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The purpose is to injure enemy combatants

The price of the share stays the same but there are fewer shares, so the market cap would go down.


But EPS rises so equilibrium would suggest the price of the share would almost certainly rise to match the old EPS.


The earnings per share certainly increases. But this is (at least theoretically) offset by the fact that the firm's assets have decreased. For example, if the buyback was paid for with cash, then prior to the buyback, the shares represented a claim of ownership not just on future earnings, but also on that cash reserve.

That said, this is all under a theoretical model (as in Miller-Modigliani theorem). In practice/empirically, there is reason to plausibly believe that e.g. the decision to announce a buyback has a signalling effect and so can increase share prices.


Is there a heuristic for how much of the value of a share is assigned to asset value vs forward looking earnings? Many of the ‘hot’ stocks like Nvidia seem almost all forward looking.


For public companies you don't need a heuristic, as the balance sheet is included in quarterly earnings reports.


Well it certainly makes a market for the lucky duckies who are the counterparties for the buyback. They benefit.


This isn’t even necessarily true for dividend yield let alone for EPS.


I saw a comment (not in the linked thread) that notes that the system prompt probably includes something along the lines of "You are a helpful AI assistant...", which does feel like a bit of a giveaway in the sense that there are many documents on the internet that discuss testing AI assistants and therefore a document who's topic is an AI assistant is likely to contain discussion of testing the assistant (and if the document is written from a first person perspective, of the assistant, then it's likely to contain text from the perspective of the assistant discussing it's own testing).


The secret challenge exists and it is the phone number / email address / VC account of CFO. If CFO wants to order EMPLOYEE to send money, then EMPLOYEE should only do the action after making an outgoing call to CFO.


100% agree. "Hang Up, Look Up, Call Back" should be made into a jingle and absolutely hammered into the culture of, at this point, literally everyone (given all the scams that occur targeted both toward consumers and employees): https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/04/when-in-doubt-hang-up-lo...


The scammers make up some “plausible” reason that the CEO can’t talk on the phone.


Where it hurts is it can be a PITA to get hold of the CFO from the mere employee side, especially as the CFO was UK based.

Basically, it was a well thought and well executed scam that perfectly fit the employee's situation.


The CFO was on the call. You just say "cool I'm sending a 4 digit code to your mobile phone, read it back to me".


The CFO already separately sent him a message before the call, and I wonder if they'd get access to the CFO's number in a central directory (leaving aside the fact that you're asking to message them while they're live "in front" of you).

I fthe CFO gave a number on the call, it wouldn't also be much of a check.

I think the real improvement would be to have the CFO file a ticket, but obviously that company was used to play it loose and fast.


With $25 million on the line, I'd argue that the company could afford an airline ticket to fly to the UK and back to verify in person.


They might be able to afford ticket price, but not the time it takes to fly to the UK. Some things are time-sensitive.


It would detect number spoofing. Spoofing is easy, hacking phones is hard(er).


> it can be a PITA to get hold of the CFO from the mere employee side

I'm guessing that someone who can authorize a $25M transaction is fairly high up in the corporate hierarchy, not that many levels away from the CFO.


For a finance worker I actually wonder how much it means to transfer $25M.

I have no idea, but I suppose moving funds from one subsidiary to another for instance wouldn't be for a few thousands only, and he's seeing money fly around day in day out. Would it feel the same as an infra engineer rebalancing a few millions of access from a cluster to another ?


I don't know enough about this, but would it be possible for the scammers to hijack the SIM swapping?

That is, the scammer manages to get ahold of the SIM card / phone number of the CFO, and be on the receiving end if/when a worker calls the CFO up.

Weakest link would probably be to compromise some telecom worker, so that this can be orchestrated.


Make a twist and call my wife, not me.


This will work, until some determined actor sim swaps the CFO in advance.


This is a weird objection because if the expensive insulin did not exist (effective price = $inf) it would not apply.


My concern is that I need to live a fairly normal life, and I need to work. If I can not eat lunch at a normal time at work, and if I have to get up every 2 or 3 hours all night long to deal with my diabetes, then I can not work a normal job.


