I think people are just tired of the fire hose of posts that have been showing up since it came out. It’s so annoying. Why does everyone need to pimp it so hard? It’s like your aunt trying to push Herbalife on you every time you see her.
I know that headlines are all about eyeballs, but this is seriously just exhausting. Headlines are advertisements and advertisements are about getting engagement. Surely having your audience just getting angry at them isn’t a good thing, right?
Money is not given to good ideas (though, it doesn’t hurt). Money is given to friends. If you look at how VC (or really any network) funding circulates, it’s just people who are allowed to enter that circle and money just flows between them constantly. On one hand, you have trusted people who you are willing to give money, on the other hand, this inherently creates a clique.
It reminds me how the Bohemian Club’s slogan, “Weaving Spiders Come Not Here” is a bit farcical given that it is impossible for the club members not to engage in commerce.
Another thing I've noticed is how when you go on the website for a VC funded B2B startup and look at the customers or testimonies they have listed, most of them will be other B2B startups funded by the same VC. It makes me wonder how much of that market is essentially a few friends standing in a circle and passing a $100 bill around, but on a larger scale.
The reason “ideas don’t get funding” is usually (but not always) true is that usually a good idea alone doesn’t mean much. So usually you have to have good idea plus something else the investor feels is a proof point or evidence you can execute.
The clearest of these is that you have already built it, or an MVP of it that is more than just smoke and mirrors, and there’s users and customers.
If you have excellent proof points and actual revenue growth, you could show up with no pants smelling like weed and somebody might fund you. Then they’d call their press people to do an “eccentric genius founder” piece about the person who showed up stoned with no pants and their pitch was that good. That’s cause if your graph goes up and to the right you’re not crazy, you’re “eccentric.”
If you don’t have any proof they fall back on secondary evidence, like credentials and schools and vibes. The latter, yes, often overlaps with cronies.
And unfortunately that by necessity includes most ideas that cost a lot to prototype, which means credentialism and croneyism tends to gate keep fields with a high cost of entry.
Ideas shouldn’t get funding - ideas are just mere results of thought that haven’t been played through in depth.
Do you need a working product to get funding? No. But you do need a compelling investment thesis - which takes months and even years of deep thought to come to fruition. Of course you can shortcut this process by smooching but only a select few can pull that off.
While that's completely true, I do think it misses a key underlying point: VCs (and many breeds of investor) are not ultimately selecting for value creating ideas, or for their friends: they're selecting for investments they believe _other people_ will pay more for later.
In the case of startups, those people are most likely other VCs (at later rounds), private equity (at private sale) or retail investors (at IPO).
Very rarely is the actual company profitable at any of those stages, demonstrably and famously.
So the whole process is selecting for hype-potential, which itself is somewhat correlated to the usual things people get annoyed about with startup cliches: founders who went to MIT; founders who are charismatic; founders who are friends with VCs; etc...
So yeah, they invest in their friends, but not because they're their friends. Because they know they can more reliably exit those investments at a higher value.
I don't think describing them as friends is entirely correct. People give money to people they trust. And friends often are in that subset of people. But that's not a strict requirement.
I'm not sure what your point is. Of course people who see and observe others on a daily basis in the flesh can determine much better whether they are trustworthy or not. They sure as hell don't think some random person who has no credibility is trustworthy.
This is also true for how HFT guys make money. It's not that they are very good in investments. The Fed injects money constantly from the top which gets distributed or trickle down to such firms. Because in a tight economy which is not akin to gambling, it should be near to impossible to make money so easily.
I'm sure VCs give money to friends but I didn't know any investors when I raised millions. They invested money because they thought it was a good idea.
Sure, but that doesn't really change anything. The poster plainly states:
> Money is not given to good ideas (though, it doesn’t hurt). Money is given to friends.
