Xylakant (u/Xylakant)

Xylakant commented on Why insurers worry the world could soon become uninsurable cnbc.com/2025/08/08/clima... · Posted by u/mooreds

_carbyau_ · 14 days ago

I think they are using Insurance as a predictive indicator of how terrible things are. So you are largely agreeing.

IE:

1. insurance spreads a hurt across a society, using money as an instrument.

2. If insurance doesn't work anymore then the hurt is too large for society!

This linking of 1 and 2 may not be entirely true due to insurance not necessarily being a perfectly efficient "spreader" across society. But I think in practical terms it is close enough.

Xylakant · 13 days ago

The linking doesn’t need to be perfect to have real-world consequences: as the article explains, dues to increasing heavy weather events, home owner insurance is harder or even impossible to obtain. Without HOI, you won’t get a mortgage, because that would mean the bank partially enters into that risk. No mortgage means a lot of people cannnot afford to own a house or flat.

Xylakant commented on Why insurers worry the world could soon become uninsurable cnbc.com/2025/08/08/clima... · Posted by u/mooreds

lazyasciiart · 14 days ago

Because they’re the ones who are supposed to pay money when shit blows up, and they are finally at the point where the giant flaming signs that it’s going to all blow up are within foreseeable shareholder ownership periods.

Xylakant · 14 days ago

Insurance is supposed to average out small probability high impact events across a large number of smaller payments from more people. It is entirely expected to loose money on insurance as a single customer - that's usually great. It means your house hasn't burned down, you're in good healt and you bike hasn't been stolen. If we're now moving towards a world where due to man-made climate change certain classes of risks are no longer insurable, everyone looses.

Xylakant commented on Exit Tax: Leave Germany before your business gets big eidel.io/exit-tax-leave-g... · Posted by u/olieidel

nolverostae · 17 days ago

> You are signing paper that claims you never left Germany!!!

No you aren't. You are signing a paper that says a managerial decision about the shares of the company happened in Germany. Where you live does not matter. You just have to do a board meeting, and be physically present in Germany during the meeting.

In fact, you likely want to keep any proof of your travel from a different country, which makes it obvious to the authorities that you don't spend all your time there.

There's multiple variants though, this is just one of them. You can also pay someone to manage the shares (and of course contractually bind them to not do anything without permission).

Edit: Also, to be clear, you don't need to manage the company from Germany. You only need to manage the holding company from Germany, where the only managerial decision is related to the shares themselves.

Xylakant · 17 days ago

If your company bylaws are set up properly, you can do board meetings via video calls just fine.

Very few acts require actual presence in the country. What is required is that you can, at any time, enter Germany to perform those acts - which shouldn’t be a problem if you are German Citizen.

Xylakant commented on Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year helsinkitimes.fi/finland/... · Posted by u/DaveZale

bluescrn · 22 days ago

Instead, there's a push to reduce limits ever closer to zero.

30mph was close to the sweet spot and had been for decades. Or it would have been with a reasonable level of enforcement.

But as the ideological and/or climate-driven war on cars ramped up there's been a big push to reduce ever-more areas to 20mph, which is just too slow, especially when deployed widely/indiscriminately as it has been in Wales. (Used very sparingly, e.g. outside schools, 20mph limits were a good 'take particular care' signal to motorists - but that effect is lost when they're widespread)

Is it really about safety or is it about 'fuck cars'?

Xylakant · 22 days ago

If you look at outcomes, 50km/h (30mph) is much less safe than 30km/h (20mph). If you look at the physics, that’s not surprising - stopping distances increase super linear. At the point where a 30km/h car would have come to a stop, a 50km/h car still impacts with 30km/h.

On the other hand, average speeds in populated areas usually are way lower than 30km/h, so lowering the top speed to 30km has negligible effect on travel times.

If you consider 50km/h the sweet spot, you prioritize vehicle speed over the very real risk of bodily harm for all other traffic participants.

Xylakant commented on Tesla must pay portion of $329M damages after fatal Autopilot crash, jury says cnbc.com/2025/08/01/tesla... · Posted by u/koolba

wouldbecouldbe · 23 days ago

Yet of all the traffic accidents, the one you describe never happens. So it’s not much difference

Xylakant · 23 days ago

It happens all of the time. Cars veering off the road and maiming pedestrians is a fairly common occurrence.

Sorry to cite German sources, but google translate should help you out

August 2024: 8 Year old “caught by a car on the pavement” https://www.swr.de/swraktuell/baden-wuerttemberg/ulm/kind-be... October 2024: A Mother and two children killed by an SUV that “veered off the road” https://www.merkur.de/deutschland/baden-wuerttemberg/erfasst... May 2025: 2 Children injured, on their way home from school https://www.focus.de/panorama/welt/20-meter-von-schule-entfe... July 2025: 2 pedestrians injured https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/starnberg/starnberg-aut...

Xylakant commented on When we get Komooted bikepacking.com/plog/when... · Posted by u/atakan_gurkan

tdiff · a month ago

> For dreams and craft, I have my side projects.

In very infrequent cases can you achieve any noticeable (for society) results without being part of a large org.

