ashika · HackerTrans

3 か月前議論

no, they issued more stock. stock is a claim on corporate equity, ie the delta between assets and liabilities. existing stock holders' claim to equity gets diluted when this happens, but share prices will often not be effected proportionally, making it appear the company has "made a billion dollars" when in fact they've just split the same pie into smaller pieces and managed to sell it at the same price. ryan now seems to think he can issue shares to acquire ebay, which will be much harder than fleecing retail.

ashika

2 年前議論

worth reading for rich's crazy jokes alone. the fact he is telling them to senior military brass in the context of negotiating his division's survival after kelly johnson's retirement makes them even funnier. my favorite - a boy comes home from school, finds his dad, and proudly declares "dad, i saved 25 cents by running alongside the bus instead of riding it!". the father shakes his head and replies sternly, "you fool, you should have run next to a taxi and saved five dollars"

ashika

3 年前議論

i agree its crazy but i thought tfa did a good job explaining why the original chart ended up looking the way it did. regime change in a dataset can expose bad assumptions about relationships between balance sheet items you thought could be summed, etc.

ashika

4 年前議論

this guy is going to love moby dick

ashika

4 年前議論

the best translations will usually have a brief explanation of the function various forms of patronymic & affectionate name forms which carry meaning in russian. translating every instance of an affectionate name to "hun" or "buster" or whatever modern english uses would be a bit too much, i think. some of the more formal honorific aliases may have no real english equivalent but once explained its not hard to follow along with the author's intent. "oh this weasel is laying it on thick..." etc.

ashika

4 年前議論

i also reacted negatively to the title but found the article to be redemptively unpretentious. i think any fan of dostoevsky would agree with his conclusions and be happy that this robot found a heart.

ashika

4 年前議論

pedal by wire

ashika

5 年前議論

youtube channel schematix did a two-part series of iteratively improving a TEG rocket stove. very entertaining but i dont think i'll be building one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dvbN2vKrc4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8b1OYy-b5I

ashika

5 年前議論

it's wild to me, given all the delays and complexity and risk, that the mission length is only 5-10 years max. but even if it blows up on the launchpad we've learned a ton, if only about the difficulty of manufacturing such devices in the 21st century. i am praying it does work, though, and that we get 10 years of amazing data from it before eagerly deploying a replacement.

ashika

5 年前議論

  Through the lacings of the leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied verdure. Oh, busy weaver! unseen weaver!--pause!--one word!--whither flows the fabric? what palace may it deck? wherefore all these ceaseless toilings? Speak, weaver!

Love Moby Dick

ashika

5 年前議論

mass appeal is overrated. being able to use terminal mode over ssh is more useful to me than rounded buttons.

ashika

5 年前議論

people will seemingly hop aboard anything that gives them authority over other people. i am reminded of that scientology grade chart that leaked a while back[1]. the end result of each training was usually the ability to give the training to others. so while all orgs obviously want to remain on a positive tipping point with the general membership rising to serve hierarchical functions over time, scientology teachings seem to exist mainly an opportunity to advance relative to other scientology members.

[1] http://scientologymyths.info/definitions/gradechart.gif

ashika

5 年前議論

while i more or less agree with your general thesis (bodies are good at grabbing what they need), tracking a few days of eating on cronometer or some other site that breaks out micronutrients is worth the effort in terms of getting an idea of your real intake and any holes. finding dietary sources you like for those blind spots can be tricky, but is far better than tossing a multivitamin over the wall and assuming you are good, imho.

ashika

5 年前議論

i went through this process several years ago. it was initially easy to force myself into correct technique, as "do the opposite of what feels natural" stably led me down the right knot path. then after maybe six weeks or so the correct way felt natural and i had to burn cycles deciding if this was the good "feels natural" or the bad "feels natural". a year or two after that i was back to tying them without thinking, correctly now.

ashika

5 年前議論

i suggest you read 'bartleby the scrivener' by herman melville[1]. bartleby is most famous for the scene(s) where he tells his manager 'i'd prefer not to' when asked to do basic parts of his job. the full short story is much richer than its most cited line, however, and it could be helpful for your situation. bartleby works hard at first, but then starts acting more and more eccentric, eventually sleeping overnight at his workplace. his manager is the narrator and the slow transition of his perception of bartleby is fantastically done by melville.

also in this vein, somethingawful had an ancient story about a guy who got reorg'd into a position of no responsibility that was pretty great. i can only seem to find the third installment[2] of the series, though. like bartleby, he begins by doing good work for a while. but where bartleby's abdication of duty is intentional, driven by something like a depressive episode, somethingawful-guy's company slowly just stops asking him to do things as waves of reorgs and mergers leave him 'on the heap, but without any references' as it were. the zany antics of avoiding his hr dept are quite fun and i think the whole thing should be dramatized.

[1] https://www.owleyes.org/text/bartleby-scrivener/read/bartleb... [2] https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=26...

ashika

5 年前議論

and dont get me wrong, i am glad all types exist and meet in the market.

what i am implying above is that i view a management team that makes decisions based on share price as about as delusional as one that drinks its own urine for power ahead of important meetings.

ashika

5 年前議論

>but no one cares about that long-term

indeed. and i congratulate you on your recent success in predicting the tastes of others who buy equities based on speculative price action. spac management likely makes their decisions largely focused on share price, which i suppose as an equity investor would feel like they have your back. but when you consider the role equity is meant to play in corporate finance, you would concede that in an ideal world management would not pay attention to share price at all, they would be working on making the most money possible using the assets and equity they already had, and then either returning or reinvesting those profits. the equity markets will always have a chaotic bent in the short term, so we should be careful of the ways we let them influence policy. its really a circular dependency if you think about it.

ashika

6 年前議論

founders that talk to pg are still working for rich people. they just negotiated a longer leash and more food.

ashika

6 年前議論

i think its a fair condensation. the discussion of google is pretty incidental and given the lack of any actual official connection to GOOG, i think we should be shrewd in our assessment; it's in the title to sell more books.

ashika

6 年前議論

if someone is looking for a book where ancient philosophical ideas are critically applied to modern institutions and ideas, look elsewhere. this appears to be aimed at undergrad teaching, perhaps for an intro course, but despite the promising title, a quick read leaves me underwhelmed.

the main premise, forcing plato to engage with the modern world a la bill and ted, doesnt have to be bad. but this dramatization comes off quite patronizingly fellowkids. but if your students want to read about drunk people you can stick to the ancient texts! honestly, plato is one of the most accessible philosophers out there so this strikes me as doubly useless.

additionally, woe to the person looking for meaningful engagement with ethical topics where philosophical tools are actually used to answer modern questions. Here's a spot where a topic comes up, but then is lost in the banality of the author's stupid device.

> “So you’re telling me that the purpose of all this knowledge is merely to make money? Greed is driving the great search engine for knowledge? This bewilders me more than anything else I’ve gathered about this place. How can those who possess all knowledge, which must include knowledge of the life that is worth living, be interested in using knowledge only for the insignificant aim of making money? Well, what do you do when you’re faced with monumental cluelessness of this sort? Plato, I said, I think you have a somewhat exalted view of Google and the nerds who work here. Nerds? he said. Another word I do not know.”

it goes on to explain what a nerd is but never revisits the question of google's business model! the book leaves the reader at the end with a hotdog of chopped up, edited, and overly seasoned ancient philosophical ideas. i bet in high enough doses it causes cancer.

tl;dr - patronizing, zero actual engagement with technology ethics questions

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