Yes, I actually linked to Open AI’s discussion of GPT-4o being overly sycophantic. I think this is a tunable parameter that they are going to use, and I fully agree re corporate cultures.
> I hope everyone here gets to have the experience of seeing HN discuss something that you're an expert in. It's eye-opening to see how confidently wrong most poasters are.
I also recently came across some of these fake company campaigns with attached employee profiles. It's very hard to distinguish them from legitimate companies.
It's especially hard now that many legitimate companies use a lot of generic sounding AI-generated content, which seems to be same approach the spam/phish/malware teams are using.
IMO we need some kind of zero-knowledge proof system that can be checked to verify if a message sender is a US citizen, employed by who they say they are employed by etc.
I don't see how we can trust anything in a post-generative AI world any other way.
The problem is that Twilio is not profitable. They wouldn't need to show a hockey stick if they were. Investor-subsidized, non-profitable companies have to sell growth to their investors because they have no other fundamental to point to.
I think the answer to both of your questions is yes. I think the related concepts of immutability and pure functions without mutable state allow for cleaner analytical modeling (and in some cases in strong functional languages, mathematical proof) of what that the code is actually going to do in production. That kind of predictability is essential for dealing with financial computations.
It depends on what you are looking at, but generally index returns (such as the FTSE 100) are calculated as if you are rebalancing your portfolio periodically to reflect the changing composition of the index over time, which is what a passive index fund manager would do for you if you were to invest in a FTSE 100 index fund, for example.
I am not aware of any non-index based stock market performance measures like what you are suggesting--e.g. if I bought all the stocks in the FTSE 100 index in 1994 and never rebalanced, what would have happened? I suspect that the returns would indeed have been a lot worse but I can't say for sure.
Do you live in or are you at least familiar with Philly? This comparison is cherry-picking a WeWork the nicest area in the city and juxtaposing it with an office space in/near one of the worst neighborhoods. Of course the prices are going to be like this.
The problem with using "small business" as a blanket term is that they vary widely in stage and ambition. For example, it's a mouthful to distinguish between "brand new small business" and "established small business" as well as "small business that intends to stay small" and "small business that intends to pursue growth to become medium-sized or large-sized without taking dilutive investment."
From an American who's been to Trader Joe's a lot and a Marks and Spencer grocery exactly once, I think they are pretty comparable except that the food items are more aligned with their respective nation's typical dietary preferences.
Yeah, I wouldn't rule out the possibility of structural problems--we've never seen this phenomenon before so it's hard to say how it will turn out.
I was just trying to point out that it's not impossible for the current crop of unicorns to produce big enough winners to outweigh the failure of the rest.
I'm definitely skeptical that this will happen though, because the winners would have to be really big (hundreds of billions in actual market cap in the public markets) in order to make up for the really big failures.
> There are about 144 unicorns right now. If only 10% break out, that's only 14 companies that will really make it.
Doesn't this ratio seem about right for any basket of unprofitable (or even zero-revenue) high-growth companies regardless of valuation? If those 14 winner companies average greater than a 10x return then everything pans out as expected--lots of risky investments together produce a reliable if more modest return on investment.
It seems like the only abnormal aspect is the size of the valuations, but that might be just what happens in a low interest rate environment--too much money chasing too few deals. Whether this affects this success rate of these investments remains to be seen I guess.
It's troubling that this is where the entrepreneurial ethos is heading. But it's hardly surprising with the leaders of the "sharing economy" almost ubiquitously operating illegally, enticing their customers and contractors to be complicit in illegal behavior, and flouting existing regulations. To make matters worse, governments are even letting them get away with it in many cases.