Hacker News: rchaud

New comment by rchaud in "The Pentagon is running an AI propaganda mill targeting Latin America"

rchaud — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 17:50:25 +0000

School of Americas-trained death squads on one hand and hoity-toity arts and culture on the other. Soft power certainly casts a wide net.

New comment by rchaud in "SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P"

rchaud — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 04:23:43 +0000

Good. Indexes are supposed to be slow-moving, precisely due to their entry requirement of sustained profitability that skews towards mature companies.

All that an inclusion of these new companies would accomplish is a bailout of their stockholders by pension funds and ETFs where millions of regular people shoulder all the downside risk.

SpaceX and OAI stock will be available through Robinhood, Questrade and all the other retail investor markets. Individuals can make an informed choice to trade it there, rather than have it automatically added to their index fund without having any say.

New comment by rchaud in "Americans Are Leaving the U.S. in Record Numbers"

rchaud — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 00:24:20 +0000

I don't know about a population decline, but it's well known that its real estate is almost as expensive as it in major population centres. It's also very hard to find a family physician taking new patients.

New comment by rchaud in "Michael Burry says neither SpaceX nor Anthropic is worth $1T"

rchaud — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 15:29:22 +0000

Graham died back when stocks were traded by guys shouting orders from a pit. High frequency trading was decades away, as was Wall Street's push for:

- creative accounting (Enron, Worldcom)

- zero-interest rate policy

- SPAC IPOs

- exotic securitization (credit default swaps)

...that made valuation more opaque over time. The age of value investing is long gone.

New comment by rchaud in "Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC"

rchaud — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 20:20:39 +0000

Microsoft and Apple had decades of profitable years before hitting a trillion. AI companies are seeking trillion dollar IPOs without profits, selling a service well below its actual cost.

New comment by rchaud in "Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC"

rchaud — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 20:14:38 +0000

Hedge funds won't try to short the stock; the holders are almost all institutional investors and insiders who are long on the stock and have no reason to lend them to HFs betting on a price decline.

What they might do is trade bespoke instruments like a credit default swap on datacenter construction deals. Stays underneath the radar of politicians and tech insiders who are invested in a particular outcome.

New comment by rchaud in "I'm So Tired of Ads"

rchaud — Sun, 31 May 2026 18:57:19 +0000

There is no moral argument anymore. Every ad peddler online has broken every TOS imaginable to feed its AI training models, at a scale a human couldn't accomplish in a million years.

New comment by rchaud in "Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'"

rchaud — Fri, 29 May 2026 17:08:39 +0000

With this governance structure, you won't actually own anything. Ownership implies that you have a say as a shareholder.

New comment by rchaud in "Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'"

rchaud — Fri, 29 May 2026 17:03:01 +0000

It's not basic math when the numbers are this big. There's not going to be $50 billion coming in Year 3 if there's a market correction and lenders scale back financing. Borrowed money is how companies are paying for AI, and that's the first thing that disappears in a recession.

New comment by rchaud in "Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'"

rchaud — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:53:44 +0000

Waiving profitability requirements to join the S&P 500 and trigger auto-buys from index funds is DEI for corporations.

New comment by rchaud in "[dead]"

rchaud — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:40:16 +0000

Directors talk to actors. There is no actor here. At best, this is the equivalent of sending multiple 3000 word emails to a casting agency and letting them figure out what to tell their actors.

New comment by rchaud in "The $500K AI Film That "Premiered at Cannes" Was Not in the Official Festival"

rchaud — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:16:58 +0000

Reminds me of a story a friend told me where she was on a date with a man who said he went to Harvard. After looking him up on LinkedIn she discovered he just took some courses at Harvard Extension school where there aren't any admission requirements besides a high school diploma and the ability to pay course fees.

Why is an AI movie startup trying to obtain social proof through the snooty film festival circuit anyway? If this is about "democratizing creation", why not just post the film on Youtube and let the public decide?

New comment by rchaud in "Anthropic raises $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation"

rchaud — Fri, 29 May 2026 05:07:12 +0000

And the punishment for securities fraud is a slap on the wrist, as Tesla proved with its "going private at $420/share, funding secured" tweet. Who cares about a $40m fine from an increasingly toothless regulator when your investors have already fronted $1.5 billion to settle copyright infringement claims?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y4jpg922qo

New comment by rchaud in "Anthropic raises $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation"

rchaud — Fri, 29 May 2026 05:02:15 +0000

If the investors are VCs, they can sell their holdings to a syndicate of underwriter banks in advance of the IPO, and let the banks shoulder the risk of finding a bigger fool in the secondary markets.

New comment by rchaud in "Don't Subscribe So Casually"

rchaud — Tue, 26 May 2026 17:31:05 +0000

I never saw the point of subscribing. The home page will show you videos from channels you've watched whether or not you've subscribed.

New comment by rchaud in "Iowa to mandate students take Intellectual Freedom classes amid low enrollment"

rchaud — Sat, 23 May 2026 23:49:48 +0000

> intellectual freedom is a cornerstone of democracy and freedom.

Indeed. And what better way to prove it than by mandating six credit hours worth of tuition fees on the topic?

New comment by rchaud in "We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot"

rchaud — Fri, 22 May 2026 00:38:32 +0000

Yeah and private health insurance can be useful if it is designed to pool risk across a population, help make healthcare costs transparent and pay for treatments that people need. But that's not where the money is.

New comment by rchaud in "We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot"

rchaud — Fri, 22 May 2026 00:34:44 +0000

Plenty of iPhone users are on Brave Browser because it blocks ads on Youtube. When you type in a search query in the address bar, it defaults to Brave Search. Don't underestimate the power of defaults.

There is a boiling point for user tolerance when it comes to ads. Google has been pushing that needle deep into the red for years now.

New comment by rchaud in "Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans"

rchaud — Thu, 21 May 2026 22:36:57 +0000

The music industry got rid of all that years ago when the big labels swallowed the small indies and imposed their corporate culture everywhere. There are no A&R men skulking through dive bars using drugs and girls to sign bands. The bands are now supposed to approach the labels with their Spotify listen counts and social media follower numbers ready.

Rick Beato has a good video on why so many new generation superstars like Gracie Abrams are nepo babies who all the time and money in the world to chase music as a career.

New comment by rchaud in "Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans"

rchaud — Thu, 21 May 2026 22:28:00 +0000

Touring costs a fortune for bands. They don't even keep most of the money, the record label takes a big cut and there's Ticketmaster after that, and now Spotify I guess. Selling paper-thin T-shirts, vinyl and lapel pins for absurd markups at the merch booth is how they make money.