ses1984

Not every bit of code is going to be meaningless.

Just 99.999%.

Why not have sub agents talk to a payment service? Sub agents should ultimately be associated with a human or business entity, the human or business entity could provide a single payment service for agents.

The question isn’t whether or not they employed a particular tool, the question is how big of an impact did it have.

Do you want each sub agent to be able to anonymously transact?

KYC is probably particularly important in this space and it should be easily traceable to a human.

Maybe it’s just my lack of imagination, but I don’t see a use case for giving agents money when they can barely be trusted to not break out of a sandbox and cause hallucinatory chaos.

Let’s say for a minute this is a failure of my imagination. Does each sub agent really need to be able to independently transact?

You don’t need to open a bank account to get a prepaid debit card.

Or you could just give your agents a debit card number loaded with only as much money as you specify.

My one dog hates broccoli but she will choke it down just so the other one can’t have it.

Goyum?

Isn’t the post above saying the same thing after the part where you cut it off…?

14 em dashes

"recovery in progress -- not a comeback story with a bow on it"

Brand new account posting their own article.

:(

There's one use case where VMs don't work, real time media processing. Mac is the preferred platform for this kind of think by most users but I use one application which is windows exclusive: rocksmith. It's theoretically possible to get something that's only marginally worse than the native experience, but I've never seen it done. Even if I could do it, I don't know if I could accept how the app behaves in practice.

But they spent money that was earned already, not money that was raised or borrowed.

It must be nice to not need to use that crap, but one day you might.

I don’t think Amazon did that…?

Some things are easier to verify than they are to solve, right?

So if you see an answer on stack overflow, read it, comprehend it, and you can pretty easily mentally verify the correctness to a sufficient degree of confidence…

I guess I’m not worth my salt.

People especially wanted uber because uber charged below market rates by subsidizing rides with vc money.

> Nobody thought there was any remotely high chance of a poor quality rendering of an ape being worth more than a house for the indefinite future

Isn’t that what all the biggest bagholders thought?

How else do you explain anyone still holding a worthless NFT they spent thousands on?

At my last two jobs, smoke tests were a common topic of conversation.

I’m not sure what this has to do with the assertion above.

The only thing that changed is that California got richer, and it just so happens that wealth was evenly distributed.

How convenient.

Only billionaires get Pokémon?

You don’t use ceteris paribus to launch into a deep retrospective or forecast. It’s used to exaggerate the effect of a single variable to make a point about that variable, reductio ad absurdum .

You say it’s ridiculous to compare two equal companies with different backlogs, well it’s ridiculous to presume that they could have just produced $4.5b worth of product perfectly efficiently if they wanted to.

It’s just used to make the point that all other things being equal, some backlog is better than no backlog. You can invent all kinds of reasons why having a backlog is bad, but in any of those situations, if everything in the backlog was canceled at once that would probably be bad, right?

Because they don’t want to have to work that hard for their money. They get more value for their effort by focusing on something else instead of trying to maximize profit for a single business.

The demand curve for a business could be such that you sell 100 widgets and get $100 profit, sell 200 widgets get $101 profit. Why bother trying to sell more than 100 widgets?

Maybe you can sell 50 widgets and make $90, that sounds like a pretty good deal. Instead of making 50 more widgets you could do something else and make more than $10 profit in the same time.

Have you ever heard the phrase ceteris paribus? It means all other things being equal. It's a phrase economists use to discuss things in the ideal, sort of like, "imagine a spherical cow in a vacuum" but for economics.

The point of the exercise is not to suppose what other things could have been different to allow these two hypothetical companies to end up in the described state. The point is to actually freeze everything else, do not allow it to vary, and look at the backlog in isolation. Obviously such a situation would never actually arise. Even if things were trending in that direction, the two companies would very quickly diverge from ceteris paribus.

Obviously having a backlog is better than no backlog because unless you make a new sale tomorrow, you have a problem. You will have idle capital and labor resources. Which company do you think has easier access to credit?

Private equity is very much interested in the margins. That is one of the key differences between private and public companies. Public companies are under pressure to grow at all costs. PE would probably be satisfied to make half the profit and double the margin, especially if it also happens to position the company for a more favorable sale. Would you rather buy a business that's at 5 or 10% margin?

The depth of the backlog also happens to be a pretty decent proxy for how much competition there is the market. A deep backlog means there isn't another firm around to fill that demand. That makes your company look better.

Let's go a little left/up the funnel. Imagine two startups, all things equal, their sales funnel goes wide > qualified > sale. They consistently convert 5% of qualified leads into sales. Do you want to be the company that has zero qualified leads, or $4.5b of qualified leads?

Let’s compare two hypothetical companies. They are equal in every way except one has a $4.5b backlog and one has a $0 backlog. Which company would you rather own?

You can fire a lot of decoys and one nuke.

If you get the impression of punk and anarchy, it's only because you're not looking any deeper than the veneer. Underneath, it's nothing like punk or anarchy.

This was already litigated decades ago in the USA, fender trademarked the headstock and lost in on the body. The bodies have been copied for 60ish years already, basically as long as they existed. Fender tried to trademark body shapes decades after and they lost on appeal in 2009.

A barely related ruling in the EU which has very different copyright and trademark law is being used as the basis for this suit.

Linus also said

“AI tools are great, but only if they actually help, rather than cause unnecessary pain and pointless make-believe work,” he wrote. “Feel free to use them, but use them in a way that is productive and makes for a better experience.”

So I think the closing remark from the register isn’t really appropriate given the context from the quotes they pulled.