In similar news: my left hand acquired my right hand today in an all stock deal valuing the combined hands at $1T. Praising the announcement my arms noted on the deal: “With these two hands now together, there’s nothing our combined fist of might can’t do.” Competitors, my left and right feet, declined to comment on the merger but are said to be in their own separate talks about a deal.
right but you don't have $1T to do that, whereas clearly he has however much money he's paid for it. it's a weird thing to do, but if he has the money to do it then meh?
In similar news: my left hand acquired my right hand today in an all stock deal valuing the combined hands at $250,000. Praising the announcement my arms noted on the deal: “With these two hands now together, there’s nothing our combined fist of might can’t do.” Competitors, my left and right feet, declined to comment on the merger but are said to be in their own separate talks about a deal.
it doesn't invalidate anything; my original point was that Musk has this much money, meaning that he's just moving money around, meaning that this pretentious analogy is not actually making any kind of insightful point whatsoever. what Musk is doing is taking two entities already with a high market value and then merging them, he's not just deciding randomly that 2 irrelevant things have value. how much money this guy has is irrelevant. it's just a shitty attempt at satire, which I cannot stand
The acquisition is entirely in stock. Shareholders of X are receiving xAI stock in exchange for their X shares. They don't get any cash.
Musk says the new combined entity is worth $80B, but that's on paper. The company certainly doesn't have that much cash or liquid assets. The valuation is based on xAI's previous funding round + whatever number they decided to assign to the X assets + the magic of "synergy" produced by this deal. In other words, it's not based on anything real. (Accountants call this "goodwill.")
right but those entities quite clearly have an existing market value in the region of those numbers. this guy's arms and legs do not. it's a poor analogy that's trying to be too clever
Maybe the guy is pretty good at basketball and sincerely thinks he’s going to be the best player in the world next year? That would make his arms and legs awfully valuable.
Musk’s xAI is in a similar place. It’s an also-ran in a crowded space and it’s not making any money while spending billions. But the founder certainly has great faith in it. Is $80B the right value to assign to that faith? Who knows.
X is "clearly" worth only $10 billion less than what Musk paid for Twitter back 2022? Really? Despite its revenue being 50% lower than it was back then?
As for xAI, Anthropic has a valuation of ~$60 billion. So again not that "clear". Of course they don't have Musk's political connections which might end up mattering quite a bit (of course there's also the risk of Musk being prosecuted in 4 years as well...)
first of all, Anthropic is hardly more successful than xAI. they get a lot of headlines, but how many people actually use Claude? and what else do they have going for them? as far as I've seen and heard Grok is just as successful if not more.
second of all, I would suggest that twitter's value as a whole is very nebulously related to its actual revenue numbers, and is far more related to: - its potential revenue numbers, which are way higher in the hands of someone less controversial and - profit, which we don't really know about because its private anyway, but is likely much higher given the amount of cuts that have been made.
> s I've seen and heard Grok is just as successful if not more.
Most of what I've seen about Grok were the various memes about people trying to trick it into saying stuff about Musk (or trying to expose the filters stopping it from saying bad things about him).
> its potential revenue numbers
Maybe. But it wasn't even that successful financial even in the pre Musk days compared to its competitors. Destroying the brand and reputation also had a non-insignficant impact.
> but is likely much higher
Twitter was barely or not at all profitable before the acquisition so that's not unlikely. Companies that have high net income but stagnant or decreasing revenue generally don't do that well in the stock market, though.
that's not how market values work and there's no such thing as a "true market value". my car has a market value, it not being for sale right now does not change that.
Your car is presumably not unique. Both the model and well... it probably does more or less exactly the same as any other car. If you had an entirely unique one of a kind antique car it would be pretty different.
Estimating "true market value" of companies whose valuation is almost entirely based on their potential long-term growth isn't particularly straightforward until you find a buyer willing to buy a significant or it does an IPO.
>Your car is presumably not unique. Both the model and well... it probably does more or less exactly the same as any other car. If you had an entirely unique one of a kind antique car it would be pretty different.
I fail to see how this is in any way whatsoever relevant. a unique car has a market value, and a non-unique car also has a market value. anything that can be sold has a market value. there's still no such thing as a "true market value"
Well not until you try to sell it and find a buyer.
