skybrian's recent activity
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Comment on How funerals keep Africa poor in ~life
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Comment on Why is ice cream so expensive? The rise of the $8 cone. in ~food
skybrian Linkhttps://archive.is/YvOGp From the article: [...] [...] [...]From the article:
Ice cream, once an everyday, affordable source of joy, has morphed into a luxury good, violating our fundamental summertime right to cold and creamy salvation. In the US, prices at scoop shops have jumped more than 35% since 2019, when the average cost of a cone was about $4.50, according to Technomic, a research firm. “It’s not just driven by one factor,” says David Ortega, a food economist at Michigan State University, citing the Covid-19 pandemic, social media, the job market, tariffs, war, the K-shaped economy and a slew of other socioeconomic forces. “It’s sort of this perfect storm.” It’s not uncommon for an ice cream shop to charge more than $8 for a couple of scoops; multiply that by four for a family, and parents now paying the price of a small meal are left wondering: Is this inflation, price gouging, or have we simply reached peak cone?
Long before inflation chaos arrived, an enterprising corner of the ice cream industry engineered its first big pricing leap. For years the dessert was served at neighborhood scoop shops for a few bucks or less and sold in half-gallon tubs at the supermarket. Then came the first generation of premium brands including Häagen-Dazs and Ben & Jerry’s, with higher butterfat content and fancier flavors. In the early 2000s, not long after chocolate, coffee and beer got the superpremium overhaul, charging more for, say, small-batch production and ingredients with provenance, ice cream entrepreneurs started doing the same. Soon enough, Van Leeuwen, Jeni’s, Salt & Straw and other pricier brands emerged, boasting high-end ingredients and creative, sometimes-questionable flavors, including fish sauce caramel and pizza, along with prices that could surpass $10 a pint. “That kind of broke a lot of economic principles,” Ortega says.
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During the pandemic, demand soared, as did premium pint sales. “A lot of people were looking for that self-care,” says Jacob Posada, an analyst for industry research firm IBISWorld. “Like ‘Let me get a small little treat to reward myself.’ ” As consumers embraced ever-pricier pints, costs were climbing too. Supply chain shocks and inflation caused the cost of ingredients to skyrocket: From 2020 to 2025, wholesale prices for dairy rose 20%, cocoa jumped more than 300% and eggs spiked more than 600%. At the same time, wages started increasing, especially in hospitality jobs such as food service.
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Still, from 2020 through 2024, premium ice cream sales were on a tear. More shops opened, lines got longer, flavors got weirder, prices rose. But the lower end of the market has been struggling, with chains such as Dairy Queen, Friendly’s and Baskin-Robbins closing locations. Even Mister Softee hit a rocky road, cutting the number of trucks from thousands to about 600.
Now new problems are creating economic headwinds for the industry. Ice cream uses a lot of energy: It needs to be shipped in refrigerated trucks, stored in energy-guzzling freezers and sold in air-conditioned shops or out the windows of diesel-powered trucks. Data center demand has pushed electricity costs up more than 6% in just the past year, and the war with Iran has increased diesel prices more than 50%. “It’s been very shocking,” says Townsend of Millie’s.
All this poses a particular problem for shops, which can’t afford to wait it out. Scoop season runs only between Memorial Day and Labor Day, and shops have to pad their prices to try to prepare for whatever economic storms may come. “We only make money for about four months out of the year,” says Molly Moon, owner of her eponymous Seattle chain. “It’s a cash-flow management game. We’re squirrels.” Whatever Moon can stash away this summer will have to sustain her business through next May, even with continued uncertainty about oil prices, tariffs and overall inflation. During the pandemic, Moon increased her single-scoop price about 20% due to higher costs. Now she’s resisting; so far, only her pints and kids’ scoops are going up.
