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Cursor has no AI services, they do not develop their own frontier models. I see no reason to understand why $10bn for Cursor's services is an advantage xAI versus say a $10bn deal with Anthropic, OpenAI or Google.

It's true that Cursor doesn't have their own frontier models, but they are training their own models. They just aren't at frontier level yet. The $60B/$10B deal looks like a bet that this is a capital/GPU constraint rather than a capability one.

Those other companies wouldn't also toss in a purchase option.

But I agree that it's hard to articulate what Cursor services you could blow this much money on.

Maybe it is all just an option! Or maybe they get a bunch of IP either way?


They're going to force a S&P500 index listing on IPO day so we're all going to be forced to baghold this regardless of if we want to or not unless you've got $0 in any major retirement fund.

So far only Nasdaq has changed its rules and will allow fast entry in 15 trading days. S&P has not changed its rules, not yet at least. Total indexed capital of Nasdaq is 1.4T vs 16T in the S&P500. Stated reason for fast tracking is that the indices are supposed to be a broad representation of the market, and leaving a 2T company out would be a significant tracking error.

I do agree that the optics of this aren’t great, and it’s rather easy to be cynical about motives.


I did a bit of research on this some time ago and it's not as bad as I originally thought. Index funds would need to count only liquid float of the company. So if Space X total valuation is 2 trillion, but float is 5%, then they need to count it as 100 billion for the purposes of index weight. Still more than I want, but not catastrophic.

Oh yes, thanks for reminding me. I’m going to cash out the 401(k).

You’ll pay massive penalties on that, another option is options (heh) but I’m not finance-literate enough to know how to pull it off.

Only penalties if you withdraw from 401k. Most 401k plans have some kind of moneymarket, bond fund, or similar

You can just reallocate away from an index fund.

I’ve made my peace with the “massive penalties”. I benefited from employer match in the past. I want the money now, not when I retire.

You gotta do what you think is best, but I hope for future you's sake you decide to not pull the money out. Or if you do you have other retirement plans.

I'm trying to help my parents now their at retirement age and am seeing first hand what not planning for your future looks like. They hit retirement with nothing but a small social security check every month. Not even enough to cover rent in most places.

I don't know how much you have in your 401k, but it will be worth literally hundreds of thousands more if you pull it out when you retire. You aren't just paying the penalties now, you're paying for potentially decades of compounding.


Retirement plan is rappelling accident before dotage.

Well can't argue with that lol

But if by some tragedy you don't die young, your older self is gonna be pissed at younger you for costing him hundreds of thousands of dollars.


You could just buy deep out of money SP500 puts expiring in 1+ year. That way you would be "insured" against the bubble popping.

The thing is, every dollar you spend on insurance is a dollar (and its interest) you lose. Furthermore, we don't know when it will pop. 1 year? 5 years?

The more reasonable solution is probably gradually reduce exposure to US markets by selling SP500 shares and turning to Europe and emerging markets ETFs. No need to cash out 401k.


You should backtest this strategy over the last 20 years before you make serious decisions off of the vibe from internet comments

20 years is not enough.

If you just look at the past 20 years, the US has had exceptional returns compared to the rest of the world.

The thing is, historically, high PE ratios like what we're seeing in the US do not correlate with short term returns that are as high. Expected future returns decrease as the PE ratios go up in a pretty linear fashion.

https://am.jpmorgan.com/us/en/asset-management/institutional...


Why 20 years? Just because we know, post hoc, the usa outperformed other places in the last 20 years, in no way means the next 20 years will be the same.

If you want a different point to backtest from, try Japan in the 80s and early 90s


What's the point of backtesting? Does backtesting say anything about the future?

The point of backtesting is to allow you to do what you want to do with a veneer of being data driven.

What are you basing this on?

I'm not an expert but it looks to my like 80% of my allocation won't be tracking spacex, because it's mid cap or small cap etc, and the 20% that's in the vanguard growth index might? I assume whoever sets the rules for the fund could change the rules to say companies must be listed for X months if they want to avoid this, right?

And I can change my allocation.

edit: Actually wait, isn't it only nasdaq 100 that's tracking it early, after 15 days rather than 3 months of trading? So 0% of my 401k is exposed to buying it quickly after IPO already, I think.


So far they're only getting fastracked into Nasdaq 100, not S&P 500.

401k rollovers into IRA aren't that hard these days and you could always use that IRA to have a more customized strategy, more specifically direct indexing of a major fund minus key ticker symbols you don't want exposure to. Of course, that all presumes that you won't regret excluding this long term.

The question is, is everyone integrating a special SpaceX correction in their algorithmic trading? Because if a dip in the index due to SpaceX causes old algorithms to think it’s a more structural issue (well, more than it is), and sell on that indicator, will that cause a cascade?

obviously no. if algos work in china, it will work with spacex

If your retirement fund is an IRA you can invest it in any stock you want. For a 401k you probably have some fund options that are not exposed to the S&P500, like emerging markets or fixed income

Maybe this already exists, but it would be great if one of the major index ETFs omitted all the firms with problematic board governance like there is at Tesla, SpaceX.

