I think another way to say this is that MDF works only if you're in a spot where you have hands that are strong enough to call. If you play every hand, and you see every river in that 100into100 situation, you shouldn't call with 50% of your hands because your hand range is too wide for that to be profitable.
So you can't make a ton of mistakes say "MDF" and call off, you have to have done the right things in previous streets to end up with a range that can call at MDF. That range (and those street actions) require an understanding of GTO (and the adjustments needed when someone isn't playing GTO).
This is always how Rolex has worked. Supply is limited, and prices are fixed, so they have to pick and choose who gets the rarer and more desirable watches, and who better to offer them to than the people who are your best customers (or have enough clout to be free advertising?).
Definitely not always how Rolex worked. Just 10-15 years ago you could walk in and purchase a stainless steel sport Rolex watch for a good discount brand new at authorized distributors.
Also an experienced poker player, and this is 100% correct.
Ideally you want to use common casino chip colors (though these are somewhat fungible) and just shift orders of magnitudes.
If 1BI is 20 bucks, you can make it equivalent to a $200 BI at the casino, which really only uses 2 colors 95% of the time: whites for 1 dollar, reds for $5. Deeper games might need a $25 (green) or even $100 (black chip). So whites in your home game are 10c, reds are 50c, greens are $2.50, blacks $10.
As someone who has run many, many home games, including cash and tournaments, also consider how easy it is to stack a fresh buy-in. Having 6 of one color, 5 of another, 3 of another, 8 of the next... Yuck. Many ways to make a mistake. If I'm doing a tournament where the starting small blind is 25, then I'm going to ALWAYS use:
8 qty 25 chips = 200
8 qty 100 chips = 800
4 qty 500 chips = 2000
N qty 1000 chips = N000, where N controls how much the starting stack is.
When I'm preparing a bunch of new stacks, I mostly just have to deal with stacks 4 or 8 high, which can be measured next to each other in under a second. Also, the first two colors add up to 1000 exactly, and the first three colors add up to 3000 exactly, simplifying the math. Also, standard chip racks hold stacks of 20 chips, so the first three colors can be pre-built and stored in the racks. If I'm doing a cash game, with $0.25/$0.50 blinds, I use the same formula as above, but divide by 100. Just as easy.
For a $1/$2 cash game, I'm going to ALWAYS use:
20 qty $1 chips = $20, for blinds
N qty $5 chips for the rest of the buy-in
And that's it. Since again, standard chip racks hold stacks of 20 chips, these can be set up in seconds. Later in the game, we can break out the $25 chips.
Also +1 to using "standard" casino chip colors. In the US, $1 is almost always white, $5 is almost always red, $25 is almost always green, $100 is almost always black, and so on. Don't confuse people.
Buy your chip set based on how you allocate your chips when playing, don't allocate your chips based on whatever chip set you happen to have.
I'm never going to have 500s and 1000s in the same chip set, but in that case you just fill it out with 500s and introduce a larger denomination chip if you're playing deep stacks.
The plane can carry 45,000 gallons of fuel. 2.1 bucks a gallon. So probably 500 bucks of savings a flight since most flights arent full capacity. 130k flights in '23. So ez 65 million in savings a year.
Worth doing for the environment even if it's cost neutral probably.
It's also the only way of getting direct takes from ICs. Can it turn into a vent session, yes. But it also can surface small issues early on and allow you to prevent things from becoming problems.
This is super important for when you manage multiple people who have to collaborate together very regularly, less so when your reports are managing teams with clear missions and defined interfaces with more internal projects.
"Meetings are a waste of time" + doesn't raise problems independently = "I'm leaving because this place sucks and nothing gets better" with no appreciation of their role in making things better.
Mine are fortnightly or monthly. I decrease the frequency with reports I think will independently and promptly raise concerns in a productive fashion.
Catching problems early is not the only reason to meet -- we also use the time to talk about company priorities, career growth, what's been learned, answering questions about why the company is doing X instead of Y, etc.
Destroying classic cars for a movie creates something. I think a few car people would be pretty upset if some really bad, made for TV movie destroyed a lot of classic cars. This is just that, but upsetting musicians, photographers, artists, and basically anyone who cares about the environment.
This ad destroys a lot of things people are really really fond about: musical instruments, painting supplies, photography equipment, and record player. And then says that all of those things will be replaced by this "gadget" that won't have the years of life of the piano, guitar, camera, record player, etc.
So it destroys things people care about AND tells you the things you care about don't matter anymore.
