More questions than answers
New York City
Joined April 2009
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"The human species hasn't changed since Cro Magnon man, and in terms of evolutionary time we're not going to change much in the next 100 or 200 years. The critical problem of our survival is going to have to be settled long before 100 or 200 years. Now, where is the source of intelligence going to come from?
There is something that's happening already today, you might say a "mechaniarchy" or whatever the word would be. The love that we have now for machines. The smell and the feel of a beautiful camera, or a tape recorder. There is an aesthetic, an almost sensuous aesthetic about machines.
I'm sure it will be useful for them to know what human feelings are because it will help them understand us.
We do now obviously need some sort of intelligence of a magnitude considerably greater than seems to exist at the moment. And you could say that man's survival depends on the ultra-intelligent machine.
I can't think of any reason why it's a frightening prospect because intelligence seems to me to be something which is good, and so I can't see how your ultra-intelligent machine is going to be any worse than a man.
At the moment, the problems of the world appear to be problems only because man seems to lack the intelligence to think his way out of the present trap that we seem to be in."
--Stanley Kubrick, 1968
Unhelpful for Anthropic. Was this the motivation for the trial-balloon S-1 Reuters leak?
nypost.com/2026/09/29/busine…
When I was an investment banking Analyst slave in my cubicle, if a time traveler gave me ChatGPT Work I would have been promoted to Associate in like two weeks.
Expectations then were SO LOW.
These poor investment banking Analysts today, how can they possibly outperform?
Piling retail capital into primary investments in startups does nothing to create liquidity for all the long-suffering institutional investors who had "access" to get in but have NO ABILITY to get OUT.
But misery loves company!
Airtable deal was valued fairly and even favorably at $2.25b based on the public comps (assuming $1b cash balance is anomalous)
However, had the company been public, shareholders might have been able to argue for a control premium on top
“Venture capital’s current recovery is all IRR, no DPI”
“Since 2022, net cash flow to LPs has been negative $202 billion”
The Airtable sale could be considered a great milestone of capitulation:
1. The company was worth invested capital (which many are not!)
2. Investors get their pref back and can deal with the realization for tax
3. Founders will have to be re-upped by the buyer
4. Rank and file employees are out of their misery - some will be retained for sure
5. In the next 45 days in 10,000 board meetings a discussion will take place along the lines of “if this was reality for Airtable - AIRTABLE - what is our reality?”
6. Now the market can maybe start to reprice itself and clear - strategics and financial buyers both might have a bid at 3x ARR…
Could be an amazing turning point if people are looking for an excuse to get real
Airtable’s $1.3B sale may be just the “opening act” in AI-driven SaaS consolidation.
"The February 2026 SaaS apocalypse wiped out almost $300 billion of market cap in a week."
"Because AI worked, customers are cutting seats as AI as more agents take more of this work." — @MarathonMP Founding Partner @ChaseAPackard
If Airtable was marked at $11b by its investors, but was really only worth ~$1.4b (roughly the amount of venture capital invested) then this is a great moment to wonder about venture/growth marks in general.
If star unicorns like Airtable are only worth invested capital, then forget about the ~$5 trillion of NAV/marked value, the VC-backed universe overall might not even be worth the ~$1.4 trillion of capital invested into it
It’s interesting Airtable investors would prefer cash and closing out at a crap multiple vs a stock deal with BSP’s liquid public currency and at least potential to recover some of the lost notional value
"Robinhood Now Makes More Revenue From Predictions Than From Stock Trades"
Doesn't this suggest that Robinhood was ALWAYS more about gambling/speculation than it was about "democratizing" access to "investment"?
theinformation.com/articles/…
It's true. Nobody will buy your shares. For two big reasons:
1) There's no market - the public secondary market is now largely inaccessible, and there is no private exchange of any size, and
2) Shares are sold, not bought - and brokers can't make a living when there's no market
Odyssey is the perfect representation of Hollywood film (and so much of mass-marketed "culture") in 2026:
- Over-wrought
- Self-serious
- Needlessly loud
- Over-hyped
- Over-bought
- Insufficiently critiqued
- Too long
- Derivative of proven material
- Less good than the original material
- Pointless
How can Christopher Nolan stay so over-rated for so long?
At least as Catwoman he got a great performance out of Anne Hathaway.
And here's Emily Wilson, whose Odyssey translation is the rage of the moment, with:
"I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script."
Neither Nolan's artistic license, nor the "woke" casting are the problem.
It's just a lousy movie.
lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n14/…
"Nolan’s Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make the poem great. It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior’s glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbours. It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible."
Many have said for a long time that information businesses like Google and the NYT MUST be ad-supported (and therefore compromised) because users just won't pay.
Now it's clear that assertion is just super wrong - users will absolutely pay for good information!
