> The federal government responded to the 2008 crisis by limiting the ability of traditional banks to take on big, risky loans. Since then, however, private-equity firms, which aren’t subject to the same regulatory scrutiny as banks, have gotten more heavily into the lending business. As of early this year, these firms had lent about $450 billion in so-called private credit to the tech sector, including financing several of the deals discussed above. And, according to one estimate, they will lend it another $800 billion over the next two years. “If the AI bubble goes bust, they are the ones that will be left holding the bag,” Arun told me.
> A private-credit bust is almost certainly preferable to a banking bust. Unlike banks, private-equity firms don’t have ordinary depositors. In theory, if their loans fail, the groups that will be hurt the most are institutional investors, such as pension funds, university endowments, and hedge funds, limiting the damage to the broader economy. The problem is that nobody knows for certain that this is the case. Private credit is functionally a black box. Unlike banks, these entities don’t have to disclose who they are getting their money from, how much they’re lending, how much capital they’re holding, and how their loans are performing. This makes it impossible for regulators to know what risks exist in the system or how tied they are to the real economy.
> Evidence is growing that the links between private credit and the rest of the financial system are stronger than once believed. Careful studies from the Federal Reserve estimate that up to a quarter of bank loans to nonbank financial institutions are now made to private-credit firms (up from just 1 percent in 2013) and that major life-insurance companies have nearly $1 trillion tied up in private credit. These connections raise the prospect that a big AI crash could lead to a wave of private-credit failures, which could in turn bring down major banks and insurers, Natasha Sarin, a Yale Law School professor who specializes in financial regulation, told me. “Unfortunately, it usually isn’t until after a crisis that we realize just how interconnected the different parts of the financial system were all along,” she said.
A lot of people lost money when YHOO tanked in 2000, but the money they lost generally hadn't been lent to them by a bank, which is why 2000 was a tech crash and not a finance crash. I generally think of private equity as a rich guy gambling with a wealthy guy's money, but to the extent that the last ten years of growth have made private equity seem safe enough for banks and pensions to invest in, a correction caused by AI companies failing seems a lot scarier.
The systemically important banks are better capitalized than ever before so even if the AI industry crashes I expect the banks to survive. But life and property insurers are more like financial dark matter. They've been buying a lot of bonds where the ratings understate the true default risk. My guess is that some of them will get hit hard.
I second these points. Risk has moved private equity post 2008.
Here's my question: what in the hell do C-board people including CFOs do besides a sales hussle? I guess it's shareholder money not their personal butt on the line.
People love to invest in Berkshire Hathaway stock and we know why: they don't do stupid.
I feel like we've always been living on borrowed time, due to the historical accident of the internet being built by academics and public institution employees. If internet protocols had been built by for-profits, HTTP requests would include credit card # as a mandatory header.
People were talking about micropayments for content in the early '90s. The first digital currency proposals were made with exactly this use case in mind. Ironically, the protocol that finally stuck the landing is terrible at handling this exact situation.
I'm convinced btc was created by the US gov specifically as a honeypot to determine if anyone had developed a functional implementation of shor's algo, and have propped the price up to keep the target lucrative.
The #1 thing I want from Firefox is for it to keep existing in the long term, as a hedge against Google's monopoly. Burning capital on hardware-intensive AI features to get FF from 1% market share to 2% market share would endanger that, no matter how useful the features might be.
Firefox development is funded almost entirely out of Google's massive donations to Mozilla. For Google, it's no more than a regulatory hedge - something they can point at and say that Chromium and Webkit are not a duopoly. But the flip side is that if Firefox were to ever become a real threat, Google pulls funding and Firefox is toast.
So if we want Firefox to ever seriously compete with Google products, the first thing we need to do is fund Mozilla. When a company's entire capex comes from a monopolistic competitor that would rather see it dead, any talk about capex is bikeshedding.
People like getting more money, but they don't die without it. You can get a job that pays just enough to pay your bills and work at it until you die. Companies can't do that under capitalism. They take on debt and require growth to pay back their investors, or they don't take on debt and get undercut by a competitor who does.
The u-turn came long before that acronym existed, as I remember it. The Dems had been trying to build consensus for some kind of single payer plan for almost twenty years by that point, and practically the first thing Obama said after being elected was that as a show of good faith he would take single payer was off the table.
