Bus driver in SF or near a tech hub, so I can listen to mindless grifting and endless complaining by tech workers that would re-enforce the life decision I made.
Those people still need to rent. So as long as the rental income covers the mortgage, you’re ahead of the game and someone is paying an asset down for you.
Yes. OpenAI is also investing in AMD. This was discussed yesterday on HN, following some very good explanation by Matt Levine at Bloomberg. This is a way for one party to reduce some risk, by enjoying some upside in the equity of the counterparty.
But this is not circular. Circular would be if I sell you an apple worth $0.25 for $2.00, and then you sell it back to me for $2.00, or other similar amount, and I get to mark all the apples in my inventory at $2.00 and show a huge profit (on paper). One can create variations of this blatant deal. Like I sell you some rubber for 10 times the market price, you make a balloon and then I buy the balloon for 10 times the market price. I may not have other balloons in my inventory, but plenty of rubber, and I show some nice profit. One can imagine other, fancier deals.
But in the case of AMD and NVidia, and OpenAI and Oracle, the direction is clear. OpenAI has a clear need for compute. They can buy it directly from NVidia and AMD, or indirectly from Oracle. They can buy it with hard cash (of which they don't have that much), or with their own equity, or some form of deal that offers the seller an upside in OpenAI's equity.
But there is not back and forth buying of the same item, or of rubber/balloons. All the deals seem legit. Is it possible that all the future compute will not be needed, because the AI craze will fizzle. It is, lots of things are possible. But that's general business risk.
> But this is not circular. Circular would be if I sell you an apple worth $0.25 for $2.00
When you draw a circle on a piece of paper do you put your pencil to the paper, start drawing a curve, stop and write the word FRAUD, and then complete the curve? Or do you just draw a circle?
I’m assuming that people are saying “circular” in that it looks like the money goes in a circle. (For one example) Nvidia invests in Lambda, Lambda buys GPUs from Nvidia, Nvidia leases GPUs back from Lambda, Lambda uses the revenue from leasing the GPUs to Nvidia to raise debt to buy more GPUs from Nvidia…
This is how financing works. When you buy a house, you get a mortgage from a bank. It is unusual to get a mortgage from a seller. It would feel a bit circular, right? But that is exactly what happens most of the time when people buy a car. They get a loan from the same company that sells them the car. Is that circular?
When you replace people with companies, the financing can become much more complex. The example you provided with Nvidia and Lambda seems quite reasonable to me. Here's an example that happens every day in the world of housing: banks lend money to house buyers. Then they package the mortgages and sell the resulting mortgage back securities. Then they take the money from the proceeds, and give more loans, and package them and create more mortgage back securities. Seems circular, right? But that's just how business is done. There is no Ponzi aspect to this, or fraud, or smoke and mirrors. It's just every day business. Nobody labels that as being circular.
When people buy a car they sometimes get a loan from the auto manufacturer’s financial services arm. What they don’t usually get are warrants struck at a penny for 10% of the manufacturer.
You sound like you know what you’re talking about. I only think I know what I’m talking about. Help me understand: What am I missing in the OpenAI / AMD deal that makes it non circular?
OpenAI: We need lots of GPUs, you make GPUs, but your GPUs are not quite equal to Nvidia's GPUs. And we are a growth startup, we don't have a lot of cash, can you give us a hefty discount on those GPUs?
AMD: We need cash too, you know? We'd love to sell you those thousands and thousands of high end GPUs, that would cover some of our R&D, and we could one day match NVidia. But we don't swim in cash either. We can't give you the discount.
OpenAI: What can you give us? You must be able to throw in something there. Otherwise, honestly, we can't make the deal.
AMD: What if we give you some equity? And if our deal goes well, and our GPUs start being viable alternatives to Nvidia's, maybe we'll be able to get close to Nvidia's market cap and even surpass them, just like we did with Intel.
OpenAI: Brilliant. We love it.
AMD: Yes, but that equity will be contingent on how the deal goes.
> You sound like you know what you’re talking about.
Honestly, I'm not an expert either, but I've run a company, and I can all but guarantee that credit_guy above really does not know what he is talking about.
I've replied else-thread, in detail, on exactly why his analogy to mortgage and car loans are incorrect.
His main point that "these deals cannot be circular because mortgage and car finance are not circular" is incorrect. The mortgage and car finance deals are not analogous to the Nvidia/OpenAI or AMD/OpenAI deals.
