manwithopinions

5 ms·

1.
by manwithopinions 3mo ago
Profitable on a per token basis is meaningless. Ed Zitron doesn’t argue that it is impossible to offer profitable inference, he argues that the business as it stands today is deeply unprofitable and only getting worse because it isn’t a h
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by manwithopinions 3mo ago
Peter Skaliy, Head of Legal at Corgi, same person who sent the cease and desist to people on Twitter, is filing a suit against me for defamation because of that Substack post. "Corgi builds insurance structures that allow us to best se
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Y Combinator's Corgi Insurance, a $2.6B disaster in the making?(reticulating.substack.com)
6 points by manwithopinions 3mo ago|0 comments
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by manwithopinions 3mo ago
Skimmed it and based on my experience in fintech, it looks good, accurately represents the real world. I guess there’s still a chance it is AI generated but it doesn’t seem like vacuous slop, it has substance!
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by manwithopinions 3mo ago
Peter is currently threatening me with a defamation suit, he seems to be quite the litigious man. My defamation suit is because I wrote a post summarizing my comments from this thread about Corgi: https://reticulating.substack.co
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by manwithopinions 3mo ago
My understanding is a normal insurance tech startup would be acting as a broker. A rare but sensible insurance tech startup would use external underwriters and reinsurance and provide insolvency protection. Corgi doesn’t have any external u
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by manwithopinions 3mo ago
turns out it was less than $1,000 per month. A startup raises ~$100m at a ~$3bn valuation and forms a team of 12 employees including their Head of Operations to build a clone of a product they pay less than $1,000/month for while they
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by manwithopinions 3mo ago
Not necessarily. Delve did a lot of bad things, the primary reason for their removal was misrepresentations they made to other YC startups, i.e: YC startups paid them for security audits that turned out to be bunk which caused a big headach
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by manwithopinions 3mo ago
Also, I should add, they’re growing fast because they will underwrite anyone for anything. They’re one “oops our AI underwriting has been taking on far too much risk” away from disaster. That they’re demanding 7 days a week from their emplo
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by manwithopinions 3mo ago
If you’re a business that deals in documents from external customers / partners, you use a data room like DocSend (by Dropbox) to share and receive documents with access management, analytics, auditing etc. Papermark is an open source
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by manwithopinions 3mo ago
They’re not really, it’s just the YC hype cycle. The business is selling insurance to other YC startups with some AI flair. They’re not even the first YC startup to do this, a previous YC insurance startup was acquired a few years ago for ~
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by manwithopinions 3mo ago
> Their margins on inference are >90% today for tokens they sell (plans are hard to count, but still profitable). That doesn’t make any sense, it doesn’t add up. Have you seen how much money they’re raising and burning? We know that t
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by manwithopinions 3mo ago
So why are they losing so much money? Money is made on the subset of inference that is charged at cost + margin via their APIs. API usage is so high because customers are still finding their feet, trying to understand how to measure the val
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by manwithopinions 3mo ago
I learned about blade servers back in ~2010 because Blizzard used to run World of Warcraft realms on them and auctioned them off for charity. https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Server_blade https://en.wikipedia.o
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by manwithopinions 3mo ago
There are practical reasons why it isn’t widespread: 1. Energy is very expensive relative to the U.S. 2. Houses are old old and retrofitting air conditioning is very difficult 3. Houses are more than 1 story with many small rooms making po
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by manwithopinions 3mo ago
I think that’s a good instinct but this line… “I think the cause was that Workspace and certain leaders (and projects) were afraid of being disrupted.” Suggests that there is much more to it. I suspect it’s actually about disregarding Googl
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by manwithopinions 3mo ago
First trade was exactly $150. The indicated price was falling from around $170 and then when it hit $150 the market opened.
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by manwithopinions 3mo ago
The $2T doesn’t depend on anything to do with space. People are investing in Elon, not any specific product or technology. Hence his roll up of X and Xai into SpaceX and Tesla soon too. SpaceX is The Elon Company, not space or cars or AI. A
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by manwithopinions 3mo ago
The U.S. is quite far behind the rest of the world on sports betting, which means you don’t even need to imagine, we know from other countries that it doesn’t end well. The most worrying aspect is, the current U.S. government has no interes
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by manwithopinions 3mo ago
The blog post is a terrible intro, the website is much more insightful: https://oak.space/ I found the section titled “Local feature branches. Server main. One squash.” most interesting.
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by manwithopinions 4mo ago
Which of those is groundbreaking? The Butterly handheld ultrasound is old technology in a new form factor with a bunch of trade offs. Useful in some situations, sure, but “groundbreaking”? Same with the Swoop portable MRI: existing technolo
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by manwithopinions 4mo ago
Matthew Prince of Cloudflare has been outspoken in saying that companies that do not go all in on AI will be left behind. There probably is some value being received in exchange for tokens but it seems quite plausible that some or even mu
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by manwithopinions 4mo ago
The EFF believes the ends (freedom) justify the means (access to everything good and bad for everyone). Governments are pragmatic, not fundamentalist. This article addresses the technological flaws in age verification, then says “but even i
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by manwithopinions 4mo ago
Accusing coworkers of being antisemitic crosses the line, but accusing coworkers of sterilizing children and denying the existence of gender is ok? Surely both are bad, neither is acceptable in a workplace. Do you mean it’s not dumb because
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by manwithopinions 4mo ago
I think Ed would argue that if 90% of your customers are only using your product because their usage is subsidised and the money to cover that subsidisation is coming from unsustainable customers tokenmaxxing then you are “fundamentally unp
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by manwithopinions 4mo ago
Pieter is so dumb. All he seems to do is post comparisons between the wonderful U.S. and dying EU that are completely wrong. If Elon is listening to Pieter, pray for Elon.