They do have identical value.

500 shares of company A is worth 100% of the market cap of company A.

500 shares of company B is also worth 100% of the market cap of company B.

So if you have 5 shares of each, you'll have 1% of the market cap of each, even if one of those companies finds the cure for cancer or turns out to be a money furnace.

> it seems we actually work more than our ancestors.

Only if you count the hours worked for the local lord and forget about all other mandatory work like:

- growing your own food

- cooking/prepping said food (44 hours per week)

- maintenance

- spinning, weaving and sewing clothes

https://acoup.blog/2025/09/05/collections-life-work-death-an...

https://acoup.blog/2025/10/10/collections-life-work-death-an...

I get your point, but people still have chores to do today. Ultimately, there is a big difference between doing work for yourself, and doing work for someone else for a wage.

In one instance you keep the value you are creating, in the other it goes to your employer.

Given the choice between the two I would much prefer to work for myself, as a matter of dignity.

That reminds me of the "Strangler Fig" pattern where you replace a service by first sending the requests to both the old and new implementation so you can compare their outputs. Then only when you're confident the new service functions as expected do you actually retire the old service.

The key part of the strangler fig is the facade and gradual migration of capabilities rather than trying to do a rewrite and swap (which never ends well).

Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Machine

"The Phillips Machine is an analogue computer which uses fluidic logic to model the workings of an economy."

See also the Glooper in Pratchett's Making Money.

How many of those languages can take an expression instead of a lambda?

Func<..> is lambda that can only be invoked.

Expression<Func..>> is an AST of a lambda that can be transformed by your code/library.

R let's you do that, and it gets used by the tidy verse libraries to do things like change the scope variables in the functions are looked up in.

> 1-(1-1/1,000,000)^(4×1,000,000) ≈ 98%

> Pretty close to 1 account per day

No, this means there is a 98% chance you get _at least_ 1 account.

`1-1/1,000,000` is the probability you fail 1 attempt. That probability to the 4millionth is the probability you fail 4 million times in a row. 1 minus _that_ probability is that the probability that you _don't_ fail 4 million times in a row, aka that you succeed at least once.

The expected number of accounts is still number of attempts times the probability of success for 1 try, or: 4 accounts.

Yeah @rlupi, America is far too poor to afford basic living conditions. /s

But seriously, no US state is as poor as Italy, in GDP per capita terms (Mississippi 50K vs Italy 40K).

Heat dissipation becomes a _huge_ problem when you deploy a data center inside a perfect insulator, the vacuum of space.

Currently about a third of the energy consumption of a data center spent on cooling (heat dissipation)? And that's with the use of a huge heat sink, the earth.

Plus, I feel like GP hasn't ever seen an actual data center. One does not simply strap on on top of a rocket (even a SpaceX Starship) and toss it into LEO.

> SpaceX should create a simple 'catch' the rocket game. Play in browser style. Just for kicks and marketing.

They did: https://starshipthegame.spacex.com/

I succeeded with a High Score of -287!

If someone comes up with a new port that had 10% more throughput than USB, do you think that will be enough to make it a viable competitor, or do you think it won't be worth the hassle of replacing your peripherals (cassettes) and computers (cassette players)?

Good point