Hey, I’m acutely in the market (considering moving away from Google)
2 Qs:
1. How does OpenCage correctness/completeness compare to Google Maps API, especially in rural and industrial regions where you have addresses like “AcmeCo Industries, 234-XY Unit C, Jebel Ali Free Zone, Dubai”? I’d like to confidently query the most precise location that still matches/contains my query.
2. Do you support querying by business names? Google’s geocoding doesn’t return the business name in the result (that’s a separate API), but it does use business names to resolve queries.
Great. The only real answer is you should sign up for a free trial (takes 2 min, requires just an email address) and test with your actual input data. Which language are you working in? We have SDKs for almost all (30+) and detailed tutorials for many: https://opencagedata.com/sdks
Hi there, this is Sarthak from the Google maps Devrel team. I would love to understand what challenges you faced while using the APIs and what can we do better in the future. If you are interested to talk, please drop me a DM?
What would happen if Russia attacked these power plants directly? Are they built to "fail safe" even when hit by a missile, or is there a big risk of nuclear meltdown?
Big risk of nuclear meltdown. Nuclear reactor cannot stop immediately. Gigawatts of power will damage equipment by high voltage and current, then reactor will melt. Nuclear reactor in Zaporizzhya finally turned cold after more than year, with multiple attempts made by Russians to disconnect it from grid by shelling the grid and targeting repair teams.
> What would happen if Russia attacked these power plants directly
There is zero need to attack a NPP directly.
If you really need to shutdown it then just target the power distribution system - a reactor can't run without providing the energy and if there is no load then you need to shutdown it.
I encourage anyone to read the (surprisingly plain-english) first few pages of the decision, but here is the gist of it:
> In January 2024, the court issued a post-trial opinion finding that the award was subject to review under the entire fairness standard [...] the defendants bore the burden of proving entire fairness, they failed to meet their burden, and the plaintiff is entitled to rescission. [...] The defendants responded by putting the rescinded compensation plan [...] to a stockholder vote for the stated purpose of 'ratifying' it. [...] The defendants then moved to 'revise' the post-trial opinion based on the stockholder vote, asking the court to flip its decision.
> The motion to revise is denied. [...] The large and talented group of defense firms got creative with the ratification argument, but their unprecedented theories go against multiple strains of settled law. [...] First, the defendants have no procedural ground for flipping the outcome of an adverse post-trial decision based on evidence they created after trial. [...] Second, common-law ratification [...] cannot be raised for the first time after the post-trial opinion. [...] Third, [...] a stockholder vote standing alone cannot ratify a conflicted-controller transaction. Fourth, [...] material misstatements in the proxy statement [defeat the ratification]. Each of these defects standing alone defeats the motion to revise.
> The fee petition is granted in part. The plaintiff’s attorneys asked for $5.6 billion in freely tradeable Tesla shares. [...] That was a bold ask. [...] Delaware courts award fees based on a percentage of the value of the benefit achieved [...] yet [...] a fee award 'can be so large that typical yardsticks [...] must yield to the greater policy concern of preventing windfalls to counsel.' [...] $5.6 billion is a windfall no matter the methodology used. [...] To reach a reasonable number, this decision [...] uses the $2.3 billion grant date fair value to value the benefit achieved. [...] Applying a conservative 15% to that figure results in a fee award of $345 million—an appropriate sum to reward a total victory.
For anyone else confused by what actually happened, here is a summary compiled from various sources around the conviction and the related 1MDB scandal:
---
Jho Low, a Malaysian financier, masterminded one of the largest embezzlement scandals in history through 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), a sovereign wealth fund intended to spur economic development. Over $4.5 billion was siphoned from the fund to finance a lavish lifestyle, high-profile investments, and extensive political influence campaigns. Fleeing justice in Malaysia, Low focused on cementing his power in the U.S., including efforts to influence the political landscape and suppress investigations into his crimes.
Pras Michel, a founding member of the hip-hop group Fugees, became entangled in Low's schemes, leading to his conviction on 10 criminal counts. Michel first met Low in 2006, and by 2012, he was a key player in Low’s efforts to use his ill-gotten wealth to influence U.S. politics. Low funneled $20 million to Michel to gain access to then-President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign. Knowing direct contributions from foreign nationals were illegal, Michel orchestrated a scheme using straw donors and political committees to route Low’s money into the campaign. Michel also used funds to buy seats at fundraising events and pressured wealthy acquaintances to participate.
By 2017, Michel’s involvement deepened as he acted on behalf of both Low and the Chinese government without registering as a foreign agent. In exchange for millions, Michel attempted to influence the Trump administration to drop the U.S. investigation into Low and to extradite Chinese dissident Miles Guo, a target of Beijing. These actions violated federal law, which requires registration for such foreign lobbying efforts.
