I've had a similar experience with Apple Store employees many, many times: I walk in and vaguely describe what I want, and they steer me to the cheapest item they sell that could possibly meet my stated requirements.
I've also returned Apple products multiple times, once (recently) without the packaging, and once several days past the return window. They refunded me every time, no questions asked.
This makes me wonder if it's part of their training?
It is - you’re not trained to upsell, only to give the customer what they need to do what they want.
Can be a little annoying (an employee actively tried to downsell my partner, even though they knew what they wanted), but overall it’s a nice practice.
Maybe you mean it's a crime to professionally provide advice of this nature without a license?
It is generally not a crime to casually provide advice of this nature without a license. For example, if my friend tells me, "My stomach hurts!", it is not a crime for me to say, "Just grin and bear it, it will be okay." If they subsequently die of appendicitis, I'm unlikely to have legal liability. It would be difficult to characterize what I said as medical diagnosis or treatment.
Similarly, I can tell my friend, "Don't bother paying your taxes, that is a waste of time." This is legal speech. (Of course, helping them evade taxes is another matter.)
What is illegal is to hold oneself out as a licensed doctor, lawyer or engineer, or to provide professional services without a license.
Of course, chatbots operate at scale and give the impression of being professionally qualified even though they don't make specific representations to that effect. You're directionally probably right and I agree with you, I just want to nitpick about what is and isn't criminal.
Yeah, exactly. ChatGPT et al provide "advice as a service," and charge up to hundreds of dollars a month for it. (And the free tier is just a loss-leader to make money).
If these companies intend to profit off of giving advice, it seems wise to restrict them in the same way we do individuals.
As you say, "the fundamental theorem of algebra relies on complex numbers" gets to the heart of the view that complex numbers are the algebraic closure of R.
But also, the most slick, sexy proof I know for the fundamental theorem of algebra is via complex analysis, where it's an easy consequence of Liouville's Theorem, which states that any function which is complex-differentiable and bounded on all of C must in fact be constant.
Like many other theorems in complex analysis, this is extremely surprising and has no analogue in real analysis!
> You can think of it as returning an equivalence class if you like. Then it's single-valued.
I can, but I still have to be very mindful of how I use the "=" sign. Sometimes it's an (in)equality, sometimes it's... the equivalence class thing. The ambiguity doesn't seem very elegant.
> Also note the very cool and fun topology connection here. The keyword to search for is Riemann surface.
One technical point about resonance: the fourth-power law only applies when the driving frequency (i.e., the frequency of visible light) is far below the resonant frequency (which is in the UV region of the spectrum). The approximation breaks down the closer you get to the resonant frequency and also above.
I was confused about how a monotonic function (f^4) could possibly describe a resonance phenomenon (which ought to have a strong local extremum), and this is the answer.
For those who don’t know: the film City of God is based on this, and it’s a great movie. One of my all-time favorites. The directing, acting photography and storytelling are all very well done. Worth anyone’s time.
1. From the perspective of shareholders, and for the moment ignoring taxes, buybacks and dividends are exactly economically equivalent. If a dividend happens, you get some cash. If a buyback happens, the value of your shares goes up. Crucially, the amount by which each share's price goes up is equal to what the per-share dividend would have been. It's a useful exercise to work this out and convince yourself that it's true.
2. Now let's stop ignoring taxes. If a dividend happens, you get taxed that year. If the value of your shares goes up, you don't get taxed that year. Instead, you get taxed whenever you sell, which might be later when you retire and are in a lower tax bracket, or after a period of some years when you get a lower capital gains tax rate.
3. Now let's think about the effect of dividends vs buybacks on the allocation of your portfolio as a shareholder. Neither changes the total value of your portfolio -- that was point number 1, plus just plain old conservation of dollars, modulo taxes -- but a dividend increases the proportion of your investment that's in cash, while a buyback keeps it constant. Let's say you auto-invest all dividends in the S&P 500 or equivalent index fund. Then dividends reduce your ownership stake in the company, while buybacks keep it constant.
For these reasons, most investors prefer (or ought to prefer) buybacks: they have the same economic effect as dividends but allow you to defer taxes to whenever is optimal for you. Also, and this is a smaller point, if a company does a dividend then you have to actively do something (that is, buy stock) in order to maintain the same proportion of your portfolio in that company. In other words, if you want 10% of your savings to be in X, and they do a dividend, then you have to take the cash and buy shares of X. The reason this is a smaller point is that at least in theory you can get your brokerage to do this for you automatically.
There are some nuances where point number 1 fails to hold: signaling, bad execution of the buybacks, and principal-agent conflicts. The big example of that final point is executive compensation tied to specific share prices. I'm not an expert in this area so I don't know, off the top of my head, if there's real evidence either way that this effect is very large, but it's one that people will bring up so everyone who thinks about this ought to know about it.
This is not quite correct. If a dividend happens, the market capitalisation drops by the amount of the dividend, the number of shares remains constant, so the share price dips by the amount of the dividend per share. All investors get the dividend.
If a buyback happens, the market capitalisation drops by the amount of the buyback, and the number of shares drops by the same ratio, keeping the share price initially constant. The money goes to the investors who sell.
Buybacks are nevertheless good for investors who hold. They now have shares in a company whose market cap is 100% growing enterprise, instead of 90% enterprise and 10% bag of money. That means that if the company keeps doing well, the share price will increase faster than it would have done otherwise (it will also drop faster - it's no longer anchored to an inert pile of cash).
