ericd

Another bad one I've heard, buying thinly traded penny stocks as a way to exfiltrate money from brokerage accounts without wiring.

Anyone have any thoughts on what happens when banks/brokerages start getting hit in earnest? Think it's prudent to split single brokerage portfolios across multiple? Or do they have enough speed bumps in their procedures that they're not quite so vulnerable to major losses?

The specifics are tough, but the rough shape isn't impossible. But it's hard, which is part of why most people try not to do it publicly with much confidence, lest they look like they're not worth listening to on the topic. Like, why are we listening to his opinions on this when he so clearly isn't an expert, and so many of his past opinions on it have been so far off?

And I think a big part of why you shouldn't listen to him is that he's said repeatedly that he doesn't really use generative AI outside of occasional experiments - he hasn't seen its potential enough to bother using it himself beyond some initial tests. Which is fine, but I think it also means that he likely doesn't have a good intuition of the likely future demand, which is pretty key in figuring out whether debt loads are likely to be sustainable or not. Investing is fundamentally about trying to predict the future and putting your money into the things that will likely be successful there. And he's demonstrably been terrible at predicting the future of this stuff.

Except the GPUs last a lot longer than 3 years - A100s are 6 years old at this point and still in heavy use.

Oh yeah, for sure, they're nice. Just mean that it's also just a real utilitarian benefit for those without technical aptitude.

Yep, for someone with ~zero technical aptitude, I'd happily pay the premium for decreasing the number of things that can go wrong. Things getting unplugged accidentally account for a lot of tech support.

I'd say Snow Leopard was peak.

I think the only real solution to this is to switch to an OS with a backing org that has optimization for power users as a first-class goal. I've been liking Omarchy and NixOS for that. I say this as a Mac user since 1989.

It's a nice thought, but the strategic implications make it very hairy, and international trust isn't going in the right direction for that. But within large countries like the US with very varied climates, it seems like we really should.

Maybe you're thinking of B Corp? That's just a certification from some group. Public Benefit Corporation, on the other hand, changes directors' fiduciary responsibilities. For example, earlier this year, the Delaware Court of Chancery ruled that PBC directors are not obligated to maximize shareholder value when selling control of their company.

I highly recommend Eric Ries' new book Incorruptible if you want to learn more about this stuff. In there he tells the story of the Vectura Group, a pharma company that was developing treatments for asthma and other respiratory diseases. It was looking at a sale, and it had a couple offers, the one from Phillip Morris slightly edged out the other, and because of fiduciary duty, even though many involved viscerally hated the idea of going to Phillip Morris, as the cause of many of the ailments they sought to cure, they sold to them.

Yeah, a copy of office I bought bricking myself, even while constantly keeping office autoupdate running was my last straw with them. Fortunately, LibreOffice seems to be mostly good enough now.

Good thing LLMs are really good at translation tasks?