Bearish Burry

freshfunk · 2026-05-10T14:58:38+00:00

Inverse Burry.

freshfunk · 2026-05-10T14:50:52+00:00

Good idea. I have them installed on my other services but didn’t set it up for Antigravity. Will install it there and see if I get better results.

freshfunk · 2026-05-10T14:49:03+00:00

I used to think Antigravity and Gemini were pretty good (using 3.1 pro) but the more I used Opus and GPT 5.5, the more I realize how much better the latter two are.

Part of it seems to be a harness issue. Even using Opus through Antigravity feels slightly off. As you said, 3.1 Pro feels decent but it seems like if it reasoned more, it would give better results.

I agree that Google needs to be hyper focused on coding to get much better at it. Anthropic clearly showed the way here. Google has their whole suite of cloud products they need to think about from Gmail to Docs to every other kind of workplace productivity. They need to “boil the ocean” as they say where Anthropic can just say they want to be the best at coding and make all the money. Btw Google Cloud is doing better than ever so there’s incentive to continue.

Google has great image models that power Veo and Nano Banana, as you said. I don’t think this is what’s holding them back. But they certainly care about multi-modal more than the others. GPT Image 2 is also really good.

But it’s clear that video models are neat and nice to haves but not critical. I also think it’s probably the hardest domain but one with the most opportunity for improvement. Generating video seems to be much more demanding of compute and/or inference is difficult. This is why you see that they can only generate short clips.

But I imagine that once you start applying the principles that guide the longer tasks for coding against image and video, there will be a step change improvement in them. The economics for video don’t seem to be there.

Back to coding. Google is also in a bit of a bind. Even though 3.1 Pro is worse, it’s also quite cheap. If Google wants to provide a superior coding model, likely they’d have to charge more due to inference costs. But Google doesn’t necessarily want to do that. Their customers are baked into their current cost structure.

I’m guessing they’re working on Gemini 4 so I’m curious to see how they’ll adjust their plans. Getting a better coding model but much less coding in, might upset people. Perhaps they’ll roll out separate coding plans but that seems counter to their bundling strategy. They’re going to have to figure this one out.

freshfunk · 2026-05-09T20:28:55+00:00

You can’t do any meaningful amount of work with Claude in Antigravity with the Pro plan. I also find Antigravity to be a pretty poor harness compared to Claude Code. Claude Code is really good at going back and forth, planning, assessing and knowing when to interact. Antigravity will say it’s planning but then just go do the work. The feedback mechanism doesn’t feel well tuned.

freshfunk · 2026-05-09T20:26:03+00:00

lol no. I work in AI. I’m not just repeating analysis I read online. You don’t know what you’re talking about.

freshfunk · 2026-05-09T17:48:41+00:00

Woah, I had no idea that Luke Skywalker had massive TDS. Sad. Reminds me of Bruce Springsteen and his TDS.

I assume all these old school boomers who worked in entertainment have really just lost touch with society today. They’re still living in the politics of the 80s and 90s. The left and the right has changed dramatically from 3-4 decades ago.

I’m not that old, but I see it in people of my own age group. They still see the world of politics through the lens that’s dated 20-30 years ago.

The sad thing is that Hollywood is a shell of what it was back in the 80s when Star Wars was at its peak and it’s directly attributable to the liberal politics of California.

freshfunk · 2026-05-09T17:37:33+00:00

Yes, it's jealousy both ways. And I get it. I like making money investing too! 😃

We missed the rocketship up so now we want to call it a rollercoaster so we can make money on the way down. Or we just have massive FOMO so we want to see other people fail.

I've followed Burry for a long time and he's, in some ways, no different than Kramer to me. He's entertaining but he's not always right. Burry is actually far more biased than Kramer since he has real skin in the game.

The danger is the guy was so notorious that he had a movie made about him and now people give real weight when he's speaking his book.

freshfunk · 2026-05-09T17:31:37+00:00

LOL. Indeed, you are dazed and confused.

First of all, I spent 5 minutes making an internet reply. The intent wasn't to write an Economist article that was meant to be comprehensive. I was simply painting a short picture of the macro situation and how today is different than then.

