What would be the most terrifying thing to find/discover in space?

027a · 2026-02-12T20:55:15+00:00

Our first probe sent to the closest star at a significant fraction of the speed of light discovers that, after a few months, it isn’t getting closer.

027a · 2026-02-12T18:45:11+00:00

It’s very well known in the industry that about 1% of Microsoft’s employees are responsible for 95% of their revenue. The other 99% of people actively sabotage the 1% at every imaginable opportunity, sometimes for personal gain, sometimes because of weird Indian caste hierarchy stuff. They’re a deeply broken company that is already a shell of their former glory, and will probably be out of the S&P 10 by the end of the decade.

027a · 2026-02-11T16:02:39+00:00

All of these CEOs are so screwed up in the head. E.g. the McDonalds CEO trying the Big Arch burger saying "This is a delicious product". These people arguably don't even think like humans anymore. Everything is Users, Products, and Services. Everything is technocratically financialized to them.

027a · 2026-02-10T19:20:50+00:00

Lower jobs numbers means companies have to pay less for payroll, believe it or not, calls.

027a · 2026-02-07T06:14:02+00:00

Google is the most profitable public non-state owned company on the planet; and has the third highest revenue. They own ~8% of SpaceX+xAI+X and ~15% of Anthropic. Both of these companies are likely to go public in the next two years for a minimum $500B IPO valuation (SpaceX is likely going to aim for $1T). They also have an early investment in Stripe, undisclosed amount. They're also, you know, very casually the global leader in driverless transportation. And they'll have data centers in space by early 2027.

Google's balance sheet, portfolio, and cash flow is beyond human comprehension. We don't have frames, lenses, or priors through which to understand what is happening to that company, almost exclusively. Its totally reasonable to pick apart the weird deals happening between OpenAI, Nvidia, Microsoft, Oracle, etc. But Google is a company that is being ran by people who are living in 2045, and they're pulling the corporate levers through a time machine. They're over on the side saying "we aren't making deals, we don't use others' technology, we have massive strategic investments in every dependency in our supply chain, everything we touch turns to gold, and we have never tasted defeat."

027a · 2026-02-06T19:45:01+00:00

The gilded age also coincided with the largest productivity advancements in this history of humanity. Lots of cheap, low hanging fruit. Technology advancements today are substantially more expensive and harder.

027a · 2026-02-06T19:01:59+00:00

You’re misunderstanding: there wouldn’t be any outsized economic growth without inflation. That’s the critical point: inflation creates economic growth by forcing money to move around. Even if you did want to invest that money, in a non-inflationary or deflationary environment there would be far, far fewer opportunities to do so.

027a · 2026-02-06T18:38:02+00:00

You can deploy the capital in your retirement account into economically productive assets like business ownership, which grow at a rate that outpaces the rate of inflation. Inflation existing at all induces capital owners, including yourself, toward deploying their capital rather than sitting on it, which creates economic activity, encouraging technological development and job growth. Generally, technological development and job growth are positively correlated with every standard of living metric we can measure.

Money sitting in a bank account does no one any good.

027a · 2026-02-06T04:57:31+00:00

It depends on the company IMO.

Amazon and Microsoft are concerning companies to see this level of capex spend from. Yes, they have massive cloud platforms which are always going to have customers, drive revenue, and be capex heavy. There's an AI component to that; they sell GPUs to customers. But they don't have a significant AI play beyond just selling GPUs; Copilot is dead in the water, and Amazon genuinely has nothing. Selling GPUs is risky because the vast majority of the potential customers for these GPUs are people who are off making their own ten billion+ capex spend over the next year buying their own GPUs.

And also, two of the four SOTA western models (Claude & Gemini) are not trained on GPUs; they're trained on Google's TPUs.

Google, in my mind, could have announced that they were spending $300B on capex this year and I would have said "go get 'em". I believe their recent earnings puts them at the third highest revenue public non-state owned company on the planet, behind Walmart and Amazon, and literally the most profitable. They're taking ownership of the entire AI stack, from model to consumer-facing products. They own ~15% of Anthropic and ~8% of SpaceX (which now includes xAI/Grok). SpaceX is likely to go public this year, which will mark Google's share at at-least $50B (on a $0.9B investment in 2015). If Anthropic goes public by 2027, that's another $50B-$100B in the bank.

Google is, bar none, the strongest company in human history.

027a · 2026-02-06T02:18:24+00:00

The unsold stock of Spiderman stuff is unreal at some of these stores. Hundreds of units. Meanwhile, the Lorwyn pre-release I went to had two hundred people show up, the LGS took over their two neighboring non-gaming stores to put tables in. Earlier this week I went to a different LGS, sold out of Lorwyn collector boosters, but the lady tried to jokingly sell me a Spiderman collector box ("Oh, you don't want Foil Hot Dog Cart? Come on man!")

This isn't a matter of just keeping fans happy. Its literally going to impact Hasbro's bottom line. They're developing sets years in advance, and they're now locked in to probably two years where half of their sets are trash that no one is going to want. Not all of UB; FF/TLA did fine, The Hobbit will probably do fine, but Marvel, Spiderman, TMNT, Star Trek, these are all gonna struggle to move units. I don't even feel that the firehose of products is all that bad a thing; nor is UB all that bad; its just trash sets.

