vmbm

I am interested. Every few months, I loop back to using LLM's for this type of task but have always had fairly mixed results. Not sure if it is my prompt, model choice, or the part itself being too complex. And I haven't had the time to really dig into why things aren't working out. But would be nice to find a workflow that gets good results as I regularly 3D print stuff for hobby projects but find 3D modeling to be the most tedious and time intensive task.

What levels of wealth are you referring to. I could believe that a doctor or lawyer is more likely to use passive strategies compared to a retail worker, who might just have a small Robinhood account for gambling. But the levels I am talking about are the ultra wealthy vs the middle class. Elon is not using passive index investing for any meaningful amount of his net worth. The vast majority of that is in his companies, which is not a passive investment. The same holds true most of the other ultra wealthy. And the top 1% controls about half the wealth in this country. So I think it is fair to say that they are going to be overrepresented in the active basket.

Sure, but it's the Americans that can least afford to be stood up as exit liquidity that have the most exposure here relative to their net worth. The ultra wealthy are going to be heavily overrepresented in the active basket. Meanwhile the folks lower down on the income scale are more likely to have their money in passive funds.

Yeah, I don't doubt that there was some abuse going on. But keep in mind there are plenty of reports out there that companies were setting up tokenmaxing leaderboards essentially encouraging this type of behavior from their employees. So I think the broader point here is that the insane growth that Anthropic has experienced over the last six months might be a temporary blip due to companies scrambling to take advantage of these more powerful agentic capabilities while not fully understanding the resulting costs.

I think for your use case, the most likely outcome is that you are going to need to be on a $100-200 month plan if you want access to the cutting edge models. But on the other end of the spectrum, you could probably get closer to $10-20 month using Chinese models. My usage was closer to yours, with the occasional tokenmaxxing sprint just to experiment a bit and test out the limits of the plan. I am not quite sure what I will be doing next month once it moves to API billing but I suspect I will move to openrouter and one of the open source CLI harnesses.

For the longest time Copilot was the best deal in town. For $10 a month you would get ~1300 requests. A single prompt was counted as a request, and it didn't matter how many tokens were used or how many loops the agent did. It was a spectacular deal. Of course, now that they are moving to API based billing the plan is a not really a deal at all. The monthly plan is essentially pre-paying for API credits, which are use it or lose it and they are not discounted in any way.

And FYI, most enterprise accounts were forced to switch to a hybrid monthly seat license plus API based usage earlier this year. So that is why we are probably seeing so much alarm over Ai bills at the enterprise level. Companies went whole hog on agentic workflows not fully appreciating the costs structures of their new plans. Didn't help that pretty much every VC and board was probably breathing down their neck that if they didn't jump on the AI bandwagon they would get left behind.

Yeah, I think it is pretty obvious at this point that users have gotten over their skis a bit on the fixed rate plans. I suspect a lot of folks were playing around with agentic workflows on a $10-200/month plan and then started implementing them at their companies under enterprise accounts not realizing that API based billing would result in easily 10-100x the costs. Running hundreds of agents 24/7 is all fun and games when you can do it for beer money. Not as fun when it is super yacht money.

As an anecdote, Github is changing their copilot plan to usage based billing next month. They released a tool that allows their users to estimate what their bills will look like under the new plan based on their past usage. There are some screenshots online from users showing their plans will go from $40/month to $3-5k/month. I imagine this is happening everywhere. These tools absolutely can do more than they were capable of just six months ago. But if the true costs are as high as it appears, folks are going to be much more judicious with how they use them moving forward.

If the market is "efficient", then the debt should work against the market cap. For example if we assume a $50B offer at 50%/50% debt and stock, then we should expect the market cap to only increase by $25B. And for GME shareholders, they should expect their stock price to stay roughly the same because that $25B market cap would be offset by a corresponding increase in the number of shares. The debt would increase the enterprise value of the company, which is the more comprehensive metric to use when trying to value a company as it takes into account both debt obligations and cash on hand.

Of course the market may move the price up or down based on how much they like the merger. If they think there is some synergy here, they may move things higher. If they think the debt is too burdensome or have other issues with it, they will move the price lower. But all things being equal, any market cap increase of a buyout should be offset by the dilution that was incurred to finance the deal.

