Can anyone with more expertise comment on the use of cryptography.hazmat which is apparently (1) a frontend to openssl, (2) "full of land mines, dragons, and dinosaurs with laser guns"?
This is the story people tell in business schools and economics departments, but there's more to it than that.
It's also a way to sterilize new issuance to employees, primarily senior management. In a very real sense, it can be a backdoor payment to management. Issue shares to management. Buy shares on the market. Net effect is cash to management.
If buybacks are funded by debt issuance, it's also a way to lever the company. Remember Apple and Carl Icahn? That particular episode looks a lot like greenmail. Apple bought back shares, mainly from Icahn, so that Icahn would go away. The buybacks weren't exclusively from Icahn, so it wasn't technically greenmail.
I'm afraid I disagree. Google running code on your phone implies it believes you have consented to that. That consent was not given in the app store, so it must have come from the ToS.
Consent is an exception to virtually every protection that exists: Wiretap Act, state wiretapping laws, the CFAA, and state computer trespass laws. Remember, consent is the difference between a home invasion and a dinner party.
So it seems that Google would have to cook up a pretty implausible stopping principle to argue that whatever allows them to do this does not also enable the hypothetical I described above.
Another question worth asking is "what is the governing law?" It is almost certainly contract law via Google's ToS. Government phones probably have different ToS, but government employee' personal phones have the same ToS we have.
If Google is asserting non-contractual rights, I'd like to know what they are.
Edit: I edited this comment because it was rude, and that was not my intent.
The factual basis of your assertion is absolutely true, but your attitude is unhelpful and defeatist.
There is a chasm between "a state actor throws an 0day at you" and "Google remotely installs an app on your phone". The latter is done at scale. The former is expensive, risky, and used relatively rarely.
If you're organizing a protest movement, it's totally reasonable to factor government 0days into your threat model. For more boring people, running GrapheneOS is a great way to reduce the attack surface they expose to the advertising and mass surveillance industrial complex.
A corollary of your question. If Google can lawfully install arbitrary apps on ordinary users' phones, can it also run arbitrary code on the personal devices of government officials investigating it for price fixing in the ad market?
> I was shocked to learn that my new employer has a very different job definition for ML Engineer than the one I was familiar with.
Job titles do not have consistent meaning across regions or industries. People use buzzwords and hype to recruit funding and talent.
You've learned an important lesson: use interviews to gather information about companies and teams. "Can you describe in broad strokes a typical project for this role?" is a perfectly reasonable question to ask a hiring manager.
There is a lot of outright corruption [1] and malfeasance [2] in the surveillance tech acquisition processes. It's probably because that process is so secret. Brandeis was right, "sunlight is the best disinfectant".
The strategy seems to be, "run the process in secret and present the result as a fait accompli". It's working.
Is there a Matrix design document at a similar level of abstraction to [1,2,3]?
I want to use it, but the client (Riot? Element?) scares me with all its features, and I'm not sure I have a working mental model about what information is shared with whom and under what circumstances.
Is there a "blessed" client that doesn't run in the browser? Written in Python or Java?
> It’s equally unsurprising that the ambitious children of highly educated and prosperous families themselves pursue such a similar path and achieve similar outcomes.
That kind of misses the point. You want to train as many effective engineers and researchers as you can. The point of the article is that most Ivies can comfortably train more people, but doing so would reduce some of the scarcity "value" of an Ivy League degree. Who cares? The goal is building.
Claude Shannon and Kelly Johnson both got their start at Michigan. The Michigan model of "train as many engineers as you can without compromising substance" is a great. If the Ivies want to create artificial scarcity to avoid "diluting brand value", then their ability to access public subsidies should be curtailed. Give it to Michigan instead.
> I guess the question "How do you size your positions?" needs to start somewhere.
Maybe the question itself is a good place to start. If someone asked me about Kelly, my mind would immediately drift from "statistical models and dynamic programming" to something else.
The real engineering problem is threefold: (1) how do I model my return generating process, (2) what is my utility function, and (3) do the first two steps yield a tractable Bellman equation?
If the problem is framed right, most people will have something to say about 1 and 2. The third part is tricky. A real world solution will involve finite element methods. But in an interview, people may be hesitant to bring up approaches that don't yield closed form solutions.
That's what's special about Kelly. It's assumptions for steps 1 and 2 that produce a closed form solution in step 3.
The solar subsidies in the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act are regarded as a failure by partisans in both parties. I think the US is beyond fixing at this point. This $250bn is going to end up in Teslas, yachts, and Florida beach houses.
> Are robinhood customers not buying stocks from them? Are stocks not "goods or a service"?
When PFOF is involved, Robinhood users do not buy stocks from Robinhood. They buy them from the Robinhood customer who buys order flow.
> What nefarious activity are you suggesting they're doing?
I pointed out a troubling conflict of interest and a potential ability to act on that conflict in a legally ambiguous manner. For what it's worth, one of Robinhood's customers was recently sanctioned for old-timey tradeahead front running.
> I hope you see the irony here.
I don't see the irony. Can you explain it to me? I was trying to be opinionated, but intellectually honest. Did I fail?
I read several of your articles to decide whether your Substack presents new facts or analysis. It does not. Your writing triggers many of the heuristics I use to filter "industry flack" from genuine dissent.
Tax policy isn't something I know a lot about, so I'll discuss your article "Breaking Down the New Yorker's Slanted Robinhood Story".
> "Brokers by definition are middlemen who have customers on both sides. And if we have to pick the side that matters more to Robinhood, it’s obviously retail customers. To suggest otherwise is either disingenuous or negligently ignorant."
Channeling my inner Antonin Scalia here. The Cambridge English dictionary defines a customer as "a person who buys goods or a service." There is a perfectly reasonable argument that Robinhood users are not customers at all, let alone Robinhood's primary customers. It's not a good look to dismiss the plausible as "disingenuous or negligently ignorant". That's a symptom of ideological conflict, which is dull and tiresome.
> "Payment for order flow is something that it seems only one financial journalist understands well enough to explain"
I see a trend here. People who disagree with you are ignorant or lying. It's not difficult to understand that PFOF entails selling user orders to brokers under common control with enormous asset managers that hoard advertising data and make market-moving trades. Questioning the intelligence of those who disagree is another symptom of ideological conflict.
> "Did stock markets haemorrhage value in 2007-2008? Famously so. But the causes there were complex. Was excessive Wall Street greed a part of it? Sure! But so were a lot of other elements — including weak consumer financial education."
With all due respect, that sounds like some sleezy shit Anthony Mozilo might say. I want to give you the benefit of the doubt, but it's hard to see this as anything but pandering to one side of an ideological conflict.
Truman relieved General MacArthur of his command over coalition forces in Korea in large part because he planned and aggressively advocated the use of nuclear weapons against the Chinese.
If you visit the Princeton stacks, you can unearth many Woodrow Wilson School theses advocating the aggressive use of nuclear weapons during Vietnam. Some of the people who authored these papers went on to craft US trade policy from the 1980s through the present. A truly remarkable change of heart.