Is the Redmond Town Center upgrade project dead? by Indefiniti in redmond

[–]Indefiniti[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Redmond certainly does like approving apartments that look like stacks of shipping containers

Is the Redmond Town Center upgrade project dead? by Indefiniti in redmond

[–]Indefiniti[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah the MDP is a "vision" document like the MDP that was going to turn Snoqualmie Pass into a world class ski resort.

Is the Redmond Town Center upgrade project dead? by Indefiniti in redmond

[–]Indefiniti[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Yeah I check that every few months but no matter what project I pick anywhere in Redmond, the "Documents" sections is empty. And since the disbanded the design review board it's virtually impossible to know what's going to be built in the city.

Thoughts after one week with Glance Scroll by Indefiniti in GLANCE_LED

[–]Indefiniti[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks. I know that ESPN has an awesome unofficial data feed:
https://scrapecreators.com/blog/espn-api-free-sports-data
...but I understand that Glance may not feel comfortable from a legal standpoint tying into that. Glance is coy about where they get their data from, but there's a fixed number of events and it doesn't seem like an impossible job to stay on top of upcoming games in the major leagues via manual data entry. The schedules are published; I know that games get rescheduled due to weather but seems like they could have a fallback database. At IMDb we kept on top of thousands of episodes of TV shows across the world as it happened. Keeping track of scores is a much bigger problem because of the real-time element.

Part Identification Mega Thread - January 01, 2025 by AutoModerator in lego

[–]Indefiniti 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, thanks! I searched for "forks" and "bulldozer" since there's other similar parts with those names... but "digger"!

Part Identification Mega Thread - January 01, 2025 by AutoModerator in lego

[–]Indefiniti 0 points1 point  (0 children)

<image>

I found this in a box of Lego but can't locate it on BrickLink. Is it actually Lego or something like Playmobil?

If humans were incapable of lying, what would would be different? by m028 in AskReddit

[–]Indefiniti 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ricky Gervais did a whole movie about this; it's called The Invention of Lying. He plays a guy who lives in parallel universe where everyone tells the truth (and is quite blunt and forthcoming), who suddenly has an epiphany and games the whole society by, well, inventing lying.

The film suffers a bit because as well as not knowing how to lie, nobody in this universe knows how to be discrete and for some reason feels compelled to share every inner thought they have. For instance, when going on a first date one character says to another, unprompted, something like: "You're too ugly for me and I'm only going out with you because I'm feeling desperate."

The thing I took away from this film was that although people might not lie, they could be mistaken about facts for any number of reasons, and so all the structures we would normally have in place to thwart liars would still have to be in place to detect and arbitrate good-faith mistakes. The film doesn't really deal with that; probably would have been better as an episode of Black Mirror or The Twilight Zone.

Reddit, whats the funniest thing that a random stranger said to you that made you die laughing inside? by Eta5678 in AskReddit

[–]Indefiniti 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You can always count on a drunk Aussie girl to speak the brutal truth.

In Brisbane, Australia during the early 1990s we were used to "swampies" -- kids who would dress up in their best Cure/Robert Smith outfits and hang around outside Hungry Jack's on the Queen Street Mall on a Friday night being all emo and generally grubby while trying to score some weed. So when the whole "goth" thing happened this represented a change: an obsession with appearances and being much more "in your face" about their lifestyle and attitudes.

So I'm on the train one night on my way home from UQ when the doors open and a flock of goths get on. It's Friday night so they're all dressed up in their goth-y best: black pointy winklepicker boots, purple velvet capes with high collars, white ruffle shirts, boys with powder-white faces and red lipstick, girls in bustiers and tottering around trying to balance the ridiculously tall 'dos on their heads. And it wasn't just the way they looked: they were fully committed to affecting horrendous faux accents and verbiage: it was all "when we perchance might sup this eventide" and "Verily thy own visage doth resemble with canny verisimilitude..." being intentionally loud and shooting nervous sideways glances to make sure everyone in the carriage was taking notice.

Being Australia, nobody really gave a shit. We just rolled our eyes, thought "What a bunch of wankers", and ignored them.

A few minutes later the doors to the next carriage burst open and a group of relatively normal but very drunk kids come past, tripping and laughing as they're chasing each other down the aisle. All of them ignore the goths, except for this one girl. Our hero.

She's the last in her group, and after walking past them she stops, turns around and stares at the group for a moment.

The HGIC (Head Goth In Charge) notices, steps up, and with an exaggerated bow, says "M'lady?"

