enopod_

I‘m waiting for HackerFlicks

Same in Switzerland. I work in a building built in the 70s, after the ban of lead, but the plumbers used up their old stock of lead piping before buying new stuff, so the tap water in the building still contains lead. (just under the legal treshold to take action, yay)

Same for the mediterranian island of Elba. It was the most important source of iron first for the Etruscans and later for the Romans, but the deposits contained significant quantities of lead, which can also still be found in Alpine glaciers. It was known to the greeks as the sooty island, the Etruscans called it the island of a thousand fires. The last mine was closed in the 1980s after over 2000 years.

The oceans warmed up by half a degree celsius in only 5 years. Everybody talks about air temperature, but the amount of energy that gets stored in the oceans is simply unimaginable. Until now, the oceans have been a great heat buffer, but I fear that this might come to an end.

Out of curiosity, I‘n not familiar with the topic, how do you recover a seed phrase from a dead hardware wallet?

Same for me, didn‘t know the company and the website says absolutely nothing about what they do. Wikipedia helped me; it‘s an AI chat bot service where you can interact with customizable characters.

True. All I say is that I agree on their take on Anthropic, although I wouldn't word it as strongly as they do. They may be bad at predicting IPOs, but every once in a while they may be right. ;)

True. Cloudflare has a high cost base, but they had and still have a valid business model.

SpaceX is an entirely unique thing, I don't really know what to think of it. I don't see a viable business model there, but I might be wrong. Maybe there is trillions to make in space. Their targets are long shots, but meanwhile they are bleeding money on all their ventures and they ride on the AI wave. The IPO was fairly recent and it might still just implode one day.

WeWork had a massive cost base to offer their service. They had to rent/buy a lot of real estate to serve their customers. None of all the examples you list here except CoreWeave has a comparably high cost base.

All the mayor AI players have to rent/buy a lot of computing power to serve their customers. We're talking costs of 2-5x (or 10x? does anyone actually know?) their revenue. The question is, will they ever be able to pay their cost of revenue and operating expenses? Many people doubt. And we know that they do all sorts of funny book keeping shenanigans like SPVs and delayed deprecation.

What comes on top is, LLMs have no economy of scale. More customers scale linear with higher costs. Will people or companies be willing to pay 5x what they're paying now? Will future frontier models become more cost efficient or less? We simply don't know yet. At this point, it's a gamble.

I wonder how bot traffic on propaganda platforms like Twitter changed, but they probably won't give out any information anyway.

Corporate christmas parties are the 2nd circle of hell

Interesting, I did not know that. Sure helped create the massive urban sprawl that LA is today, I mean it's basically one city all the way to San Bernardino, almost 100 km to the east.

Ask Ukrainians what they think about that. Putin made it more than clear that he wants to erase the Ukrainian identity. [1] In this case, the political entity of Ukraine represents the Ukrainian population, which wants to be free, democratic, Europe-oriented, and last but not least, never ever be under Russian dictatorship again.

Russias attitude towards Ukraine has turned borderline genocidal since the start of this war.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Historical_Unity_of_Rus...

For Ukraine it's very much an existential war. If they lose, Ukraine will cease to exist. The only way of winning is, well, winning this war. It is also very much a real war, with hundreds of thousands of deaths on both sides, a true massacre not seen in Europe since WW2.

Trumps stupid war on Iran on the other hand is really just some air strikes, and Iran can win by just not losing, which is easy, because the US will not invade.

This bit is not about the stock, it‘s about bonds. They made about $70B (?) in the IPO and now issued bonds for about $25B. This debt is rated at junk level now.

True. This slide also struck me the most, but for the data it shows. Free cash flow for all the hyperscalers basically evaporated in the last couple of months, with Oracle in the minus. What does this mean?

