Plain text accounting

It’s a snapshot of what it takes to run a massive scale viral YouTube operation in the 2020s, as well as a detailed description of a very specific company culture evolved to fulfill that mission.

Twenty injuries might sound like a lot, but Waymo’s driverless cars have traveled more than 22 million miles. So driverless Waymo taxis have been involved in fewer than one injury-causing crash for every million miles of driving—a much better rate than a typical human driver.

He says, “In guarding their fortune, men are often closefisted, yet, when it comes to the matter of wasting time, in the case of the one thing in which it is right to be miserly, they show themselves most prodigal.”

Field inventory at the dealerships at the beginning of April, 2021 was 61,330 units and that inventory level grew to 90,148 by the beginning of August, 2024 or 32%.

Both sides have accused the other of engaging in a lengthy negotiation process that has stretched over two years. The Guild has put forward a number of proposals that management has balked at in totality, including a four-day work week coupled with significant increases in pay, full coverage of all health care premiums for employees and family members, guaranteed RSU grants for all members of the unit, and non-performance-based annual bonuses, all of which the company estimates would cost over $100 million over three years.

The DOJ published a press release earlier this week that named Rudy’s Performance Parts and its owner Aaron Rudolf for making, selling, and installing emissions defeat devices. Rudy’s pleaded guilty and was sentenced on Tuesday, Sept. 10, to pay $2.4 million in criminal fines for conspiring to violate the CAA. This follows a previous sentencing and fine from April in which Rudolf was ordered to pay $600,000 and enter a three-year organizational probation period.

There are several persuading factors. Not least the current climate when it comes to selling a flat. FT analysis of recent Land Registry data showed prices for a flat have underperformed the rest of the market in every region, and in the capital have barely changed since 2019. All the more reason to keep a bigger slice of the pie.

We present a novel method called “generative regulatory measurement” that uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to interpret statutes and administrative documents. We demonstrate its effectiveness in analyzing municipal zoning codes, achieving 96% accuracy in binary classification tasks and a 0.92 correlation in predicting minimum lot sizes. Applying this method to U.S. zoning regulations, we establish five facts about American zoning: (1) Housing production disproportionately happens in unincorporated areas without municipal zoning codes. (2) Density in the form of multifamily apartments and small lot single family homes is broadly limited. (3) Zoning follows a monocentric pattern with regional variations, with suburban regulations particularly strict in the Northeast. (4) Housing regulations can be clustered into two main principal components, the first of which corresponds to housing complexity and can be interpreted as extracting value in high demand environments. (5) The second principal component associates with exclusionary zoning.

 The US has tens of thousands of local governments which each produce lengthy municipal codes, and so simply understanding the nature and scope of housing regulations, let alone figuring out which ones are really important and bind supply, is a big hurdle.

Until the turn of the millennium, the workflow for record releases was simple enough. Once the multitrack was mixed, the 2-track master was turned into a piece of vinyl, a cassette tape or, starting in 1982, a compact disc, and those original tapes—by and large— then went into storage. Around 2000, with the advent of 5.1-surround releases, then in 2005 with the debut of the Guitar Hero video game, things started to get complicated. When rights holders went to the vaults to transfer, remix and repurpose some of their catalog tracks for these new platforms, they discovered that some tapes were deteriorating while others were unplayable. Not all assets had been stored under optimum conditions. Some recordings had been made on machines that were now obsolete, in formats that could no longer be easily played. And some recordings were missing.

Currently, Apple Card has around $17 billion in outstanding balances across 12 million users. JPMorgan hopes to pay “less than the full face value” of those balances, according to today’s report:

The networked tribalization of government bureaucracy (suppressing dissent and political opposition). Best analyzed as part of a larger pattern of behavior across multiple agencies + political rhetoric.

This is a massive assertion from a U.S. senator and Hillary Clinton just called for criminal charges against misinformation purveyors. Let’s make sure you are careful with your information Ms. Warren.

