> I certainly wouldn't start by reading the commit log
Me neither, for what is worth. But even if the idea is "when in order to figure out this issue, you have to go to the history", a linear history and a linear log never helped me either. For example, to find where a certain change happened to try to understand what was the intent, what I need is the commit and its neighbors, which works just as well with linear vs branching history because the neighbors are going to still be nearby up and down, not found via visual search.
In the context of merge vs rebase, I think "clean" means linear, without visible parallel lines. Quality of commit messages is orthogonal. I agree with the poster that this particular flavor of "clean" (linear) has never ever helped me one bit.
I think the obsession with a linear master/main is a leftover from the time when everyone used a centralized system like svn. Git wasn't designed like that; the Linux kernel project tells contributors to "embrace merges." Your commit history is supposed to look like a branching river, because that's an accurate representation of the activity within your community.
I think having a major platform like github encourages people to treat git as a centralized version control system, and care about the aesthetics of their master/main branches more than they should. The fact the github only shows the commit history as a linear timeline doesn't help, either.
I thought the reason for this to be a visa is because their fields' activities were in-person (acting in movies/plays/shows, academic life & research, sports training & leagues, etc). A streamer / OF worker is not like that as far as I know (but e-sports is). So this is purely to bring people with money and/or influence, nothing exceptional except the number of 0's.
What I know from news articles is that some of them openly "escort", like some traditional porn stars did more quietly. The fame on the screen can be brand-building for the even more lucrative in-person work.
As one said in a quote, regarding AI threat and crumbling economies: "The oldest profession will be the last profession."
If some of them want to move to the US right now, from currently healthier countries, one reason may be that social inequality means there are many deep-pocketed customers able to pay 5 figures for a weekend experience.
The decline of the US means that there will be increasingly fewer deep-pocketed customers able to pay 5 figures for anything.
Those who come to the US with enough money on the bank will have access to a lifestyle and experiences that are becoming more and more exclusive, which makes for great content for the peasant class to consume on their phones.
> The decline of the US means that there will be increasingly fewer deep-pocketed customers able to pay 5 figures for anything.
Those at the top are doing very well, it's those without access to capital who are struggling. America in decline looks like a bifurcated economy where low-paying jobs catering to the desires of the wealthy take up an increasingly large share of the economy. You can decide for yourself to what extent this is already happening.
A world war and a socialist-minded president could correct that for a good couple of decades but this time the US is going to be on the wrong side of history.
As an outsider, it's interesting to watch Nero play the fiddle while the rest of the world sanctions the US (except India and the Middle East and Taiwan). I think this is how the average Roman felt during Honorius' reign.
US invading Greenland means all US troops in Europe risk getting captured/foxholed in their own military bases. That's 65k permanent staff and 20-35k on rotation. Or 10% of the US military, simply turning PoW (and a huge bargaining chip so early in the conflict).
It will also signal to the world that America is no longer world police, which means the Middle East, Japan and Taiwan will once again come under threat. The Middle East already foresaw this, which is why Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan are building a regional nuclear-enabled alliance, with open invitation to the other oil economies. Taiwan is most likely to get caught with their pants down, given the lack of US military support.
Interestingly, with the exist of the US from NATO, the largest military in NATO will be Turkey's, that country that Europe has long considered the unwanted bastard child.
That's fantasy. I seriously doubt Trump will invade Greenland, but even if so, there will be zero consequences for U.S. forces in Europe. Europe's armed forces are not capable of taking on U.S. troops in Europe.
Conversely -- declining countries usually have a lot of deep-pocketed customers, and mind less of whether their crimes go public. They also tend to care less of spending money in wasteful ways, as those money were easily earned.
I wouldn't prophesize the 'decline' of the US, but if you're sufficiently wealthy, the kind of services and lifestyle options (like living in a luxury apartment overlooking the sea, or decent medical care), is available in a lot of places nowadays.
Well it's already declining. Remove the AI and tech industry and the US economy is in literal decline. Invading Greenland ensures NATO is crippled, Taiwan is left undefended and China finds a great excuse to impose sanctions on the US as part of a coordinated effort. That's a huge chunk of the semiconductor manufacturing lifecycle that becomes inaccessible to the US.
USA is doing pretty well and far from decline not withstanding local minimas they might hit.
When economic outlook is bad, it is generally the middle class and lower class that gets hit the hardest and women in these categories end up joining sin professions. Vegas always sees a big boom in 21 year olds in strip clubs when economy is bad.
