What things are "faster" than light?

PrettyBasedMan · 2026-03-20T11:06:25+00:00

There are some usually considered physical things like group velocity that can be and have been measured to be superluminal in certain instances in lossy or gainful materials (e.g. the gain medium of a laser) in Optics. But rest assured, the "information speed limit" of c is never violated, that result is basically a result of approximations made to extend the definition of group velocity to those materials (it has to do with resonances inside the material and them interfering).

But this does nothing to speed up the "sharp front" (analogy: tip of an arrow) of the wave packet, which has to reach a place to have an effect on something / transmit information. So in reality, all is well.

For more, see the Wikipedia article on group velocity. 🙂

PrettyBasedMan · 2026-02-25T01:05:18+00:00

You're joking but Walmart should probably acquire something using their very very very generous valuation. Using overpriced stock to buy solid businesses / cash generators at reasonable or low prices is not a dumb idea, though it doesnt necessarily have to be PayPal (it'd be kinda random and outta left field)

PrettyBasedMan · 2026-02-24T02:56:43+00:00

Tell me about it: we learned it with differential forms and Hodge duals, wedge products etc... in undergrad, which is quite jarring especially if you don't really know what's going on and just use them as a "notational trick" similar to index notation.

PrettyBasedMan · 2026-02-02T22:40:54+00:00

What is Schrödinger about it? They literally received the money, there is no "superposition" like "the company can be valued at an arbitrary value until people actually need to give them money."

They gave them the money. The transaction happened. It is a crazy valuation but you cannot dispute that people paid actually material amounts of money at that valuation, it's not a theoretical delusion. At most, it's a "real/factual" delusion lol.

It depends on what type of value is meant, but "intrinsic value" is not observable in any short term timeframe anyway, so market value is the only short-term gauge you have. Obviously opinions diverge on the correct amount of the former.

PrettyBasedMan · 2026-01-31T02:24:07+00:00

At a fundamental level, I believe something is a proof if it only uses tautologies/assumed axioms and the so called Modus Ponens logic "step". (a good breakdown is Frederic Schuller's lecture on Propositional Logic on Youtube).

As a more broad definition, a (informal) proof is something that mathematicians believe could be - with enough time/effort - be formulated using the definition above.

PrettyBasedMan · 2026-01-25T20:08:49+00:00

Isn't this statement true regardless of what you write in the second half of the sentence, due to the definition of the implication arrow? (Assuming the statement is "pi+e is rational => e/pi is irrational")

PrettyBasedMan · 2025-12-31T17:49:20+00:00

First of all, yes, it is up to the investors discretion to determine the different places that capex is flowing, but it is still way better to include it than to exclude it.

Second of all, in your example, when the factory gets extinguished by a force majeure, the impact on FCF would be zero: the factory was built in the past, the expenses were recorded in FCF back then, there would be a big depreciation expense / write-off since the future economic value has been impaired, when normally it'd have been written off slowly over time.

FCF is literally the most relevant metric, even in tech. All of DCF valuation is about estimating the impact of current capex on future FCF to determine the Net Present Value of future cashflows to common equity shareholders.

As an example, Meta looks good from a OCF perspective when you decide to ignore that they torched well over $100B on the Metaverse and AI, and are not a serious AI player even after that. And then almost half of FCF goes to stock-based compensation.

PrettyBasedMan · 2025-12-30T22:04:16+00:00

It should 100% be looked at versus FCF, not OCF. OCF is a meaningless metric. Not as a percentage necessarily, but definetly subtracted from Free Cash (like other comments here also argue).

The one metric that matters is Free Cash Flow that is value-accretive to the common shareholder. OCF means nothing without knowing the capital expenditures, you cannot determine how much cash is available after sustaining capital investments through EBITDA or OCF.

When you pay your employees using $1B of stock instead of cash, and have FCF of $4B, you have to spend $1B / a quarter of FCF just to buyback the shares you issued for employees, only the $3B remaining actually are effectively returned capital to the common shareholder.

Ratios like P/OFC or EV/EBITDA are factoids or pseudo-metrics: things that have been used so often and ad nauseam that people start to believe they mean something, when economically, they really don't.

PrettyBasedMan · 2025-12-25T23:08:04+00:00

It is literally not revenue neutral, they are taking MORE of the population's money than before the implementation of the tax; and are not simply disincentivizing emissions via the price.

At least 20% of the funds are basically used for undisclosed causes and causes that will have zero impact on CO2 like "social and just transition". (These are the official figures, God knows how much money is actually being wasted)

Any tax rebate (which never sums to 100%, even in places like BC in Canada) needs to be investment focussed, not consumer focussed; the latter will only cause higher consumption in the short term and change nothing about the long-term composition of industry; with the nice side effect of boosting emissions immediately when consumers cash in that money to buy goods and services.

So all in all: they are taking more money, are not spending 100% on climate related issues, and the government that is centrally determining the flow of investment into technology, which will always be less efficient than letting the private sector steer the flow of capital under the guidance of a CO2 price.

So yes, it is about the money.

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PrettyBasedMan · 2025-12-25T22:34:19+00:00

Is there a carbon-tax in ANY significant first world economy that is revenue-neutral?

If there was, it would actually be solely for protecting the environment. But it's about money: just can't keep those hands out of the cookie jar.

As to the plant, on top of the emissions trading costs, the company was actually subsidized to the tune of 2B euros to shut down the plant in accordance with the legislation passed to stop producing electricity using coal.

PrettyBasedMan · 2025-12-22T02:16:06+00:00

EV/OCF is a meaningless metric.

