progressdeveloper

I always wondered about this and Some Study That The Economist Found Credible Enough To Write About agrees: Index funds are bad. It's almost beyond debate that, for an investor, index funds are better than actively managed funds. But for the broader economy, that may not be true. It's because they blunt the process of investors making informed decisions about the relative prices and strengths of sectors and companies. People are going to keep buying Nvidia and Palantir as long as they are in the index, no matter how crazy high their PE ratios get (Nvidia: around 49, not that crazy; Palantir: around 400, beyond crazy; boring old Royal Bank: 17). The hope was that arbitrageurs would force prices back into line, but this study finds that their effect is very small compared to the mass of hundreds of millions of people plowing money into the S&P index automatically, month after month. Interesting!

Apparently Donald Trump is on a rampage to get credit card companies to reduce their interchange fees; the % (I think around 2%) that stores pay Visa and Mastercard. These rates are something like 8x what they pay in Europe (something similar is true of realtor commissions), and it seems to me like a failure of the market system that these fees are still so high. Therefore I am 100% with DT on this, even if the Economist surely is not. You may also have heard that DT wants to force banks to cap their interest rates at 10%. While on the surface it sounds reasonable, I can see the problem with this: namely, banks will simply stop offering credit, and people will end up borrowing from ever sketchier and more expensive sources. Meanwhile, it will act as a big drag on economic activity. I am not completely convinced by this, but I do think it makes some sense. Of course there is a larger point that none of these initiatives should be at the discretion of a single unhinged individual. If the...

It's been a big week for interesting stuff from History Extra and The Economist. I want to share the one story that most blew me away. It's from The Economist Xmas Special, which is a double edition; the extra stories, about 30 of them, are on more Atlantic-ish general interest topics than their normal fare. I read maybe 2/3 of them, they were all OK, but this one most caught my attention: Consider loneliness across countries. If you are like me, and I suspect most people, you might vaguely believe that countries like Congo and Tibet, full of economic suffering as they are, at least have better interpersonal relations and therefore less loneliness. As opposed to countries like Canada and France, where, maybe, you have a mental image of people addicted to their phones and often deeply lonely. Well, it turns out that, according to Some Study That The Economist Found Credible, the opposite is true. At the level of countries, there is a strong correlation between poverty and loneli...

I know skepticism about AI and "2+2=5" style AI stories abound and I remain a "fan with tons of huge doubts". But I have to say this little experiment is making it harder. Here's what happened: We have a thing where you can type in someone's name and get back any recent news about them that might influence your willingness to do business with them. For example type "Hank Green Vancouver crime stories since 2025" and get back a link to a CBC story about Hank having robbed a bank. Maybe you decide not to hire him after all. Systems to do these things exist and we offer it via a third party supplier, who does a fairly bad job. So we were wondering if AI could do better. I was pretty surprised that Gemini, Perplexity and Deepseek all consistently came up with totally fabricated stories. I was even more surprised at Gemini's explanation: "Gemini is a "next-word predictor." If it doesn't find a news story in its training data, it d...

Some dude named Tyler Virgen runs a web site largely dedicated to publishing totally random correlations, eg. things that strongly correlate by sheer coincidence. He cheekily uses AI to come up with a plausible explanation which, being AI, at a glance sounds very plausible indeed. Example:

I don't know when it will become fashionable to talk about "World War 3", I am surprised it is not already.  So I got to wondering: in WW2, at what point did this become a common term, given that up until Germany and Japan became military allies (1940) and the US became directly involved (1941) it was more of simultaneous wars in Europe and Asia (up until 1937, the Rape of Nanking, we were calling it an "incident"; then we switched to "Sino-Japanese War"). Well: "The term World War I was coined long before the war even started  to describe a hypothetical future conflict." "The first time the name was applied to the actual conflict as it happened was by Time Magazine i n its September 11, 1939 issue." "FDR is most responsible for cementing the name in the public consciousness when he began publicly referring to it as the "Second World War" in 1941. Interestingly, he actually hated the name."

Sam and I had a delightful day at Whistler on Friday - my first ski day in 5? years and first time to Whistler in more than that. I love Whistler; it is so gorgeous in the Whistler alpine, especially the so-called "Symphony Amphitheatre". I knew Whistler was now owned by USA but I didn't know much about it, other than Vail Resorts (of Colorado fame) owns it. A few factoids I looked up: 1. Vail paid $1B for WB in 2010. Their 2025 revenues were about $3B. 2. They own 42, but WB is by far their largest property, and generates around 22% of revenues. Others are mostly in USA except for Canada - 1, Europe - 2, Australia -3. 3. Gemini claims WB is the largest ski area in North America, but I imagine there are several ways to measure that. WB is largest by size of lift serviced terrain, about 8200 acres. 4. #1 ski area in the world is in France with a hard to imagine triple the terrain of WB, over 180 lifts (WB: 36) and 600k of runs (WB: 200k). However, it is operated by 8 compa...

