quantummagic

It could just be streaming the trailer.

I'm not missing it at all. Whatever the damn price is (of course it fluctuates) the only way you can make a bet that the price will go down further, is if someone else thinks it's going to go up. Therefore for every single short, WHATEVER THE PRICE, there's an exact same amount of optimism and pessimism. It's the only way a sale is made.

So you can focus on the pessimism if you want. But the point you're missing, is it's exactly offset by an equal amount of optimism (based on that price). One side is betting it will go down further, the other side is betting it will go up.

It turns out there's soon going to be a 20% to 30% increase in the number of stocks available to be traded, and people are betting that those holders will cash out now that they're vesting. So this is all more about market factors than intrinsic company fundamentals anyway.

But people want to always focus on the negative, and get too hung up on the fluctuations of a stock price like it's a message from God or something.

Anyway, it's been enjoyable talking with you and others, it seems we're not going to have a meeting of the minds on this one.

There is pleasure in completing things. In actually producing something, and moving on to the next thing. It isn't enjoyable to have paralysis by analysis... too afraid to take the next step, because you have less than perfect information. In the pathological case (since we never really have perfect information), there are people who never get anything done.

Pragmatically speaking, a half-assed answer now, is often better than a perfect answer tomorrow.

What you're essentially saying is that "every gallon of milk is sold to a person". This is not useful information.

Only because you're ignoring the other option, that the gallon of milk DIDN'T sell. It tells you that there was demand for the milk you had to sell. If there was no customer, the milk would have spoiled. There are still people who want to drink milk. There are still people who believe you're not selling poison, that milk is a worthy thing to buy from you. That is useful information.

And every (short) sale is proof that the market thinks it's a bad investment at that price, which logically nullifies your point.

No it doesn't. It's the flip side of the one you want to focus on, and all i've been saying is that it's not the ONLY side. If it nullifies my point, it also nullifies yours. They cancel EACH OTHER out.

There isn't infinite liquidity at every price point.

Sure, but so what? That is true of literally every product sold. The price isn't zero, so there is enough liquidity to cover every short that was actually sold. You've already admitted to that. The fact that the price goes down, (and can sometimes move back up) is immaterial.

No, you're just working very hard to miss the point. Nobody can place the pessimistic bet, unless there is someone equally optimistic in the other direction. The fact that you're fixated on the price varying as each side attempts to do the best it can is just a commitment to a narrative, not a useful insight.

Here's the simple way to know you're wrong. The stock price isn't zero. That means there people willing (at some price) to put their money where their mouth is, that the people betting against the stock at that price are wrong.

But at that point they're both just making bets.. all it says is that there are an equal number of dollars willing to gamble at that price point. It says nothing about which side of the gamble will win.

Shorts don't exist in a vacuum. They literally can't be made, unless there was someone in the market who thinks that at the short price, the stock is a good investment opportunity. Every trade is proof that the market thinks the stock is a good investment at that price. I don't know why you have such a hard time facing up to that fact, even after you admit it is one.

People respond to market forces. When they see that there are other people making irrational valuations, they may wait to buy even lower. It's not a judgment about the intrinsic value of the stock at the current price, but of opportunities in the market.

It's still a hard fact that for every single trade, there is someone as fully optimistic, to perfectly match the pessimistic side. And people have to be pretty committed to a narrative to deny that fact.

Yes, stocks go up and down; hardly revelatory. The point, regardless of the imprecise wording of my alternate title, remains. There are people who think they are getting a valuable investment, at the price short-sellers are willing to sell at. There's just as much optimism as pessimism about the stock, at that price. And that's my complaint about the title, it wants to only highlight one side of the trade -- for narrative reasons.

I never intended to imply that the law of supply and demand was nullified. And I didn't say that the price was unaffected, just that there is as much money thinking they're getting a valuable long term investment, as there is as money shorting the stock. (By definition, since every sale is consensual, and of the opposite position)

It has nothing to do with the shares being borrowed. That's a separate transaction that comes with a fee. The point is that the share is then sold. It's sold to someone who is taking the long position. The original owner of the share, from whom it was borrowed, makes their money in fees, and by investing any security deposit given by the borrower. They are not taking a long or short position.

You're absolutely correct, and I should have been more precise. The value is always identical, but the number of participants, need not be the same for each position. Mea culpa.

That's exactly the point. The clickbait title wants you to forget that fact and draw an incorrect conclusion. It could have also been, "SPCX is the most purchased new stock", but that wouldn't have fed the desired narrative.