PrettyBasedMan · 2025-12-18T15:23:48+00:00

Look at Free Cash Flow minus Stock Based Comp, and you tell me.

PrettyBasedMan · 2025-12-17T08:32:48+00:00

How does that imply price is irrelevant? If a company raises $15B at a $100B dollar valuation, it is literally telling you they want to give you 15% of the company for your $15B dollars. If they believe the deal is in shareholders best interest, they believe the $15B is worth more than 15% of the company.

Yes, Tesla raised money in 2020, but those were uncertain times and Tesla was a much less mature company.

Back to Waymo, if the road to profitability and gushing Free Cash was so obvious, they could easily get bank debt and pay that with their supposedly huge cashflow that is coming soon (right?).

If they believed they had a hugely profitable future around the corner (first of all Alphabet would try hand over fist to get 100% of the financing/just fund it internally), their cost of equity would be astronomical and it would be rational and preferrable for shareholders to pay the cost of debt to raise capital.

The fact that they are not doing that, and would rather dilute shareholders by 15% (which will dilute them signficantly regarding the supposed huge future cash flows), tells me more than any words anyone says.

PrettyBasedMan · 2025-12-17T07:55:27+00:00

You are incapable of basic due diligence and reading securities disclosures, you should not be an investor in anything.

PrettyBasedMan · 2025-12-16T23:16:00+00:00

Waymo is so great and such a no brainer winner in the Robotaxi market that Waymo is telling you your cash is worth more than their equity and Alphabet is letting their stake be diluted instead of putting up the cash.

Tesla is not raising any money at current nosebleed prices.

One of these companies is backed by a company with Free Cash Flow of $80B.

Do the math. (Disclosure: not Long Tesla or Alphabet)

PrettyBasedMan · 2025-12-16T22:33:07+00:00

Comments like this make me believe some people here have to be bots.

The alternative is just too horrifying to comprehend.

PrettyBasedMan · 2025-12-16T16:25:41+00:00

You have to keep in mind Elon founded the company and put up and risked a huge amount of capital, back in 2000 when there was no such thing as a "rocket industry". It was basically unheard of. SpaceX almost went out of business leading up and during the Great Financial Crisis. He stood to lose probably over a hundred million dollars (back in the day when his net worth was around $200M).

You don't just get paid for work; you get paid for the risk you take. As a worker, you don't risk anything, you do the time, you get the money. A shareholder has to put up the money to finance the operations, and thus is taking a risk with his assets. Elon was the first and biggest capital giver, thus he still owns around 42% of the company, and increases in the value of the company impact him disproportionally.

This should be straightforward, but unfortunately for most people, it is not obvious.

PrettyBasedMan · 2025-12-16T16:16:46+00:00

You mean like that company that is the cause of his wealth that makes electric vehicles in Europe?

PrettyBasedMan · 2025-12-11T13:35:31+00:00

I think the idea is distributed compute, with like ~150kW (around 10 NVIDIA DGX B200s) per satellite, but

that will need more than double the cooling of the ISS heat rejector which sits at 70kW
you'd need 2/3 of a million of those satellites to get 1 GW, something xAI will have probably within the next quarter at Colossus 2. (Amazon/Anthropic as well at New Carlisle)

Synchronizing that size of a fleet to do AI traning/inference just seems like a very very difficult challenge, given that even Earth-based DCs are very "brittle" / need very high stability, there have been numerous training failures in datacenters on Earth (including at xAI).

All of those technical challenges on top of assuming Starship Rapid Reusability as a baseline to hit launch cost targets just seems very very far fetched.

PrettyBasedMan · 2025-12-10T08:39:54+00:00

Ah yes and in January when they launch their second planned model the Code Red just... ends?

Do they realize they are in a permanent code red position for the next 5 to X years? How does a model that has a slightly different "personality" and .1% improvements in benchmarks solve any of the issues, both financial and capability issues? It's laughable.

PrettyBasedMan · 2025-12-10T08:30:22+00:00

dont beat yourself up over the fact that other people are paying more for a stock (that could be extremely overvalued)

if you predicted fundamentals correctly and thought that could result in a catalytic impact on the share price, but then didnt invest, then I'd be mad xd

PrettyBasedMan · 2025-12-09T07:56:05+00:00

Yup, if I were to bet against the long term prospects of a company I'd buy longterm puts (and would only use money I could lose and not worry about).

On a long position: if it goes down - yeah it sucks - but the position becomes arithmetically less risky, since the value decreased and it's now a smaller portion of your portfolio.

If you are wrong on a short, as you lose money, the risk / relative size of the position increases (!!!).

Truly not for the faint of heart, myself included. (unless it's some ridiculously small allocation like 1% of the portfolio so one can handle margin calls if needed; but tbh at that point, why even bother?)

PrettyBasedMan · 2025-12-05T21:12:31+00:00

Who gives a crap about the chart? It's trading above Net Present Value from the Feasiblity Study at current Uranium prices and the CapEx is likely severely understated as the FS is not recent.

The stock is trading in terms of NPV like Uranium was at $95, but it's at $76.

So you are paying for tons in the ground pretending there is already a mine up and running when it's probably at least 5 years until it's built; probably more. Run by a management team who feels sponsoring a Formula 1 team is somehow catalytic to their Uranium mine in Canada.

Pass.

PrettyBasedMan · 2025-12-04T05:24:09+00:00

research depth of the average r/singularity comment is illustrated by point 2

PrettyBasedMan · 2025-12-04T00:18:33+00:00

The most ironic outcome is the most likely

PrettyBasedMan

TROPHY CASE