skybrian's recent activity

  1. Comment on Anthropic aims to nearly triple annualized revenue in 2026, sources say in ~tech

    skybrian
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    From the article: When I last checked at the end of May, they were at about $3 billion. ... ... Also, they just signed a deal with Google to rent up to a million TPU's.

    From the article:

    Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic is projecting to more than double and potentially nearly triple its annualized revenue run rate next year, fueled by the rapid adoption of its enterprise products, according to two people familiar with the matter.

    The company is on track to meet an internal goal of $9 billion in annual revenue run rate - a calculation of annual revenue extrapolated from the current sales pace - by the end of 2025, the people said. For 2026, Anthropic has set even more aggressive targets: a base case of more than doubling to $20 billion in annualized revenue and a best case of as much as $26 billion, the people said, requesting anonymity to discuss private figures.

    Anthropic told Reuters its annual revenue run rate is approaching $7 billion this month, but declined to comment on future projections. The company has said its annual revenue run rate was more than $5 billion in August.

    When I last checked at the end of May, they were at about $3 billion.

    ...

    Fueling the expansion is the uptake of enterprise products, which are built for organizations. Anthropic has more than 300,000 business and enterprise customers, which account for about 80% of its revenue.

    ...

    Also, they just signed a deal with Google to rent up to a million TPU's.

    3 votes

  3. Comment on Talking to the Bank of England about systemic risk and systems engineering in ~finance

    skybrian
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    Looks like Patrick McKenzie got a chance to give a talk to people at the Bank of England. It's very long, but there's some interesting stuff in there on a three different topics. CrowdStrike He...

    Looks like Patrick McKenzie got a chance to give a talk to people at the Bank of England. It's very long, but there's some interesting stuff in there on a three different topics.

    CrowdStrike

    He talked at length about last year's CrowdStrike incident:

    I understand one of the largest financial institutions in the world to have entirely grounded their tellers for the entire day of Friday due to the inability of their tellers to log into their systems because the systems were completely down—Blue Screen of Death. And that meant that all bank functions which were gated on speaking to a teller could not happen.

    The most consequential of those functions on a Friday is large cash withdrawals, particularly by business customers. Many people may not appreciate that businesses still do large cash withdrawals to fund payday. [...] there are particular subsectors of the economy which are still heavily cash-based.

    For example, in my hometown of Chicago, for a variety of reasons, the construction industry tends to be heavily cash-based. [...]

    ...

    The Wall Street Journal reported Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and TD Bank as being heavily impacted by the CrowdStrike Falcon issue. Those account for a large share of all deposits. And in many markets, when those banks need to turn customers away because their tellers are unable to service them, that large portion of the deposit business of all banks in the city immediately falls over to the large regional banks that are in the city and the smaller financial institutions that are in the city. And those banks do not have enough standing capacity to quickly redirect all the [...] withdrawal business of the largest banks in the nation.

    So even if their bank did not personally have CrowdStrike Falcon installed, they had a very similar situation where "our tellers are unable to do withdrawal transactions because we have physically depleted just the amount of physical U.S. specie that we have on the premises, because we have the only money that is available in the city of Chicago or any other city in the United States right now."

    ...

    I collected a series of anecdotes from small financial institutions all across Chicago: "We didn't even understand why it happened, but by 10 a.m., we were out of dollars."

    Now, fortuitously, many of the automated systems for banking continued operation throughout the duration of this. They did not have the endpoint monitoring software installed. They ran on Linux systems, etc. And so the thing that banks were told to do by higher-ups, the thing bank branch staff were told to do, was to redirect customers from the teller transaction which they wanted to do and which would fail to: "If you can use the website right now or use the ATM right now, that will work for you. And so if you were going to pay someone via cash, could you try paying them via Zelle instead, because Zelle is still up?"

    ...

    I want to emphasize this: This was a near miss, and it was a near miss including for you folks in the United Kingdom.

    ...

    This happened on a randomly selected Friday, and that was astoundingly good luck for us. We might experience a technical crisis when the broader economic and business environment weather is not normal.

