The stock started the month at $208 and was down to $185 on 11/19 when earnings were released. The next day (when this article was released) it had opened at $196 and dropped to close at $180. A week later, it’s sitting at $176.

I guess you can call all that a nothingburger because it’s only down a few percent, but I think the story is that any downward slide after announcing blockbuster earnings is… unusual, and therefore indicative of something bigger going on. At the very least you’d expect it to arrest the slow and steady slide it’s been on this month, but the fact that the positive sentiment from that incredible earnings report didn’t even last a full trading day is noteworthy.

To be fair, the article is over a week old. Not sure why it got reposted now.

That was the punchline to the last comic.

Unaware or into it?

Everyone knows that the only year with 25 months was 2020.

Which is fine and dandy until the gold miners realize that they aren’t going to find enough gold to make it worthwhile and stop buying shovels and the market value of your company depends on your ability to continue selling shovels. Twenty five years after the dot com bubble burst, shovel seller Cisco is only just now reaching the same stock price they peaked at in early April of 2000.

real sales of physical bullion on the domestic market

If you’re not planning to live there long, I don’t think you shouldn’t be buying; that’s one of the few times I’d choose to rent. I guess maybe if home prices are rising then you can accrue some equity, but then you risk buying at the top of the market. I genuinely how it would compare to a fixed rate mortgage though.

If you think interest rates are going to decline, you can easily refinance a fixed rate mortgage as well. I don’t see any benefit in that scenario, but there’s a downside in that if rates don’t go down you still have that balloon payment to worry about, and if you don’t qualify for a traditional mortgage, you’re really in a bind.

Maybe if you’re flipping a house it makes sense, especially if you want to minimize cash outflow. Otherwise, there are so many more downsides that are much more severe than the mild upsides that you might gain. Perhaps there’s a few niche applications that I haven’t considered though.

Not sure if this is what they were talking about, but balloon mortgages are a thing here too. I can’t ever imagine considering one, but they exist.

If he extended the analogy just a little I think it might make more sense to you?

The “freeze up” is when all those thoughts are competing for attention and you can’t focus on just one, so you either choose your favorite color (your current hyperfixation for example), or literally just sit there, not doing anything of value. The dysfunction literally is the inability to choose one of those thoughts and run with it, at least not without expending significant amounts of energy to do so (meaning we get tired out while doing less) or coming up with some system to trick our brain into choosing and focusing on something.

Neurotypical brains have many of the same traits that ADHD and autistic people have… just not as many, and they’re not as crippling. It’s like pain in that regard - everyone experiences pain, but someone with chronic pain may have difficulty doing normal tasks, or if the pain is bad enough, unable to do those tasks at all.

In the case of ADHD I can take some medication and sometimes my brain acts like a normal person. Without trying, I realize a couple hours later that I accomplished a bunch of stuff without doing or thinking any differently. I just… suddenly can do stuff. First time I tried medication it really was magical; I didn’t feel or think any differently, I just… did stuff. It was weird.

It’s not just prioritization, it’s just picking one task from the list and going with it. The longer my list gets, the worse it gets, because holy shit that’s a long list. Each item makes it more and more difficult to focus on just one.

It’s like a crowd of people yelling at you all at once. Someone at a press conference or outside a courtroom can point to a reporter and everyone shuts up to let that one ask a question, answer it, and then point to the next one. The person doing the pointing is the executive function in the brain directing the flow of questions from the crowd, forcing everybody to quiet down while each question gets answered.

It’s not that the questions or reporters are prioritized… they may not even get an even distribution of questions because the person may be choosing favorites, or looking at the loudest or most obnoxious person trying to get their attention. Just the act of picking a person and quieting everyone else long enough to focus on them, to be able to hear and answer their question, before moving on to the next, that’s what makes the difference.

Someone who is well organized may have a press conference that is regimented. Questions have to be put into a list and someone is sorting that list and ensuring that every person gets their turn. There’s no shouting or jostling to get that person’s attention, it’s just a smooth process of moving from question to question. Like a debate.