The AI startup valuation largely is. I feel it quickly becomes circular because people make projections purely on other projections since the world is too impatient to wait and find out.
A single hamburger store is never going to be projected to have a billion dollars of revenue because people understand the total addressable market. Doesn’t matter how good the burger is.
The AI stuff is too new that people don’t have a firm grasp on the costs and profit opportunities. They don’t really even know how to define the TAM. Too many unknowns. Entire classes of labor could be replaced by AI —- or perhaps not.
With little grounding, it quickly becomes a circle of hype.
I don’t know what to tell you guy, but when people see money moving in a circle in a deal there is a good chance that “circular deal” might pop into their heads. Because it’s a deal that is shaped like a circle.
> Is that circular?
Doesn’t really seem so because at the end of the day the money goes from me to them. I don’t get my money back, I get a car in exchange for my money.
Also this deal didn’t begin with the manufacturer purchasing shares of me before offering me debt to buy a car from them.
>But that is exactly what happens most of the time when people buy a car.
Your car manufacturer leases your car back from you? And you use that revenue to raise debt to buy more cars from them? What manufacturer are you doing this with? What do you end up driving?
> Your car manufacturer leases your car back from you? And you use that revenue to raise debt to buy more cars from them?
Honestly, if this was possible people would be doing it (not that they are not - fleet services and rental fleet services do some pretty funky accounting sometimes, so I wouldn't be surprised at all if this sort of thing happened).
If this was possible, I'd be doing it.
> What manufacturer are you doing this with?
Good question. The minute an answer gets posted I'm going to have a really good side-hustle.
> What do you end up driving?
I presume, at the point that this is being done, there is no actual car involved, so nobody involved will be driving because there is no car to drive.
> Good question. The minute an answer gets posted I'm going to have a really good side-hustle.
Yeah “everybody buys cars through the infinite car glitch” sounds like the sort of thing that would be part of an enormously long answer to “should I try WoW for the first time in 2025”
"Do not charge your brother interest on money, food, or any other type of loan. You may charge a foreigner interest, but not your brother." - Deuteronomy 23:19-20
> But that is exactly what happens most of the time when people buy a car. They get a loan from the same company that sells them the car.
No, they don't!
Serious "Citation Needed" here. They get a loan from a financial services company, that is a separate company from the automaker and/or dealership.
The certification and requirements for trading as a credit provider will not be met by neither the auto manufacturer nor the dealership.
> Here's an example that happens every day in the world of housing: banks lend money to house buyers. Then they package the mortgages and sell the resulting mortgage back securities. Then they take the money from the proceeds, and give more loans, and package them and create more mortgage back securities. Seems circular, right?
No, it doesn't! They make out new loans, sure, but they aren't loaning you specifically the proceeds from the sale of your specific mortgage-backed security!
If you happen to get a new loan from the sale of the MBS, it is impossible that only you get that loan, from the sale of an MBS that had only your existing loan.
Seriously, there's laws and regulations around this, and from what you say, with all due respect, it seems that you are unaware of these regulations.[1]
The only reason that these actually-circular deals can go on right now is because OpenAI (and other providers doing similar circular deals) are not publicly traded, and thus there are fewer regulations and even fewer enforcement of what little regulations there are for unlisted companies.
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[1] Why is your handle "credit_guy"? You don't appear to be familiar with the fact that credit providers are heavily regulated in all jurisdictions that we are talking about. I mean, you don't even need to know the specific regulations and certifications necessary, you just need to know things like a dealer cannot be a credit provider too.
> But there is not back and forth buying of the same item, or of rubber/balloons. All the deals seem legit.
Some, certainly, but the vendor-financing deals certainly look circular to the casual observer. Microsoft invests $X into OpenAI for a 51% (or whatever) stake, and that investment then goes straight back to Microsoft to pay for compute credits.
Or Nvidia invests[1] $100m into OpenAI, which OpenAI then turns around and pays back to Nvidia for compute.
The majority of the deals making the news are structured like this; maybe technically those aren't actual ducks[2], but they sure look, walk and talk like ducks.
Similarly structured deals are with Oracle. And Coreweave. And everyone.
It may not be a "circular" deal, but what do you expect people to call it when a company makes a deal to receive cash (not credit, but actual cash) from a vendor, and spends that cash with that vendor?
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[1] I use this word loosely here - the investment is a commitment of 10x $10m tranches.