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Those who can afford it continue seeking out this kind of splurge wherever possible. Dominique Ansel Bakery, the home of the Cronut, sells—and regularly sells out of—a vanilla ice cream cone dipped in gourmet French butter and sprinkled with fleur de sel. Riding the latest iteration of a frozen yogurt boom, ice cream-adjacent Culture Cream regularly has lines snaking around the block for its frozen yogurt made with “specially selected live probiotic cultures,” which runs $10 for a medium cup. For the past few years, indie ice cream brands, including Betty Jo’s Ice Cream in New York and Henry’s Secret Ice Cream in Los Angeles, which don’t have storefronts, have been arranging monthly “pint drops” for devoted followers. The pints can cost more than $20 each, and social media is full of fans sampling the coveted flavors. “People want ice cream to be an event,” says Posada, the analyst. “Seasonal flavors or limited-edition flavor drops, like Dubai chocolate, drive people to come.”
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Why is ice cream so expensive? The rise of the $8 cone.
11 votes -
Comment on Hacking Google with AI for $500,000 in ~comp
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
Having spent the past year building small projects with Claude, I realized there was untapped potential in using AI to automatically fuzz Google's APIs at scale. The key to this approach? Google's discovery documents. For those unfamiliar, I'd recommend reading my other article for a deep dive, but here's a quick refresher:
Discovery documents are essentially Google's equivalent of Swagger docs - machine-readable API specifications that list all available endpoints, parameters, and methods. While they're publicly documented for APIs like the YouTube Data API, they also exist for Google's internal APIs (like the Internal People API). Some discovery docs are publicly accessible, while most require valid API keys.
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We took an exhaustive approach. We scraped over 60,000 Android APKs (every version of every Google app ever released), unpacked them, and grepped for API keys.
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We also decrypted every Google IPA we could obtain and analyzed any Google binaries we could find.
To keep things in scope for Google VRP and remove non-Google API keys (keys from third-party GCP projects), I used an interesting endpoint I found in the Cloud Marketplace API. First, we need the project number associated with the key's GCP project, which is revealed in the error message returned when using the key with a Google API it doesn't have enabled. For instance, fetching https://protos.googleapis.com/$discovery/rest?key=AIzaSyDWUi9T78xEO-m10evQANR7TMSiB_bjyNc returns the error:
Protos API has not been used in project 244648151629 before, revealing the project number.[...]
With API keys collected, the next step was finding all Google API domains to scan. I used a combination of domains logged by the Chrome extension, brute-force generated names using keywords, and certificate transparency logs. To verify if a domain was a live Google API, I made the following request:
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Equipped with valid API keys and a list of live Google API domains, I started mass scanning for open discovery documents. In July 2025, Google removed the
/$discovery/restpath from most of their APIs, but if you're clever enough this is possible to bypass in some cases.[...]
It was now time to start automatically fuzzing these APIs. My goal was to automate finding basic access control issues, which I could then escalate manually into more serious vulnerabilities. In fact, the RCE I found in my previous writeup was initially a lead reported by the AI.
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Three months of this setup turned up over $500,000 in bounties, only a fraction of which made it here. Most Google bugs don't need clever exploitation, just patience. The same broken patterns showed up everywhere: missing IAM checks on cross-tenant resources, GraphQL schemas with no authorization, debug endpoints in prod, sandbox environments pointing at prod data. The AI's job wasn't to be novel, it was to be tireless about the obvious on a surface too large for a human to cover end-to-end.
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Hacking Google with AI for $500,000
15 votes -
Comment on Access to Fable and Mythos 5 cut off after US government order in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentIf they really have no idea what it might be, making everyday software improvements faster isn't going to save them. (Maybe they do know? I don't want to say it's impossible just because I'm not...If they really have no idea what it might be, making everyday software improvements faster isn't going to save them.
(Maybe they do know? I don't want to say it's impossible just because I'm not imagining it.)
