patfla

5 ms·

1.
by patfla 2y ago
Don't disagree. I regard Tan as a (powerful) local optimization where the counter argument to broader optimizations is that they're riskier. The latter are though more fundamental. New businesses, new processes, new products ar
2.
by patfla 2y ago
Unfortunately, an economy is now wholly peopled by shareholders, and the most important shareholders are usually the owners and corporate officers. Software dev who's worked in both tech and finance. I don't measure things in jus
3.
by patfla 2y ago
If you look at its history, Broadcom is a financial acquisition company that operates in technology. I think Tan's position is: these are (mostly) mature technologies and should be horse traded like financial assets. Got lucky with th
4.
by patfla 3y ago
Fred Brooks wrote in The Mythical Man-Month that it's harder (more time-consuming) to produce the software that corresponds to a given hardware. In 1975.
5.
by patfla 3y ago
It'd be interesting to bring this up to date.
6.
by patfla 3y ago
I wonder how much of this is about getting closer access to relatively inexpensive US energy in general and petrochemicals in particular?
7.
by patfla 4y ago
I thought that ASML got its EUV light source, basically, by buying Cymer in San Diego. Read some of [0], and then searched it, but didn't find a single instance of 'Cymer.'
8.
by patfla 5y ago
Watched about 20 minutes of Gringo before I got tired of it and turned it off. Sounds like a textbook case of what can happen if you take a very bright person and then give them a sudden windfall of success. That is, derangement. He or sh
9.
by patfla 5y ago
Maybe I should have read past the first sentence. The joke's on me.
10.
by patfla 5y ago
I stopped reading at the first sentence: "It’s a well-established fact that a guitarist’s acumen can be accurately gauged by the size of their pedal board- the more stompboxes, the better the player." As both a software engineer a
11.
by patfla 5y ago
Traditionally, you had _decreasing_ returns to scale. What's new with digital technologies is _increasing_ returns to scale. Very counter-intuitive for traditional economists - or even business people. People like Gates, Bezos, Brin
12.
by patfla 5y ago
Big Tech got so big because digital technology is different from preceding industries in that increasing (not decreasing) returns to scale prevail. In particular, in software where marginal costs are near 0. It's a different ballgame
13.
by patfla 6y ago
The article says ARHGAP11B promotes the growth of upper-layer neurons. Jeff Hawkins has this intriguing idea that the transition is all about the runaway growth of, in particular, grid cells which is slightly confusing in that the major pla
14.
by patfla 6y ago
I've never spent a lot of time on FB and with the interface change, I avoid FB even more than I did before. Interfaces with fewer, larger elements always strike me as a dumbing down. Companies that offer (insist upon) that may have t
15.
by patfla 6y ago
It seems that's the same bay as for Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, which with a population of 180,000 is Kamchatska's largest city. So this is very close to what amounts to a large population for Kamchatka. The Russians have always be
16.
by patfla 6y ago
The dollar's status as the world's reserve currency allows the US to consume at a rate that wouldn't otherwise be possible. All the trade surplus countries want that to continue. Losing that status, or changing the instituti
17.
by patfla 6y ago
Of the parts of the world, other than the US, that I'm most familiar with, Japan and Western Europe, they control drug prices - and keep them low. I've had a theory for a while that the way world drug companies make up for low pro
18.
by patfla 6y ago
Some serious diseases (this was true with the Pandemic of 1918) cause their worst effects, including death, through overreactions of the immune system. Evolution is clever but it's not perfect and regulating biological systems is diff
19.
by patfla 6y ago
How does this get past the FTC? Oh right, it's been a dead letter since the Reagan administration. Monopoly 'R Us. Never mind the FTC - the rest of the semiconductor industry has to be [very] strongly opposed.
20.
by patfla 6y ago
Sit at home and wait for covid19 to pass.
21.
by patfla 6y ago
I read this intriguing thing once to the effect that: if space and time were discrete, say, at the Planck scale, that the infinities that bedevil modern physics would, magically, disappear. No more renormalization - no more many things.
22.
by patfla 6y ago
> turned the table back to the US "back" is incorrect - not a native English speaker. Who says Chinese disinformation doesn't need to reach as far as ycombinator news? I agree with little to none of your strategic assessm
23.
by patfla 7y ago
Actually if one looks it up (I have many times), as the Chinese industry was developing (meaning a while ago now), a large part of the key cell technology that China used came from a research group at the University of New South Wales in Au
24.
by patfla 7y ago
I think China played a much more important role in driving down PV module costs than Germany. Germany was one source of demand - China has amounted to about all of the supply. Germany has an important coal industry and lobby and remains a
25.
by patfla 7y ago
Unlikely to happen (at least now) in a place that's, uh, culturally like the US. We're in California and are in a community that was affected by PG&E's power shut off. I think one problem in California is that since I fir
26.
by patfla 7y ago
I assume the denser the population, the more it makes economic sense to put power lines underground. The particular problem though is wildfires and they're more slowly caught, and can become larger and more destructive, the further awa
27.
by patfla 7y ago
Putting power lines underground is very expensive - meaning, very nearly prohibitively so. Or actually prohibitively so when you consider that PG&E has to serve vast areas of wilderness in California. Paradise (Camp fire) was sufficien
28.
by patfla 7y ago
Some low-end production had already been moving to places like Vietnam, based on labor costs where Chinese labor costs are now > places like Vietnam (and have been for a while). Trump's trade war has accelerated the trend. Arguing
29.
by patfla 7y ago
KLP (according to Reuters) is the largest pension fund in Norway? Who anyway is KLP? https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=norway+... I see: public employees. Public employee pension funds, in the West,
30.
by patfla 7y ago
Tesla can now, more or less, build cars in volume and that's great. The problem is profitability and, at present levels of profitability, the current stock price is not at all justified.

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