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Quantian @quantian.bsky.social · 11h

(15% of the time it’s Thiel and 4% of the time it’s Andreessen)

Quantian @quantian.bsky.social · 11h

Elon Musk’s existence is incredibly load bearing to lefty techno skeptics. Any critique made by certain a kind of dumb guy on Bluesky or Twitter is at least 80% likely to a critique of a specific identifiable Musk Thing and not really anybody else.

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Quantian @quantian.bsky.social · 16h

Yeah I’m sure some platinum plated executive healthcare product exists which is like “you can go to any doctor in the US and we will handle everything for you, that will be $5,000 a month” and I would buy that just so I never have to think about it

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Quantian @quantian.bsky.social · 16h

I buy a lot of specialized non-healthcare insurance and the process is literally 100x easier and more straightforward than this, you just get some competitive quotes and then slide around the premium/deductible until you’ve calibrated your risk transfer appropriately

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Quantian @quantian.bsky.social · 16h

Man I’m in like the top 0.1% of Americans for, like, quantitative financial modeling and the idea of having to do some kind of actuarial underwriting of my expected healthcare expenses to buy a plan strikes me as such an insane way to run a system (no shade on OP for the great thread, to be clear)

K. Chen @tznkai.bsky.social · Oct 28

It's open enrollment time so here's a convenient peg to hang a little tutorial about how to choose your health insurance.

Most of the advice you get is bad. Most of your instincts are bad. I however used to work for a health insurance company and I do arithmetic for a living so I can help.

Bionic Woman @batmansrobyn.bsky.social · Oct 28

Personally I think it's great that my company's HR sends out an official looking tool where they even ask you to pre-populate your healthcare providers and instead of being the actual insurance enrollment process it's just some bullshit checklist to try and convince me I actually don't want a PPO

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Quantian @quantian.bsky.social · 1d

"For example, fur"

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Quantian @quantian.bsky.social · 1d

lol this actually is a use case, every time your camera takes a photo it uploads a statement to a public blockchain that phone ID X took a picture with a hash of Y at timestamp Z, then if you want to use it as evidence you would show that your phone had ID X and the image matched the hash perfectly.

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Quantian @quantian.bsky.social · 1d

The problem with this strategy is that you are entering into what essentially amounts to a conspiracy where Elon Musk is a prominent participant to keep something secret. So it should last for what, 6 months before he tweets out its existence by way of a complaint it woke? bsky.app/profile/theo...

rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 1d

there is still a way to reliably make a forensic distinction between generated video and real video, but there is an agreement to keep it secret because it can be defeated if known. unfortunately i know about it despite this not being my job.

Quantian @quantian.bsky.social · 1d

I am being charitable in assuming that Sora videos have some kind of steganography in the file that can’t be removed as easily as getting rid of the video watermark, but even failing that there’s still a company you can subpoena if they’re the only ones with the technology, which soon they won’t be.

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Quantian @quantian.bsky.social · 1d

I assume someone got cute with the name and searching public GitHub repos for OrAIon will turn something up sooner or later.

EURion constellation - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

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Quantian @quantian.bsky.social · 1d

Not to be a conspiracy theorist but I thought at the time it was insanely egotistical for Elon or Sam to spent what was obviously a ton of time and money fine-tuning their own models to generate images of themselves. But there’s another reason why they might want to do that! bsky.app/profile/ncal...

Noah @ncallaway.bsky.social · 1d

I think this is half the goal of AI for those seeking a post-truth order. Yes, they can produce fake evidence against people they don’t like, but probably more importantly they can dismiss actual evidence against them as being fake.

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Quantian @quantian.bsky.social · 1d

I’m assuming that the first clones will be too big to run locally and it will take hobbyists a little while to whittle them down and streamline the pipeline to the point where it can be done efficiency, but yeah it is only a matter of time at this point.

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Quantian @quantian.bsky.social · 1d

I am being charitable in assuming that Sora videos have some kind of steganography in the file that can’t be removed as easily as getting rid of the video watermark, but even failing that there’s still a company you can subpoena if they’re the only ones with the technology, which soon they won’t be.

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Quantian @quantian.bsky.social · 1d

People need to start investing in, like, Polaroids and Technicolor film if you ever want to use photographic or video evidence in a courtroom after 2026

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Quantian @quantian.bsky.social · 1d

Sora is not the real problem here. The real problem is that in 12, at most 24 months, there will be a Sora clone from Tencent or Alibaba that is just as good and can be run by anybody with a 5099, at which point everyone in society needs to rapidly agree to treat all digital video as fake, period.

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Quantian @quantian.bsky.social · 1d

Who needs a credit card wallet when you can have a goth gf in lingerie that costs $3 billion to make $27 million a month in subscription revenue?

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Quantian @quantian.bsky.social · 1d

This isn't quite a magic money tree because anyone selling puts on the combined EV is getting screwed by the increases in uncertainty, which is why all the debt on data center deals trades like wide of 2015 oil patch names despite nothing bad actually happening in the space yet:

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Quantian @quantian.bsky.social · 1d

Yeah that's what I'm saying, you have a massive notional size on a transaction which will probably screw one of the parties, but until who is screwed gets determined you have just increased the volatility on a basket of 2 call options so the value of both will increase.

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Quantian @quantian.bsky.social · 1d

One of them should definitely be mooning! Someone is handing out gobs of free money but it’s not quite clear whom yet.

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Quantian @quantian.bsky.social · 1d

If you choose to get into that business and your customers are like “capacity seller I need your biggest capacity” then your response better be “yes sir but please finance all my capex to derisk this so I don’t get screwed” or you’re bad at your job

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Quantian @quantian.bsky.social · 1d

There is a long and storied history of business models like "we will provide the last unit of incremental capacity for X and charge the spot rate for our services" and while they get absolutely reamed on operating leverage in a downcycle that sword cuts both ways (see, eg, LNG carriers in 2022)

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Quantian @quantian.bsky.social · 1d

This is maybe an unusual take from me but I don't actually think stuff like vendor financing is particularly strong evidence of a bubble per se, there's much better cases to be made (e.g. the company who doesn't make nuclear reactors getting a Goldman initiation on projected FCF inflection in 2045)

Blaise Ulysse Bernard Collins @wittywebhandle.bsky.social · 1d

This is an actual visual map of the Circular Vendor Ponzi laid out by @anthonycr.bsky.social

We're in the phase where they are making sure that none of the nodes die, but it is becoming increasingly thinly stretched

It's likely in the terminal phase. If one of these faulters, the whole thing pops

Circular Vendor Ponzi map

Dell, Nvidia, Supermicro, Lambda, Coreweave, Crusce, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Oracle all buyuing from and selling to each other with no arrows leaving the map.

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Quantian @quantian.bsky.social · 1d

If you don't praise a "cuisine" that consists of nutritionally inadequate dishes designed to feed slaves as cheaply as possible as the most authentic expression of American culinary traditions it's because you're racist :/

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Quantian @quantian.bsky.social · 2d

I t's the DOS2 engine they already had! That's why it has all the weird non-5e quirks like throwing water bottles to electrify floor surfaces and stuff

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Quantian @quantian.bsky.social · 2d

No DLC is a bit of a surprise but at this point following up with BG4 has a lot more downside risks for everybody involved than sailing off into the sunset with a universally beloved game

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Quantian @quantian.bsky.social · 2d

I’m willing to assign Larian a little more share of the blame than most, it’s clear that they strongly dislike the constraints of the 5e system (which is why they rewrote it to match DOS2) and wanted to go back to their own IP, figuring that they’ll be able to take all the fans with them.

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