Ryan Hendrickson

We have entered the "weird financial tricks" phase of the bubble. A reliable indicator of bubbles is that companies concoct bizarre financial instruments and accounting measures to paper over their problems. In Fortune, Allie Garfinkel reports that venture capitalists are irked at some of the creative accounting going on in their portfolios. Some startups are reporting one-time sales as "recurring revenue." Others technically show "recurring revenue" for what are essentially trials. And that's on the tame side. For crazy, you can look to Robinhood's suggestion that it might offer "tokenized" equity in OpenAI. By "tokenized," Business Insider reports, Robinhood means "blockchain-enabled representations of securities like stocks." In reality, they have no connection to OpenAI equity whatsoever. But that doesn't mean that consumers shouldn't be able to gamble on the mirage!

Wrote about fresh signs of an AI bubble (and why the industry says the worries are mostly overblown) www.platformer.news/ai-bubble-20...

A vertical flow-style diagram showing relationships among major tech companies. At the top is the OpenAI logo, with arrows pointing to and from various other companies below. These include SoftBank, Oracle, NVIDIA, CoreWeave, Microsoft, Broadcom, Google, Meta, Anthropic, and Amazon. Arrows indicate funding, partnership, or supply-chain connections between them, such as NVIDIA connecting to CoreWeave, Google connecting to Meta, and Amazon connecting to Anthropic. The diagram suggests a web of interconnections among these companies around AI development and infrastructure.

"The deals also involve circular arrangements between the world’s most valuable start-up and its partners, as well as complex financing terms that have in most cases yet to be agreed."

Also recommend this article:

bsky.app/profile/just...

Important article for anyone following AI and AI policy.

"In the process, [NVIDIA and OpenAI are] now seen as playing a key role in ratcheting up the risks of a possible AI bubble by inflating the market and binding the fates of numerous companies together. "

I don’t use this term lightly but this is satanically evil

You probably can’t make very good art if you can purchase your way out of annoying life things like grocery checkout lines or a crowded bus

It's not just that they're going to strike down a law against conversion therapy, it's that they're going to do it on behalf of made-up claims from a straw plaintiff who can't honestly show the law affected her at all

the article in the QT is solid & if you’re cis & don’t get exactly how grim headlines like “supreme court poised to overturn conversion therapy ban,” please know that the international council for the rehabilitation of torture victims (ICRT) considers conversion therapy torture.

because it is.

Seeing people saying Weiss et al don't know what they're doing and will kill CBS but I feel like this is just the logical endpoint of social media platforms becoming the main source of truth about the world for millions of people. Nice to think the Internet wouldn't eat reality, but it did

"The news" as journalists reporting on and contextualizing factual happenings has been replaced by "the news" as promoting/reacting to content creators like the US gov, billionaires, and genocidaires. In this info environment I think the Ellison-ized CBS will probably do great

This is something I wish my AI-cheerleading colleagues in archives and libraries fully understood: all the work we've done in the past 25+ years, all of it, is now actively being used to putting us out of business in the most dire fashion imaginable by the wealthiest people on the planet

I spent the day looking at applications for licenses to deal second hand goods, which were required in Boston in 1839, and was struck by how many were on blue paper. Made from coarse rags dyed with indigo, they form a sort of class-based material vernacular. No rich person used paper this color 🗃️

ADF has a track record of representing clients with just-so standing claims, like wedding businesses that are incorporated just long enough to challenge nondiscrimination laws protecting queer couples and are never heard from again

Will I be the first to suggest the carbon offsets worked exactly as planned: they delayed real action for another 25 years

Watched Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure (1997) and Pulse (2001) back to back and they both felt eerily prophetic. I don't want to spoil anything so if you're in the mood for some supremely bad/creepy vibes in October I gotta recommend them

Believe me when I tell you that a lot of people are hanging on by their fingernails and services like the food bank are one of the only lifelines they have left. Hate to say it can get worse but add mass hunger to the current equation and, well -

It's wild to see a person who is so clearly and obviously our contemporary analogue to MLK, Jr., Desmond Tutu, Mandela, etc. be treated with sneering condescension by liberals and rabid urges of sexualized violence on the right. A clear indication of how morally stunted the US is now

I'm also reminded of the "whistleblower" report about abuses at a Missouri gender clinic, the author of which is now just a full-time anti-transgender lobbyist, that fell apart the moment any reporter tried to verify it

I hope this is a wake up call for folks up here in the Northeast: the federal government is arguing that it can legally coup your governor using the national guard as the President's private army, under a completely fictional pretext. The health care pact is nice but maybe not enough

For you history buffs out there imagine a timeline where Roy Cohn is put in charge of CBS and Edward R. Murrow is deported to a black site

An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis | James Baldwin One might have hoped that, by this hour, the very sight of chains on black flesh, or the very sight of chains, would be so intolerable a sight for the American people, and so unbearable a memory, that...

You can read the full essay—that Baldwin wrote after Angela had been arrested and put on trail—here

It's no exaggeration to say that "whiteness" as a concept has been disastrous, possibly to the point of extinction in the near future, for human civilization, though saying so too loudly and often can actually get you killed in the twenty first century

this is the key: "policy" outside law, aka fascism

REVEALED: ADL’s US-Israel Police Exchanges Militarize the Police - JVP “The ADL’s cover is blown once and for all. There’s nothing Jewish about fighting against Palestinian freedom or militarizing the police.”

Unfortunately, the ADL has paid for many law enforcement agencies to be trained by IDF. Even Border Patrol has IDF training. This is the training now. www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2022/03/17/r...

ICE Plans to Build ‘Hyper-Realistic’ Tactical Training Facility That Can Simulate ‘Urban Warfare’ ICE is building a new training facility that will feature “hyper-realistic” simulations of homes, schools, courtrooms, and commercial buildings.

When you say they are not trained, you are wrong. This is the training they were given in Trump’s 1st Admin. ICE was trained specifically in urban warfare for this moment in 2019. www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/ice-bui...

'Ultra-elite' units have been mostly aristocratic self-congratulatory nonsense for most of military history, but in this era *in particular* is it is *particularly* nonsense.

And yet it now seems to be the guiding ethos of our military our of masculine insecurity compensation.

And the cult of SOF is a real problem given that, if we've seen one thing in Ukraine, it is that in a near-peer conflict, highly-trained, ultra-elite infantry cost a lot to form and field but get shredded by firepower at exactly the same rate, if not faster than, regular infantry.

This 'cult of the operator' appears, to me at least, wholly unsuited for modern warfare, in which victory depends primarily on the depth of your political will, the effectiveness of your logistics, the advancement of your technology and most of all the raw quantity of steel you can put in the air.

I feel like Hostomel should have been the nail in the coffin of “elite” units but it doesn’t appear the senior civilian leadership had learned anything from Ukraine other than drones might be a cash cow

Two parallels here: one is the cancelation of food aid for USAID which was provided by US farmers. The other is the broad attack on SNAP which already means more people will need food banks that Trump is also undermining. It is an assault on our he most vulnerable.
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