One segment I have been absolutely upbeat is IT/Tech. Tech has always been the hidden moat for many companies - AP/BFL to name a few. Tech is no longer a vertical in market. It has become horizontal that cuts across every single vertical.

Be it Pharma/API, Finance, Insurance, Manufacturing, Retail, CD, or any other segment, Tech is going to give you edge over peers.

The spend on IT/Tech is going to increase stupendously in coming 4/5 years to levels we haven't even imagined. The investment in tech is going to help big get even bigger and put very hard survival barriers to new entrants.

BFL/HDFC Life from Fin/Insurance segment have one of the best tech platforms. IndiaMart relies on customer data monetization, Dmart has a very small but extremely strong team of data scientists

Even Nestle has very strong data scientist pool, Asian Paints story is well knows to everyone now. Not investing in IT/Tech is going to be your biggest mistake in investing journey.

1/ Now that the election has been called and voter fraud dismissed, it’s time to search for other frauds. Let’s look at $TSLA Full Self Drive. About 3 weeks ago, Tesla released its Beta version to a limited audience of Tesla influencers.

2/ The influencers were supposed to flood social media with praise and testimonial videos. Instead, FSD performance was so bad that every video contained errors, many requiring driver intervention.

3/ Excuses were made. “Remember, this is only Beta”. “I’m teaching it to drive down this street”. But the reality clear to everyone was that Tesla’s Beta FSD is anything but Full Self Drive.

4/ Beta release – what does that mean? It means that the software is a candidate for production release. It means 100% of the specification has been implemented. It means only clean-ups remain.

5/ So how is it possible that FSD performs so poorly after all the hype? Certainly, there’s an element of time pressure to fulfill the Robotaxi proclamation. And similar pressure from Waymo’s competition.

I don't think people have quite internalized *how* the US became the global leader in science and technology. It's partially a story of massive global talent migration.

And it's important to get this story right if we want to maintain

Around 1900, the US was a bit of a scientific backwater when compared to Europe. Most of the exciting work was being done in Germany and Austria, especially.

Then came three enormous waves of academic and scientific talent to the US.

1) First came a group of Jewish scientists fleeing persecution.

In a massive own-goal, 1930s Nazi Germany dismissed ~15% of the physicists who made up a stunning 64% (!) of their physics citations.

The group who fleed to the US included intellectual superstars like Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard, John von Neumann, and Edward Teller who formed the backbone of the Manhattan Project.

In a pithy quote, Churchill’s military secretary Sir Ian Jacob is said to have remarked that the Allies won “because our German scientists were better than their German scientists.”

ET Weekend Deals: $100 off New Samsung Galaxy S20 FE 5G Smartphone, Dell Vostro 15 5501 Intel Core i5 Aluminum Laptop for $629.https://t.co/wgXnApT72j technology up to date

Samsung’s Galaxy S20 FE 5G smartphone is now officially available, and today you can get it with a $100 discount.

Incremental rebuild was a feature of the C# compiler which was meant to increase the throughput after an initial build. It worked on the principle that changes in between builds are localized, and that the information gathered by the compiler from previous builds wouldn't be

entirely invalidated; specifically, some of the information and, indeed, the assembly itself could be updated in an incremental fashion resulting in faster builds.

Both the VS 2002 and VS 2003 compilers exposed this option through the /incr switch on the command line, and the ‘Incremental Rebuild’ option in the Advanced tab of Project Properties. In 2002 incremental rebuild was enabled by default for all project types.

After we shipped 2002 we noticed that we started to get a large number of bugs (internal compiler errors - ICEs – the worst kind) which were a direct result of the incremental rebuild feature.

These bugs derived from the complexities involved in correctly implementing incremental rebuild and the problems associated with testing it. Consequently, for 2003 we fixed all known issues with incremental rebuild but subsequently turned it off by default for all projects.

For people curious about the Roam API and confused by the syntax, or interested in why Conor went with Datomic/Datascript and not a traditional database, this older talk by Roam developer @mark_bastian is a great overview.

He gives great examples using Spiderman of how even modeling something fairly trivial in SQL is much more complex than in Datomic. But the real kicker is when you're trying to interrogate the data to find recursive relationships.

Right now the Roam data model (at least that's exposed to developers) is just about pages, blocks, and children with tags. Already you can see how finding the page containing a block with a certain tag etc is useful.https://t.co/jWJnuKu1RG

But imagine when attribute relationships are fully represented

You should be able to model the entire Spiderman story in Roam.
Page title: Peter Parker
Child of:: [[Richard Parker]] [[Mary Parker]]
Aliases:: [[Spidey]]

etc, and do these kind of queries.

