> Is there really anything about them that's bad? Or any worse than other things?
A full-on nuclear war will literally make a large portion of our planet uninhabitable for anyone for centuries, and leave the rest severely crippled and contaminated.
Sorry I know we're supposed to be kind and whatnot in these comments but I can't help but explicitly state that your comment is one of the dumbest things I've read on this site in a while. I hope you otherwise have a good day.
Copyright being as long as it is is a theft of our culture. I (and many of our generation) grew up with Pokemon, it's a common experience for many of us. A classic of our culture. Except we're not allowed to use it, remix it, build our own versions, etc. We still do, of course, but it's all illegal.
It didn't used to be this way.
I think 20-30 years of copyright should be plenty to extract whatever profits you deserve from the fruits of your labor. Anything beyond that is just holding culture hostage for the benefit of a few. It doesn't serve society in any meaningful way.
Since pdqsort (an older project of mine) was mentioned, I felt it wouldn't be entirely inappropriate to mention that I've since then collaborated with Lukas Bergdoll to provide two high-quality sort implementations for the Rust standard library, ipnsort (unstable) and driftsort (stable).
So if you use Rust, you get these by simply calling [T]::sort(_unstable). Great performance out of the box :)
On my machine (Apple M2), using the benchmarks from the repository on Apple clang 17 and Rust 1.98 nightly:
Thanks for everything Orson! I know Clang struggled to ship improved sorts for their C++ implementation, so it's a good sign that Rust was able to ship ipnsort and driftsort without too much chaos.
Also, Lukas looked over my `misfortunate` crate (which provides "perverse" implementations of safe Rust traits) and although misfortunate isn't intended for testing he has inspired me to improve the perverse implementations of Ord, not for testing per se but to further illustrate. It occurs to me I should point anybody reading misfortunate's documentation at your/ Lukas' work in case they actually need really nasty tests not just mild perversion.
but that's not a violation of the contract, it's just a hash collision. Hash collisions are expected to happen, so HashMap and HashSet won't "misbehave seriously", they'll just be slow (linear-time lookup) and unable to remove entries.
The contract of Hash is that if two values are equal, then they hash to the same value. Which would be violated by doing the opposite of Maxwell: all values equal each other, but their hash differs (you can even make it random so it changes across calls on the same value!)
FWIW, I believe that's not a mistake, just a consistent use of (novel?) jargon. From context I infer that the paragraph is distinguishing between the _hard requirements_ of the traits (quote: "the language contract says they cannot become unsafe") and the behavior human programmers would naturally _expect_ of the traits ("the social contract").
And yes, looking at https://docs.rs/misfortunate/latest/misfortunate/index.html and Ctrl+F'ing for "social contract," I see that usage very consistently. The entire point of Misfortunate is that its types correctly implement the language contract, while violating the "social contract" in various surprising ways. For example, causing a hash collision on every operation is a perfectly cromulent implementation of Hash, but violates the "social contract" of Hash. For another example, look at LoadLetter — throwing an error on every operation is a valid implementation of Read, but still violates the "social contract" of what a human programmer would naturally expect from something readable.
I take your point but I do still think it's a violation here, if I see a type which implements Hash and Eq this doesn't feel like a reasonable outcome to me.
Do you have a better way to describe how Maxwell<T> works here? Or, failing that, an idea for a type which you feel can be perverse in a more interesting way here?
By the way (though you should not design things where this happens) you can alway remove things from a HashMap (or HashSet) because such collections provide e.g. retain and extract_if which both take callables, your callable is given a reference to each thing in the collection and asked if you want it, they behave differently and have different intended purposes but either will let you fish out a NaN you mistakenly stored in an ordered collection for example.
> I know Clang struggled to ship improved sorts for their C++ implementation
Clang has no built-in sorting algorithms.
I imagine you're referring to the LLVM project's libc++?
Though all common distributions of LLVM default to GCC's libstdc++.
Fair enough, I'm not from the US. Globally they're at a roughly 10% market share and where I'm from closer to just 5%. It's a rarity to see any here and I've never gotten to try macOS outside a shop.
I looked at your paper[0] and was curious why it was named "drift" sort. Even searching for 'drift' didn't show me. I mainly ask because this is noted as a stable sort and the word 'drift' implies movement; I did not expect it, from the name, to be a stable sort.
It's called driftsort because it's derived from another sort I made, glidesort: https://github.com/orlp/glidesort. Glidesort is a bit faster still for large inputs, however it was too large and complex for inclusion in the standard library, and suffered from code size penalties on small inputs. So driftsort is a slimmed down version more appropriate for general purpose.
No, but it was also named in the 60s. If someone was three comments deep replying to people asking about it, at some point someone would say "it's quick and in place because it does a recursive partition".
As for your party trick: The performance drop in "blqs" occurred because heapsort was applied directly to a poorly partitioned input. Quicksort now gets a second chance in this case. With 10% random, 90% sorted, the performance drop no longer occurs. It is now faster than std::sort.