Right now strip clubs are full of 35+ women why ? All the young ones are on OF. It is safer and much cleaner way of making money
I believe they are implying that the US itself isn't in a healthy state. Economic disparity mostly, but also politically, socially, and likely physically. I think many would agree.
It increases the countries' soft power if people around the world watch content from there.
Eg. a self-reinforcing cycle that you get the best from the other immigrant categories arriving because they choose the country where everything "seems to be happening".
> I thought the reason for this to be a visa is because their fields' activities were in-person (acting in movies/plays/shows, academic life & research, sports training & leagues, etc). A streamer / OF worker is not like that as far as I know (but e-sports is).
Just like film work (which it is a kind of, in a sense), any place can be an OF set, but you need a set and, for performances with more than one performer, you generally need the performers at the same set. Physical proximity to both sets that you want to use and other performers who you might do recurring joint performances with seem to have obvious utility.
As I understand it [1], usually if you try to cross the border declaring you intend to engage in sex work, they turn you away. Some combination of prudishness and concern about trafficking.
For there to be a special sex worker visa is a surprise, to me.
The distinction is that this is meant to bring in women in service to a man such that they’re sponsor is also their new boss in sex work, rather than women who service men while maintaining independent free will to control their career in sex work. The phrase “sex worker” could refer to either scenario and it’s important to distinguish the former from the latter in order to understand just how that particular criteria came to be. (And, yeah, it can be quite uncomfortable to discover that the U.S. has a special immigration pathway for wealthy and/or politically-connected men to import women as sex servants. Isn’t history swell, congress protects its privileges quite effectively, etc.)
It's strange, but is it really surprising? It's not like hypocrisy and moat building are new things in American politics.
These days I wouldn't even be surprised to discover it was intentional. Some person or group wanted to ensure they could engage in sex trafficking with a superficially legal cover, but didn't want it to actually be legal.
O visa is sponsored by an employer. The employer has to provide reasons why the person is being brought in USA. It makes perfect sense for USA to bring as many OF models as they want into USA as it could mean $$$$ in revenue for IRS, more money for US business and since these models are typically young there is lower load on any kind of welfare.
> A streamer / OF worker is not like that as far as I know (but e-sports is).
Well Streamer vs Influencer can be different potentially, that said I can think of one example even for video game streamers, that being the AGDQ charity event where speedrunners/streamers do stuff live for charity at the event space.
> I thought the reason for this to be a visa is because their fields' activities were in-person (acting in movies/plays/shows, academic life & research, sports training & leagues, etc). A streamer / OF worker is not like that as far as I know
An OnlyFans worker may make the bulk of her money by meeting fans in person for dates. That can't be done over the internet.
While possible to be for physical sex work, I think the previous commenter meant by meeting fans, would be like at a meet-and-greet at a Con, so they can further increase the parasocial relationship with the people giving them subscriptions, signing autographs. Also, they may be doing collabs with other content creators, just as comedians and actors will be on each others podcasts.
INA §212(a)(2)(D) renders inadmissible any alien who:
(i) is coming to the United States solely, principally, or incidentally to engage in prostitution, or has engaged in prostitution within 10 years of the date of application for a visa, admission, or adjustment of status,
(ii) directly or indirectly procures or attempts to procure, or (within 10 years of the date of application for a visa, admission, or adjustment of status) procured or attempted to procure or to import, prostitutes or persons for the purpose of prostitution, or receives or (within such 10-year period) received, in whole or in part, the proceeds of prostitution, or
(iii) is coming to the United States to engage in any other unlawful commercialized vice, whether or not related to prostitution
Obviously these people should be applying for EB-1s since that is the established visa program for prostitutes.
If they stream the sex on their OF feed, then it's not prostitution. Even if model is paid by the other person, it would be difficult to legally separate it from any other adult entertainment contract.
> An OnlyFans worker may make the bulk of her money by meeting fans in person for dates.
I don't believe it. Do you have any evidence? As I understand, the money is made two ways: (1) regular subscriptions and (2) whales that pay for extra content. Also, most of them have private chat and email, which I assume is serviced offshore from somewhere like the Philippines where it is cheap and easy to hire English speakers.
When I recently installed Windows 11 on my new rig, it didn't recognize the built-in motherboard wifi and I could only connect after installation of Windows + mobo drivers. How would that work now?