"Show me quotes about operational efficiency in books by authors who used to be in the military"
"Show me companies in Boise, Idaho, founded by women, whose evaluation is lower than 10X ARR"

When you complain about an open source project's management you'll get the reply, "Use something else if you don't like it!" That'd be true except for the tiny problem that *many* projects also strive for complete monopolistic dominance.

Let me tell you about Java in early 2k:

I was programming in Java since it's release, and all through the late 90s into the early 2000s. At first Java was very determined to unseat C++ and it used various propaganda tactics to turn C++ and malloc into a weird enemy for all of us to hate. This worked great!

Everything was fine though because there were plenty of jobs in tech because of the dot-com boom, and then suddenly there were not jobs because of the dot-com bomb.

Overnight it seemed as if the *only* way to get a job was at giant companies, and they *loved* Enterprise Java.

Now, this is the golden ticket for many open source projects and corporations. They all want to be the top dog #1 in the industry for their particular use, and once they gain that position they become abusive by ignoring user needs and extracting wealth from them.

With Java the dominance was so insane that *every* language had to copy Java's weirdness to survive. If you wonder why a language has some odd CamelCase things it's because early Python, Ruby, and others had to copy Java's semantics and style to even be considered "serious".

In 2003's Pattern Recognition, @greatdismal discusses the role of "apophenia" - finding patterns where none exist - in paranoid thinking. We are a pattern-matching animal, prone to seeing faces in clouds and hearing speech in static.

https://t.co/lKHfKbvzLN

1/

Apophenia is omnipresent and weird. It's why 5G conspiracy theorists started circulating a guitar-pedal circuit diagram as a leaked 5G cancer-microchip design (the diagram has a segment labeled "5G

But this kind of hilarious idiocy doesn't occur in a vacuum. It's got a business model. Companies like Devon's @Energydots1 prey on people who've been sucked in by their own apophenic misfirings to sell them "Smartdots" - stickers to protect them from "radiation."

3/

It will not surprise you to learn that Smartdots don't work. Indeed, they don't do anything, except, perhaps, produce a hard-to-remove gummy

Energydots claims that their stickers are programmed with "scalar energy" - a study by the University of Surrey's 6th Generation Innovation Centre, commissioned by the @BBC, was unable to detect "scalar energy".

5/

I’m quoted in this, which does about as good a job overviewing the topic as a New York Times profile can be expected to.

Major oversights in it as I see.

First, It does not acknowledge the fact that Yudkowsky is, at heart, a complete crank. This remains, to my mind, crucial to understanding the rationalist community’s influence on the world: they’re sci-fi writers being mistaken for scientists.

You can’t really understand the harmful effects of SSC until you realize that it’s part of a larger movement of bullshit artists serving as cult leaders to the techbros.

Second, and more importantly, it never really explains the harm that’s being done by Scott Siskind and his followers. It comes close, noting that “SJWs” were the only group not welcome in SSC, but it doesn’t capture the harm of that because it doesn’t unpack the term.

What is meant in practice when “SJWs” aren’t welcome in a space is that marginalized people speaking of the harm they experience are silenced.

That’s it. That’s the meaning.

Fintech firms will become digital layers around central banks, just like banks were physical layers

Central banks will create plug and play digital infrastructure (e.g. UPI, Aadhar) on which fintech products are built

Central banks will enable fintechs to replace banks

Deconstructing AH’s ‘bot’ list - A Thread 🤖
#JusticeForJohnnyDepp
#AmberHeardIsALiar

First things first here’s Amber’s first claim of ‘bots’ included in her Counterclaim (Aug 2020)

“Smear and harass Ms.Heard while simultaneously promoting and praising Mr Depp’s agent and attorney, Adam Waldman.” - This part is specifically important.

There’s 209 accounts listed so I broke them up into 7 groups:
• No Longer exists
• No Connection at all
• P*rn accounts
• Depp Fan accounts
• Only 1 tweet with any link
• Other
• and finally @adam_waldman 🤣

Side note - When I searched the accounts that didn’t obviously show JD tweets (eg fan accs) I searched with the words/#’s
#JusticeForJohnnyDepp, Justice, Johnny, Depp, Amber and Heard

I used all the most commonly used terms with this case so it would throw up anything connected

I can’t search what people have Retweeted but on accounts where there were no tweets to be found, I scrolled back through their profiles for a while to make sure I wasn’t missing anything.

