SatanicNotMessianic @ SatanicNotMessianic @lemmy.ml

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2 yr. ago

I’ve repurchased very many physical books. Sometimes it was because they were read so often that they started falling apart. Sometimes it was because they were so good that I wanted copies on hand to give out to people. Sometimes it was because I lent out my only copy and it was never returned.

I’ve also bought many ebooks even if I already own the physical book. It’s more convenient to read, easier to take notes, and I can resize the text as needed. I’ve bought ebooks for which I have the audiobook, and vice versa. I’ll still buy physical books if it’s an art book or a special edition, but even then I don’t mind it. I think I have four different copies of Wicked, and I would have a hard time estimating the number of Tolkiens I’ve been through.

I’m not too sure about the second part there. We can see if/how they pursue it, but I’m pretty sure using something like a Forbes article containing lies in order to lie in court testimony (or even to fraudulently enter into a contract is fraud.

He loves to skirt the line on these things. He’s watched so many mafia movies literally all of his lawyers have said that’s his technique. He doesn’t say “make fake votes,” he says “I need you to find some votes.”

That’s the level of criminal mastermind it takes to run the United States and the gop.

Okay, I think I must absolutely be misreading this. They started with 1500 potential accounts, then picked 500 that, by hand, they could make guesses about based on people doing things like actually posting where they live or how much they make.

And then they’re claiming their LLMs have 85% accuracy based on that subset of data? There has to be more than this. Were they 85% on the full 1500? How did they confirm that? Was it just on the 500? Then what’s the point?

There was a study on Facebook that showed that they could predict with between 80-95% accuracy (or some crazy number like that) your gender, orientation, politics, and so on just based on your public likes. That was ten years ago at least. What is this even showing?

Did they become beard twins?

It always struck me that, most hostesses being more than one foot wide, those would lead to one of those Very Special Episodes of Star Trek, like when the rock tried to eat Kira.

To be fair, they don’t get invited to a lot of parties.

I live in one of the highest population cities in the US, and can confirm that they’re ghost towns most of the time. 1 pharm, maybe 1 tech, and 1-2 cashiers/floaters restocking shelves.

I literally only go there for vaccinations at this point.

If you aren’t working, why are you putting in any salary?

Since the article is quoting some of the top economists in the world, I would t let not being one really limit your options for commenting.

Here’smy hot take: economists have discussed sticky prices and sticky wages - which is a (imho) crappy way of describing effectively friction in economics. I wonder if what we are seeing here is sticky consumer spending. Normally we’d expect spending to react most quickly to interest rates and inflation, but people have gotten used to a certain level of spending and escalating debt, and so they might simply feel (or need to feel) unaffected by the fed changes.

Honestly, until we update the idea of an economic rational actor, I don’t think we’re going to get very far. In fact I think we risk getting further afield the longer we persist, and the more difficult it will finally be to realign everything.

Either the reporter or I am very confused about how RSUs work, and I’ve gotten quite a few of them, so let me just explain this one as I understand it.

RSUs aren’t options. Options are a contract to buy a stock at a given price at a given time. You have a contract to buy 100 shares of XYZ at $5/share, while it’s currently worth $10/share. You just made $500. Options used to be pretty poorly regulated by the SEC and got a lot of abuse (options marked far below market value ad comp to executives). The industry has largely moved over to restricted stock units (RSUs). RSUs are an actual grant of stock, not an option to buy stock. The restricted part comes from them vesting over time - say, 25% per year over the next four years. In the same kind of transaction above, you might get an RSUs grant of $1000. If the price of the stock is at $10 when the grant is made, you’re getting 100 shares, granted at 25 per year. It doesn’t matter whether the price goes up or down after the grant, (other than you wanting it to go up) - the number of shares is fixed when the grant is made.

So here’s the shady bit that for some reason the article isn’t calling Twitter on - by marking the value of the shares granted to $49, which is vastly more than the shares are worth (but it’s privately held, so he doesn’t have the market telling everyone they’re actually worth about $10), he’s giving people a bonus on paper that says they’re getting $50k when they’re actually getting $10k. And it’s not even worth $10k because they’re continuing to slide with no end in sight, and RSUs take years to vest. I don’t know if there’s even going to be a Twitter in two years, much less one worth $50/share.

