You only have to decompress it first if it's compressed (commonly using gzip, which is shown with the .gz suffix).
Otherwise, you can randomly access any file in a .tar as long as:
- the file is seekable/range-addressible
- you scan through it and build the file index first, either at runtime or in advance.
Uncompressed .tar is a reasonable choice for this application because the tools to read/write tar files are very standard, the file format is simple and well-documented, and it incurs no computational overhead.
You've just constructed your own crappy in-memory zip file, here. If you have to build your own custom index, you're no longer using the standard tools. If you find yourself building indices of tar files, and you control the creation, give yourself a break and use a zip file instead. It has the index built in. Compression is not required when packing files into a zip, if you don't want it.
Yeah it's pretty common to use zip files as purely a container format, with no compression enabled. You can even construct them in such a way it's possible to memory map the contents directly out of the zip file, or read them over network via a small number of range requsts.
You can achieve the same with tar if you individually compress the files before adding them to the tar ball instead of compressing the tar ball itself.
I don’t see how that plus a small index of offsets would be notably more or less work to do from using a zip file.
Zip has a central directory you could just query, instead of having to construct one in-memory by scanning the entire archive. That's significantly less work.
I mean if they include a pre-made index with it. For example an uncompressed index at byte offset 0 in the tar ball that lists what is inside and their offsets. It would still be comparable amount of work to create software to do that with tar as to use a zip file, if fine grained compression levels etc is being used.
I suppose you are right about that. But it would still be a valid tar file that can be viewed and extracted with normal tools. Kind of similar to how a .docx file can be extracted as zip but still has additional structure to its contents.
This isn't very surprising. Typical US economic policy aims for 2-3% annual inflation. That counter shows an average 2.6% inflation across 26 years, which is kind of right in the range we'd expect.
It's debatable whether this is good longterm policy - but it's been the norm in the US for decades.
This ticker's current speed is faster than that, though. It's going about 1e-9 dollar per second. That comes to about $0.03 per year, which as a fraction of the current base of $0.50, comes to 6% inflation per year.
I don't know how that speed was determined. Either it's using a linear decrease since 2000 (which isn't correct, the inverse of exponential inflation would be logarithmic decay, not linear), or it's weighting by recency for the high inflation since 2020 (which may continue, or may not.)
Good eye. The ticker was using the observed rate of change over the two most recent data points, so it's actually biased towards the most recent inflation numbers. I've updated it to simply use the slope between the oldest (January 2000) and the most recent data.
It won't be 100% accurate, but it's close enough to create a visual. And the number is always updated monthly with real data anyways.
> Typical US economic policy aims for 2-3% annual inflation. That counter shows an average 2.6% inflation across 26 years, which is kind of right in the range we'd expect
We aim for "inflation of 2 percent over the longer run, as measured by the annual change in the price index for personal consumption expenditures" [1].
Accurately aiming inflation as a central bank is like trying to keep a deflating balloon the same size using a harmonica. 2.6% isn’t bad, I don’t know that many if any central banks have managed a tighter band.
> "as measured by the annual change in the price index for personal consumption expenditures"
How closely does that track with CPI-U, which is the index this web site is using? If I believe Gemini, PCE should show a slightly lower inflation number?
If Windows wants to commit to quality and user experience, they can do it by moving closer to the experience that made a generation fall in love with it.
- Turn Notepad back into a text editor.
- Remove ads from your operating system. Yes it feels like a license to print money, but it makes your users hate your product.
- Stop charging money for Freecell and Minesweeper.
- Converge your three control panels back into one. The classic control panel was not broken.
- Drop the mandatory Microsoft User accounts. Nobody wants this except your bean counters.
When 3 out of these 5 happen, I'll believe that Microsoft is actually recommitting to their users.
Not the grandparent, but I've used most of the OpenAI models that have been released in the last year. Out of all of them, o3 was the best at the programming tasks I do. I liked it a lot more than I like GPT 5.2 Thinking/Pro. Overall, I'm not at all convinced that models are making forward progress in general.
I get your point about camera vs lidar. Humans do have other senses in play while driving though. We have touch/vibration (feeling the road surface texture), hearing, proprioception / acceleration sense, etc. These are all involved for me when I drive a car.
Kind of reads 25 people's stories about "How I became a parasite". Why not create new things, instead of making a career out of leeching the wealth created by others?
This isn’t really a good angle to critique finance IMO, because it is indeed a necessary part of the modern economy.
A better angle is how finance tends to acquire a ton of smart young people that could/would otherwise be doing work that has more benefits to society. It’s hard to blame the individual here, because the salaries are orders of magnitude larger in finance vs. say, aerospace engineering. Would I turn down $700k at a hedge fund to earn $90k at a science lab? Probably not, unless I was already independently wealthy.