I have an obvious counter example. I'm sure money is invested for all sorts of reasons to all sorts of people. I'm also sure that money is not exclusively invested based on friendships, and I'm quite sure that money is at times invested based on the merits of an idea. Obviously those merits have to correspond to the ability to form the basis of a successful company, unless it's a philanthropic investment.
What I meant is that yes, good ideas will get funding, if they like you and if you are a good ROI (though, not all are required). This also may allow you to enter the clique/network. However, a lot of this money circulates between the same network. Convincing the right person of the value of your idea can enable you to join the network and access that money at a much, much lower threshold later on.
Obviously, it is not that cut and dry, but it is kind of impressive how much of the money circulating around is between the same people. I’m not really condemning it. I think it is a natural consequence because humans trust other humans they know. People should be more aware of it and need to make sure they keep it in check. Otherwise, you eventually start getting high on your own supply.
Money is given to ideas that might become billion dollar businesses and teams that look like they can do it. Pedigree, domain expertise, previous exits.
That works under the assumption of the "wisdom of the markets", and we assume VC possesses that wisdom, but laid bare it's just as vulnerable to cronyism as any other institution.
If you're being handed millions of dollars in early venture capital and don't have revenue/pmf to show, they're going to want to see a top university, FAANG, relevant industry experience, etc. How else would they underwrite the risk?
Upon every commit, AI will review your code to check if it's worth committing or not (after all, disk space is expensive these days!). If the AI finds the code is not up to scratch, it will be reverted and you'll be given a chance to try again.
Then, we will develop (read: sell) AI agents that will ingest a proposed code change (created by your front-line agent), and iteratively refactor it until the commit agent accepts it.
I really don’t understand the structure that Mozilla has setup here where Thunderbird lives under their for-profit branch, but is so dependent on donations. I remember reading they were considering charging for Thunderbird services when the move was announced 6 years ago, but as far as I can tell, nothing has happened and they’re still desperate for funding.
Now not only does it still need donations, the tax exemption for donors has evaporated. Great.
Nix provides declarative, reproducible builds. So, ostensibly, if you had your build system using Nix, then some of the issues here go away.
Unfortunately, Nix is also not how most people function. You have to do things the Nix way, period. The value in part comes from this strong opinion, but it also makes it inherently niche. Most people do not want to learn an entire new language/paradigm just so they can get this feature. And so it becomes a chicken and egg problem. IMHO, I think it also suffers from a little bit of snobbery and poor naming (Nix vs. NixOS vs. Nixpkgs) which makes it that much harder to get traction.
Based on what? A lot of this is vibes and FOMO; just like any economic bubble.
There is no objective evidence of anything you’ve said. It isn’t even clear if AI has contributed positively to global economic growth. It reminds me a lot of the late 90s and the dot-com mania. Slapping a domain on a commercial would make your stock go up even if there was no substance to any of it.
The real shame is this mania drowns out serious, practical use cases because when the bubble collapses, the market will throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Regardless they are getting that revenue through genuine demand for their product. It’s not like they are selling back some commodity product, billions are being spent on model outputs.
I think anyone who has used Opus 4.6 can see what is causing this demand. It is genuinely “smart” in the sense that it can work its way around non-trivial coding problems.
I don't see why tokens/$ would suddenly stop dropping. Maybe this is the first time the cost of compute will plateau, but do have any reason to think so?
There is a strong suspicion, especially of people who are skeptical of AI, that the actual price is being severely subsidized. The sense is that it’s an extreme version of growth before revenue. It is questionable if the true cost of training and inference make any of this worthwhile once Anthropic/OpenAI need to stand on their own and make money.
Imagine you open a cookie shop and you are VC funded, so you charge 5¢ for a cookie to attract people.
- Your real cost is $20/cookie. $15 for the fancy retail packaging and presentation, $5 for baking each cookie.
- You get lots of attention, strong profits and go public.
- VC funding is gone so, now instead of charging 5¢, you now need to charge $25 in order to not be in the red.