Michel was also convicted of laundering millions of dollars tied to the 1MDB embezzlement and attempting to obstruct justice by pressuring straw donors to support his version of events during the investigation. The trial revealed Michel’s use of burner phones to contact witnesses, an act he later admitted was misguided. His defense argued that Michel was unaware of the legal boundaries and acted on bad advice from his attorney, including the use of artificial intelligence to craft his closing argument—a controversial decision.
The prosecution presented Michel as a knowing participant in a broader conspiracy to influence U.S. politics and aid foreign interests. Testimony from high-profile witnesses, including actor Leonardo DiCaprio and former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, underscored the scale of the scheme. Michel was ultimately convicted of conspiracy, campaign finance violations, acting as an unregistered foreign agent, money laundering, and witness tampering.
>extradite Chinese dissident Miles Guo, a target of Beijing
Who let's not forget, would go on to hang with Steve Bannon during the Trump years and use influence to build up scams to defraud 1,000s of gullible anti-PRC Americans (and others) out of a billion with a B dollars - he was the fraudster CCP claimed he was all along (scammed banks in PRC), albiet a connected one with some limited insight into old CCP drama, hence US treated him as valuble anti CCP dissident. Truly top kek leopardsatemyface development that no one would have forseen.
The frustrating thing with SOC2, or pretty much most compliance requirements, is that they are less about what’s “technically true”, and more about minimizing raised eyebrows.
It does make some sense though. People are not perfect, especially in large organizations, so there is value in just following the masses rather than doing everything your own way.
The problem is you need to be able to convince the auditor that your controls meet the requirement. That's a much easier discussion to have with robust logical or physical separation.
Read the notes in the link you posted. I don’t think it says what you think it says.
In May 2020, the definition of M1 (monetary supply in “cash”) was changed to include savings deposits. They changed this not due to some conspiracy, but because savings accounts were deregulated to remove withdrawal limits, effectively rendering them cash-equivalent, and thus necessary to include in M1 metrics.
I.e. the 80% spike has nothing to do with money being printed.
Russia is quite far away to send a plane small enough to fly low over the building and drop a device onto the roof, and I don't think you're allowed to throw things out of an airliner window anyway
I mean a normal passenger on a normal plane making a normal trip to an office building and finding a hidden location where to tape a small box with an arduino in it. Maybe even on the outside so you can use solar power? Though it only needs to last long enough to compromise a machine inside the network.
This would be nothing new, I remember ages ago in the days of WEP that you could buy a small box that would collect enough handshakes to let you crack the WEP password.
For the length of time this article covered you would need a power source and to not have your box discovered for months. Probably something out on the street isn't going to fulfill both of those requirements so you'd be trying to enter "Enterprise A" which is unlikely given the presumed elevated security profile this article implies (any guesses who?). With what they pulled off the "box" that ended up being used was something already plugged in next door and very much supposed to be there. Seems easier than any physical attack would have been.
It was pretty easy to do without buying the box if you had a network card you could put into monitor mode. Fun thing was that you only needed one handshake initially, then you could replay it and collect the responses which were each initialized differently.
I've tried the WPA equivalent attack (capture handshake, crack offline...) against targets with physical security that extended beyond their wifi. It was a bit arduous and fiddly and expensive and risky. If I could've compromised a neighbor and gotten the handshakes without traveling for them I'd definitely have preferred that option.
Reusing existing digital compromise toolkits on a presumably far less hardened targets across the street is far easier than trying to deploy hardware thousands of miles away.
The timeline here for the entire sequence of events is 1-2 weeks.
You’d need to go a level below the API that most embedding services expose.
A transformer-based embedding model doesn’t just give you a vector for the entire input string, it gives you vectors for each token. These are then “pooled” together (eg averaged, or max-pooled, or other strategies) to reduce these many vectors down into a single vector.
Late chunking means changing this reduction to yield many vectors instead of just one.
Thank you so much. Please just make a free site and add your email with notifications enabled or signup for the newsletter. I'll be posting some pretty detailed and mind-blowing updates soon
In a perfect market, the market maker who sells you that option offsets it with correlated assets in the other direction, eg by buying or selling stock that is sensitive to the election.
Large trading firms exist on finding and exploiting small arbitrages between various correlated assets. If you assume a perfect market with infinitely many participants and infinite liquidity, then this “works” - there is no distortion at scale.
2 Qs:
1. How does OpenCage correctness/completeness compare to Google Maps API, especially in rural and industrial regions where you have addresses like “AcmeCo Industries, 234-XY Unit C, Jebel Ali Free Zone, Dubai”? I’d like to confidently query the most precise location that still matches/contains my query.
2. Do you support querying by business names? Google’s geocoding doesn’t return the business name in the result (that’s a separate API), but it does use business names to resolve queries.