Let us remember that, in some sense, modern democracy as we know it today, is the child of a revolution that was formed under the principle that there cannot be taxation without representation. the main task of this house, for what it was intended, is to establish a national budget to define what the state does with taxpayers’ money.

The second reason why i am presenting myself here today is because i am coming to propose a budget project that is diametrically different from what we are used to.

Not only different but the most radically different in this century… and i have learned firsthand that the deeper the change, the greater the effort must be to fight for it.

So, we’re asking each s-team organization to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025. Having fewer managers will remove layers and flatten organizations more than they are today. If we do this work well, it will increase our teammates’ ability to move fast, clarify and invigorate their sense of ownership, drive decision-making closer to the front lines where it most impacts customers (and the business), decrease bureaucracy, and strengthen our organizations’ ability to make customers’ lives better and easier every day. We will do this thoughtfully, and our PxT team will work closely with our leaders to evolve our organizations to accomplish these goals over the next few months. [By the way, I’ve created a “Bureaucracy Mailbox” for any examples any of you see where we might have bureaucracy or unnecessary process that’s crept in and we can root out…to be clear, companies need process to run effectively, and process does not equal bureaucracy, but unnecessary and excessive process or rules should be called out and extinguished. I will read these emails and action them accordingly.]

Music, in short, has become both too easy to produce and too easy to consume. It would be easy for anyone under 30 to dismiss Beato’s argument as that of a middle-aged man reflexively insisting that things were better in his day, when we knew the value of an album. But even the youngest generation of music-lovers must, at times, feel a certain dissatisfaction amid this endless abundance. To them — and to all of us — Beato says this: “Vote with your attention” by trying to listen to music deliberately, without distraction. Personally, I recommend listening to not just full albums but complete discographies, which at the very least cultivates a certain discernment. And to cross the musical landscape ahead of us, we’ll need all the discernment we can get.

After 1??,0??3??8?? days “not a single person has been connected to the internet using the $42.45 billion.”

Of all these hype cycles, I suspect that the “AI” hype has more staying power than the rest, if for no other reason than it provides a hedge against the downside of previous hype cycles. Not sure to do with the exabytes of Big Data you’re sitting on? Have LLMs parse it all then convincingly lie to you about what it means.

The horrifying death of the CIA’s Beirut station chief at the hands of Hezbollah

For nearly two years, SpaceX has voiced its concerns with the FAA’s inability to keep pace with the commercial spaceflight industry. It is clear that the Agency lacks the resources to timely review licensing materials, but also focuses its limited resources on areas unrelated to public safety. These distractions continue to directly threaten national priorities and undercut American industry’s ability to innovate.

“We’re not going to spend city resources engaging with white, single-family homeowners,” Bernard said. “They already have access to agency. Let’s spend our resources bringing other folks to the table who don’t have that access.”

Kugelman, let go from an online-marketing role at eBay, blanketed Manhattan streetlight poles with 150 fliers over nearly three months this spring. “RECENTLY LAID OFF,” they blared. “LOOKING FOR A NEW JOB.” The 30-year-old posted them outside the offices of Google, Facebook and other tech companies, hoping hiring managers would spot them among the “lost cat” signs. A QR code on the flier sent people to his LinkedIn profile.

Backstory: I spent ten years working in de-facto operations and technical roles at startups. Sourcetable draws from that experience of needing better data tooling inside spreadsheets, and constantly hacking ad hoc solutions to fill the gap. Andrew (CTO / co-founder) previously had a deep learning company and was initially drawn to the idea that Sourcetable could be an operating system for the web. We’re both Aussie expats in the Bay Area, which is how we met. Internally, we think of Sourcetable as an application platform, with AI applications being a useful and interesting place to focus.

The United States health system ranked dead last in an international comparison of 10 peer nations, according to a new report by the Commonwealth Fund.

