ProjectBarks

Requested early access! This sounds really really cool!

Found a good Forbes Article [https://web.archive.org/web/20260201051310/https://www.forbe...]

Hong Kong-based Rich Sparkle Holdings (ANPA) reported to the SEC on Jan. 9 it was acquiring Lame's Step Distinctive Limited, and announced the $975 million all-stock transaction closed in a press release two days later.

Rich Sparkle boasted the deal would offer a "structured, exclusive, full-chain, platform-style commercialization system" around Lame, who would be a "controlling shareholder," and whose likeness would be replicated by an "AI Digital Twin."

Soon after, Rich Sparkle's stock skyrocketed over 650%, reaching a high of $180.64 per share on January 15, with Lame's stake worth $6.6 billion (based on his 49% ownership of Step Distinctive, which gave him a 41% stake in its buyer), though due to limited disclosure requirements for foreign entities, it's unclear whether Lame sold any shares.

Rich Sparkle had first listed on Nasdaq six months prior in July, in a small offering of 1.25 million shares priced at $4 each with an implied enterprise value of about $50 million, according to SEC filings, and it disclosed 2024 revenue of under $6 million from "designing and printing high quality financial materials."

Rich Sparkle's sudden shift in focus, explosive stock growth and quick crash---it's dropped as low as $41, 77% from its peak---has some critics raising "red flags."

Lame, who has over 160 million followers on TikTok and 78 million on Instagram, only commented on the deal 11 days after Rich Sparkle announced it had closed, saying "Congratulations to the team at ANPA very excited to be a shareholder and looking forward to doing great things!" (Lame and Rich Sparkle have not responded to Forbes' requests for comment).

Based on Rich Sparkle's most recent stock price, Lame's net worth appears to be $3 billion, but given its tiny float of less than 5%, Forbes would value it based on its financials and not its stock price, meaning he's nowhere close to being a billionaire.

I saw headlines such as ANPA bought Khaby Lames company for ~$900M but nobody is pointing out how sketchy it looks.

What I gathered, the $975M deal was paid in stock = 75,000,000 new ANPA shares to the sellers which is roughly $13 a share.

If they really issue 75M new shares (vs ~12.5M outstanding, ish), doesn't that basically destroy the scarcity and force the price to re-anchor closer to the $13ish deal valuation? Like post, deal you're at ~87.5M shares, so even a ~$1B valuation is like $11/$13 a share not $60/$100/$180.

And... $975M for an influencer operating company sounds totally crazy if there isn't any real revenue/EBITDA that supports it. Does anyone have the actual numbers for Step Distinctive / Khabys business? Any comparable deals where an influencer brand was valued anywhere close to this?

What am I missing?

Removing - Realized I made a mistake

Totally understandable! I don’t want to undersell how cool this project was! Thank you so much for sharing!

I was extremely excited until I looked closer and realized how many of these look like ... well AI. The article is such a good read and would recommend people check it out.

Feels like something is missing... maybe just a pixelation effect over the actual result? Seems like a lot of the images also lack continuity (something they go over in the article)

Overall, such a cool usage of AI that blends Art and AI well.

This is a pretty interesting visualization tool!

I had a few ideas for some areas for improvement:

1. Interactive Debugging - It would be great if users could click through the code line by line to see how execution flows.

2. UI Improvements – There's a lot of whitespace. Consider:

   - Moving the title to the top left to free up space.  
   - Flattening the buttons for a cleaner, more modern look.  

4. Goroutine Analysis – Could be cool to highlight:

   - Goroutines that are still running after execution ends.  
   - Common concurrency issues like improper synchronization or goroutine leaks.

Genuinely curious, how is this any different than me formatting a prompt in chat gpt?

Uber has 3500 ish engineers. Then a huge amount of operations personal.

Best source I could find: https://www.themuse.com/profiles/uber/team/engineering

Those bounds are fairly wide. Also, my other frustration was an article that has provocative headline, great for sending to your friends, but doesn't do anything but link the study. What are the odds someone is going to read the study? What are the odds they are going to go and learn what HR rate is?

Seems to me all good things for this article to do.

How much more risk? Is this a hit piece by big sugar or something? This article is so sparse on details. Exposure to the sun increases the risk of cancer. Emissions let off by cars increases the risk of cancer. I’m just curious…

The HR has fairly large bounds... 1.03 to 1.25 so there is increased risk but this still does not tell you if people who consume a lot of sugar substitutes also exhibit behaviors that increase their risk of cancers. Such as also consuming highly processed food.

