Reminds me of a fun story. Some 20 years ago when I moved from Fort Frances to Toronto for college, my high school best friend was also going to college in Toronto, and his dad offered to drive us together in his truck with all our stuff in the back. We were saying our goodbyes and my buddies dad said to my dad "We'll get there a lot faster, I found a shortcut!" My dad, confused says "shortcut? there is no shortcut, just highway 1..." and his dad insists he found an alternative route, much shorter by kms and we'll fly up there 6 hours faster! Get into the truck and he pulls out 5 pages of printed mapquest... I assure you, having done it, Sault Ste. Marie to Sudbury via Elliot Lake on logging roads, may look interesting, but not correct, added a good 8 hours to the trip.
When I tried, just for fun, to put together an MVP of a fully autonomous business, I wanted to see how far it would go, when I got it generally working to around a 30% level I stopped because it was enough to see people would make a concerted effort to build this for real. HN was not impressed, heh: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44143928
Not feeling particularly charitable to your country folk this morning eh Good Canadian? The US didn't include Canada in the shuttle program as a favor or because Canada wrote a check, they included Canada because the technology was excellent and necessary. Canada had world class engineering skills at that time, and was invited by NSAS to participate. I don't think we bought our way on, I think our country happened to have an ounce of ambitions during that period and we preformed incredibly well.
I did not mean for it to be taken as uncharitable. I am extremely proud of Canada's contribution. My point was more that even when foreign nationals were included, the U.S. did not hand out seats for propaganda reasons. There was a quid pro quo.
Every day I find myself thinking more and more that capitalism ruined the internet. The Green Card Lottery usenet spam was the clear indication of where things were going and now everything is Green Card Lottery spam.
That's the same attitude as "cheap airfares caused too many tourists which ruined my favorite tourist destination". You're unhappy that more people have access to it and wish it was still exclusive to the small group you conveniently belong to. Capitalism is what made the internet available to the general public.
Sometimes gatekeeping is a good thing. I don't mind being gatekept from some areas of life, not everything is for me. Mass tourism absolutely has made some places less pleasant to visit, and more importantly, less pleasant to live in.
They did look petty and intolerant. The explosion of popularity of the internet in the late 1990's was done by capitalism. Only a few privileged people had access to the pre-capitalism academic internet. Additional capitalism also made it interesting to the little people so that it's the hugely popular thing it is today.
The general public are only able and willing to use the internet because of the capitalism! When it was an academic thing, most people didn't care at all, and even if they did, they'd have to have social connections to gain access. Even when consumer ISPs were widespread, internet use was still much smaller than today because it wasn't as engaging without capitalism's social media.
"Pick one repo and become a contributor first", add the operative "real" after a, and this should probably be the one and only point under "What I'd do differently"
Re: the "low price", they'd already sold their publishing right in 2021 for $140MM, so this is the master rights they sold for 300. By comparison, Springsteen sold both his together to Sony in 2021 for $500MM.
I don't think they're just selling the mastering rights here, it's the rights for the recordings that are being played that is being sold here.
> The new deal with Warner Music Group hands over the rights to the official recordings, meaning the label will profit from any further streaming, radio play or album sales.
Edit: I'm stupid, you mean "master rights", which is correct, they're getting the rights of the masters. Your typo made me think of the act of mastering music, not the "masters".
Imo the most interesting thing is basically the operational details on Iran. It's efectively a view into into what years of sustained ISR over the Strait of Hormuz looks like. I gave the full dump of pdfs to Codex and asked it to pull out some details on Iran -
"482 ATKS Reapers out of OKAS doing 20-hour orbits, 24-hour pre-coordination with NAVCENT, named Iranian assets being characterized — NASER WAPs, SAFIR KISH PCs, HOUDONG-class boats, IRIN aircraft (IL-76, IL-38, A-50U Mainstay D, SU-27/35) at Abu Musa Island airfield, vessels at Bushehr and the IRIN boatyard. We see the Iranian air-defense response logged in formal categories — "Guardcall Tone: PROFESSIONAL" vs "DIRECTIVE" — meaning U.S. forms have a structured way to grade Iranian threatening behavior, and the public can now see that they were hailed five times in a single 21-hour mission with two of those calls coded "Directive." Several reports disclose just enough operational detail to send a message, d28, for example, gives a surprisingly rich armed-overwatch context, weapon calibration, munitions released, and named sensor systems like MX-25, plus an object detected by MX-20 and MX-25 during an AGM-176 engagement . d74 gives target-development context, including stop-follow activity on a probable vehicle/person of interest before the UAP event later in the mission ."
I wonder if when trump kept saying something to the effect of "Oh, I think some people will find some of it very interesting" - he meant adversaries are about to see how much intelligence has been collected and for how long.
