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mbesto

16,161 karma · joined November 19, 2010

M&A advisor to tech investors. Mainly providing tech due diligence and transaction integration advisory to PE/VC clients and their portfolio companies.

my user name AT google's mail service

I generally don't much effort into my grammar when commenting on HN, so I apologize in advance.

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mbesto··on LeCun has "zero concerns" about AI wiping out humanity, recent "rogue" incidents
There's also no consensus on the definition of AGI, so all of this discussion is moot anyway.
mbesto··on Gemini 4 Argon
> The famous theory of Dario Amodei was that AI was this winner-takes-all field where the first team to get a head start would never cede ground back.

It's also hilarious, because OpenAI had the lead and ceded ground already.

mbesto··on macOS Golden Gate Is a Buggy Mess
Please please can we get a modern Snow Leopard upgrade?
mbesto··on OpenAI's Sam Altman says it would be 'ill-advised' to go public in 2026
> The point is that openAI is currently messaging against IPO in 2026. That is news by itself

It's not news when it's not trustworthy...you missed my point.

mbesto··on OpenAI's Sam Altman says it would be 'ill-advised' to go public in 2026
Do people seriously trust what this guy says anymore?
mbesto··on We must pace the frontier
He can both believe that AND be the slime mold chief. His rationale doesn't excuse it - and worse this all degrades into a "trust me bro" situation.
mbesto··on Neki – Sharded Postgres
You can build good stuff, care, and be very opinionated...you can also be all of those things and still be an asshole.
mbesto··on Neki – Sharded Postgres
Did anyone say you said anything untruthful? No, they just called you an asshole. You can both be an asshole and be right.

PS - Just some advice that I learned in sales 101 early in my career...focusing on shit talking the competition generally isn't a strategy that works well.

mbesto··on The largest electric aircraft just flew [video]
> I told you how to check for yourself if you actually cared about veracity.

Which means nothing. You still dont get my point.

> Also this is just a conversation, not an academic debate

It can be both.

mbesto··on Formalizing Fermat's Last Theorem
> healthy profit margin (as near as we can tell from the outside)

Ugh we still don't know if this is true and it's nearly impossible to calculate without a full understanding of the real CAPEX cycle. Stop spreading these rumors until we know for sure.

mbesto··on The largest electric aircraft just flew [video]
> but they're very frequent.

Yet you state their frequency as some sort of statistical fact. Your anecdotal experience doesn't make it any more or less true.

mbesto··on GPT-6 Astra
> For the many people who resist the AGI label possibly ever being achieved, I'd be curious to hear takes on what would make you think Astra is yet to be AGI, and what would still need to be achieved for this to effectively be AGI from this point forward.

Simple. AGI is undefinable and benchmarks are notoriously flawed.

mbesto··on Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them
I use perplexity simply to avoid underlying vendor lock in.
mbesto··on How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
> his strategy for manipulating human attention has been correct.

"Correct" is not the word you're looking for here. More like "very effective". His strategy for manipulating human attention is very effective, but the correctness of his strategy isn't relevant here, so I'm not sure why you're bringing that up.

mbesto··on Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX
If the Opus/Fable harness is superior and it's written using Opus/Fable then it will cease to be a moat. Otherwise the premise for coding using LLMs is essentially untrue.
mbesto··on Vomit: Clean up Claude 5's token output with a separate LLM
> AGENTS.md does very little, agents will consistently violate the communication preferences, especially as the session drags on.

Non-determinism at its finest.

mbesto··on OpenLogi
> It seems that trust in OSS is eroding and big SaaS might win here because they have the reputation.

Yes because everyone trusts what SalesForce is doing with their data..

mbesto··on Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
(1) Because they can. Implied

(2) If you're WD, Seagate, etc. you may shift all your fabs to higher growth areas which means you create less supply for less demand products (spinning disks)

mbesto··on The Amazon tax
>I've slowly shifted all my consumer purchases from Amazon to local shops and other online platforms, including Etsy.