    Stablecoins

    He goes on to talk about stablecoins (apparently because these are topics they asked for):

    [A report about stablecoins] shows almost 3x growth in volumes from approximately $2 billion a month to approximately $6 billion a month in the last two years.

    This is the first time in 15 years of being a diligent skeptic that I've seen something in the crypto industry and said, "Wow, that almost looks like there's a there there."

    ...

    When you just aggregate the numbers, a large portion of the growth is coming from B2B payments, which went up from a negligible base of under $100 million a month in January of 2023 to over $3 billion a month by early 2025.

    Interestingly, they say that the average stablecoin payment is approximately $200,000, which might inform you as to what these payments are being used for. That's likely to be small firms buying on the order of one shipping container at a time from China. Or, well, the cryptocurrency community will be slightly vaguer as to where the money is going, but without loss of generality, it's going to China.

    ...

    If you are a small trader or a small business and you attempt to wire $200,000 to a new counterparty physically located in China, your bank is going to have all sorts of questions. And that wire might be held up in review for weeks. The factory is unlikely to release a shipment to you while the wire has not actually cleared. And so your shipment might be weeks delayed to the loading dock and weeks delayed off the ship and weeks delayed to your facility and eventually to your customers.

    Stablecoins, on the other hand, transfer in seconds. And there is, in many deployments, essentially nobody who is doing a real-time human check on who you're sending the money to.

    But compared to other payment systems, this isn't all that impressive:

    Here's the monthly payment volumes denominated in U.S. dollars, billions, in mid-2025:

    • The entire stablecoin industry, those 34 firms all wrapped up together: about $6.3 billion a month. Congratulations, that's nice business.
    • PayPay: about $10 billion a month. That's a good business.
    • And then Pix in Brazil does $90 billion a month only on person-to-business transactions—the classic payments use case.

    He also talked why Tether survived:

    The colorful part of the cryptocurrency community will say—and we will not in public agree that there was a hole, but in private, yeah, of course there was a hole, I mean, come on—"If there was a hole, that hole got made up over the years by some combination of coincidentally receiving tens of billions of dollars from FTX under circumstances that we will not elaborate about, and moreover by the interest rate environment moving massively in Tether's favor."

    But they're still shady:

    [...] Tether has filed multiple legal pleadings with their judge attempting to get them to quash the request to produce balance sheets on the basis that we can't produce balance sheets because we had no books.

    Tether was not a tiny financial institution at this time. They were, you know, nominally having tens of billions of dollars of assets under management, and they had no books to do it with.

    ...

    Tether has not gotten rid of the non-crypto assets in their reserves. They've continued to increase the amount. And they've eliminated the disclosure that they used to make that their quote-unquote "secured loans" were not to related parties.

    So the inference, given that Tether is always doing the worst thing that is possible in coherence with their regulatory statements, is that they are making loans to related parties. And of course, they're probably continuing their history of lies, frauds, and evasions on top of that.

    Going back to talking about stablecoins in general:

    Another thing—and I will credit the CEO of Ethena, which has a stablecoin-adjacent financial product, for saying this—is a thing that you can tease out from stablecoin peer-to-peer payments volume: it's heavily correlated with the price of Bitcoin and froth in the crypto market generally.

    That is not something we expect to see in payments. The amount of coffee that you consume is not correlated with the price of Bitcoin. We generally expect the real economy to only have a fairly tenuous relationship with, say, the financial markets and almost no relationship with cryptocurrency, except to the extent that cryptocurrency is shadowing the financial markets.

    So that is another data point that would suggest—and again, highlighted by someone who would bet the other way—that stablecoins are not materially used in peer-to-peer payments at the moment to the degree that has been asserted.

    AI and the Future of Trading

    [W]hen I say I'm skeptical, I think that the impact of AI will be greater than the impact of any technology up to and including the Internet, where I consider the Internet to be the most important artifact that humanity has ever created and our collective great work as a species.

    That's what makes me a skeptic. Because I'm not saying that it will fundamentally transform human life forever within the next three years.

    ...

    The most experienced cool kids in the world have about 12 months of time that they've played with these tools. And increasingly, even in only six weeks of playing with it myself, it has become physically difficult for me to navigate a codebase without having Claude Code help me to digest the code base that I wrote.