AT&T looks to sell DirecTV as investors question its huge bet on content.https://t.co/JZgjgHwUco business information up to date

AT&T is reportedly putting its DirecTV business up for auction just five years after buying it. The move raises momentous questions: Does this signal the unwinding of AT&T’s hugely ambitious program to become a media titan,

The ACCC rejected the insufficient conditions w/ which DG Comp cleared Google-Fitbit. The EC decision shows a lack of courage and a refusal to learn from past mistakes. Having worked for months w/ @Caffar3Cristina trying to explain why, it’s time to put down a final marker. 1/

This is a (long) thread in four parts:

I.The Problem with Google
II.Google-Fitbit in a time of Digital Platform introspection
III.Google-Fitbit Theories of Harm
IV.The remedies are insufficient

2/

PART I: The Problem with Google.

We’ll start by agreeing that Google makes some great products. (That’s not the problem.) It claims: 3/

We have a very different view of Google’s true motives: 4/

To see this, divide Google’s product history into three parts. Part 1 is “Google as Traditional Media Company”. They launch Desktop Search (1998) and acquire YouTube (2006). Both are free services, monetized by advertising.

5/

The Elon Musk BS about indentured servitude on Mars, this was bothering me the other day before I read that quote and I didn’t tweet about it, but yeah I have thoughts about capitalists planning to “save humanity” by leaving earth...

The idea that it is somehow an easier feat of engineering to leave our planet and terraform another planet, than it is to fight climate change on Earth is a load of horseshit. So why is it billed that way? Why convince people that space travel is “our only hope as a species”?

When I played Horizon Zero Dawn, one thing that really, really upset me was the quest where you discover the classrooms intended to educate future humans, and there is a Faro logo on *everything*.

It’s not about saving humanity, it’s about being acknowledged as a “saviour”

You can’t save “humanity” by fleeing the Earth, leaving billions to die and the biosphere to collapse. And you can’t create a utopian society elsewhere by exporting the same sociocultural mindset and capitalist ideology that destroyed our planet, you can only delay the inevitable

It’s one big fucking vanity project entirely devoid of merit, and a society with a literal saviour is not going to be one where shit like equality is possible. Without dissenters, it’s going to be a perfect distillation of everything already wrong with our present society

Microtest Test-Driven Development is a strategy for *change*. To understand the case, we need to answer two questions: 1) Why have a strategy for change? 2) How does TDD provide one? Let's take up the first question today.

(Before we begin, I remind you of the relative unimportance of geekery to me just now. This is just respite.

Please work for change and support the others who are doing so.

Black lives matter.

Stay safe, stay strong, stay angry, stay kind.)

Why is having a change strategy so urgent?

The TL;DR is dead simple:

Because continuous ongoing change is at the base of all software development, both before and after our software is in the field.

When I read old-school software ideas, or for that matter what is being taught in our colleges for the most part today, I'm struck over and over again by the "timeless" aspect of the material. It is concerned almost entirely with the static and atemporal aspects of software.

In these approaches, applications spring Athena-like from the heads of our pantheon-worthy programmers. The designs emerge in an instant and once emerged they are final. The process looks like 1) Nothing. 2) Everything. 3) Move on.

Thank you members of the Commerce Committee for the opportunity to speak with the American people about Twitter and §230. My remarks will be brief to get to questions. §230 is the most important law protecting internet speech. Removing §230 will remove speech from the internet.

§230 gave internet services two important tools. The first provides immunity from liability for user’s content. The second provides “Good Samaritan” protections for content moderation and removal, even of constitutionally protected speech, as long as it’s done “in good faith.”

That concept of “good faith” is what’s being challenged by many of you today. Some of you don’t trust we’re acting in good faith. That’s the problem I want to focus on solving. How do services like Twitter earn your trust? How do we ensure more choice in the market if we don’t?

There are three solutions we’d like to propose to address the concerns raised, all focused on services that decide to moderate or remove content. They could be expansions to §230, new legislative frameworks, or a commitment to industry wide self-regulation best practices.

The first is requiring a service’s moderation process to be published. How are cases reported and reviewed? How are decisions made? What tools are used to enforce? Publishing answers to questions like these will make our process more robust and accountable to the people we serve.