Its not just who remains after the bubble pops - its we dont know yet *which product* will pay the bills, and *then* who remains selling that product.

OpenAI has more users overall, but they have mainly "sold" a free / loss leader product. Anthropic has become more popular on the enterprise "maybe eliza doesnt pay the bills" business model. OpenAI pivots but if this were "search" its too early to figure out if either of these is google or they're yahoo and altavista.

Nvidia seems to be betting this is the PC + MPC redux and all these folks are trying to be IBM selling mainframes; which is less of a "worst timeline" but they're biased since their valuation already priced in the "mainframe" market. Democratizing AI is a larger addressable market for a chips seller whether its a real market or not.

Or the real business model could be elsewhere altogether - I still remember the early aughts when the future of growth for the interwebs was telecoms and iTV and Netflix was shipping CDs and the video streaming business was licensing codecs.

Or the site hallucinated it had been slashdotted, like the claudius vending machine bot

e.g.: the agent tasked as web admin has been trained on a couple decades of detritus from the interweb, and its convinced if its on the slashdot frontpage the site should be down like its 2004.

That was back when slashdot had more daily users than /r/breadstapledtotrees

The problem is a market exchange that is pliable to manipulation is by definition a strong predictor of its market movements.

If its purely 'stock markets', its all fun and games until the speculative assets infect the core economy. If you have any memory if 2008 that should be a concern, and that was a "could have gone terribly worse" scenario.

Polymarket brings speculation and feedback loops with consequences far out of the financial world. The risk of insider trading reaping "undeserved riches" is real, but the non-financial consequences of reckless insider trading influencing IRL policies is even greater.

Epistemicological is the study of the nature of knowledge that occurs spontaneously when you consume the right type of mushrooms

Isn't that what Kotlin and Scala and the half a dozen new JVM languages we see per year are all about? Take the decades of investment on the JVM and the lessons from java, start clean and keep interoperability at bytecode level...

The small bit of nerd news is shadowed by the press release as comment.

This.

Whoever came up with this strategy has not traveled since the pandemic or is rooting for appletv. If I have to setup a netflix profile on my hotel room / airbnb before I can relax after several hours stuck in a plane watching netflix - suddenly finding *anything else to do* has less friction. Even trying any other streaming app seems less cumbersome.

I think Jonathan Coulton made a song about Elon Musk's venture on this area

Was the cop in a backwards baseball cap carrying a skateboard and asking "fellow youths" where to get drinks?

And in terms of the median they're not wrong...

The problem is the government folks assume they are the exception to the rule

Against the federal government, where every agent and federal employee has qualified immunity for any actions without extremely, ridiculously specific, established precedent at scotus level? For civil damages only, because there is no right of private prosecution in federal law as ruled by scotus back in the 80s? Damages paid by the federal government which prints the money, years if not decades after the case crawls the appeals all the way to scotus?

Good luck collecting damages against the federal government, but the frontline agent has zero reasons to care - their chain of command has zero reasons to care, they are immune from accountability. Legally literally, career wise practically - they are too insignificant to be worth throwing under the bus even if things go sideways at that level.

The problem is not about legal recourse - the problem is how incentives and deterrents translate to day to day actions on the ground

The escathon of the techbros is slightly less concerning than the escathon of millenialist religious groups actively working to bring closer the End of Times.

You know, the literal source of that expression - not the metaphorical sense its used in politics since Buckley.

I'm not saying this startup is that type of death cult - rather training an AI based on a technology prone to hallucinations on the Book of Revelations... is a remarkably stupid "fit function" unless thats the output you want.

There is a hell of a difference in context - cops are not federal agents. if a citizen brings a civil rights case against a police department they do this in a federal court - the prosecutor does not work for the same people that may be held responsible for the damage. Thats how you get consent decrees, leadership changes, etc.

Those cases can be career ending for police leadership, and career making for the prosecutors - you can figure out the incentives and deterrents that flow down to the chain.

ICE are federal agents - they are not DOJ but work closely enough, and follow the directives of the same executive branch. Unless the agencies have both disparate policies and a lot of independence (not the case today), a zealous prosecution will be damaging and embarrassing for the executive branch in general.

No prosecutor is going to touch that without clear support from the top. Agency leadership is not going to worry about that risk if they're getting the go ahead from the top of the branch. No individual agent will see the risk of "crossing the line" ending his career, or their boss and their bosses' boss.

For a lot of people those deterrents had gone too far, enforcement had their hands tied, etc. so they don't see this as a bad thing. But we have seen what happens in towns and cities when you give local police "bonuses" and incentives for aggressive enforcement without checks.

How does the investor find the products that are viable, but not "seen" or getting traction with customers?

The general idea is not new, that's basically "cigar butt" investing strategy. But the point of tech startups is they are high risk / reward enterprises, which have not proven their worth or accumulated hard assets to justify more debt or valuation on liquidation. They don't struggle long waiting for a turnkey investor. Persistence is not seen as innovation and its cheaper to close shop and launch a new venture.