lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

Jason Zweig has a very interesting observation about Warren Buffet:

I like to talk, instead, about structure.
In 1962, three years before Buffett took over at Berkshire, the business historian Alfred D. Chandler wrote that “unless structure follows strategy, inefficiency results.”
What did he mean? Businesses that design themselves around what they’re trying to achieve are the most likely to succeed. That’s structure following strategy. Instead, at all too many businesses, it’s the other way around: What they can achieve is constrained by how they’re designed. That’s strategy following structure.

I had not heard the line “unless structure follows strategy, inefficiency results.”

Buffett made structure follow strategy instead of the other way around.
His strategy was to earn the highest possible net after-tax return on the assets investors entrusted to him – nothing more and never anything less.
From that, structure had to follow.

A counter example to what Buffett did is seen in many Silicon Valley companies.  Take, for example Google’s 2013 decision to require Google+ for YouTube comments. Google said the redesign would make comments more useful through better sorting, moderation, and conversations tied to people’s Google+ circles. Users objected to being required to use a separate social profile to comment, and the new system faced problems in adoption. In 2015, YouTube said a Google+ profile would no longer be required to comment, upload, or create a channel.

Had to work around the "SmartDetect" feature that Vitamix has to make it work again.  Documented the steps here

Quoting Daniel Stenberg 

I decided that instead of trying to do this the best and optimal way – I shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of good – I would start out by doing the things I know how to do and take it as far as I can one step at a time. Something should be better than nothing.

Interesting thought process from a great hacker and engineer.

Interesting quote from a John Carmack tweet (xcancel link)

When failure is not an option, success can stay very expensive. You need to experiment to improve, and that fundamentally means being comfortable with failure. If you know it is going to work, it isn’t an experiment.

An interesting comment from hacker news  in the discussion on Small models also found the vulnerabilities that Mythos found

This is from the first of the caveats that they list:

> Scoped context: Our tests gave models the vulnerable function directly, often with contextual hints (e.g., "consider wraparound behavior"). A real autonomous discovery pipeline starts from a full codebase with no hints. The models' performance here is an upper bound on what they'd achieve in a fully autonomous scan. That said, a well-designed scaffold naturally produces this kind of scoped context through its targeting and iterative prompting stages, which is exactly what both AISLE's and Anthropic's systems do.

That's why their point is what the subheadline says, that the moat is the system, not the model.

Everybody so far here seems to be misunderstanding the point they are making.

Link to the comment

In a recent interview, Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, signaled a shift in tone. The firm, once a strong advocate of ESG and DEI, is now taking a more “pragmatic” approach. Fink described the “woke” phase as part of a cycle and suggested it may have gone too far.

Looking past the word soup: what does it even mean for a financial firm to lead “environmental and social activism”?

As one Reddit commenter put it:

“None of this even touches on the absurdity of the proposition that an entity such as BlackRock could be considered an interlocutor for ‘environmental and social activism.’”

Another commenter sharpened that critique:

There’s a reason finance capitalist environmental and social plans focus so much on ‘consumerism’ and envision saving the world through a reduction of people and production, and in rent seeking, not a change in property ownership.”

From the Bloomberg opinion piece: America Is Depleting a More Powerful Weapon Than Its Missiles (the answer is: belief in the truth of what the leader of the US tells the world about the war, peace and everything else.) an interesting tit-bit:

Contrary to the illusion held by many Americans, the BBC is not a government-run body, it is an independent corporation administered by trustees and funded by public subscription. Throughout World War II, millions of people in occupied Europe risked their freedom to hear its news. The penalty for those caught listening by German detector vans was deportation to a concentration camp.

The magic words with which its impeccably modulated announcers began their reports — “this is London” — resounded across the globe. After 1945, the BBC habit persisted. Tens of millions of people — especially in Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia — even now prefer the Beeb’s foreign language news to the local variety, rigorously censored by their own governments. Voice of America has never achieved quite the same authority or reputation for impartiality, but it has been nonetheless useful and influential.