Samuel Hapák

@Hyperguyver02 @esrtweet Do you want USD to lose its reserve currency status? Do you understand that it's not US subsidising anyone, but actually US taxing the whole world by exporting green pieces of paper? Again, Europe is retarded. But so far, US was profiting from it.

@samuha @esrtweet At this point, China can fucking have them.

Hello, Europeans. The first thing you need to understand about the rant I'm about to utter is that I'm not MAGA, not a Trumpite, but a libertarian who has in the past nevertheless been strongly supportive of US military presence overseas. Because I want the wars that defend this country to be fought in somebody else's country, as far away from me as possible with a nice big ocean in the way. Also relevant: I have a history of having lived in Europe and traveled there extensively. I was at one time bilingual in English and Spanish, and have been passably fluent in Italian and French as well. I could probably still find my way around London and Rome and central Paris reasonably well. So if you're tempted to tell yourselves that I'm some kind of parochial American hick, abandon that hope. All that was set-up. So that, when I tell you that almost the entirety of the US electorate, not just Trump supporters, is increasingly fed up with your shit, take me seriously. We've been cleaning up your messes and keeping the sea lanes open since 1917. And that was for you, not us - we, being very close to resource self-sufficient, don't need that investment so much. We've spent enormous amounts of blood and treasure on keeping you safe. We risked nuclear hellfire on our own cities for nearly 50 years to keep Soviet tanks from rolling through the Fulda Gap. Even since the Cold War ended, we've subsidized your socialist-playpen welfare states and disastrous immigration policies by taking the need to maintain militaries more effective than a sack of wet farts off the table. Now we've come looking for help keeping a bunch of rabid Islamic fanatics from getting nuclear weapons that are a clear and present danger to all of you even more than they are to us, and what do we hear? "Waah! It's another Republican president we don't like, just like the last half dozen of them! So we're going to sulk in a corner, except when we're biting at your ankles with crap like airspace restrictions." No. No, we're not going to take this anymore. It's not just conservatives who have had enough, it's moderates and people who used to be strong supporters of liberal internationalism. Our citizen's willingness to pay higher taxes to protect you was upward-bounded by your gratitude. Now that we know your gratitude has effectively gone to zero, so does our willingness. Don't expect this to change if the Democrats take power here. They are much less liberal-internationalist than Republicans now. While they might make mouth noises that soothe you, their overriding concern is the gaping, insatiable maw of their income transfer programs. They'll sacrifice subsidizing Europe's playpen socialism to feed their domestic version in a heartbeat. And there is no longer any significant Democratic constituency to argue against that. In truth, three decades after the Cold War ended there is no American constituency at all for the massive subsidies you get. It frankly surprises me they lasted this long, that we were this patient with your cowardice and your bitchy whining. This moment has been a long time coming. It's not Donald Trump sinking the transatlantic alliance, it is absolutely you.

@esrtweet My main worry isn’t that Europe will finally wake up and become independent. That would be great! My main worry is that US deciding it doesn’t want to be an empire anymore will lead to China taking over as a worldwide empire. And I don’t think you will appreciate that.

@esrtweet I am not trying to persuade median American voter, I am replying to You, assuming that You can appreciate the argument I am making. And Europe, yes, is weak, poor, silly these days. My main hope is Poland these days. They seem to be the most sensible European country.

@WissamKadamani Here is how to do this one: 2^10~10^3 2^38~1/4 10^12 ~250B However, 2^10 is 1024, 2.4% more than 1000. So 2^40 will be roughly 9.6%~10% more than we calculated. So will be 2^38, thus better estimate is 275B. True result: 274,878,906,944

i always thought im better than others at grasping exponentials, but one day i was explaining to my sister ways of approximating things i went: 2¹⁰ is 1024 which is roughly 1000, so you can approximate a big power of 2 as 1000^(⅒ of the exponent) i then gave the example of 2³⁸, and said: that roughly 1000⁴, call it 700,000,000,000 obviously, it turned out to be less than half that, cz 2³⁸ is a quarter of 2⁴⁰ at that moment, i realized that as soon as my brain isn't actively remembering that exponentials are counterintuitive, I'm about as foolish as anyone.

@valigo Let’s do pointer to fn taking char and returning int: int (*fn)(char). See? fn is a pointer to function, so *fn is a function, (*fn)(char) is a function callled on char and that should be int.

@valigo It’s actually very intuitive once you learn to read it left to right. Let’s start with a simple stuff: pointer to int: int *c; Why? Because if c is pointer to int, then *c is int.

Maybe hot take idk, but I hate syntax for aliasing functions and their signature in C. So unintuitive. And it gets worse if it's there's more indirection. I swear I'm just gonna use __attribute__((alias)) next time it takes me more than 2 seconds to understand one of these

@AgustinLebron3 @_Dean_Machine @robinhanson @nic_carter The problem of insider trading isn’t that you have an unfair advantage. If that was the problem, then everyone sophisticated would have “unfair advantage” of not being retard. Problem of insider trading is that you essentially broke your NDA.