Normally, quicksort works best on random data. But with 90% already sorted and 10% random, it actually becomes harder to pick a good pivot. Sometimes the pivot ends up too large, which creates very uneven splits. When that happens, the algorithm switches to heapsort to avoid worst-case behavior, but heapsort is slower. Now, instead of immediately switching, it tries to partition again. Only if it’s still bad does it fall back to heapsort. That’s why performance improves.
The input space is 32 + 32 = 64 bits. The output space is 64 bits. So the best you can do is an 1-to-1 mapping.
However, since a * b = b * a, our input space has a lot of duplicate outputs. So from this alone you can conclude roughly half of the output space must be uncovered by any input pair, simply because there aren't enough input pairs.
GameStop doesn't have (even close to) $55.5B. Their offer from the letter is literally impossible:
> Our offer is $125.00 per share, comprising 50% cash and 50% GameStop common stock
Even if you magically included all existing GameStop stock in the offer, it still would not comprise 50% of $55.5B.
EDIT: looks like it's not impossible and I misunderstood. It's a proposed change of leadership with a $25B injection of cash to sweeten the deal. GameStop would issue shares which would capture the original eBay value (since GameStop would own eBay after the trade), making that part a wash. At least assuming people owning eBay stock currently would value the combined company at at least the sum of their parts, which is a big if.
When the merger concludes, the former shareholders of eBay will have $27.5bn of GameStop-eBay stock and $27.5bn of cash. (“Cohen said GameStop has a commitment letter from TD Bank to provide up to $20 billion in debt financing” and “GameStop has around $9 billion in cash on its balance sheet to put toward a deal” [1].)
It looks like mutual funds pass the gains, and the tax, onto those holding shared of the mutual fund.
> Because mutual funds are pass-through vehicles, they are required by law to distribute most of these gains to shareholders each year. These are called capital gains distributions.
Other types of funds don't necessarily have this problem, or lessen it.
> Holding mutual funds inside an IRA, 401(k), or Roth IRA shields you from annual tax bills.
> Index funds: Passive funds trade less frequently, leading to fewer gains.
> Tax-managed funds: Specifically structured to reduce taxable events.
> Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs): Use an “in-kind” redemption mechanism that avoids triggering taxable sales.
They own eBay + GME + some financial alchemy. If you aren't a financial wizard you should assume that the value of the financial alchemy is negative. (Because 99% of the time it is.) Now, what are the synergies of eBay + GME that outweighs the chaos caused by the merger and the finance stuff?
I’m not totally sure how it would be structured but if GME is the purchaser then the merged company would be listed under GME and eBay would become a brand in the GME group and no longer a stock listed under the eBay ticker.
The whole thing seems incredibly dubious and fishy. The eBay board should vote this down which is why the CEO of GME has already realised that and said he’ll appeal to the shareholders directly. If eBay wanted to load themselves with twenty billion dollars of unnecessary debt and extra complications which would kill the company then they could do it themselves. They’re not in that kind of business.
There is, literally, nothing fishy about this offer. It’s a cash and stock offer from a public company to public company shareholders. We could call the financial or shareholder benefits to ebay dubious (I don’t hold any opinion about this) but this is a very aggressive offer, and allows the chance for GME to keep some cash - if enough shareholders of ebay opt for stock, then they’ll have cash available after. Plus they’d keep whatever current net assets ebay has.
ebay was at like 100 before the offer went out, it’s trading up to 120 or so in early hours this morning, so speculators and institutional desks do not find this offer fishy or dubious - they are pricing it as likely to be pretty well received.
As a side note, one of many plays you might make in this situation is what Cohen has done here; they bought a bunch of options. Those options are now worth a lot; before the letter if it was all options, they controlled $2b of EBAY shares, today that’s $2.6b. We might imagine the options at least doubled the underlying return. The market had not priced in a rapid jump to $120 when he bought them. If the deal closes, then this will put at least another billion or two of liquid capital into GME.
TD Bank also believes it will work, i.e. return them a profit.
They've seen the detailed plans and I haven't. But they're the ones with real skin in the game. It seems like an opportunity for them to lose their shirts.
So yeah, eBay shareholders should take TD Bank's free money and run.
TD Bank believes it will make them a profit. Their interests are not those of eBay’s shareholders: if they can juice the financials long enough to sell their loan, they don’t care if the company goes bankrupt the minute after that sale closes.
When the SEC filing is made, we'll get to see how the deal is structured. The $20 billion from TD Securities becomes a debt obligation of the combined company. There's a tax break in equity to debt conversion, and a second tax break for carried interest. [2]
There may be a preferred stock deal or debt refinancing so that TD gets their $20 billion back. Usually, the private equity firm exits within a few years.
