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It’s the same grift all over again. The market will drop 2-3% Monday. Jared and Jr will load up on options, WTI puts, and whatever other BS they do.

Then Tuesday we’ll announce that “good talks have happened” and bridge day is delayed. Maybe they’ll roll out the Shah’s nephew or whatever and pave the way for an announcement of a transitional government.

They’ll push the strikes until late in the week or early next week to maximize volatility - next Friday is the April options expiry. It likely the Treasury is intervening in the oil markets, so there’s likely a counter-trade there as well.

I’ve 3x’d my salary on this trade as an observer, the insiders are printing cash. Eventually the credibility of the office of the POTUS will erode to a point where it is going to blow up, we probably have another 3-5 rounds of this.


I don’t disagree, but the reality is SaaS is the model that most companies depend on and these risks exist everywhere.

If your business is dependent on services you need to take a modicum of effort to protect yourself - the posts author was literally walking around with his entire business at risk from him dropping his phone or having it pickpocketed.

At the end of the day, the protagonist in this story is mad because Google won’t allow him to social engineer access to his company. He deleted his sole token (Google makes it trivial to add many) in the most fraud signally way possible.


> He deleted his sole token (Google makes it trivial to add many) in the most fraud signally way possible.

Are we reading the same blog post? He had his password, 2FA authenticator set up, and backup codes -- everything Google asks you to have to be on the "golden" auth path.

He only deleted his SMS authentication path (one thing I don't understand is how he was able to do this in the first place without being logged in), which is in any case the least secure method of 2FA. Also, It should be fairly obvious that SMS is not expected to work seamlessly while traveling, how is this not a scenario that's hit by millions of Google users worldwide?


We’re hearing one side of the story from a frustrated user recounting a borderline traumatic and stressful event.

The SMS only fallback is when other things have failed and they suspect that there’s been a takeover. Microsoft does something similar to tie it to some tangible thing. I’m not excusing Google. Their exception handling is poor at best. I’ve seen issues at customers where phones left in flight get flagged because of GPS disruptions due to Middle East conflicts, for example. (Phones flagged as having been in Syria or Russia can be kryptonite) One scenario was a VIP whose kid was in Europe with their other parent and the VIP’s tablet, signed into work email.

Other factors apply too - there may be multiple accounts tied to the number that are in different locales, for example. No idea what obnoxious rules Australia and UK add as well.

Point is, this type of shit happens and you should have a contingency.


> Point is, this type of shit happens and you should have a contingency.

Let's work through what the contingency could have been. Always make sure you buy international roaming everywhere you go? Always be able to switch your MX records (from a provider whose account isn't tied to a Google-controlled email)?

They seem to get increasingly less practical to be honest. People travel all over the world everyday, this shit shouldn't be hard for a company like Google that supposedly ingests mountains of data.

More to the point, I think email has become sort of a fundamental right given how much of your identity depends on it. Companies that control this sort of identity foundation need to be heavily regulated, and perhaps nationalized.


Ok, sure man. In the meantime before the Lenin of our age appears…

In this case, don’t run around with a business account with a single user with admin privileges. Segregate privilege. Don’t share a phone number with other accounts. Don’t use SSO as the key to your business.

If you run a business you need to manage risk. If a customs officer thought he looked funny and seized the phone, he’d be boned as well.


We’re regulars at a resort we go to annually.

We always tip everyone generously and send notes to management about especially helpful staff. My wife was on a first name basis with our normal housekeepers, who have watched my kid grow up. We spend at the property with events, amenities etc. The management tends to cycle through the company but the local staff does not - they flag us as VIPs directly.

Most people don’t do that and don’t or can’t throw money around in a resort setting. But in a casino, it’s easy to measure the lifetime value of a guest and price the interaction cost. In a beach setting, the financial benefit of a happy customer is less certain. Point being, i would guess that Wynn does 50x the hospitality outreach than Relais & Châteaux, despite both offering a high quality product.


