I imagine his time at ycombinator as Gríma Wormtongue whispering into theoden's(paulg's) ear

Find me a person who knows about power grid voltage fluctuations and you will have found me a person who has watched Tom Scott's video on the matter

I'm not sure I understand, are you suggesting that Tom Scott made it up?

No, not at all. Just that I've heard maybe 10 people over the years mention ways to harness power grid fluctuations and they all had watched the tom Scott video.

Do you think western AI polemicists have read a lot of Andrew Chi-Chih Yao or Yi Yeng?

ironically rust has fewer features than c++ and zig has more than c

Give it a chance! Rust hasn't even had its bar mitzvah yet and C++ is already buying a Porsche during its midlife crisis.

Yes, on paper zig has more features than C, but what zig has is explicitness. C has a big murky space of implicitness. For example, there might be 5 different zig features which can be used at various times you might use a void* in C, buy the conceptual space of void* fully contains(and then some) the spaces of those zig features.

Everything has less features than c++. There's probably no spec that's more bloated with all the (unimplemented) junk that has been piled onto it.

Maybe it's a really big onion

maybe it tastes more oniony than most onions, these onions are the essential onions of which other onions are mere shadows.

It's the mischief caused by shadow onions lurking in dark corners of the market bins that make me cry.

I think more likely is that bill and Jeff built their wealth through their businesses, which they are still directly involved in. Giving away their wealth would be equivalent to giving away the business they built from the ground up

I think there's also a question of efficacy. Bill and Jeff are really good at turning $1 into $10. Melinda and Mackenzie? Not so much. If bill or Jeff wanted to maximize the amount they can give, the best strategy would be for them to continually earn until they die, and then donate it.

That's what it's about though. The amount THEY can give, not the benefit to humanity.

It's not like Bill and Jeff actually built any of these products themselves. Microsoft bought DOS. Right place, right time for that Nepo baby. Bezos at least had a normal family.

Bezos didn't build Amazon? First I heard of that

> Giving away their wealth would be equivalent to giving away the business they built from the ground up

On the backs of the government and its people's tax money with nothing given back.

I agree that Bill and Jeff are better at exploitation at scale. That’s how you become that wealthy. We are lucky they’re divorced and the wealth is in the hands of better stewards to distribute it to do good.

I agreed right off the bat, they definitely reached scale like few others, but maybe it might have been the way they grew without stopping more so than today's well-known scaling process that got them there.

Doubtless they got in position early to take advantage of many potential upswings.

You want to implement your own is-odd in your code - simple, right? isOdd = (x) => x % 2 == 1

Ut oh, your code is broken for negative numbers now since % isn't a true modulo operator...

Fine then, isOdd = (x) => x % 2 != 0

Ut oh, your code is broken because isOdd("hi") returns true now...

Fine then, isOdd = (x) => if(!isNumber(x)) throw... else return x%2 != 0

Ut oh, your code is now broken because isOdd(2^55+1) returns true now...

> Ut oh, your code is now broken because isOdd(2^55+1) returns true now...

I think you messed up this example. Whether I literally use "2^55" with XOR or replace it with "2*55", that version of isOdd returns false.

False for isOdd(58) is obviously correct. (Also thanks C for permanently screwing up the precedence of bitwise operations because you didn't want to break some existing programs in 1972.)

False for isOdd(36028797018963970) is also correct, and if you expected to send in a different number the bug is in the "+1" not the isOdd.

Sorry, it's supposed to be power. So 2**55 in JavaScript

2 to the 55th power is obviously even, so that +1 is obviously odd, but ((2*55) +1) % 2 == 0 in JavaScript.

But there's no bug in isOdd. You're sending the number 36028797018963970 into it, which is clearly even.

Putting extra code between the parentheses of the function call doesn't make it the function's responsibility. As nice as it would be for debugging if you could stuff your entire program inside of isNaN((function(){ /* your code here */ })()) and force your browser vendor to fix all problems.

You should check the math on a real calculator.

Despite what most JavaScript implementations will tell you, 2 to the 55th power is 36028797018963968, and adding one to that value is 36028797018963969. That's clearly odd.

There is no extra code between the parens. I just put them there so there wouldn't be any question as to operator precedence. I do see now that hn ate my double star, but I think you know what I mean since you told me the value that is spits out when you do the exponentiation

> There is no extra code between the parens.

You have a plus and an exponentiation in there. That's code.

  var n = 2**55 + 1
  console.log(n)
  isOdd(n)

n is 36028797018963970. isOdd(n) is giving you the right answer. Putting the +1 inside the parentheses and talking about calculators is a sleight of hand that lets you pretend isOdd gets an odd number, but it doesn't. No odd numbers are around by the time isOdd actually does anything.

The problems are in + and/or our expectations of +. It does not output 36028797018963969, and we must acknowledge that.

Ut oh? I've never seen that, is it variant on uh oh or something else?

It's something I'm fighting for in my own little way.

Everyone does a glottal stop between the "uh" and "oh", so I'm trying to align the spelling

Unlike the guy on him who writes all years with 5 digits like 02026, I have good reasons for my idiosyncracies.

Hm, I would not spell it with a "t" then, but maybe with an apostrophe instead.

"Uh'oh" is more readable in my opinion and won't be mispronou in ced

To be fair to sam, he doesn't really have any experience running a successful company not dependent on VC backing

I had a pony!

If the leaders want to slow down, but the companies aren't, then it isn't those 50-100 people demonstrating no agency - it's just the opposite. Or, the leaders words are empty.