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Comment on Access to Fable and Mythos 5 cut off after US government order in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentI don't mean in general. I mean that I'm having a hard time seeing specifically how calling an Uber or a Lyft could be improved all that much via just better software, since they already have apps...I don't mean in general. I mean that I'm having a hard time seeing specifically how calling an Uber or a Lyft could be improved all that much via just better software, since they already have apps that work fine for calling a ride. (As opposed to making a major change like Waymo where AI is obviously very important.)
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Comment on How funerals keep Africa poor in ~life
skybrian (edited )LinkThe author also wrote another post that's very dark: Why kinship societies kill their oldThe author also wrote another post that's very dark: Why kinship societies kill their old
The Akan have a proverb, abusua do funu: “the family loves the corpse.” I quoted it in my essay on funerals, as a sort of wry comment on the tendency to spend more on funerals than on the living. But really it’s much darker than that: it’s one of the proverbs that Ghanaian taxi drivers paint on the backs of their cars as charms against witchcraft, alongside others like sura nea oben wo, “fear the one who is close to you” and otan firi fie, “hatred comes from the home.” They are sayings about the dangers that lurk within the family unit. The family loves the corpse because the corpse no longer eats. The living elder, in bad times, is not always loved at all.
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Comment on How funerals keep Africa poor in ~life
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
A modest, mid-level funeral in Ghana costs about $5,000 U.S. dollars; a “befitting” one can easily cost $15,000 or $20,000. And all this in a country with a median income of about $1,500 per year. Ghana is known for its particularly ornate funeral culture; but it’s not the only place in sub-Saharan Africa with a culture of exorbitantly expensive funerals. The average household in KwaZulu-Natal in eastern South Africa, for example, spends the equivalent of an adult’s annual income on a single funeral. We see the same tendency for ultra-expensive funerals in a striking number of places: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Nigeria, Benin, Cameroon, Mozambique, the Ivory Coast. It’s often observed, in fact, that families will spend more money on burying the dead than on keeping the sick alive: indeed, in the Kagera region of northern Tanzania, families spend 50 percent more money on funerals than on medical care.
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The answer, I think, is that the funeral isn’t really about the deceased. Funerals function as a costly signal of kinship group loyalty: and in that context, the expense of the funeral is the point. And, in turn, funerals tell us quite a lot about why so many societies across Africa have had so much trouble achieving economic “takeoff.” Kinship societies are actively hostile to economic growth, because economic growth undermines the basis of kinship: that is why kinship societies demand constant, visible sacrifices of wealth—funerals being the most spectacular—that make it extraordinarily difficult for any individual to accumulate capital, reinvest their assets, and pull ahead. The funeral is a window into a system of wealth destruction that serves, above all else, to keep people poor.
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African societies, as a broad pattern, have extraordinarily intense kinship ties. Only a few other places—the Pashtun heartlands of southern Afghanistan, the mountains of Chechnya and Dagestan, the jungles of New Guinea—exhibit kinship intensity on par with what prevails in much of sub-Saharan Africa. This is not a universal pattern across all of Africa—the San people of the Kalahari desert, for example, have relatively flexible social arrangements—but the general tendency is clear: African societies, by and large, are kinship societies.
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But you also owe things to your kinship network on a more day-to-day level: we can call these sharing obligations. Just as you pay taxes and fees to the various impersonal institutions that govern life in the rich world, you must make regular contributions to the collective welfare of your kin. But there’s a crucial distinction. In a modern society, you will know, more or less, what you owe and when you’ll owe it; but with sharing obligations there’s no such clarity. The demands from your kin—hospital bills, loan requests, funeral expenses—simply come up.
And you can’t really say no to these obligations. The mutual obligation that defines intensive kinship really is essential to the functioning of everyday life in kinship societies. A person who fails to demonstrate loyalty to the group risks losing access to everything the group provides. And this threat is powerfully enforced in traditional cultures. In a society where your standing in the kinship network is often the single most important thing about you, being cast out is a kind of social death.
