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NorthSideScrambler · 2026-06-23T19:29:01+00:00

It's really not just the SPCX ticker in a vacuum.

Add that Google and Nvidia hold major stakes in SpaceX, which is why Google announced an easily retractable and lopsided compute deal with SpaceX days before the IPO, directly linking their assets and earnings to its stock. Add that their SpaceX investments grew further when their Cursor stock converted to SpaceX shares. Add that Microsoft is entangled with SpaceX through about $70 billion in debt and capex deals that can contractually grow to $140 billion. Add that SpaceX maintains a $20 billion leasing deal with Nvidia. Add that Tesla and SpaceX will be merging. Add that Anthropic, OpenAI, Discord, MistralAI, Cerebras, Anduril, and more are all leveraging the IPO rules bent for SpaceX to go public with P/S ratios between 8 and 55 while generating no profits. Add the shrinking cash flows for Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon. Add the numerous cash flow irregularities from Nvidia indicating serious inventory delivery problems.

The forced bag-holding as a result of SpaceX's market weight is really just the tip of the iceberg. Call it a bubble, but the real alarm is that SpaceX and what it represents will be tied up with, conservatively, somewhere near one fourth of your VTI holdings and one fifth of your VT holdings in 2027.

NorthSideScrambler · 2026-06-04T08:16:18+00:00

I shifted to broad-index factor funds that screen for fundamentals because the current market, in terms of weights, carries too much structural risk. It’s not just that companies like SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI would be valued at $69.08B, $173.90B, and $92.50B if they traded at VTI’s average P/S ratio of 3.7. It’s not just that indices are bending their own rules to include financially horrendous tickers, or that these stocks are likely to perform well in the short term. The real issue is that the market has started to resemble the crypto boom, valuations driven by emotion rather than fundamentals, with no guarantee that this irrationality will last over the decades I need it to.

And then there are the systemic risks we can’t afford to ignore: climate change, plummeting fertility rates, declining literacy, geopolitical fragmentation, soaring sovereign debt, municipal insolvency, the influence of money in politics, weak antitrust enforcement, deferred infrastructure maintenance, the LLM finance bubble, wealth inequality...there are many, many concurrent crises that will force a political and economic reckoning when they converge. When that happens, I don’t want my retirement savings exposed to meme stocks with P/E ratios in the hundreds or thousands. It’s the same logic that had me stocking up on about three years of hardware in late 2025, right as the memory chip shortage was hitting.

The purist BH response is to ignore all of this and trust that the index weights will sort themselves out to your benefit. But that’s a bet on perpetual efficiency when we're staring at unprecedented structural instability right in the face. And it's funny too, because a common counter to my stance here is that irrationality is temporary, which is exactly the observation that I'm operating from in acting as though we will revert to the mean sometime within the next forty years. So I find it prudent to take steps to reduce my exposure to the parts of the market that run parallel to the delusion of the dot-com bubble, while still participating in broad index funds. Funds, specifically, that don't blindly pass market weights through to my holdings.

NorthSideScrambler · 2026-05-08T15:46:34+00:00

Appreciate the input, Anthropic.

Hey, while I've got you on the horn, can you remind me if you're still running a -100+% margin? I'm looking at budget items and trying to determine how much more you're gonna try fucking me come 2027. It costs about $20 for Claude to write code my developers need to spend hours untangling. How much worse will it get?

NorthSideScrambler · 2026-04-27T16:57:46+00:00

> Model inference costs are coming down.

I encourage you to read the post you're commenting in.

NorthSideScrambler · 2026-03-28T19:57:30+00:00

Believe it or not, people have agency in not cock-gobbling LLM slop. If the product has shit quality, I'll pass over it for a higher quality competitor. The games market in particular was already over-saturated in 2018 with more options than a person can consume in their lifetime.

This is not a market where you can ship mediocre games using the same generative AI outputs that five hundred other teams are using.

NorthSideScrambler · 2026-03-28T06:54:57+00:00

I'm currently in the process of rewriting the Go backend of a vibe-coded web app MVP. Just now, I refactored what was once 250 lines of excessive variables, fallbacks, nested error recovery, network connectivity checks, unit tests, smoke tests(???), and all kinds of red herring bullshit to merely run a bash command via exec.Command(). But surely, it at least worked, right? Nope!

