Liberty

New AI project from Deepmind, this time tackling computational protein folding: https://deepmind.com/blog/alphafold/

This is cool: https://deepmind.com/blog/alphafold/

I'll second Forever War if you like that kind of military sci-fi that StarShip Troopers started (Forever War is to the Vietnam war what Starship Troopers was to WWII). I remember not liking American Gods nearly as much as most people. But that was a long time ago so memory's fuzzy on it... I mostly remember what is basically a short-story stuck somewhere in about the frozen lake with the car on it. Scalzi is one of the original wave of bloggers. One thing that he wrote that got really viral back in 2005 might interest you: https://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/

Hadn't heard of this site before today. Allows you to do all kinds of visualization of financial data, graph all kinds of things, make comparisons, etc. Looks really interesting so far. www.koyfin.com h/t Mike Puangmalai for the recommendation (@NonGaap on twitter)

So this used to be an almost consensus short a few years ago. At the time, I remember CRM being constantly mentioned all over the forum in multiple threads as an example of an overvalued company. I was looking back through this thread to see what could be learned, and thought I'd bump it up in case anyone wanted to do the same or add something about it with the benefit of hindsight.

New acquisition: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181128005106/en/

The author of Scuttleblurb.com (a high-quality subscription site, but with many free samples that you should check out--they're very detailed and I'm sure you'll learn something) now has a podcast: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/scuttleblurb/id1443244539?mt=2 They discuss 4 companies and go into specifics, this isn't just a general finance/macro/investing stragegy podcast (there are many of those out there). here's the official announcement:

Not true for me. I think changes are memorable. I.e. location changes, school/university/job changes, marital status changes. Plus traumatic and/or very happy memories. Things like travel/vacations are somewhere in the middle: some are memorable like bigger changes, some are mush. Plus some not that special moments that for some reason get stuck into memory (maybe they are somehow special for my brain/mind/persona). I agree about that, but didn't want to make a big off-topic aside about this. Of course big changes, trauma, huge happy events, etc are also memorable. But on average, I think it's true that childhood/teenage years tend to be much more memorable than the average year in your 30s or 40s. If you don't remember anything exciting about the late 90s and early 2000s, maybe you weren't paying much attention? ;)

Related video by CGP Grey (worth watching):

https://stratechery.com/2018/antitrust-the-app-store-and-apple/

https://www.geekwire.com/2018/amazon-web-services-introduces-custom-designed-arm-server-processor-promises-45-percent-lower-costs-workloads/

Liberty, i thought the risk for Apple was China would relaiate against US sanctions by targeting US multinationals; or at a miminum stoke the flames of nationalism to the detriment of US based companies like Apple. This may yet play out. What i did not expect was for Trump to launch a direct assault on multinationals with operations outside of the US and threaten tarrifs if they do not bring production back to the US. I am such a simpleton :-) "The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits."

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-expects-to-move-ahead-with-boost-on-china-tariffs-1543266545 https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/26/trump-says-us-could-slap-10percent-tariffs-on-iphones-laptops-from-china.html

scorpioncapital, I agree that's a real phenomenon, but it's different from what I was talking about. I'd phrase it as: You can have a deeper appreciation for mentors as you get better, even if you aren't are surprised and changed by the things they have to say over time because you're not as starting from as low a base of knowledge. I think the title of the piece trips people up, but I didn't find a better one at the time... Oh well.

Exactly. BRK shares and gold aren't currency, and BTC isn't recognized as such by the government yet despite how some people are interpreting that headline. You can't pay your taxes in BTC, you can sell BTC to pay taxes in USD. But that's not a headline that will get clicks...

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/general-motors-accelerates-transformation-300755112.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/26/gm-unallocating-several-plants-in-2019-to-take-3-billion-to-3point8-billion-charge-in-future-quarters.html I'm sure the trade war is helping a lot...

I wrote a little something else, if anyone's interested: https://medium.com/@Liberty/formative-years-forever-echo-for-investors-8542ecb0c058

Ohio becomes the first state to accept bitcoin for tax payments https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/25/ohio-becomes-the-first-state-to-accept-bitcoin-for-tax-payments/ "Ohio filers will technically send their tax payments to an Atlanta-based payments processor called BitPay, which will then convert the bitcoin to dollars for the state treasurer’s office." They still are asking for dollars and the amount is denominated in dollars, they're just making it more convenient to convert. Not nothing, but not quite what the headline makes it seem.

No problem

$3.7k now. Small hiccup.

This is an internal presentation that was released publicly. Mostly about technology, progress, how they invest, but also some philosophy/psychology stuff. High level stuff, but I found it interesting.

That oil selloff just won't quit, eh? -7% this morning to $50...

Both of those concerns are addressed. There are teams, points (more computations = more points), there are APIs, so dozens of sites give you different visualizations of your stats (there's a better ecosystem than for financial data, almost). You get daily average number of points, if you run it on more than one computer you can use the same account so it's cumulative, etc. And it's been around for a long time, it's open-source, and it's based at Berkeley university. They take security pretty seriously and are totally legit. "Folding@Home is supported by the NIH and NSF, and already has over 200,000 active users. It has been published in over 100 papers" Rosetta also has published many papers, including in Science and Nature. https://www.bakerlab.org/index.php/publications/

Happy thanksgiving to my American friends, don't fill up on the worst side dishes, keep room for the good stuff.

How so? I live in Canada. I have to heat my house. All electricity (hydro, in my case) used by this is then converted to waste heat, which helps heat my house. This is just a smaller version of baking in the winter (you get food and heat -- cogeneration?) reducing how much the furnace has to run...