Dorsey only kept his $1B in Twitter because Elmo guaranteed him a buyout at $54.20 per share. If these also have a guaranteed buyout at that price (NOT a “current value” but a “can be redeemed at any time for this amount” value), then that’s good for the employees, again assuming that Twitter is still around in 4 years.

On the other hand, if the buy back value is guaranteed, Twitter just took on a shitload more debt which should further tank its value. Let’s say Twitter, were it public, would be worth $10B now. They have an outstanding loan to I forge which bank, but the bank has marked down their investment by 2/3s or something, and I think that was before Elmo decided to ditch the brand name that by itself carried most of the value of Twitter. Dorsey and probably the Saudis ($1.5B invested) kept their money in while Elon bought everyone else out. That’s $2.5B that Twitter has as an outstanding but uncounted debt. If Twitter is worth $5B right now, that’s half the value of the company they could be forced to surrender this afternoon.

At the end of the day, Elmo is giving out dimes and calling them dollars. Of the buy out price is locked at $50, great, but that’s assuming the company stays in business. If it’s going to be revalued, either because it goes back public, or Elon changes his mind, or the courts force him to justify himself, they’re fucked.

I hope they get their money.

Whoever sets out to answer that question will have their Jobs cut out for them.

I got spam from zoom telling me how to use their tools to better work from home less than a couple of weeks after zoom announced a mandatory return to work policy.

The answer to which came first would be the male proto-chicken.

The problem with this question is that its assumption is so wrong that it is rebdered meaningless. Chomsky once wrote the sentence “Colorless greed ideas sleep furiously” as an example of a sentence that has syntactic correctness but no semantic meaning. Also, why a chicken, in particular? Why this animal who has been so successfully domesticated and differentially bred over centuries that calling it out is like Roy Confort calling out the similarly domesticated banana as evidence of god and creation?

In any case, eggs came first. The egg, if you will, is basically a big cell. It has a lot going on, but it got figured out long before modern birds, much less the domesticated chicken.

But of course, that’s not what they really mean. What they really mean is - how do you get from not-chicken to chicken without the biological equivalent of a big bang (and I’m not even touching on how cosmogenesis gets misunderstood)?

And the real answer is that, whether we’re talking about natural or human driven evolution, there’s no line between chicken and not-chicken. Its fairly easy for us to say that a cat is not a chicken and that a jellyfish is not a chicken, but as you get into the later dinosaurs and early birds, you start to move into grey areas.

Which brings us back around to semantics. As humans, for some reason, we like hard categories around things. That’s often not how the real world works. There’s really a lot of just continuous blessings, and ideas like species are a convenient label for us to understand gross differences but whose utility starts to fall apart once too closely examined. The definitions written in textbooks for high school students are unhelpful, as they represent the ideas as if they were handed down from on high, rather than “this is a convenient way of organizing things for some of our purposes.”

It’s been a while since I slung Perl, but I’m pretty sure kbin + 2 = kbip, isn’t it?

I will give you the cliff notes version. There’s a thing called an umbilical cord. It’s used to provide nutrients and has been used as a mode of nutrient supply in placental mammals throughout evolutionary time.

The problem is that people who start with the conclusion (“god made people special”) get all fouled up when they have to walk through increasingly convoluted thinking to make their presuppositions line up with reality. Belly buttons are only a problem is you start from the idea of some weird mythology. Otherwise, they’re just expected and fully explained. It’s really not a matter for a course, but if you’re interested in a freshman level text on biology I could probably recommend one.

They literally didn’t become differentiated in the way you’re postulating. It’s a continuum. That’s my point.

I’ve taught this course.

Okay, on what aspect of your theory should I focus? There is no support for a sudden transition to “intelligence.” It’s literally all continuous to the point that people are studying the learned and taught moral rules among chimpanzee and baboon populations.

My point is that it makes no sense in the framework of reality and that you might as well go with the literal story of Adam and Eve or whatever mythology you want, because throwing Neanderthals into the mix does fuck all in terms of making anything believable. It’s literally as scientifically justified as the Norse creation myth about a giant cow licking salty ice to uncover the gods.

As an evolutionary biologist I promise you that this makes way more sense in your head than it makes in actual reality. This is not how evolution works.