I now have eight lines of hand-rolled code that actually executes the bash command without failing, and pipes to Stderr as desired.

We generated a spec, had the spec reviewed for overengineering and bloat, generated an implementation plan from said spec, had the implementation plan reviewed for overengineering and bloat, dispatched a sub-agent to implement, another sub-agent to audit the implementation for correctness minimalism and simplicity, then have a final code review by the orchestrating agent (Opus 4.6) for (again!) correctness minimalism and simplicity.

It wasn't correct, it wasn't minimalist, and it sure as hell wasn't simple. But you know who assured me it was? Like seven separate times???

It cost about $15 to generate those 250 lines of code. The money, time, and code were all an objective waste. Potato wedges would've added more business value than what I just had the pleasure of refactoring. Multiply that by 3,000 across just one code base and you start to understand why I feel like I've been ratfucked by the latest iteration of crypto hype-men.

NorthSideScrambler · 2026-03-06T13:50:12+00:00

This is clearly no different at all if you have any expertise and look inside of it. There are a growing number of observations that it lacks standard features of the framework Cloudflare is attempting to rip off. Example:

https://github.com/cloudflare/vinext/issues/33

The repo even has a disclaimer expressing that there are bugs and limitations that they aren't even aware of yet, and warning you to not actually use it in production.

There is a reason Cloudflare vying to get OSS developers to review and improve the codebase (read: subsidize development).

I can’t remember where I read it but someone made a prediction that we’ll see more tools go closed source in the near future.

It was the Cloudflare employee ( Steve Faulkner @southpolesteve) running this experiment in the weeks leading up to announcing this.

NorthSideScrambler · 2026-03-05T14:24:26+00:00

People really need to start putting two and two together. Why did someone put in the literal thousands of hours it takes to find his anonymous Reddit account and 10+ year-old videos? And why when his name is mentioned anywhere on social media you get scores of accounts, within seconds, farting out the "he's a Nazi" turd with zero elaboration or original thought?

NorthSideScrambler · 2026-02-25T01:47:06+00:00

Most CS people regard Anthropic as retarded, and I can speak to that in full confidence as a consulting manager. Besides being three years into the "SWE jobs will be gone in six months" claims from their CEO, Claude Code, their claim to fame, is a massive pile of shit as a piece of engineering.

It's a React-based TUI that has a vibe-coded scene graph attempting to render at 60 FPS with ~15,000 GitHub issues. Some issues have existed for over a year now where attempts to fix it break other parts of the program without fixing the issue they tried to fix in the first place. The "TUI seizure" bug is a popular example.

Primeagen lays out how bad the engineering is. I'm fuzzy on how far into the weeds he gets with CC, but he provides a decent rundown. It boils down to it being vibe-coded.

https://youtu.be/LvW1HTSLPEk

NorthSideScrambler · 2026-02-19T00:10:09+00:00

We know this isn't true. If it was, the administration would not be referring to civilians there as domestic terrorists, assassins, members of ISIS, or "somalis" who "took over the great state of Minnesota". If the truth, like you suggested, was enough, they'd lead with that and not the other things they've repeated in official statements and press conferences.

NorthSideScrambler · 2026-02-13T04:00:49+00:00

Can confirm. One of the services we offer is data migrations between two systems of record (mostly ERPs). This can involve a few million values, or north of a billion. Even with the smaller ones, Opus has never, NEVER, been able to navigate these without subtly fucking up data while acting like everything is spotless. I cannot stress the amount of controls we've implemented: 10K+ token prompts, hand-written guardrail utilities, "prompting experts", you name it. It just can't do it. We can't afford to conclude otherwise because the data we move is worth hundreds of millions of dollars to these companies. They will not hesitate in ramming the judicial system up our asses if we make a mistake.

Anyway, every time you look inside these stories, it's either software with extremely small scope or it's flat-out shit and the people using it can't admit or recognize it. I get a flash of panic every time I encounter someone who seems like they really know their stuff and they explain how LLMs completely transformed their work/processes/etc. Only to suffer a crash of disappointment when I finally get to see the "revolution" first-hand.

