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kipchak

1,083 karma · joined December 26, 2017

normal fella
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kipchak··on Meta Muse Glimmer – open weights 30B local coding model
Think they're talking about things that are free as in beer but not free as in freedom, not FOSS
kipchak··on Nothing works and everyone is euphoric
I think the trouble you are experiencing is you are basically asking people to change or update their whole framework for looking at the world. The identity portion is to some extent a load bearing column. It's like asking a hunter gatherer to think about individual property rights.
kipchak··on AI Companies Are Trying to Hide a Staggering Amount of Debt
Looking at for example 1965, the top 10 of the S&P500 were, rounded, ATT 9%, GM 7%, Exxon (4%) IBM (4%) DuPont (3%) Texaco (3%) Sears (3%) GE 2%, Kodak 2%, Gulf 1%, for a total of 38%.

This is pretty close to current concentration, but the current top 10% is basically all technology except for Eli Lily at 1.5%, so in that sense it's arguably unprecedented.

There's a good chart here on page 5 of top 10 weights over time, and on 6 of how the 1965 top 10 fared to 2025.

https://corporate.vanguard.com/content/dam/corp/research/pdf...

kipchak··on AI Companies Are Trying to Hide a Staggering Amount of Debt
In that sense, isn't the 60/40 or Boglehead perspective also timing the market, in the sense that you are betting the regime of the past will continue into the near future?

To me the diversification hedge options (say GUNR) seem like they are helping you get closer to regime neutral. Or in other words you are giving up returns to cover more macro scenarios and betting less on what the future looks like.

kipchak··on AI Companies Are Trying to Hide a Staggering Amount of Debt
I think the risk for increasing your bond exposure as compensation would be if instead of a low growth/low inflation scenario (Bonds do well) there's a low growth+high inflation scenario (1940s, 1970s, 2022) and the negative correlation between stocks and bonds doesn't hold.
kipchak··on AI Companies Are Trying to Hide a Staggering Amount of Debt
Regardless of whether it's a good idea, it absolutely happens and as a result would impact retirees, both in individually managed accounts and target date funds. For example here 70+ are 45% equity.[1] TROW retirement 2020 funds are about 50% stock, for example, and only decrease to a floor of 30%.

https://workplace.vanguard.com/content/dam/inst/iig-transfor... (page 78)

kipchak··on AI Companies Are Trying to Hide a Staggering Amount of Debt
Regarding unprecedented concentration, wasn't the nifty fifty era comparable for the top 10, about 40%?
kipchak··on The lost joy of music piracy
For the lyrics/vocals, the closest I can think of is Brat by MoxiFloxi though the genre isn't quite a match, the lyrics/vibe is sort of their "thing". Maybe one of the Benny Bassani Satisfaction remixes or Halogen - U Got also that but they're further.
kipchak··on How to read more books
There's only so much time we have. If I can filter out a category of music (slop) I know from experience I'm 99% likely to not enjoy I'd like to be able to.
kipchak··on Apple to increase spend with Broadcom to produce billions more U.S. chips
In terms of the country's overall health I think you could argue we've sold industrial capacity for wealth, and it's too early to say if it was a good trade. Reliance on China for Rare Earth Minerals is commonly referenced, [1] but China is in general a major supplier to the DoW, which negatively hampers our ability to for example credibly deter an invasion of Taiwan. Arguably Post WWII Pax Americana, which relies on industrial capacity, has kept the peace more so than economic interdependence. For example Pre WWI Germany and the UK were each others' largest trading partner, and a conflict was argued to be economically unthinkable. [2]

It also increases the immiseration of those in the areas replaced[3], which is likely a contributor to rising populism and political instability. Most of this malaise is just hidden in places like the Rust Belt.

[1]https://www.csis.org/analysis/rare-earth-export-restrictions...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion

[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disease_of_despair

kipchak··on Resetting Xbox
There's a bit of Mad Libs in there as well, you can for example add your own conversation topics or draw your own food items or pets which the characters will then talk to each other about.
kipchak··on Nintendo has raised its employees base salary by 10%
I think they're ordering it as a la carte vs a combo. The same items are $20.5 vs $13 pretax at the location closest to me in Florida.
kipchak··on Nintendo has raised its employees base salary by 10%
I agree, though 2 seems pretty tricky to navigate/predict. For example I wouldn't have guessed Advanced Wars would get a new release after Days of Ruin, or with Earthbound I could maybe see Mother 3 finally getting a US release with how popular Undertale/Deltarune has been. Maybe the best option is to be as under the radar as possible until it's done and out.
kipchak··on Nintendo has raised its employees base salary by 10%
Part of this was the Spaceworld 2000 demo creating expectations for a game which looked basically like Ocarina of Time but on the GameCube. Then when Twilight Princess came out people missed the Wind Waker art style and the cycle continued.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNrOHY2HZqs

kipchak··on Nintendo has raised its employees base salary by 10%
AM2R for example was distributed for free and DMCA-ed.
kipchak··on Linux for the Sega MegaDrive
Comix Zone holds up well too I think.
kipchak··on Venezuela reveals $240B in debt it cannot pay (~$100B more than expected)
imo this sort of strategy is not decided at the POTUS level, or at least there's consensus. For example during Biden's term the trade war largely persisted or expanded.

