anybody reasonable is around or in charge...
It's scary that there seems to be no off ramp. The massive incompetence of the administration is absolutely appalling. Let suppose they decide to keep the tariffs until the actual lagged economic metrics are showing the stress on jobs and companies earnings. That means an absolutely insane amount of goods will go up in price between 10% and 50% in just a couple of weeks (depending how much the company margins are going to be absorbing the hike). The direct impact is probably a proportional amount of suppressed consumption so direct impact on the top line and bottom line of all those firms. This does not even account for all the effects of retaliation which are not yet decided. The markets were trading with lofty multipliers that were including quite a bit of revenue growth assumptions. All that is gone now! Without a quick change of course, the valuations will still have to go down a lot...
During my several decades of translating businesses logic into code I never found a test that does not pay back the time spent to write it many times over, they are truly the super-power of the trade mainly because the can be completely automatized. Because of this automatic nature from a business perspective their marginal cost becomes almost zero (pretty much regardless of the initial cost and maintenance cost), the reason for this is that the value function of the business logic embedded in code, the reason for the code to even exist (i.e. the thing that gives a value to the piece of software), needs to account in the long run for the risk components, risks generated by defects or poorly aligned specifications, security risk, reputation risk, obsolescence, performance, etc. The way to manage risk at the business level is by somehow hedging and this hedge is precisely testing, again and again, hopefully automatically. Testing is then not a cost, it's precisely the instrument that allows to stop paying over and over for those risks and therefore in the end capture more value and reduce the variance of the outcomes.
People also mentioned side projects and testing. What I found personally is that tests are the best way to also document/encode ideas for later so that when you pause something for months because... life, getting back to a project becomes easier. I found very useful for instance to add some tests that would just fail for some feature easy to implement just to have an easy entry point back into the project.
well being homoiconic and dynamic helps quite a bit... This being said, if you squint a bit and get used to the syntax, c++ variadic templates are just a compile-time lisp (really templates are just generalized functions over types) and the template mechanism is 100% pure, with a runtime capability of evaluating those pure monadic computational effects defined at compile-time to runtime, there is no more boundary (not saying it's a thing that should be done all the time). The main advantage then over functional languages is the fact that c++ optimizing compilers are already pretty good at optimization so assuming that you can afford to re-compile at runtime the tight inner loops or critical paths (say at "configuration time" when adding some latency might not be a big deal), a lot of otherwise impossible optimizations could probably be done better (thinking of loop invariants, polyhedral, unrolling, constant propagation, aliasing, row major to column major etc etc) probably the result would also be better than what a JIT compiler and profiler would be able to achieve too.
compile c++ code at runtime for instance. Lots of use cases, most obvious one specializing/instantiating dense computational kernels on values only known at runtime... but so many more things would be possible if the compiler was just a reusable library.
valid points, time will tell how well this will work. For the ban lists there are directories they are typically updated by people you trust or are in the circles you care about. One can indeed imagine manipulating ban lists, I'm personally not too worried about that because typically accounts that post "reasonable" useful or interesting content are very few, most of the other "organic" accounts are just readers. The readers tend to prefer a good ratio of "signal/noise" and in my experience the noise part of the equation is the problem. Trimming down all the accounts whose purpose it just to insult, flame war, yell or post garbage is the goal.
Not sure why you think it's necessary, twitter could disappear tomorrow and nobody would be worse off. It's not even a real fight it's more like yelling past each others without anybody actually getting much out of the experience but rage. Did you manage to breach twitter echo chamber once? convince a single person on twitter of whatever point of view you have? And this is even before all the bots and the hidden agendas of the owner
significantly less of a problem on bluesky than on twitter. First there is a mass ban which scales well (one can ban entire lists of bots). Two there is no gamed algorithm that bias engagement towards the ideology of the owner of the platform... In other words, you have significantly more control over the content
that's the reason, the article also gives as an advice for savers to invest into income producing assets which also produce proportionally more income as inflation rises instead of sitting on cash.
a good case of pump and at some point a dump. The prices are pumped by insiders using pretty heavy leverage to make huge directional bets (just insane from a risk/reward perspective but hey, we're dealing with the most degenerate gamblers here) on the theory that a bunch of "muppets" (Goldman Sachs terminology here) are going to long term bring their savings through ETFs and provide much needed exit liquidity. Fascinating how humans are never changing or learning
I thought a sense of humor and maybe a little bit of a thick skin would be required if you want to partake into April fools bashing. Who's taking oneself seriously now...
well, the initial twitter rant was pretty bombastic:
"The cat is finally out of the bag – Google relied heavily on @ShareGPT
's data when training Bard.
This was also why we took down ShareGPT's Explore page – which has over 112K shared conversations – last week.
Insanity."
Fine-tunning is not exactly the same as "relying heavily", I bet they got way more fine-tunning data from simply asking their 100k employees to pre-beta test for a couple of months
even if true which it does not seem to be the case, the whole thing sounds pretty marginal, in order to train a model that is most likely significantly bigger than 100b parameters, one also needs orders of magnitude more training data than the small 120k chat that were shared on the ShareGPT website
Technically speaking, as you get closer to maturity, the "time value" of the option goes down towards 0 but options also have intrinsic value and the total value of the option converges to it's intrinsic value not to 0 (intrinsic value can be 0 but not only). Now if you do not exercise your in the money option it's like having a winning lottery ticket and not cashing it, it's not something a rational agent would do.
Let take this example from the article: "Carroll Gardens — traditionally one of Brooklyn’s most expensive neighborhoods — was conspicuously absent from top 10 rankings at the start of the year. Claiming #4 with a $2.79 million median sale price in Q1 2024, Carroll Gardens’ median sale price was halved to just $1.38 million". I know pretty well this neighborhood and the market there and this is not the actual case that overall prices in Carrol Gardens halved (even if the median price over the Q1 transactions halved)! It's just probably the type of property sold in Q1 that changed, the market is made of townhouses and new developments of condos and also some coops, the mix of sales in a given quarter is very far from homogeneous.
The article goes on to say essentially the same thing: "Among these was the whopping 145% price surge in Madison that lifted the neighborhood from last year’s #104 to its current spot at #25. This came as Madison went from $510,000 a year ago to the current $1.25 million median sale price due to a significant shift in its sold-property mix." Pretty sure median transaction prices in Madison Brooklyn will collapse by nearly 50% next quarter once the transaction property mix will change again...