Looks like they show you ads in the ride? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30611380

I think you are thinking of a trie

viginti_tres, your experience is ubiquitous. I am the exact same age and have noticed a similar pattern for everyone my age. I am sure a lot of people are well intentioned but these simple solutions of finding new friends is just not that simple. Alcohol is extremely prevalent in the US. People are self medicating and using it as a form of escapism.

One thing I have anecdotally noticed is there are some parts of the US that are much more oriented towards drinking than others, such as NYC.

I use it as an hourly clock but anymore than every half hour would be a miserable experience since it is far from silent.

Agreed it is a solid risk. I want to spend some time with wireshark to see if I can get something of my own going until an official local api is released.

I own one and here are my thoughts:

So far it has been an extremely reliable product that was fun to get some scripts running on. I use a raspberry pie with a cron job to update the board with the weather and my daily schedule. Board actually looks extremely repairable for each individual character, and have has no issues with reliability in ~6mo.

API currently is through a rest interface which they have promised to keep free despite charging for plugins shared through their a subscription model. They had promised a native/local API but I have not heard anything from that.

Overall would recommend but it falls in the tech art category for sure.

I own one. No issues with readability. In fact I’d say it’s easier to read than most fonts. Online pictures don’t do it justice.

I’d switch the order of the testimonials so it says: company name, title. Right now it reads like a bunch of testimonials from your own company when looking around.

The original title of the paper was "Comparing SARS-CoV-2 natural immunity to vaccine-induced immunity: reinfections versus breakthrough infections." It's important to point out that the paper isn't just one fact but a collection of facts that form nuance.

To me science mags title is much more sensationalistic and there is a reason they did not chose a title more closely aligned to what the authors of the original study chose.

This feels like an irresponsible title on behalf of the author. People don’t get the vaccine strictly on the strength of the vaccine. It’s considering the risk of getting COVID, understanding the long term side effects, and minimizing risk for those around you. It’s also about avoiding mutations of the virus as the higher availability of the virus only provides more opportunities for it to mutate into something more resistant or possessing other less desirable traits. I understand that the post goes into these types of details but with the proliferation of “I read the title so I read the article” types a much less clickbait title should have been chosen. This only vindicates people looking to confirm their biases and leaves out the nuance that is so important to science.

Reposting for a well composted comment from Alex DeLarge for visibility and to add to the conversation:

Here is a quick response on science and fiction parts as a follow up to my previous comment. I am not sure if I want to spend a lot of time on this one-sided, brand-bashing article to point out all the misinformation or truth hiding. Believe me when I say I come up with an immediate counter argument in a second when I read a paragraph in this piece.

Unfortunately, I do have better things to do and hoping below should suffice.

The science-fiction writer here understands the average reader’s quirks and their unwillingness to dig through all the “sources” cited here so he just hand-picked some data that works for the narrative.

Hey, don’t get me wrong - I do agree it works pretty well for the aimed narrative.

SCIENCE

“Uber’s time is up.”

Nope. It is not. Dull claim requires a dull answer but I’ll do you one better. Uber just raised $1.5B in senior notes due 2029. In plain language, this means that Uber is capable of raising money when it needs because there are investors out there who did their due diligence and concluded Uber will be good for its word.

“Uber loses a lot of money. A lot of money. Billions. But it claims it’s making money. How does it do this? It lies. Uber eschews boring old generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) and invents fanciful new forms of mathematics where losing money is good, actually.

Every quarter, it releases new lies laid out like a profit-and-loss statement, and every quarter, Horan shows it’s losing money. Here he is on the company’s $6.8 billion (with a B!) loss last summer, predicting the company would be broke by mid-2021.

It’s mid-2021. Uber is going broke.

Yesterday, Horan published his 26th (!) analysis of Uber, breaking down its Q2–21 financials.”

Yes, let’s address the financial elephant in the room. Adjusted EBITDA! What a fancy name, eh? Basically, all it does is to remove certain items from the profitabilty calculation as those are, well, called one time for a good reason. It is for investors/analysts so they are able to make good comparisons and educated decisions in the same industry. It is not to lie to those people who will never read their financial statements. This calculation is never meant for those people.

Another misinformation is Uber avoiding using GAAP. Just go ahead and take a look at their last filing and tell me how they are avoiding using GAAP as it is required by law to publish results in GAAP.

It is way past mid-2021 and Uber is not broke. I still see tons of cash ($4.4B) in their balance sheet and already shown their ability to raise money. It is going to be a bit cheesy but if Horan (who?) was right then he would not need 26 (!) analyses to prove it. One would suffice.

“Uber increased road congestion.”

