Rury

Yeah, and it's similar reasoning as to why gentrification tends to happen when the wealthy move into an area, and why prices for things typically decrease when the wealthy leave.

The $72B number is just for convertible notes sold prior and through 1st half of 2026. They were issued as a way to finance growth costs (e.g. acquiring compute).

There might be some additional sold in Q3, but that wasn't published here. But these notes aren't costs that Anthropic has to pay in any normal sense - they're shares they sold pre-IPO and valued at $72B. Anthropic would have to pay that much to buy them back at said valuation price, but they're not obligated in any way to do that.

Post IPO, they'll have alternative avenues for sourcing funds... (e.g. secondary offerings, corporate bonds). Continued growth at this rate will need continued financing, but it wouldn't be done using convertible notes.

The real liabilities are the hundreds of billions in non-cancelable compute costs Anthropic owes Google, Amazon etc, over the course of the next 10 years.

These sorts of products aren't typically driven by consumer wants. Rather they're typically driven by B2B/sales/marketing/investor types, who are primarily focused on finding/addressing secondary markets for further profits, more so than it is about addressing core consumer wants.

In other words, these product decisions aren't really made on the rationale that internet connected coffee makers make sense from the standpoint of a consumer who simply wants coffee made...

It's more: "let's make smart coffee makers so that we can sell to 2 markets:

    1) a coffee maker to consumers who want coffee made

    2) consumers data/eyeballs to advertisers who want their info/eyes

... and make more profits for ourselves".

I thought the reason was well known, and the article briefly touches it...

The liver's great ability to regenerate largely boils down to how homogenous and simple the liver actually is. It's structured more like a battery pack, where you have individual cells that are largely functionally identical to each other that perform the bulk of the work, and they happen to be connected together. If an individual cell fails, (for the most part) all you need to do is merely regrow a new one, and it's orientation matters little (relatively speaking as compared to other organs) so long as it's connected to the rest of the battery pack (organ).

Contrast that to something like a kidney, which has complex orientation that is formed via growth, and which has a high degree of different types of cells where replacing a part isn't as simple as merely regrowing the part which failed, but also about that growth happening in precisely the right location. So instead of it being like having to replace a failed cell in a battery pack, it's like replacing a wheel to a car. Attaching it anywhere (like the windshield for example) won't necessarily fix the issue, it needs to be connected to the axle...

Seems incomplete? Like several island nations are missing (e.g. Bahrain).

That’s an uncompetitive market. No one can outcompete on service, so they can only compete on price, but why would you in such a circumstance, it would only hurt you, so nobody does.

This is what people seem to forget... you don’t need monopolies or collusion for markets to be uncompetitive. Collusion works fundamentally because participants aren't competing with each other... not for the fact people made a secret agreement. It is entirely possible for markets to be completely uncompetitive even without a monopoly or any collusion going on.

Your examples here are better known amongst economists as the Bertrand–Edgeworth model (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand%E2%80%93Edgeworth_mod...)

I once saw someone say something like this: "Working in a monopoly mega corp is like working for a 20 person company, connected to 20 other 20 person companies, connected to 20 similar entities containing similar 20 companies, with each group of 20 persons in each competing with each other for investment/budgeting."

Maybe hyperbole... but to some extent I think that's about right. It's like you're not even a cohesive unit other than that thin marketing veneer facing the outside world.

Things are often built in silos. Integration of products is almost always an after thought. Decisions/changes are done in response to outside markets or internal political games for promotional appeal and money. The turnover of people retiring, new hires coming. Most every mega corp today is nothing like it was 30 years ago. And so, things typically end up half-baked and the customer left wondering why the products are often such a mess.

Now some companies do things better than others, and may have their stellar areas and their bad areas. Same goes for cities, and even countries, when you think about it.

You don't get it? It's like this:

"Make me a picture of a house".

> AI proceeds to draw a house.

"No that's not right, it should be a red bricked house. Not a brown one."

> AI redraws a red bricked house.

"No. It should have a 2 car garage, sit on top of a hill. Also it should have a front porch, and have a tree right in front."

> AI then draws a red bricked house on top a hill with a 2 car garage with a front porch and a tree right in front.

...

The issue is that people think AI should automagically create some vague idea in of theirs, without having to do the work of spelling out all the exact details. So AI (like people) must make some assumptions about what wasn't specified. Like since you didn't specify a "red bricked house" in your initial prompt, but merely a "house"... it had to come up with something as to the color, and did as you otherwise asked, but it didn't know you actually wanted a "red bricked house", since you never specified that detail. Hence why it failed to do what you wanted, and you had to "review and correct it".

