It's telling that one of the leaders in ai, Google, also can't seem to ship an assistant that is better than Siri. Maybe it's not the ai that's the problem.
The problem is that stocks are often valued and traded on revenue growth, not profit[0] So circular funding generates stock price bumps when, as you said, there's no inherent value underneath. Creates a recipe for a crash.
[0] consider pagerduty, incredibly profitable with little revenue growth. Trading at 1.5X revenue, where high revenue growth, unprofitable companies are trading at 10X revenue.
I feel like it's almost more of a Popular stock thing. Consider if pagerduty eked out an empty deal with any one of the "Pop stocks" that had little impact on their real profitability. Would stock trade differently or better? It feels like it really would in the modern market. Like even if the numbers weren't a big change, the buzz would be.
Why? Wash trading is about selling and then requiring the same asset for tax purposes. How is this analogous, other than that you presumably dislike both practices?
In crypto, wash trading usually refers to the practice of exchanges or project creators colluding to trade the same asset back and forth in order to make the volume/liquidity/popularity look greater than it is.
- "Our coin hit $100M daily volume, get on this rocketship before it's too late!"
- "Our exchange does $1B annually, so you know we're trustworthy!"
- "Hey investors, look at the massive demand for our GPUs (driven by the company we invested $100B)!"
Nvidia is buying customers that will likely have increasing need for Nvidia. Those investment dollars will be spent on Nvidia. Future dollars will be spent on Nvidia.
Second order effects are that everyone serviced by AI today will need even more AI tomorrow. Nvidia is there for that. They're increasing AI proliferation.
By increasing the number of engineers, dollars, watts spent on GPU, Nvidia grows its market.
The added benefit here is that Nvidia gets to share in the upside if any of these companies succeed in their goals.
It's as if Microsoft had Azure back before the doctom boom and took investments in Google, Amazon, and Facebook in exchange for hosting them. (And maybe a few misfires, like WebVan.)
Both are taken into account. Potential profitability is taken into account with growth companies. Circular funding has no effect on that. With unprofitable companies case is made on how risky the company is and what the potential profit will be in the future.
I would disagree, at least in the short term. Exhibit A: AMD's stock rose 36% at the announcement of their OpenAI circular deal. If 1+1 = 3 and there is potential profit to be gleaned from such a deal, then it isn't circular, and is just plain good business. But the fact that AMD's stock collapsed back to where it was shortly after suggests otherwise
This isn't to do with this being circular. It is moreso that AMD is thought to be falling behind in AI race, but OpenAI doing a deal with them is a strong indicator that they might have potential to come back.
The deal allows OpenAI to purchase up to 6GW of AMD GPUs, while AMD grants OpenAI warrants for up to 10% equity tied to performance milestones, creating a closed-loop of compute, equity, and potential self-funding hardware purchases. Circular.
From the announcement per se, AMD's stock rose to a level that effectively canceled out whatever liabilities they were committing to as part of the deal, so it was all gravy, despite it being a press release
Why is that generous? This is clearly showing OpenAI's belief in AMD, which in turn would give investors a large amount of confidence. A lot of that market cap came from Nvidia, which lost around 50B that day while AMD gained 70B in market cap. It all makes sense to me.
Where do you see the 70B being erased? But in any case it is also plausible that a confidence changes given new stream of constant information, so I don't see how it would be problematic if it did lose given new information.
That first os screenshot made my heart sink; a reminder of how far we've fallen.
How I wish our operating systems still looked like this. Utilitarian, useful. No rounded corners and bubbly icons, reducing the useful space more and more each year.
The incredible quality of Mac hardware is the only thing keeping me from jumping to a thinkpad / omarchy setup.
I'm no fan of modern macOS, but I don't think that screenshot is great. There's too many lines everywhere and too little color, making it unclear where to focus your eye.
(What I am a fan of is Leopard-era Aqua, which is reasonably information dense but uses depth and color to help focus your attention.)
Rounded corners are a utilitarian feature. Human vision is based on edge detection and corners unnaturally activate it more than necessary. It's basically like being continually poked in the eye.
The link tells the story how Bill Atkinson sped up drawing primitives on early Apple devices.
It does not support the claim that corners are in any way special for human vision. I’m very skeptical on that. AFAIK motion is most easily perceptible.
Ah well, the evidence for my claim is that I just told you. This particular claim is not a Steve Jobs story, but he would agree I think.
I did tell a true and previously unreported Steve Jobs story on reddit the other day and was voted to -10 and someone told me I was off my meds. In conclusion, Steve Jobs is a land of contrasts.
