Being completely indifferent to the soundness of a publicly traded company's business model is the correct choice for most ordinary people trying to invest their retirement savings, because they have no basis for thinking any other choice of how to invest will result in superior returns. This is the entire line of thinking behind all passive index-fund-based stock investing.
> And in the end you have a market where nobody has any basis for thinking anything has any value, and the market ends up being a random walk.
Companies have value: at the very least they can be liquidated and their assets sold off (book value). They also tend to generate profits and may choose to distribute them (dividends, share buybacks): this also has value to shareholders.
Where the random walk comes in is that the information of how healthy or profitable a company is gives it a (perceived) value of $x. But new information can be learned at any point about the company which can change the (perceived) outlook of its health and profitability, which may give it a value of $y. Now it could be that x>y or x.
It is the fact that this new information (real, rumoured, fake) can come at any random point in the future:
Book value is pretty much irrelevant unless your business is buying businesses and dismantling them for parts (vulture capitalism). A company's true value can also be less than its asset value because the dismantling process can be costly.
Nah. The more irrational it gets, the more margin available to active. There's always an incentive for active investors to participate in price discovery.
Affordable housing initiatives in major US cities are somewhere between charity for the poor and a sinecure for people who have lived in that city for a long time as renters (that actively harms everyone else who would like to live in that city). It is not something that people should expect to make money investing in.
Anyway yeah this entire article is left-progressive slop. If you go to the About page (https://lpeproject.org/about/) you will find the text "We believe that developments over the last several decades in legal scholarship and policy helped to facilitate rising inequality and precarity, political alienation, the entrenchment of racial hierarchies and intersectional exploitation, and ecological and social catastrophe." These are all left-progressive political shibboleths.
Libghostty is a very cool project, this is an exciting release, kudos to mitchellh for spearheading this as well as all the people who have made contributions to the project. I use ghostty as my primary terminal emulator today and a few months ago I was experimenting with using libghostty in an android project that I plan to jump back to someday when I have the time, so I personally benefit from this work.
Indeed it is. It feels like libghostty was only announced yesterday and already there are things like ghostel for emacs that are imo far above and beyond the other emacs terminal options.
Ghostel is the first Emacs terminal emulator I've used that really just worked. Vterm and EAT were nice at for time but it's like night and day to Ghostel.
wow. Even today, all the modal interface options for emacs feel too slow for my fingers. Maybe a different terminal root will fix that? I should reinvestigate.
You can literally type that question into any search engine or LLM. Don't challenge me like we're on a school bus. I'm a die-hard vimmer, been hjkl-ming for 17 years. I don't mince my modes here.
And the LLM tried for a bit (mostly things I know), and then concluded:
> And the original commenter never actually explains what Emacs does better. When challenged, they get defensive rather than providing examples. So we're interpreting a provocative claim, not a demonstrated advantage.
I found that very enlightening! Thank you for your suggestion to ask an LLM!
That's exactly why I didn't take your bait. You already know the reasons for my statement; you simply choose to ignore them. That's fine, Neovim is an excellent text editor, perhaps the best modal editor out there. For me, the idea of vim modality, a brilliant, practical, beautiful model, has more value as an abstraction rather than as a concrete implementation. It's a magnificent idea, and ideas do port.
For years, my every single choice of a tool that had anything to do with text composition got paired with vim modality; every IDE, every editor, terminal, browser, WM invariably went with it. It's been years since it stopped being just an instrument of ergonomics, productivity, faster typing - it became my identity. Just like a left-handed person can't contemplate one day becoming different, I have zero practical, emotional or whatever reasons to stop being a vimmer.
Gary Bernhardt (the wat javascript guy) once said, "There's no vim-mode, there's only Vim," meaning that not a single vim emulation has ever gotten to the point of not having glaring, annoying deficiencies. I've used vim-motions in Sublime, Atom, IntelliJ, VSCode, Chrome, Firefox, Brave - not a single extension gets it to the point where it starts feeling natural.
I had to agree with Gary until the day I found Evil-mode in Emacs. It is surprisingly good. It is so good that you forget - it is not a built-in feature of Emacs. And when you understand the sheer amount of effort required to get vim modality right, you just can't remain unimpressed. And Evil-mode is such a small chunk of what Emacs is about; it's not even the tip of the tip of the iceberg. If there were a jet plane that could perform a perfect vertical landing and yet almost never had to use or even advertise that feature, it would still amaze you as a masterpiece of engineering.