Chatting with Alejandra about The Congo, an interesting question came up: are there any present-day colonies? Is Venezuela a colony now? Is Greenland, either now or soon? What exactly is the difference between being occupied and being a colony? What exactly IS a colony? It turns out that the UN has a definition (which may or may not be authoritative). They call them "non-self governing states", " territories whose people have not yet attained a full measure of self-government", and by their analysis, today, there are 17 of them. Nothing about this list is obvious and all of it is "mildly interesting". Here we go: 1. The biggest, by far: Western Sahara (pop. 632k). Also the only neo-country whose name starts with W. Its status is in ongoing dispute between Morocco and Spain, the former(?) colonial power. 2. Colonial power that still has the most colonies: unsurprisingly, UK. Most surprising to me entry on this list: Cayman Islands and Bermuda , which I wou...

Documentary on Netflix 100% worth the time. They have 29 fact checkers and receive something like 1000? or was it 10000? or 100000? candidate cartoons per week. And a similarly giant number of stories (acceptance rate is 2%, IIRC). I didn't know they were known for their cartoons. Also for being a bit snobby. I have never read one. Added to TODO. It's around $300 and comes out weekly (YIKES). Economist is about the same price, and also weekly.

I was most intrigued when a friend told me that following a stay at a hotel in Richmond (the River Rock, if you must know) she was charged a 2.1% credit card fee. In principle: I think this is great. She avoided it by paying with a debit card instead, which is EXACTLY HOW THIS IS SUPPOSED TO WORK and the IDEAL OUTCOME. She surely didn't buy my story, though. It is surely good that credit card users should be required to pay for their own willingness to support the gusher of Mastercard profits (most profitable company in history, as measured by longevity of outsize ROI), as well as other people's loyalty rewards. It would be nice if other businesses did this, though it would be much more sellable (saleable?) if presented as a discount for non-credit cards.

From 2026-01-03 Economist. What is more depressing, that reliable people in authority in well run countries are saying such things, or that The Economist buried this in a secondary story on page 37? In which they defended the statement.

Though I feel like I barely qualify, I guess I am, officially, a Google Play (Android) developer. They sent me this notification: In principle - YOU GO, AUSTRALIA! GOOD FOR YOU !! In practice, it will be interesting to see how this works out. Aside from the obvious possibility of kids getting hold of adult accounts, there is the issue of classifying apps. If I remember right, Facebook and Snapchat qualify for these restrictions, but YouTube does not. Which (if true) sort of makes sense, but, you can see what a slippery slope that is. Personally, I find YT to be by FAR the more addictive and useless platform. Although, at the same time, it can also be the MOST useful - you can learn real and useful things there! (I view my more-than-occasional inability to regulate YT use a personal failure, not a YT problem). Australia, like Canada, also implemented some rules requiring SM to compensate news sources for reposts. In Canada, SM responded by blocking news, eg. if you try to repost a story...

The cover story on last week's Economist was "Angst over Affordability", which right off the bat I found slightly annoying because, though the dictionary definition is not clear about this, to me, "angst" implies a degree of not justified / unreasonable / illogical. I, obviously, have a lot of faith in the use of data / statistics in general and Economist use thereof in particular. But in this case, I really have a hard time accepting their conclusions. Which, in a nutshell, are as follows: 1. Food prices are up 28%. But wages are up 30%. 2. Electricity prices are up significantly. But gas prices are DOWN even more. 3. Rent is WAY up, but only in specific markets (NY and SF cited, but probably applies to YVR / YYZ). I can believe points #2 and #3 completely. Squinting a little, I can also believe that food prices are only up 28%. Lots of things seem to have at least doubled, but I grant that those tend to jump out and lots of other things don't seem to be up...

Ben gave me this book for Xmas and I just finished it: It has the great virtue of being quite short (about 150 pages). The author is the Sherlock Holmes guy and it as written in early 20th century; long before the Congo became the country that is is today. I have had a thought more than once that before reading a book like this, I should jot down my preconceived notions and compare them afterwards. I didn't do that. But here is my post-reading attempt: "The Belgians ran the Congo for a while in the 1800's and are notorious for having treated the local population horribly, a lot hands chopped off, mostly motivated by rubber." That description is very roughly accurate. It motivated me to peruse Wikipedia a bit to fill in some blanks: 1. Although Germans, British, French, Portuguese were all involved in treating Africa badly to various degrees, what we know today as the Congo was only colonized by Belgium. There was also a French Congo, which today is a separate country,...

