Rob Cyran

Yeah, either that or he basically meant I read tons of email, and just named a number that popped in his head because he was in a relaxed conversation with a doofus (Rogan)

I put this in the same category as Jensen saying he has 50 direct reports. I'm uhh, highly skeptical, and if true, why would you?

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in an interview with Joe Rogan (??) he reads "several thousand emails a day". If you assume 3,000 emails at a rather speedy 30 seconds each, that's 25 hours a day.

Definitely. I always thought people have to go through a period of questioning what they are doing, and if they don't do it in high school then they are just a mid-life crisis waiting to happen. But I've realized some people just never seem to question themselves at all.

I don’t ever assume this is nefarious- I’ve seen so many high school age kids who are career focused and have no answer when I ask why they want success.

Once you realize career-driven people often have lost sight, or never even thought, about why they are focused on their goal, you see this behavior all the time.

I have seen many businesses compared to Amazon over the years, but I don't think any of them had a negative cash conversion cycle like Amazon. Which is basically the entire point of why Amazon succeeded.

Amazon was cash flow positive from an early date (customers paid up front, suppliers were paid later) and used these funds to finance its expansion. But the company lost money on the P&L, and it spawned the wrong idea among investors that losses are irrelevant when it comes to building a moat.

Same!

Literal LOL at idea of putting them in LEO.

My nephew has spent the past few years designing cooling systems for satellites. It sounds like it’s easy if you don’t have a clue what you are talking about - in reality extremely difficult.

Exclusive | Sam Altman Has Explored Deal to Build Competitor to Elon Musk’s SpaceX The OpenAI chief executive has looked to put together funds to either acquire or partner with a rocket company.

Sam hits big red button at OpenAI, proceeds to try and take on low margin space launch business. Talks about data centers in space (please explain cooling, depreciation and latency) and building a Dyson Sphere (physically impossible because matter constraints).
www.wsj.com/tech/ai/sam-...

First Segway I saw in the wild was a cop in Palo Alto who wasn’t paying attention. He plowed into the back of a car.

Updated FDA org chart from BioSpace: nearly 90% of sr leaders who were at FDA a yr ago are gone. Most FDA employees are usually "career staff" who worked 4 multiple FDA commissioners & yrs of training 2b knowledgeable incl cell & gene therapies. Pazdur had worked 4 Bush, Obama,Trump & Biden #medsky

I think quite a bit is simply the whistling past the graveyard idea that "bad things happen to bad people" (e.g. people who eat garbage, are not from the same place, aren't the right religion). So they can't imagine getting ill, or why they would need to prevent illness.

FDA official proposes ‘impossible’ standards for vaccine testing that could curtail access to immunizations

These proposed standards would kill a lot of people, full stop. Vaccines are among the lowest risk, highest reward interventions you can make in health, and the US is considering throwing it away because....anti-vax brain rot? www.cidrap.umn.edu/childhood-va...

Would be very amusing if the models “go into reverse” and the GOP would have ended up with more seats if they had tried to produce a map designed to favor Dems under normal conditions.

Gerrymandering is like selling out of the money puts. It works well until you get BTFO by a shift that is way outside normal conditions your model is built upon. The swing and more importantly turnout for the Tennessee election indicates we are probably heading for such a moment.

Note also the richly provisioned pile of gifts below. Most Christmases today are a genuine embarrassment of riches

Growing Christmas Trees for the Future NC State is leading a nearly $7.5 million project to accelerate the genetic improvement of Christmas trees to mitigate the impacts of climate change and disease and pest outbreaks.

In case you want to learn more about how scientists are breeding super Christmas trees that grow faster and smell nicer: cnr.ncsu.edu/news/2024/09...

Sad looking Christmas tree

Every Christmas I think of economics’ measurement problem when it comes to quality. I grew up with trees that literally looked like this, and even the cheapest trees today are genetically modified to be greener, fuller and lose very few needles.

Great culture can save lives. Literally.

Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard

Mainly rising exports and it’s really below normal temps in a lot of the US

Even if you don‘t read German, the chart will do it for you. Rise of the electrostate.

The residential mortgage market was simply like 2 orders of magnitude bigger than the tech debt right now.

Like people are talking about 3 trillion in tech debt by 2028. There was 10 trillion in MBS in 2008 (not including the private insurer issues, weird derivatives).

The Enhanced Games - a pro-drug Olympic Games - which was founded by the guy who led Peter Thiel’s lawsuit that bankrupt
Gawker, is going public via SPAC.

The above sentence is completely factual.

Yeah there’s a natural limit on how many people will pay for software. Microsoft subscribers are probably the pool of people and businesses most likely to subscribe to an AI service. Many more people are willing to use a service in exchange for watching ads

Think of it this way - OpenAI projects it can turn a profit in 2030 when revenue is $200bn annually (LOL). If they made $20 per user in ads annually, or roughly what fabulously successful Instagram makes, that’s 10bn users. Hence they chase subs.

Instagram revenue per user annually is around what OpemAI wants to charge per month. That’s a problem for Sam.

This is silly. There’s a reason mass market consumer facing internet companies from Google to Meta toyed with charging users and went the ad route instead. Snag is Sam has to make the revenue projections sufficient to justify his capex assumptions. Hard to do with ad ARPU.