It isn’t just corporations that have ruined everything, it’s spammers and scammers and cybercriminals too. Searching any topic these days is a crapshoot, with a high likelihood of falling into a spammer’s tarpit.

To me it feels like the internet is evolving into a virtual Dark Forest. We float around in these little bubbles of sanity, hiding amid a yawning expanse of seething chaos.

And YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, BitTorrent…

People have a lot more choices now than they did in the bad old days of high cable bills. If streaming services charge too much people will just bail back to free stuff.

There’s a lot of advantages that simply come with using a more popular distribution. For one, having a larger pool of package maintainers (and therefore more packages) is pretty important. Have you ever tried using NixOS as a daily driver? I did a few years ago. Very annoying having to create my own packages for so many different (and relatively common) things I wanted to use.

No, but Russian bullets will! Not one step back, comrade!

Should’ve eaten some sauerkraut and fried onions! The manliest of all vegetables! Has the bonus effect of repelling ladies up to 5 feet away!

Taxing profits just means the company will borrow from investors (by issuing bonds) and then instead of profits paying out as dividends the company shows losses from interest payments.

I would rather try land value taxes.

Putting a huge percentage of a company up for sale on the open market is going to tank the price no matter what the fundamentals are. It’s simple supply and demand: you’re putting a huge glut of supply on the market and not putting similar demand. All those sell orders will begin expiring as the offers drop in price.

The largest owner of shares putting everything on the market at once is strong signal that the stock is overpriced and so buyers will react accordingly.

By the way, TSLA has a P/E ratio in the 60’s so it’s not exactly a great deal anyway.

I’m neither defending nor attacking capitalism. I’m just pointing out that putting heavy taxes on illiquid assets leads to huge disruptions.

The increase in value of shares above book is called unrealized gains. They can be here today and gone tomorrow. Taxing makes no sense unless you’re going to reimburse the taxes if the shares drop in price.

The whole system seems like a sham to me. If one artist has fans that listen 24/7 and another artist has fans that only listen for one hour a day (but that artist is all they listen to), it should be the same. Each person’s account should have its own “pot” out of the subscription fee that only they can allocate to the artists they listen to. Duration of listening shouldn’t matter at all.

How does that work though? Presumably he’s not paying subscription fees on all of his bot accounts, so they must be free accounts. I don’t use Spotify, so I don’t even know why they would have free accounts.

Unless he’s hacked other people’s accounts, then that would make sense for the seriousness of these charges.

Shares aren’t always given to you as a reward. If you are the sole founder of a company then you create the shares yourself and decide who to give (or sell) them to. If you choose not to take your company public on the stock market, then what your stake in the company is worth is unclear. Sure, the company may have assets (equipment, properties, resources) but that’s only the book value. The true market value of the company might be much higher.

Look at a software company. The software they create might never be sold, only used to provide services. The market value of the company could far exceed the book value of all the desks, chairs, computers, and other stuff the company has at the office. But you don’t really know that if the company never goes public. So how do you tax it?

if he were able to convert all of his $241.8B to cash

That’s the assumption everyone makes but it’s a false premise. If he tried to sell all his shares it would cause the stock price to collapse, his wealth would plummet, and his companies would be in jeopardy. Far from being able to give all of them $1.6M, they would all likely lose their jobs.

That’s also the issue with taxing them. If someone owns a billion dollar company (based on the price of their shares of stock) we call them a billionaire but they might not have very much money in cash (say a few million). Suppose we want to tax them 10% of their wealth: that’s $100 million! They don’t have enough cash to pay for that, so they have to sell shares, which causes the share price to go down, which negatively affects the company and the workers.

I think the issue is with how we view ownership of a business vs other things, like a yacht. The yacht can be sold to pay taxes and it won’t affect other people. The company cannot. In a lot of ways, the company isn’t just a possession of the owner, it’s a responsibility. These days I feel like we don’t talk enough about responsibility.

Using AI to provide services or crawlers to scan the internet for pages to add to search evinces is different from what this guy did with bots. Those use cases are not pretending to be a legit user in order to collect money.

