No, these are well established funds that make up the "quant trend following" sector. Most have been around for a couple of decades or more. It's not a case of putting them into a category post hoc. Of course, in any year there will always be some sector or some strategy that has surged ahead...

I think Apple gives slightly more courteous treatment to a big firm like Microsoft than they would to a small-time app store developer.

Well, windows can have mosquito netting. Doors need to let through people but not mosquitoes. I would like a ventilator above the doorway that blows air downwards whenever the door is open. Mosquitoes cannot fly in strong wind and, I think, they will keep away from it.

If you can compress a document (be it text, image, or sound) to a summary of its key attributes, then recreate it, then in a sense you have understood it. In a very loose sense - it's not a viewpoint I fully agree with - but until philosophers come up with a generally agreed, clearly defined definition of "to understand" then a definition based on compression and Kolmogorov complexity (the smallest computer program that generates the document) is as good as any other.

This viewpoint motivated the Hutter Prize, offering a prize to the first to compress the one gigabyte corpus to less than 115 megabytes (including the size of the decompression code). "This compression contest is motivated by the fact that being able to compress well is closely related to acting intelligently, thus reducing the slippery concept of intelligence to hard file size numbers."

Here it's a bit different since you have a lossy compression scheme - the exact input image is not returned. That means you couldn't really offer a contest with a cash prize, since the judges couldn't fairly decide whether the output was "close enough". Nonetheless you could say that the model has demonstrated some kind of intelligence in being able to recreate a close-enough image from a short description. As usual with machine learning, it's hard to get the model to explain how it produces the result or what key features it has discerned.

That's not quite fair. If you live in the USA and you wanted to pay someone in US dollars, but they lived in a different state, you'd have to drive there and hand over the cash. It would be even slower and more expensive if they lived in another country.

In practice it's fast because you are not paying in physical currency, but in a kind of electronic promise made by banks. Your bank balance falls, the other person's increases, and everyone trusts that in the end you will be able to convert the electronic balance back to physical dollar bills if you want.

The cryptocurrency world has largely failed to develop this kind of intermediary layer. That's partly because of terrible security -- would you really trust one of these bitcoin deposit sites not to get hacked? and partly because to have banks, you need some authority making sure they have enough physical reserves to back up the balances they create. That could be a full reserve requirement, so the bank holds bitcoin equal to at least 100% of its liabilities, or it could be fractional reserve banking, where only a part must be held. If the latter, you need a central bank and some kind of deposit guarantee scheme to prevent bank runs, but there is no central bank of bitcoin.

The ROM was actually a little bit slower than RAM, so you could speed up your machine by a few per cent by copying the ROM to RAM and remapping the address space. I think most home computers of the 1980s were instant-on. There's nothing remarkable about switching on a C64 and it showing the prompt immediately. What's unusual about the Archimedes is that it maintained the "home computer" feel (both good and bad) into the 32-bit era.

The original RISC OS 2 booted to the desktop in about a second. Later versions became slower. Then if your machine had a hard disk there was the temptation to make it load all sorts of stuff on startup. Mine became so bloated I made it play music and colour cycle the background while things loaded.

I contacted Computer Concepts to ask if they still had the code for their alternative operating system Impulse. (They had scrapped the project when RISC OS 2 came out, offering co-operative multitasking and a usable GUI; perhaps it wasn't what CC had hoped for but it was good enough.) I had hoped the Impulse prototype could be released as free software and bundled with the 'arcem' emulator. But they replied saying there was nothing left. That was 25 years ago.

Yes, we had this hype with Second Life about fifteen years ago. But the story is much older than that. Businesses were going to exist in "virtual reality" according to early-nineties predictions. Early websites sometimes tried to recreate a "virtual shopping mall" or "virtual village", until people realized that there was no reason to make your customers move awkwardly around a three-dimensional world to do online shopping.

Software user interfaces tried to mimic a real desktop. That's okay if it's just a metaphor or a way to present controls -- a paint program showing a palette of colours makes sense -- but daft if it means you have to navigate an adventure game to operate the computer. The most famous example was Microsoft Bob with its "rooms".

What you say about "chimping" applies to an eye-level viewfinder compared to a large LCD screen on the back. It's not a point of difference between an optical viewfinder and an electronic viewfinder, since both of them are held at the same position (and in both cases there is a dioptric lens so your eye doesn't have to focus close). The remaining advantage of optical viewfinders is battery life. Especially with manual focus, the camera is passive until the moment comes to take the shot. But this advantage will disappear over the coming years as electronics become more efficient and batteries improve.

What about encoding with QOI and then running through gzip? How does that perform in file size and speed compared to PNG? Or QOI followed by zstd?

Yes, and IBM can do it because IBM has a monopoly in AS/400 compatible systems. In a fully competitive chip market there wouldn't be any room for this crippling. After all if you can sell a crippled chip for $100 and still make a profit, any competitor can sell an equally good chip for the same price and not cripple it. It starts to become a worthwhile business model as you get closer to a monopoly. I can imagine a tacit agreement between Intel and AMD that they're both going to market their chips like this, and not undercut each other by selling uncrippled units at the lower price.

Banks are covered by deposit guarantee schemes. They need to be heavily regulated else there's an incentive for them to undertake risky lending where the bank gets the upside but the taxpayer gets the downside if they go bust ("looting"). These stablecoin companies don't have any explicit guarantee and the government won't bail out your investment if they go bust -- or at least has made no promise that it will. If they are only risking their own money and the money of their foolish depositors, there's a case for leaving them to it. I don't think it increases M2 money supply because again, the lending done stablecoin issuers does not create bank deposits. They can't just credit your account in the same way a bank does (which then gives you real dollars to spend or pay your taxes with, guaranteed up to the deposit insurance maximum). They can only issue securities, of doubtful worth, which you hope to sell for real dollars later.

I understood that the ARM64 instruction set was also an Apple-ARM collaboration.

Deena Karia, another scam victim, told Reuters how she lost 10,000 pounds in early February after buying a seemingly safe bond purportedly issued by Credit Suisse and apparently listed on price-comparison site MoneySuperMarket.

Yes, I've seen this. The site was money-supermarket.uk rather than the legitimate www.moneysupermarket.com. I didn't immediately spot it was a phishing domain (after all marketers are always coming up with new website addresses) and gave my details for a "fixed investment bond". They called me back from "JP Morgan" but by then I had realized it was a scam. To get rid of them I said I had spent the money on a car instead.