1. On Venture Capital

• VCs think they operate in power law environment but they don’t lol
• Technowatermelons often don’t make money from portco real sales
• Instead, they profit by MARKETING; hyping up ideas, raising money in successive rounds, and cashing out as new investors join. In other words, passing the bag to a greater fool
• Therefore, they are packaging and selling hope, rather than relying on actual revenue (side note: also explains why every VC and their aunt is on Twitter/LinkedIn)
• Low IR environment facilitated this watermelon growth, given there were minimal penalties for playing speculative games (Fed the farmer didn’t harvest the watermelon crop)

Since Biden only started getting bad “in January” (Nuzzi reports in July once it’s clear he’s being switched out) then I guess it wasn’t such a crime to run him in the primaries and shut out competition from RFK etc. This story passed for tough, independent reporting at the time it came out but it was actually quite helpful to the official party mid-summer narrative of a rather recent and troubling decline

Taste is eating software. Taste is the new weapon. Whether in design, branding, or user experience, taste now defines how a product is perceived and felt as well as how it is adopted, i.e. distributed(whether it’s software or hardware or both). Technology has become deeply intertwined with culture. People now engage with technology as part of their lives, no matter their location, career, or status. The markets being served now are cultural markets, where utility plus taste forms the foundation.

GPS—9,344 mobile devices at the Alliant Energy Center in Madison, WI today. 487 appear to be staff.

High Resolution image of the Night Watch.

Porsche has revealed a strange (and possibly brilliant) idea for a six-stroke combustion engine. If you don’t know the fundamentals of an internal combustion engine, we’ll try to keep this simple. If you do know how engines work … we’ll still try and keep it simple

More importantly, Musk is in favor in Texas, and its tax incentives and fewer corporate regulations could be attractive. Lastly, having all his major companies in the same state could make operations simpler.

Before the year is out, a fast fare mobile app will be available. The plan for next year is to be able to use credit cards, Apple Pay or Google Wallet directly at the bus reader. How to use the ticket or fare card on the bus

Two months after the start of the virus injections, the shrunken tumour was no longer invading the skin or underlying muscle and was surgically excised. The excised tumour showed strong lymphocytic infiltration, with an increase in CD20-positive B cells, CD8-positive T cells and macrophages.

Over 14 essays, Demsas makes the case that solutions to the housing crisis will have to come from states, not cities. Bloomberg CityLab spoke to Demsas about how local democracy is set up to stymie development, and how fewer democratic bottlenecks could help fix the problem. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

If SF’s homeless population, crime, empty offices, retail and downtown, budget shortfalls, anti-business climate, migrant policies, and failing schools are what you want for your family, vote @KamalaHarris.

We recently received a launch license date estimate of late November from the FAA, the government agency responsible for licensing Starship flight tests. This is a more than two-month delay to the previously communicated date of mid-September. This delay was not based on a new safety concern, but instead driven by superfluous environmental analysis. The four open environmental issues are illustrative of the difficulties launch companies face in the current regulatory environment for launch and reentry licensing.

I’m mad, too.

Among the digital technologies the company is looking at to increase its animation output is artificial intelligence. The company’s chief executive Kenichiro Yoshida told FT, “It’s not going to be easy to balance?.?.?. and it will be a continuous search for how we can use technology while protecting the rights of the creators.”

Now that we’ve covered the basic organization and separation of North, South, Northeast and Southeast Minneapolis, let’s take a deeper look at the streets and avenues. The map below shows all the streets with directional suffixes in Minneapolis in red, revealing some clear patterns. In general, many (but not all) streets are numbered. For the numbered streets, the origin for numbering is the Mississippi river around Downtown Minneapolis.

While the robotaxi was stopped, the cyclist passed in front of it and appeared to dismount, according to the documents. “The cyclist then reached out a hand and made contact with the front passenger side of the stationary Waymo AV (autonomous vehicle), backed the bicycle up slightly, dropped the bicycle, then fell to the ground,” the documents said.

