Hacker News: rchaud

New comment by rchaud in "Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit"

rchaud — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 15:23:39 +0000

Considering that the buyer is Google, it's more likely to be a Gemini customer with a Google Cloud plan.

New comment by rchaud in "Credit card debt rises to $1.26T, nearing all-time record"

rchaud — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 02:20:11 +0000

The US doesn't default on his interest payments. The US consumer on the other hand....

New comment by rchaud in "Corgi kills short-lived website that ranked its female employees"

rchaud — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 02:26:47 +0000

> Sebastian Mandal, a San Francisco-based startup startup founder who describes himself on LinkedIn as a college dropout and a professional Minecraft player.

I see a Sequoia Capital funding round in his future.

New comment by rchaud in "uBlock Origin Is Giving Up the Fight to Keep Ads Off Facebook"

rchaud — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 20:08:57 +0000

The biggest buyers of ads are not promoting products, they're shilling for politicians. The same way junk mail props up the postal service, political ads keep the lights on at local TV channels. They are unwatchable during election season, and there's some election campaign happening all the time. Mayors, governors, senators, congress.

Facebook and Youtube are just the newest battlefields. If it's not politician ads, it's military ads, partisan "nonprofit" ads, or ads for podcasts. I don't need to see any of them.

That said, as long as UBO keeps up the good fight on the open web, I'm good. Facebook is basically a memory now, and there are other ways to access Youtube that are actually less taxing on their bandwidth because they don't have auto-play enabled and don't show a 45-minute podcast episode as a pre-roll.

New comment by rchaud in "A Fed official is asking whether AI is becoming 'too big to fail'"

rchaud — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:56:18 +0000

Tech itself may not be a big employer, but the whole point of paying for AI is to eventually save billions on salaries, payroll taxes and insurance premiums, is it not? What happens to the labor market and consumer confidence then?

I agree that the companies taking on debt have strong balance sheets. Yet they are taking on debt at high interest, and stacking it in off-balance sheet Special Purpose Vehicles. Why, when they have hundreds of billions in cash reserves that could pay for the buildout? It's not like they're socking that cash away to pay shareholders. The big dogs like Google and Meta are paying 27c a share, which is a rounding error for them.

New comment by rchaud in "I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel"

rchaud — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:14:27 +0000

Just because the hardware and inference costs may decrease in the future doesn't mean prices will. The AI vendor market is the furthest thing from a competitive industry where there are limited barriers to entry and new market entrants exert downward pressure on prices and profit margins.

Every single company in this market is losing billions on this business, and the only way to make it back is to acquire paying customers at a loss and jack up prices later.

New comment by rchaud in "Bending Spoons makes first post-IPO acquisition with $1.3B Airtable deal"

rchaud — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 11:58:21 +0000

In other words, the private equity sales pitch. You left out the bit about jacking up the price and milking customers for every penny until their contracts expire.

New comment by rchaud in "Apple seeks U.S. approval to buy memory chips from blacklisted CXMT"

rchaud — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 03:16:50 +0000

You can't possibly believe Apple had no hand in the Huawei ban.

New comment by rchaud in "Apple seeks U.S. approval to buy memory chips from blacklisted CXMT"

rchaud — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 03:14:38 +0000

Consumer demand is much more price-sensitive than enterprise demand, not least because the latter can issue bonds to pay for RAM and GPUs. Prices for consumers are going up everywhere: food, gas, insurance, you name it.

Steam Deck and Nintendo Switch have a competitor that's the elephant in the room: Chinese Android handhelds that run rings around them on price and play everything from NES to Switch games locally as well as PS5/Steam via remote link.

New comment by rchaud in "Launching Health in ChatGPT to US Users"

rchaud — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 03:07:13 +0000

"Involved in their own healthcare" tends to mean getting second opinions, reading medical articles, joining a support group and talking to other patients.

Pretty soon it will mean "I looked it up on ChatGPT and it says I don't need surgery".

New comment by rchaud in "Launching Health in ChatGPT to US Users"

rchaud — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 03:03:22 +0000

From this[0]

> A lawsuit filed by Scott Winters, a 55-year-old pastor from Florida, claimed ChatGPT told him not to seek medical help after repeatedly asking about symptoms in the build-up to a near-fatal pulmonary embolism.

in the same article:

> OpenAI's Drew Pusateri told the BBC's US news partner CBS News that "ChatGPT is not a doctor and should never be used as a substitute for medical care, diagnosis or treatment".

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwylp3nxp5yo

New comment by rchaud in "PlayStation Network outage leaves players dreading all-digital future"

rchaud — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 02:55:36 +0000

> If this makes the PS6 cheaper then great.

Yes, I'm sure that was top of mind for Playstation executives when making this decision. /s

New comment by rchaud in "Patreon laying off 20% of staff"

rchaud — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 14:17:44 +0000

So why not send this out as an email? What purpose does a public proclamation serve?

New comment by rchaud in "New rental trend? A $200 'work-from-home fee' tacked on to Bay Area lease"

rchaud — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 23:04:32 +0000

Using more Internet at work than at night playing 4K Netflix or downloading 100GB+ games and multi-GB patches? Doubtful.

New comment by rchaud in "Jack Dorsey launches Buzz to combine team chat, AI agents and Git hosting"

rchaud — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 17:29:11 +0000

"Explain like I'm pitching to TechCrunch Disrupt".

New comment by rchaud in "Valve say there's no end in sight to the memory crisis, prices going to increase"

rchaud — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 18:42:54 +0000

That's what the entire apparatus of sanctions and blockades are for - to make sure they don't make the wrong choice.

New comment by rchaud in "SpaceX stock erases all its gains and slides below IPO price in intraday trading"

rchaud — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 17:14:33 +0000

not to mention hiding all the Twitter losses inside of xAI because AI in general loses lots of money.

New comment by rchaud in "SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status"

rchaud — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:35:18 +0000

Burton Malkiel's "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" was published in 1973, well before significant changes to financial markets that affect its theoretical randomness.

1. 401Ks were introduced in 1978, making mainstream the concept of automatic payroll deductions that funded an investment account. Trillions more dollars moved into pension funds that might otherwise have been spent elsewhere.

2. Bloomberg Terminals went online in 1982, kicking off an ever-growing information assymetry between investment professionals and retail investors.

3. Electronic trading didn't take off until 1992 with Globex, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange's platform

4. High-frequency trading didn't take off until 2005 or so

5. Finally, the Nasdaq changed its rules in 2026 in a way that directly benefited new IPOs like SpaceX, triggering automated purchases from investment funds, propping up its price beyond what its business fundamentals might have justified.

New comment by rchaud in "Iran Hatched Fresh Plot to Kill Trump, Israel Told U.S."

rchaud — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 14:50:36 +0000

They were always the regional hegemon next to Israel. US leaders just happen to love the canard of "they'll welcome us as liberators" because it's the only thing they can attempt to sell to the electorate.

New comment by rchaud in "Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected"

rchaud — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 03:33:13 +0000

Gubernatorial run in California.