One of the reasons people think this is the shenanigans that Anthropic is currently playing, quietly tweaking the behavior of Claude Code and whatnot without really telling people. You can see lots of comments online about Claude Code randomly feeling dumber before Anthropic engineers admit they are messing with it.
Imagine you are on the $200/month Max plan. If the sustainable cost of this is several orders of magnitude higher, would enough current users pay something like $3,000/month for what we currently have?
Sure, yeah, I saw grubhub happen too... but this is compute, not cookies. It gets cheaper.
I don't even get what "skeptical of AI" means. We made AI, many companies reliably teach computers every spoken language. I perform my white collar job with a massive AI multiplier to my productivity.
I'm typing this on a machine comparable to Japan's Earth Simulator, a $350M supercomputer.
There are no talks or anything. Iran has no incentive to negotiate with a party as unreliable as the US is under Trump. I would literally negotiate with a dead opossum before I would continue to negotiate with Witkoff and Kushner.
I mean, as much as I don’t like the Iranian government, put yourselves in their position. You have the US and Israel literally leveling the equivalent of Balfour or the White House and taking out other government officials in a decapitation strike that failed, but killed off all of the moderates. The government is then replaced by hardliners who see this attack as existential. You have little to lose at this point, so you go for broke.
Since the US seems unwilling to put boots on the ground, cannot form a coherent reason for any of this and is lead by a man who is unable to accept that he can commit errors, it degrades into a war of attrition and, in the case of Trump, influence peddling since it is clear that Israel and the Saudis would like to see Iran wiped off the map and all Trump cares about is how he can internalize it as yet another reason why he is a victim and entitled to the Nobel Peace Prize.
IMHO, I think there is tremendous pressure to, at the very least restore the Strait of Hormuz as an international waterway not subject to Iranian control or tolling, but that’s an after-the-fact thing. I think Trump simply thought it would be an easy win and play well on TV. I suspect what will happen is the US pays a massive indemnity/bribe to Iran, Iran agrees to not contest control of the Strait of Hormuz and the US looks like morons which Trump will internalize as a win that nobody will believe except himself.
> There are no talks or anything. Iran has no incentive to negotiate with a party as unreliable as the US is under Trump. I would literally negotiate with a dead opossum before I would continue to negotiate with Witkoff and Kushner.
> Iran, while rejecting all the plans presented by the enemy, formulated a 10-point plan and presented it to the US side through Pakistan, emphasizing the fundamental points such as controlled passage through the Strait of Hormuz in coordination with the Iranian armed forces, which would grant Iran a unique economic and geopolitical position, the necessity of ending the war against all elements of the axis of resistance, which would mean the historic defeat of the aggression of the child-killing Israeli regime, the withdrawal of US combat forces from all bases and deployment points in the region, the establishment of a safe transit protocol in the Strait of Hormuz in a way that guarantees Iran's dominance according to the agreed protocol, full payment for the damages inflicted of Iran according to estimates, the lifting of all primary and secondary sanctions and resolutions of the Board of Governors and the Security Council, the release of all of Iran's frozen assets abroad, and finally the ratification of all of these matters in a binding Security Council resolution. It should be noted that the ratification of this resolution would turn all of these agreements into binding international law and would create an important diplomatic victory for the Iranian nation.
> Now, the Honorable Prime Minister of Pakistan has informed Iran that the American side, despite all the apparent threats, has accepted these principles as the basis for negotiations and has surrendered to the will of the Iranian people.
> Accordingly, it was decided at the highest level that Iran will hold talks with the American side in Islamabad for two weeks and solely on the basis of these principles. It is emphasized that this does not mean an end to the war and Iran will accept an end to the war only when, in view of Iran's acceptance of the principles envisaged in the 10-point plan, its details are also finalized in the negotiations.
> These negotiations will begin in Islamabad on Friday, April 11, with complete distrust about the US side, and Iran will allocate two weeks for these negotiations. This period can be extended by agreement of the parties.
