epistasis

This sounds a lot like the play that SpaceX made for their IPO.

There are indeed caps on contributions to the political campaigns of candidates.

However in 2010 the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United that corporations (including so-called Political Action Committees) and unions cants have their expenditures capped. A subsequent decision in SpeechNow.org ruled that contributions to these PACs can't be capped, as long as the PAC doesn't coordinate with a candidate.

So here we are. I'm not sure if taxation on these types of contributions would be considered limitation of free speech, but I'm willing to give it a shot in courts.

That is true, but not even really connected at all to the comment I was replying to. Revenue is indeed an indicator of a successful business.

Additionally, the Anthropic S-1 does indeed show scalable profitable growth. This is perhaps the most shocking thing in the S-1, to me.

A single downward point for one quarter is not a "trend."

If you are trying to indicate that revenue is somehow not a key indicator of a successful business, or that somehow revenue growth is not the primary indicator used to derive Anthropic's eye-popping valuation for IPO, then I think you have lost the plot.

That's not the takeaway of this analyst or anyone I have heard.

This is specifically about the end of tokenmaxxing and how much worse the growth rate would look after the Q3 numbers came out.

(I do think moats are shallow, and I personally switch away from Anthropic every few months for a while, but I've been coming back. All software moats have been made more shallow now, affecting the entire investment landscape.)

I think the key thing is to make the tax payment a fraction of the donor's excessive wealth, rather than a multiple of the payment.

Musk dumping $360M into a political race is trivial to him. Making it cost three times as much to make the donation isn't a huge factor.

Making contributions have an impact on the donors total wealth will democratize these massive campaign spends.

Establishing a wealth tax based on the rolling 10 prior years worth of PAC donations would feel somewhat fitting. A basis point per $50k or something.

Yes, we need a vastly larger supreme court, probably with a reorganization such that there are smaller panels that hear cases, etc, like happens with other courts.

The current court is completely partisan and has zero judicial theory other than backing partisan power and oligarch power. They have the final say on how to interpret the constitution but reject the founding principles of the USA.

Well when talking about induction, ovens aren't super relevant.

But overall, here's average US consumption:

    Heating                  12000 kWh/yr (1400 watts)
    Hot water                 3000 kWh/yr  (340 watts)
    Cooling and refrigeration 1200 kWh/yr  (140 watts)
    Lighting                  1200 kWh/yr  (140 watts)
    Washing and drying        1000 kWh/yr  (110 watts)
    Cooking                   1000 kWh/yr  (110 watts)
    Miscellaneous electric     600 kWh/yr   (70 watts)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_energy_consumption

When I had searched previously, I recall only 20% of a gas stove's energy going to the pan, but now I'm finding <40% of a gas stove's energy goes to the pan, leaving 60% wasted.

In any case the amount of energy used for cooking is dwarfed by other energy use in the home, a rounding error. The real reason to prefer induction is that it's more powerful and easier to control, in addition to being far easier to clean and also keeping the air far safer to breather.

If you have a $35 demand charge for an induction stove, the political problem is that people have already voted themselves into very expensive energy.

The energy transition to clean energy is to a cheaper energy future.

Fossil fuels are not only more expensive, they cause tons of health problems from their pollution, in addition to climate change.

I'm not so sure I agree. A big turning point in my thinking was reading a mid 1980s Forbes piece that investigated several other factors that stopped more US nuclear builds. Perhaps most of all was lack of need, there were too many starts resulting in a glut of nuclear power. Second, construction projects were frequently over budget, meaning the power wasn't as cheap as everybody anticipated. Third, yes, there were mid-construction design changes but that was only on a fraction of projects that were already way behind.

Look over at France, frequently touted as a "successful" buildout. But reactors got more expensive the more they built, not cheaper, and they never met their initial goals for number of builds.

And look at the one place with modern-day "successful" builds: China. They like to tout the reactors as great successes, and they are on time and on budget, or at least as on budget as we can tell in an economic system like that. But they missed their 2020 and 2025 five year plan goals for deployment, and will miss their 2030 goal too. Meanwhile, they deploy 20x-30x as much wind and solar each year, each tech. That's after adjusting for capacity factor! So the best nuclear builders in the world are only building enough of it to be low single digits of their energy mix.

Nuclear was always oversold as a technology, always underdelivered, and has not seen a positive learning curve that a normal technology would. It was doomed from the start, IMHO.

There is a very very strong pro-nuclear contingent on HN and in tech in general, and most of the tech pro-nuclear support comes from viewing nuclear as environmentally positive compared to alternatives, so I'm not surprised at all to see this. It hits all the right "this is good" receptors, even if UK Greens are a tiny party. (I personally view nuclear as completely infeasible, economically, while also being environmentally friendly, so I've had few allies on any grounds when it comes to public debate on nuclear.)