Again this isn't solely an intelligence problem, but an inherent problem in language/communication, of unsaid assumptions/specifications. Of being unaware of what you don't know, unaware of your own assumptions, sometimes even being unaware of what you even want. It's why AI can't fully get rid of jobs in software.

But sometimes people just don't care. They just want a picture of a house made. Anything remotely resembling a house will do, not necessarily a solid one, or one that can withstand a magnitude 8 earthquake. You know... like something people can put up in minutes so they don't have to do hard work... such as a shabby old tent. And AI is very good at generalizing, so it can in fact achieve this. So everyone reports they are far more productive now, putting up tent after tent. Meanwhile, the people responsible for the slop have a nightmare to review...

Yup. This is basically what Steve Jobs argued throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and championed as a philosophy. Adopting it, took Apple from being a struggling tech company on the verge of bankruptcy, to the dominant personal consumer technology maker it is today.

There are more numerous cases where cities happen to be situated fairly close together in Europe, where trains actually are a more sensible travel option, hence the fixation there.

Planes instead make more sense the further you must travel.

I mean, depending on circumstances, it takes nearly the same amount of time to travel from Chicago to St. Louis by plane as it does by car. Something shorter than that and it can actually take longer to get there by plane than it does by car. I mean no one takes a plane to travel to a city that's only 30 minutes away by car - as it often takes longer to get through airport security and board a plane than that.

This mis-frames the actual issue. "Being there for the paycheck" isn't bad per se, it's the morality in the manner of doing such.

There's a marked difference in earning a paycheck via genuinely helping someone else out, as compared to... being apathetic to how that happens, or worse: earning a paycheck via deliberately sabotaging someone else's wellbeing.

Does it matter if they only own a small fraction of the homes? There's some studies that show that in markets where institutional investors do buy, prices typically noticeably increase for houses afterwards, even if they only own a tiny fraction of the housing units.

There's plausible argument as to network effects (e.g. my neighbor is charging that much, so why can't I?), as well as changing unit types to rentals, limiting owner-occupied supply and hence driving up prices.

I mean, I imagine it can be kind of similar in the stock market, where that you don't actually need to buy all a company's shares in existence to bid up a stock's price... you only need to buy enough of the available float to raise prices (sometimes which can be <0.5% of shares in existence).

Yes, I don't think this is a single faceted issue. I've yet to see anyone here mention animals yet... but numerous animals in captivity have also been shown to have far lower breeding/fertility rates. Factors like restricted space, lack of mate choice, and disrupted natural instincts can all influence animal behavior, and I see no reason why the same can't apply to us?

I know for me personally, it's not economic reasons as to why I have not had children, but more a problem of finding the right mate at the right time. Some people just aren't socially fit for each other...

That alone will probably do little, due to contagion effects. Simply finding an index which excludes it might not be enough if it still shares other similar underlying stocks with indexes that do include it.

It's as if the author doesn't understand why various forms of money came to exist, and why there are disagreements over monetary ideas/matters.

That makes sense, but something I've been wondering as of late... what if markets are just being... cornered? Surely, it can difficult to assess genuine market activity from not, no?

I mean I know it sounds absurd for something like the size of the stock market, but all you really need to do is have enough capital to consume floating demand, and you can control prices. Even easier with options, as they give leverage to do this. And arguably this essentially explains the behavior behind stocks like GME, AMC, AVIS, BIRD... heck even Tesla. If you look at Tesla, most of its stock price appreciation happened in 2020-2021, when SoftBank was allegedly controlling their options chain. And since its peak in 2021, when SoftBank stopped, Tesla has underperformed the S&P 500, and would probably would have fallen by now if it wasn't for all the passive inflows from being in the Mag 7. I mean, it could just be coincidence or genuine market activity, but how can we be certain that markets aren't just being cornered by coordinated groups?

Also, the oil market right now doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you compare futures and spot and what analyst estimates are giving even in the best case scenario. But Japan mentioned considering shorting over $1.4 trillion in oil futures, and if they actually are, then suddenly things make a bit more sense...

Which is a poor choice of words by the industry, as this is a semantically specious argument. You are still, in the strictest sense, relying on obscurity - the key being obscure from public knowledge.

The industry should instead say: relying on an obscure process is bad when it comes to security. Better to rely on obscured data. As this is what is meant.

