except my desktop computer can run continuously, not just for 20 min at a time.

Probably not if you take all the fans off.

Sure. And when the government decides that the datacentre services you use, like this one, are low priority and should be shut down to free up capacity for others, you'll be totally okay with that.

Sure. I doubt very much there's anyone in the world who has hundreds of billions of dollars though. Probably nobody who has billions either. IIRC Elon Musk has claimed he keeps around $500 million in cash, but that's probably not really true either. It's likely almost all in something fairly liquid like government bonds.

Most people can't stick parts of cars together either. They certainly can't make those parts, nor make the materials those parts are made from.

Your "implied" bit makes a big assumption: that you get to start from a fairly small number of parts that fit together in a fairly obvious way. Paint by numbers. The OPs assumption about software vulnerabilities is even bigger: that finding one vulnerability is of similar difficulty to protecting against all possible vulnerabilities.

Very, very few of the rich hoard money. That's not how you get rich, and it's also not what the ones who inherit tend to do.

"People say the darnest things."

We can't have "AI is able to detect incredibly obscure security vulnerabilities and exploit them as zero days", and "AI is incapable of producing secure code" at the same time.

I guess the days when passing a formal logic course was required to get a CS degree ended a long time ago.

Most people can recognize a car when they see one. Very few of those people can build one.

It's dangerous to hang around with a bunch of people who constantly talk about what awesome and smart and world changing leaders you all are.

Cryptocurrency has as many objectives as there are nerds involved in it. They change whenever one isn't working out so well too.

People say the darndest things.

It's pretty easy to calculate the expected return of the stock market over any period of time you desire. It's positive. Still. When that changes in the short term we run around screaming our heads off. If it ever changes long term we're fucked.

What I cannot wrap my head around is that trillion dollar Google, trillion dollar Facebook, etc are all still just advertising firms.

That was a while ago. Google is 3.5 Trillion. Meta is 1.6. They're both much better at advertising than the NY Times and their cost to show ads is much lower.

It means it has less value than the purchase price indicates.

Accounting practice usually includes some incremental depreciation on things that lose value over time. For tax purposes that rate is often specified but you can also use different rates. The idea is for the books to better indicate the actual asset value rather than freezing it at the purchase price until it's sold or disposed of.

Of course, that's why they hid the disclaimers in the article where nobody reads them. I seriously doubt Anduril actually cares about any of that, or even takes it seriously. They want to sell some expensive laptops to the US military and "USA USA USA" currently turns enough peoples' brains off that it makes a great marketing slogan.

You've got a shovel and you're determined to dig hey? Well, have at it!

holding the value of the asset directly on the blockchain. For example, the blockchain holds the actual bitcoins I just mined.

WTF does that mean? A blockchain holds numbers. That's it. There's no such thing as "a bitcoin." Bitcoins are numbers. The Bitcoin blockchain has a mechanism where transactions (not bitcoin) are trackable, but that's definitely not the same thing as "value."

physical share

What is this? A share is a portion of a company. There used to be certificates that said you owned some number of shares but those weren't shares, they were just pieces of paper that proved ownership, and even those are virtually unheard of today.