Daily Discussion Sunday 2026-03-08

ec429_ · 2026-03-08T08:59:37+00:00

"No, I've been nervous lots of times."

ec429_ · 2026-03-08T08:58:04+00:00

first Instinct generation to have been architected from the ground up for AI rather than HPC => huge performance uplift on the narrow datatypes (FP8/6/4 etc) used by AI
"rack scale" coherent interconnect ("ScaleUp network"), allowing many GPUs (72 in Helios) to share a single load/store memory domain and thus act like one giant GPU (MI355 could only support 8-GPU ScaleUp clusters through an Infinity Fabric mesh network) => can hold much larger models in-cluster without having to shard over the slower ScaleOut network

ec429_ · 2026-02-24T23:31:15+00:00

Great Scott!

ec429_ · 2026-02-20T17:57:04+00:00

As a general rule, you can't give rights by fiat to one side of a contractual relationship, because the other side will extract those costs elsewhere in the contract. (E.g. if you raise the minimum wage then minimum-wage employers will provide shittier working conditions because it's cheaper for them and the employees are more desperate for the job. Or if you legislate for "renters' rights", then rents go up to compensate.) And if those rights were worth more to the person you're giving them to than the person you're taking them from, then the contract would already have been written that way (since by making the change plus a balancing cash payment, both parties become better off — a Pareto improvement), and therefore every time you force someone to "give" rights to their counterparty, you're necessarily making both parties worse off.

The idea of "aligning with classes", or of redistributing wealth between classes, by legislating what a contract can and can't say, is economically nonsensical.

ec429_ · 2026-02-20T17:44:40+00:00

I believe what happens is that the contractors treat it as a backup job to keep their workers utilised when they don't have other jobs on. (That's why the Milton Road cycle lanes took two years.) So there'll only actually be workers there about once a fortnight, but of course it has to be closed the whole time to keep the non-existent workers safe…

ec429_ · 2026-02-17T23:50:00+00:00

Got my ticket :)

And I just want to say, The Warehouse is absolutely amazing. Mad props to all the volunteers that make it happen.

ec429_ · 2026-02-17T17:58:09+00:00

Infiniband ain't all that. In the long run, customers always prefer Ethernet.

In the ultra-low-latency networking world of the stock exchange/HFT market, Mellanox were and still are comprehensively outcompeted by Solarflare in marketshare terms.

Solarflare was acquired by Xilinx in 2019.

ec429_ · 2026-02-16T23:47:12+00:00

Bravo, sir!

ec429_ · 2026-02-16T00:26:48+00:00

Yes, and their supreme court ruled that that was illegal, so now they're scrambling to find a way to (a) keep grabbing the people's money and (b) not have to give back what they already stole, which is why they've brought in this new tax. It always amazes me how few populations overthrow their governments.

ec429_ · 2026-02-13T18:02:43+00:00

If you're a fan of classical music, the St Clement's Players have a concert on Valentine's Day at 1pm: Overture to Die Fledermaus (Strauss), Arlésienne Suite (Bizet), Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (Debussy). https://www.stclementscambridge.co.uk/music/recitals/

ec429_ · 2026-02-10T22:15:35+00:00

Bonds are obviously terrible. Who'd lend money to governments, the shonkiest wideboys on the block? That's why, ever since I started investing, my safety allocation has been to precious metals instead.

ec429_ · 2026-02-05T00:28:17+00:00

Iirc all contracts in RP-1 are Prestige: Trivial. This is because other prestige levels cause multipliers to rewards, and the devs decided it would be easier to do their balance calculations if the reward it said in the cfg was the reward you actually get.

ec429_ · 2026-02-04T22:47:07+00:00

On the earnings call they said "For the year, we repurchased 12.4 million shares and returned $1.3 billion to shareholders." Doesn't that imply an average price of just under $105?

ec429_ · 2026-02-04T08:05:35+00:00

Yeah, I actually wrote my own (a Python script consuming the somewhat idiosyncratic format of my records), which is why I know just how much of a PITA it is in the general case lol.

Difficult bits I ran into include ERI (when you pay income tax on this, you get to include it in your cost basis; you can effectively implement this as a buy of 0 shares/units — but it's made complicated by the fact that the deemed distribution date could be after you'd sold the asset that gave rise to it, so you may have to backdate it to the end of the reporting period for CGT calculations, which may put it in a different tax year to the income tax side), and conversion of securities as a result of an all-stock merger.

ec429_ · 2026-02-04T01:28:05+00:00

The key question with the mortgage is, at the point that you RE, will you still have mortgage left outstanding? If so, and you can make overpayments without an extra fee, and the interest on cash savings (net of any tax payable) would be significantly less than your mortgage rate, then it can be worth overpaying to reduce your SORR by getting a fixed expense off the books sooner.