Why do Americans pay eight times more for hearing aids than the British? Hearing aids are big business, and a cartel controls the industry through mergers, patents, and control of audiologists.

What if I told you that participation in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program is completely voluntary and starting in 2021, 37% of police departments stopped reporting crime data to the FBI, including Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York…

The filings by Judge Troupis describe how Al Gore could have won the Presidency had the Gore campaign utilized alternate electors in 2000, as it would have allowed time to complete the recount. Legal scholars and U.S. Supreme Court Justices have identified that terminal mistake by the Gore legal team. It would have been legal malpractice to have made the same mistake in Wisconsin in 2020.  Moreover, as the formerly secret papers detail, the Wisconsin Trump/Pence legal team provided advance notice to the Biden/Harris attorneys and the Wisconsin Attorney General that they intended to have the alternate electors meet. Neither Biden/Harris or Attorney General Kaul registered any objection. 

This is the chart that you need before talking with a pediatrician.

Now, I’d like to take you through exactly how we produced the story and analyzed the evidence. This is precisely the case that I made in the original piece, that the establishment media is more interested in denial and obfuscation, even when the evidence points the other way.

Climategate emails show that erasure of the prior warmth was coordinated by #ClimateScam professionals in several countries.

Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground.

Under Kamala’s plan, if you have an asset that the government says has appreciated by $1 million in value, you’ll owe $250,000 in taxes – even if you don’t want to sell it, and even if you can’t sell it.

In the world of cloud computing, the costs can quickly add up, especially when using serverless architectures. However, with a little effort, you can set up a virtual machine (VM) on Hetzner for just $4 a month, allowing you to bypass the “serverless tax.” and have full control over your server. In this tutorial, we’ll walk through setting up a VM on Hetzner, installing Caddy for SSL, configuring Cloudflare for DNS, and deploying a web app using Github.

But E Ink displays also have slow screen refresh rates, limited support for color (on models that support any color at all), and generally aren’t very useful for high-motion graphics like videos or games. So while there are a handful of companies producing E Ink smartphones and tablets, they tend to be niche devices. And now we’re seeing a growing number of companies offering products with reflective LCD displays or similar technology that offer some of the paper-like qualities of E Ink, but which are more suitable for animation and video.

Ever since Milwaukee spent $60 million to build a high-tech pitching lab at their Arizona spring training facility, the Brewers have struck out more batters than any team but Houston and rank fifth in the majors in ERA (3.85).

You can feel how uncomfortable Reid Hoffman is here as he fidgets in his chair, punctuating his word salad response with “uh, um, uh.” He’s struggling hard to answer whether Democratic voters are okay with not having a say in their nominee. But let’s be fair—that question is unanswerable without a free, fair, and open primary where millions of voters actually get to make their voices heard. One guy’s opinion on how voters feel? Irrelevant.

The Justice Department alleges the giant health insurer cheated Medicare out of more than $2 billion by reviewing patients’ records to find additional diagnoses, adding revenue while ignoring overcharges that might reduce bills. The company “buried its head in the sand and did nothing but keep the money,” DOJ said in a court filing.

Richard Qian didn’t know what to expect when he heard that WM Motor, a Shanghai-based EV maker popular for its low prices, filed for bankruptcy in October 2023. He tried to drive his compact EX5 SUV as he normally would, but discovered that he could no longer log into WM Motor’s smartphone app, which remotely controlled the car lock and air conditioner. He also couldn’t see his car’s mileage and charging status on the dashboard. 

Epic is known for their fun/quirky software names (Radiant/Beaker/Cupid/Beans/ etc). Looking through things, I noticed a few names on the Epic trademarks page (epic.com/epic/page/trad…) that I didn’t recognize. Anyone know what they are?

I think it’s clearer to call it “early scaling” rather than rate of scaling (fast scaling). Fast scaling isn’t the issue, when you scale is.