From your source article: “And it’s always worth remembering, as transportation professionals say again and again, that congestion can be a sign that your city is thriving. “Congestion arises because we have people, and people go out and do things and they have jobs,” says Castiglione. Fighting congestion is good. But expecting traffic to disappear—or blaming it all on one or two players—isn’t realistic.”

“Uber was never going to be profitable. Never.”

I cannot decide if this is part is getting the science wrong or all together fiction so I guess it is a bit of both.

Here is another one. FB was never going to be profitable. Never. Until one day it was. (FB founded in 2004, turned cash flow positive in 2009 and IPO’ed in 2012). I’ll prescribe Business 101 so you understand why companies are formed. Hint: It is related with profits.

Uber in its last filing (2Q21) shows its revenue progress from its worst quarter (hello Covid19) to its current. It goes like this: $1.9B -> $2.8B -> $3.1B -> $2.9B -> $3.9B

(I will not bother myself to explain “one-time item” so just took $2.9B instead of $3.5B for 1Q21.)

It is only a matter of time and it just requires some clever lever pulling (read the guidance in the below link — page 14) for Uber to be able to become profitable. (First EBITDA, then GAAP).

And yet you claim it was never going to be profitable. Huh, interesting! (in Larry David’s voice).

https://s23.q4cdn.com/407969754/files/doc_financials/2021/q2...

FICTION

“Cities, meanwhile, experienced a lost decade of transit activism. It’s true that Uber had upsides, like bringing transport to underserved communities of color — but because Uber was always doomed, this was a temporary mirage that would strand those communities again.”

I seriously don’t understand the logic here. You say Uber did one good thing but because Uber was always doomed it is not a good thing anymore. How come we are having this discussion if Uber was always doomed? If Uber is not currently doomed that means it is still helping underserved communities, right?

“Take the story that Uber could be a substitute for public transit. Private cars can’t substitute for buses, light rail and subways. It’s just fucking geometry. Number of cars * area occupied by cars * increased distances created by roads = infinity."

First, where is this said story coming from? I cannot find any official statement that says Uber could be or wants to be a substitute for public transit. I do however see their plans to integrate public transport into their app to make it easier to go from point A to point B. Basically, you open their app and plan your whole trip which might include taking a bus or metro to a certain point and jump on an Uber to go to your next point and maybe ending your last mile on a scooter. I gotta add you must be really proud of with that formula when you finished forming it. Like hell yeah I showed them Uber boys.

https://d1nyezh1ys8wfo.cloudfront.net/static/PDFs/Transit+Ho...

“This gives Uber a great new financial trick: they can put the inflated valuations of these regional Uber-alikes on their balance sheet to make it look like the company is sitting on a mountain of cash that will let it continue with its losses for years.”

You gotta be kidding me. You have got to be kidding me here. You think Uber can just conjure up valuations for other companies and put some numbers on them to inflate its balance sheet. Below are some key search words as I am getting really annoyed by the financial ineptness shown here so not going to explain anymore.

“Valuation for a private company”

“Valuation for a public company”

“409A valuation”

“Security Exchange Commission”

“Big jail time”

This is the exact sentiment I hold as well. I think the demographics of hacker news may be slightly swayed towards people who already have established networks and industry experience.

This might sound crazy but free may be worse than offering to charge. "Free" is saying my work offers no value and may even cost more through your time.

I am curious why unusual whales did not compare performance to market performance over set periods. I looked around for some papers and was unable to find anything recent. CATO published a report showing there is weak performance difference between senators and their stock portfolio [1].

If they are outperforming this should 100% be remedied but I'd be open if anyone has comments that would contradict this report?

[1] https://www.cato.org/research-briefs-economic-policy/relief-...

I'm glad you are happy with your new Toyota but I think you are giving too much confidence in it's ability. Look at this evaluation between OpenPilot and Toyota TSS 2.0 https://youtu.be/z5-inxH92wM

Also free to checkout navigating SF with OpenPilot https://youtu.be/0TpMMoQ7GGg (30 min). I highly doubt you would find similar results with a Toyota TSS 2.0 system. Nevertheless, I will let the contents of the videos speak for themselves.

$3,495 Separate $99/month subscription required.

and according to their website....

Coming soon

The delivery and use of Ghost products will depend on our ability to meet certain reliability and performance levels, as well as receiving applicable regulatory approvals, which could take longer for certain car models and in certain jurisdictions. We continuously work to improve the functionality of our products, and as a result, some of the features depicted herein may be delivered to you via over-the-air software updates or equipment upgrades.

Interned for Comma AI. The tech is indeed chill.

Can you please provide a citation?

Yes. I am so tired of this somehow rebranding from murderer/rapist to eccentric security expert.