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spiantino

349 karma · joined November 27, 2010

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spiantino··on Nvidia's $20B antitrust loophole
Founders could either get paid through secondary as well or through new employment agreements. Secondary is much more tax efficient, otherwise it doesn't really matter
spiantino··on Nvidia's $20B antitrust loophole
i thought so at first, but I did some digging and changed my mind. it's possible the following is how it goes:

- secondary transaction with the preferred shareholders (VCs) at some price that implies a 20b valuation

- founders quit and get new employment agreements

- some cash is transferred to the company as a license fee

- no acquisition means no DOJ approval

in this scenario the headline can be $20b but the cash expense can be much lower, you have full flexibility to direct whatever cash or equity you want to founders vs the rest of the company, as an up front payment or as retention/salary, and the founders have no hinderance from working on anything they touched at previous company because of IP license.

I actually bet this is how it went down. This is becoming the standard in the industry and it's just awful for the future of SV

spiantino··on Nvidia's $20B antitrust loophole
I don't think you can treat owners of the same shares differently in the way this is suggesting. The VC shareholders and the employee shareholders are probably on equal footing and getting the same price. VCs will own preferred but I doubt that is enough to windfall them at the expense of the common shareholders.

So if VCs are getting paid a certain share price, employees with vested stock almost certainly are getting the same price. And probably employees with vested options can either exercise now or will just get paid the net during the transaction.

Yes, the company is probably doomed so people staying there are not doing well, but they also just got paid a 3x premium on their vested equity.

spiantino··on Ventoy: Create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI Files
Ventoy rocks
spiantino··on Starship: The minimal, fast, and customizable prompt for any shell
Starship + Ghostty has been an awesome (and fast) experience.
spiantino··on OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive
Kind of both? "While Ive and LoveFrom will remain independent, they will take over design for all of OpenAI, including its software. Altman said his first conversations with Ive weren’t about hardware, but rather about how to improve the interface of ChatGPT."
spiantino··on Stats – macOS system monitor in your menu bar
Stats + Hidden Bar + Brave are my first 3 downloads on any new Mac
spiantino··on Boom XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video]
seems too small. where do the passengers go?
spiantino··on The Rate of Return on Everything, 1870–2015 (2019)
Especially when you consider all the tax affordances related to owning real estate vs. equities.
spiantino··on What Extropic is building
Obvious grifty nonsense.
spiantino··on What Extropic is building
So exciting! We'd be walking amongst our GAI brethren this very day if it weren't for the computational limits of those pesky RNGs!
spiantino··on Gemma: New Open Models
out of curiosity, why is this a "terms" and not a license? I'm used to reading and understanding the software as coming with a license to use it. Do the terms give us license to use this explicitly?
spiantino··on Gemma: New Open Models
Maybe a dumb question, but why is there a Terms instead of a license? That feels a little flimsier as an open source offering
spiantino··on Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO
The EA community includes a lot of AI folks, as well as philanthropists like Dustin.

That doesn't mean this is this kind of conspiracy

spiantino··on Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories
I think a slitting mill is a different thing than the iron foundries described here
spiantino··on Reddit’s plan to kill third-party apps sparks widespread protests
If you click the three dots on a recommendation you can select "show less like this" and you won't see recommendations from that subreddit. Also, there is a setting in user settings to prevent recommendations from subs you don't subscribe to from appearing at all, but I would give the algorithm a chance since there are interesting subs you probably aren't aware of.

Also, I wouldn't call making recommendations in home feed a growth hack, fwiw.

spiantino··on Improving Tailscale via Apple’s open source
I wonder if this will help with the iOS app's battery drain issues. VPNs of any kind come with a battery penalty, but some of these issues might have exacerbated that
spiantino··on Starlink internet is going from rural savior to unreliable luxury
That's a strange interpretation of a new upstart utility pricing itself out of competition.
spiantino··on Color of the Night Sky (2019)
Dr. Clark is pretty active on Reddit. He's helped me process astrophotography data in the past, particularly when using DSLRs

http://reddit.com/u/rnclark

spiantino··on FX swap debt a $80T 'blind spot', global regulator says
OK I lied and opened the article:

"FX swap markets, where for example a Dutch pension fund or Japanese insurer borrows dollars and lends euro or yen before later repaying them, have a history of problems."

Isn't this false? If we do a swap nobody borrows anything, we just agree to track the returns and pay the difference in one direction or another. An FX forward does the same thing, but actually involves borrowing from a bank, which is why the swap is easier.

Anyway that's my understanding

spiantino··on FX swap debt a $80T 'blind spot', global regulator says
Calling the total notional value of a pile of swaps "debt" is really misleading. If you and I do $1m in fx swaps, in no sense do either of us owe each other $1m. Currency swaps settle daily I think, so if one of us goes bust all that happens is that I don't get your payments and my currency risk goes back to what it was.

Anyway, headline is sensational enough that I'm not willing to read the article

spiantino··on What is spacetime made of?
I think what you're describing is nonlocality? It's well-described by quantum mechanics, which sits on top of regular old continuous spacetime. Is that not the direct mapping you're talking about?
spiantino··on We will not pursue the potential acquisition of FTX
I think the point of that saying is that when you get fooled a second time you have nobody to blame but yourself
spiantino··on Alphabet Q2 FY2022 Earnings [pdf]
Here are accurate numbers:

Google Q2: 70B, ads: 57B, cloud 6B. Net profit: $16B

Amazon Q1: 117B, ads: 8B, cloud 18B. Net profit: -$4B

spiantino··on Uber broke laws, duped police and built lobbying operation, leak reveals
Did you read the article? You like Uber a lot, congrats, what does that have to do with this?
spiantino··on Twitter plans to comply with Musk’s demands for data
He doesn’t need MAE here, he would need to show the company broke a covenant - specifically the one saying they will provide reasonable answers / data to his inquiries. It’s a stretch, though
spiantino··on Jump Trading sues 79-year-old Carl Sagan fan over wormhole.com domain
What would the remedy be, though? Would the court say you had a contract so you have to sell/transfer the domain? Or would they say, you're in breach of a contract and so Jump can sue you for damages from your breach of the contract?
spiantino··on On anti-crypto toxicity
Think about how much bullshit you can justify with this argument.

if someone has to defend their tech by using analogy to the early web, it's probably bullshit

spiantino··on Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
Your logic would make it seem like a hostile takeover would be accepted with any premium, and companies routinely have to bid 40 or 50% higher.

Maybe it's different with a poison pill in place as the onus is on the board, but I don't think its obvious what the board should/will do

spiantino··on Qubits based on FinFET at above 4 kelvin and use holes as spin qubits
I think this translates to "technique to build a quantum computer using traditional silicon, maybe"
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