I remember grinding away to a set of black armor, going right to the wilderness and getting immediately crushed and losing it immediately lol.

There will be cases where they stick around (luxury hotels, etc) where the ancillary benefits are the point, but there are many cases where the primary task is the economically valuable thing.

I live in an apartment without one and I would not pay $150/month for a dedicated doorman so that delivery people have an easier time with the intercom.

And honestly, you are undercounting the cost, you can't get away with 3 doormen for 24/7 coverage and the salary is not the all in cost. It's probably closer the $300/month for 145 apartments.

If you're already paying $10k/month for an apartment, sure, you don't care about the cost and are happy with the fringe benefits. This doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of people have an intercom because the main function is solved.

Which is to say, it is sometimes a fallacy, but often, it is not. We have far more intercoms and automatic door openers than doormen.

It would break the long tail of the ad ecosystem, but a bunch of people think the tradeoff is fine.

Given how much of online advertising is now in walled gardens rather than display ads, I think this shows this is more doable than the people who are part of the open ecosystem want it to be.

I obviously deeply regret not getting a second opinion.

I went to a surgeon and got them removed, due to which I developed a sinus infection that needed to be scraped out surgically under general anesthesia, after all that I went back to the original dentist and when they looked, they didn't see anything there...

I definitely wish I'd gotten a second opinion and saved myself a lot of pain and money.

Single player PC games are a small fraction of the market these days, and once people have a job, they are generally happy to pay for the things they like.

I think the "clean room" Photoshop example is much more interesting because Photoshop is far more expensive and Adobe has a semi-antagonistic relationship with creatives.

Often in nonprofits, the person in charge is mostly an exceptional fundraiser and so their contributions are easily visible in that realm. The corollary to that is they are often a bad manager of the org.

In hindsight, it doesn't look like they did a great job running it, but the comp package doesn't seem crazy at that scale.

Presumably when that happens you don't immediately cancel, but rather try some last ditch efforts with sponsors, vendors, etc and then you wind up 2 weeks out in a shitty situation.

Though looking at their filings, it seems like they did not adapt to reduced revenues starting in 2023, so maybe denial and an inability to cut costs is a bigger explanation: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/770...

They also stopped posting audited financials around then: https://anitab.org/audited-financials

Anyway, Anthropic seems able to do exactly one thing well: train a frontier model. Their other software seems like garbage. OpenAI seems to be following a similar trend lately too.

Everyone who had stock (including common stock) at character.ai was bought out at the $2.6bn price: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-hires-charact...

The buyout included guaranteed payouts for people who had unvested stock for 2 years post-acquisition.

These transactions are opaque and confusing, but employees are generally not being fucked over here.

Cursor scaled git to way more writes/s than Anthropic did with their rewrite.

Assuming you're talking about the Trados Inc litigation, the situation was:

* Raised 52m

* Acquired for 52m

* 8m paid to exec team to stay in place

* Common stock got zero

The lawsuit determined that the board did have a fiduciary duty to the common stock, but that the common stock had no economic value, so they were not actually being harmed here, aka this is basically the best deal the company could have gotten, but it didn't clear the pref stack.

In the Groq/Character deals, they very obviously cleared the pref stack, so common stock deserves to get a piece of the licensing deal at the rate of the stock they held. It's annoying because its a dividend and doesn't benefit from QSBS, etc, but common stock is getting paid there.

Google did a very good job on things that required longer research times and compute scale, note that Transformers, BERT & Scaling Laws came out of Google (though the latter were also worked on at OpenAI).

Conversely, Google is horrible at product, and without OpenAI, it probably would have taken many years longer to take off. I know this because Google had demos of this internally, but absolutely no stomach to release it, and they didn't believe in the API use case at all.

Which is to say, I think if Google was smaller, we probably would have gotten more SaaS, not more breakthrough research.

It's also worth noting, Gemini 3.5 Pro never came out.

Having worked there (but only in a small part of it that eventually got absorbed into Gemini), it's some combination of:

* The eye of Sauron (management) can make specific spots (e.g. Gemini) push harder (and attract the motivated people at the company and be selective)

* They hire a lot better than average (Generally from the top 10%, hotter places in Google are more selective)

* They have a promo process that gives career motivated people a way to prove themselves (not always aligned with things being on the right track ofc, and not always non-political, but they definitely do something)

* Redundancy in teams causes them to compete (not necessarily productively)

Of course, there are other downsides not listed here (insane bureaucracy for launches, GDPR/BCID compliance, etc, etc), but a lot of what makes Google possible is the insane amounts of cash Search throws off.