@_Dean_Machine @robinhanson @nic_carter So we should transform the greatest mechanism we've invented for solving the central problem of economics (the allocation of scarce resources) into a market between sharps and marks?

In case everyon'e missed it, @robinhanson has been advocating on X and on CNBC recently for the position that "maybe insider trading on prediction markets ain't so bad".

Someone built a Google translate for Linkedin 😭

“Everything is your fault if you're any damn good.” — Ernest Hemingway

stop lying sam. you know the balance sheet you showed me of our assets after you stopped withdrawals was not near enough to meet the obligations. and we had ran entirely out of certain crypto assets, which would mean every single user had to have lent out 100% of their balance in that asset, but we know that wasn’t the case so that’s false (otherwise we would still be custodying their non lent out balance). also the reported spot margin market was only 2.5bn at the time of the blowup. so how was the hole 8bn from a 2.5bn margin market?

This nonsense needs to stop. Merit is what matters, not what you have between your legs. Yesterday, an investor showed up in my office and told me I shouldn’t be hiring female executives. Let’s be done with DEI and reverse DEI and literally anything other than pure merit.

I was using ChatGPT for legal advice and it decided to completely hallucinate some preposterous nonsense about how growing wheat to use on my own farm somehow constitutes interstate commerce

@DrInsensitive Yeah. Most of these should not exist. The rules (for personal income tax) should be actually simple: – No double taxation: no tax on gifts, estate, dividends, nor capital gains – No deductions on anything.

Some people are suggesting a flat tax only for W2 income and interest. Then we would lose these deductions: IRA contributions Mortgage interest Dependants State and local taxes Education expense Home office Charity Catastrophic medical expense Casualty / theft. Alimony I say let's do it. All those deductions only add up to about one percent of the business tax complexity, but that's not why I favor dumping them. I favor dumping them because I want to hear the screaming.

Sorry, the Flat Tax is Not Simple. A "Flat tax" means everyone pays the same income tax rate, say 10%. Simplifying the tax code this way is like simplifying my car by replacing five lug nuts with one big lugnut. The lugnuts are not the complicated part. Okay a flat 10% tax would be SLIGHTLY simpler than our current system, but varying tax rates are about 0.001% of the tax code's complexity. The other 99.999% is hiding inside that word, "Income." Some will protest. "But we will also eliminate deductions!" I certainly approve of that, but don't expect to get a simple tax code. For example: Shall we eliminate the deduction for cost of goods sold? Then all revenue becomes "Income." Shall we eliminate the deduction for wage expense? "No no, we will only eliminate the silly deductions." Okay. Is dinner for a client a silly deduction? What if I eat some too? Is research and development a silly deduction? How about advertising? How about the gasoline to drive my car to work? Is depreciation a silly deduction? Is it even possible to simplify it? How much does a car depreciate in the fourth year? Every one of these expenses, and a hundred more, require a set of rules to define when it is, and is not, a deductible expense. If we try to simplify the rules by removing them, does that mean I can deduct my gasoline expense, or not? We will need a rule to explain the missing rule. Another example: We need timing rules. Does a sale become "Income" when the customer signs the contract? When the product is delivered? When the payment arrives? You probably have an opinion, and so do I, but there is no escaping the need for a rule. Well, there is one escape. The income tax is inherently complex, because income is inherently complex. It cannot be simplified by saying, "Everyone pays 10%." The tax rate was never the complexity, which means we cannot simplify the tax code with a single rate, unless the rate is 0%.

@DrInsensitive Corporate tax is more complex though. Still single rate, though many more rules around expensing. But, at the end relatively straightforward: these things are expense, these are not, and some you need to depreciate over time.

@DrInsensitive Well, we did a big flat-tax reform in Slovakia in 2004 and it was a great simplification. Personal income tax was trivial, single rate, some flat amount deductible per each child, and that was it. You wouldn’t need a tax advisor for that. Oh, and no dividend tax.

@Devon_Eriksen_ Monkey Island was rescued.