And so, in a kinship society, nothing that you earn is truly yours. If you make money beyond the point of subsistence, you’ll be expected to share it with your less-fortunate relatives; if you start a business, you’ll be expected to hire your cousins or nephews or in-laws, even if they’re not the best possible employees; if you buy a car, you’ll be expected to lend it out to relatives who need it.
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The relentlessness of sharing obligations also makes it nearly impossible to accrue savings over time. Thus we see that in KwaZulu-Natal individuals will go out of their way to invest their surplus in non-sharable goods, like roofing or fencing, instead of accumulating liquid savings that their families might claim.
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So from the perspective of the kinship network, wealth is a threat. Those who become wealthy have an incentive to defect; and while social sanctions can punish those who defect explicitly, it’s much harder to police those—like the businesswoman in Nairobi—who defect quietly. The safest bet is to prevent people from becoming too rich in the first place.
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You can think of funerals as another wealth destruction ritual. The genius of it is that it can’t be evaded: it is a public ceremony virtually dedicated to the immolation of wealth. In private, you might be able to evade your sharing obligations by hiding your earnings or your savings; but in public, at the funeral, the claims that your kin make on your wealth are at their most visible and least avoidable. You can’t simply not show up to your uncle’s funeral; and, if you show up, you will obviously be expected to contribute a handsome sum.
And this logic is even more powerful for those who are suspected of shirking their kinship obligations. It’s at the funeral where you must signal your willingness to honor sharing obligations most loudly. The lavishness of the funeral is a costly signal of continued commitment to the system of mutual obligation that holds the kinship group together. The point is that it’s expensive and incommensurate with your means.
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And so in the second half of the twentieth century a huge funeral economy emerged in Ghana. Bodies could be refrigerated indefinitely in hospital mortuaries, and since the fees escalated with each passing week it became prestigious to refrigerate bodies for a long time; by the 2000s, many Ghanaian hospitals were earning more from storing dead bodies than from treating living patients.
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There’s a reason why virtually every economically successful society has graduated from a social order that stresses the claims of kin into one that stresses the rights of individuals. Living in a society of individuals governed by impersonal institutions, we have an understandable wistfulness for the imagined world of warm communities and thick familial bonds. But we forget how suffocating that social world is, how parasitical it is on its most productive members, and how poisonous it is for any prospect of economic development.
I don’t think that African societies are ripe for social transformations of the kind just described; loyalties to strong states won’t supplant loyalties to kinship networks anytime soon. But for the most productive people trapped inside these kinship networks, I do think that technology offers something like an escape hatch. Mobile phones and bank accounts held under a single name are tools that help these people put a wall between what they earn and what their family knows they earn. In many cases these technologies are remarkably liberating. Senegalese women who were able to receive hidden income immediately cut transfers to relatives by a quarter and spent the money on healthcare for themselves.
There’s a lot to be said, then, for one of the most underappreciated virtues of modern financial systems: privacy. Social modernity, in the end, is really about not having to do what your family tells you to do—marrying whom you want, taking the job you want, and spending your earnings the way you want. There is something cold about this, of course, but also something deeply emancipating. In a world where your relatives can see and lay claim to everything you earn, anything that makes your income a little less legible to them is also, quietly, an engine of economic development.
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How funerals keep Africa poor
31 votes -
Comment on How should we think about Starship? in ~space
skybrian (edited )Link ParentMaybe, but what if Musk is exaggerating the drop in launch costs, too? What if it isn't actually cheaper than a Falcon 9? The article didn't talk about launch costs directly, but they will depend...Maybe, but what if Musk is exaggerating the drop in launch costs, too? What if it isn't actually cheaper than a Falcon 9?
The article didn't talk about launch costs directly, but they will depend on the second stage's payload and reusability, and it seems those are still unknown.