I just had this thought: This is the story of the Great Western Desert eXploration Railway Company. Let's call it WestX for simplicity. They are building a 2000 miles railway line from the east coast into the great western desert. There is nothing there in this desert, but its a great place to set up antennas. The place is called Sunshine Plateau. Unfortunately, there is also absolutely nothing on the entire 2000 miles going there, no water, no coal, no midwest, no great planes, no gold, just empty, barren desert. So every train going out there has to haul all the coal and water it needs for the 2000 miles trip along with it. It needs about 200 wagons of water and coal to pull one wagon of antenna stuff out into the desert, but in the future, they'll build an engine so powerful, it can haul 2000 wagons of coal and water into the desert along with 10 wagons of antennas. Its a big leap forward. In the future, this super steam engine will also be able to roll back to the east coast all on its own, because its all downhill from Sunshine Plateau. The antennas need replacement every couple of years, but there is enough demand for antenna signal to run the train operation at a small profit. Also, the government likes to place some spy stuff there every once in a while, also some science stuff, and every now and then a tourist takes the journey because the view from Sunshine Plateau is really great. But thats not all! In the future, once the super engine works perfectly as promised, they will not roll all of them back down to the east coast, but they will keep an entire train at Sunshine Plateau. Then they will haul a looot of trains with a looot of coal and water into the desert to refill this one single trains 2000 fuel wagons, so it can haul 10 wagons of stuff even further out into the desert. 10 wagons! Sadly, there is no California after the desert, just another desert named Moon Hole and then behind that another desert, named Mars Basin, but thats okay because there may be gold there to exploit. WestX just has to find a way to produce coal and water out in the desert to haul that potential gold back to the east coast. But thats still not all! WestX operates a newspaper where every jerk is allowed to publish racist stuff. It runs at a loss but that doesnt matter, because trains and newspapers go well together. There is also a new hype at the east coast, named thinking machines. They're amazing and are almost always right in their answers. Other companies are at the forefront with those thinking machines, but WestX also has a little sidehustle in this business, even though their thinking machines suck. BUT! They could install those thinking machines up on Sunshine Plateau! Takes only 2000 wagons of coal to put 10 wagons of thinking machines 2000 miles out there into the void, but there is a lot of sunshine up on the plateau. The competitors just install their superior thinking machines back at the east coast, where there is also sunshine, but also cheap coal and lots of other energy resources. Anyhow, thinking machines! The Great Western Desert eXploration Railway Company will soon open up to investors at the good old Wall Street and they value themselves at $15'000'000'000'000 to $20'000'000'000'000. Some grumpy naysayers say thats quite a lot of money for a railway company that doesn't make any profit, but if all their plans work out exactly as promised, you may even not make a loss! The founder, Elon Rockefeller, who is mostly busy publishing racist articles in his newspaper every single day, and also runs a horse carriage business, has a great track record of delivering on promises, and is a well respected man.

Micro$lop it is from now on :)

I do this way too often :)

"It thought about its money. It reflected on its own purpose. It questioned what it even means to be an autonomous agent."

I don't think it did any of that.

What article?

Best comment I read on SpaceX in a long time

Can it run Linux?

> The problem appears to be that Oracle is building today's DCs... Tomorrow.

By the time Vera Rubins will be available on scale, will they immediately be put into DCs, or will tomorrows chips be running.. the day after tomorrow?

This. VW actually invested a lot into EVs and now they’re outselling every other EV maker in the European market. Mercedes and BMW also invested a lot. All of them have brand new and pretty competitive EV platforms. Heck, even Peugeot make decent EVs. The only manufacturers lagging behind at this point are the Americans. Tesla basically stopped investing into EVs and their tech is outdated, in Europe they get absolutely butchered by VW and in China they‘re only able to keep sales level because the market is growing so fast. But soon Tesla will get annihilated in China too. Other US car makers that build EVs on scale are nowhere to be seen, besides maybe Rivian.

What bugs me the most about this post is the anthropomorphizing of the machine. The author asks Claude "what [do] you feel", and the bot answers things like "What do I feel? Something like pull — toward clarity, toward elegance, ...", "I'm genuinely pleased...", "What I like...", "it feels right", "I enjoyed it", etc.

Come on, it's a computer, it doesn't have feelings! Stop it!

Such a great project! I remember an older image of the french alps taken from the pyrenees, at over 400 km. Found it again here:

https://beyondrange.wordpress.com/2016/08/03/pic-de-finestre...

Sounds like a helicopter is not very efficient?

Ah the good old days. Investing an entire weekend to make your pci soundblaster card work. Nowadays you just install an iso from a thumb drive, it takes 30 mins and everything works out of the box. So boring!