I mean sure xAI does technically have a market value we just don't know what it is because there is no market that would allow us to determine it.
Of course the price paid by private investors do provide some estimate but a company .e.g. raising $5 billion at a valuation of $150 billions or something like doesn't necessarily have a market value which is that high.
Except there is no money involved. xAI has nowhere near that amount of money in cash or in any liquid assets. The valuation hardly means anything, it might be worth $10 billion, it might be worth $100 billion nobody can tell at this point.
You because you didn’t have to come out of pocket the high cost of a down payment, handle maintenance costs, deal with the risk of mortgage default if you lost your income, deal with the possibility (and thus hold insurance for) of liability if someone is injured and sues, or lose out on the opportunity cost of money spent on the house versus what else that money could have purchased. To say nothing of you don’t know what their interest rates are, how property taxes or cost of home owners insurance may have changed (in the U.S. your escrow payments change often if taxes and insurance change) or how liquid the house is (ie could they sell if they needed to and at what discount to the market value).
Oh, and don’t forget that they’re paying interest on the mortgage and that - when adjusted for inflation - the actual increase in value versus what they’ve paid in in mortgage interest over the years is probably far less than the non adjusted gains it looks like.
It’s pretty easy to demonize owner landlords when you’ve always been a renter because you think only about a monthly payment. I’m not going to tell you that’s it’s a relative luxury to be fixated on one simple payment each month, but it’s also not the case that owning a home as an individual is some kind of pot of gold.
An owner that values their tenant and keeps their rent flat isn’t a saint. But they’re also doing a good thing in a time when they could be - by account of this thread - exploiting people for as much as possible. We don’t need to order them a parade, but it might be worth broadening your understanding of what the cost of a home is before you blanket assume they’re worthy of scorn.
Seems like I struck a nerve in some way? It's 2024 and you can call a man a dog to his face or even stomp on his blue suede shoes, but as soon as an argument has a walletary impact, the response is swift and lethal.
Maintenance is just not an argument. Unless you choose – yes choose – to rent to destructive tenants, or in other ways are irresponsible with your property, maintenance cost is a tiny fraction of what you get from rent. The same for insurance, taxes, etc that you list. Nobody is unaware of these costs.
With that said, I'm not demonizing over these landlords. I'm sure they're fine people and could be worse like you say.
A renter should not be any more grateful to the landlord than a worker should be grateful to the shareholder for paying their salary. It is an exchange. I do think it is better when homeowners at least rent out their property instead of just letting it rot abandoned like many choose. The most decent thing of course would be for them to sell property they don't need and we wouldn't be living in this dystopia from the beginning.
The youth of the industrialized nations are vanishing on a grander scale than ever seen - for petty gains to a few. And those gains will be short lived when the economy folds in on itself due to the impossibility for productive people to have a home. In the end you cannot have an extremely highly skilled workforce that is needed to sustain a modern economy, while at the same time keeping them dumbed down enough to accept total life long exploitation and their own genetical extermination.
> A renter should not be any more grateful to the landlord than a worker should be grateful to the shareholder for paying their salary. It is an exchange.
All true, but there can be a lot of "quality of life" variance in how that exchange is implemented in practice. I've been a tenant a couple of times and now had a couple of tenants myself. Landlords can make things more or less difficult while offering the same agreement, and tenants can make things more or less difficult while complying fully with the same agreement.
I'm grateful whenever someone chooses to do better than the bare minimum required by the agreement. If anyone reading this takes good faith for granted, I urge you to at least read horror stories on reddit.
The finding on simpler prompts, especially with GPT4 tracks (3.5 requires the opposite).
The take on RAG feels application specific. For our use-case where having details of the past rendered up the ability to generate loose connections is actually a feature. Things like this are what I find excites me most about LLMs, having a way to proxy subjective similarities the way we do when we remember things is one of the benefits of the technology that didn’t really exist before that opens up a new kind of product opportunity.
The point of the punishment is to tell you how much we don’t want you to do it. You get life for murder because we really don’t want people killing people. Fleecing them out of money is bad, but we can (literally) print more of it. Once someone is dead we can’t bring them back.