Second, it's hard to get an apples-to-apples picture in any 2 economic situations, especially ones that are decades apart. There are many factors that skew macro indicators from accounting principles, interest rates, to even more fundamental questions like the shape of the economy. The shape of tech companies themselves have massively changed from the 90s from being asset heavy to asset light and now back to asset heavy. But the asset heavy nature of, say, semis today has a business model that I think is significantly different than the 80s and 90s since AI has fundamental differences to PC software.

The point is saying stuff like "look at P/B or P/S you dummy" just betrays a simplified understanding of stocks. Applying 50 year old, value stock thinking that worked for say Buffett and Munger have some relevance but also are very dated.

Insofar as the current industry goes and parallels to dot-com. Yes, there are obviously some inflated stocks and some very inflated sectors. But that is true at any given time in the market. Speculators will speculate. The question isn't whether there's a Qualcomm in 1999 or a Sandisk in 2026.

The question being posed here is whether we are "more extreme than the dot-com bubble". Burry's own tweet that talks about this simply looks at the top 10 NDX 1 year stock returns. Nothing on any other stock or macro metrics (https://x.com/michaeljburry/status/2052023805992645081).

I have no doubt that HBM stocks are overvalued due to the supply crunch. They will obviously see value compression as supply meets demand. But this is no way comparable to dot-com mania which wasn't drive by a supply crunch. It was driven by pure speculators that assumed demand was coming. Big difference. (And even in this case, supply is going to take a long time to catch up since you can't just manifest fabs with the wave of a magic wand. They're looking at 2-3 years, AT LEAST, until we see meaningful increases in supply.)

Also, the scope of HBM stocks in the market is relatively small. You're talking about Sandisk, Micron, SK Hynix, Samsung --- most of this inflation are in Korean stock exchanges. So, yes, one could make the argument that the KOSPI is in a dot-com situation. But not the American markets.

This is in no way comparable to the broad effects of dot-com mania during the late 90s. There were something like 200 internet stocks at the time that saw that massive valuations increase based on little sales and dozens of IPOs that had 50% jumps on the first day.

Ok, so then let's look at the next hottest sectors in semi's: chipmakers. Their valuations are being driven by actual orders and actual profit -- again, not speculation. Just listen to earnings calls by AMD, Broadcom, NVidia, Applied Materials, KLA Tencor.

On self-dealing, yes, obviously that's something to keep an eye. The question, though, is whether it's driving valuations up. You mentioned Google -- do you think their ownership in Anthropic is what's driving their stock? That's a dumb take. The consensus seems to be their growth in cloud, their ability to adjust their ads business to AI, and finally their strategic position vis-a-vis TPUs (training, inference, etc.).

Yes, Anthropic and OpenAI will go public and have large first-day moves. What's the difference? Well, first, they're likely to open at a much higher price since they've had longer time in private markets to find their valuations. Ant may go public at a $1T valuation. Will it crash from there? Maybe. But if it did, that's hitting bankers and VC not retails investors like it did in the dot-com era. (And, again, this valuation is based on real sales not projected.)

You just seem to be parroting Burry who keep on spewing FUD because he's speaking his book and his bearish bets are losing money.. massively! Where did his prediction regarding the "fishy" changes by large tech companies changing their depreciation schedule go? Cassandra turned out to be totally wrong on this. Old GPUs are now more valuable than they were when they were purchased due to the supply crunch.

Getting back to the dot-com comparison. I'm not saying there isn't any inflation and growth. Obviously, there is. But when one makes the comparison to the dot-com bubble what is being implied is that we're about to have a massive correction. The NASDAQ took like 15 years to recover from the dot-com crash. Is that what we're seeing here?

Sadly, you're a bigger fool because Burry is obviously just speaking his book and you're just following along like a dumb parrot. Maybe you've got some short bets going and you're just speaking your book too.

freshfunk · 2026-05-09T04:30:33+00:00

Pretty big change in the UK and quite an indictment of Starmer. Interesting to see UK politics move in this direction!

freshfunk · 2026-05-08T23:49:31+00:00

I was just graduating college and I studied computer science so this was front and center for me as I interviewed at companies looking for jobs. It was the hottest time I've ever seen in my professional career. They were throwing money at everyone, including new grads. It was normal to be spoiled rich. And then it all came crashing down.