That’s like saying cigarettes are the same as scented candles because both involve flame.

The difference is that gambling, like cigarettes, delivers a dopamine fix. The playbook is well aligned with cigarettes — you target brands to the population. Draft Kings is like mass market cigarettes, targeting low income males, soldiers, old people.

The “most profitable customer” metric is misleading - you need mass adoption to lure in the whales. My son is 14 - sports gambling is a routine conversation among his cohort and many kids are actively gambling in school with accounts provided by parents.


FedRAMP means nothing. It’s a checkbox. National security stuff has a different standard.

It "means nothing" that the way that government systems get set up for government data is all using Microsoft tooling?

The tail wags the dog. GCP and Workspace have had better FedRAMP certs for ages.

I have no idea what you're talking about. This has nothing to do with having "better fedramp certs". If you are setting up fedramp or cmmc you will be heavily, heavily pressured and incentivized to do so with Microsoft tooling.

"Better" isn't relevant, which is my entire point. The reason people choose Microsoft isn't "it's better for this", it's because every consultancy out there, every government agency or affiliate, etc, is going to push Microsoft very very hard.


I’ve been in the space for 30 years. Nobody is pressuring anyone to buy Microsoft because of FedRAMP, and Microsoft is not even close to having any advantage with respect to FedRAMP vs their competitors.

FedRAMP is demonstration that the solution met some assessment of controls in alignment with NIST 800-53. As a checkbox, it’s almost as dumb as FIPS 140, and like FIPS, you need to asses risk for your implementation regardless of these things.

Microsoft wins deals because their product catalog is well engineered to incentivize bundled subscriptions that drive marginal adoption. The user facing products are better, Entra is generally right there, and that’s a pivot into many other scenarios that drive spend.


What's the most common architecture you see for CMMC enclaves, especially those built by outside consulting firms?

I don’t work in defense, and neither does FedRAMP.

Tesla is a great example. It’s 30% retail, 25% elon and insiders, and the remainder institutional, mostly index funds.

The investment thesis for Tesla is absurd. They built the market cap on hype and it got big enough that it remains a force. It’s a flailing company, kept afloat by bullshit.

The bigger issue is the death of small cap. Massive venture, sovereign wealth and PE funds don’t need the public market capital anymore, so they harvest the vslue and spit out the company late in the value cycle.

Snap, cool as it is, is a social media loser. The investors cashed out their shares to the public, who took the loss.


> The investment thesis for Tesla is absurd. They built the market cap on hype and it got big enough that it remains a force. It’s a flailing company, kept afloat by bullshit.

Maybe, or maybe they are one of the few businesses people want to bet on to be able to create new streams of revenue. Intel used to be big, and now it isn’t. It being big didn’t help stop its demise.

> The investors cashed out their shares to the public, who took the loss.

They didn’t. The biggest investors, the founders, still have almost 50% of the shares. Also, SNAP peaked at $131B in September 2021, 2 years after SNAP went public at $27B.

Would you have written then that “The investors cashed out their shares to the public, who took the loss”?

Of course not. Because index fund investors did not cause it to go to $131B, and they didn’t cause it to go to $6B.


The fact that founders still own 50% of the shares doesn't mean that they didn't sold some of ones they had. Also Snap gives very generous stock options to their C-team, meaning that they can sell overtime while keeping their large stash.

In your previous post, you complained

> so they harvest the vslue and spit out the company late in the value cycle.

So SNAP executives IPO’d at $27B, and over the next 4 years, the market cap increased to $131B, which anyone in the public could have benefited from.

Yet now you are saying SNAP execs are wrong for selling their equity over time?

It doesn’t seem like there is any winning here for SNAP’s executives, even though they gave the public the ability to quadruple their money in 4 years. What more can you ask for?


You are referring to a different OP. And market cap increases is not an excuse to dilute shareholders to hell.

If you have $100k, you can do it with direct indexing at Schwab. The management fee is 0.40%.