    When financial systems are on fire, every minute matters. Knight Capital collapsed over a 20-minute critical window. CrowdStrike was citing about a 90-minute window for their time to resolution.

    If during a crisis it is difficult to find engineers who can remediate the crisis because Claude Code is in a slightly degraded state on any given day, that introduces a source of risk into the financial system which didn't exist two years ago, because we didn't have computers that were so good at assisting engineers two years ago that engineers would forget how to do core parts of the job.

    I don't want to call engineers incompetent or malicious for forgetting how to do this. This is simply like a skill that one develops over the course of a long career. It's something like riding a bicycle—you never forget it per se, but it really matters if you are doing the Tour de France that you have continued riding a bicycle every day for the last 365 days versus "Bicycles? Yeah, I remember having seen one about five years ago. But why would I ever use a bicycle when I have a car available?"

    You should be aware of the fact that we are now acutely dependent on cars and acutely dependent on LLMs, even for things where LLMs are not officially making the decision that matters. And the recursive dependency graph puts larger chunks of the economy on narrower shoulders.

    Again, if there are three labs where one or three of those labs going down will idle engineers at a huge number of firms, then we have far less numerous points of failure than we did previously.

    5 votes

  5. Comment on At least twenty-five US states plan to cut off food aid benefits in November in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: ...

    From the article:

    Twenty-five states told POLITICO that they are issuing notices informing participants of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — the nation’s largest anti-hunger initiative — that they won’t receive checks next month. Those states include California, Arkansas, Hawaii, Indiana, Mississippi and New Jersey. Others didn’t respond to requests for comment in time for publication.

    USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service recently told every state that they’d need to hold off on distributing benefits until further notice, according to multiple state agencies.

    ...

    Under SNAP, which serves more than 42 million people, families receive an average of $187.20 per month to pay for groceries. The pause in benefits would kick in just before the Thanksgiving holiday and add further strain on food banks and pantries during a typically busy season.

    Even if lawmakers clinch a funding deal before the end of October, anti-hunger advocates and states expect a delay between the government reopening and state administrators being able to issue November’s benefits, after weeks of holding up the typical process. For example, Kansas’ Department for Children and Families told POLITICO that it would take at least three days to fully reboot the program.

    8 votes

  7. Comment on Offbeat Fridays – The thread where offbeat headlines become front page news in ~news

    skybrian
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    Wild bear pays surprise visit to bear enclosure at California zoo: ‘He was very polite’

    Wild bear pays surprise visit to bear enclosure at California zoo: ‘He was very polite’

    In a Facebook post, the Sequoia Park Zoo in Eureka in the northern part of the state said its staff were conducting a routine inspection of part of the complex when they spotted a wild American black bear leaning on a gate and looking in at three captive black bears in their enclosure.

    “The wild bear did not appear aggressive and was observed interacting with [the captive bears] through their habitat fencing,” the zoo said.

    “At no point did the wild bear enter any animal habitats and, after a brief exploration of the enrichment items around the night house, the bear was safely coaxed back into the woods through a service gate.”

    5 votes

  8. Comment on Super PAC aims to drown out AI critics in US midterms, with $100M and counting in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Certainly there are lots of different opinions on AI. Predicting the future is difficult and they're all talking about different scenarios, and many of them might be true, depending on what...

    Certainly there are lots of different opinions on AI. Predicting the future is difficult and they're all talking about different scenarios, and many of them might be true, depending on what further technological progress is made. Nobody has a crystal ball that tells them how R&D efforts will play out.

    One interesting paper I happened to see today: some researchers figured out how to train an LLM to multiply large numbers accurately. (Without using tools.) There's lots of interesting research like this every month.

    I like to see reporting on where we are right now, but using that to promote one future scenario over others isn't all that convincing either.

    To be fair to the doomers, they are pretty focused on what artificial intelligence might do someday and they've been warning about this since before LLM's became big. This is a form of disaster awareness. Just because we haven't had a pandemic or been hit by an asteroid this year doesn't mean it's been ruled out for next year.