Maybe today the ACA is thought of as progressive, especially in the sense that the right wants it to end and the left doesn't; but in its time I think it was rightly understood as the Democrats caving to a massive transfer from the public to the private sector. I recall the private insurers' stock prices all going up 10-20% that week.
The issue isn't people going too fast, it's people turning left. 26 basically connects Portland on one end and Mt Hood recreation stuff on the other, and it used to be that there wasn't that much in between. Over the last few decades, a lot of development has gone up, meaning a lot more businesses and neighborhoods along both sides of 26, plus the highway has gotten a lot busier.
* I use Bluesky to chat as a Twitter replacement, which gets me into the Fediverse and gets me a PDS
* I use my PDS to store my payment details, giving me a (at first client-side) way to submit stored payment details that feels similar to storing it in the browser, but stores it in my "server"
* From there, it's a natural step to giving the retailer a token that can be used to pull payment details from my PDS; early adopter retailers are incentivized to do this because it frees them from the burden of storing and updating PII/PCI
* After some subset of users and retailers do this, users see the benefit of controlling their data as a viable alternative to some of the worst user-hostile patterns, e.g. the New York Times' "we don't have a cancel subscription page, you have to call an 800 number" nonsense.
* To the extent that storing PCI/PII in a PDS is as easy as storing it in the browser but with perceived additional benefits, user demand drives wider adoption
* Once it's technically feasible for sites to maintain their business model without storing any PII/PCI, it is much more realistic to write laws that proscribe it effectively for those users who choose that
FWIW, I've been able to cancel my NYT subscription with only a web form since I first subscribed in 2020. It works, and I use it every year. Some years there were several weeks before I got the discounted price again.
I wonder how many years need to pass after a company removes a user-hostile pattern before it should stop being lambasted for it. I don't know how long they did what you say, but I could see that 5 years might not yet be enough.
> I wonder how many years need to pass after a company removes a user-hostile pattern before it should stop being lambasted for it.
Why would there be a statute of limitations on this. A company doesn’t have an inherent right to customers. A lot of us gave up on Windows with XP (a second strike, after ME). Maybe it’s better now, maybe not, but why would I be motivated to give a company who screwed up already (due to making choices I hate, not just incompetence) another chance? NYT absolutely permanently lost customers by placing revenue above civility; which of us benefits from hoping people forget that?
Last week I wanted to quiz myself on German vocab words, and after searching in vain for a simple "flashcard" site without subscriptions or bullshit I ended up just making one myself. Very barebones, a single index.htm file with a little css and js in the header. Threw it on to a silly novelty domain I own ( ineptech.com/flash ) and bang, a useful (to me) webapp from zero to done in maybe two hours. And I'm a terrible programmer! It does feel sort of powerful in the way this site describes.
Still, I can't see buying a domain for it and putting it on this guy's webring, because while it's possible someone somewhere might find it useful, i don't think it's possible that person would be able to find it. They'd see the same 30 links to adware crap I saw and build their own like I did. In fact I'm probably the hundredth person to build this exact site for themselves. That part doesn't feel so powerful.
Sorry to have missed this, been traveling (naturally). You can see it yourself if you like, ineptech.com/flash. It is absolutely the bare minimum, but it worked fine for me.
Another FF feature I love that I believe Chrome lacks: text replacement in bookmarks. Add a bookmark with url "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search/%s" and keyword "wp" and typing "wp Potato" in the url bar will take you to the wikipedia entry on Potato.
I switched to FF a few years back I really do like it better, but honestly even if it crashed every hour on the hour I'd still use it over chrome for uBO alone.
This has nothing to do with search engines, it substitutes the argument from the search bar into the destination url. "wp XYZ" -> "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XYZ"
It has everything to do the browser feature known as "custom search engines", which is a URL replacement capability that was never limited to actual search engines.
As interactive fiction this is very well executed. I'm some part of the way through the story from one character's perspective so I don't know how far it goes, but is this a (for lack of a better word) novelization of the entire plot of the movie? And did you make it?
Late to finding out about the HN mention, but I made this! And yes, it's an adaptation of the entire movie, but with the twist of making every character the 'main' character.
There's a text-based adventure in the movie that the characters play briefly, so this riffs on that. Happy to answer any questions.
Does the game "spoil" the movie? Like, is the movie's entire plot included or is it more of a prologue? And were you involved with the movie?
