brendanyounger

I'll never understand this point of view. If someone would please explain how to create perfectly secure software, I will gladly start writing perfectly secure software. Only after, if it's clear I ignored obviously correct advice, should there be malpractice penalties.

Consider surgery instead of software development. There are general best practices, but the difference between a good surgeon and a poor one is a small number of deaths. Malpractice insurance is high. Litigation is constant. And patients still die on the operating table. It's unclear what all the malpractice tort law actually gets you in the end.

What will actually happen is that frauds and poorly run companies will opt for the 6 month schedule while well run ones will keep the 3 month.

To your point that "executives should be tracking performance daily", there's an argument that all that data should be publicly released daily. It would make it nearly impossible to hide mismanagement and actually remove most of the human overhead since it would be impossible to spin bad data on a daily basis.

Absolutely. Zuckerberg was willing to burn tens of billions on a metaverse that no one wanted. Staying relevant is worth every penny he spent on Moltbook. We're deep in a repeat of the dot-com boom. The interesting question is what will rise from the ashes and take down old guard of FB, Google, Salesforce, Oracle, etc.

I'm in my mid-40's now. I taught myself C when I was 15. I have no desire to use LLMs to pump out code.

I take comfort in re-reading much of the 70's and 80's literature which focuses the possibilities of user experience. We still haven't fully explored all the dreams of half a century ago.

If AI forces the business case that "code is cheap", I can only hope we re-double our efforts at creating new interfaces and capabilities for computer systems. The Meta glasses, Apple Vision, and the like are small steps in this direction.

Doubtful. I knew Ono as an undergrad at Wisconsin. He has far too much integrity for that.

He's always been involved in mentoring high schoolers, undergrads, and, of course, his own grad students. It's not surprising that he's working with a 24 year old.

He's a bundle of energy in math and sports and always looking for the new thing. Jumping in on a new project in a burgeoning field is very much his m.o.

For anyone outside the US, exactly 0% of the populace is interested in a confrontation with Venezuela. This looks like an unpopular president eager for a rally around the troops moment and possibly taking over oil fields to reward his supporters in the petroleum industry.

Trump sends migrants overseas to be tortured. Mamdani says the very rich should pay a little more for better city services (free buses, etc.). These are not comparable at all. What is behind this disingenuous both-sidesism? What is going on in VC-land?

The current US federal tax system already is progressive in this way. Your first $X are taxed at 0%, the next $Y at 10%, etc. up to 37%. Your UBI in your formula is basically the standard deduction in the current system. But you still need to work or invest to make the first $X which are federal tax-free.

I think the video streaming services are a good model to follow. You go on Prime Video and see videos from several decades, dozens of cable & broadcast networks, and hundreds or thousands of distributors and production companies. The rights are a mess, but that's all hidden from view. Now if only text-based media could operate like that...

Yes, you're still calculating an infinite decimal, no matter how you approach the problem.

What Wildberger is suggesting is that, rather than taking an nth root (solution to x^n = A where A is a fraction) as a "fundamental" operation, what if we took power series with "hyper-Catalan" coefficients as fundamental operators? (This is where I get a bit fuzzy because I haven't read and understood his work.)

Galois proved that you can't have a general algorithm for solving polynomials of degree >= 5 if all you can use are +,-,*,/, and nth roots. But what if you can use a different operation besides nth roots? That's what Wildberger is proposing and apparently it works for higher degrees.

Stepping back a bit, this is very much in line with Kronecker's notion that God made the natural numbers and all else is man's handiwork. There's no avoiding infinite series for computing non-rational roots of equations, but it is possible to choose series that are easier to work with.

I suspect they gave him a timeline to IPO and/or sell or he's kicked out as CEO. His recent actions are those of a man with a deadline and nothing to lose.

To put a little color on the BSD conjecture, it states that the rank (0, 1, 2, 3, etc.) of rational points on an elliptic curve is related to the residue (coefficient of 1/q) of the L-function for the curve. There are some additional multiplicative factors, in particular the size of the Tate-Shafarevich group.

No one knows how to compute the size of that group in general (in fact no one has proved that it's finite!). Computing the rank of a curve via non-analytic means is more akin to a bespoke proof than a straightforward computation (see Noam Elkies' work).

So saying you're going to disprove BSD with blind computation is rather naive unless you're sitting on several career-defining proofs and not sharing them.

While I have no love for Ambetter, I think we need to ask whether behavioral health services should ever be covered by insurance. From 10,000 feet, the behavioral health product is terrible. There's no clear timeline for how long it takes to get better, and it's nearly impossible to objectively compare provider quality using any publicly available data set. In short, it's a terrible match for insurance as a product. Which is why we're in this pickle.