Situational Awareness is a "hedge" fund that did the opposite of hedging - they made a bunch of leveraged bets that were all linked to each other in typical market movements. It was headed by Leopold Aschenbrenner, a guy just a couple years out of college, whose employment career had been very brief stints at the FTX crypto exchange firm (until it collapsed) and at OpenAI (until he was fired a year later over an alleged information leak). No financial management experience whatsoever. But he was into Effective Altruism, writing AI whitepapers, all that sort of stuff that Silicon Valley tech bros like, and so when he started a hedge fund, $45B was quickly pumped into it.

Nah, this isn't a sort of bubble-popping event. It's a tangential player in the stock market, not some key participant in operations or loans in the AI ecosystem. My main concern: inference IS profitable. Very. But the heavy leverage of the industry is also very real, and can very much still spread like a contagion. And a likely trigger for that is inflation, triggered by trade wars and the ongoing Hormuz and Ukraine conflicts (or worse, new ones added to the list!). One, inflation directly increases their costs, but two, it causes central banks to raise rates. This starves companies of capital (both loans and equity), incl. to refinance existing liabilities, while also hindering income (e.g. new orders get put off or cancelled). It can easily flip a leveraged company into insolvency, and then that can ripple if there's nothing to stop it.

An investment opportunity can be brilliant, a massive world-changing field with huge margins, but still be a terrible investment. One, because the companies you invest in need to survive continuously and not get blipped out by an adverse market event until they have more ability to withstand them. And two, also, because there's a problem where investors don't merely value the whole market as if it has high odds of success, but value the specific player they're invested in with high confidence as if it will dominate said market. Which, obviously, all players combined cannot do.

The recent trend in software companies is to fire middle managers, and the metric used to evaluate managers for firing is the velocity. So that's the reason.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/2...

If you like your manager enough to help them, then break up tasks into smaller tasks that take an hour or so but still have 1 point of value.

Whether it's profit or not depends on whether people buy anyway. I've decided "no upgrade this year".

It's almost certainly all operational expense, same as the salary paid, which means it's "written off". But "write off" doesn't mean "it's like you didn't have to pay it", it just means that it's subtracted from revenues when calculating profits. Net is that writing something off saves about 21% (the corporate tax rate) of the amount written off.

It's the same as your personal taxes, more or less. When you donate to charity, you get to subtract the donation from your adjusted gross income. If you make $100k and donate $10k, then it's as if you made $90k. Supposing (for simplicity) you pay a flat 20% tax rate, and you didn't make the donation, you'd pay $100k * 0.2 = $20k in taxes. Having made the donation, though, you only pay $90k * 0.2 = $18k in taxes. You donated $10k and basically got $2k of it back from Uncle Sam so the donation only cost you $8k out of pocket. But you still ended up $8k poorer (but the charity is $10k richer!).

The principle is the same with corporate "write-offs", though the mechanics are different.

Silicon Valley companies will pay the $100k. The positions typically pay $500k+ (base + bonus + equity + benefits) and companies are accustomed to spending tens of thousands of dollars in addition to deal with the H1B filings, and for other immigration services, including fees for green card filings, etc. An additional $100k is painful, but since it's good for 6 years, they're already paying around $3M, so it's only a ~3.5% increase.

I used it quite a bit and found it pretty decent. I never used a modem, though, so you may be right about that.

"US$ 6,858,947 pledged of US$ 1,500,000 goal"??? Damn, girl! Always outperforming expectation!

Thanks for the good news, I can't wait for a The Guild movie!

NO company should be allowed to be "too big too fail". If you're too big to fail, then immediate antitrust breakup of your company should be mandatory. Are the people implementing the circular finance scheme creating the bubble expecting to get rich on the government bailout? Absolutely! They assume if the government spent tax dollars to cover the billionaire's losses before, they will do it again. I'm sticking to my original strategy: don't invest anything in crypto or AI.

For every dollar invested, he purchased 5 dollars worth of stock. When the stock went up, they claim fantastic returns. When the stock went down, they had to sell all their shares leaving them with zero assets. That's not called investing, that's called gambling!

The AC is incorrect. LLMs do it because their training data does it. Their training data includes lots of literature, scholarly humanities writing, journalism and ad copy. Naturally it sounds pretentious.

t is also why AI cannot replace any of the dangerous gross jobs people actually want replaced

https://renxhomes.ca/promise-r...

https://www.hitachicm.com/eu/e...

https://www.deere.ca/en/autono...

https://ntwist.com/blog/autono...

https://getsomatic.com/

https://blog.robozaps.com/b/hu...

It can, and is. Interaction with the real world is harder and takes longer because we don't have giant piles of training data sitting around ready to go like we do for images and text. There are also safety concerns and cost barriers that aren't there with things like text.

No post processing needed. LLMs sound like they do because that style was prominent in their training data and was scored highly by their trainers. If you ask most of the language models not to use excessive punctuation, lists, headings, polish your knob, and write at a grade six level, they generally sound reasonably human.

If you're watching some random thing on YouTube you should be wondering that regardless of whether it sounds like it was written by an LLM or not.

Many require you to use the phone app for MFA, even if you're using a web browser.

I guess there's the option of just doing all your banking in person, at a physical branch location... or at least an ATM.

Assuming for the sake of argument that what Dre does is creative and that he is talented, very little of making great music is about the mechanical process of executing on the generation and recording of sound. That's important, but there are a lot more people who can do that than create something that is new, and good.

Creation (in any medium) is about the ideas, and about the ability to recognize what works well and what doesn't. Given that, I could completely see AI being a useful tool for a creative, talented artist. They have to supply the ideas, in the form of prompts, and they have to recognize whether the results are good. The AI is just a time-saving device for the middle step of generating representations of the ideas.