What looks like a "hack" here though, is that Cohen tied his incentive structure to market cap and not share price. The fact that his award is in the form of options and not RSU's does add some incentive for a higher share price, but at the end of the day, it looks like he can get 100% of his award by simply buying companies using dilutive stock issuance. Not sure how much the GME faithful appreciated that at the time of the vote. I think Elon did something similar in his incentive package.

The jury is still out on this. Those tax based deprecation schedules are largely a relic of traditional data centers, where workloads are fairly moderate compared to AI use cases. Additionally, power and rack space constraints can complicate things quite a bit. If next gen chips are significantly more efficient and you are currently constrained by power availability, you might pull your old servers and replace them with the newer ones regardless of how much useful life you have left.

I am all for Europe establishing a bit more autonomy in regards to energy and defense, but let's not forgot there is a very real reason things are the way the are. Europe had a long history of warfare and the post-WWII was specifically designed to try and reign that in. And as the U.S. is finding out, you can have a largely pacifist population, but it only takes one motivated individual to seize the reigns of power and kick off ill advised military adventures. So I think there is a rather convincing argument to be made that sometimes it is better to just not have those capabilities in the first place.

It is very difficult to ship and store oil in the volumes that are relevant to modern economies. We are very much in a situation where some regions are business as usual, some regions can't get oil at any cost, and some regions have so much oil they are stopping production because they don't have any where to store it.

In terms of how this impacts prices, the headline number is usually Brent crude, but there are a number of different "flavors" with various geopolitical factors that influence price[1]. For example, the US market is going to respond differently then the Indian market. The former is a net exporter halfway across the globe from the conflict area, the later gets a substantial portion of their oil through the Strait of Hormuz.

If the conflict carries on for a while things will probably normalize across markets as production and shipping adjust to the new reality. But in the short term you are going to have some folks mildly inconvenienced by slightly higher prices, while other folks might not even be able to fill their tanks.

[]1 https://oilprice.com/oil-price-charts/

Hard disagree. These are public markets we are talking about, which give companies access to financing from mom and pop investors. No one is forcing these companies to be public, they chose to be public because they wanted access to the liquidity provided by public markets. That liquidity is coming from folks retirement savings.

I was following a company that did an ATM offering in January. By June, less than six months later, they had entered Chapter 11. Things can move fast in the business world. A financing deal falling through at the wrong time can be the difference between business as usual and bankruptcy.

This change would largely benefit insiders and deep pocketed investors/funds that can afford bespoke data sources to fill in the gaps. And it feels like just another attempt by Wall street to force mom and pop investors into the role of dumb exit liquidity.

I have stopped doing index investing and have switched to actively managing my portfolio, so I haven't spent much time looking into it. I have seen a few posts on reddit (r/bogleheads in particular) and it looks like there are some names getting thrown out over there, as well as discussion about particular ETF's rules regarding these types of changes.

If you are an index investor, it is probably not worth your time and energy to make any drastic changes because of this particular incident. Space X will comprise a small percentage of the indexes in question, and any impact on your portfolio will likely be imperceptible. And if your holdings are in a taxable account, the tax hit from selling are probably not worth it.

Longer term, folks should be aware that Wall Street has fully caught on to the normalization of index investing and have been looking at ways to use passive investors as exit liquidity. Private equity and private credit are the two recent high profile examples. There was an executive order recently that directed the federal government to consider allowing these asset classes into 401k's. And these sectors have been increasingly making there way into the public markets in various ways (which is ironic considering the name of the asset class). Same story with crypto.

In the past, most passive index investors worried about fees and portfolio composition and diversity. But moving forward it is probably worth thinking about index governance as well. For example the S&P500 has a one year waiting period before an public company can be considered.

Do you know if First Brand's actions are considered fraud? Or was this entirely on the lenders to make sure they were in the clear regarding the collateral? Doesn't excuse the lack of diligence, but curious if there was some assumption of good faith that may have played a role in what diligence was or was not done.

It is incredibly hard to make money going short. Even if you are right about the direction, most short positions require interest payments to hold, or have some sort of decay built into the structure. So timing is everything and even then, if the underlying security slowly grinds down (instead of a quick abrupt move) you could still lose if the interest/decay on the short position outruns the downward movement on the underlying.