> AFAIK motion is most easily perceptible.
That's how it works for predators, but you can see things that are still if you're focusing on them. It's important to see corners in real life because they actually can poke you. Like a paper cut.
Count the pixels! Percentagewise, the window decorations and menu bar in that screenshot take up a lot more space than the modern equivalent does at 5K. If you're comparing it to to the current 14" Macbook Pro, it's closer, but Macbook Pro still wins - and still continues to hold its own even if the classic Mac is producing a 1280x1024 display. And this even though the Macbook Pro is the space-constraised pocket version! (Also note: you haven't even investigated the scaled display options yet)
Disclaimer: I have a desktop Mac, and I'm assuming the pixel counts are the same for the laptops.
(The window corners weren't always round, but there was a bit of rounding to the screen corners there from day 1: https://infinitemac.org/ - this really struck me when I first saw it, coming from the Atari ST.)
I've been on a 13" MBA for years as my daily, and I'm convinced that the usable screen real estate in macOS 26 is a significant downgrade. The window bezels feel like they're 1cm thick, as if they're meant to be finger-accurate rather than mouse-accurate. Probably telegraphing what's to come
Predicting the stock market will likely never happen because it’s recursive. We can predict the next 10 days of weather, but the weather doesn’t change because it read your forecast. As long as markets continue to react to their own reactions, they will remain unpredictable.
If the strategy is long, there might be alpha to be found. But day trading? No way.
If stocks are more of a closed system that are weakly affected by external factors in the short term, now I finally understand why they hire so many physicists for financial modeling!
There is of course the fact that physicists tend to be the best applied mathematicians, even if they don’t end up using any of their physics knowledge. And they generally had the reputation of “the smartest” people for the last century.
Anyway, such systems are complex and chaotic yes, but there are many ways of predicting aspects of them, like with fluid simulation to give a basic example. And I don’t get your point about weather, it is also recursive in the same way and reacting to its own reactions. Sure it is not reacting to predictions of itself, but that’s just a special kind of reaction, and patterns in others predictions can definitely be predicted accurately, perhaps not individually but in the aggregate.
I have no info on Tesla batteries. But, just as a point of reference, you can now buy knock-down 48V battery "kits" from China for under $90/kWh. They include everything you need: case, cells, BMS, circuit breaker/isolator, and fire suppression. Assembly takes about an hour. (The raw prismatic cells without the rest go for ~$50/kWh).
Shipping from China to the west coast runs an additional $30/kWh due to the weight of the cells and volume of the box (shipped in several boxes to reduce cost). So you can have a 300 lbs, 15 kWh 48V battery shipped to your door for about $120/kWh).
High voltage EV batteries need additional components (like HV contractors) due to stacking so many cells in series, but it seems entirely plausible that Tesla's economies of scale allow them to offer a 75 kWh battery for $10k (~$133/kWh) plus installation.
This is like comparing a Casio to a Rolex. Both do roughly the same thing, but the markets are completely different. Nobody buys a high-end luxury car like a Taycan because it makes financial sense. The manufacturers know this and price everything accordingly.
That is such a terrible example. Why are you comparing Teslas to cars where the battery pack costs more than the Tesla, instead of the myriad of competitively priced models?
There are currently 17 total carreras for sale with over 100k miles, none of them are less than 8 years old. The average taycan buyer isn’t going to own the car long enough to exceed the warranty.
The head of the product disagrees with you. No offense but I think he has a slightly better idea of their target buyer than you.
>AW: How much was Tesla on Porsche’s mind when the Taycan was produced? It seems like you’re going right after Model S with this car.
>SW: The first target for ourselves was to make sure that the Taycan becomes a Porsche. We needed to make it as close to the 911, our icon, as possible. Obviously, we had a look at the competition, we had a look at BMW, Mercedes, Tesla.
They mean this as a status symbol, not as the competing vehicle? Taycan is a four door car. A daily driver. Not a two-door sports car. It would compete with Panamera, not 911. Equating the two is wrong in the context of mileage driven. See other comments for that.
It's like the S60, VW W12, old V12 Continentals, etc. If it's expensive to maintain no one wants to buy it off you so you get hit with massive depreciation costs. You can get a 20y/o 'no issues' 500+hp V12 Continental for 10k where I'm at. They've had a brutal cost/year and cost/mile.
I've driven a 2003 Volvo S60 (plain 5 cylinder, no turbo), which matches your 20 years - and most diy repairs were quite straightforward. I suppose you're talking about some Mercedes or other brand I'm less familiar with?
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