bostonsre (u/bostonsre)

bostonsre commented on Anthropic Faces Potentially "Business-Ending" Copyright Lawsuit obsolete.pub/p/anthropic-... · Posted by u/Invictus0

Ajedi32 · a month ago

That's very interesting, because it totally makes sense legally, but the practical effect is ludicrously stupid. The law is effectively forcing companies to spend millions re-scanning the same books over and over for no reason. It'd be like if we had a law which stated "Before you can train an AI, you must light 1 million dollars on fire. After that you can do whatever you want.". It serves no purpose but to waste societal resources on nothing.

bostonsre · a month ago

It needs to hook into the existing legal book supply chain so that authors could potentially get compensated (I doubt they do for used book resale tho..).

bostonsre commented on Terraform Provider for Dominos Pizza registry.terraform.io/pro... · Posted by u/freeqaz

MNThomson · a year ago

Author here. I got nerdsniped at 2AM a few years back, never expected to see this on HN!

bostonsre · a year ago

Do you have to run destroy first to order the same order again a second time?

bostonsre commented on Goldman Sachs: AI Is overhyped, expensive, and unreliable 404media.co/goldman-sachs... · Posted by u/mrzool

pie420 · a year ago

Goldman Sachs has no reason to disseminate valuable market insights and analysis for free. All financial thinkpieces by investment firms should be disregarded as economic manipulation and propaganda

bostonsre · a year ago

They don't have an incentive to share their view of reality until after they make investments that would capitalize on their belief in that view of reality. After they take those positions though, it is in their best interest to inform everyone about what they view to be real. It would seem to be risky for them to try to take positions based on some false narrative on some aspect of the market because if someone else finds and publishes the true narrative, and that becomes the prevailing sentiment, they would be harmed.

bostonsre commented on Vista Equity writes off PluralSight value, after $3.5B buyout axios.com/2024/05/31/vist... · Posted by u/belter

eterm · a year ago

I don't know if it's my own career development, but it felt like the quality of Pluralsight has also taken a nosedive.

I had a bit of career break during the pandemic, so went from being a fairly regular consumer of pluralsight in 2018/9 to only coming back to it fairly recently.

Whereas previously it felt like I could find interesting guides at my level, when I tried to look for similar things now, nothing felt quite right.

Worst still, some of my previous favourite series were no longer available. It seemed really short sighted to destroy so much value.

Even if videos were produced on "old" (i.e. .Net framework) technology, they should be marked as such, not removed from the platform.

They could have been a massive hub of long tail content, instead it feels like they're trapped re-recording and refreshing the same content.

Perhaps it's also just market forces, I think 5 years ago there was a lot more .Net content and perhaps .Net is just a lot less in vogue now.

One of the recent videos on .net benchmarking had serious flaws. I realised half-way through I had seen an article on hacker news about it, but hadn't realised it was the same course. ( https://sergeyteplyakov.github.io/Blog/benchmarking/2023/11/... with hn discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38137879 )

bostonsre · a year ago

It was not great to work at a company Vista acquired company ~10 years ago. Engineering talent fled, code quality dropped, product prices were jacked up, etc. I guess the company I worked for was then sold to another pe company in 2017, but it's not public if Vista made money or not. I would guess they're still using cold fusion to this day.

bostonsre commented on "Fake Chinese income" mortgages fuel Toronto real estate bubble: HSBC bank leaks thebureau.news/p/fake-chi... · Posted by u/eswat

beiller · 2 years ago

Makes sense I wasn't thinking about the full on laundering aspects. But even so, if the real estate is used in laundering, it will eventually have to be sold to get back clean money. This should still run up prices at the start, and run them down in the end. So I think the majority of the point still stands: there should be an uptick in sales (which there is not). They could be speculating on top of laundering, in which case they are taking some losses. We are -20% from peak. The time will come when they (the launderers) will need liquidity and sell which has not come. Will it ever come?

bostonsre · 2 years ago

I think they want to get their money out of china and parked into a safe place. If they pay off their mortgage, they don't want to find a new place to park their money, they can just keep the house as an asset. I think a lot of investing in china is real estate based and is part of the reason that market is struggling over there so much now. It would make sense for them to continue to follow that investing model when exporting their wealth to other countries.

bostonsre commented on Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees theverge.com/2024/1/25/24... · Posted by u/mikece

rsanek · 2 years ago

this doesn't require any advanced analysis, it's simple supply and demand. offer up more shares to a market without changing demand and the price per share must go down.

think about it the other way -- why would a company ever do a stock buyback if changing the amount of issued stock didn't change the price? there's a reason buybacks are considered essentially the same as dividends.

bostonsre · 2 years ago

> why would a company ever do a stock buyback if changing the amount of issued stock didn't change the price?