The classic cars destroyed in movies are, quite often, not worth restoring, The Ferrari in Ferris Bueller's Day Off was a kit car, vehicles are often insurance write offs...there was a time when you could see cars in-frame were suddently 10 years older and tell that there was some destruction going to happen. I'm sure you can find some Italian Supercar destroyed for real in some Fast and the Furious type movie, but it's often not what it seems.
Is there also outcry when a Musician destroys a guitar on-stage?
My feeling at the ad wasn't particularly emotional, more curiosity at how much of it was real and how much wasnt. Speakers and art supplies aren't particularly expensive, and the Arcade machine wasn't recognizeably a machine worth keeping. There are plenty of used up pianos out there. The emoji was kinda funny...I don't know what that says about me.
Movies generate something that’s visually interesting. If this wasn’t an ad, wouldn’t you say it was visually interesting to see what happens when you crush something like that? Things get destroyed all the time for visuals, experiments, someone’s ”fun”, etc.
I think the difference is that people are very removed from what waste actually is, and when they see what it actually happens all day every day to all those items, shock. We all generate this every day. In the big picture, someone’s old trumpet in an attic is going to end up in a landfill once they move/die/need space. Once it got produced, its final form is landfill.
Even if I don’t believe in the product, and I don’t think of the company very fondly, I lean towards considering the ad anti waste.
“You no longer need to buy and store and move and hoard all these things, you only need an iPad”. It’s not saying “go crush all this items to buy an iPad”, it’s saying “don’t generate all this other waste, you can do it all here”
Volume wise at least, there is more waste in the “loved” items, and no one is recycling emoji squishy balls.
AWS has my name and my credit card number. But they have never asked for a photocopy of my passport, my history of international travel, which nationalities I have and so on. Something tells me that for the goal of this law to be achieved, all those details would need to enter the database.
Amazon is certainly supposed to ensure that you are not a sanctioned person or a citizen of a sanctioned country. This was a concern decades ago when I was in shared web hosting.. don't know why it would have changed?
Not necessarily (although that doesn't necessarily mean I think this is OK). Payment-card-based verification is a longstanding method of doing prima-facie verification like this. When you give your credit card, you give your billing address and typically your phone number -- if the postal code is a US address and the phone number is a US area code and everything else is consistent with that, that might be all the KYC required. If you appear to be a foreign national operating outside the US, they can flag that and require additional paperwork only then.
This proposed rule looks to me like it basically requires providers to come up with their own verification plans, which may then differ from provider to provider, so as to be "flexible and minimally burdensome to their business operations".
[note for the following: I am not a lawyer. The following is not legal advice. Do not fold, spindle or multilate. Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.]
The real danger, I think, with things like this is, there's an executive order that was issued, but it further specified a rulemaking process be conducted to determine the actual regulations that define compliance. The link in the title is to the proposed rule. There's nothing that says any amount of prior public input will necessarily influence the details of the final rule, or that rule can't change in the future through another rulemaking process, and if it does the only way to challenge it is either to sue the agency on the grounds that it exceeded its discretion (e.g. by making rules that require unconstitutional things) or that the enabling executive order is itself unconstitutional -- but these kinds of federal cases have a pretty high bar for what's called "standing" (the legal grounds to bring a particular lawsuit): you pretty much have to suffer concrete harm or be in obvious and imminent danger of suffering it to a grievous degree. (This is one reason you hear about "test cases" -- often somebody will agree to be the goat who is denied something, fined, or even arrested and convicted of a crime, so that standing to sue to overturn the law can be established.) Other times, if a lot of potential defendants already have standing, a particularly sympathetic defendant will be selected for the actual challenge. The US federal courts are also deferential to "agency discretion" by default, as a matter of doctrine.
What happens all too often with these things is, the initial rulemaking is pretty reasonable, and the public outrage (if there was any) dissipates. Then three years (or however long) on, the next rulemaking imposes onerous restrictions and strict criteria, and people suddenly (relatively speaking) wake up and find they're now in violation of federal regulations that they were in compliance with last week. (This is one reason public-interest groups are so critical -- they have the motivation and sustained attention to comb the Federal Register for announcements about upcoming rounds of rulemaking on various topics.)
I don't think that is a legal requirement in Germany. At least Hetzner lets you rent a German VPS or dedicated server without ID. Though Hetzner may require you to submit an ID if you are flagged by their automated systems upon registration.
It was actually Hetzner that didn't want to provision my VPS without Photo ID. I blanked out the SSN as our government tells us to do and they balked at that as well. After I showed them my government's website explaining how and why to do that they were OK with it but at that point the relationship was already soured and I started looking for alternatives.