Regardless, you can't short anything without someone taking the opposite position. It's really independent of the overall downward trend.

They're illegal, and you can look at them just as the broker making a long bet themselves. Since they'll have to pay off the short seller, if the stock goes down.

Every single shorted stock, was purchased by someone else who is taking the long side of the trade. So there's as many people betting the stock will go up. This says more about volatility and volume of trading, than anything else.

There are conversations worth having. But it feels very dismissive of the obvious power of the technology to constantly focus, in an unbalanced way, on the challenges. People are biased heavily by irrational emotion, on both sides of the debate. It's all just getting a little tedious. I'm all for rational discourse and debate, but it's hard to find through all the vitriol and contempt.

But people can't separate their emotions from the "reality". The reality is, this technology has strengths and limitations. It has benefits and it has negative consequences. We can and will discuss all of that. But many people aren't operating from a detached analytical viewpoint. They're operating from an emotional, self-interested, defensive stance. And granted, there are just as many people operating from a utopian, rose tinted, self-serving, evangelical position.

In the end, the technology will get used where appropriate. And more importantly many of its weaknesses will be overcome and replaced by new challenges.

It's just a bit tiring to hear the same denouncements repeated over and over. Everyone knows them all by heart now. They're not wrong, they're just not helpful or accomplishing anything. The technology marches forward and will develop naturally. If you personally don't want to use it, then don't.

The parallels you can draw between LLMs and calculators.. just don't make sense.

The technology doesn't matter, you can compare to say the power loom from the 1700's. I'm comparing the reaction of humans; human's haven't changed that much. They always react the same when they feel threatened and emotionally challenged by a technology.

The exact same arguments were made against electronic computing in general, in the early days. Pearl clutching is a very human thing to do as new technologies are integrated and become common place. A whole generation or two of developers are going to have to pass away before we stop hearing incessant diatribes about LLMs.

In 2024, "search royalties" brought in approximately $585 million for Mozilla, largely from Google. It's not hard to see why they tread very lightly around ad blocking. It's actually impressive that ublock remains easy and painless to install as an extension.

For sure, on both counts. I'm just a bit astonished at how many people continue to do business with them, especially anyone who strongly denounces authoritarianism.

... because buyers trust it.

I did until October 2022, when PayPal published an update to its Acceptable Use Policy that threatened to fine users $2,500 for promoting "misinformation".

Like they were the arbiters of what is misinformation and worthy of economic penalty. While it was later rescinded, it was beyond the pale. It's proof that something is corrupt and completely out to lunch in their management, and I won't sign up again after deleting my account in protest.

Edit: So apparently they only removed the misinformation clause, and they may still seize $2,500 of your money if they alone decide you are guilty of "...the promotion of hate, violence, racial or other forms of intolerance that is discriminatory or the financial exploitation of a crime...". People are worried about authoritarianism, yet meekly cede such powers to a corporation? It boggles the mind.

No, the point is that not everyone is cut out to be an engineer. If you find yourself being depressed as an engineer, one possibility is that it's really not the job for you. Not everyone is capable of being an engineer, and being prone to emotional disregulation is probably a good indicator. Not to say you can't muddle through, but the original post was saying that you should at least ask yourself if you'd be happier elsewhere.

I think the point was that there are people who don't need all this extra work, it just comes naturally. And they are more suited to engineering than people who need to spend a lot of energy on emotional and mental regulation as well.

Forming the prompt is still a skill, tokens aren't free, and it all takes some time and attention, which also has a price. So someone else doing that for you isn't exactly worthless, if they do a good job of it.

It doesn't matter because nobody cares. Businesses truly do not care. You are a cog, a means to an end. It's only about "winning".

A cynical person would tell you that nothing has changed; this was always the way it was. AI didn't change anything in this regard. Maybe it just made it more apparent to you?

See, you're part of the problem. This perfectly demonstrates the point of confirmation bias. You've already decided what the evidence shows, so you don't need to analyze it independently and objectively. "We already know what it means! Stop thinking!"

Not ignoring anything, just commenting on what the graph says as a singular piece of evidence. And it's "the hundreds of other signals that tell a similar story" that can lead to confirmation bias (ie. following a narrative arc) and potentially interpreting this piece of evidence more strongly than it actually deserves.

The graph represents 44 years of statistics, and shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. But you can not determine how these stats relate to longer term time frames such as a 100 years or more. Obviously the article wants you to believe the absolute worst about how these modern indicators compare back even further than the data shows, but how much of that is confirmation bias, and how much is actual science?