It's a neat idea with beautiful execution and I hope it gets more attention in other places than it got here. I'm not even sure what genre it is. It's not a game in the sense of requiring the player to solve anything, more of a novel in which the reader chooses a perspective and shapes the narrative but (AFAICT) cannot really direct the plot. Was the author of the game's text the same writer as the movie's plot and dialogue?
edit to add, also, was this built with an existing interactive fiction engine or was the site custom coded?
The entire plot of the movie is included. You could play through entire story, but in practice that would take a very long time, even with digressions -- and even then, it would be the story just through a specific character's perspective.
The idea was to make something that stood alongside the movie as a companion piece, an alternative way of experiencing it, rather than just a promotional thing. It's been fun seeing players playing for 4+ hours and barely getting through the first half, when the movie itself is 90 minutes and change.
I may try to post a Show HN later this week with more details, since the technical details are kind of fun. It's fully custom-coded and uses some LLMs under the hood (more as a 'game master' than in a creative capacity). I worked with the writer/director of the film to translate the script to a more interactive-friendly format, but he basically did the interactive adaptation himself.
I worked on the movie as a technical consultant and they credited me as 'unix wrangler' (I can check having an imdb page off my bucket list I guess)...
Easter eggs if anyone finds this and reads this far: try typing 'chloe' or 'camus' in the character selection screen.
Very interesting, I hope you do. Anything new and weird is always fun to learn about the design, and I'm curious just how much of the text is LLM how much is hand-written. (Fair warning people will assume the worst if you are not explicit about that) The continuity is very good but I had assumed there must be some LLM involvement just due to the time it takes to load each page. Actually, now that I think of it, even if all/most of the text were from an LLM, I'm surprised it wouldn't be generated beforehand and loaded as static text. So what is being done when the spinner spins?
I also really enjoyed the Popov "biography", I'm a sucker for that kind of is-it-true-or-is-it-performance-art stuff online. Reminds me of the Velocity Gnome saga[0].
I'm not sure why your comments were being flagged but hopefully the HN algorithm knows you're not spam at this point.
It isn't as obvious as it maybe should be, but in classic text-based adventure fashion you can also type your own 'actions' (in addition to the four default choices). We use LLMs to basically manage incorporating any player actions without letting them derail the story (too much).
There's also some caching involved which resets every 24 hours, so you will have a slightly different experience each time you play through (even if you choose the same character).
I also love the whole early 2000s ARG stuff I think it was a big part of the inspiration for the movie.
> The federal government responded to the 2008 crisis by limiting the ability of traditional banks to take on big, risky loans. Since then, however, private-equity firms, which aren’t subject to the same regulatory scrutiny as banks, have gotten more heavily into the lending business. As of early this year, these firms had lent about $450 billion in so-called private credit to the tech sector, including financing several of the deals discussed above. And, according to one estimate, they will lend it another $800 billion over the next two years. “If the AI bubble goes bust, they are the ones that will be left holding the bag,” Arun told me.
> A private-credit bust is almost certainly preferable to a banking bust. Unlike banks, private-equity firms don’t have ordinary depositors. In theory, if their loans fail, the groups that will be hurt the most are institutional investors, such as pension funds, university endowments, and hedge funds, limiting the damage to the broader economy. The problem is that nobody knows for certain that this is the case. Private credit is functionally a black box. Unlike banks, these entities don’t have to disclose who they are getting their money from, how much they’re lending, how much capital they’re holding, and how their loans are performing. This makes it impossible for regulators to know what risks exist in the system or how tied they are to the real economy.
> Evidence is growing that the links between private credit and the rest of the financial system are stronger than once believed. Careful studies from the Federal Reserve estimate that up to a quarter of bank loans to nonbank financial institutions are now made to private-credit firms (up from just 1 percent in 2013) and that major life-insurance companies have nearly $1 trillion tied up in private credit. These connections raise the prospect that a big AI crash could lead to a wave of private-credit failures, which could in turn bring down major banks and insurers, Natasha Sarin, a Yale Law School professor who specializes in financial regulation, told me. “Unfortunately, it usually isn’t until after a crisis that we realize just how interconnected the different parts of the financial system were all along,” she said.
A lot of people lost money when YHOO tanked in 2000, but the money they lost generally hadn't been lent to them by a bank, which is why 2000 was a tech crash and not a finance crash. I generally think of private equity as a rich guy gambling with a wealthy guy's money, but to the extent that the last ten years of growth have made private equity seem safe enough for banks and pensions to invest in, a correction caused by AI companies failing seems a lot scarier.
reply