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Private Equity Supports Efficient Markets (and why you should care)

What is Private Equity? Private equity refers to investments made in companies that are not publicly traded . The goal is to achieve high returns by improving the company’s operations and then selling it for a profit. Think of diamond-in-the-rough companies in which value is difficult to see, (but which you are assured is there).  What is the Efficient Markets Hypothesis (EMH)? The EMH states that share prices reflect all available information. It posits that stocks always trade at their fair market value , making it impossible to consistently outpe
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Recent posts

YouTube High CPU/GPU usage

Fix. No tweaks required. YouTube videos would start OK then start stuttering after about a minute, with CPU in Task Manager spiking to 100%. What I didn't realise is that how you play videos affects resource intensity.
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AI Image Prompts - Or-ca(r)

What would an Orca look like as a car? You can use images as a prompt , and combine them with text.
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AI Landscapes - Views of Mt Fuji

Mixing image generators, image prompts, and weird problems. Google's Gemini does a pretty good job of imagining Mt Fuji as Vincent Van Gogh ... ... and Caspar David Friedrich ... but it flat out refuses to imagine them on display in a museum. I tried both inputting the image, as well as rewriting the prompt. Nope. Can't do it. So I use Fooocus, a Stable Diffusion-based generator to get around these restrictions. Straight-up using these images as prompts causes a re-imagining of the painting. Not what I want. Easiest is just to outpaint and expand the borders. Hmm. A bit too modern-art-gallery. After some fiddling, I could get exhibit label ... ... or a fancy period frame ... ... but somehow, not both. Anyway, not a bad result after 1 hour fiddling, including generation time.
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AI Landscapes - Through Fresh Eyes

What if Hokusai toured America? What if a master of luminism, like Bierstadt, went to China?
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AI Lunar New Year

What better time to try out AI art than Lunar/Chinese New Year (LNY)? A lot of LNY art is understandably done in Asian art styles. Nothing against that, but it can be overbearingly chipper ...
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Fashionable Austerity

Economic justice is so last season. The late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez called the International Monetary Fund ("IMF") a tool of US imperialism. Tanzania's president John Magufuli, accused the World Bank of interfering in his country's affairs. That's a novel way to treat one's creditors. Applicants for home loans don't call their banks neo-colonial oppressors as a matter of course.
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