My brain has no pointer… everyone is shouting questions and me and I may look at a person and try to understand them and shout back at them, but more than anything I just want to run home and do something that I want to do rather than be yelled at. Eventually I feel burned out and run away to do exactly that - the defendant who comes out of the courtroom, has a bunch of reporters yelling at them, and is just trying to get to his car to get away.

It’s a perfect analogy because it seems like an improvement because it seems like an improvement and on paper it is. But as I got a bit older I realized that:

• I primarily used one color, meaning that it would run out of ink before the others
• The colors that didn’t get used would be gummed up by the time I did switch to them because it didn’t have a proper cap
• The barrel of the pen was wider to accommodate those extra cartridges inside making it more uncomfortable to use.
• The pen was more expensive than a box of cheap pens, so I only had one; since I’d lose pens all the time this meant that I’d have to use a cheap pen anyway, if I even had any.

Like AI, it’s a novelty that is worse in almost every way while appearing to convey an illusory benefit!

Machine learning is not why companies are dumping hundreds of billions of dollars into building data centers so they can earn tens of billions of dollars; it’s specifically large language models. Machine learning existed before the LLM boom and had real benefits, but has barely seen a fraction of the investment into it that LLMs have, because it didn’t have a bunch of tech bros speculating that artificial superintelligence would make them trillionaires.

Anyone remember when WeWork filed their S-1 and interest in their IPO crashed in the ensuing reality check? This seems like it will be so much worse, at least in terms of numbers. I just hope we don’t have to wait that long to pop this bubble.

Because teacher Christa McAuliffe was onboard. I believe they previously broadcast earlier shuttle launches, but by 1986 they were no longer novel; putting a teacher onboard who was planning to teach some lessons in space made educators more interested and so many schools pulled out the TVs to show the launch live. Turned out to be a different kind of education than they expected.

Dowsing rods are basically chance. Facial recognition has well known problems with non-white faces.

I love that this is like that evolution of man painting, but showing how script evolved over the years.

Just a reminder that Musk’s original timeline to Mars was to launch in 2024 and land this year. Meanwhile, the Starship rocket(s) meant to accomplish this, as well as the lunar landings have only just had 6 successful launches out of 11 attempts.

Furthermore, none of those launches even attempted low earth orbit (LEO) which is roughly 120+ miles up. The delta-v to go to the moon is much lower, but the fuel for that has to get into LEO first, along with fuel for descent, ascent, and the trip back to Earth. The Apollo missions accomplished this by using a truly colossal rocket, the Saturn V. Incidentally, the Soviet’s approach was the N1, which blew up on all four attempts to launch it. While Starship is planned to be as big or bigger than the Saturn V, which much greater payload capacity, the actual lunar module (LEM) was a much smaller craft and was left at the moon to avoid return fuel, while the Starship lander is the rocket itself (or the top stage) and meant to be returnable.

In order to achieve this, it will need much more fuel and therefore can’t fly a single rocket to accomplish this. SpaceX plans to accomplish this via refueling in space, a novel technology that has yet to be demonstrated and therefore adds more uncertainty into their time budget to work out the kinks. All of this brings into question the timelines for Artemis as extremely optimistic.

Of course, the original goal (for Musk) was to go to Mars, which is like the jump from LEO to lunar landing, as the distance jumps from 120+ miles to 250,000 miles and then to 140,000,000 miles. Additionally, you can reach the moon in 3 days, while a trip to Mars takes 9 months. The difficulty curve is exponential and they’re nowhere close to this goal. Naturally, Musk is “50/50 confident” that they can launch a mission in 2026 in remarks made this year.

All of this to say - while SpaceX has some incredibly smart engineers who are passionate about what they do, Elon Musk is a liar and a fraud who has an abysmal track record of ridiculously optimistic timeline predictions and should never be trusted.

It’s so upsetting to me that everyone (including the title) have focused on Steve Jobs while completely ignoring a much more worthy person: Dr Norman Borlaug. At least the linked page has him first.

TIL what a GGUF file is.