This is not a weird objection. The companies distributing the "expensive insulin" also distribute the affordable insulin, and created the cost disparity. Something strikingly apparent to anyone interacting with insurance companies for any chronic condition.


The reality is that before we had these medications, more people just died. Yeah sure in some sense it does not apply, but that's missing the point.


This law was passed specifically to allow Aryeh Dery to ignore the terms of his plea agreement and serve as a minister. It's not related to the Jewish-Arab demographic balance (which, within the 67 borders, is about 85-15).


That's technically true but also myopic. This was an explicit step to weaken the judiciary, strengthen the hard right and also indicted PM. This move is not explicitly anti-arab but it greatly empowers anti-arab leaders at the expense of democratic fairness. And rather severely at that. This was a canary. The next bill be worse and the one after worse again because they know they can't be stopped.


As the current government is making abundantly clear, 67 borders are irrelevant. There are roughly the same number of Jewish and Arab people within the territory Israel controls.


In the past the Israeli justice has been reasonably independent of the government, as can be seen from this long list where Aryeh Dery figures prominently:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Israeli_public_officia...

Even if the law passed now might have only the tactical goal of promoting Aryeh Dery once more, it certainly will allow the government to do unsanctioned in the future other things that could be much more harmful.


This law is intended to prevent the judiciary from finding settlements unreasonable. Aryeh Dery is the cover story.


Exactly. The right wingers plan to annex the territories without giving the Palestinians citizenship. It was literally in their election platform!


OP was being disingenuous at best, as if the country could be brought to a standstill over a minor legislative change to allow one guy into Parliament


1. There seems to be some suggestion that X

2. ???

3. In no world can I imagine ¬X


launch scrubbed


Double quotes hasn't worked in a long time. It used to be the case that if you search "foo" "bar" it would only return documents that had the words "foo" and "bar".

I will frequently search for z foo bar z, get documents that have synonyms of foo and bar (and the synonyms will be highlighted in the snippet), then I will search "foo" "bar" and get the same documents except now it doesn't highlight the synonyms in the snippet. Maybe I am in some awful cohort where this feature is intentionally broken to see if it reduces engagement.


>Double quotes hasn't worked in a long time

Same here, but seems to be 30/70. 30% of the time it works.

A while ago I was looking at an odd NetBSD issue and searched using "NetBSD". I got a few results on top, but most of the results on the first page were OpenBSD without any mention of NetBSD.


-"OpenBSD" as a negative quoted keyword in these cases.

Once you get your query dialed in, prepare to take the Turing test.


Make sure your quotes are plain quotes and not smart quotes.

They used to have a bug with those


If you ask ChatGPT to compose a layoff email with a quote from MLK that is the quote it uses (ref https://twitter.com/mattstratton/status/1618018859763798016)


Maybe she saw this tweet and that's where she got the idea?

When I saw the title here I thought maybe that tweet was satirizing her email, but, the tweet clearly predates it.

Amazing.


Huh.. not only the quote but also the promotion bit.

I'm shocked. Must be a case of her having read this tweet and subconsciously regurgitating it. Otherwise I'm scared for our eventual chatgpt overlords.


This Tweet was a response to her email


The tweet was from the 24th and the email is today though?


The Gizmodo article is from today, but the letter itself was posted the 24th.

Here's the original source: https://www.pagerduty.com/blog/improving-pagerdutys-operatio...

Here's a Tweet quoting it at 11am PST: https://twitter.com/noahchestnut/status/1617960469565931523

And the tweet in the parent was ~4 hours later at 2:52pm PST: https://twitter.com/mattstratton/status/1618018859763798016


Thanks that makes more sense. I thought the matrix glitched again.


> the tweet clearly predates it

Both were on the 24th. The PagerDuty post doesn't have a visible time but it refers to a town hall later in the day that was a couple hours before that tweet happened.


The author, Matt Stratton, used to be a devrel for PagerDuty. One imagines he had some inside information on layoff emails.


Ah, ok, that makes sense. Thanks.


Officially blaming Matty Stratton for this. :p


I tried and it does the same even in Spanish.


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