Sister #1 sent me one of those self-improvement videos which I am a sucker for to a limited extent. This one starts off by asking you to think seriously about your biggest regret from the past year. It can be only one, and I took it to mean something specific to the year, eg. not "I wish I had travelled more in my 20's". I thought about this and the truth is I had a great year and I am especially happy with my health level and running. That said, here's what I came up with for my greatest regret: Not having lost the last 15 pounds that would make me feel like I was at a perfect weight. I think obsessing about weight is hugely overdone, and in any case, I am 90% happy with mine. But man, I would also just love to get down to that last point! By the way, for those of you who know about my "no eating before 1pm" thing, I still 95% follow that rule, and I aspire to 100%. The runner-up was not having done anything of note on my write a hobby operating system proj...

TIL about the Saturn Hexagon: It's an entirely natural but freakishly symmetrical storm cloud at the exact north pole of Saturn. Each side is about 15,000 km long (a bit more than the diameter of our planet). I have read so much Arthur C Clarke stuff over the years and I can't believe I never came across this until I listened to the Economist's science podcast yesterday. --- Another cool thing from the same podcast that I was only extremely vaguely aware of: This is a picture of comet upon which the vehicle that took the picture, Rosetta, landed after a 12 year journey. Though the landing was successful in that it wasn't a crash, it did bounce around more than expected and ended up in a shadow where it couldn't get any sun by which to charge its solar panels; thus it's useful life unexpectedly ended a couple of days later. This project cost about $2 billion, less than the US military spends (wastes?) every day .

In an effort to understand something about AI / ML / LLM's, I bought this book. I will never read every page nor understand it completely, but, it does give one lots to think about. It purports to offer step by step instructions to write a small LLM capable of generating coherent text, "from scratch", without anything other than a compiler, but this already seems to be a lie: it relies on Py Torch, which is some kind of AI tool, as well as others (Word2Vec? BP encoding libraries?) I think everyone knows that the basic idea of LLMs is to generate word relationship scores, eg. that "Vancouver" and "rain", or "pizza" and "Italy" belong together, but "bicycle" and "cucumber" do not. How on earth that can be translated into being able to generate such consistently correct text is a mystery, though. This book is full of obscure terms and acronyms.

Quick TV roundup: 1. I believe The Pitt starts again today. Very good show, much more medical than soap opera-y, looking forward. (Incidentally, we had been rewatching ER, I love that show, but drifted away halfway through). 2. Like so many shows, The Big C (premise: comedy about a woman dying of cancer) started fairly good and accelerated downhill. Than god, only a few episodes left. It's awful. 3. Gave up on The Morning Show . Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon: both hot AF, but neither pull off this extremely contrived show. The male talent in is consistently insufferable. Why do so many people like Steve Carrell? 4. Started Shrinking , which seems OK. It's got Marshall from HIMYM in it, about a psychiatrist who has more issues than do his patients. Don't we all? 5. On a serious note How To Be A Tyrant  (NF) isn't bad. It seems aimed at DJT, but goes into some interesting background about Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Gadaffi. I will probably see it through.

I love this picture of Stelly that Janet took this morning hiking around the trails near here on the foot of Mount Seymour. Rain has returned with a vengeance, but it was minimal for the hour and a half that we were out here. I forgot to mention but on December 25th I hit my 2-year running streak record, which I'm very proud of. I am also quite proud of my Vancouver 2025 marathon time, which, honestly, I will be hard pressed to ever match. Mark Carney's stunning (to me) 3:30 time is always in the back of my mind. Lastly, I'm proud of now being able to consistently run 5k's under 5:00 per K, which seems not bad for an old guy. I'm trying to follow a program of rotating between (a) 5k at speed, (b) 8k on hills, (c) 10k+, ideally increasing to 30k by May. I need new shoes again!

I happen to have three separate gay Spanish friends (Spain, Ecuador, Costa Rica) and one of them (Spain, Toni) was explaining to me about Prep. I had heard of Prep and knew what is was in approximate terms. It's something gay men take to avoid getting AIDS. What I did not know is that it is, according to Toni, nearly 100% effective. While that's a good thing, it also leads, in his opinion, to reckless sexual behaviour ("nobody cares if they get STDs anymore") and lots of non-fatal STD's (which may become more fatal as they develop more resistance to antibiotics). Interesting. Prep is a pill that must be taken daily and long-term (eg. you can't just take it the morning after a night of debauchery). It costs around $60 a month and in Spain, is covered by MSP (is it here? Condoms aren't, how is this different?)