That's where you might realize that Emacs isn't a mere text editor, it's a darn text orchestrator - it doesn't only focus on text composition, it also shifts the attention to valuing text consumption. The grand idea behind a Lisp REPL with a built-in text editor is a magnificent abstraction. Anyone who tries to compare Emacs with any other IDE or text editor would miss the point; it's a categorical error to even attempt to do that.
if you're, as you say, coming off of decades of vi muscle memory, i'm sure evil can do the job of not making you relearn anything just fine.
if you've, like me, trained your muscles to relearn quickly, you'll eventually want modal editing that actually works the way emacs works. and evil... is hacks on top of hacks, you pay a severe price for the seemingly seamless integration.
when i wanted to customize evil, i quickly realized that what i wanted wasn't vi in emacs, it was modal editing in emacs. i landed on boon, then used that until codex took over.
I have zero interest in comparing different modal-mode packages for Emacs here - I've used Evil for many years, and whatever tweaking it required, I just went with it; writing Elisp is cheap.
You're (perhaps inadvertently) highlighting my main point - the architecture of Emacs is so flexible that it allows (maybe even encourages) the existence of such variability for modal modes, which would be inconceivable in pretty much any other editor or IDE.
Therefore, it proves my statement once more - Emacs vims better.
cheaper than a model call? you and i have very different conceptions of value. models make it so cheap you can construct a whole editor with the same level of effort you're putting in to maintain your workflow.
and there's pretty much nothing more flexible than that.
Tell me you're trolling. Or you really have no idea what it means in practice to modify a Lisp-based editor on the fly. I can change virtually any aspect of it in the middle of typing this very comment, without missing a beat. Yes, by sending calls to a model. It does it without linting, linking compiling or even saving that code anywhere. I don't have to even restart anything. Like at all. I think you seriously have little clue of what you're talking about right now. Or you're trolling.
i've been doing the same with my ruby editor. once i built hot-reloading, the clanker just does everything.
i learned lisp with htdp, many many years ago, then eventually settled on ruby. it's every bit as powerful. and with my own editor built from the ground-up, i don't have to deal with 50-year old cruft. i consider the lack of homoiconicity a fun challenge to work around.
Cool. Can't wait to see your agentic rewrite of the Linux kernel caused by a misapprehension of systemd or something. In a "powerful" language that even DHH is admittedly not using much anymore and most of us moved away circa 2015. I'm sure this is exactly what Larry Wall meant when he said hubris is one of the three virtues of a programmer.
hah. i'd fully expect someone who just discovered agentic tool-building and is talking about it like it's the second coming to care about anything dhh has to say. if i were going to move off of ruby it would be to smalltalk, not any kind of lisp. you should check out pharo sometime. its been putting emacs to shame for decades.
why rewrite the linux kernel to get off of systemd when bsd is like, right there? or void, or alpine? do you even tech bro? only thing keeping me off it is lack of hardware support for my librem 5.
Altman was simply making an accurate observation about DRAM, in the context of a conversation about DRAM shortages and precisely why it is difficult for DRAM manufacturers to respond to the market price incentive to increase DRAM production. Even if you think it is bad that DRAM is currently expensive, as I do, that doesn't change the underlying fact about the world that Altman's comment reflects.
Thiel's comment is also pro-individual-ownership - in context he was talking about the danger that in a mass democracy the people as a whole would vote to have the government restrict the freedom and confiscate the property of successful people (particularly prescient in light of the recent California attempt at a billionaire wealth tax). RAM being expensive is better than RAM being rationed by a democratically-elected government so no one person has too much, as judged by the voting masses.
> Altman was simply making an accurate observation about DRAM
no, he was lying by omission
"it's quite terrible" only if you ignore all the problems with plans they promote and measure it only in metrics Altman wants to measure, as they support his plans
For start, Altman would charge as much as possible to optimize profits, so very significant part of efficiency increase would become profits of "Open"AI.
As another obvious problem: handing so much power to a specific company has own costs.
There are so many problems here with this specific part - starting from their power dictating how can you use it, access to your data. And that part is getting worse for anyone not planning to obey all decisions coming from USA. We have already seen export controls being invoked.
