topspin (u/topspin) - Readit News

topspin commented on Luce: First Electric Ferrari ferrari.com/en-US/auto/fe... · Posted by u/kaizenb

beAbU · 2 days ago

I had the same thought, but the article starts with "first look at the interior". So maybe the exterior does not exist yet?

topspin · 2 days ago

It's exists. Car and Driver and other sites have photos.

Obviously it's weird to not showcase the exterior of a Ferrari, that being pretty much the entire point of Ferrari. The cynic in me can't help but think this may be due to the fact that it looks like a lowered Hyundai with a body kit[1].

[1] https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a70279106/ferrari-luce-ev-...

topspin commented on The Great Unwind occupywallst.com/yen... · Posted by u/jart

mempko · 8 days ago

You're right that $566B alone isn't a black swan. That FINRA figure only captures retail and small institutional margin at broker-dealers. It excludes prime brokerage (hedge funds), securities-based lending, and repo markets. Conservative estimates put total leveraged exposure at $10-15 trillion. The $566B is maybe 5% of the iceberg.

I see visible margin debt as both a canary and a proxy. It's a canary because retail cracks first (less sophisticated risk management, stricter regulatory margin). It's a proxy because when visible leverage contracts, it usually means hidden leverage is contracting too. They're exposed to the same assets. When FINRA margin debt starts falling, it's not just a warning, it's confirmation that system-wide deleveraging is already underway.

That's my 2c. Does that make sense?

topspin · 8 days ago

> a canary and a proxy

Whatever shenanigans are appear in the public record, multiply by 10x to approximate of the real story.

> Does that make sense?

Yep. 1929 called. Just to gloat. They don't want their market back.

topspin commented on The Great Unwind occupywallst.com/yen... · Posted by u/jart

mempko · 8 days ago

This is a good analysis of the yen carry trade but i'd argue the causality is backwards. Record high margin debt in the U.S. is the root cause as it's a powder keg. The yen is just the fuse being lit. When system-wide leverage is this extreme, any funding sock (whether it's the BOJ rate hikes, hawish fed, or geopolitical event) can initiate the liquidation cascade. The yen carry trade is one source of that leverage but the fragility was baked in. If Japan didn't do anything something else would have cause the liquidation cascade, only a matter of time.

The real story isn't Tokyo, it's that Wall Street built a house of cards and ran out of steady hands.

I have a public ThetaEdge card that monitors margin debt and calculates the correlation with the S&P here:

https://thetaedge.ai/public/thetix-card/42d9c6de-218d-4627-a...

topspin · 8 days ago

> Record high margin debt

$566B in margin debt. Is that actually a financial black swan amount of money? If 50% of that got "corrected" into Money Heaven on Friday, would it be more than a bad day at the stock market?

topspin commented on I miss thinking hard jernesto.com/articles/thi... · Posted by u/jernestomg

holysoles · 8 days ago

I very much think its possible to use LLMs as a tool in this way. However a lot of folks are not. I see people, both personally and professionally, give it a problem and expect it to both design and implement a solution, then hold it as a gold standard.

I find the best uses, for at least my self, are smaller parts of my workflow where I'm not going to learn anything from doing it: - build one to throw away: give me a quick prototype to get stakeholder feedback - straightforward helper functions: I have the design and parameters planned, just need an implementation that I can review - tab-completion code-gen - If I want leads for looking into something (libraries, tools) and Googling isn't cutting it

topspin · 8 days ago

> then hold it as a gold standard

I just changed employers recently in part due to this: dealing with someone that appears to now spend his time coercing LLM's to give the answers he wants, and becoming deaf to any contradictions. LLMs are very effective at amplifying the Reality Distortion Field for those that live in them. LLMs are replacing blog posts for this purpose.

topspin commented on I miss thinking hard jernesto.com/articles/thi... · Posted by u/jernestomg

Aeglaecia · 8 days ago

there's no such thing as right or wrong , so the following isn't intended as any form of judgement or admonition , merely an observation that you are starting to sound like an llm

topspin · 8 days ago

> you are starting to sound like an llm

My observation: I've always had that "sound." I don't know or care much about what that implies. I will admit I'm now deliberately avoiding em dashs, whereas I was once an enthusiastic user of them.

topspin commented on I miss thinking hard jernesto.com/articles/thi... · Posted by u/jernestomg

topspin · 8 days ago

I'm using LLMs to code and I'm still thinking hard. I'm not doing it wrong: I think about design choices: risks, constraints, technical debt, alternatives, possibilities... I'm thinking as hard as I've ever done.

topspin commented on What's up with all those equals signs anyway? lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2026... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

beejiu · 9 days ago

> So what’s happened here? Well, whoever collected these emails first converted from CRLF (i.e., “Windows” line ending coding) to “NL” (i.e., “Unix” line ending coding). This is pretty normal if you want to deal with email. But you then have one byte fewer:

I think there is a second possible conclusion, which is that the transformation happened historically. Everyone assumes these emails are an exact dump from Gmail, but isn't it possible that Epstein was syncing emails from Gmail to a third party mail server?

