For me if Christmas eve is a Monday we usually get the whole Monday off, if it’s later in the week we only get a half day. We get from Christmas eve 12 noon to January 1 off normally

ISP around me had policies like “we can provide Usenet except for the binaries trees”

Cubes are the worst of both worlds. You have the noise of open plan, but the lack of visibility of other people like offices

The common refrain of how we’re doomed by climate change and the fact we can’t fix it, so nothing matters anyway has their fingerprints all over it

I see zero subscribers, zero posts. I’m not breaking that streak

If I must

Although dictionaries will show words that significant parts of the population say are wrong, I’m still going to say octopuses is also correct because octopus is an English word and English usually pluralises like that

Octopusen is not common since octopus is too new to get that style of English plural

Of course significant parts of the population spell “than” with an e, or “then” with an a, and/or don’t know the difference between it’s and its

Would you care to pluralise octagon?

There are workflows using LLMs that seem fair to me, for example

• using an LLM to produce a draft, then
• Editing and correcting the LLM draft
• Finding real references and replacing the hallucinated ones
• Correcting LLM style to your style

That seems like more work than doing it properly, but it avoids some of the sticking points of the proper process

LLMs can’t cite. They don’t know what a citation is other than a collection of text of a specific style

You’d be lucky if the number of references equalled the number of referenced items even if you were lucky enough to get real sources out of an LLM

If the student is clever enough to remove the trap reference, the fact that the other references won’t be in the University library should be enough to sink the paper

Legal eagle has a video spelling out which laws are broken. Note that there are specific laws against paying people to vote

Use a throwaway email, drop it as soon as the promotion is over

I can’t say I have ever considered myselfgender fluid due to my gender perfectly fitting the shape of its container (ie me)

His parents were not all that well off. They invested $300,000 in his new company. That’s within the ability of many middle class workers

His parents were employees, not business owners.

Amazon: people like books; people like next day delivery of stuff; people and companies like making stuff and running stuff in Amazon web services

Minecraft: Marcus Persson owned the game studio (and wrote quite a bit of the game) that made Minecraft, lots of people like it, Microsoft was willing to buy it for billions

Kiran Mazumdan-Shaw made beer, people like beer. They then used beer making processes to make biotech medicines - people like being alive and will pay a lot to stay alive, or even just a bit healthier

There have been a couple (or maybe one or a few) that started with very little. A lot more had a gift or loan from a parent for enough to buy land or start a business, often that was less than $100,000

As much as Musk’s family had money before, his initial big money came from his share of his brother and his city guide software “zip2” which they sold to Compaq for a few hundred million. Lots of people have made more complex or bigger programs with no more wealth than an average middle class family.

Then x.com (the 1999 one, a bank) which became part of PayPal which sold to eBay for $1.5 billion which Musk got a share of

Then he made SpaceX then Tesla* and Tesla made him a billionaire through his ownership of a large part of it

*Tesla was made of Musk’s money and A/C Propulsion electric vehicle conversion system. It was incorporated with SpaceX’s incorporation papers with the company name changed. A/C propulsion’s drivetrain was replaced by a new system after a year of production of the roadster

Having listened to ‘good bad billionaire’ for several episodes the formula is

1. Create or inherit a company
2. Do good at it
3. Float it on the stock exchange
4. Now own the bulk of a company whose stock values it at enough that your share is worth over a billion

Or

1. Make an insanely popular game
2. Sell it to Microsoft

Or

1. Be the child of someone who did one of the above

Index funds are pretty incredibly safe. Pick one of the big US indexes and look at the graph since before the global financial crisis

For safety.

When you back in you have good visibility on your way in - you see in and behind the spot you’re taking as you drive past it to line up

When you leave you have excellent visibility ahead as it’s on front of

Also the car is easier to steer into the spot in reverse

I guess some people are really bad drivers

Leave the spot just the opposite way to which you entered the spot. Then try again.

Ideal: exactly centered between whatever defines the spot (lines, cars, kerbs)

Ideal’: close to a kerb and far from the neighboring car/line