    If the AI boom fizzles, it might be pretty big news for the economy, but probably not bigger news than the 2008 recession.

    1 vote

  9. Comment on India poised to sharply cut Russian oil imports after sanctions, sources say in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article : … …

    From the article :

    India has emerged as the biggest buyer of discounted seaborne Russian crude in the aftermath of Moscow's 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, importing about 1.7 million barrels per day in the first nine months of this year.

    The U.S. sanctions target Lukoil (LKOH.MM), and Rosneft (ROSN.MM), Russia's two biggest oil producers.

    Privately-owned Reliance Industries (RELI.NS), the top Indian buyer of Russian crude, plans to reduce or cease imports of Russian oil, including halting purchases under its large long-term deal with Rosneft, people familiar with the matter said.

    …

    Indian state refiners including Indian Oil Corp (IOC.NS), Bharat Petroleum Corp (BPCL.NS), and Hindustan Petroleum Corp (HPCL.NS), are also reviewing their Russian oil trade documents to ensure no supply will be coming directly from Rosneft and Lukoil after the U.S. sanctioned the oil companies, a source with direct knowledge of the matter said on Thursday.

    …

    The U.S. Treasury has given companies until November 21 to wind down their transactions with the Russian oil producers, according to a release on the sanctions on Wednesday.

    "It all depends on banks," another Indian refinery official said. "If banks clear payments then we will buy. Otherwise my intake will be zero."

    1 vote

  11. Comment on SpaceX disables 2,500 Starlink terminals allegedly used by Asian scam centers in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: … …

    From the article:

    Starlink is not licensed to operate in Myanmar. While Dreyer didn’t say how the terminals were disabled, it’s known that Starlink can disable individual terminals based on their ID numbers or use geofencing to block areas from receiving signals.

    On Monday, Myanmar state media reported that “Myanmar’s military has shut down a major online scam operation near the border with Thailand, detaining more than 2,000 people and seizing dozens of Starlink satellite Internet terminals,” according to an Associated Press article. The army reportedly raided a cybercrime center known as KK Park as part of operations that began in early September. The operations reportedly targeted 260 unregistered buildings and resulted in seizure of 30 Starlink terminals and detention of 2,198 people.

    …

    Satellite images and drone footage recently showed “frenetic building work in the heavily guarded compounds around Myawaddy on the Thailand-Myanmar border, which appear to be using Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite Internet service on a huge scale,” Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported last week.

    …

    An October 2024 report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime described the use of Starlink in fraud operations. About 80 “Starlink satellite dishes linked to cyber-enabled fraud operations” were seized between April and June 2024 in Myanmar and Thailand, the report said. Starlink is prohibited in both countries.

    “Despite Starlink use being strictly monitored and, in some cases, restricted through geofencing, organized crime groups appear to have found ways around existing security protocols in order to access the remote high-speed Internet connectivity made possible by this portable technology,” the report said.

    In July this year, US Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) urged SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to prevent criminals from using Starlink for scam operations that target Americans.

    7 votes

  14. Comment on Super PAC aims to drown out AI critics in US midterms, with $100M and counting in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    You’re certainly right that creating a sense of urgency is commonly used both by pushy sales people and by scammers. There are horror stories. A good tactic is to always think about it overnight...

    You’re certainly right that creating a sense of urgency is commonly used both by pushy sales people and by scammers. There are horror stories. A good tactic is to always think about it overnight before signing a contract or sending money.

    However, it’s also a fairly universal political tactic used in most public awareness campaigns. Certainly, the AI safety people are also attempting to create a sense of urgency. A recent book is titled If anyone builds it, everyone dies.

    Attempting to create a sense of urgency about fighting climate change is also extremely common (some of us remember Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, almost 20 years ago.)

    It’s a pretty good indication that someone is trying to convince you of something, but doesn’t tell you whether the cause is good. Bad arguments can be made for good causes.

    I do prefer calmer, more evidence-based arguments.

    2 votes

  15. Comment on Salmon clear last Klamath dams, reaching Williamson and Sprague rivers in ~enviro

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: ... ...