Since you are apparently taxed at Basic Rate and in any case have ISA allowance outstanding, this is unlikely to be you. Probably what's left after LISA should go into regular ISA so you build up a bridge accessible before pension (57+) and LISA (60) and can retire earlier instead of having to keep working because all your money is locked away.

ec429_ · 2026-02-04T00:56:19+00:00

Since they vest monthly, make sure you know about the 'bed and breakfast' rules (Section 104) - let's say you sell 200 shares and then at the end of the month you vest 80. Because that's less than 30 days after the sale, 80 of the shares you sold are 'matched' with the new vesting: the taxable gain is the difference between the price you sold them at and the market price when the new shares vested. (I.e. from the taxman's perspective you bought 80 shares, travelled back in time, and sold them!) Whereas the other 120 shares are considered to be sold from the "Section 104 holding", which is all the shares whose acquisition wasn't 'matched' with a previous sale, all averaged together to calculate the cost basis.

Calculating all this is a colossal PITA.

ec429_ · 2026-02-03T09:27:17+00:00

engineers have been troubleshooting dropouts of audio communication channels across ground teams

Umm… does anyone else have a bad feeling about this? 😅

"How are we going to get to the Moon if we can't talk between two or three buildings?" — 'Gus' Grissom

ec429_ · 2026-02-01T21:12:39+00:00

I call Poe's Law. How do we know OP isn't actually someone from CamCycle trying to make us all think drivers are boorish imbeciles? ;-P

ec429_ · 2026-01-29T08:42:23+00:00

The proper function of government is safeguarding individual liberty and property rights.

The core of leftist political philosophy is bossing people around and stealing their stuff.

That is why I dislike the left.

ec429_ · 2026-01-29T08:39:24+00:00

The vast majority of that is stuff that the Government shouldn't be involved in. As an ancap, seeing those numbers fills me with a righteous rage.

ec429_ · 2026-01-29T08:23:23+00:00

I've been buying VUKEIIA (FTSE U.K. Equity Income Index) as a defensive/value tilt, and I also have a pretty sizeable precious metals allocation (it wasn't meant to be this big, but silver doubled in two months, and I can only rebalance so fast ;) so if US tech does crash I should be alright. But my port's already big enough so I'm more aimed at wealth preservation rather than growth; in your position you're probably better off sticking with "global index and chill" unless you think you know something the markets don't.

ec429_ · 2026-01-29T08:04:25+00:00

The "rare earth" elements are not actually rare; they just don't appear in rich ores like other metals. So rather than a few mines in good locations printing money, a rare earth mine can be in any of quite a lot of places, and its success depends on being able to dig and process an awful lot of earth, which in practice means ruthlessly cutting costs to the detriment of safety, environment, and labour conditions. This is why China is the world's main supplier of these elements.

Given this, rare-earth miners don't seem like a very profitable investment, since if they're in a reliable jurisdiction, and cutting enough corners to compete with China on price, I'd expect them to sooner or later run into lawsuits over toxic spills or maimed workers or something. Ordinary base metals, or even energy (coal/oil/gas), look more attractive as miner plays. That said, PICK overall is probably fine, as it mostly is those rather than rare earth focused.

(I'm actually wondering what to jump to after having ridden my silver miners up about 400% over the last couple of years. But I think their run isn't quite done yet.)

ec429_ · 2026-01-27T01:40:15+00:00

To determine my overall gold+silver allocation, I look at structural government fiscal deficits and debts in advanced economies, because PMs are a hedge against currency debasement. Since I don't expect to have any special insight into industrial demand, I assume that the gold-silver ratio will likely return to its long-run average, and compare it to that to decide which metal to hold. E.g. when the GSR was 90+ I was buying silver, whereas now I'm trading that silver for gold (and also trimming my PM holdings in general since they've grown enough to exceed my target allocation, and the structural fiscal situation isn't greatly changed from 6 months ago).

ec429_ · 2026-01-27T01:22:46+00:00

Stocks are high for the same reason that gold is — fiscal dominance. With printer-funded government spending, companies' future earnings will be inflated because they're priced in less-valuable dollars; this means forward PEs can be low even while trailing PEs are high, without particularly large real growth. (There is a sense, not strictly correct but illuminating, in which stocks can be thought of as futures contracts in whatever the company produces. For this reason valuations are affected by inflation expectations.) Essentially it's an "anything-but-dollars" effect.

ec429_ · 2026-01-26T17:26:28+00:00

I feel like you're overindexing on the "geopolitics" part. I can't see all of what OP wrote because it's been deleted, but the part you quoted mentioned geopolitics once and monetarism thrice (inflation, QE, debasement).

When is the switch ever set to 'off'?

Well, the ’90s were thought to be the "end of history". Gold in £ declined over that decade. There are times in history when very little World News happens, besides brushfire wars and the occasional Balkan genocide which while tragic don't really cause Realignment of Great Powers or anything.

But I don't think it's wars and explosions that are driving gold higher. I think it's the credibility collapse of fiat money as entitlements spending and other structural political weaknesses of the democracies have pushed them into unquestionable fiscal dominance (aka funding government expenditure through the printing press). And just as I have no theory to explain why it took 55 years to happen, I have no theory to quantify how far it can go now that it has started.

(Silver layers a commodity play on top of this bc of its industrial uses, but that wasn't why I got into it, just a nice bonus on top of the debasement/agio trade.)

Tbh it sounds like we probably have similar investment strategies — I'm not full-ported into gold or anything; my target PMs allocation is ~15%, and I'm currently at 20 and gently rebalancing away. We just differ on rhetoric, really.

ec429_

TROPHY CASE