Gotta make sure those pensioners are raking in more money per year than the people actually in their prime working years take home...

The M6 version is also cheaper than the M5 Max by a significant amount. I wouldn't be surprised if the M6 could keep up on LLM prefill (compute bound), but the memory bandwidth means that decode is going to be a lot slower, most likely?

Small improvements don't get much accolades. And for the most part, the UX is so good that most changes tend to be neutral or for the worse. And when you're really attached to something and there's on an unnecessary change, it feels almost like betrayal!

I, for one, prefer Apple products because they sweat the small stuff more than the other options, and when they have put in effort to make things worse it's kind of infuriating.

I do a bit of desktop Linux work too, and it's OK, but hard to complain when it's all open source volunteer work! Windows is so terrible that I wouldn't even know where to start. What's the point? There's nobody at Microsoft that even gives a damn.

I wonder if this is from not trying to get maximum performance, and instead focusing on efficiency? But I've noticed this too. I definitely prefer the Air form factor over larger models as the primary benefit, but the durability seems to be a big benefit too. Fewer ports, thinner shell that seals tighter and can't flex as much due to the curved metal instead of flat surfaces... everything about it just seems like a better design.

I'm loving my M1 Macbook Air still, and only a few weeks away from six years of use Sometimes it lags a bit when I'm running a macOS VM, and all the coding agent VMs, so I'm kind of interested in going to 32GB of RAM, but honestly this computer is still faster than any of my laptops that came before, even with the visual atrocity of Liquid Glass.

I'll go and look at this new box, drool a little, and realize that I'd get more personal utility from donating $3k (or whatever the trade in delta is) to a charity than upgrading my computer.

I complain at Claude all the time, but do not submit feedback becuase of this exact reason, and because I knew it I assumed everyone knew it...

Won't be long, battery installation is bigger by GW than wing or gas:

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67205

But for the most part it will trail solar, because the first chunk of the solar doesn't really need storage. But once there's a healthy percentage of solar, all new solar will have storage or it won't get paid.

It's a subthread where commentary about the IPO was assumed to be a joke.

I'm really baffled that you think that Anthropic has been promising the creation of life! Even if it's not meant to have anything to do with this subthread or post.

OK, let's say that they actually are marketing themselves as having "Created life" (which is not anything that I have seen anywhere).

How does that "life creation" promise affect anything with the topic of the post, which is the financial valuation of the company?

Does that increase the financial valuation of the company? Expose risks in the S-1 that they haven't properly accounted for?

I don't read many Anthropic blog posts, but usually it's about a model release, interpretability research, or similar, and I haven't seen any of this marketing that you have. That said, they did somehow spend $2B on sales in the last quarter, almost 10x what it was in the prior quarter, and I don't get exposed to advertising anywhere; is this something that's getting played on TV? Billboards? Somewhere else?

A supply shortage reveals the inherent value.

A supply abundance reveals the inherent cost.

Their distribution channels are concentrated, at 47% of revenue going through AWS or GCP.

But the top two customers are 12%, which is less customer concentration than I would have expected

Look there's largely diversified customer base paying them at rates snd growth that justify the valuations.

Unless "cosmic DC8" (whatever that is) has S1 with data thus string, what possible comparison could there be?

These financials are very very strong. They alleviated many doubts I had about Anthropic's viability (namely I wasn't sure training+experiments could fit in the compute budget and keep them profitable).

We have the numbers right here. Comparisons to Scientology and Elizabeth Holmes are more similar to Scientology than what we see in the S1.

Could you explain what the joke is? It's very good advice, and should be followed. Also consistent with the beliefs that Anthropic's leadership has demonstrated.

They might be very wrong, but they undoubtedly believe what they wrote and what they put in the S1

Yeah the fab shortage is really keeping lifetimes long, far longer than in the past.

I've brought my old GTX 1070 out of retirement for for some molecular dynamics these days because its "free" except for eh electricity and have Ben pleasantly surprised at what it can get done chugging along in the background. I'm considering buying some more, as it's kind of a steal in pricing.

Lately the drones have been flowing the other direction, from Russian factories to Iran.

If he's doing this at an urging of an enemy of the US, Putin, how could that not be treason?

He put American lives in direct risk in Kyiv, at the bidding of a foreign enemy, while having control of massive amount of crucial infrastructure.

I'm not sure how you can see that as anything except treason. Any plebe employee doing it would be up for treason, especially an employee that had been in direct contact with Putin or other foreign agents, like Musk has been.