Startup execs are not so clueless. In public they might act like idealist, eager builders who just haven't gotten around to thinking about the money thing yet - that works on a surprising number of people still. But that pose doesn't work with VCs. For startups in these markets now the rug-pull is going to be Plan B (where Plan A is being acquired).

Columbia destroyed its reputation by its collaboration with this regime. Nobody wanting an actual liberal arts education will go near it for at least a generation.

Maybe they can transition to being the version of Oral Roberts University where you have to be able to read to graduate.

widening existing restrictions on "authoritarian" regimes

Think they forgot an asterisk.

*Offer not available to subjects of certain authoritarian polities

To start where I agree, there can be situations where a company has what amounts to free cashflow and no realistic opportunities to invest it. If that is the normal state of affairs, it should be issuing dividends. But if it is windfall, I can see a buyback being a reasonable way to responsibly handle it.

Otherwise I think they give management too much room to play games at the expense of long-term firm health, both by opportunities for self-dealing and by training investors to expect them.

I agree that buybacks are usually a stupid idea, and companies that train investors to expect them are setting themselves up for future pain, if nothing else. And more generally, "I can't think of any way to improve the business I run" is a very weird thing for an executive to claim.

I disagree that Intel's problem was buybacks. I mean, they were dumb, yes, but Intel's problems wouldn't have been solved by that money going to more R&D. Their problems today are rooted in bad strategic bets going back to the start of the smart phone mass market.

Microsoft fucked that one up, too - there was a lot of misplaced arrogance. MS corrected. Intel doubled-down.

"Only the Paranoid Survive," in retrospect, may not have been the best title choice.

Yes, consistently rising is consistent.

More specifically, the GP was speculating that R&D dropped while they were doing buybacks; my comment was refuting that.

Absolutely agree that the R&D spend has been wasted on consistently bad strategy.

It looks pretty consistent over time to me.

I currently work for a large public company. I would absolutely expect to be fired if I called someone a dickhead. (Above or below me, we don't tolerate abusive managers, at least in this corner of the firm.)

In the past I've worked for small companies where this sort of thing would be entirely normal. I ran one with two partners, we had some vivid arguments at various times.

Hell, a really long time ago I worked in a place where fist fights were relatively normal, if they didn't go "too far". (One summer of that was more than enough.)

More generally, employers who demand "respect" need to get a dog, or maybe therapy. You are paying fee-for-service unless otherwise negotiated, and ego-stroking was not specified in the job duties. I see this more in first-time business owners who have too much of their identity wrapped up in being a "business owner", but lots of broken people prop their egos up with their jobs.

Someone important in the firm thinks they're plateauing, time to start rolling out second-order product and maybe thinking a little harder about that moat.

They may as well just offer their own non-consensual undresser apps at this point.

Between this shit, Trump's ongoing demented ramblings and Musk perving over robot anime to the point where his suckup-brigade was telling him to quit beating off in public, I feel like the 10-digit+ club is decompensating as we watch.

I'm trying to adapt a slightly more nihilistic sensibility in defense. Pointing and laughing is the only healthy thing to do.

They're still going to be bullshit nobody can trust.

I don't see that as a huge problem - it isn't that hard to filter.

We run a hook that looks for secrets on push. It takes an admin to fix a false positive; that happens less than once a year. (We have a working population of about 800 engineers committing.)

Presumably OAI would care a lot less about false positives than we do (we don't want to throw away work product; OAI just wants masses of human output), so I expect they could err towards omission, not lose much on false positives and be pretty sure they're not training on anyone's secrets.

You seem to believe this is still a country of laws. That's only illegal if the money flows to Democrats.

Planes, crypto, buckets of cash - well, when King Shitlizard does it, it isn't illegal, and will stomp on you if you disagree in public.

First, yeah.

Second, These disgusting, shitheel wastes of skin seem to be doing it correctly - see 28 USC 4104, I think.

I hope they all die of an embarrassing skin condition right after winning.

The easy explanation is, "marketing".

But if you squint the right way, it isn't quite a lie.

Textbook definitions of "security" in an IT context tend to emphasize integrity, confidentiality, and availability. I suspect if pressed they'd emphasize "availability" and maybe "integrity" - they hired some dude to swap backup tapes and replicate to distributed DCs, and the average Windows user does not.

Of course that comes at the cost of "confidentiality", which they'll downplay.