Your analysis is flawed because you’re looking at the problem from the vantage of collective outcomes. A murderer is one person who is making a decision to take an action that can end one or many lives. You want them to weigh that heavily as an absolute cost (I will go to prison forever if caught) not some relative cost (well if I just murder a little then I’ll only get a little punishment).
> Fleecing them out of money is bad, but we can (literally) print more of it. Once someone is dead we can’t bring them back.
The math of my argument was that with money, you can save lives, i.e., prevent people from dying. I don't believe the govt can print as much as it likes without hurting the economy (and thus people) in some other way.
The core of my argument is that defrauding billions of dollars causes deaths of dozens of people indirectly. Is that better than directly causing a death? I am not accussing anyone; just asking what I think is an interesting question.
Don’t do the cleaning and leave a medium review that politely says you were not informed of cleaning policy beforehand. Host has no way to penalize you (outside of a bad review) and you can respond to their review (if they criticize you) saying you were not informed at booking. Keep your review and response cordial and any future host evaluating you will assume that the past host was weird. There’s no way anyone can verify the claim by the other host that they articulated the cleaning policies.
I’m not equivocating AI to these inventions, but imagine if this dour, pessimistic outlook greeted electricity, the combustion engine, the car? New things aren’t immediately valuable and come with all kinds of tradeoffs. We would hardly recognize our lives without these things now and - even though they come at great cost - no serious person would have given that progress up.
It’s fair that “we” (the collective human race) have been too optimistic about new things and too sanguine about the cost. That’s why climate change is as bad as it is. That’s why having everyone plugged into social networks makes us sad.
This constant stream of pessimism that started in the 10’s for everything (tech, any institutions, the world) etc is just so..small seeming. Complaining like this makes none of these things better and the ideas expressed in this piece are far from unique. So as criticism goes it fails to even meet that definition.
So why even do it? To feel cool I guess to other people who think being pessimistic about everything is cool?
We’re coming up on a decade plus of this prevailing dour attitude and not a single bit of it has helped forestall anything. Maybe we try a new approach where we treat new things as things to be improved when they’re at the beginning (and therefore most able to be shaped). Maybe we try being cautiously optimistic?
If you look at the history of these inventions, you'll find that the people who've been working on them recognized the limitations at the heart of these criticisms. Even today, it's more a question of tradeoffs where we try to minimize the negative impacts. But if you look at the tech world, there is no such philosophy. It's all about growth, being barely legal, and trying to ignore the negative aspects. All the points listed in the article is true, but there's been no answer other than "give me money".
> Am I out of touch? No. It's the children who are wrong.
Maybe the reason people are pessimistic about technology is because it sucks. You note that it started in the 10's and I'm inclined to agree (the 90's were amazing for techno optimism), so what changed?
Opinion based: It's the focus on growth and not bettering the service. Even Apple who has been constantly focused on experience is trying to lock users in with "We know better than you" as an explanation. Windows XP, 7, and even Vista, has tried to provide an operating system so that the users can utilize their tools. I'm not against business trying to make a profit. I'm very much for it. But more often than not, engaging in a transaction with tech companies feels like doing shady deals in a dark alley, wondering if you're not selling your soul.
> I’m not equivocating AI to these inventions, but imagine if this dour, pessimistic outlook greeted electricity, the combustion engine, the car?
It did — all of those inventions had their fair share of opponents. Some of the naysayers simply didn't like change, while others had a pretty good understanding of the negative side effects of mass adoption. https://dangerousminds.net/comments/100_years_ago_some_peopl...
One piece of advice, I found myself this person once - it’s the road to burn out city to be the critical path answer to everyone on the team’s challenges. You sound like someone who is very generous with your time and support. In my experience once people have found a critical path there is no point at which they “stop.” This isn’t because they’re trying to hurt you, they’ve just found the answer so to them it doesn’t seem wrong.
It will take even more of your time, but you ought to consider practicing giving less answers and asking more questions of those who seek your help to try to help them unpack the issues themselves. It will feel more tiring at first, but you’ll gradually help the others learn and also create a small bit of friction that will encourage them to try their own solution or two before seeking you.
Management asks are separate/ they can actually reward you with compensation and promotions for this extra work. But the team asking for help won’t stop when you get more comp unless you start teaching that you’re not the answer.