Maybe they changed it now but they were asses about it then. I thought it was a legal requirement, they basically said as much though I don't recall the exact details, it was before the pandemic.
Eventually I just moved to Scaleway in France which is much nicer and cheaper and you can even talk to their support on slack.
PS: I don't do anything nefarious on my servers but I just don't want my ID on file anywhere it's not needed.
There are IaaS services out there that accept bitcoin, monero, or anonymous prepaid charge cards. They aren't an IaaS but Mullvad even accepts cash mailed to them in an envelope.
Is it fair to assume, that one can engage in a business relationship with these services outside the US? I'm not sure I see the effect that you are implying. AWS, GCP, Azure don't accept crypto. Mullvad is as you point out not an IaaS provider.
Namecheap, Vultr, BuyVm all operate in the U.S. and at times in the past (I don't know if they still do) have either accepted crypto or anonymous charge cards (available for cash at a convenience store), thus making it possible to get a dedicated server or VM totally anonymously. This new regulation would seem to prevent this.
Some hosts accept alternate payment systems, like gift cards or cryptocurrency. You can also have someone else pay for it with a credit card or bank transfer without giving your name, which can be quite important in some cases. The new rules would presumably make that a crime.
I was (at one point) fairly conversational in French by US standards (was taking 300 level French conversation classes).
Did a fairly long trip in France, using as much French as I could. The speed of native French speakers meant comprehension was hard but manageable, and they seemed (almost intentionally at times), unable to make anything but what I would consider "travel French" work. I was fairly discouraged. I then met an Italian ski instructor who worked in France, and I could understand him quite well, and talked with him at a level (job, hobbies, family, reasons for travel) that I never achieved with a native speaker.
It was one of the most memorable moments of the trip and really gave me a feeling that we're all "citizens of the world" and not quite so divided by culture and lines on a map.
I am French, the oral French is very different from what is taught in books. There are a lot of transformations like 'je' to 'che' or 'il' to 'i' (from a French perspective). Also, many liaisons between words are pronounced but others are not, sometimes astonishingly to me, a guy born a long time ago in Brittany.
And young people learn to speak very quickly when they go to primary school (I don't know why).
Also there are lots of invented words by each generation like "wish" that you are ignorant if are not 10 years old.
I think that is common in Catalan, too. But, curiously, not so much with Castilian Spanish: almost every word I can think of is pronounced just like it is written, if you do it properly.
One of the hardest things tobadapt to: following conversation and discussions in French. In the beginning, I always was at least five sentences behind with my comprehension of what was said...
I think it depends on how you measure top 10% in a video game (especially the MMORPGs Asmongold plays), being a top 10% player by stats is a function of play time and 'grind'.
People actively looking at top 10% players can have more game knowledge and build efficiency than people who just grind bigger numbers.
Being an "effective" software engineer also depends on your definition of effective. Mark Zuckerberg was clearly an effective software engineer, but was he in the top 5% of engineers?
People judging their abilities by adjacent (and loosely correlated) metrics is a road to unhappiness.
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to become a good measure"
I've posted about this before, but this is just the hollowing out of the "middle" of the value curve.
Most people want something that's good enough, and they're not willing to pay for something that's N+1 good at 2N price. Other people want something that's N+5 good and will pay 3N price. As AI pushes down the lower bound of cost for creativity, the "mediocre" content creators/programmers/writers are going to get squeezed. At the same time, this means there is an untapped market for the people who can truly be creative and do great work.
Thinking the difference between the Sports Illustrated AI articles and premium sports journalism (The Athletic), blog spam recipes vs America's Test Kitchen, or CNN/Fox front page vs NYT/WaPo/Politico, etc. You're going to have to vote with your dollar to support the things you care about. If you're not willing to pay for the higher quality, you're going to get AI (or other "budget") content that's making it's money by just being good enough to get you to see the advertisements.
It's a free market out there and you need to be aware that just a few percent of people (probably roughly similar to the lurker/poster ratios) are the ones that enable high quality content to be successful. The HackerNews crowd are significantly more likely to be able to actively support creative pursuits that they find valuable, so I'd suggest you do so! Otherwise, when we don't reward quality, why wouldn't people just be mediocre?
So you can't make a ton of mistakes say "MDF" and call off, you have to have done the right things in previous streets to end up with a range that can call at MDF. That range (and those street actions) require an understanding of GTO (and the adjustments needed when someone isn't playing GTO).