But wider, if you think that outsourcing thinking to a specific SaaS has no costs, beyond current subscription costs, then I have several thousands of bridges for sale.
> Altman was simply making an accurate observation about DRAM
Which might be true, I'm willing to accept that, but it does not change the fact his message was incredibly tone deaf.
Cost of living in general is through the roof for years now, many people haven't had the financial ability to meaningfully upgrade their computers for just about the same timeframe - first Bitcoin drove CPU prices through the roof, then GPU prices, once that died down due to ASICs there were a few fads that "mined" RAM, HDD and SSD, and in parallel to the latter Covid hit, disrupting supply chains. After Covid was somewhat over, the Russians invaded Ukraine, then we got the various MENA conflicts after Oct 7th, and now the Iran war is wrecking everything - and ever since AI entered the picture somewhat three years ago, first GPUs and now everything else has exploded in price. Entry level smartphones have all but disappeared. And don't forget our existing computers got less and less useful because first Microsoft pushed the garbage called Windows 11 onto everyone it could and second, everyone and their dog went for Electron resource hog apps.
For Altman to now say "your unused RAM could be of much better use in our servers" is like a giant fat fucking middle finger, telling us to sacrifice even more of our needs just for the opportunity of him and his fellow rich bastard friends to make more money, all while he and his fellow rich bastard friends are executing the setup of a financial crisis that will make 2007 look fucking tame.
> Thiel's comment is also pro-individual-ownership - in context he was talking about the danger that in a mass democracy the people as a whole would vote to have the government restrict the freedom and confiscate the property of successful people (particularly prescient in light of the recent California attempt at a billionaire wealth tax).
Oh for fucks sake. Taxes aren't theft, they provide for the environment that makes these rich fucks able to earn money in the first place. Thiel is worth 38 billion dollars. Even if you'd tax the guy 50% of his wealth, he'd still have more than one single human and their descendants can ever feasibly gamble away.
> RAM being expensive is better than RAM being rationed by a democratically-elected government so no one person has too much, as judged by the voting masses.
At least in a rationed system that allocates supply fairly, ordinary people wouldn't have to run with barely working hardware because they can't afford to buy something new and modern for once as all the new stuff is hoarded by the rich like a LotR dragon hoards his gold pile.
And as evidenced by this week's elections - the people are fed up beyond belief. Either we the people get some relief, the sooner the better, or the situation may indeed devolve into open riots.
Successful people are not successful without keeping unsuccessful people from success; inflation since Millennials were born is almost 300% and taxes have been slashed; takes 800k/yr now to have the buying power of $200k in the 1980s
Thiel has benefited from wealth being wielded by rich media owners to convince the masses decades long trends in deflation of buying power through inflation of costs are good for them
With such a system giving him a boost he was successful before Millennials and GenZ were adults or even born
Altman came along during ZIRP; being successful when the government is intentionally printing money is not really success
The sci-fi story that I constantly find myself thinking about when I read about real-world AI developments is Ra, by qntm/Sam Hughes: https://qntm.org/ra
I just voted in favor of California proposition 45, which weakens a huge amount of California environmental review law, specifically in order to prevent it from being weaponized by NIMBYs to block or delay housing developments. Unfortunately it looks like the measure is losing, because housing NIMBYs have a great deal of political power in California. Anyway, I would support similar legislation aimed at allowing data centers to be built for exactly the same reasons.
The homelessness problem in the bay area is mostly caused by the extremely high housing prices, which are ultimately caused by NIMBYism; and by the stupid and self-destructive empathy of the local progressive elites who think it's oppressive to use the police to force the most dysfunctional visibly homeless people living on the streets into involuntary treatment and shelter.
Neither of these phenomena are primarily the fault of the Silicon Valley tech industry; and NIMBYism in particular is largely driven by people who bought bay area houses many decades ago (my family is from the bay area, and I'm absolutely including my relatives in my parents' generation in that number - none of them work in the tech industry).
Public free education is already in tatters in many neighborhoods and has been for many decades. People already pay a lot of money to live in a neighborhood with expensive housing prices in order to price out from living there people whose children would make the local public school worse (by e.g. getting into physical fights). People sometimes pay for a private school to avoid this because it is cheaper than a house in a neighborhood with people whose children make good students to spend time in close physical proximity with.
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