istewart

This post serves as your periodic reminder that the bald people were the bad guys in Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo

Dragon Ball A16Z: We have replaced interminable screaming powerup sequences and planet-destroying energy blasts with long panning shots of the characters using their abilities to light giant mountains of cash on fire. If you give us a series C at a valuation of $420 million, we may be able to determine why test audience surveys have thus far come back unfavorable

please be gentle with my child, they will soon have a presence on the discount paperback rack at the local grocery store

Altman is certainly aware of what it takes to be a Jobs-like marketing personality (and probably holds Hubbard-like totalism as a not-so-secret ambition), he’s just not, uh, very good at it. He’s put the most effort into the strictly lower-case, faux-casual persona on Twitter to seem “approachable” in a social media context, and that doesn’t help him at all when trying to actually appear serious.

I also don’t doubt that he’s beginning to succumb to the yes-man filter bubble that traps so many public personalities. That’s surely made worse by the likelihood that any underlings he might have reviewing this crap are drinking the AI koolaid and “punching everything up!” with a few rounds of ChatGPT.

Imagine if he turned up among the guest cast on Star Trek. He’d probably play a Bajoran who narc’d out to the Cardassians

Yeah, “thousands of days” seems like a first-draft attempt at “let’s choose a unit of smaller magnitude to make this seem more serious to the plebs.” And everyone around him drowning their brains in GPT slurry shouted, “excellent turn of phrase, sir!”

I guess in this scenario, Balaji’s fetishized hyperinflation finally happens sometime in the next 6 months.

Point well made. Engineers, however quantitative they may be, are not often finance people. If the true believers were left in charge, they’d probably bankrupt promises much more rapidly, and auger the whole enterprise into the ground that much quicker. I can’t see that Altman is actually that great a finance guy either, at least in stewardship of other people’s money, but he has cultivated the ability to manipulate cash out of people and institutions during this grift-dominant era of Silicon Valley.

Despite the industry’s deeply ingrained neophilia, I think it speaks to the importance of backwards compatibility and legacy systems.

I can’t help but think that the genAI craze will end up being a regrettable side-quest along the path to “coding for non-programmers” akin to Visual Basic. But hey, I bet there’s a lot more legacy VB apps being kept alive out there than anyone would be comfortable with.

crazy people who look sort of like me but younger.

giving away the game a bit, Mr. Schmidt