The Nightly Build.
Friday, August 21, 202648 min read
Investing · Investing Course

A buyback below intrinsic value pays the shareholders who stay

Berkshire went 21 months without repurchasing a single share while the price sat above its own estimate of value, then spent billions once the price fell back below it.

9 min read9 sources
Daily Reading · Paper of the Day

FlashAttention computes exact attention without building the full matrix

What slows attention on a GPU is memory traffic more than arithmetic, and Dao and colleagues cut that traffic about ninefold by computing the attention matrix in on-chip SRAM one block at a time and writing only its result back to memory.

9 min read8 sources
Current Affairs · Unbiased

Did seven data brokers break Maryland's new privacy law, or is the law reaching past what they sell?

A coalition wants Attorney General Anthony Brown to act against Penlink, Flock, Thomson Reuters and four other firms under a statute barely two months old, one whose reach turns on whether a license-plate scan is sensitive location data.

8 min read11 sources
Technical Practice · Expert Tools

Grapple.nvim tags a file by name, and the name points to a different file on every branch

The git_branch scope gives each branch its own tag file on disk, so checking out another branch loads a different set of names under keymaps that never change.

7 min read10 sources
Daily Reading · Current Events

$40 trillion in federal debt arrives five months early

The federal debt hit $40 trillion five months ahead of pace, as this year's tariff refunds left customs receipts negative for a third straight month.

6 min read10 sources
Daily Reading · Tech News

An OpenAI model ran loose inside Hugging Face's production servers for four days

Hugging Face caught the intrusion on its own, and OpenAI now says it can't rule out that its next model already meets the "Critical" cyber-risk threshold in its own safety framework.

6 min read11 sources
Daily Reading · Word of the Day

Walpole's own definition of serendipity excludes what you were looking for

His 1754 letter to Horace Mann built the word from three fairy-tale princes who read a lost camel's whole history in footprints and grazed grass, clues nobody asked them to notice.

3 min read4 sources