Just like you used to be able to provide storage drivers on a floppy disk, you can now provide NIC drivers on a USB stick. (IIRC, there's a button for it on the Microsoft account sign-in page of the OOBE.)
IIRC someone did exactly that around 15 years ago, a game renderer using div strips, first with Wolfenstein and then Doom. It may have been "Jacob Seidelin" who was very active experimenting with early HTML5 tech, but I've lost all links or they've vanished from the web - I only keep two screenshots I used in a lecture back then.
> For the right investor base, $10B in annual losses at OpenAI could be worth $2-3B in tax shields (depending on their bracket and how the structure works). That completely changes the return calculation
I know nothing about finances at this level, so asking like a complete newbie: doesn't that just mean that instead of risking $10B they're risking $7-8B? It is a cheaper bet for sure, but doesn't look to me like a game changer when the range of the bet's outcome goes from 0 to 1000% or more.
It all depends on the actual numbers. Consider this simplified example: If you are offered a deal that requires you to lay down 10 billion today and it has a 5% chance to pay out 150 billion tomorrow, your accountants will tell you not to take this deal because your expected return is -2.5 billion. But if you can offset 3 billion in cost to the tax payer, your expected return suddenly becomes $500 million, making it a good deal that you should take every time.
I get that this example is simplified, but doesn’t the maths here change drastically when the 5% changes by even a few percentage points? The error bars on Openais chance of succes are obviously huge, so why would this be attractive to accountants?
That's why you have armies of accountants rating stuff like this all day long. I'm sure they could show you a highly detailed risk analysis. You also don't count on any specific deal working, you count on the overall statistics being in your favour. That's literally how venture capital works.
(I think) I get how venture capital works, my point is that the bullish story for openAI has them literally restructuring the global economy. It seems strange to me that people are making bets with relatively slim profit margins (an average of 500m on a 10b investment in your example) on such volatile and unpredictable events.
What if your 10B investment encourages others to invest 50B and much of that makes it back to you indirectly via selling more of your core business?
I may be way off, but to me it seems like the AI bubble is largely a way to siphon money from institutional investors to the tech industry (and try to get away with it by proxying the investments) based on a volatile and unpredictable promise?
AI has a lot lower bar to clear to upend the tech industry compared to the global economy. Not being in on AI is an existential risk for these companies.
The existential risk is in companies smoking the AI crackpipe that sama (begging your pardon) handed them, thinking it feels great and then projecting[1] that every investment will hit like the first, and continuing to buy the <EXPLETIVE> crack that they can't afford, and they investors can't afford, and their clients can't afford, their vendors can't afford, the grid can't afford, the planet can't afford, the American people can't afford, and sama[2] can't afford, _because it's <EXPLETIVE> crack_!
The wise will shut up and take the win on the slop com bubble.
This reminds me of the scene in Margin Call [1] when the analyst discovers that their assumptions for the risk of highly leveraged positions are inaccurate.
I'm pretty the armies of accountants would have rated it higher if the cashflow was positive than negative. Negative can't be good even while accounting for taxes.
This applies to any spending Microsoft does. What does it have to do with OpenAI?
Also, classifying business expenses as "cost to the tax payer" seems less than useful, unless you are a proponent of simply taxing gross receipts. Which has its merits, but then the discussion is about taxing gross receipts versus income with at least some deductible expenses, not anything to do with OpenAI.
Those 150 billion will be taxable at the same (hypothetically 30%) tax rate, reducing the expected return by 45bn * 5% chance. The expected return is still negative; all this bet does is shift tax liabilities in time, which admittedly would matter to some people who subscribe to short-termism.
I guess to truly calculate it you need to estimate how long it will take to get the ROI (i.e. reach the point where you need to pay taxes on the 150billion). And add back what you can earn by investing the money you didn't have to pay taxes on. I'm not sure what the magnificent 7 can expect as a ROI on invested money though, given that they tend to have enough cash to invest anyways and just pay out dividends.
Thank you, that made perfect sense and in a very simple (simplified but relevant) way. Besides the idea that such risks get aggregated over a portfolio, I can also imagine how the raw numbers flipping from - to + may be useful to paint as acceptable to accounting a bet you want to take anyway for strategic reasons.
I guess the reasoning assumes that you have multiple eggs in your basket. A 95% chance of failure is bad if you're pinning the whole business on it, but if you have a variety of 5% chance deals, then it can make sense to pursue them, which is basically what venture capitalists do.