Since the Stackoverflow post details the exact situation in 2011, I think we should be open to the idea that we're seeing data collected from a secondary mail server, not Gmail directly.

Do we have anything to discount this?

(If I'm not mistaken, I think you can also see the "=" issue simply by applying the Quoted-Printable encoding twice, not just by mishandling the line-endings, which also makes me think two mail servers. It also explains why the "=" symbol is retained.)

topspin · 9 days ago

What happened here is what always happens with all printed and digital material that goes through some evidentiary process.

The shot-callers demand the material, which is a task fobbed off onto some nobody intern who doesn't matter (deliberately, because the lawyers and career LEOs don't want any "officer of the court" or other "party" to put eyes on things they might need to deny knowing about later.) They use only the most primitive, mechanical method possible, with little to no discretion. The collected mass of mangled junk is then shipped to whoever, either in boxes or on CD-ROM/DVD (yes, still) or something. Then, the reverse process is done, equally badly, again by low-level staff, also with zero discretion and little to no technical knowledge or ability, for exactly the same reasons, to get the material into some form suitable for filing or whatever.

Through all of this, the subtle details of data formats and encodings are utterly lost, and the legal archive fills with mangled garbage like raw quoted-printable emails. The parties involved have other priorities, such as minimizing the number of people involved in the process, and tight control over the number of copies created. Their instinct is not to bring in a bunch of clever folk that might make the work product come out better, because "better" for them is different than "better" for Twitter or Facebook. Also, these disclosures are inevitably and invariably challenged by time: the obligation to provide one thing or another is fought to the last possible minute, and when the word does finally go out there is next to no time to piddle around with details.

In the Epstein case, the disclosures were done years ago, the original source material (computers, accounts, file systems, etc.) have all long since been (deliberately) destroyed, and what the feds have is the shrapnel we see today.

topspin commented on Notepad++ hijacked by state-sponsored actors notepad-plus-plus.org/new... · Posted by u/mysterydip

FpUser · 10 days ago

8.4.7 here. phew

topspin · 10 days ago

8.5.7 here (built Sept 6, 2023)

Now I need to worry about this one. I've been anxious about vscode lately: apparently vscode extensions are a dumpster fire of compromises.

topspin commented on NASA's WB-57 crash lands at Houston arstechnica.com/space/202... · Posted by u/verzali

contrarian1234 · 12 days ago

Why is such an ancient plane still being used? Lack of funding to use something newer? Or it has some capability that can't be replicated?

I would imagine it's incredibly expensive to maintain. Are they machining their own engine parts?

topspin · 12 days ago

> Why is such an ancient plane still being used?

Because it was designed to operate in the same atmosphere as we had in the 1950's, it's highly customized with unique instruments and communication gear specialized for NASA and its systems, and they have a big shop filled with tools and spare parts accumulated over half a century to adapt to whatever conceivable thing comes up. They could drop a few hundred million and replace their WB-57s, but there isn't a real need.

> Are they machining their own engine parts?

The WB-57 engines are basically downrated, high-altitude versions of the Pratt & Whitney JT3D/TF33, not the original Avons. They are still in service today in military applications, so servicing them isn't some extraordinary concept. Plus, they don't see many flight hours, as these aircraft (there are 3) spend most of their time in a shop getting reworked for future missions, so engine overhauls aren't that frequent.

> I would imagine it's incredibly expensive to maintain.

All such aircraft are incredibly expensive. However, the Canberra is as old fashioned rivet and sheet metal design, and modifying it is relatively straightforward compared to most of what is manufactured today. It was designed as a bomber and has a large fuel and payload capacity, and a handy bomb-bay with large doors, filled with racks of mission specific gear.

I suspect this one can be repaired and returned to service. That's not uncommon for controlled belly landings. It did not appear to incur excessive damage in that landing, and there are mothballed Canberra in various boneyards around the world to provide replacement parts.

topspin commented on TikTok users can't upload anti-ICE videos. The company blames tech issues cnn.com/2026/01/26/tech/t... · Posted by u/kotaKat

iugtmkbdfil834 · 16 days ago

Allow me to offer some words of wisdom. If you help building weapons to be used against $currently_designated_bad_people, you can rest assured that given enough time, those weapons will be used against you. I am watching all this with a mild sense of bemusement.

topspin · 16 days ago

> those weapons will be used against you

On the matter of social media "moderation," this is the phase you're actually in, right now.