I have been actively trading in the market for a little over a year now, and while winning on a short position is probably the most satisfying trade for me, the overwhelming majority of those trades are losses and at this point I mostly treat them as hedges. I suspect that is true for most market participants as well.

I think a lot of the hype is coming from content creators who are actually finding it useful for content creation. Generating ideas, organizing notes and research, writing scripts and articles, managing schedules, editing, promoting, etc...

I assume a lot of these folks were already using LLM's quite a bit, but were using the Chat interfaces or had workflows that were split among a bunch of different services and tools. Something like OpenClaw gave them a way to centralize a lot of that and also gave them a way to use natural language to direct efforts. So for them this probably feels like a big step change.

If you are coming from a programming background you were aware that this type of setup has been doable for a while, but you were probably content sticking with Claude code or similar tools because those tools covered most of your LLM based workflows quite well.

And tying this altogether, one of the lowest hanging fruits for content creators is to create content about the tools they are using. Doubly so if that particular tool is starting to go viral. So you end up with a self feeding virality of sorts, as OpenClaw got more popular, more content creators started using it, and then publishing content about it, etc....

I got into a bike accident yesterday and injured both of my arms. Fortunately the damage wasn't too severe, but it was bad enough that using a computer is rather difficult. So now I'm spending some of my idle time playing around with different options for voice control. Like you I am a little wary of OpenClaw so I might try something similar to your setup as an alternative. So far I have gotten to the point where I can use voice dictation in notepad to write comments and commands, but copying and pasting the text is enough of a struggle (compounded by the fact that my cat is competing with me for the keyboard and I am in no state to fend her off) that I am aiming to push things a bit further. Sucks being injured but having a nice distraction to keep my mind occupied has so far been a great way to pass the time.

I have been assigning issues to copilot in Github. It will then create a pull request and work on and report back on the issue in the PR. I will pull the code and make small changes locally using VSCode when needed.

But what I like about this setup is that I have almost all the context I need to review the work in a single PR. And I can go back and revisit the PR if I ever run into issues down the line. Plus you can run sessions in parallel if needed, although I don't do that too much.

I have trouble sleeping, and it gets particularly bad in the winter. I have figured out that at least one of the triggers for poor sleep has been evening screen time. Redshift style apps help a little but barely. I can get away with some light usage of my phone on the dimmer settings, but if I sit down at my multi-monitor desk setup I will be wide awake all night and feel terrible in the morning. And this is with redshift and screens set to their lowest brightness levels.

So I spent a fair amount of time looking into e-ink options as a potential solution. I eventually settled on a refurbished Lenovo Thinkbook Plus G4, which has a flip-able screen with e-ink on one side. I paid around $800 which was less than a dedicated e-ink monitor, and only slightly more than some of the higher end large tablets/e-readers. So it was a hard deal to pass up.

I am happy to report that using the e-ink in the evenings has helped quite a bit on the sleep front. And while the laptop is pretty nice, e-ink in general requires a fair bit of compromise and the laptop in particular has some rough edges. You definitely need to spend some time on your display settings to make things work (high contrast, cursor and pointer visibility, font color in IDE and terminal apps, etc...), but for the most part I can make it work. And while I don't work in sunlight often, e-ink can really shine if you are outdoors (I have the sun shining on my screen right now as I type this and it is super readable.)

Anyways, I guess what I am trying to say is that I really hope more investment gets put into e-ink. I think it is a pretty awesome technology and would love to expand my usage of it. But at least for now it is mostly something that I am tolerating for the sake of sleep.

Best guess is that they were all caught up in the arms race to try and make a better model, at whatever the cost. And if you work in this space you were probably getting thrown fistfuls of money to join in on it. I read somewhere on reddit that anyone trying to push for efficiency at these places was getting ignored or pushed aside. DeepSeek had an incentive to focus on efficiency because of the chip embargo. So I don't think this is necessarily a knock on US AI capabilities. It is just that the incentives were different and when stock prices are going to the moon regardless of how much capex was getting spent, it was easy for everyone to just go along with it.

With that said, I think all of these companies are capable of learning from this and implementing these efficiency improvement. And I think the arms race is still on. The goal is to achieve super human level of intelligence, and they have a ways to go to get there. It is possible that these new efficiency improvements might even help them take the next step as they can now do a lot more with a lot less.