The growth engine needs to be in that efficiency range where we’re. actually not losing money to acquire customers,” Ellis says.

This subtle difference in the ordering of legal enforcement is the major cause of the stagnation of aircraft design and manufacturing.

Mr Ceviker is helping revive Turkey’s viticulture. Though wine has been produced in Anatolia for millennia, the country’s modern vineyards and wineries produce mostly French varieties imported in the past century. But Mr Ceviker works with old vines that have survived for far longer, many abandoned when the Greeks and Armenians, vintners of the Ottoman empire, were forced out. Many of the Muslim farmers who took over now sell their produce for dried fruit or pekmez, an unfermented grape syrup, rather than alcohol. Mr Ceviker has persuaded some to sell their grapes to him at higher prices and has bought several vineyards outright. He takes his crop to different micro-wineries using traditional methods. “With each vintage, we experiment,” he says.

The Supreme Court’s ruling made clear that not only are Presidents immune from prosecution for many official acts, but such acts cannot be used as evidence at trial. This requires extensive pretrial proceedings to ensure official acts are not admitted into evidence.

How the heck did Dane County let this guy walk? And at any other time in US history, he’s deported.

Citizen DJ is officially open to the public and all sounds on this website are completely free-to-use for your remixing needs. Read a behind-the-scenes retrospective post on this experimental project and residency.

Before modern air travel and first-class suites, the grandest thing in luxury air travel was the German Zeppelin airship. The Hindenburg was designed to ferry passengers across the Atlantic in serenity, with the dirigible floating smoothly through the clouds. The airship was considered the longest class of flying machine and the largest airship by envelope volume.

In this latest interview in the Open Questions series,Charles “Chas” Freeman assesses the history of China-US relations and where they might go from here amid their “adversarial antagonism” stage and as the US presidential election looms. Freeman interpreted for then-president Richard Nixon during his historic 1972 Beijing trip to meet Mao Zedong. He has served in the US Foreign Service and state and defence departments and was US ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the 1991 Gulf war.

It means database partitioning — of worlds. Parallel worlds each running the same static template database source, but evolving different runtime databases. But these were just called “servers” — like, Meridian 59 had bunches of them, and they had numbers instead of the common practice of names that is in use today.

A new study by the University of St.Gallen (HSG) in collaboration with scientists from the University of Zurich and the University of Notre Dame reveals that the attractiveness of female founders also plays an important role.

Freedom of navigation is in the US Navy’s DNA – now is a bad time for the world’s most powerful navy to abandon that key principle. 

San Francisco must REFUND the Police not continue to DEFUND the Police. Our Police need to be empowered now — not this new terrible decision to end pretext stops. Our SFPD and Sheriffs and BART Police are the absolute key to a safe and clean San Francisco every day. SFPD must be returned to >2000 officers within 18 months from <1400 where it has been allowed to fall, and the police force must be fully empowered to enforce ALL laws.

Exxon still expects fossil fuels to make up the majority of energy market in 25 years

Possibly THE most prominent pedo hunter is @LizCrokin . Here is story of her efforts to dig up dirt on The Donald…

By pulling the plug on Constellation, Obama had unleashed the power of markets and competition. While many associate competition with dog-eat-dog and survival of the fittest tropes, competition is a healthy and productive force.

“So, what the FDA has done… [is] unquestionably beyond its authority.”

Getting fined by San Francisco for not removing crack head graffiti on our office door is the most on brand slow ventures thing ever. I love it… and guess what, we aren’t gonna pay it just to see what happens… 😉

Free public api: What really sets this site apart from all other API lists is that each API endpoint is tested once every 24 hours by our friendly robots to make sure it works. When our robots find an API that no longer works because it was taken down or moved behind a paywall, it will start ranking poorly and eventually be removed from the site.

