AI has not been used to write any comment that I have ever posted on Hacker News. You can observe my previous comments over the years, even prior to the adoption of modern LLMs, which demonstrate how I communicate.
(While the patterns may be similar, I have a tendency to be more loquacious due to my larger token limit! %)
You can always tell when there is a problem. When things are fine the companies keep the profits to themselves. When things start to get dicey - foist it off onto retail investers.
Private equity (PE) is increasingly being introduced into 401(k) plans, driven by a 2025 executive order encouraging "democratization" of alternative assets. - Google AI
It's why as a retail investor, never buy things that would otherwise have not been available to you (but was to those "elite"/institutional investors previously).
Think pre-IPO buy-in. Investors in the know and other well connected institutional investors get first dibs on all of the good ones. The bad ones are pawned off to retail investors. It's no different with private credit and private equity. These sorts of deals have good ones and bad ones - the good ones will have been taken by the time it flows down to retail.
Survivorship bias and the corporate finance world of today is completely unrecognizable from the world of Google and Apple. Just look at the resulting performance of the SPAC craze
Even for good assets there's a price you shouldn't pay. People are joking(?) about triple-layer SPVs where you can get pre-IPO exposure but at higher-than-IPO price.
Google and Apple didn't go through ten funding rounds like today's startups do. Apple had one angel and three rounds, Google had one angel and literally just an A round after that; then retail investors could capture all the upside. Now there's way more time for private investors to pick the bones clean before it gets dumped on the public.
To answer your question: LLMs don't have free speech, because they aren't companies/businesses, they are a tool (that is used by companies/businesses).
Whether a company/business uses an LLM or a real human to write a particular piece of text, that piece of text is entitled to free speech protections on the basis of the company signing off on it. Not on the basis of how that piece of writing was produced.
VCs have mined all the low hanging fruit of the internet. Exactly how many attention grabbing advertising companies, crypto scammers and gambling sites can the world stand. Enshittification is forcing them to seek new horizons.
Cigarette vending machines had little stickers that said it was illegal for those under 18 to purchase cigarettes. Sure stopped all my friends from buying them.
Seems exactly like the useless process fixation that Abundance advocates abhor.
Las Vegas tourism is experiencing a significant downturn in early 2026, with 2025 finishing with a 7.5% decline in visitors—the sharpest drop outside the pandemic since 1970. - Google AI
tl;dw - They say Vegas visitor numbers are down, but profits are actually up. This is because the tourism industry there has refocused on higher end clientele
The "Backlash" he is referring to is people canceling their OpenAI accounts and going to Claude. And by "Painful" he means less money. - Professional CEO Sam Speak Interpreter
I mean, I guess. It's not like they're profitable yet are they? At least not at the consumer level as far as I am aware. Me canceling my subscription might have saved them money.
Honestly I think these tech billionaires are very thin-skinned and they don't like people saying mean things about them, and I think a lot of them are completely unable to reconcile this simple fact: when you're a billionaire, you don't fucking get to have a normal life.
You didn't have to get billions of dollars of wealth. If you get into a situation like that, then yes your actions are going to be scrutinized more than a nobody like me. People are going to call you an asshole when you do asshole things more than when some random nobody does something assholey. You chose to be popular and powerful; if you don't like that then there's no law saying you can't get a regular 9-5 job like the rest of us.
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