zirkonit

Amazon had valuation of $60M at their first venture round, and it took them 19 years to 3500x it to $200B.

Anthropic had valuation of $550M at their first venture round, and assuming it IPOs at roughly $2T, it will take them 5 years to give this 3500x return to their initial investors.

I don't understand why people are unhappy when SO MUCH shareholder value is being created.

Since ChatGPT's initial release, the S&P 500's combined market cap has grown by about $33 trillion, roughly doubling. Before that, it took 31 years to add the same amount.

Isn't that what we should all care about, making sure capital holders get more capital? As long as BlackRock's assets under management keep growing, we should be happy. Trickle-down economics will definitely trickle down eventually.

(Since Hacker News is unusually tough on sarcasm, I grudgingly have to end this with /s)

Our family volunteers at a nonprofit that moves a huge number of books. We take donations and run massive charity sales, clearing tens of thousands of books a month. Pricing works like a ladder: you try to sell a book for a couple of bucks, then for a dollar, then by the $5 bag, then for free, and you still end up with thousands of books nobody wants even at no cost. These used to go straight to pulp. Now they go to AI labs for scanning. Would we rather they were read, or at least owned, by someone? Yes. Is scanning better than turning them into toilet paper? Yes, even if only marginally.

I'm sure the Anthropics of the world have shredded the last known copies of plenty of titles. But nobody talks about the last known copies that get pulped every day simply because there are so many books nobody wants and storing them is expensive.

I'm especially enjoying how RAM and SSDs are going down in price.

Up to 47.

Funnily enough, for me AI writing is usually the summarizer rather than expander. I would usually give Claude 2-3x the amount of data in notes, context, braindump etc; when doing person-to-person communication, using AI to _expand_ the context rather than shrink it is doing everyone a disservice.

At some point, the rabid anti-generative AI crowd becomes tiring. This is extremely masturbatory and very intellectually lazy piece of writing whose only purpose is to raise cheers from the same echo chamber an author is in.

But, but, how does the pelican look?!

Based on the name, he's either Ukrainian running away from the war, or Russian, running away from being complicit in the war. Shitty situation to be in either way.

Necessary context for someone probably being more detached from US politics:

Former FBI Director James Comey — fired by Trump in 2017 and one of his most prominent critics ever since — was indicted this week by Trump's Justice Department for allegedly threatening the president's life through a May 2025 Instagram photo of seashells arranged to spell "8647" (a protest slogan where "86" is slang for "get rid of" and "47" refers to Trump as the 47th president), which Comey says he intended as political commentary, not a call to violence.

A comment based on the reading of the title that could only be conceived if the commenter didn't bother to click the article at all.

An uncalled-for ad hominem that serves to quickly devolve the discussion in opinionated ragebait.

In consumer space, 69 KB of RAM (138 x 4 kbit chips) would cost around $1700 70s dollars for the entire package, ~$10k in modern dollars.

Radioationed hardened for space though — $50k-$100k in 70s dollars, roughly the price of a Silicon Valley house back then - $300k-$600k in today's money.

David Bowie was always the pioneer with regards to the Internet. Launched his own ISP in 1998, probably the first mainstream musician with a website (in 1994!), first concert streamed in 1997, etc. etc.