Any business can be run in a shady manner if the human decided. One fully automated business I think could exist and might be useful is apartment/condo rental. I'd pay a business $100 for a proper report on the rentals available in a city that meet a criteria and are amalgamated from all the the various platforms. Doing it yourself (at least in Canada) means creating accounts on a bunch of platforms, and the process is very tedious.
> I'd pay a business $100 for a proper report on the rentals available in a city
I'm curious about things of this nature, where it seems like a case of "this information is important to me and I want accurate results".
But then the talk of automation seems to exclude careful human review of those results, which is needed to stop hallucinations from making their way to customers.
> I'd pay a business $100 for a proper report on the rentals available in a city that meet a criteria and are amalgamated from all the the various platforms.
If this can be fully automated then you can just ask your own agent to do this and wouldn't need a business for it. And agents can already fill out web forms just fine.
Well like most rich guys, I have an assistant, so I don't need or use "agents" - maybe my assistant could learn to use "agents" - but her core competency isn't, nor should it be, learning to use AI agents in any meaningful way. Maybe she could outsource it to someone who got their agents to do it for her for $100.... Same with my little sister who has a 5 year old and a 2 year old and doesn't really know how a computer works never mind what AI agents are.
> Any business can be run in a shady manner if the human decided.
No kidding.
> One fully automated business I think could exist and might be useful is apartment/condo rental.
We're starting strong on the category of businesses that generate no actual value and just scrape an amount of value out of existing transactions that would've happened anyway, i.e., rent-seeking. But good for you, you can now artificially shrink the supply of limited-availability goods in the market, then gate access to them behind a paywall, and you don't even have to do the minimal amount of actual work required to fleece strangers for part of their paycheck while creating no value.
Despite paying rent for an apartment, it’s not rent-seeking. You get a place to live out of it that wouldn’t exist without the owner renting it to you.
Rent-seeking is a very specific economic term where a party inserts themselves into a transaction and takes a cut without providing anything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
Being a landlord comes with significant responsibilities and even principal investment risk.
> Despite paying rent for an apartment, it’s not rent-seeking. You get a place to live out of it that wouldn’t exist without the owner renting it to you.
> Rent-seeking is a very specific economic term where a party inserts themselves into a transaction and takes a cut without providing anything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
> Being a landlord comes with significant responsibilities and even principal investment risk.
Economist here. Yes, this was a correct use of the term "rent-seeking behavior". It's actually quite funny to see someone try to argue otherwise, when the name was chosen because this is, literally, the textbook example.
It is not the textbook example. The textbook example is regulatory capture where people put in an artificial gate and charge people to cross it.
Everything functioned fine without the gate and nothing was improved by the gate.
An apartment LEASE is literally nothing like that. You’re borrowing something you don’t have and it’s a rivalrous good so other people can’t use it while you are.
Renting (leasing) a car, an apartment, or any other good like that is not rent seeking behavior. No actual economist would argue that because it dilutes the term to something completely meaningless.
A landlord is partially rent-seeking. Yes they provide the service of making sure the apartment is habitable (cough) and so on, but they charge above market price for that. How do I know? I know because I'd do it myself for cheaper if that was an option, but it's not an option because landlords own all the spare apartments. (Why don't I buy one then? They're very expensive because I have to price-match the landlords, who are paying very high prices for the right to rent-seek!)
The market for real estate is basically the market for taxi medallions. It costs something to run a taxi, but there are a limited number of medallions and you can charge well over that cost because you have a medallion, which also makes the medallions very expensive. Until Uber comes along. But you can't just make an illegal apartment without land the same way you can make an illegal taxi without a medallion.
So if anyone accepts your challenge will you move the goalposts and tell them their business isn’t good enough in your point of view? It doesn’t seem like you’re actually interested in dialogue. You also don’t seem to be aware of the definition of rent seeking but that’s an entirely different topic.
I’ll sit out your little experiment because I’m not in the mood for this kind of response. But you may discover that if you turn down the venom a little, qualified people could teach you things like automated business models that are quite ethical and even the definition of rent seeking.
> So if anyone accepts your challenge will you move the goalposts and tell them their business isn’t good enough in your point of view?
It's not a value judgement, it's literally rent-seeking behavior. You're seeking, to rent, property that you own, presumably for a profit. Like come on, it's what the word means.
> You also don’t seem to be aware of the definition of rent seeking but that’s an entirely different topic.
Both my command of the English language and the economist elsewhere in this thread disagree with you, but go off I guess.
> qualified people could teach you things like automated business models that are quite ethical and even the definition of rent seeking.
And yet instead of citing one you went off a tone-policing rant.
My question was quite open-ended. I genuinely didn't expect someone to come in and list the textbook example that an actual economist went on to point out was crap for the exact reason I said, truly. But that's the kind of poetic unawareness that one really can't plan for.
49 minute Amiga play through for those feeling like a nostalgia hit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukSECkajKYA
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