octo_t

Joined 14 years ago

Karma
2,251
Submissions
447
Member since
Nov 19
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/thorpemichael; my proof: https://keybase.io/thorpemichael/sigs/dlX-3gORUCJmBXX5mX9tn2ugJaO9wM3bb1rcqez2BgU ]
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Recent submissions

Comment · 2 years ago
The solution I landed on is having 2 iCloud accounts in the same “family” so things can be shared, but in a controlled manner.
Comment · 4 years ago
This reminds me of being in secondary school and procrastinating/nerd sniping our teacher for A-level Further Maths (so I was roughly 17-18) by arguing that a number system in base e (so 1, 2, 2.1, ..., 2.7, 2.71, ..., 10) would simplify a lot of the maths we were studying.
Comment · 4 years ago
This has more context in: https://intellinews.com/us-oligarch-sanctions-list-exempts-u...

> A few other oligarchs, and their companies, have been exempted because of their importance to the global commodities market, most notably Oleg Deripaska and his aluminium producer Rusal.

> When very harsh sanctions were imposed on Deripaska in 2018 that effectively banned doing any business with the company, prices for aluminium on the London Metals Exchange (LME) soared by 40% overnight potentially causing a price shock for the consumers of the metal. The implementation of those sanctions were at first delayed and eventually withdrawn completely

Comment · 4 years ago
It has felt to me over the last few years (and I have no inside knowledge) that Google Maps saw Apple Maps fail at launch, and didn't improve the service at all.

Meanwhile, Apple Maps and the OpenStreetMaps backing data has continued to get better and better each year.

Comment · 4 years ago
Seems like everyone wants to make everything in Rust these days! /s
Comment · 5 years ago
I'm remembering this analogy for next time!
Comment · 5 years ago
Single Point Of Failure
Comment · 5 years ago
One core place that shorting is key (which isn't touched on much) is shorting/going long on commodity futures. Very simplified example below:

If I'm an airline (and my business is dependent on the price of oil) and I think the price of oil will go up, I will hold some amount of oil futures at the current price. If the price of oil rises, my company is "hedged" against that rise. This is good for the buyer of the commodity. If the price of oil goes down, I lose on my future, but my business is fine overall.

Correspondingly, if I'm the seller of a commodity (I own an oilfield), I might short oil futures, in case the price goes down. I make less money selling my oil, but I hopefully make some back on the short

Comment · 6 years ago
Another issue not mentioned is cross-compiling.

If the result of my `sort ` function is dependent on `sizeof(void )` being 8, when I compile from my x86 hardware for a 32-bit only architecture, assumptions go awry.

Note that this isn't likely with something like sort, but definitely is* likely with precomputing values/structs etc.

Comment · 6 years ago
For most countries, this is true. The US is in a unique position because it is the global currency.

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