maria2

Very few places use electricity for heat. It’s super inefficient unless you use a heat pump, and residential heat pumps typically don’t work too far below freezing.

The human brain may only be 10 watts, but the “weights” in the brains NN were computed over billions of years with countless amounts of data.

It's a meaningless distinction.

Overly pedantic

Are you sure? Just some back of the napkin math: S&P 500 is 5.17 times higher since the bottom of 08. BRKB is 6 times higher. And performance this year is even more dramatic. S&P is down 20%. BRKB is up 3%. In 08, too, the decline in Berkshire was much less than the S&P. Clearly Berkshire has been a better bet at most points in time.

There are very few cases where mortgage interest deductions are better than the standard deduction.

Warren Buffet is not betting on index funds. If he was, Berkshire Hathaway would not exist. Buffet uses index funds to manage some of Berkshire’s money, and he famously bet a meager sum (for him) that actively managed funds wouldn’t beat the S&P, but if you look at what Berkshire does, then you would see they are still very much into active management. The success of Berkshire should really prove to everyone that it’s possible to beat the market. Will most beat the market? No. But it’s obviously possible if you have the talent.

Last time I checked, the “mutual funds don’t beat the market” is kind of a myth perpetuated by S&P Dow Jones Indices to hype their own index products. First of all, what is the S&P 500 if not a handpicked collection of stocks? To say mutual funds don’t beat the S&P 500 is to say that S&P is the best stock picker out there. I find that unlikely. Second, something like 10% of mutual funds do beat the S&P 500 on long time horizons.

Core CPI, which is what the Fed typically uses, excludes food and energy.

White box crypto is kind of like obfuscation, but tries to make it impossible to extract the information.

The original topic of conversation was:

> Nvidia primarily makes add on GPU's, if I understand their business correctly. Apple integrated a GPU onto its m2 (or whichever chip is used in their studio) that performs comparably to the 3060, and even beat the the 3090 in some benchmarks/workloads. I think that's pretty impressive.

The form-factor of the 3090 isn't relevant.

Just watched the videos, a few thoughts:

Coffeezilla says that Tether doesn't need to honor your redemption by point to the TOS. The TOS that he shows in the video says that Tether reserves the right to delay the redemption and pay it in-kind securities held by Tether. So if Tether is holding a bond, they reserve the right to give you that bond instead of selling the bond and giving you the proceeds. That's very different than his claim that Tether doesn't need to honor the redemption.

His discussion about whether or not it was transparent that Bitfinex and Tether were owned by the same people. He plays sound clips that sound a little misleading: Phil Potter is prompted with "Tether is Bitfinex, right?" To which Phil Potter responds: "No, it's not." Is that really misleading. If someone asked Elon Musk, Twitter is SpaceX, right? Wouldn't the answer be no, even though they're owned by the same people? All the sound clips are less than 10 seconds longs, so it's really hard to understand everything in context.

The leadership team of Tether does seem a little sketch.

The part about Tether lending Bitfinex money to stay solvent while Bitfinex's money was held by the state pending investigation of their bank was sketchy, but technically the currency would still be backed by the loan, assuming Bitfinex can get their money back, which seems likely given that they weren't a party in the investigation holding up the money.

I think the bottom line is that you have to trust the Tether team to handle the money wisely. Usually, you can't trust people to do that so using Tether is extremely risky. As for the video, I won't say it's wrong, but it certainly picked the least charitable interpretation of events and also cherry-picked sound-bites, which is kind of a misleading tactic to use that helps suit a narrative.

Why do you find it sad? Everything has a cost. There are plenty of things that harm people every single day that we tolerate readily. For example, 91 lumberjacks died last year. There are way fewer employed lumberjacks than there are subway riders.

Many lifetimes of time are being wasted every day to save < 10 lives every century.