danielmarkbruce

Classic apples-to-peanuts comparison

There is the affect as you say - but more interesting is that it just suggests people who sit around analyzing companies all day think there is a pretty decent chance this thing goes bankrupt.

He wasn't making the case he isn't harmed. He was making the case that the effect isn't large. You don't appear to understand the claim itself, let alone the reasoning.

Just because you don't understand the basics of the financial system, or the different indices, or the amount of money flowing into the funds that track each, it doesn't mean others don't. The impact if it had been included in the S&P500 would have been at least an order of magnitude more than just the nasdaq 100.

His reasoning is valid. Compared to the S&P500, it's a small sum of money. Most people aren't buying a fund that tracks that nasdaq index. The total effect isn't that large.

1 - the area was cherry picked. 2 - only this year's data is highlighted in red - the data from last year wasn't highlighted. It's hard to know if this is a trend or it's just a weird year. 3 - the time horizon is cherry picked. Why mean on a given day rather than the mean for a week?

Imagine someone else cherry picks the line that is really low and highlights it. Or they pick a different area which shows cooling. Now you have some idiot claiming global cooling.

The thing about cherry picking is that it works so well. When someone pointed out the cherry picked data, you couldn't even come to the conclusion it was cherry picked. And you are on hacker news. Imagine the really really silly people.

You can't be serious. Modern civilization is not just the past few decades.

By choosing what data to show. There is a lot of data to choose from in climate science. How do you think we end up with such strong arguments on the issue? Cherry picking is as big a problem in climate science as anything else.

That's fine though. If that doesn't work for you, don't buy. There are all manner of situations where what one wants or needs and what they get don't match up well. You don't price out every situation - it's take it or leave it. Pricing in a way that is somehow based on cost structure at least enables the provider to work to reduce the cost and hence price and win. Costco prices at a small margin above cost, they don't price "if this meets value prop X, pay Y and if only value prop A, pay B".

An LLM is an extremely complex thing used for all manner of purposes. The hope that there would be some simple pricing construct that would map nicely to value provided is a pipe dream.

Pricing per token is at least reasonably straight forward. If you aren't getting value, you don't use the service. One doesn't buy a Ferrari and then complain that in their town Ferrari doesn't help them pick up women and hence it should cost less.

Yeah, we did. It took humans 100,000 or so years to land on the moon - we aren't so clever.

It's actually market forces. Evolution has almost zero to do with it. It's the past few thousand years where the vast majority of useful abstractions/tools/puzzle pieces have been built that enable any one person to do a lot without knowing so much.

"We" doesn't mean what you think it means... You don't realize how much detail (and work) you are in fact relying on, but the 8 billion (we) know it in aggregate.

"We" (the 8 billion) have made some insanely great abstractions or puzzle pieces to work with. There is just an insane amount of work that goes into even elementary things to get the world to where it works this way.

This is getting voted down because people just hate the idea that it's true.

Other countries take it way more seriously. The US has way more deaths per capita than Australia (just one example) simply due to lack of enforcement of speeding, drunk driving, smart phone use.

lol if i knew the next big industry i wouldn't be sitting here chatting on hacker news.

New industry after new industry has been created over the past 100 years. It's difficult to believe that all of a sudden that stops.

No, it doesn't. The economy can grow. Money isn't some fixed amount thing.

No, I'm not. I was using it to size the market for AI. I don't imagine those people just sit idle. They do something else. Tractors took a good chunk of labor out of farming, those people didn't sit idle.

No. But stickiness isn't the only way to build a moat. Scale is a way too.

I meant by dollar amount, not headcount.

Look at the history of farming. Tractors also don't go to disneyland.

It's high, really high. But, that isn't bad. In fact... they are better of with it being extremely high. Then scale matters. They need enough revenue at high enough margins to earn a decent return on that spend, but higher is, from a competitive perspective, better.

It's 40% based on total revenue, not a subset of it.

I'm not suggesting the people then sit idle. The economy can grow, services can be added, the % done by AI drops, but the raw value of it doesn't. It's just to show that the market is extremely large.

Like agriculture. That market has grown significantly through time, even though it's shrunk dramatically as a % of GDP.

They are running 40% margins. Every dollar of inference at the margin is profitable.

If by most, you literally mean > 50%, sure. But I've heard it quoted that knowledge work in advanced economies is something like 40%. So, we are still talking extremely large numbers.

If you drill a dry well, under successful efforts accounting, you expense it. You also make zero dollars.

On top of that, oil wells decline, slowly but surely, just like... customers churn.

If you spend $100 mill on sales and marketing and get zero customers, I'd agree it should expensed. If you get a bunch of customers, it's hard to argue against the capex treatment idea.

The words have meaning in accounting. The basic idea of accounting is to communicate what is going on in the business in as consistent a way as possible. It's not a perfect system, but this stuff really is 101.

No, they show they just need to keep growing. Not a crazy assumption.

They are running 40% margins, assuming the reported numbers are valid.

No, they argue they shouldn't be counted as operating expenses because they are basically capex dollars. It's a completely reasonable argument. If I spend $100 million on s&m to get a bunch of customers to my saas, it's not different economically to drilling 20 oil wells at $5 million a pop.