But technically speaking, all of information security is done through obscurity. It is all done via hiding something from being known. To state otherwise, is a misuse of semantics.

Tough to limit to just 5, but I would consider something like the following:

1) Some measure of wealth (beyond GDP)

2) An equality quotient (considering both wealth and power)

3) Hours of work per capita

4) Reported happiness

5) Healthspan / Lifespan / Crime / Safety rates

> the others would just do the same and compete away those margins once again, with the marginal gain being handed back to consumers

This is an assumption that doesn't necessarily have to happen. Some markets remain uncompetitive, otherwise you would see every market collapse to 0 margins if this were always true.

I'm still waiting for people to understand the bias-variance tradeoff, and what it implies for the limitations of AI and terms such as "consciousness".

The game was always going to be systemically rigged, because the "riggedness" is borne from the very nature of how reality itself works. But it seems to me economics doesn't want to actually contend with nature or reality, just ideas which sound more or less true, even if they actually fall flat upon deeper analysis. It's essentially an ideology at this point... if it ever wasn't in the first place.

Odor was an example given by the researchers. And I too doubt it's due to odor, but we can't dismiss odor outright just because it seems reasonable. I mean humans for example are known to have an overall worse sense of smell than dogs, but can actually detect certain specific odors/chemicals at much lower thresholds than dogs (such as amyl acetate). Which is to say, birds may possess an acute sense of smell to certain things that we may not know of yet, even if they're bad in general when it comes to smells.

Another hypothesis given is sunscreen. If women wear sunscreen more often (such as on their face) and sunscreen reflects UV (and birds can see in the UV spectrum), then that could also explain it.

"Austerity" is a red herring. I mean let's be serious, every option is austerity for someone...

Cutting spending, means those who would have received that debt spending take a loss (perhaps their job). Raising taxes means taxpayers pay. Raising productivity or inflating the debt means the young and laborers shoulder most of the burden. Financial repression means capital owners pay. Defaulting means bond holders pay.

This is what people who argue the debt doesn't matter don't understand. Sure it doesn't matter in the sense that we could always just roll the debt forward, and continue to make future generations pay. Just as it's possible to choose over and over again to wine and dine at someone else's expense, against their will.

No the debt always matters, because, it's a matter over who gets to benefit and who has to pay.

They did control for obvious appearance differences (e.g. color & type of clothing, hair length) and morphology (e.g. height/body size), even people's approach. But not more subtle traits such as gait, waist-hip ratio, odor...

One hypothesis suggested that in early history, women may have more commonly caught smaller prey (birds) than men did, and this fear could be evolutionarily ingrained.

NVIDIA execs are now saying otherwise: https://fortune.com/2026/04/28/nvidia-executive-cost-of-ai-i...

Maybe Ed is right even if he's wrong on some things?

> the initial investment will pay off once the technology matures

That's not guaranteed. Just look at the Metaverse. It did not pay off.

Yes about commodities, but what you said about surplus is actually wrong. Consumer surplus is at a maximum when there is no differentiation. That is because when producers struggle to differentiate amongst competition, they must compete fiercely on price, so customers often pay far less than their maximum willingness to pay.

And arguably your own statement here doesn't help the view that the industry is not a bubble, as one could argue most LLM models are not substantially different from each other, and most products integrating them are offering similar features. The industry may need to do better at differentiating if it wants to avoid being commodified.

Now do costs.

You're also ignoring the fact that these companies have been shifting things around to make their books look better than they actually are. Here's a good example explaining how META has been keeping debt and lease obligations off its books to fuel growth (and who's at risk if META doesn't pay up):

https://www.reddit.com/r/economy/comments/1soent7/if_the_ai_...

People skills are primarily learned through observation, interaction, and modeling the behavior of others who have already have cultivated social skills. You know, from being around and interacting with people. It's not like studying a certain discipline, such a mathematics, forbids you from ever cultivating these abilities.

Mech E. on the other hand, is perhaps the broadest engineering discipline in terms of foundational principles, application variety, and transferable skills. So shouldn't be all that surprising when it comes to hardware engineering.

Does it really say something? If so what? I think the assumption that suppliers are always just catering to whatever the market demands is dubious at best. In uncompetitive markets with strong moats and price inelasticity, there's no need to cater the demands of market, the market must cater to the supplier's demands. And since markets tend to collapse into a few main stakeholders, markets eventually end up this way, rather than the assumed way.