    From the article:

    For the first time in more than 100 years, Chinook salmon have been spotted at the confluence of the Sprague and Williamson rivers in Chiloquin, the government seat of the Klamath Tribes in Southern Oregon.

    It’s the latest milestone following the removal of four dams on the Klamath River last year, which was the largest river restoration project in U.S. history.

    ...

    Scientists have been tracking the migration of this year’s run of fall Chinook as they’ve passed all of the old dam sites on the river.

    Last week they reached a huge milestone: A Chinook was photographed entering Upper Klamath Lake. But it was unclear how that fish and the others waiting to scale the fish ladder would fare in the lake, which has been plagued by water quality issues, including toxic cyanobacteria blooms.

    ...

    “We figure that right now, there are possibly more than 100 salmon that have made it — that are above the Link River Dam,” said Ray.

    9 votes

  17. Comment on Mosquitoes have been found in Iceland for the first time as global heating makes the country more hospitable for insects in ~enviro

    skybrian
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    Since they’re not native, it seems like a good place to experiment with new ways of killing them off.

    Since they’re not native, it seems like a good place to experiment with new ways of killing them off.

    18 votes

  18. Comment on Diamond blankets will keep future chips cool in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article:

    From the article:

    But my research group at Stanford University has managed what seemed impossible. We can now grow a form of diamond suitable for spreading heat, directly atop semiconductor devices at low enough temperatures that even the most delicate interconnects inside advanced chips will survive. To be clear, this isn’t the kind of diamond you see in jewelry, which is a large single crystal. Our diamonds are a polycrystalline coating no more than a couple of micrometers thick.

    The potential benefits could be huge. In some of our earliest gallium-nitride radio-frequency transistors, the addition of diamond dropped the device temperature by more than 50 °C. At the lower temperature, the transistors amplified X-band radio signals five times as well as before. We think our diamond will be even more important for advanced CMOS chips. Researchers predict that upcoming chipmaking technologies could make hot spots almost 10 °C hotter [see , “Future Chips Will Be Hotter Than Ever”, in this issue]. That’s probably why our research is drawing intense interest from the chip industry, including Applied Materials, Samsung, and TSMC. If our work continues to succeed as it has, heat will become a far less onerous constraint in CMOS and other electronics too.

    12 votes

  20. Comment on Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of October 20 in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    My Signal exchange with the interim U.S. attorney about the Letitia James grand jury. ... ...

    My Signal exchange with the interim U.S. attorney about the Letitia James grand jury.

    Lindsey Halligan—the top prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia—was texting me. As it turned out, she was texting me about a criminal case she is pursuing against one of the president’s perceived political enemies: New York Attorney General Letitia James.

    So began my two-day text correspondence with the woman President Donald Trump had installed, in no small part, to bring the very prosecution she was now discussing with me by text message.

    ...

    Through the whole of our correspondence, however, there is something Halligan never said: She never said a word suggesting that she was not “on the record.”

    It is not uncommon for federal prosecutors to communicate with the press, both through formal channels and sometimes informally. My exchange with Halligan, however, was highly unusual in a number of respects. She initiated a conversation with me, a reporter she barely knew, to discuss an ongoing prosecution that she is personally handling. She mostly criticized my reporting—or, more precisely, my summary of someone else’s reporting. But several of her messages contained language that touch on grand jury matters, even as she insisted that she could not reveal such information, which is protected from disclosure by prosecutors under federal law.

    As a legal journalist covering the Justice Department, I had never encountered anything quite like my exchange with Halligan. Neither had my editor. Over the last several days, he and I spoke with multiple former federal officials and journalists who cover the justice system. None could recall a similar instance in which a sitting U.S. attorney reached out to chastise a reporter about matters concerning grand jury testimony in an active case.

    ...

    The user on the other end had selected a setting to make all messages in the chat disappear after eight hours, so I took screenshots of the exchange as it happened to make sure a record of the back-and-forth was preserved. Those screenshots are all available here.

    Even as I took this precaution, I assumed the exchange was a hoax because, while it is not unusual for lawyers to reach out to me about my reporting or commentary, it is highly unusual for a U.S. attorney to do so regarding an ongoing prosecution [...]

    17 votes