When you use words like "decapitation strike that failed, but killed off all of the moderates," what do those words mean to you? With all due respect, I don't really get the Internet brain way of thinking of things. What decapitation failed? I guess, if you mean, there are still Islamic Revolution people in charge, I still can't see the point. When you say "failed" that would imply that they were literally attempting to kill literally every single member of the government at once. I don't think anyone serious would think that. Also, "failed?" I can't recall ever a decapitation happening so swiftly or so massively within the first few hours of a conflict. Also, the meat of what I wanted respond to was this idea of "killing the moderates." I get that most people here think the West and America is evil or whatever but the idea the Ayatollah and top members of the IRGC were moderate is just an affront to morality. The same people think that Trump is Hitler for doing things that 90s Democrats agreed with (even ones currently serving), would hold vigils for a truly monstrous regime. This is like some Billie Eilish "no one is illegal on stolen land" type stuff. We are talking about brutal executions for no reason at all.
decapitation was intended to result in regime change, but instead showed that the iranian system is perfectly capable of peaceable changes in power. what particularly failed is that the people the US wanted to champion as the new leaders of iran were also killed in the decapitation.
you can compare against the successful decapitation from christmas, where the US removed maduro, and championed rodriguez and now takes a cut of all venesuelan oil sales.
i think there's a reasonable argument that the ayatollah was a moderate, in a much more militant government. He's the guy that was making sure iran never built a nuke, and by observation, iran stood down after each attack the US/israel did on iran up until he was gone
"no one is illegal on stolen land" is perfectly reasonable - the american government has no actual legitimacy to control who comes and goes from land that doesnt belong to it. the various tribes do. its impractical in that the US genocided the legitimate owners and took it over by force, but its still the right and just end view. the US gets to kick people out of certain borders because it did a ton of brutal executions
> I get that most people here think the West and America is evil or whatever but the idea the Ayatollah and top members of the IRGC were moderate is just an affront to morality.
I really don’t understand this logic. I find it rather myopic and based on one’s own pain. Everything is relative, unfortunately. The idea that I would in any way condone or argue that the Iranian regime is not culpable of its own massive war crimes, grifting and other crimes against its own people is…bizarre. I am well aware of the crimes of the Iranian regime and look forward to the day it is removed, but I don’t think this is it. Even Trump admits that they killed off all of the people they thought would be more amenable to work with the US which is just a level of incompetence I can’t fathom, but here we are.
Unfortunately, in practice, moral absolutism does not exist in international relations. The evidence is right in front of your face of this fact. We could go through the litany of crimes against people that we (the US) have condoned or facilitate or been unresponsive to. The folks in Beijing have also committed unspeakable acts against their own people and others, so why aren’t we bombing them right now? Why Iran right now? Haiti is a failed state nobody seems interested in caring about. We failed to stop a genocidal massacre in Rwanda…
> When you say “failed” that would imply that they were literally attempting to kill literally every single member of the government at once.
I literally believe that Trump thought this given that he openly admitted he ignored the military and intelligence agencies telling him that this was a terrible idea. I agree that nobody rational would think this, but I argue that Trump never lies even when he says he is joking. He literally thinks as POTUS he can do whatever he wants.
Anthropic needs to show that its models continually get better. If the model showed minimal to no improvement, it would cause significant damage to their valuation. We have no way of validating any of this, there are no independent researchers that can back any of the assertions made by Anthropic.
I don’t doubt they have found interesting security holes, the question is how they actually found them.
This System Card is just a sales whitepaper and just confirms what that “leak” from a week or so ago implied.
I think it’s also important to add the context that Broadcom’s CEO, Hock Tan, went on CNBC in October and had a vacuous conversation with Jim Cramer about their OpenAI “deal” at the time [0]. Nothing of substance was said, it was just endless loops about the opportunity of AI. It is now 6 months later and there has been nary a peep from Broadcom about any updates.
I think Anthropic is a more grounded company than OpenAI because Sam Altman is insane, but it is still playing the same game.
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