S&P500 had a rule from 2017 to 2023 that prevented companies with dual classes of shares (the sort that allow them to maintain founder control- like what GOOG and META did) that went public after the rule was instituted from ever being in the index. To be clear, META and GOOG were both in the index, but it was to prevent new companies from coming along and doing it. (I think it was related to SNAP going public?)

They removed it largely because investors wanted higher returns, and the tech companies that had such dual classes (1) were doing really well, and the S&P ended up caving on that rule.

1: Perennial hot button around here Palantir did this in a more extreme fashion than most. The three founders F class shares will always be at 49.9999% of the votes and the early investors B class shares have 10 votes each as compared to the publicly traded A class shares 1 votes.


My money's all in Bitcoin pats himself on the back

Kinda shocked SpaceX hasn't bailed out the DOGE-holders at this point..

the power of yet

The point of a rug pull is for the holders to lose money not to be bailed out.

EV batteries do not become "trash" after a few years.

Shipping hundreds of millions of new phones every year isn't pushing hard while earning billions? Near every single company in the world would die to have Apple's balance sheet.

Apple Silicon in the past 5 years has trounced every single market player. Apple has to make decisions on things like sensors based on the supplier being able to deliver hundreds of millions annually -- by the time we see the hardware it was baked and locked in over 12 months ago.


In the areas I specifically mentioned? No, they don't push that hard.

Apple introduced 48MP camera sensors many years after they became available. For the past 2 or 3 years, there have been devices with much better cameras, but again, they're not iPhones. Some phones have been charging at peak 40-100W for a while, so when you look at Apple's 30-40W, it's not that impressive, is it? In a year or so they may release a foldable phone, but Samsung is already on the 7th iteration of the Fold. And so on.

It doesn't make their SoCs less impressive (typing this on a M4 Mac!) or the shipping of so many devices a lesser feat, but Apple is very conservative with iPhones, and that's very apparent when you look at all phones out there.


What other company has ever sold wireless earbuds with a replaceable battery?


Fairphone has the Fairbuds

They missed out on the massive trademark lawsuit over “Fairpods Pro”.

The shipped nearly 250 million phones last year plus millions of other products. Having 30% recycled materials across a production line of that scale is massively impressive if you ask me.

Why is the number of phones of relevance? If anything, wouldn't a higher number of shipped phones just mean, that recycling becomes more worth it? Other than that, I don't see how that number plays a role. It is what is inside each of those phones, that matters, I think.

By week 20 there is practically no chance you're not going to know if you're carrying a baby with downs or not unless you refuse all the modern screening/tests available.

NIPT tests can be done at week 8 and give a very high indicator that can be followed up with close monitoring/invasive tests at week 14-15 that give a 99% accuracy. That's hardly "are really not that exact".


Per Wikipedia, Down's syndrome currently occurs in ~1 in 1000 live births, and used to occur in 2 in 1000 live births some decades ago, in the USA. That means that a test with a 1% false positive rate (99% accuracy) will lead to a false positive for 98-99 healthy embryos per 1000 live births. I would say that this is fair to call "not all that accurate".

Note: I am not in anyway saying that this means that people shouldn't trust the tests, or anything like that. Just reminding everyone that a test's accuracy has to be compared to the incidence of the disease to decide if it's high or not.


> lead to a false positive for 98-99 healthy embryos per 1000 live births.

The number you’re looking for is 9, not 99


Oops... Off by one [order of magnitude]...

Screening ‘test’ vs diagnostic ‘test’ is an important concept.

Screening tests are designed for sensitivity — false positives are expected and identify who would benefit from additional diagnostic tool and procedures.


While there may be some issues with Backblaze there's no real trusted alternative with such a long history.

Regardless to the OP's issues:

- on macOS since 9.0.2.784 released in 2023 all .git folders are included in backups - Cloud drives are problematic to backup because they all use extension plugins to hide the network and your local disk only contains stubs instead of actual files. If Backblaze scans it fully it'll download everything and exhaust your disk space there's no easy solution here.

I don't buy for a minute they were trying to be "sneaky" to save some $$ I instead feel like for the majority of users they felt it was misleading to backup stubs only and would rather not brick user computers by downloading all the files. Remember they can't access your cloud disk directly so the only way they can get the file contents is by doing an fread and letting the cloud drive client sync the content on demand.


This is exactly why I will never create a business that sells to developers. Some of the highest paid individuals on the planet cannot fathom paying for tools that make their life easy.

I get there are lots of tools that all add up, but even paying an extra $2,000/yr per dev isn't really that much for the time savings. But for some reason we're fickle, we think things should be cheaper than a daily coffee because "we can create this ourselves".


> Some of the highest paid individuals on the planet cannot fathom paying for tools that make their life easy.

I get where you're coming from, but you do realize that developers aren't the ones making the purchasing decisions, right?


Because Bun's runtime is a bug ridden mess. Say what you want about Deno but people that chose Bun's runtime over Deno's are either not really using Bun's runtime (just the package manager part) or are not running in production at scale.


Yeah I’m not running it at scale. It’s been good for my projects though


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