This is why I'm so bullish on Shopify. It increasingly is getting network effects (Shop.app) and people are starting to become even more brand loyal than before. Even Chinese companies are creating strong brand categories at a fraction of US counterparts and selling direct on Shopify to (e.g. Anker, Fnirsi, Fanttik, etc.)

mbesto··on The Amazon tax
Isn't it funny that marketers are usually the first people to complain about paying for marketing?

FWIW - I agree with the premise of the article, but I have to say - the reason these types of practices are acceptable in American culture is exactly because of prominent "marketing gurus".

mbesto··on When Genius Fails: The Intellectual Arrogance of the AI Labs
You can argue the semantics all you want and ignore the original premise of my comment - which is romanticising people who have perceived "foresight" is super weird.
mbesto··on When Genius Fails: The Intellectual Arrogance of the AI Labs
> This fund is not closing and not on a loss.

> Getting margin called and closed this way is not the same as going bankrupt.

Technically we don't actually know the details here since no one here is privy to the specific fund structure - which is very likely WAY more complex than reported.

So, realistically we're arguing semantics. I said it folded and for intents and purposes if you're getting margin called and have to sell, then that's folding.

Just like in poker I can fold and not play anymore and still have a stack of chips.

mbesto··on When Genius Fails: The Intellectual Arrogance of the AI Labs
It did.

It's not part of the strategy or operating agreement of a GP/LP structure to sell a specific fund to another investment firm at a discount. The fund may buy and sell assets to create returns for LPs but selling the fund itself at a discount is not a successful exit, e.g. they folded.

mbesto··on When Genius Fails: The Intellectual Arrogance of the AI Labs
He sold the fund to another buyer - it folded by every definition of the term.
mbesto··on When Genius Fails: The Intellectual Arrogance of the AI Labs
> generational foresight not available to 99.999999999999999999% of 25 year olds. I want to get ahead of the default cynicism and "oh it's just dumb luck woe is me" aspect of HN.

And I want to get ahead of this absurd romanticism. I have plenty of counterpoints in all types of technical domains (3D printing, blockchain, you name it). Oracles don't exist, just stories of right place right time survivors.

> That's what he based the fund on.

His thesis was so true that his fund folded. Fancy that.

mbesto··on When Genius Fails: The Intellectual Arrogance of the AI Labs
> It’s much easier to say someone else’s job is going to be fully replaceable by AI when you don’t actually know what they do.

This exactly. As someone who once lived in Silicon Valley and then ended up interviewing 700+ CxO's of profitable (or nearly profitable) SaaS businesses in various domain specific fields, it amazes me how many prominent "experts" in SV believed they were consistently "right" simply because they made enough bets to eventually get one right. Maybe not in enterprise value terms, but in volume of companies there are FAR more successful and profitable SaaS businesses that you've never heard of because they were started by entrepreneurs in their respective domains (the MD who started an EHR platform or the truck driver who started a TMS solution, etc.).

mbesto··on What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers
The entire premise of the article is that we're being promised that an entire workforce is going to be eliminated overnight. The people who are promising this, do not care about what happens to the working class. This is clearly causing anxiety.

The comparison is useful. Printers had decades to pivot and hence the anxiety didn't exist like it does today. Today's capital allocated wants this to happen within a decade.

mbesto··on US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects
Also, two other characteristics of the fall of roman empire:

1. It struggled to remain "solvent" because it lost taxable provinces relative to the costs of wars, administration, etc.

2. It took years for it to eventually "fall". It didn't just magically disappear overnight.

mbesto··on A $500 RL fine-tune of a 9B open model beat frontier models on catalog review
This is basically the entire argument by Richard Sutton happening in real time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21EYKqUsPfg

Right now, we keep creating new models with larger and larger weights and throwing hardware at it. His argument is that this is a dead end and ultimately we'll eventually go back to purpose fit algorithms like we've always done in the history of AI development.

mbesto··on Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources
> Visa or MasterCard is making the bulk of the commission

They are not. Payment facilitators (like Stripe) are.

https://images.prismic.io/sacra/30d7bd58-8149-461e-a3c2-8a4a...

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