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.

I remember the Internet before Eternal September. You need to go back at least that far.

Not a financial person either, but wouldn't writing it down mean that a company no longer considers it to have value? Is there something unique to the hardware they use for search-specific AI that prevents it from being leased out as part of Google Cloud or being used to run other teams' models?

Free speech has never been free as in beer, or at least not at any meaningful volume level. Talking to a single person was free, but that's not going to spread your ideas very far or very quickly. In the early days, you paid scribes, but that would cost you money. Later, the printing press brought the costs down, but you still needed money. Radio and TV made it possible to reach even more people more quickly, but at a significantly nonzero cost.

The Internet is no different in that regard. In theory, you can always spin up your own server and post anything you want to. But that won't guarantee that anybody is going to actually visit your site. To get eyes, you'll still have to buy ads, etc.

If we build it, then it will frictionlessly tell us what to build.

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.

Only in the most utterly pedantic sense of the word "different" wherein you mean that by definition, infant mortality occurs early and wear occurs later. But they can both stem from the same root cause, which is a component not built with adequate tolerances. In other words, they can be the same fundamental issue, just expressing themselves at different times.

Most products don't have an MTBF. And things that do have MTBF are based on accelerated wear testing on a small number of units, and can have almost zero basis in reality. There was one model of major brand hard drive about twenty years back where a couple of RAIDs where I used to work got lost because the drives all died after such a predictable number of powered-on hours that by the time you could re-stripe the RAID, the next drive would die. They ended up making sure the drives had a high variance in powered-on hours before using them in RAIDs after that.

It's an example that proves or demonstrates a point. And the point it was proving was that the same root cause can be responsible for both catastrophic early product failures and premature deterioration-related failures.

They use TSMC and Samsung, so South Korea, Taiwan, or, theoretically, the US.

Components sourced from U.S. and allied-country suppliers account for more than 90% of the BlueChip prototypes’ component procurement cost.

Both South Korea and Taiwan are US allies.

The more interesting question is what are the 10% that they aren't sourcing from allies?

This reminds me of a segment I saw about 15 or 20 years ago on a show called "How It's Made" that played on a channel like the Discovery Channel (before all cable became reality TV).

The segment was "How CRTs are Made". I was kind of surprised that CRTs were still being made, but I was especially surprised by the fact that they appeared to be American workers in the factory. They were doing everything pretty much by hand with no automation, and they were making some rather skinny looking CRTs. The show never elaborated on what the CRTs were for, but they sure didn't look like TVs.

I dug into it a bit after that using some clues I noticed in the show, and found out that these were cockpit displays for F15s or similar military aircraft. It's probably an item that you just don't go changing the specs on, and they understandably aren't going to farm out to TCL. I can't imagine how much each one cost, though. And I certainly wouldn't try to rack it up as a "win" for any of GWB's or Obama's trade policies.

Wear-out failures aren't always different from infant mortality failures, though. If the defect is caused by a design flaw in a component resulting in a structural weak point, that same weak point could fail after one use or a thousand, and it could just be a ticking time bomb. Someone could get very unlucky and find one that is slightly weaker, and it could break much sooner.

Case in point, I recall a machine where some people would have to have their laptops replaced every couple of months for motherboard failures, while others lasted for years, and it turned out to be dependent on how people closed their laptops at the end of the day and whether they pressed on the bottom of the case in a particular spot that wiggled the GPU. But if you handed one that had been working for five years to someone who used their left hand under the laptop while closing it, it would be dead in two or three months. If you replaced it with a brand new one, the brand new one would be dead in two or three months. And so on.