Sure it is. The acquirer is borrowing money for the buyout, and the debt will become a debt of the acquired/merged company. That, by definition, is a leveraged buyout.
No, unless any control transaction using any leverage counts.
A third of the deal is financed with debt. A fifth is financed with cash. The bulk—fifty percent—is being financed with equity. An LBO would see debt and a thin tranche of cash finance the bulk of the acquisition.
That's just for the cash part. The stock part makes no sense. For this 50/50 deal to work in principle, they'd need to issue around a billion new shares, which would massively dilute the existing ~450M shares. So Ebay shareholders would suddenly own 70% of Gamestop after the deal. It's also highly questionable if investors actually believe the combined stock is worth that much, so the stock price would probably fall and turn those 70% into >90%. At this point it basically becomes a reverse acquisition plus a large loan for the final company from the cash part of the deal.
This is not atypical; smaller company “buys” the larger company with debt on the larger company’s books. The blended shareholder mix is mostly the larger company; management comes from the smaller company.
The one I was most familiar with was the Discovery “acquisition” of Warner Brothers. Though apparently that’s a little complicated because AT&T was divesting itself of Warner.
How is a 20bn company going to issue 27bn worth of stock? Or are they just going to pretend the newly issued shares are valued the same per share as existing stock is right now?
Because it acquires an asset worth roughly that much, it’s neutral. GME is (probably!) not doing a huge at-the-market offering, they’re creating the shares and immediately giving them to eBay shareholders.
In practice the price paid for the company being acquired is usually a bit higher than the market value (so the shareholders take the deal), and the market usually punishes the acquirer a bit and the resulting entity’s stock will fall a bit. (This is most definitely not investing advice.)
Both stocks went up in value after the announcement, so it's a good sign that if it comes to it, eBay stock holders would vote for a merger, because they value the combined company at at least the sum of their parts.
why do i keep seeing comments of this sentiment? can't they just take loans? I thought there were serious consequences to making an offer, and then backing out , especially if the other party accepts your offer.
… and the stock has not dropped 39%, in fact it’s trading about where it was a year ago. Shareholders have been content to let Cohen add to the balance sheet, adjust operations and make a large move. This is one such move. And GME is up 5+% in pre trading, so shareholders are generally positive about this idea.
If Cohen's "large move" was to buy EBay, investors could have done that themselves. They would have gotten a better deal on shares in the new company. Also, they'd be up 50% over 12 months. Partly because Cohen "adding to the balance sheet" has meant dilutions, and there will be more for this deal.
Yeah this is the funny part to me - if you thought EBay was an amazing business then you could have just bought that stock months or years ago. Maybe the combined company will really be worth more than both companies individually, but for the most part this is just GameStop deciding how you should have invested your money months ago.
Technically, we only know that the marginal non-shareholder is 5% more positive about the idea, since the price represents what the marginal buyer and seller are willing to transact at. The only shareholders involved in the increase are actually selling.
I operate under the delusion that it was a $400 gamble and there is no point selling stock that I forgot I even owned at all, when it's such a small amount.
Perhaps that is part of the scam here. Meme stock buyers will think this means something and will spend more on worthless shares so that ebay executives can sell.
Yes, that goes into the '50% cash' part of the offer. With a 20B credit line and 7.5B cash from their own coffers (which they claim to have, so let's believe them on their word there), you cover the cash portion.
The issue is the non-cash portion of the offer. They claim that the remaining 27.5B is covered by GameStop stock. But that's more than double the market cap of GameStop.
With the approval of the board of directors (in most cases), a company can simply create new shares and give them to whomever they like.
I would guess that this information will bother you.
If it helps, because many public company executives are compensated on earnings per share, most C level teams are incentivized to buy back shares, thus decreasing the denominator for the EPS calculation without changing fundamental economics of the company.
If this also bothers you, you should guess what Buffet says and thinks about those two dynamics, and then read up on it, and you will learn something interesting about public markets!
The non-cash (stock) portion of the offer needs to be valued against the resulting entity, which will own eBay. This will likely result in current eBay shareholders owning half or more of the resulting entity. (Though we don't know specific numbers yet). That's normal for a M&A where the smaller company is doing the buying.
> So you're just outright accusing GameStop of fraud?
I have no idea why you interpret my words that way. I just meant that I didn't want to analyze the cash portion of their offer any further and just wanted to take it at face value.
It's like saying 'tobacco allegedly causes cancer' - the proof is very public and available. The typical reason for saying it like that is to indicate you don't believe it.
Are they under any obligation to ground the value of their own stock or can a salesman simply claim that the "true" value of that stock is much much more than it currently seems to be?
A full-on nuclear war will literally make a large portion of our planet uninhabitable for anyone for centuries, and leave the rest severely crippled and contaminated.
Sorry I know we're supposed to be kind and whatnot in these comments but I can't help but explicitly state that your comment is one of the dumbest things I've read on this site in a while. I hope you otherwise have a good day.
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