gphil

Yes, I actually linked to Open AI’s discussion of GPT-4o being overly sycophantic. I think this is a tunable parameter that they are going to use, and I fully agree re corporate cultures.

> I hope everyone here gets to have the experience of seeing HN discuss something that you're an expert in. It's eye-opening to see how confidently wrong most poasters are.

This is so true. And not confined to HN.

I also recently came across some of these fake company campaigns with attached employee profiles. It's very hard to distinguish them from legitimate companies.

It's especially hard now that many legitimate companies use a lot of generic sounding AI-generated content, which seems to be same approach the spam/phish/malware teams are using.

IMO we need some kind of zero-knowledge proof system that can be checked to verify if a message sender is a US citizen, employed by who they say they are employed by etc.

I don't see how we can trust anything in a post-generative AI world any other way.

The problem is that Twilio is not profitable. They wouldn't need to show a hockey stick if they were. Investor-subsidized, non-profitable companies have to sell growth to their investors because they have no other fundamental to point to.

Or: incumbent banks worried about disruption have the stronger lobby/influence.

I think the answer to both of your questions is yes. I think the related concepts of immutability and pure functions without mutable state allow for cleaner analytical modeling (and in some cases in strong functional languages, mathematical proof) of what that the code is actually going to do in production. That kind of predictability is essential for dealing with financial computations.

It depends on what you are looking at, but generally index returns (such as the FTSE 100) are calculated as if you are rebalancing your portfolio periodically to reflect the changing composition of the index over time, which is what a passive index fund manager would do for you if you were to invest in a FTSE 100 index fund, for example.

I am not aware of any non-index based stock market performance measures like what you are suggesting--e.g. if I bought all the stocks in the FTSE 100 index in 1994 and never rebalanced, what would have happened? I suspect that the returns would indeed have been a lot worse but I can't say for sure.

Do you live in or are you at least familiar with Philly? This comparison is cherry-picking a WeWork the nicest area in the city and juxtaposing it with an office space in/near one of the worst neighborhoods. Of course the prices are going to be like this.

In a lot of places it's illegal to ride motor vehicles on the sidewalk. I think the sweet spots for this are trails and low-traffic streets.

The problem with using "small business" as a blanket term is that they vary widely in stage and ambition. For example, it's a mouthful to distinguish between "brand new small business" and "established small business" as well as "small business that intends to stay small" and "small business that intends to pursue growth to become medium-sized or large-sized without taking dilutive investment."

OK, then I agree with you completely now that I understand. I concur we should incent small and family businesses.

I was with you until the last sentence:

> This means tax cuts but above all simplifications of the relevant law.

How do you pay for the poorest to have tolerable lives with tax cuts? Or are you talking about cutting out regressive taxes on the working poor?