Xylakant · a month ago

That depends on what you consider noticeable. A lot of things are noticeable (and noticed) on the local level. The folks that organise reading sessions with the kids a my sons school. The people managing the local hockey club. People doing local education in IT. Organizing the neighborhood meetup. The people that do hack and tell. Blog about what they’re doing by as fun projects.

They may not be known beyond their local communities, but they have impact on society. Most of them are contend with that. If you’re looking to change the world, then that’s likely not good enough, but then again, if you’re looking to do that it’s unlikely that you will achieve that as a rank and file employee in a corporation.

Xylakant commented on Windsurf employee #2: I was given a payout of only 1% what my shares where worth twitter.com/premqnair/sta... · Posted by u/rfurmani

fragmede · a month ago

Dilution is where things get fucky.

So you're working at this startup. Lets say it's worth $10 million. To make things simple, in this company, there are 2 people, the fucker, the CEO, the guy that started it all. He holds 90,000 RSUs, each worth $100, so $9 million, and the fuckee, you, who holds 10,000 RSUs, each worth $100, for a cool million.

Here's where the fucker fucks the fuckee, ie you. The company does a round, and then creates, out of thin air, a billion shares (1,000,000,000), and issues them to the new investors. Lets say the company reached unicorn status this round, which is to say a valuation of a billion.

Holy hell a billion! But wait now there's 1,000,100,000 total shares out there, and the valuation of a billion, divided by the new shares, means that each share, of which you only have 10,000 of, is now worth just under one dollar.

That's right, your $1 million just turned into $10,000. Which isn't nothing, I'd love to come across a random $10k I didn't know I had. But that's just, like, one really nice vacation for you and the kids, which you haven't seen enough of because you've been working so hard at this startup, and not, like, a college fund for the kid that's showing aptitude at engineering and that you were hoping was gonna go to MIT.

Dilution is inevitable, there's no avoiding it. The scenario I presented is just to show you an example of how dilution fucks you. If things go well, would you rather have 10% of $1 million or 0.1% of $1 billion?

For more, it depends on how you like your information. ChatGPT's got stuff like ISOs vs NSOs pretty well covered, Investopedia's got a lot of good stuff if you'd rather it that way.

Xylakant · a month ago

You are misrepresenting how dilution works - and dilution usually is not what fucks you. Dilution is fairly straightforward - someone ponies up money and gets a share of the company. The valuation that gets handed around is usually what’s called “post money” - how much is the company worth after investors have paid in their money. In a simple example, matching your numbers, a company that is worth 10 million, with 10 million shares, each valued at 1 dollar with a 90/10 split finds someone who invests a billion dollars at 1 dollar per share. These shares are created as part of the acquisition. The value of the shares doesn’t change - the company, post money, now is valued at 1 billion 10 million and has 1 billion 10 million shares, each worth 1 dollar. It also happens to have 1 billion in cash at hand. No change in value for anyone here, but dilution happened - the person that owned 10% of the company pre-investment now only owns 0.1% - but the value of each share is still the same, which means they still own the same number of shares, each at the same valuation with the same total value.

The problem tends to be elsewhere - as part of the deal, the investor asked that his share get preferred treatment in the next round - a liquidation preference which grants them the right to first take their investment of the table and then, whatever is left is distributed. The company gets sold for 1 billion. The investor takes the billion that they invested off the table. There’s nothing left to be distributed. Your shares are suddenly worthless - just as the founders.

Xylakant commented on Windsurf employee #2: I was given a payout of only 1% what my shares where worth twitter.com/premqnair/sta... · Posted by u/rfurmani

munksbeer · a month ago

I don't know how this works, but my question is, on a funding round, couldn't the C suite just allocate themselves additional equity in proportion so that their total value remains the same?

Xylakant · a month ago

They could, but the shares represent value - and that money needs to come from somewhere. Simple, but extreme example: A company is valued at 10 million gobbledoks, and the C-Suite holds 10%, representing 1 Million valuation. Now the company takes 10 Million gobbledoks Investment that end up in cash on the companies bank account. This raises the the valuation to 20 Million.

Under simple dilution rules, the Investor takes 50%, and the existing shareholders are diluted to 50% of their stake - the C-Suite owns 5% of 2 Million, 10 million as before.

If the C-Suite demands that their equity proportion remains at 1%, they’d suddenly own a stake representing 2 million valuation. That difference needs to come from somewhere.

Xylakant commented on Windsurf employee #2: I was given a payout of only 1% what my shares where worth twitter.com/premqnair/sta... · Posted by u/rfurmani

djoldman · a month ago

They can easily, they just don't.

Xylakant · a month ago

Legally speaking, it’s probably possible. Practically speaking it almost certainly a guarantee that the company will never see outside investment. On every round someone would need to pony up the cash to fill that employees stock. Anti-dilution clauses exist, but they never work like that.

Such a privilege is also likely to be almost worthless - if the company succeeds and the round makes it worth more, you’ll win even with dilution. If the company doesn’t, then other clauses such as liquidation preferences will make your stock worthless, regardless of how much you own.

Xylakant commented on AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks arstechnica.com/ai/2025/0... · Posted by u/jonbaer

al_borland · a month ago

Maybe with Orion instead of Safari?

Apple really needs to update Safari to let people choose their search engine, instead of just having the list of blessed search engines to choose from.

Xylakant · a month ago

Kagi has an extension to add itself. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default/s...