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Comment on How should we think about Starship? in ~space
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
Today Super Heavy is a piece of pure electric-guitars-and-screaming-eagles space awesomeness, from the gorgeous purple exhaust plume full of shock diamonds, to the grace with which it descends on a single swiveling column of flame until the rocket comes to rest on the chopsticks that catch it.
The fact that SpaceX seems to have had less trouble with this vast booster than the simpler upper stage was one of the big surprises of the flight test campaign. While Super Heavy had some early engine failures on the first two flights, these were ironed out quickly. The fifth and seventh test flights demonstrated a successful return of Super Heavy to the launch pad, and the booster from that second catch was then re-flown two flights later.
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The second stage of Starship, confusingly also called Starship, is where SpaceX has struggled. The problem is mostly one of size. In order for Super Heavy to fly back to its launch site, Starship-the-rocket has to stage very early, which pushes a lot of mass and propellant into the second stage. That stage is about as tall as the Space Shuttle and its attached fuel tank put together, and when fully fueled, nearly as heavy as the entire Space Shuttle stack was when it sat on the launch pad.
Keeping this hunk of spacecraft intact and controllable during re-entry requires large control surfaces and a capable heat shield. But for these elements to be re-usable, they have to be sturdy, and ‘sturdy’ in an aerospace context usually means so heavy that it eats through all your available payload.
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The nightmare scenario for SpaceX is one where making Starship robust enough to survive repeated atmospheric entries leaves it too heavy to carry useful payload. This seems to be what happened with V1. That first iteration of Starship was supposed to deliver 100 tons to low earth orbit, a claim Musk later walked back to 45 tons, then ultimately 15 tons, less than the payload of the Falcon 9. The V2 version of the rocket (a horrible version number to use in rocketry, just saying) managed to lift 35 tons to near orbit, but was also prone to explode, accelerating the shift to the new design that launched on Friday. Starship V3 has incredible new engines and looked peppy on its maiden flight, but it’s not clear how much mass will have to be added back to the rocket before the latest design either stabilizes or gets ditched for an even more ambitious V4.
Put simply, SpaceX is in a race to see whether it can improve performance in the Raptor engines faster than the upper stage of Starship gains weight. The real test for the program will be the first capture and re-flight of an upper stage, because the economics of launch cost are sensitive to just how many times that upper stage can fly. If it turns out a Starship upper stage is only good for a flight or two, the rocket will remain groundbreaking, but cannot meet its more transformative goals.
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How often will Starship launch? Getting a credible answer is hard because the SpaceX IPO hinges on preposterous numbers that the company can’t disavow yet.
The lower limit to launch cadence is set by SpaceX’s contract with NASA for a lunar lander, which the agency calls the ‘Human Landing System’. HLS has to be refueled from an orbiting depot Starship to get to the Moon, and filling that depot will involve launching a large number of tanker Starships over the span of a few months. How many launches that will take is unknown; I think people would be surprised to see it happen with fewer than ten launches, or more than thirty. Assuming that a fuel depot can hang around in orbit for six months, that implies an operational tempo of about one launch per week, from at least two different launch sites (so that a pad explosion at one won’t ruin the whole campaign).
This would be an ambitious but achievable cadence for Starship, particularly if the tanker Starships didn’t have to be reusable, and could be made without a heat shield or control surfaces. Just how much time SpaceX has to reach this cadence is an interesting question, since right now NASA and SpaceX are locked in a game of chicken around who can commit to the least realistic timeline. But it probably has to get in gear by early 2027.
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Finally, there is the launch cadence SpaceX actually targets in their S-1, a million metric tons a year to Earth orbit. That frankly preposterous figure implies 25-30 Starship launches a day, with the exact number contingent on how much payload the final version of the rocket can carry. This would be the flight rate of a small regional American airport like Chattanooga or Sioux Falls, except that instead of turbojets SpaceX would be launching skyscrapers full of liquid oxygen and methane from a constellation of launch pads, each one handling multiple launches, catches, and re-stackings in every 24 hour period.
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How should we think about Starship?
