danny_codes

The excess money goes into assets that people need to survive/thrive. In SF/Bay Area a lot of it goes into land appreciation (housing prices). The end effect is rampant homelessness (did you know a full 1% of SF is homeless), delayed family formation, and an ever-growing state bill to subsidize landowners.

Excess isn't a problem, it's the distribution of the excess. Right now (in America) pretty much all of it goes to the top couple percent. The bottom ~40% of Americans have, by all practical measures, experienced a reduction in standard of living compared to 1980. Like, yes, they can afford more trivialities. TVs are cheap, particle-board furniture is cheap, and so on. But the actually important things like healthcare, education, and housing have moved further out of reach.

So yes, it's nice that my Anthropic friends can retire to work on, in one case, their fantasy novels. I'm very happy they can focus on something they love (and I look forward to reading their books). However, that much capital concentration leads to a hefty chunk of our (really rather rich) country struggling to service basic needs (like having a roof).

He's generating a lot more pollution. It's reasonable to want equity around externalities, which is a distinct problem under capitalism.

LVT works just as well in space.

Is it? I switched to Kiro and it's essentially identical.. well a bit better because you get a better idea of what the harness is doing, but otherwise identical.

Sure, but 98% of what you buy is is either in the set of SKUs near you or substitutable for them. Near you only applies if you live among actual density of course.

Sounds like you want to have unequal representation. Or rather, you want to keep your privilege by preventing other people from gaining equal footing. You are right that this is a pretty central element of American society. However, I think we're at our best when we concede that this sort of thinking is counter-productive in the end. Cooperation is really the core mechanism for societal growth, so any efforts to prevent cooperation (in this case, by creating a subclass) is eventually self-defeating

> The problem I have with the immigration of today is that the levels of cultural distance are much, much higher than Ellis island.

Sounds like a good thing to me. More diversity means we can incorporate the best ideas from everyone, instead of a select few. But I suppose not everyone likes to try new things

But his base is largely not people benefiting from birthright citizenship (at least, not recently).. so if anything Trump would be an indicator that we need more immigration to counter the homegrown, um, MAGAts

That sounds like a great idea. The more citizens of your country the better. Note that US citizens pay taxes no matter where they live. So it's not a free ride by any means.

Birthright citizenship is one of the best things we have going for us. I see no reason why we should treat people differently depending on whether or not they have an imaginary stamp labeling them as special (IE, as citizens). Birthright citizenship ensures the problem of unequal representation is fixed over time. A self-fixing function, if you will.

Yeah there's no way that was the reason. I judge it to be a combination of FOMO and the big tech companies needing to pump demand for compute.

Damn that's crazy. Guess the take home test is dead now.

I never understood this behavior from undergrads though, you're paying so much for an education and then you just skip the education part? Why bother?

Why teach kids how to read, they can just take a picture of whatever text they want and have AI say it aloud.

Long-term downsides tend not to show up in studies for many years. For example, these drugs might increase cancer rates, but we wouldn't know for a few decades.

I imagine though that on-balance they'll be net positive because being overweight is just so bad for you.

> and thus far everyone has accepted it

For now. SC is becoming more partisan, which causes SC's credibility to decline. I assume there's a point where SC loses too much credibility and the existing system of balancing power breaks down.

I'm surprised they're legal. In fact, it looks like there are strict limits on them in CA

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Good luck finding anyone in SF who wants to replace open space with more density. SF is amazingly lucky that it has so much green space and it's a big reason the city is so desirable. Increasing sprawl into our open spaces seems like a really bad idea to me (and I assume most people who live in SF). You could argue we should replace golfing with other green-space uses, and I'm sure you'd find takers, but for more sprawl? I doubt it.

Also I never understood this obsession with "heritage". Why not promote the next generation of SF architecture instead? Modernize the victorian into increased density, create something new and creative. Over time blend the new-ness with the old. This ideology of stasis seems at-odds with SF's image as an innovation hub, both technologically and culturally. Why should our architecture be stagnant when our ethos is to constantly push forward?

This is one of the big loses we've had to NIMBYism / prop 13 / regressive zoning. We could have such cool, interesting architectural advances, but ironically our perverse urban development incentive structure discourages those kinds of innovations.

This seems wildly naive. This entire field is like 4 years old. We have quite frankly no idea about what things will look like in 4 more years.

Fortunately we have both a democracy and a constitution, making those sorts of things hard for the government to do.

How dare they steal what we already stole!

So they reduce their prices 50x and their revenue drops to $1B a year? And they're supposed to be worth $1T each? If there is an open model offering at the cost of inference + whatever margin you need to stay alive, then as inference falls Anthropic/OpenAI revenue also falls.

What's the end-game? It sounds like in this business, if you are right, your revenues drop every year.

SOTA models can be run by anybody with compute capacity. You can pay for GLM 5.2 inference right now via Fireworks AI and presumably several dozen other providers. So if you don't want vendor lock-in and rug-pulling (Anthropic has churned on their subscription model like 4-5 times in the past month) you can just pay an inference provider and have far more control over your environment.

Or we could build walkable cities so people can, you know, just walk to the restaurant.

I'm not sure I understand. The cynical analysis is that SpaceX insiders are dumping on retail at a high valuation. They know the valuation is ridiculous, but are relying on "dumb" retail (think wallstreetbeets level of gambling) and "forced" retail (your 401k) to create artificial demand so the valuation doesn't collapse until the insiders have sold.

The cynical part (that they know the valuation is ridiculous) is supported by the structure of the IPO. A 4% float with a, what, 30% retail component is unheard of. NASDAQ QQQ admission rule-change is also unheard of. If SpaceX insiders actually thought their company was worth $2T or whatever, why make this highly suspicious changes?

This is irrespective of whether or not SpaceX will eventually be worth more. It definitely could be. But when you look at this IPO, you can't help but catch a smell that something fishy is going on.

> The vast majority of US retirement savings are already tied to the military sector

The defense sector is 2% of the stock market. So if by majority you mean 2%, then that's a reasonable statement.

I mean we have trillionaires now, budget limitations are a political choice. Perhaps instead of giving all our resources to Elon we can, you know, pay teachers instead.

Billionaires can't have the UK passing sensible taxation policies to curtail the influence of the super-rich. If the UK achieves success in preventing the collapse of their society into a form of feudal poverty, Americans might catch on that there are other options. The Musk-types enjoy playing god and would rather risk systemic collapse than shed some part of their power.

Well probably your income will decrease slightly as your field gets automated. So you'll output twice the much for the same effort and make a bit less money.

The free fast-follow situation with open models seems to be a big "if" here. It's not particularly hard to set up OpenCode for your company and plug in one of the myriad inference providers running free models. All of these stacks are one release away from being a dramatically different value proposition, as proved by, well, Anthropic themselves.

I guess we'll see if people will pay a premium for Anthropic in ~6 months, 12 months, etc. If not, well, it's a race to commodity.