shaftway

Cash App is owned by Block, and Block has an existing banking license (an Industrial Loan Company chartered in Utah in 2021), and has a new license application is progress (a National Trust Bank Charter filed just last month). I happen to know that internally Jack was saying things like "we are a bank", and "we can use this license to do all sorts of banking things."

Clearly this is evidence that they can't be trusted as a bank, and should have those licenses revoked.

I 100% guarantee that this source of truth for this is either in google3 or git-on-borg and is being mirrored to GitHub for external use. There aren't a lot of public catch-all repos or public micro repos published by Google. Given that, GitHub is a reasonable choice.

My guess is that not meeting these commitments will actually help Oracle.

Oracle has been sitting on their heap of cash for a while now. They've had a lot of locked-in customers for a while. But as they started to bleed customers they looked for new revenue streams. I think the lawsuits filled that niche for a while

Eventually transforming themselves into an AWS clone became the plan, and last year there were all sorts of deals announced. But a lot of those deals were basically expectations, and Oracle didn't have a lot of guarantees that they were going to get the spend. They probably figured they had the OpenAI business and if that didn't pan out then they could offer database services to their existing customers. But to get any hope of any of that they need to lay out the cash upfront, to build the data centers and fill them.

But their existing customers hate them. Nobody will switch to Oracle willingly, certainly not for any kind of hosting. And Oracle bonds are Rated at BBB-, one step above junk status, so nobody wants to lend them money. They're shedding employees as fast as they can because they can't raise cash.

Ultimately, I expect them to renege on their datacenter contracts. But I think that'll probably be fine, because nobody was really going to use them anyway. The penalties are probably minor and Oracle will walk away from this whole thing without any of the obligations, and with a much smaller workforce that costs far less to maintain.

And then they'll go back to their rent-seeking. My guess is that in 2 or 3 years you'll see Oracle try to do a bunch of acquisitions of the modern tech stack to try to regain relevance and re-capture some of their lost market, and then go back to their old rent-seeking behavior.

I hear MongoDB recently lost their CEO; bet that makes them a good chunk cheaper......

There is zero chance I would approach a kid on their own that isn't mine. Because there is a very non-zero chance that someone would accuse me of that. If it gets to charges, even if I do successfully defend myself, then my name is mud and it costs me a ton.

I'd call security too. Not my monkey, not my circus.

I appreciate looking at it from another point of view, but no. We worked with a child therapist and checked in fairly regularly on progress and goals. We considered that aspect of it, but there were a few signs that this wasn't the case.

He wasn't very good at not getting caught. Half the time we caught him it was because he'd fall asleep watching videos and we'd find the laptop in his bed in the morning. Or some of the approaches just weren't very clever. At one point he took a computer from somewhere else in the house. He wasn't going to be able to put it back, so there was no way we wouldn't have found out.

This fit with his general problem-solving ability. He knew what he wanted, and he'd devise a way to get it, but he never thought things through after that. The consequences didn't matter; just like an addict looking for their next fix.

The addiction shifted a few times too. It wasn't always YouTube, but it was usually around technology (there was a short stint where it was about solving Rubik's Cubes, and maybe another around Lego).

Having a child with technology addiction, the struggle is real. It was my first experience dealing with real addiction. My son wanted to watch YouTube videos all night long. It's easy to say "don't do that"; it's harder to make it actually happen. He was 7.

We'd take devices and lock them up, but in the middle of the night while we were asleep he'd find a way. He'd plan it out during the day. He'd borrow his friends' school Chromebook, hide it in his room, download videos for offline viewing, and then wake up at 1:00 AM and binge watch.

We set up security cameras and would punish him when we caught him, but it didn't matter, because all he wanted was to watch videos, and no punishment mattered. He was going to watch them anyway. We locked devices in a safe, and during the day he'd figure out how to pull up security video and get an idea of the combination, and try every one close to that until he got in.

We considered locking him in his room at night, but rejected it because of safety and bathroom issues. Eventually we had to set up alarms around the house that would wake us up every time he got up. It took years of our sleep and mental health suffering, but we eventually broke him of it. Or he grew out of it. Who knows.

Technology is ubiquitous today. The schools require it. Society demands it. It's like if every house had a heroin dispenser. How would you prevent a junkie from getting their fix?

I want to always be able to do the next thing without worrying about getting to a point in my life where I'll need money to survive that I can't earn.

How do I do that?

Right now the next thing is to build neat stuff in my garage wood shop. One of the next things is going to be traveling in comfort. After that the next thing might be learning to fly a plane. But some day I'm going to be in a nursing home, and I don't want to suffer or be a burden on my family. The only real answer I see that gives me that kind of freedom (freedom from worrying) is to earn money now.

The billion dollar question is unnecessarily short-sighted and hedonistic. It advocates that you sell your future self short by doing what your present self wants. We are ever-changing bags of meat, and what you want in 10 years is almost certainly not going to be what you want now.

It's basically contingent on the AGs suing those companies as well.

> and paying the same amount, split between the two companies.

So it's a bucket of crabs

> On merchants who netted ginger, cinnamon and rhubarb from the Nile. In medieval price lists, a pound of ginger sold for the price of a sheep; a pound of saffron, the price of a horse.

A modern horse costs $3000 - $8000. Saffron at the grocery store costs $5 - $20 per gram, but you can get it for wholesale at $1000 - $5000 per pound.

So saffron is about the same affordability now, even though it's more common.

Both. AI code review is built-in, but there's always a second human in the loop.

I'm concerned that there are people pushing on the code generation front, the code reviewing front, and the laziness front. Eventually they're going to all meet in the middle, and there will be a significant number of engineers who are using AI to write and review the code, rubber stamp it, and push it into prod, with disasterous results.

I used the Microsoft Surface Duo, and the experience was terrible. I carry a Pixel 10 Fold, and 90% of the time I use it closed. But when I want to watch a video, or I want to show someone something. The bezel very much ruins that experience. And the Duo went even further by having hidden pixels, which made some UIs completely unusable.

That said, I hardly think that foldable is the peak. I'd prefer a rollable phone that I can expand the screen on, with maybe an edge display.

And the price is the real kicker. For the vast majority of the Android population, a phone at a price point about $1000 is just a non-starter.

Thanks for the assist, I typed it up from memory.

Not a fix for the battery, but if you're on Android, enable developer settings and change your animations to 0.5x speed (there are three settings to change). Every OS animation will take half as long. It makes an aging phone feel much snappier.

> "In a worst case scenario, the hillside can liquefy and actually slide into the community," Assembly member Pilar Schiavo, D-Santa Clarita, said at a news conference last month.

Once again, proving that Idiocracy (2006) was prophetic, and not just satire.