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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Even if the electios are free in fair, I don’t think he’d be done in November.

    The only way he’s “done” is if GOP loses every single last senate seat up for grabs. Every single one in Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Kansas, Oklahoma, South Dakota, West Virginia, Florida, Texas, etc.

    Hell, most analysts think that Democrats don’t have a realistic chance of even getting a simple senate majority, let alone a veto-proof one or even a filibuster proof one.

    If they don’t then they cannot remove anyone from office, they cannot override vetos. Yes, they can decline to pass bills, but given their stance of ‘executive branch has supreme power’, they’ll just do illegal executive orders and ignore the courts unless the supreme court agrees with them. Trump is already declared immune from any and all crimes except by the Senate and has the ability to pardon any and all federal cases, and that’s assuming his own enforcement agencies even bother trying to punish anyone…


  • But then there are the differences.

    Let’s say the COVID vaccinne triggered a whole lot of new pharmarcies that specialized only in vacinnes. Still good news for Moderna. Except those new pharmacies can’t quite afford the vaccines they set up their business to work in. Moderna’s stock is so high though, that they can leverage that stock to get money to invest in those new pharmacies to give them money so they can buy the vacinnes.

    Then the pandemic passes and those pharmacies have no business and fold and their market cap collapses to zero and Moderna spent a bunch of money they didn’t actually have on now worthless equity, and their revenue and perceived value drops back to pre-bubble levels. Except even lower because they incurred liabilities that they didn’t have pre-bubble.

    For the crypto bubble, nVidia went out of their way to keep their financials out of it. But for AI they’ve been giving their biggest customers the money they need to buy nVidia’s product. Basically a cyclone of big top line numbers self-funded but enough to drive the markets wild for nVidia stock. The big players have likely already ensured billions of more secure assets that won’t pop as hard and so “why not?” to play with the extra ‘free’ money to see how big the numbers can go.








  • Challenge there being that seems to have proven elusive. It’s not too surprising, but trying to use machine learning for robotics is actually really hard.

    Driving is much easier, training data with video, audio, and other sensor input complete with how the human manipulated steering and two pedals.

    But direct human interaction with the environment is both much more complicated than three controls and is not instrumented. They are trying to build training data from remote operators, but it turns out we aren’t very good at controlling these things remotely anywhere close to acting directly. We are terrible teachers and there’s a fraction of the actionable data that other more successful models had to work with.

    If an AI sees a video of someone doing something, it can make a similar video, but can’t model how that might map to what it would see as unrelated motor and hydraulic operation.


  • Note that Tesla was clearly a viable business, I don’t see the justification for it being 3 times the value of ford, gm, Toyota, and Honda all put together.

    Generally people are not challenging the fundamental possibility of these as viable business, just that they don’t make sense at their valuations.

    Though I’ll agree that open ai particularly should get some skepticism. To the extent that actionable business models might emerge, I don’t see openai actually in a position to be a big party of any of it. Microsoft and Anthropic seem to mostly own business revenue, ChatGPT is generally not even providing the models people select when they are able to choose.


  • OEM license revenue represents a tiny tiny bit of their financials these days. They could just charge nothing for it and business wise no one probably notice much of a difference.

    It is foundational to a lot of what they do, but older devices are just as good for their subscription and tie in revenue. Hell I use my work subscription for office from Linux, complete with OneDrive filesystem synchronization. Microsoft gets all their money from my headcount even as I don’t even use Windows.

    But that capex could bite them hard if revenue falls to follow from it. That’s pretty much the only exposure investors care about.


  • Familiar but with a difference in my case.

    I’ve spent my entire career alternating between two experiences.

    One is being grilled why I an delivering what I think should be done instead of what the executives told me to do.

    The other is getting awards and promotions when it turns out that I was right and the customers loved it.

    It happened to work for me to do it my way, though my executives have usually simultaneously rented the implication they don’t have good vision, they also know how to leverage my success for themselves. Particularly this most recent promotion has been stalled to reward better drones instead, but it’s looking like they have to pivot back to rewarding the folks the paying customers actually like instead of those that feed the executive egos.







  • Yes, but even then you’d expect the faltering to be reflected, just earlier. As the analysts estimate low profits you’d expect the stock to suffer a sharp decline then.

    Given how overvalued Tesla is arguably in general and that the rationalization is that while it’s not the biggest and best brand now, but their growth trajectory should carry them past all the other automakers, it’s insane that they are only down 11% from their late december highs, and still showing a $1.4 trillion market cap…

    It’s not a company that looks like growth nor do their current results look to justify that crazy valuation. They are valued at 3x Ford, GM, Toyota, and Honda combined, despite having more modest business results than any of them.

    Yes, this local move upward on beating estimates despite a bad result is normal, but the broader trend of this stock is still anything but.

    They squandered their reputation to gain political clout that seems to have evaporated and are locked into EVs in a market where that’s no longer subsidized and a great deal of EV interest is muted now and other manufacturers are able to push out compelling EV cars. You know that Musk is going to take your money and spend it how he sees fit including obscene bonuses to himself…

    I just don’t understand Tesla investors at all at this point…


  • What i find funny are people building golang binaries without cgo and still wrapping them in full distro containers. Your binary uses nothing from the container and still it gets packaged that way…

    Seen so many developers incur a huge headache trying to figure out overly complicated container setup when they could just run their already static binary without any drama…