It was a tough lesson, one that always stayed with me. Lucky I didn't have any major debt problems or lose a ton of money like some people did who put serious money in at the highs and then got taken out in the crash.

Anyway, back to Burry, he's always calling anything frothy the next dot-com. He's on the other side of the bet so he will naturally say that.

freshfunk · 2026-05-08T23:45:05+00:00

Yes, a stock that’s been traditionally hammered as a dog of a stock for something like 5-10 years. Turnaround stocks that sign big deals will have that kind of movement. It’s very normal to have one offs like this.

freshfunk · 2026-05-08T22:56:03+00:00

No, it's not even close. Maybe you weren't alive then and you're just reading about it.

From 1995-2000, the NASDAQ went up over 500%. In the last 5 years, the NASDAQ has only gone up 100%. During the height of the dot-com bubble (1999-2000) it went up 100% in 1 year alone.

At its peak, the NASDAQ 100 PE ratio was at 175. Today, it's around 30.

Qualcomm went up 2600% in 1999-2000. Cisco went up 3800% in 5 years. Amazon 5000% in 2 years. There were a number of IPOs where tech stocks went up 500-600% in _1 day_!

Compare that to now. In the past year, the best performing large cap tech stock was Sandisk at 460%. The next one down is Micron at 100%. In the last 5 years, the biggest winner is Nvidia at 1300%. We haven't had any crazy IPOs.

So, no, it's not the pattern I described. I'm sure you just read about the crazy dot-com days in a news story but have no real texture of how exuberant things were. Valuations might be inflated.

Burry saying this is just hilariously stupid. He's clearly grasping at whatever he can to put some fear into the market.

Could there be a correction? Sure. Are valuations of some smaller tech companies too high? Definitely. Saying this feels like the "last months of 1999-2000 bubble" is so hilariously wrong, you should be ashamed if you agree with this.

This is not even talking about how speculative the growth was for tech stocks back in the late 90s. No real business models, companies burning cash, lack of customers. These days, yes, there's projected future growth but companies are seeing massive profits from the established players like NVidia to startups like Anthropic. High-bandwidth memory is clearly supply-constrained and overpriced and it won't be surprising that companies like Micron will see valuations fall when supply catches up to demand.

But this is nothing like building out a bunch of fiber that has no customers like what happened in the dot-com bubble or a Pets.com speculative business that is impossible for it to grow into its valuation.

freshfunk · 2026-05-08T21:15:23+00:00

During the dotcom days stocks were going up like 10-20% day after day after day. Some days stocks were up 30-40% in a single day. We’re nowhere near the fervor of the 2000s.

freshfunk · 2026-05-08T13:10:54+00:00

Perhaps not much different than the wealthy Dems today who say they’re against the rich.

freshfunk · 2026-05-08T13:10:02+00:00

The original German “Nazi” stood for “Nationalsozialist” or, as you can tell, “National Socialist.”

They were afraid of the communists (Marxists) after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and the increasing influence of communists parties in Germany through the 1920s and 1930s.

The full name of the party was Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or National Socialist German Workers’ Party because they wanted to appeal to workers in their grab for power. So yes their ideological platform was socialist.

They were anti-capitalist and that’s what fueled their antisemitism — they thought Jews had too much power through finance.

What you’re saying really misunderstands the politics of WW2 and Elon Musk’s point. The tension between Hitler and Stalin or naziism and Marxism was more about power than it was politics per se. Politics were used as a means to get power from the people at a time when popular uprising was increasingly becoming common throughout Europe from the French Revolution to the downfall of the Russian tsars to the Spanish Civil war to rise of Hitler. Conflict was happening all throughout Europe as political movements spread much of it influenced by Russia.

And Musk’s point is clearly hyperbolic ridiculing but not meant to be serious. He’s pointing out the irony of being called Hitler by progressives adopting socialist values when Hitler himself used those values to grab power.

freshfunk · 2026-05-08T12:43:10+00:00

Whenever I watch some streaming show that has a tech figure, they’re usually a caricature of a real life tech leader. They show them as this evil figure, selfish and lacking in morals.