"it's all just numbers really. Just changing what you're adding up. And, to speak freely, the money here is considerably more attractive." - Peter Sullivan in the movie Margin Call
I ended up rewatching that movie more than ten times a few months ago after I got stuck with a capped internet connection and not much to do online. It's one of those films where there isn't a single fucking scene wasted: everything plays out a little over a day, and the character dynamics and dialogue feel genuinely tight. Lots of great characters overall, but Jeremy Irons's John Tuld is just stellar in terms of presence and delivery.
It's an intentionally naive position to say that places don't leech off of others. Even large places like Fidelity and Schwab that respect customers aren't just keeping people's money in vaults. They literally take your checking, savings, retirement accounts, etc. and make money off of them while they "sit".
Firms specialize in intercepting trades and then placing trades faster than 99.9% of others.
These institutions hide behind "we provide liquidity" like it's a selfless act of kindness, whereas that's just a mere side effect, and just one of many.
The entire modern financial system is layers and layers of unneeded complexity that almost solely rose out of people trying to leech money from the system. These financial institutions have built the entire system around them so that now they can say "look at how essential we are!".
> aren't just keeping people's money in vaults. They literally take your checking, savings, retirement accounts, etc. and make money off of them while they "sit".
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depending on jurisdiction and TOS, this maybe legal, but it needs to be announced somehow to the customer; a capital management firm of an ETF needs to buy the included shares, e.g; those have no money "sitting around"?
the leeches are the publicly traded companies that are listed on the stock market. Any market should be happy to have more participants, unless you like price-uncertainty.
I didn't go to NYC, but Money is fungible so it's a simple math problem.
How much non-parasite good can you do making $50k/year * 10 years? Even if we ignore taxes and you donated your entire salary, that tops out at $500k worth. If instead you could make, say, $500k/year * 10 years, and then quit and form your own non-profit for $2,000,000 and do 4x as much good.
I get your point, but that was the exact logic of Effective Altruism and Sam Altman is now jailed for the Largest Fraud of All Time. It's a slippery slope.
Sam Bankman-Fried. And I think he’s a bit of a special case, others do not need to be worried they’ll succumb to multi billion dollar fraud schemes if they try to earn-to-give.
I'm not defending SBF, but I think you may not be completely taking into account how strong the pressures are on someone like that. I'm pretty sure he didn't set out to commit a multi-billion dollar fraud, he was sucked into it as a consequence of the expectations on him and so forth. My point here is just that this is a symptom of a societal problem, and SBF is just a well-positioned scapegoat.
SBF was really unusual in that he claimed to be a pure expected-utility maximiser. He admitted that he would take 51% coin-flips forever on Conversations with Tyler in March 2022, long before everything blew up:
> COWEN: Then you keep on playing the game. So, what's the chance we're left with anything? Don't I just St. Petersburg paradox you into nonexistence?
> BANKMAN-FRIED: Well, not necessarily. Maybe you St. Petersburg paradox into an enormously valuable existence. That's the other option.
I'm not saying the pressures are absent, but they are hopefully vastly less compelling for any normal person with a more standard view of risk and utility. ("Sure, I'll just cover up this little bit of fraud, because that's got a better than 50% chance of success" is a course of action SBF all but said he would take, months in advance!)
If you have a billion dollars to give me, I'm pretty sure I can manage to not to use them for outright crypto fraud. You'd have to give me a billion dollars to be sure, but I promise really hard.
there are a lot of quants who aren't at T1 firms or in the hottest seats. plenty make less than this. obviously if you are top of class and getting headhunted by XTX, your offers will be much bigger than $500k ... but it's kind of obnoxious to claim that QRs making less than this aren't even players
The term "player" tends to imply something more than just someone employed in a field. I don't support all this insane inequality, but the other commenter is not wrong on the relative value assessment.
Feel free to do more accurate math! I don't think you'd be doing $500k right out of college either, so it was intended to be a rough average. The person I know I'm finance is doing well over $1,000,000/yr, but I have no idea how average that is.
Said on a website hosted by a major VC that specializes in Silicon Valley types of venture capital, bringing the next data collecting mobile app to your doorstep.
Their problem is with false positives they find, not true positives you find. My application for a credit card was somehow flagged as fraudulent. Chase repeatedly asked for additional forms of ID, then told me the scans I sent were illegible. (The scans were fine; I think they just needed an excuse.) I went to a branch with the physical documents, and they said they couldn't look at them. The branch put me in an office and called the same telephone support, with the same result. I eventually gave up.
I guess I'm lucky they rejected me before any money changed hands. I've heard horror stories from people with significant assets at their bank, locked out until an actual lawsuit (the letter from a lawyer didn't work) finally got their attention. I think it's like Google support, usually fine but catastrophic when it's not.
> The branch put me in an office and called the same telephone support, with the same result.
As far as I can tell, going to a branch of a big bank to address a problem nowadays is similar to going to a cellphone store for tech support. All they can really do is call the same hotline or fill out the same webform you’d have access to at home.
Yeah probably not. A large amount of posts and videos from social medias are blocked in Vietnam, it's still a communist country with very low level of free speech and press freedom, albeit still better than China.
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