Buy low/sell high maybe? They buy their stock when the price is low and they think it is undervalued so that they can sell it later when the price more accurately reflects the value or even better when the price is overvaluing their stock.

bostonsre commented on Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees theverge.com/2024/1/25/24... · Posted by u/mikece

seydor · 2 years ago

Last time the stock market was surging, everyone was hiring. This time it's different

bostonsre · 2 years ago

Is it all due to inflation and the interest rates? Shouldn't these companies be able to issue stock to get some cheap capital to continue growth/hiring? Or anyone know why this is happening?

bostonsre commented on Study: Field Drug Tests Generate Nearly 30k Bogus Arrests a Year techdirt.com/2024/01/17/s... · Posted by u/rntn

anigbrowl · 2 years ago

No, I gave yo a general report on the topic that cited one instance of a lawsuit. I don't give a shit about police morale. They are generally well paid, have massive benefits including all sorts of legal immunity, incredibly powerful unions, and often net up to half of municipal budgets. It's not a thankless job, politicians fall over themselves to do photo ops with police and talk about how great they are. If cops have a morale problem maybe they should worker harder at treating everyone with respect and upholding their constitutional rights instead of thorwing money at concepts like 'killology'.

bostonsre · 2 years ago

From the abstract:

> This paper explores this case in detail and its potential impact.

You talk about them like they are the enemy. Lots of people talk about them like you without a word of thanks without acknowledging how fucked we would be without the good ones out there. I am thankful we aren't living in a country where there is complete anarchy or horrible police corruption like in Mexico.

Municipal budgets aren't great and their pay and benefits should be better for the work they do. You and I being on this forum probably means we are paid way too much for not real jobs screwing around on computers. There is a reason we aren't cops and their hiring isn't great. It is a hard job where you literally risk your life and literally deal with the worst parts of society.

There are guns in America. It doesn't matter whether we think that's right or not, that's the world we live in. There are criminals out there, they exist. Should cops carry around tasers only? I would like my local police force to effectively deter local criminals. Lax laws and lax deterrents are taken advantage of, we are not some peaceful species.

bostonsre commented on Study: Field Drug Tests Generate Nearly 30k Bogus Arrests a Year techdirt.com/2024/01/17/s... · Posted by u/rntn

anigbrowl · 2 years ago

A lot of them are not bright by design, departments select for obedience rather than intelligence, and at least one person sued and lost after learning that they were rejected because of having too high an IQ: https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/jordan-v...

Here's you're equating cops' default behavior with doing their job of law enforcement, while overlooking the fact that they often don't perform that job well because they discount reasonable possibilities that initially suspect activity is not actually illegal, and reflexively waive issues like presumption of innocence, 4th amendment limitations and so on. Read up on police training, which is terrible in the US.

bostonsre · 2 years ago

You cite one instance and equate that to a lot of them are not bright by design. I am sure there are indeed some cops that are not great and some that have lower intelligence. The bad cases are usually highlighted, while those that serve their country honorably and professionally get zero recognition. It is an incredibly hard and thankless job and we will be a lot worse off as a country in the future if we keep shouting them down and denigrating them instead of giving constructive criticism about the system. The better ones will become more and more discouraged and people will have more and more to complain about in the future.

bostonsre commented on Study: Field Drug Tests Generate Nearly 30k Bogus Arrests a Year techdirt.com/2024/01/17/s... · Posted by u/rntn

alan-hn · 2 years ago

Unfortunately police don't tend to be very bright and seem to constantly try to find things to pin people for, it's what they're trained to do. Drugs being illegal is a bad idea partially because of this issue. This is just another example of how drug prohibition causes more harm than good.

bostonsre · 2 years ago

Their job is to enforce the law. It doesn't seem quite right to denigrate them and call them not bright for doing their job. Shouldn't you be blaming someone else and not the people in the trenches? Also, I'm not sure its so black and white about how drug prohibition has caused more harm than good. I definitely wouldn't want to live in Portland or SF and some of the people stuck in the throws of inescapable addiction might disagree with you.