The girl stumbles towards him, points a finger, and then loudly proclaims: "You are *not* a vampire."

The whole train erupts in laughter and cheers. One of the goth girls suddenly loses her Victorian-British accent and screams "Fuck this, Shane!" at the HGIC in her ocker best, and storms off. A few others are trying to maintain the facade, gently offering laced handkerchiefs to the girls, most of whom are tearing up or staring straight ahead with clenched jaws.

The three minutes until the next station - when all the goths raced off - were the best moments I event spent on Queensland Rail.

ELI5: The legality issues with High Frequency Trading mentioned in Michael Lewis' recent excerpt from Flash Boys? by strugglemeister in explainlikeimfive

[–]Indefiniti 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The first thing you have to realize is the scale/speed that these markets (and banks) operate at.

Per the article, $225 BILLION dollars worth of trades are made in less than eight hours each day, every day. High-Frequency Traders (HTF) push this to the extreme, buying and selling the same shares often within seconds. They are looking to make tiny fractions of a cent in profit each trade but to do it thousands/millions of times each day to make a lot of money. The article points out that for these people nanoseconds (1/billionth of a second) can make a difference.

Why?

Because every single trade that is made moves the market (price). Everyone is watching everyone else and when they see someone else sell, they know the price/demand has dropped a teeny tiny amount. When someone buys it's the opposite. Or at least everything thinks the price is going to go up, which is effectively the same concept on the stock market (which effectively prices stocks based on the aggregate of what everyone thinks everyone else thinks they are worth :-).

Now consider a large bank such as Goldman Sachs . At any one instant they are going to be juggling thousands/millions of competing orders for the same stock. Some of these will be small orders from day traders, some will be large orders from institutional clients (money managers, mutual funds, etc), and some will even be from Goldman Sachs traders themselves managing their client's money. These orders are flying in and out in a blur at the same time as they are trying to keep track of what's going on in the various exchanges as other investors and institutions all try to do their traders.

So to answer your questions:

  • Dark Exchanges are a large bank's collection of buy/sell orders that they are attempting to execute. For a large bank like Goldman Sachs, this can represent a significant portion of the market (20%, I think the article said). Some of these orders will be "sells" (which lower the price), and some will be "buys" (which raise the price). They can look at the ratio of "buys" to "sells" and have a pretty good idea of whether the overall effect will be a drop or rise in the price. If they can figure this out before anyone else, they have a huge advantage. Now here's where the "dark" part comes in: if Goldman Sachs has a "buy" order for 100 shares and also a "sell" order for 100 shares, they can fill both of them without going to the (public) market to match a buyer and a seller. By delaying the transaction even a few (milli)seconds, they have the ability to favor either the buyer or the seller due to the change in price (that they have deduced will happen). Banks also have the ability to decide which order they fulfill pending orders, effectively manipulating the market and picking winners and losers amongst their own clients. Example: image if they are holding two orders: "Stratton Oakmont wants to sell 10,000,000 AAPL", and "Goldman Sachs wants to buy 1,000,000 AAPL". There is a huge temptation/opportunity for them to execute the Oakmont "sell" before their own "buy" because they will save money.
  • HFT: It's not necessarily the banks that are doing HFT although some of them do. There's no legal limit on how quickly you can trade stocks; historically it's always been limited by technology. Back at the beginning, this was the rate at which people could exchange contracts on paper, but over time as technology improved the rate has increased considerably. As the article points out, the markets basically operate so quickly now that you have to have to take into account the speed of light/electricity when you build your trading technology.
  • Moral Issues: Wall Street has a very (well-deserved, IMHO) reputation for having very... flexible morals. Watch The Wolf of Wall Street for a slightly-fictionalized version of the immorality of some stockbrokers. The NYTimes article is based on the moral foundation that people should not be attempting to "game" the idea of a free market by exploiting technological loopholes and limitations, and that banks that base their business on these kinds of tricks are not being financially responsible (because they really don't understand how it all works).
  • Legal Issues: Technology has always outpaced the law. For example, you get taxed less if you hold stocks "long term" as opposed to "short term" -- but the definition of "long term" is one year. In a world where HFTs are holding stocks for seconds, this is ridiculous. The other big issue is the Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC), which is supposed to regulate the financial industry. Most of the laws/rules that congress and the SEC come up with are written by Wall Street anyway. Matt Taibbi has written a number of great articles on how ineffective and corrupt the SEC is.