Activision CoD uses EOMM, engagement optimized match making. They’re optimizing for your to stay on, much like a gambler playing slots. You allow one win where the player is matched with lesser opponents, and then the next X games, you’re the lesser opponent.
It’s all tuned to keep you playing and want that dopamine hit of a win that’s always just around the corner.
This is also worth considering, thanks. We would need to be careful to avoid overwriting any pre-existing affiliate tags set on a user provided URL like Honey was doing [0]. I’m curious why you stopped pursuing the idea if you don’t mind sharing.
I find this interesting… I grew up in a Latin family and learned to shower at night. I rationalized it as, not going to bed dirty, and you aren’t going to get dirtier just sleeping anyway.
I’m simply way too greasy of a person to shower at night. I’d rather sleep through the part where it’s built up the most, not waste the first 8 hours of being less greasy when I’m sleeping.
I suppose different genetics in different regions might play into that.
I’m in the habit of a shower in the morning and a quick rinse shower before bed. Idk why people limit themselves to grooming only at a single point in the day.
Depends where you're from. I'm from Australia and lived through a period of extreme water shortages called the Millennium Drought[0]. During it, the water catchments for most of my state were alarmingly close to dry. We started collecting water from showers and using it on the garden, the government sent out little five-minute hourglasses with suction cups for everyone to put in their shower, and several families in my local area had to have tankers of water brought in to refill their rainwater tanks.
My uncle's family kept visiting from America and taking 20 minute showers, which would have been totally fine if they were still in Vermont but used an incredibly high amount of water. He eventually installed a shower timer so his tank wouldn't run dry.
In such conditions, water costs more than mere money. Yes, you can probably afford to shower twice a day, but that would require you to bring in a tanker of water from an already drought-stricken reservoir. Water takes on a moral cost as well as a financial one. There's a famous passage from Dune: "One date palm requires forty liters of water a day. A man requires but eight liters. A palm, then, equals five men." Australia is not quite Arrakis, but in a water shortage extra showers start to feel like an Arrakeen date palm.
Currently our home's AC is out which has resulted in two showers/day due to the heat. Post exercise is going to at least be a hot rinse.
The irony (pun semi-intended) is my wife has gotten fond of at times hanging clothes in the bathroom during a shower to help remove wrinkles. No, Ironing is better but it's a little less ceremony as well as increasing the overall utility of the water you used in the shower.
> you aren’t going to get dirtier just sleeping anyway
I don’t shower to wash off dirt; I shower to wash off my own body’s excretions. Which definitely do happen while I’m sleeping (and more so, in fact, because body temperature rises during sleep.)
I can shower, dry thoroughly, get straight into bed… and still, the next morning, I’m sticky from sweat; have BO (that deodorant won’t mask); and my hair is now stuck moussed by my own overnight scalp oils into looking like Goku.
You have that backwards. “People maintain a fairly consistent body temperature during the day which drops at night by around 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit. However, some people still feel hot at night due to their unique body composition, sleep environment, something they ate or drank, or other medical reasons.” https://www.sleepfoundation.org/sleep-faqs/why-do-i-get-so-h....
Critically your body intentionally lowers temperature including changes to skin capillaries and sweating, it’s not simply lowering temperature from not moving. So you can wake up sweating even if things where fine when you went to sleep.
Maybe technically true as a matter of biology in isolation, but mostly not in practice — specifically due to that "something they ate or drank" part. The basal body temperature reduction that happens at night really isn't relevant for anyone who consumes any amount of caffeine during the day (which is most people), as when caffeinated, the BBT shift downward at night isn't accompanied by a complementary upward shift in comfortable/tolerable air temperature. Rather the opposite.
Caffeine, as a cholinergic, constricts peripheral blood vessels, and reduces bloodflow; and as a diuretic, it also reduces interstitial-fluid retention in peripheral tissues. These effects combine to decrease your skin temperature (or rather, to make your skin temperature less reflective of your core temperature and more reflective of the ambient air temperature); while very slightly increasing your core temperature (and blood pressure! Which is one reason caffeine is bad for your heart!)
Most of your heat-sensing nerves are in your periphery, not in your core. So caffeine, by making your skin cooler, makes you feel cooler (even though your basal body temperature goes up!) to which your body responds by sweating less (even though caffeine, as a cholinergic, would force you to sweat in great-enough amounts. See: SLUDGE syndrome.)