What this guy did — using bots to fake listen to music — is in the same category as using bots to click on ads that you put on your own web page: it’s serving no legitimate purpose and only exists to defraud businesses which paid for the ads (or Spotify which is paying the royalties)…

No it’s actually way faster. You can swipe whole words in less than a second. It’s like writing with pen and paper but each letter is actually a whole word.

Just dealing with this tonight!

You skipped a crucial step: first you gotta raise a few hundred million in VC funding from Silicon Valley bigwigs!

As much as we all would love to see it happen, such “laws” are known as bills of attainder. The US constitution explicitly forbids these.

I have carbon steel and stainless steel, as well as cast iron. I don’t use nonstick whatsoever. It is well known that induction doesn’t perform well with carbon steel. The issue is carbon steel’s poor heat conductivity which makes it very difficult for heat to spread up the sides of the pan. Gas doesn’t have this issue because the flames and hot gases wrap around the sides of the pan and heat them directly. Having hot pan sides is critical to prevent the eggs from sticking when you tilt the pan to roll up a French omelette.

As for warping? Just search on YouTube. There’s tons of videos showing how easy it is to warp a pan on induction: just use high heat. This is never an issue on gas because of the superior evenness of heating, so you can crank gas as high as you want. Yes, you can turn the induction heat way down to avoid warping but then your performance and responsiveness goes out the window and you spend a ton of time waiting around for the pan to preheat.

Another issue is when you’re searing meats, frying eggs, or sauteeing veggies and basting by spooning hot fat over them. To do this you need to tilt the pan at an angle so the fat pools on one side and then rapidly baste the food. Unfortunately, induction burners stop heating as you try to lift and tilt the pan. Plus the sides of the pan aren’t getting hot so the fat cools when it reaches the sides of the pan as you tilt. You can still do the technique but it’s much slower, clumsier, and less effective without gas (which continues heating no matter how you tilt the pan).

Here’s some videos on the technique:

Steak

Eggs

I wouldn’t exactly call it niche if you’re an Asian family who cooks with a wok every day. Yes, Technology Connections videos are heavily focused on the North American market because this is where Alec’s audience is largely from.

North Americans love gas stoves because of how simple and performant they are. North Americans also tend to have a fascination with wanting to cook with professional, restaurant-grade equipment (including ultra-expensive Sub Zero refrigerators and freezers, for some reason).

Having said all that, induction cooktops are still pretty niche in North America because large ones with large cooking surfaces that can handle large pans (without creating intense hot spots that literally warp and destroy your pans) are insanely expensive here ($4000++). Even the best Wolf professional induction ranges cannot do what a gas range does with carbon steel pans: heat the bottom and sides of the pan evenly. You always get intense heat where the bottom of the pan makes contact and then the sides are hundreds of degrees cooler, which means your French omelettes stick to the sides of the pan and get ruined.

This induction wok device from the video is cute but it only works with woks that are the exact same shape as the one included with the device. A carbon steel pan with a flat bottom and gently sloped sides won’t work at all with this thing.

See, the thing Alec complains about with gas stoves (the flames going around the pan and heating up the room) is actually a feature for people who know how to cook and want their pans to heat evenly and perform really well. There’s no electric stove on the market (radiant or induction) that can replicate this!

Russia waited until Trump was out of office to attack Ukraine. I think they just would’ve waited longer and in the mean time cozied up to him even more to try to make the situation more favourable for the attack.

The reason they attacked was because they thought Biden was weak. If you’ll recall, in the beginning the US had to have a debate just to give themselves permission to send Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine.

My rabbit never bit me even once over his entire life. He gave lots of kisses though. And he loved coming over for pets and then running and jumping and spinning around in the air.

Every rabbit has a different personality. They aren’t the smartest pets around but they can be trained not to do the things you don’t want them to do, such as biting. They remember best when you get their attention with something that provokes a fear based response, such as a sharp “no!” That’s all it took for my bunny.