FDIC insured, no doubt.
783 karma · joined November 18, 2025
They are costs.
Derivative liabilities, SAFEs - those are basically taking cash from RETAIL shareholders and giving them to employees and early investors INSTEAD of using it to fund the business.
Let's have that discussion if you want, but don't act like a thing that is CLEARLY a COST to the business isn't a cost.
Original S1 and discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50242939
It's the it's the nature of mercantilist systems to leave only scraps for the people at the bottom. The absolute bare minimum to stave off revolution in good times.
This is merely the nature of the beast.
We're way better off in capitalism than other systems (as you can see); but to assume that we just had better ideas like the article suggests to get there is laughable.
Capitalism was enabled by a superstructure of world power that, we must remember, very nearly didn't make it.
Leaving Omelas &c.
There is a comforting fairy tale popular among tech optimists: that human history is driven by mental upgrades that trickle down to the masses.
The first part of that sentence is absolutely true. The second part has a much darker side that optimists conveniently ignore.
1. Mercantilism is alive and well. Please see Hormuz, Straight of. 2. Mercantilist rent-seeking is alive and well, just at a layer up of abstraction. See Google, Meta, Microsoft. No single player can compete with them. Ones that somehow manage to even threaten get bought. 3. Tech doesn't solve issues broadly: a modern worker with a battery-powered chainsaw has more productive power than an 18th-century frontier settler. Yet we still have homelessness. Riddle me this, techno-optimist.
But you'll say, we're overall better off. Of course we are. But the gains have BY AND LARGE gone to the wealthiest individuals and countries. The idea that the dude can eat a variety of incredibly rare food sits on the backs of billions of impoverished people who don't spend time in our air conditioned offices on MacBooks.
Great men and discoveries move the world (see Musk, Elon) but their exploits spread wealth HIGHLY unevenly, and big nation states want to steal it in the most mercantile way possible - by forcing and scaling up supply (look at China for cars, steel, and basically any advanced manufacturing right now).
One man intelligence will be a boon for people with agency. But it's HIGHLY unlikely to undo the superstructure which captured the rules of mercantilism AND capitalism at the same time.
Because all these newly trained models using the compute are doing really well and growing!
This will only get worse.
2 things: 1. Yes they are. Yet here we are not using WorldCoin despite its obvious utility. But backdooring every major software library in the world is pretty useful for governments. Too big to fail. But not an economic weapon, more like a cyber one.
2. Employees and consultants don't have what it takes to start a business, that's why they become employees.
Just take a second. I promise it makes sense. Many see the simple point I'm communicating.
AI is brains. Companies need arms and legs and relationships.
The reality is that employees are also mostly not entrepreneurs, same as consultants.
There are trillions of company ideas in those tokens, just like there are trillions of shots in the fans head watching the basketball players.
Takes years, patience, capital and the right mindset to get to the point to even take the shot.
Supply skyrockets - demand slows. Price... you know what happens.
Someone share an alternative story here - revenue is committed. How do these companies that have bought this compute justify their costs in 2027 and 2028?
On paper this seems reasonable insulation from going rogue.
However normal shareholders, who they are selling stakes in the company to, can do very little.
Started in the repoprompt (https://repoprompt.com/) community.
Good stuff.
Many more things will be like this. The massive amounts of 'genius' buried under corporate management and obscurity in the past 500 years will be a treasure trove.