Most people don't drink caffeine after a certain time in the evening; and so at night, whatever caffeine was in their bodies has a chance to flush out — which then suddenly allows bloodflow, blood pressure, and interstitial fluid to wash back out to their skin and extremities — and with that comes an increase in skin temperature, "hot" qualia, and triggered sweating from signalled overheating (i.e. the same reason you sweat from spicy food even though your BBT isn't increasing.)
I definitely heat up in the evening when laying down. I may need socks + woollen socks through the day, but it's socks off time during the evening movie. And sleeping time means full-body heating, which my partner really appreciates.
With my partner we have complementary heating systems. I get warm in the evening when they are cold, and they warm up after eating which does nothing for me. The difference is radical.
I guess partly due to this I would never spend a day without a shower in the morning. I've never been sick enough to skip a morning shower, even in a high fever (or especially then I guess, due to sweating more than usual). The dirty feeling is just too much to bear.
You feel the sensation of warmth because your body is trying to cool down. It does so by raising the temperature of your skin so more heat is dumped into the environment. This is part of the reason why drinking can lead to hypothermia. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1811578/ “Alcohol is a dominant cause of death in urban hypothermia. Drinking alcohol gives a pleasant feeling of warmth.”
Try taking your core body temperature using a thermometer rather than relying on perceived temperature.
Sounds logical. I don't mind which mechanism is behind it, but the ability to heat up any sleeping spot to a comfortable temperature for two is feature I quite like.
Yeah, body temperature falls when you sleep. In fact, that's one of the tips give to insomniacs to help them sleep - have a bath at night, preferably with cold water.
In my family, parents showered in the morning and kids showered at night.
I tried switching after moving out but didn't find it nice for the same reason you mention, getting the bed all dirty with whatever sweat had accumulated over the day.
As a fellow night sweater, I got a forced air blower and special sheet that distributes the air for my bed and it’s been life changing. It took a week or so to get used to. It’s temperature and speed controlled. Check out BedJet.
Because the only winning move it not to play. This is Europe's war. Not sure why the US is involved at all. It's not like Ukraine has oil or a NATO partner.
As Viscount Cunningham famously said when he risked his fleet to evacuate troops in the Battle of Crete in 1941, 'It takes three years to build a ship; it takes three centuries to build a tradition'. Which feels like how America's new insularism is undoing all the "leader of the free world" fandom that it has carefully cultivated - and profited from - in the last 80 years.
Today the US has two strategic enemies - Russia and China - and two strategic partners, Nato in Europe and everyone in pacific except China.
The US can spend peanuts - it really isn't a lot of money in US defence terms - backing Ukraine and using Ukrainian casualties to defeat it's strategic enemy, Russia, whilst making it's other strategic enemy, China, fear it.
Or it can waver and show it's no longer the leader of the democratic world and make all it's allies in Europe and Asia not believe in it.
My big fear is that it is empowering China to dare to have it's go at Taiwan in a couple of years.
This presumes there's any amount US can spend to allow UKR to strategically defeat RU by proxy, and thereby have PRC fear it. UKR as proxy is as much limited by quality/quantity of it's human capita as it is by external support. What happens to US credibilty / desire to be US proxy in IndoPac to fight for US security interests when partners see UKR decimated to the last man despite full US assistance? The western wunderwaffles delivered to UKR have underdelivered, meanwhile US failing to guarantee red sea shipping against Houthis that US armed Saudis have failed to contain for over a decade. Single digit salvos of shit tier RU and Houthi missiles successfully penetrating Patriots in UKR and Flight2/3 DDGs in Red Sea has basically affirmed PRC the vulnerability of US hardware and validated their doctorine to deliver 1000x more fires. If anything the more US commits/show hand, and the more she reveals her (in)capability, the less her adversaries fear it. Sometimes better to commit half heartly and be thought incompetent (or indifferent) than go all in an remove all doubt. Nothing worse for US credibility than trying and failing.
Europe is probably uncomfortable/ashamed by how dependent they are on the US for maintaining the western-centric global power axis. But on the same hand are unwilling to make the sacrifices their societies would need to in order to pick up the slack. Especially now that European economies tend to be in a slump.
It certainly seems that the US is unsure whether it wants this role. The Congress is putting US credibility at huge risk right now.
Nevertheless, if the US abdicates its leadership, the free world will shrink. Even democracies have domestic enemies and all of these will be encouraged to push autocracy as an alternative to the messy parliamentary system.
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