Stop this. Don't you understand? They are not looking for sales. They do not want your approval. They hate you, and they want to humiliate and demoralize you so they can be socially ascendant and feel good and momentarily forget that they were weird theater kids in high school that no one liked. And so they can pave the way for a communist revolution that they imagine will put the theater kids in charge. In reality, they'll all be machine gunned into mass graves by thugs within the first 18 days after the fall of the old order, but they don't know that. So every time they hollow out another franchise and wear it like a skinsuit, they don't care if you buy it. They just want to hear you cry. So if you tell them you don't like it, you won't buy it, you're very upset, then you might as well be giving them a smoothie and a handjob. But you can't help it, though, can you? You see the death of your beloved Warcraft, your Star Wars, your Warhammer 40K, and you can't help but mourn. You think something precious has been destroyed. You're sad for what might have been, but never will be. You're wrong. You don't understand. You don't understand because you are an electrical engineer who designs high-voltage grid hardware, and reads and watches stories in his spare time. You are not a professional maker of stories. Well, I am. So I'm going to explain this to you. Star Wars, Star Trek, Cowboy Bebop, Lord of the Rings, Warhammer40K... these aren't stories. They are story ideas. And any professional author will tell you that ideas are the cheapest and easiest part of our whole job. That's not the hard part, or the part that requires talent and skill. The real work in storytelling consists of turning that idea into a complete, satisfying story that is ready to publish and be read and loved. I can come up with ten story ideas in ten minutes, but I dream of someday having enough control over my writing process to publish one good novel a year. The reason you loved all these franchises is that they were a garment worn by good writers, who were able to make you love the characters and situations. Now they are a skinsuit worn by bad writers. Good writers are always going to make stories you like, regardless of which characters and settings they use. Bad ones are always going to disappoint you, no matter which franchise you hand them the keys to. If all the good writers are kicked out of Games Workshop, they still exist and can write good stuff. And if they are not kicked out, but merely disenfranchised and overruled by managerial theater kids, but they have to stay for a paycheck, then it's because YOU give more money to Games Workshop than you would to all the independent projects they could start. You thinking you are fighting for the soul of Warhammer40K and Star Wars. But you are fighting against the people who own the copyrights, so you will always lose. The best you could ever do is to kill the franchise by rallying the customer base to defect. And you can do that right now by giving your attention to storytellers who don't hate you, instead. But you are attached to the familiar, to what you are used to instead of to what could be. So you follow franchises and intellectual properties instead of artists and writers. And you get so mad that there won't be more Star Wars that you reward critics like @TheCriticalDri2 for his tenth angry rant about how Star Wars sucks now. Sure, I could tell him to spend his time promoting good new stuff instead, but the only reason he is able to promote anything is because he has an audience, and you are that audience, and you are rewarding him for ragebaiting you, demanding that he ragebait you, because that's the only thing you tune in for. That's why there are so few good writers in your field of view who are making good new stuff that you like. Because you've never heard of the ones that exist, and if they're not attached to one of your beloved franchises, they can't raise any money. I would love to spend 100% of my working hours writing novels. I'd certainly finish them faster that way. But I can't. Because I have to be on Twitter most of the time, so I can pay my bills now. And I'm considered one of the fortunate ones, because the time I spend on publicity actually earns me enough money to do that. Most other authors, good storytellers who don't hate you, can't even quit their day jobs. Which means even less time and energy for creating. I know you loved these franchises when they were alive. I did, too, some of them. But you have to let them go. Because they are dead now. They are still moving, but they are dead. We're in the part of the zombie movie now where your son has succumbed to the infection, and you have him locked in the basement, feeding him raw meat while he lunges at the end of his chain, trying to devour your flesh. You're just too attached to let go, hoping against hope that you can hang on until a cure is found, but there isn't a cure, there's never a cure, and that isn't your son. It's pure evil piloting the husk of his body. The only thing left for him is a quick 5.56mm bullet in the head. Do you doubt me? Do you think you can win against the copyright holders? Well, tell me then, when have you ever won one of these? Name one franchise that fans have rescued. Not rescued from financial cancellation, there are plenty of those, but name one that was rescued from woke infiltration, and brought back to its roots. Well? I'm waiting. The truth is, wars are not won by being bold and resolute and surrendering no inch of ground. That's just a strategy for filling graveyards with your brothers. Wars are won by fighting the enemy where you are strong and he is weak. If every one of you gave an independent author, or artist, or filmmaker, or developer, one tenth the time and money you spend on overpriced plastic army women made by neomarxist feminists who hate you, then a lot more of them would thrive, and there would be just as many new things for you to love are there were old ones. You're not selfish, or short-sighted, or tight-fisted. You just loved too deeply, and you can't let go. But he who cannot cast away a treasure at need is in chains. Stop stalking your crazy ex-girlfriend who got fat and hates you now. There are younger, hotter, nicer women who would love to meet you.

They are really taking Orwell's books as implementation manual :D

@ModernRhetorics @romanhelmetguy One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. Did US deserve this? Of course not! Is Al-Qaeda an enemy? Of course yes! Is it useful to frame our enemy as a weak irrational cowards? No. Does empathy help defeating one’s enemy? Yes. That’s all I claim.

@samuha @romanhelmetguy Does this mean the US "had it coming"? How about you have the courage to deal with an argument in good faith?

A few days after 9/11, Roman historian Mary Beard wrote that the United States "had it coming." She said we were paying the price for our "refusal to listen to what the 'terrorists' have to say." She called what they did an "extraordinary act of bravery." The UK knighted her.