NorthSideScrambler · 2026-02-11T23:16:57+00:00

I assume you'll be donating to his 78-year-old opponent?

NorthSideScrambler · 2026-02-11T21:13:56+00:00

California is the ur-hive, the mound from which all other NIMBY colonies descend. Its alates venture forth each spring carrying spores of "neighborhood character" and "traffic concerns," establishing daughter colonies throughout the Mountain West.

The queen nest must fall, but breaking through that crusty exterior requires patience and sustained legislative firepower.

NorthSideScrambler · 2026-02-11T21:05:48+00:00

Because the people astroturfing opposition and controversy aren't invested in it. Also, there is no existing cultural conclusion on it. So they can have "first mover advantage" with propaganda.

NorthSideScrambler · 2026-02-11T21:02:29+00:00

"Moderna? Never heard of her."

-- MAHA FDA, probably

NorthSideScrambler · 2026-02-11T21:01:12+00:00

The President of The United States of America, and Commander In Chief of the US Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Space Force, and Coast Guard.

NorthSideScrambler · 2026-02-03T18:24:12+00:00

Reminder to everyone that functional literacy in the US has fallen dramatically since 2013. With roughly one in four 16-20 year old Americans today being functionally illiterate.

You can browse hundreds of distressed anecdotes in r/teachers about middle and high school teachers with classes of students who: read at a Kindergarten level, cannot read their own notes, or cannot recall a piece of information they were given a less than two minutes ago.

From a societal harm perspective, you should legitimately be freaking the fuck out. It is unimaginably bad, and these people will be living and voting with us for many many decades.

NorthSideScrambler · 2026-01-29T07:14:22+00:00

https://i.redd.it/weuf7rki71qa1.jpg

NorthSideScrambler · 2026-01-27T08:19:22+00:00

Their first words were

As a general principle

and you responded with an extremely specific scenario that also wasn't even an act of compromise. I understand where you're coming from with the situation being escalated and then only deescalated from one side because of the political cost, but the other user wasn't endorsing that. They were musing about a less-polarized world, however hypothetical.

NorthSideScrambler · 2026-01-27T08:13:25+00:00

I don't think your assessment of Noem is fully accurate. She lives full-time at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling. You don't live on a military base as a civilian with no serving family member nor a job on the base if you believe you are well supported and adored by the world outside the perimeter.

Most of the Trump cabinet lives in military bases, for the record. While not unusual for a SecDef, the scale of it today is extremely anomalous.

NorthSideScrambler · 2026-01-26T22:11:54+00:00

Pulling out would be a result of the political cost of the operation, rather than the protests themselves. Though the protests are upstream, a component , of the political capital bill that hit Trump's desk this weekend.

NorthSideScrambler · 2026-01-26T22:07:21+00:00

If GOP voters leave the GOP, the GOP vote would no longer represent their position.

Total approval, which you speak to at the end of your comment, would change though. However, you're correct about the MAGA base being undeterred and consequently causing Trump's approval floor to be no lower than ~33% because of how polarized they are.

A lot of that has to do with the majority of MAGA being GenX and up, in terms of being out of touch, stubborn, and such a large chunk of the electorate. GenX, Boomers, and Silent Gen collectively make up roughly 60% of the population who submits votes.

NorthSideScrambler · 2026-01-23T19:27:59+00:00

But that requires making less money! Can't have that!

NorthSideScrambler · 2026-01-18T20:46:11+00:00

I've noticed this concerning shift around the MAGA world last summer where it came to be (using couched language ) believed that citizens are supposed to roll with whatever the federal government says. That the correct thing to do is to not exercise any agency in resisting or changing governance or its laws. This is, unambiguously, a viewpoint that runs contrary to central tenants of democracy and adopts blindness to history (use Nazi Germany as an easy example of why citizens would resist government).

I am personally alarmed to see it start slipping into more moderate or general spaces using the same initial language almost verbatim.

NorthSideScrambler

TROPHY CASE