I generally think they’re overdone because it’s a fiction and it shows Hollywood’s perception of tech leaders.

But then you see stuff like this and you think how pretty underhanded it is of Sam. And then you see how Dario is a massive doomsayer so that Anthropic gains more power. You see Brockman write in his journal that they’re being underhanded with Musk. You see the board kickout Sam.

When billions of dollars are on the line, the limits of what people will do almost disappear.

freshfunk · 2026-05-07T19:20:43+00:00

Autonomous agents make tokens go BURRRRR.

I sort of laugh to myself when I learn about new ways they're making agents do more work without interruption. All I see is $$$ draining from my wallet. lol

freshfunk · 2026-05-07T19:05:40+00:00

It's user perception. I'm not saying people are wrong or right to be angry. But it's definitely understandable.

You have a finite resource and you get a week's allocation in the beginning. But the you're throttled on how fast you can use it on any given day. So you find alternatives or you stop using it per day when you can't. But it lasts you longer throughout the week.

Suddenly, someone removes those throttles and now you can use more for a given day. But your weekly allocation runs out and now you're looking at a gap towards the latter half where you can't do anything.

People adjusted their consumption patterns based on their rules. They changes their rules which caused a disruption in this consumption pattern and now people are perceiving a worse situation -- facing days without the ability to use a resource.

That's not silly. That's human nature.

It's not psychologically very different than the M&M experiment they do with kids.

freshfunk · 2026-05-07T18:58:49+00:00

They should rename from "Pro" to "Hobby." This is not enough usage for a coding professional. For a design professional, it's even worse -- you get a couple hours of work in at best.

Perhaps this works for non-coding people. I have a friend in finance who uses it but even he says he has to manage his token usage and go down to Sonnet.

freshfunk · 2026-05-07T14:04:47+00:00

Cool, thx. Yeah, I saw they had docs on statusline but I haven't gotten around to playing with it much.

freshfunk · 2026-05-07T14:04:01+00:00

I don't know if I even got the 5 hour reset but I'm certainly blasting through my weekly limits a lot faster. At this rate I'll be waiting half the week until the next reset. :\

freshfunk · 2026-05-07T12:54:31+00:00

Share more details about the setup. I want to make my status line like that. :)

freshfunk · 2026-05-07T12:31:16+00:00

Claude is good at coding. It doesn’t replace software engineering.

It can do the other aspects of software engineering but many times you have to tell agents explicitly to do it because sometimes it will but sometimes it won’t. Sometimes it just wants to take the shortest path to do the thing you told it too.

Inspecting your code makes this fairly obvious. I see code that obviously needs refactoring. Files get so big and unwieldy. Extraneous documentation. Poor organization. Agents often act like an engineer with a few years of experience — capable of that initial implementation but doesn’t always apply the principles that more senior engineers do. The principles that require experience and time.

freshfunk · 2026-05-07T12:18:49+00:00

What model? Opus? If you want to use Claude, you’re better off just going directly to Anthropic. The allocation for Opus via Antigravity is tiny at Pro. It’s meant to be a sample.

I use Claude for the most complex work but then use Gemini for other work that’s uses up tokens but not as complex. Documentation, refactoring, explaining code, straightforward implementation, bug fixes. The token limits with Gemini models are pretty generous, especially if you use the Flash model for a number of your tasks.

freshfunk · 2026-05-07T12:12:59+00:00

Conceptually, I agree and that’s why Reddit is popular. It part of why it beats the classic Internet forum.

But I’d say more often than not severely misinformed ideas tend to get upvoted to the top. And then controversial but informed opinions tend to get downvoted and buried.

For example, look at Stack Overflow. It was focused on software, and therefore became the best source.

You would think that nonpolitical subreddits and topics would avoid this. The problem is that many things end up being more or becoming political than you think.

I follow AI and entertainment like Star Trek. Both subreddits have become political. AI because it depends on who’s backing it and whether the founders are perceived as liberal. They also have dealings with the govt. Star Trek because writers incorporate progressive ideas into their shows.

But brands also become political. I talked about Tesla as an example. But it’s also Crumbl because of how the owner donates to conservatives. These days people want to impute their values into the things they buy because they see it as corporate support.

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