U.S. Ambassador to Canada David Cohen says Canadians are consuming too much American news, which he believes is “unhealthy” because of American legacy media’s polarizing and partisan nature.

It is a stock element in narratives of 1950s computing to distinguish between programmers and coders, the latter considered a “lowly technician” doing the routine job of converting flowcharts or pseudo-instructions into coded machine instructions (for example, see Campbell-Kelly et al.⁴ and Ensmenger⁷). This division of labor between coders and programmers is often overlaid with social distinctions of education and gender.⁷ Researching the early uses of the words “programming” and “coding,”⁵however, we were confronted with the near absence of evidence for this coder/programmer distinction in practice. While the activities of coding and programming can be more or less clearly distinguished, the activities did not map onto different jobs, but rather were performed by the same person(s). It thus seemed that the distinction between the coder and the programmer pertains not to the reality but to the mythology of early computing. It emerged in the wake of automatic programming in the 1950s, creating a discourse that has been influential until today.

We’re on a quest to find the most beautiful word in the English language. We’ll show you two words; choose the one you like the most.

The experiences of staff in the Philippines’ outsourcing industry are a preview of the challenges and choices coming soon to white-collar workers around the globe

Shake Shack, the Big Apple-based competitor to In-N-Out known for smash burgers, crinkle-cut fries and milkshakes, announced that six California storefronts, including the only Oakland location, would close by the end of next month. Ownership cited underperformance as the primary factor for the closures, according to Nation’s Restaurant News. Most locations will close around Los Angeles; the other three outposts to shutter are in Columbus, Ohio, and Houston, Texas.

The principals are evidently quite proud of the bureaucracy they have built. For my part, I have been doing research for 40 years in both industry and academia, and I have never seen anything as shambolic as this.  Since  I do not plan to spend the rest of my professional career playing these sorts of games, I decided enough was enough.

A deep-cover CIA officer spent years underground trying to infiltrate Al Qaeda. But an investigation into his life, work, and death reveals mystery, moral quagmires, and the secret toll of the War on Terror

Asking for 350 million friends.

Independence.

The most important silicon in 2013’s iPhone 5S, the A7 System-on-Chip (SoC) was made, not by Intel, but by Korean rival Samsung. The SoC contains the processor that runs user apps – the ‘application processor’ – and lots of other silicon powering graphics and much more. The SoC is almost always the most complex chip in a modern smartphone. 

Web design museum

What books should I read to improve as a software engineer?

Ford Motor told employees in an internal communication that it had taken “a fresh look” at its DEI policies and practices over the past year.

Fascinating and well reported story, but I’m still baffled by the idea that any competent military or intelligence organization would use Telegram for secret comms. The vast majority of its traffic is sitting in plaintext on its servers. I’d be stunned if the NSA isn’t in them.

PRC trade surplus is ~$100B per month now. That used to be recycled into US Treasuries, but China has stopped buying them. Where is this money going now? Is some of recent Mag7 performance due to offshore buying linked to China?

“As long as they can stand up and shuffle they will get through. Then when the plane takes off, we see the misbehaviour. “We don’t want to begrudge people having a drink. But we don’t allow people to drink-drive, yet we keep putting them up in aircraft at 33,000 feet,” he said.

In at least three instances in July and August, Oakland police sought to tow a Tesla into evidence to obtain — via a second court order — its stored video. Officers cited the cars’ “Sentry Mode” feature, a system of cameras and sensors that records noise and movement around the vehicle when it is empty and locked, storing it in a USB drive in the glove box.

As I write this, we’ve just heard news that Oprah is planning to do a big broadcast special about AI and society. Despite the fact that it hasn’t aired, and I haven’t seen it or talked to anyone who’s seen it, we can reliably predict many of the shortcomings that this show will have. And it didn’t even take an AI chatbot to come up with this list.

All laws must be fully enforced. Police must be fully funded. The DA’s office must prosecute to the fullest level of the law.