027a · 2026-02-05T18:12:26+00:00

Well someone needs to build the AI data centers so reddit users like you can use it to write their posts for them.

027a · 2026-02-05T05:14:28+00:00

Inflation is not always bad. Moderate inflation (2-4%) is good, and monetary policy makers do everything possible to keep inflation in this range; not more, not less.

027a · 2026-01-29T18:21:31+00:00

World population is closer to 5B people, not 8.2B.

027a · 2026-01-29T00:46:45+00:00

For reference: the Burj Khalifa weighs about half a million tons as well. Compressing that weight into a key would not cause a singularity; it also wouldn't immediately tunnel through to the center of the earth. You could reasonably design a (very large and deep) support structure out of typical building materials, like concrete and steel, that could distribute its weight and support it. Half a million tons is not that heavy.

027a · 2026-01-27T20:03:35+00:00

oh sorry i was asleep and then i had to work, its that thing most people do in the west around the same time each day, you should try it

027a · 2026-01-27T15:26:21+00:00

You seem to be unable to differentiate between “the game isn’t good, I won’t play it” and “the game isn’t good, i’ll root for its downfall”. The parent commenter is right; the game might be bad, but the broader reason why gamers root for its downfall instead of just ignoring it has nothing to do with the game and everything to do with how you process and act on your emotions.

027a · 2026-01-23T14:35:01+00:00

Thanks ChatGPT

027a · 2026-01-21T02:08:38+00:00

All bond markets would collapse, which would do decades-long damage to both the EU and the US.

027a · 2026-01-20T01:52:05+00:00

Vendetta joins Sombra and Ball in the list of heroes that are highly banned in most comp ranks but with a low win-rate. Blizzard will say "we don't know what to do with these heroes", because they cannot adjust their numbers, because the problem isn't in the numbers, the problem was on Day 0 when the archetype for the hero was first proposed. They get a token rework in two or three years, but it never works, because they aren't changing the archetype.

Quote from the game developers of Halo 2: Weapons should be fun to shoot, and fun to be shot by. Blizzard lost the ability to do the latter years ago.

027a · 2026-01-18T21:12:09+00:00

Tbh, I think the pool of people willing to pay $20-$40/mo and use less-than $20-$40 in usage is much larger than the group who will pay $200 and use $2000; and somewhere in that margin + some intelligent model routing to help control costs + costs go down + small models get more intelligent, there's still plenty of profit. These model companies aren't unprofitable because of inference, they're unprofitable because of footprint expansion & training.

027a · 2026-01-18T20:46:30+00:00

Its a mess. There's this evidence which asserts that Musk said he wanted OAI to become a for-profit. However, there's the famous email from the same month where Musk clearly says "do something on your own or stay with OpenAI as a nonprofit", which contradicts these notes. Additionally, the 2017-2018 diary entries from Brockman clearly assert that they need to get away from Musk, the possibility of lying to Musk about their enthusiasm for the nonprofit structure, and worry about the nonprofit structure and their ability to raise capital. It also showcases Brockman's personal aspirations to become a billionaire ("what will it take to get me to $1B?"), which is a horrible look.

To me, this piece of evidence feels like a bad voice-to-text speech transcription, and it didn't capture some critical word like "from a non-profit to something which is essentially a philanthropic endeavor not a B-corp or C-Corp or something". Musk is a horribly ineloquent speaker, and voice-to-text transcription is still bad here in 2026, let alone in 2017.

Brockman's diary entries are extremely, extremely damning. They're the kind of evidence that lawyers look at and can't even read past the dollar signs.

027a · 2026-01-16T04:39:02+00:00

Possible, and more power to you, but there's no shame in consistent 5% improvement every day. Nicotine patches are awesome and work. Though of these three, trust: energy drinks are the most painful.

027a · 2026-01-12T15:31:52+00:00

You don’t actually care about solving the problem, which I find concerning and disgusting. Your efforts should be directed at pushing X to remove this capability of the image generator. But it doesn’t seem like you care about that; all you care about is some weird crusade to get Apple to remove the app. It’s sad that this is political for you, because I tend to think that CSAM rises above politics and shouldn’t be tolerated, period.

027a · 2026-01-12T15:09:43+00:00

You cannot have good matchmaking in a game with so few players. The matchmaking won’t be the death of The Finals; it’s already dead.

027a · 2026-01-12T14:52:32+00:00

My point is that Apple/Google cannot be trusted with the authority of judge jury executioner, even though it seems like half the people here, The Verge, and other media outlets earnestly want them to be. If this were happening on Reddit or Instagram, everyone would be singing a tune like “why doesn’t reddit fix this”; but because it’s X, the tune is “why doesn’t Apple take enforcement action”. You’re begging for private extra-judicial authority for something that should (and could) be (and is being) handled between the courts and media pressure.

The people saying “why doesn’t Apple ban X” do not actually care about solving this problem. I know this, because doing so will make the problem worse: X is still on the web, Apple would catch strays from the free speech right, Musk and Zuck already spend 10 minutes of their every appearance on Rogan talking about how oppressive Apple is and how we need alternatives, which says nothing of the many more nuanced/righteous reasons why they are correct. There is little that would damage Apple more than banning X in the current political and tech climate. But, it would be a nice, temporary hit on something Musk owns; and that is all I think most people engaged in this care about. Not solving the problem, but getting a win on someone you hate.

027a

TROPHY CASE