Competing in terms of production is realistically not an option (Triffin Dilemma, strong currency means exports other than tech/finance are inherently noncompetitive). Competitive exports would require giving up the dollar as a unilateral reserve currency, and China for the reverse reasons, at least for now, does not seem to want the Yuan to be a reserve currency. My personal read is both sides wish for something like the current system to persist but on more favorable terms.

I agree China has been actively taking steps for this scenario, but that they're continuing to make strides seems to indicate it is still an issue. I think we're still in the thick of it before a victor is conclusively decided either way.

kipchak··on Venezuela reveals $240B in debt it cannot pay (~$100B more than expected)
The pro argument I find most convincing is that the US's interest is mostly in restricting oil going from Venezuela to China, which previously was the majority destination of of Venezuela's imports. A similar case can be made for Iran.

China possibly expecting something to this effect has recently built up both it's coal and renewables capacity, as well as an extremely large SPR.

kipchak··on Steam Machine launches today
I don't think the goal here is to necessarily sell a bunch of hardware units, but to create a new product category of devices which buy games from steam, like the steam deck did with handheld gaming PCs.
kipchak··on The dead economy theory
This is the normal economist understanding for how things should or aught to work (Ford paying his workers so they can buy his cars), but it is not necessarily how they must work in practice.

Colonial economies did not require the lowest earners to contribute to demand nor Rome when it transitioned from small farmholders to consolidated farms and slaves, or modern gulf states. The examples are arguably unhealthy as economies long term, but practically they may persist for fairly long periods of time.

kipchak··on The dead economy theory
This is already to some extent a solved problem. The top 10% of households in the US for example are 50% of spending, the "horses" to a large extent already don't matter to the economy. This is similar to the relationship between US consumers and workers in undeveloped nations during globalization. Historically this tends to be resolved when it creates an unsustainable level of political instability, but there are many new ways of managing this.

https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2026/05/tracki...

kipchak··on USDA Projects Smallest US Wheat Harvest Since 1972 Due to Plains Drought
There's a risk of food prices increasing across the board and shortages in poorer countries if fertilizer exports stay restricted, or in other words increased demand for soybeans in the later half of 2026.
kipchak··on France pulls last gold held in US for $15B gain
I seem to be having more luck with French language sources, mostly the Bank of France records. From what I can tell the shipping was done mostly commercially with some later by air[1]. Reportedly De Gaulle was frustrated with the speed of change wanted to use the Colbert warship but was dissuaded by the minister of finance.[2]

[1]https://archives-historiques.banque-france.fr/ark:/56433/115...

[2]https://www.lesechos.fr/finance-marches/banque-assurances/st...

kipchak··on People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account
I'm not sure if I'm lucky or it's because I have feature releases deferred or if the tool ripped enough things out but this hasn't been my experience so far. If it does you could save off the changes as a JSON template and re-apply after updates, or automatically with task scheduler.
kipchak··on People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account
I've had good luck with the winutil tool, which is wrapper for a bunch of powershell commands and registry edits in a .ps1 to remove bloat. After using it on a fresh install I can't recall the last time I've had any of the mentioned issues.

If you're (understandably) concerned about the security implications most of the changes can be done manually going off the docs.

https://github.com/christitustech/winutil

kipchak··on Despite Doubts, Federal Cyber Experts Approved Microsoft Cloud Service
As far as I know numbers aren't reported, but there's probably at least as many DIB GCC-H customers as government, who in part use it because the government does and it's compliant. Once they're locked in it's very hard to migrate.
kipchak··on U.S. Navy turns down Hormuz escort requests because of high risk
I'm reminded of the pre ww1 Berlin–Baghdad railway.
kipchak··on World-first gigabit laser link between aircraft and geostationary satellite
There's a patent (2017/0280211 A1) for using this as a data storage method, and there was a company called Lyteloop trying to leverage the idea for data storage with estimations for petabytes across constellation.
kipchak··on Rise of the Triforce
Agree on the rest, but thankfully for #3 a modern base ND Miata with the 1.5 is pretty close to in weight to a NA due to a lot of weight saving work by Mazda.
kipchak··on A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs
Thanks, trying to figure out the timeline relative to the board's creation given how close they are. The first email I can find related to a meeting is this one from Boris Nikolic on Oct 20th, with /pol/ on the 23rd.

https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA01992...

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