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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • Once there’s a public expectation for profit from the two biggest AI labs

    I don’t think that it’s necessarily the order things will go.

    Anthropic and OpenAI have bills to pay, including obligations to pay a ton of money to partners/vendors in the coming years. They need cash to do that. And the cash can come from 3 main places: revenue from customers, loans from lenders (usually in the form of issuing bonds), and issuing new stock/equity to raise funds.

    The IPOs are basically their last chance to raise funds by issuing new equity. Even if each of them raise $100 billion, that’s probably not enough to hit self sustaining profitability. As lenders start to get more skeptical, in a macroeconomic environment with high interest rates and high energy prices, they start to run into a very real possibility that they hit illiquidity issues, even if their core business model actually works by then (and I don’t think it will). There’s just not enough runway for them, even in the most optimistic long term projections.




  • Annualized Revenue rate is a made up number

    It is fundamentally a projection about the future using recent results, and transparent in its methodology. It’s shit methodology, but it’s not hiding anything. So I don’t know that I’d classify it as fraud.

    Playing games with “revenue” is another problem, but because that’s misleading about the past, and making an active decision on whether to classify money that was never gonna end up in their pockets as revenue share to partners or cost of revenue. Companies sometimes engage in shenanigans where they give discounts but classify the discounts as marketing/sales expenses rather than foregone revenue. That kind of stuff strikes me as more squarely in the category of accounting shenanigans.






  • It is believed that pi is “absolutely normal” in the strict mathematical definition: that in any base numbering system, any finite sequence of digits appears as frequently as any other sequence of that length. If that’s true, then yes, a particular binary string, including one that corresponds to a particular digital file (like a particular mp4 file), can be found in pi.

    That said, it hasn’t actually been proven that pi is normal. If it’s not normal, then the number can be infinitely non-repeating and still never hit that particular sequence of digits.




  • When I’m bored, I get price quotes from Lyft and Uber to the airport. I’ll click around and look at the different tiers of service. Then I choose not to actually request a fare, and close the app.

    I fly enough to where both apps probably have me as a regular airport customer, but that I’m price sensitive enough where I just won’t use their service sometimes.

    I do the same with Doordash and other food apps, where I just put together potential orders to get a sense of how much something would cost if I ordered it, and then just never order it, letting that cart expire. I’m hoping this poisons their data or adds something to the price sensitivity metrics.

    I also look at airfares, hotel prices, etc., a lot. It’s not for the purpose of manipulating their algorithms, as I just like to get a sense for how prices move over time. But if there’s a side effect that these variable pricing algorithms take into account people who window shop and walk away, maybe I’m helping push prices down.

    If they’re gonna create a panopticon, we should fuck with their data.


  • AMP was two different things.

    1. Google defined a standard that was an approved subset of html/css/js designed to load quickly on mobile screens, with none of the extra cruft that slows down sites as experienced by phone users.
    2. Google also agreed to host AMP-compliant pages on their own ultra-fast servers. Many smaller sites, especially local news stations and local newspapers, agreed to offload the extra work by allowing Google to host their content. Those hosted pages had a whole system of referring back to the canonical URL on the actual outlet’s own website (and the desktop version of the page), and had little things referring to the AMP project.

    I was 100% on board with #1, but #2 was controversial and created a lot of the conflicts of interest that tore the whole thing apart. Google spun off the AMP project as an open governance model, and then it was taken over by the OpenJS foundation.

    In the end, the performance gap between mobile devices and desktops narrowed, and at this point most people’s phones and mobile browsers can load pages just as quickly as a laptop, so the purpose of the project itself is less important to the actual web as it exists today.







  • Somewhere along the line someone is going to have a password that is their favorite sports team followed by their anniversary. Someone will reuse the same password over and over including a site with exploitable security flaws.

    None of this is new, and none of this has destroyed the feasibility of electronic payments. AI has nothing to do with any of it.

    The ability to conduct fraud, hack websites, and hijack accounts has always been around. The systems we’ve built will always assume that occurs on a regular basis, and are resilient against needing to address this reality. How does any of this prevent electronic payments from being processed?