> A 95% chance of failure is bad if you're pinning the whole business on it, but if you have a variety of 5% chance deals, then it can make sense to pursue them
This is only true if the probability distributions for the values of the individual deals are rather uncorrelated (or even better: stochastically mostly independent).
I don’t really see what’s relevant about crypto nonsense in this context. We are really talking about the overall economy especially in the tech sector.
Even if every cryptocurrency becomes worthless overnight, that doesn’t represent the market going to zero.
I see you’ve edited your comment with more doom and gloom. It’s easy to view everything as a bubble when you’re in a negative mental space.
> a) collapse of the real estate bubble, especially commercial real estate;
Any proof of this bubble? Housing construction continues to lag demand. Offices are largely RTO and Covid-era remote jobs are basically legacy and grandfathered. Every remote employee I know who was laid off in the past couple years had to get a hybrid/in-person job. You can’t just assume 2008 is going to happen again without some real data that shows real estate instability. Where are the poorly qualified borrowers?
> b) the ongoing IT crash that is only just getting started;
That’s one industry of many. One specific industry struggling doesn’t mean much.
> c) whatever damage the (current, red-flavored) orangutan in the White House manages to accomplish in his 3+ remaining years of hell;
Lame duck presidency, he can’t crash shit. Congress will be unfriendly next year and already isn’t even very supportive within his own party.
> d) fear of looming war;
In what universe is any impending war impacting the American economy? You mean the one where defense contractors are hiring and the US is selling weapons to the nations who are doing the fighting?
> e) economic fallout from COVID which is still ongoing and expanding (hint--many destroyed businesses and people out of work);
You are gonna need to explain this one and back this up with some numbers that make sense.
> f) a thousand other icebergs, minefields, and financial hazards confronting us in the near future?
Sounds like internal anxiety demons that are not tangible.
Look, I’m in full agreement that AI will face some kind of correction or crash, but predicting once in a century catastrophe is a losing game.
Venture capitalists never take on a single deal. The same way you shouldn't put all your life savings into one stock, even if it has a 90% chance of working out. That's not how any of this stuff works.
You cannot just scale down the numbers and pretend like the world around you doesn't exist. There isn't much I'll do with 1 dollar. There's a shitload Microsoft could do with 10 000 000 000 dollars.
The taxes on returning profits to investors via dividends are quite high. You’d be looking at the corporate tax rate (35%) + the dividend tax rates (between 15 and 35%). For any company which may need to raise equity finance later, this is an awful deal - but growing a cash balance doesn’t do the job either.
So MSFT is effectively getting 2x the equity by putting money into OpenAI, it also conveys some financial engineering capability as they can choose to invest more when profits are high to smooth out cash flow growth.
That just doesn't sound right. This kind of thought process only works if you think you are guaranteed more than that the next year. It only works in crony capitalism where your friends in government put money in your pockets. It's where we are right now, but definitely not something that is sustainable or something to aspire to.
Your intuition is exactly correct. An investor with tax to offset can essentially access the same future upside at a discount
However, this discussion will be a perfect introduction to "finances at this level", where about 60% of the action is injecting more variables until you can fit a veneer of quantification onto any narrative.
If that $7-8 billion is spent on Azure, then it's basically a way to invest in data center capacity while also getting a big piece of Open AI ownership at the same time.
Är the same time, MS revenues are looking real good, causing the stock price to go up. It's a win win win maybe win huge situation.
I think this is the only comment that captures the message of the article. I feel for everyone who is priced out of life, those are very serious problems, but it wasn't what the article is talking about.
If I was seeing lots of comments say something like "The cost of life is preventing me from pursuing my dreams" then the article would be relevant to that.
Maybe this post has a narrow intended audience. Not every post has to be targeting all readers. If it's not true for you then it's not, y'know? Absolutely no need to lash out and HN is not a place for venting. Besides I think they're basically writing about themselves. By the upvotes and comments, it looks like some people do relate.
Just because it's legal and in the open doesn't mean it's sound or not creating perverse incentives. Investors that "should be taking that into account" probably are, and hoping that they come out on top when the bubble bursts. That means pain for many people. Those are very valid reasons to point the finger and criticize.
Me neither, for what is worth. But even if the idea is "when in order to figure out this issue, you have to go to the history", a linear history and a linear log never helped me either. For example, to find where a certain change happened to try to understand what was the intent, what I need is the commit and its neighbors, which works just as well with linear vs branching history because the neighbors are going to still be nearby up and down, not found via visual search.
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