busyant

> Is there even a way to professionally decide if a company's value is 1.25 or 1.4 Trillion?

The quote below is about valuing the bond market in the 1980s. Obviously, it's meant as a cynical answer to your question, but maybe there's a kernel of truth there, too.

"He'd lean across to Lewie [Ranieri] and ask, 'How do you like 'em, Lewie?' (referring to the bond market). Lewie would say, 'I like 'em a lot!' And Mario would say, 'Yeah, I like 'em, too, I like 'em, too.' Fifteen minutes later he'd lean across again to Lewie and ask, 'How do you like 'em now, Lewie?' Lewie would say, 'Don't like 'em at all.' And Mario would say, 'I don't like 'em neither, I don't like 'em neither.'

Taken from Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker.

> The sense in the family was that the collapse of the industry denied him a dignified last decade of work

Very sorry. Dignity is important and often overlooked.

> Was the lawyer that hired you present when she made the offer to pay you?

Yes. "my" lawyer was there, too.

I tried to keep the story short, but the request was actually that I drive both of them to the airport.

I know it sounds naive, but I was shocked by their friendliness after the deposition.

agreed. both of my sisters-in-law are lawyers.

whenever some unsavory person is in the news being defended by his attorney, most of us get upset, but they say stuff like, "his attorney is just doing a good job defending his client. that's how this works."

I get it, but I'm not built for it.

I was deposed once.

It was 6 hours where the opposing counsel tried to rattle me / get under my skin with insulting questions.

To be clear, I was only an expert witness in the lawsuit (drug + pregnant lady + birth defects). It paid extremely well, but was something I would never want to do routinely.

At the end of the deposition, the lawyer had to catch a flight to the west coast and she asked ME if I would drive her to the airport* (she said she'd pay me my hourly rate)!

At that point it was clear that the insults were just theater and "part of the job", but I took it all too personally and told her I had to get home.

* She was late for the flight and Uber wasn't a thing yet.

> At one point the gold standard for generating leads was using combinatorial chemistry to experimentally screen through millions of compounds.

I don't think this was ever the gold standard. I mean, some companies did employ these approaches, but they were generally viewed as low-quality, brute-force approaches (at least at the handful of companies I was associated with).

Them Duke boys are gonna be mighty happy.

> leveling up all of the DIYers

Yep. My brother used ChatGPT to guide his repair of a rusted hole in the driver's side door of his pickup truck.

He never would have tried that repair on his own. Looks good, too.

> And that's probably why we don't see a lot, if any, aliens out there.

This isn't the best analogy, but it struck me the other night that "AI" feels like Jon Carpenter's "The Thing".

Especially the final scene where Childs and MacReady are trying to determine which (if any) of them is still human.

Also, early in the movie, MacReady loses to a computer chess program and pours whiskey into the computer, calling it a "cheating bitch."

Anyway, there are some parallels there.

Where I worked, USB ports on TVs/monitors were used for wireless mouse receivers.

If I had to go poking around back there, the toilet paper would have at least piqued my interest.

Without the toilet paper, I would have simply assumed whatever was plugged in there was officially sanctioned.

I mean, Nixon bugged himself, right?

> seeing the full list of problems would be the most interesting part of this whole situation.

This is a "complaint" that Tao had (I think it was on his blog) is that if mathematicians could see the failures, it might provide insight of where/how the models struggle. Of course, it's unclear if these failures can be addressed with more chips/training/etc.

> when the only affect is appetite suppression

You don't know this.

> These things are useful for a few months

You don't know this.

> For anyone else (most people), it's much healthier to learn how to do difficult things.

You don't know this.

> Willpower is a muscle.

I know you mean this in a figurative sense, but what exactly is "willpower"? There has to be a physical (and physiological) mechanism for "willpower", no?

Do you believe that can be aberrant physiological conditions?

I do. I also believe over-eating is a manifestation of some type of "aberrant" physiology.

> People only come out of the woodwork because it suddenly happened to be worth a lot.

I used to work in pharma with a chemist whose medicinal chem team had invented 3 different multi-billion-$ prescription drugs.

He told me ... no one gives a shit about your patents unless you start to make money. when that happens, your competitors suddenly remember that they invented your drug before you did.

He spent a considerable amount of time being deposed by lawyers from rival big-pharma companies.

> The medical field as a whole isn’t generally interested in understanding how medication, only in empirical measuring and qualify the effects.

I don't think this is quite correct. I mean many practitioners of medicine will have the attitude of ... "if it works, it works". And that's perfectly reasonable.

But if you understand the mechanism of action of a drug (or other treatment), it (often) makes it easier to improve a drug.

So ... some sectors of the "medical field" understandably care only about empirical results. But other sectors would prefer to understand what's going on.