That's not crazy because if past predicts the future, that revenue will grow quickly. At $8 billion/year it's just 7.5 years, which is a reasonable investment.

So SpaceX is buying 15 years of future cashflows, assuming no change in revenue. Which is bad assumption given past growth was gigantic.

They are also buying 300-400 employees with proven record of training good coding models.

Their expertise will be used to improve Grok Build coding agent.

Also, they're using stock, not cash, so effectively they doubled the amount of money raised.

EGCS was created because Cygnus, a company whose business was based on GCC, wasn't getting their patches to GCC, maintained by non-company FSF.

Cygnus outcompeted FSF by so much that FSF folded and made EGCS maintainers new maintainers of GCC.

I just don't see average open source project being forked and improved by so much that it eliminates the original.

This requires 3 rare things to happen:

- the project is important enough

- the project is half-dead

- someone is willing to out-compete the original project

That won't happen to e.g. Laydbird. Yes, it's important but it's making rapid progress and they also use ai, so you can't outcompete them just using ai. It's a full-time project for at least one person (Andreas Kling) so unless you manage to find a band of great, unemployed programmers I don't see how you would compete.

Granted, their profitability is better but in 2021 they were (rationally) valued based on Great Expectations which didn't pan out.

Now they're (rationally) valued on Much Less Great Expectations.

So I think it has nothing to do with skills of early investors (not the boogeymen, irrelevant private equity) and everything to do with Coinbase being a fast growth company at the time of IPO and being negative growth company after IPO.

They make money by curating an index i.e. a list of companies and licensing that list to other companies for a fee.

If they pick good, profitable companies with great future, then the business continues. If not, the business fails.

So when you're debating "should/shouldn't", the only perspective is that of Nasdaq, the company, and they only question they "should" be interested in is: is SpaceX a good company with great feature that will make the list better.

The 6 month rule was created by Nasdaq, the company, in order to pick good companies. It's not a religion. It's not a suicide pact.

Therefore when faced with historic IPO (the largest IPO ever) it's a sign of good management that they are not applying the same rules to SpaceX (debuting at $1.75 Trillion) as they do to companies that IPO at $100 million.

The reason is not "whatever".

Only very successful CEOs can negotiate super voting shares. In this context "successful" means "runs very profitable company".

If you're crap CEO (your company is not very profitable) then investors won't say "sure, you're crap CEO but we'll give you a complete control so that you can continue to be crap CEO".

Only when you're very successful you can negotiate complete control (which investors don't want to give unless they think they'll make lots of money).

And the best predictor of future success is past success.

Therefore companies run by CEOs with super voting shares were successful in the past and are more likely to be successful in the future.

The guy who landed on the Moon testified in congress opposing giving SpaceX any money.

The government wanted nothing to do with SpaceX.

SpaceX won the contracts despite the government, not because. They won the contracts because they offered the best product at the lowest price.

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...

Do explain to me his evil plan of becoming rich by lying about going to Mars and yet agreeing to only get paid when he does go to Mars.

The rules are made by politicians.

All it takes to change the rules is to rotate politicians.

Or enough public dissent that the same politicians are forced to revert the rules.

Just as I was reading this claude implemented a drag&drop of images out of SumatraPDF.

I asked:

> implement dragging out images; if we initiate drag action and the element under cursor is an image, allow dragging out the image and dropping on other applications

then it didn't quite work:

I'm testing it by trying to drop on a web application that accepts dropped images from file system but it doesn't work for that

Here's the result: https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf/commit/58d9a4...

It took me less than 15 mins, with testing.

Now you tell me:

1. Can a farm worker do that?

2. Can you improve this code in a meaningful way? If you were doing a code review, what would you ask to be changed?

3. How long would it take you to type this code?

Here's what I think: No. No. Much longer.

> Do that enough and you won't know enough about your codebase to recognise errors in the LLM output.

Okay, when that happens, then sure, you'll have a problem.

I have not seen any evidence that that is currently the case i.e. I have no problems correcting LLM output when needed.

When the situation changes, then we can talk about pulling back on LLM usage.

And the crucial point is: me.

I'm not saying that everyone that uses LLM to generate code won't fall into "not able to use LLM generated code".

I now generate 90% of the code with LLM and I see no issues so far. Just implementing features faster. Fixing bugs faster.

> aware of existing and new laws, standards and codes of practice

Yeah, because software business is not at all ruled by fads.

1997: you have to follow Extreme Programming (XP) or you don't get your license

2000: you now have to use XML for everything in XML or you don't get your license

2002: you now have to follow Agile or you don't get your license

2025: you now have to write everything in Rust or you don't get your license

etc., etc.

2. pacemakers and other medical devices have to get approval from the government. So that's covered.

medical CRM software is covered by medical privacy laws which does what you say you want (criminalizes "bad" software) but in reality is a giant set of rules, many idiotic, that make health care more expensive for no benefit at all.

Of course not.

And yet they leave X and only X.

C++ build system, at the core, boils down to calling gcc foo.c -o foo.obj / link foo.obj foo.exe (please forgive if I got they syntax wrong).

Sure, you have more .c files, and you pass some flags but that's the core.

I've recently started a new C++ program from scratch.

What build system did I write?

I didn't. I told Claude:

"Write a bun typescript script build.ts that compiles the .cpp files with cl and creates foo.exe. Create release and debug builds, trigger release build with -release cmd-line flag".

And it did it in minutes and it worked. And I can expand it with similar instructions. I can ask for release build with all the sanitize flags and claude will add it.

The particulars don't matter. I could have asked for a makefile, or cmake file or ninja or a script written in python or in ruby or in Go or in rust. I just like using bun for scripting.

The point is that in the past I tried to learn cmake and good lord, it's days spent learning something that I'll spent 1 hr using.

It just doesn't make sense to learn any of those tools given that claude can give me working any build system in minutes.

It makes even less sense to create new build tools. Even if you create the most amazing tool, I would still choose spending a minute asking claude than spending days learning arbitrary syntax of a new tool.

On average, it's probably better than the code I would write.

I say "on average" because AI doesn't make stupid mistakes, doesn't invert logical conditions. I know I do. Which I eventually fix, but it's better to not make them in the first place, hence "on average".

And in cases that AI doesn't generate code up to my quality standards, I re-prompt it until it does. Or fix it myself.

I'm not a hapless victim of AI. I'm a supervisor. I operate a machine that generates good code most of the time but not all of the time. I'm there to spot and correct the "not all of the time" cases.

To give you a concrete examples. Recently pretext library made waves. I looked at the code and noticed that isCJK could possibly faster.

So I spent 30 minutes TELLING claude to write a benchmark and implement several different, hopefully faster, versions. Some claude came up with by itself and some were based on my guidance.

You can see the result here: https://github.com/chenglou/pretext/issues/2

The original isCJK, also written by AI (I assume), was fast. It wasn't obviously slow like lots of human JavaScript code I see.

Claude did implement a faster version.

Could I do the same thing (write multiple implementations and benchmark them) without Claude? Yes.

Would I do it? Probably not. It would take significantly longer than 30 min. and I don't have that much time to spend on isCJK.

Would I achieve as good result? Probably no. The big win came from replacing for .. of with regular for loop. Something that didn't occur to me but Claude did it because I instructed it to "come up with ideas to speed it up". I'm an expert in writing fast code but I don't know everything and I all good ideas. AI knows everything, you just need to poke it the right way.

Methinks that mass produced pottery makes more than $2 billion and etsy pottery is a tiny fraction of overall etsy sales.