Rury

Yeah, and it's similar reasoning as to why gentrification tends to happen when the wealthy move into an area, and why prices for things typically decrease when the wealthy leave.

The $72B number is just for convertible notes sold prior and through 1st half of 2026. They were issued as a way to finance growth costs (e.g. acquiring compute).

There might be some additional sold in Q3, but that wasn't published here. But these notes aren't costs that Anthropic has to pay in any normal sense - they're shares they sold pre-IPO and valued at $72B. Anthropic would have to pay that much to buy them back at said valuation price, but they're not obligated in any way to do that.

Post IPO, they'll have alternative avenues for sourcing funds... (e.g. secondary offerings, corporate bonds). Continued growth at this rate will need continued financing, but it wouldn't be done using convertible notes.

The real liabilities are the hundreds of billions in non-cancelable compute costs Anthropic owes Google, Amazon etc, over the course of the next 10 years.

These sorts of products aren't typically driven by consumer wants. Rather they're typically driven by B2B/sales/marketing/investor types, who are primarily focused on finding/addressing secondary markets for further profits, more so than it is about addressing core consumer wants.

In other words, these product decisions aren't really made on the rationale that internet connected coffee makers make sense from the standpoint of a consumer who simply wants coffee made...

It's more: "let's make smart coffee makers so that we can sell to 2 markets:

    1) a coffee maker to consumers who want coffee made

    2) consumers data/eyeballs to advertisers who want their info/eyes

... and make more profits for ourselves".

I thought the reason was well known, and the article briefly touches it...

The liver's great ability to regenerate largely boils down to how homogenous and simple the liver actually is. It's structured more like a battery pack, where you have individual cells that are largely functionally identical to each other that perform the bulk of the work, and they happen to be connected together. If an individual cell fails, (for the most part) all you need to do is merely regrow a new one, and it's orientation matters little (relatively speaking as compared to other organs) so long as it's connected to the rest of the battery pack (organ).

Contrast that to something like a kidney, which has complex orientation that is formed via growth, and which has a high degree of different types of cells where replacing a part isn't as simple as merely regrowing the part which failed, but also about that growth happening in precisely the right location. So instead of it being like having to replace a failed cell in a battery pack, it's like replacing a wheel to a car. Attaching it anywhere (like the windshield for example) won't necessarily fix the issue, it needs to be connected to the axle...

Seems incomplete? Like several island nations are missing (e.g. Bahrain).

I once saw someone say something like this: "Working in a monopoly mega corp is like working for a 20 person company, connected to 20 other 20 person companies, connected to 20 similar entities containing similar 20 companies, with each group of 20 persons in each competing with each other for investment/budgeting."

Maybe hyperbole... but to some extent I think that's about right. It's like you're not even a cohesive unit other than that thin marketing veneer facing the outside world.

Things are often built in silos. Integration of products is almost always an after thought. Decisions/changes are done in response to outside markets or internal political games for promotional appeal and money. The turnover of people retiring, new hires coming. Most every mega corp today is nothing like it was 30 years ago. And so, things typically end up half-baked and the customer left wondering why the products are often such a mess.

Now some companies do things better than others, and may have their stellar areas and their bad areas. Same goes for cities, and even countries, when you think about it.

You don't get it? It's like this:

"Make me a picture of a house".

> AI proceeds to draw a house.

"No that's not right, it should be a red bricked house. Not a brown one."

> AI redraws a red bricked house.

"No. It should have a 2 car garage, sit on top of a hill. Also it should have a front porch, and have a tree right in front."

> AI then draws a red bricked house on top a hill with a 2 car garage with a front porch and a tree right in front.

...

The issue is that people think AI should automagically create some vague idea in of theirs, without having to do the work of spelling out all the exact details. So AI (like people) must make some assumptions about what wasn't specified. Like since you didn't specify a "red bricked house" in your initial prompt, but merely a "house"... it had to come up with something as to the color, and did as you otherwise asked, but it didn't know you actually wanted a "red bricked house", since you never specified that detail. Hence why it failed to do what you wanted, and you had to "review and correct it".

Again this isn't solely an intelligence problem, but an inherent problem in language/communication, of unsaid assumptions/specifications. Of being unaware of what you don't know, unaware of your own assumptions, sometimes even being unaware of what you even want. It's why AI can't fully get rid of jobs in software.

But sometimes people just don't care. They just want a picture of a house made. Anything remotely resembling a house will do, not necessarily a solid one, or one that can withstand a magnitude 8 earthquake. You know... like something people can put up in minutes so they don't have to do hard work... such as a shabby old tent. And AI is very good at generalizing, so it can in fact achieve this. So everyone reports they are far more productive now, putting up tent after tent. Meanwhile, the people responsible for the slop have a nightmare to review...

Yup. This is basically what Steve Jobs argued throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and championed as a philosophy. Adopting it, took Apple from being a struggling tech company on the verge of bankruptcy, to the dominant personal consumer technology maker it is today.

There are more numerous cases where cities happen to be situated fairly close together in Europe, where trains actually are a more sensible travel option, hence the fixation there.

Planes instead make more sense the further you must travel.

I mean, depending on circumstances, it takes nearly the same amount of time to travel from Chicago to St. Louis by plane as it does by car. Something shorter than that and it can actually take longer to get there by plane than it does by car. I mean no one takes a plane to travel to a city that's only 30 minutes away by car - as it often takes longer to get through airport security and board a plane than that.

This mis-frames the actual issue. "Being there for the paycheck" isn't bad per se, it's the morality in the manner of doing such.

There's a marked difference in earning a paycheck via genuinely helping someone else out, as compared to... being apathetic to how that happens, or worse: earning a paycheck via deliberately sabotaging someone else's wellbeing.

Does it matter if they only own a small fraction of the homes? There's some studies that show that in markets where institutional investors do buy, prices typically noticeably increase for houses afterwards, even if they only own a tiny fraction of the housing units.

There's plausible argument as to network effects (e.g. my neighbor is charging that much, so why can't I?), as well as changing unit types to rentals, limiting owner-occupied supply and hence driving up prices.

I mean, I imagine it can be kind of similar in the stock market, where that you don't actually need to buy all a company's shares in existence to bid up a stock's price... you only need to buy enough of the available float to raise prices (sometimes which can be <0.5% of shares in existence).

Yes, I don't think this is a single faceted issue. I've yet to see anyone here mention animals yet... but numerous animals in captivity have also been shown to have far lower breeding/fertility rates. Factors like restricted space, lack of mate choice, and disrupted natural instincts can all influence animal behavior, and I see no reason why the same can't apply to us?

I know for me personally, it's not economic reasons as to why I have not had children, but more a problem of finding the right mate at the right time. Some people just aren't socially fit for each other...