The investors who sell are wealthier by amount $X because now they have fewer shares and more dollars.
The investors who don't sell are wealthier by the same amount $X because the shares they kept are worth more, because prices go up.
> keeping the share price initially constant.
This statement is definitely incorrect, unless you're being very technicaly and pedantic about "initially". You can think about it theoretically or you can look at empirical evidence. It is well-supported empirically that share prices go up after buybacks, and in fact they do so quantitatively by exactly the amount necessary for the equation implied above to hold.
No, this is incorrect. Investors like buybacks, so when the buyback is announced, share prices may rise, but certainly not by the amount of the buyback. They don't go up when the buyback gets executed, unlike dividends, which decrease the share price at the moment when they get distributed.
The equations are:
nr_shares * share_price = cash_of_company + value_of_company_excluding_cash.
In a buyback, cash_of_company decreases by the buyback, and nr_shares decreases by buyback / share_price.
Consider the extreme case, a lemonade stand with a bank account with $1M. 1000 shares outstanding, share price $1000. After a buyback of $900K is announced, 900 shares are sold for $1000. $100K remains in the company's bank account, 100 shares remain outstanding, at ... $1000 per share.
> If the value of your shares goes up, you don't get taxed that year. Instead, you get taxed whenever you sell, which might be later when you retire and are in a lower tax bracket, or after a period of some years when you get a lower capital gains tax rate.
This is actually not true in the Netherlands, which taxes unrealized gains on wealth. Quite unique. But NL also features a dividend tax, which politicians tried to get rid off but didn't succeed because it was such an unpopular plan.
> In other words, if you want 10% of your savings to be in X, and they do a dividend, then you have to take the cash and buy shares of X.
Wouldn't the inverse of this be true in buybacks though? If it's economically equivalent then buyback should increase the price and similarly increase the proportion of X in your portfolio - which would force you to rebalance (might have tax implications).
This is great! Lovely to see a clean new codebase implementing quantum chemistry algorithms like Hartree-Fock. I remember using Molpro at my fist job. Venerable and comprehensive it may be, but it is some hoary Fortran code for sure.
This is so poorly written. What is "Ralph"? What is its purpose? How does it work? A single sentence at the top would help. The writer imagines that the reader cares enough to have followed their entire journey, or to decode this enormously distended pile of words.
More generally, I've noticed that people who spend a lot of time interacting with LLMs sometimes develop a distinct brain-fried tone when they write or talk.
Please don't post shallow dismissals of other people's work (this is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and especially please don't cross into personal attack.
How is it shallow? The commenter asked three questions. That shows that they read the article and are reacting to it. Shallow would be something like, "More AI slop."
They allege these 3 questions aren't answered in the article and then use that as a jumping off point to further allege that using LLMs have damaged the writer's mind, but the article does address each one of their questions and they would've noticed that if their engagement hadn't been skin deep.
So their comment is really a vehicle for them to deliver an insult and doesn't represent significant engagement with the material or a thoughtful digression that could foster curious conversation.
Note that that doesn't mean it's a good article or that Ralph is a good idea.
"develop a distinct brain-fried tone when they write or talk" - I find that using an LLM as a writing copilot seriously degrades the flow of short form content
I actually visited that link, and the answer seems to be
"If you've seen my socials lately, you might have seen me talking about Ralph and wondering what Ralph is. Ralph is a technique. In its purest form, Ralph is a Bash loop.
while :; do cat PROMPT.md | claude-code ; done
Ralph can replace the majority of outsourcing at most companies for greenfield projects. It has defects, but these are identifiable and resolvable through various styles of prompts."
but the contents of PROMPT.md are behind a paywall. In spirit that is not so different from
gcc program.c; ./a.out
while program.c is behind a paywall. It's nearly impossible to reason about what the system will do and how it works without knowing more about PROMPT.md. For example, PROMPT.md could say "Build the software" or it could say "Write formal proofs in lean for each function" or ...
In the spirit of curiosity, I'd appreciate a summary of a couple sentences describing the approach, aimed at a technically sophisticated audience that understands LLMs and software engineering, but not the specifics of this particular system.
Won’t this only work when connected to the internet? So I can’t use it on a flight.
Or if I work in finance, or healthcare, or law, or government, or a hardware design company, I don’t want my files leaving my network. Those are very important use cases, much more important than searching my personal laptop. I want this for WORK, not my little photo collection or notes or whatever.
This is a great use case for modern LLM/embedding models but gotta be local to be actually useful in the places where it’s most needed.
The file browsing is fully offline supported (as in the files get synced locally). We also allow text search offline, but smart search is not yet offline (we need to embed the search prompt), however, we would like to support fully offline use soon!
Many tools offer offline file browsing and full text search. Anything from midnight commander to Alfred to ripgrep.
I think the valuable and difficult thing is high quality, fast, offline semantic search, including indexing (so my files don't go to your servers -- that's an immediate no-go for all the important industries).
I've tried my hand at this a couple times and it's hard! But really hope you succeed, because it would be a big game changer in how we organize and use information. Every company out there would buy this immediately.
I've also returned Apple products multiple times, once (recently) without the packaging, and once several days past the return window. They refunded me every time, no questions asked.
This makes me wonder if it's part of their training?
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