I don't think it's correct to say "rates were kept low" as if the Fed had a choice in the matter. All the Fed can really do is respond to market conditions. It can be slow to react, and it could in theory be wrong about the market in a way that causes economic damage (in one direction or the other), but it can't really do better than the implied market rate.
Interest rates were kept at historic lows for a decade because the 2008 crisis caused available credit to absolutely implode, which destroyed a huge swath of the effective money supply. Leverage ratios at banks went from north of 40:1 to closer to 10:1. Without ZIRP and QE and all of the rest, we would have had outright deflation, kicking off the kind of deflationary debt spiral that made the Great Depression so bad.
That kind of dramatic destruction of credit did not happen during the pandemic. The banks were fine [0]. What happened was that the economic output of actual goods and services collapsed. So high levels of stimulus led to more money chasing fewer real resources, and you got inflation instead.
This should not have been a surprise.
[0] Modulo a few like SVB that blew up a couple of years later because they had forgotten that interest rates could also go up.
This is fine advice up to a certain point, but you do not accomplish bigger and grander things by working harder, nor even, as this implies, by working more diligently. You accomplish them through leverage.
It is not just about what you are working on. You need to understand what everyone else is working on, and more importantly, what they could be working on (their capabilities) and what they should be working on (the org's priorities). When you find yourself being dragged in to meetings to write roadmaps, estimate schedules, and contribute paragraphs to the annual budgeting process, you know you're on the right track.
He does have one thing right, that this is about reputation, because you cannot just go out and unilaterally take this authority. It has to be earned. Having a large number of lines of code written, commits landed, and tickets closed can be a means to that end, but it is not in and of itself the goal.
No, that risk always existed. When the Communists took over Russia, they did not bother to honor all of the Tsarist debts. A country is not like a company. Sovereign default is always a choice. That is what it means to be sovereign.
There have been over 70 incidents of overt domestic default since 1800. The United States defaulted in 1790, when a portion of the interest it owed was deferred for 10 years, and technically defaulted again in 1933 when it abrogated the gold clause.
There were something like 40 companies involved in AV1 standardization. Quite a few technical contributions did not come from Google, and quite a few of Google's proposals were substantially modified by feedback from others before they were included (and not all of them were eventually included).
Source: I lead Mozilla's technical contributions to AV1.
It saddens me to see discourse on the internet about AV1's ancestry being focused on Google's VPx line of contributions, while diminishing those coming from Daala (entropy coder...) and Thor (QMs...), as well as inter-company collaborations (CDEF).
A redeeming outcome is that with AVIF's new image tuning modes (both in libaom and SVT-AV1), Gianni and I managed to utilize as many AV1 coding tools as possible, including QMs that sorely needed a well-deserved spotlight.
Also, thanks for paving the way to the current state of multimedia compression! I'm a longtime fan of Xiph(ophorus) since the 1.0 beta/RC Vorbis days. We used your image sets a lot during our testing.
You're welcome. That is what those image sets were for.
I was really happy Thomas Davies added quantization matrices to the spec, because if he hadn't, I would have had to. Fortunately, he did a good job. I am glad someone is finally using them. Don't sleep on per-segment quantizer deltas, either.
Me and a bunch of friends (mainly Clybius and Yiss/Uranite), after I was constantly saying daala was a great low complexity visual metric that should be added back to AV1 encoders, we decided to implement it into yet another svt-av1 encoder fork:
https://github.com/Uranite/svt-av1-tritium#from-svt-av1-hdr-...
It has been showing great performance overall and is quite nice.
It can work on CDEF, like it did in aomenc-av1 back in 2018/early 2019. It does so very well.
We've also implemented deeper controls, but that is still experimental.
Thank you so much for your work on daala stuff, as it's been one of my many inspirations in the field.
> A lower resolution image layered below the full resolution image, which is loaded and rendered first.
Unlike a thumbnail, higher-resolution layers can be predicted from the lower-resolution layer, so those bits are not wasted. That is not possible by layering <img> elements.
I don't need the TV to be cheaper. I can afford to make up the difference for whatever few hundred dollars extra they would earn selling my data. But the expensive ones do this stuff, too.
So what you're saying is you're more valuable to advertisers . . . which means the amount you are worth to them grows with the amount you'd spend to avoid them.
Unless this stuff is made literally illegal they will keep doing it, because it's far more profitable than the alternatives. This is precisely why ideas like paying for a privacy respecting option on Facebook could never work.
I recently solved this problem by buying the Dell U5226KW. It has the same height as a 16:9 42" TV, but is 21:9, so a lot wider. It costs about four times as much as a similar sized 16:9 TV and you can't get it any bigger.
My first question was, if the vtable only has a single function in it (as in these examples), can the compiler optimize it to a function pointer to save an indirection?
But your steel-man actually proves my point: people who have insecure attachment commonly develop such an attachment style as a result of their childhood relationships with their caregivers.
It has absolutely nothing to do with being "strong" versus "weak".
Under your steel-man, someone who is anxious-avoidant could appear very independent and therefore "strong" even though they are struggling inside.
Sarah C. M. Paine has an excellent series of lectures on what it means to be a "continental" vs. a "maritime" power, and how the latter build wealth through trade and an international rules-based order. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9VSg4ZSwJs is probably the most succinct, and a good introduction if the name Alfred T. Mahan is not familiar to you. Dwarkesh Patel's channel has a more recent 9-part series (on this and other topics): https://www.youtube.com/@DwarkeshPatel
Warren Buffett has often said, "In looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if you don't have the first, the other two will kill you."
The exact same logic applies to devices you buy. These companies have shown they do not have any integrity. So why would you want buy something from them that is "smart" and never sleeps?
Because our government has failed to protect us from monopolies or duopolies. How many things can you buy with modern technology that you'd say the brand had integrity?
Yea competition only enforces integrity if consumers are selecting for integrity. Without getting into a nitty grityy morality debate, you've got an obvious first issue here that many if not most people dont know what they are buying when it comes to tech, so we cant expect a market to correct for our perceived morality if the consumers havent even got a clue they're being slighted in the first place.
Interest rates were kept at historic lows for a decade because the 2008 crisis caused available credit to absolutely implode, which destroyed a huge swath of the effective money supply. Leverage ratios at banks went from north of 40:1 to closer to 10:1. Without ZIRP and QE and all of the rest, we would have had outright deflation, kicking off the kind of deflationary debt spiral that made the Great Depression so bad.
That kind of dramatic destruction of credit did not happen during the pandemic. The banks were fine [0]. What happened was that the economic output of actual goods and services collapsed. So high levels of stimulus led to more money chasing fewer real resources, and you got inflation instead.
This should not have been a surprise.
[0] Modulo a few like SVB that blew up a couple of years later because they had forgotten that interest rates could also go up.
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