danielparsons

I find exactly the same for legal analysis. Great at ideation and proofreading but frequently misunderstands concepts and hallucinates conclusions from faulty premises.

I've been following this guy on youtube since he started - cool to see him posted here

I don't understand how PE manages to get debt financing for LBOs? Seems like a big risk for the creditors?

If I buy a corp at 10% net margin for 5x ebidta on 80% leverage, i’ve really paid 1x ebidta. then lets say 20% of revenue was going to R/D and stuff that would only pay off in a few years. I cut all R/D so now its at 30% net margin.

So I can triple my money every year because it’s now generating profits of 3x my original downpayment every year (minus interest payments). After a few years of zero R/D the company has no good products to sell, demand falls, and it’s declared insolvent. Well, I dont care about my 20% equity downpayment because I already got like a 3-9x return. But the debt financers are screwed.

I love how obsessed HN is with civilization. I put over 1000 hours into Civ 5 alone and was proud to beat diety (and then consistently beat diety). It's funny how many founders are big on civ. Zuck and Elon both apparently spent a lot of time during college on the series.

that's not true - it's also common in Canada and Japan

status-seeking isn't inherently bad or good, depends who's appreciation you are seeking

I think it just sounds like a fun game to be honest. By a goofy little overengineered piece of jewellery. Buy a bunch of them and join the club. Compare to your friends. Reminds me of pokemon cards on the school playground...

ah the classic "most people are mere sheep, unlike us Great Minds"

So what? We want to be the strongest. The principle is not 'dont spy', the principle is 'dont spy on ME'.

Because it's useful...

I do wonder if all this extra user data will be of much use. I suppose it could make commerce frictionless, recommending the exact product/service to you at the ideal moment, before you've even heard of it.

But the nature of innovative products and services is that most people don't know how to use them yet, and therefore they can't be recommended based on user data. So idk...

we need to start a paywalled private HN forum

Bit melodramatic. The US still has the most talent, most capital, and best property protections of anywhere in the world. Name a country that (1) doesn't have any quid-pro-quo system with the govt, and (2) has pro-growth pro-capitalist policies.

This was poorly worded but indeed rockefeller was the richest man ever by selling a commodity. But he did it by merging with all his competitors. Not sure Altman could pull that off here because most of the other models are attached to massive tech co's that can use AI as a loss leader for other profitable services.

*entire curve to-date (I should have clarified). Yes it will get better for a long time, but where we are on the curve is harder to say. Lots of metrics to choose from, like "well it's incorrect 90% less often than a year ago, so that's a 10x improvement!". But the real metric that matters is how useful it is to people, and based on user data it looks like the only area it's getting exponentially more useful YoY is for programming. Lot of coders using it 10x more than before to code 10x faster. Not sure any other profession uses it for more than a juiced-up search engine / proofreader.

the AI has gotten good enough that click-thru-rate on informational searches has fallen off a cliff. I have some blog posts for SEO, their CTR is like 0.1% now.

google search definitely has a moat. people build their websites to optimize for google's algorithm, therefore google users see better results -> google gets more users -> websites optimize for google -> repeat. Personally I never bother with 'bing SEO' or 'bing ppc ads'.

you're looking at nearly the entire curve of the tech's development. that's like saying lightbulbs became 99% more energy efficient and therefore will become another 99% more energy efficient. but most techs follow an S curve.

Seems like anthropic is the only company that really believes in AGI still, considering their neglect of the consumer market and continued worries about AI ethics

sammy boy needs to pull a rockefeller and buy up all the competitors. Maybe that's what all these backroom deals about datacentre investment will amount to...

I love the hex system - adds a lot of tactical depth. Choice of naval vs air vs land focus often comes down to who you're fighting and where. Then you turn around to fight someone else and realize your 20 veteran frigates are near useless despite your new enemy being coastal because all of their cities are tucked away in bays or behind hills...

civ 5 is now the most popular among hardcore civ fans. still in the top 100 games on steam. more than 2x the player count of its sequel

bragging about billing $400 an hour LOL

Good lessons!