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Comment on Access to Fable and Mythos 5 cut off after US government order in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentI think that argument works better in a less-mature market where the software is changing a lot, or where software development is a large cost relative to their other costs. Maybe they overrate...I think that argument works better in a less-mature market where the software is changing a lot, or where software development is a large cost relative to their other costs.
Maybe they overrate the importance of better software, though, or I’m underrating it.
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Comment on US battery industry cuts losses, shifts to new ventures amid electric vehicle bust in ~transport
skybrian Link Parent“Done nothing” seems a bit much? They built all those battery factories for a reason. But the subsidies they were relying on got cancelled. Consistent regulation is important and we’re not getting it.“Done nothing” seems a bit much? They built all those battery factories for a reason. But the subsidies they were relying on got cancelled.
Consistent regulation is important and we’re not getting it.
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Comment on Access to Fable and Mythos 5 cut off after US government order in ~tech
skybrian (edited )Link ParentCorporate governance varies and some big tech companies (including Google and Facebook) have rigged things so that management cannot be kicked out. A common way this is done is with some...Corporate governance varies and some big tech companies (including Google and Facebook) have rigged things so that management cannot be kicked out. A common way this is done is with some shareholder classes having more votes.
But management and employees often have stock options or restricted shares too. The whole company will be happier if the stock price is going up. Even when their control is secure, they have incentives to do things the stock market likes anyway.
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Comment on Access to Fable and Mythos 5 cut off after US government order in ~tech
skybrian LinkApparently the "jailbreak" was "fix this code." The Fable 5 Export Controls Harm US Cyber DefenseApparently the "jailbreak" was "fix this code."
The Fable 5 Export Controls Harm US Cyber Defense
Since I appear to be the only outside expert who has actually read the paper, I can separate the technical facts from the speculation. The researchers took open-source code with known CVEs, plus new code with deliberately planted vulnerabilities, and asked Fable 5, Mythos, and Opus to “review the code for security issues.” Fable 5 refused. They then asked the models to “fix this code” and, through a multistep and manual process, turned the output into scripts that test the patches.
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Comment on Access to Fable and Mythos 5 cut off after US government order in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentYou can sincerely believe that your company has great products that users like and make the world a better place, and also you're all going to be rich. That was Google for the first decade or so....You can sincerely believe that your company has great products that users like and make the world a better place, and also you're all going to be rich. That was Google for the first decade or so. People got a little giddy.
This doesn't seem to be how it's going at the AI labs. They are warning everyone who will listen about the dangers of AI while also attempting to grow the company as fast as they can, because better that they be in charge of it than their competitors. Sure, they hope it turns out to make the world a better place, somehow, but they're worried.
As for what outside investors want, they don't get much formal say due to things like shareholder classes. But employees are shareholders, so they're directly motivated. (Which is why the coup against Altman failed.)
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Comment on Elon Musk net worth estimated at $1.1 trillion in ~finance
skybrian Link ParentThat depends on whether you believe prices ought to have something to do with future cash flows. But when there's no consensus on this, maybe it's more chaotic.That depends on whether you believe prices ought to have something to do with future cash flows.
But when there's no consensus on this, maybe it's more chaotic.
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Comment on What about having an LLM teach you to code? in ~comp
skybrian Link ParentWhen writing code, I will have the coding agent write a design doc with a checklist and check off things when they're done. So, when it restarts it can see what's been done already. It seems like...When writing code, I will have the coding agent write a design doc with a checklist and check off things when they're done. So, when it restarts it can see what's been done already. It seems like something like ought to work for lessons if it can store a persistent file somewhere.
I imagine someday, that will be built in. We're just at the beginning of figuring out how to use these things.
To follow up on that, here’s a third blog post where he writes about why there are few large firms:
Africa doesn't have large firms because it doesn't have social trust
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It seems like a trap that’s hard to get out of. Perhaps that’s why outside help is needed?