I looked into it, but there are gotchas with wash sale rules and taxes. You really need $500k-$1M to avoid tracking errors. End of the day, the overhead seemed more problematic than the problem, so I ended up increasing my global allocation instead.


Could you emulate this by instead shorting thr stock in question? I suppose it would be hard to limit the risk of a short squeeze?

Not for this kind of investment. If I was going to actively manage, I’d tilt the portfolio differently than S&P500.

Who is using Grok seriously?

Overall it's worse than the other frontier models, but it's decent for queries about breaking news, due to being trained on twitter data. It's also better for queries about controversial topics, and topics that the other labs have deemed to be "unsafe".

Politically, it differs quite a bit from other models.[0] It's right leaning, although it's closer neutral than other models, defining what neutral is a challenge though.

[0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.23841


The study you link to doesn't take into consideration the Overton window of opinions. Perhaps there's some dimension along which you could say that one ideology lies 'opposite' to another political persuasion, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the two ideologies are equally acceptable to support in a given society.

I don't think calling defining neutral a 'challenge' does the question justice - neutral will always be context-dependent, and what may be in the center of the Overton window of one society may be unpopular or even highly illegal in a different society.


Wasn't it just, likely, a Claude proxy, then a local LLM for a while, then now-ish an OpenRouter proxy?

> due to being trained on twitter data

twitter data is 70%+ bots (probably more than that now)


Grok is of course also trained on the same giant blob of "all human writing" that the other models are trained on.

The stated goal for Grok is to be as truthful as possible.

Maybe that shows up as being more right leaning than the competition.


stated goal ≠ output

see: democratic people's republic of korea, the chinese communist party, american first


Grok and Elon's ventures in general should really get the Purpose of a System treatement in public discourse. For all we know the purpose of Grok is to make nude edits of people. You can assign this to left or right leaning as you please.

The obligatory "Elon is a poophead!" responses anytime you mention Elon without criticizing him is my least favorite thing about this forum.

He is a literally walking felony who in an era with an effective regulatory system would be at minimum barred from running public companies.

If you’re not one of the nerds stuck in 2014, and still enthralled with the Elon reality field and the Mars grift, taxi grift, robot laundry grift, etc, it’s pretty obvious.


I use it, overall, it is not too bad. I wouldn't use it for coding etc, but its access to X means it can answer news related stuff much better. Its guardrails are lower so it does fairly innocuous things that will have ChatGPT or Gemini refusing to do.

I tried it when it has the most extensive free offering, and it definitely answers my worldbuilding questions in more detail than I expected and compared to Gemini or Chatgpt. Can't say anything about hallucinations tho.

In my bubble I only see right winger influencers using it.

Right wingers and generating creating nude images of girls and women who post on xitter, without their consent? Those are the only things I even associate with Grok anymore. The venn diagram may line up pretty nicely between them, too.

Well, we elected a bunch of criminals, and Elon fired everyone who regulates this. The SEC was gutted like a fish, and contract terminations resulted in a large percentage of FINRA staff being laid off.

But the Dow is over 50,000 right now!!!1

(actually, 46,565.74 right now)


$50,000.

Gotta be accurate. Just saying 50,000 implies her incoherent rant was even a little bit based in reality.

https://youtu.be/WK12_IkAj2s?t=94


But the DJIA isn't in dollars it's in points.

You're missing the reference (which the parent comment linked for you)

I hope you inform our attorney general

Alot of the problem with these “disproven” things is over broad scope or abused in the popular media beyond comprehension.

The delayed gratification thing in particular is correlation vs. causation. It was really more about trust. Forcing kids to delay gratification is meaningless or counterproductive.


Agree. But according to Gemini [for what's worth] the final 1990 Mashmallow's study [since first versions were cautious] did indeed jump to conclusions to point there was a causation to a better later life. The media might have amplified, but the wrong (or misleading) conclusion was already present in the _scientific_ paper.

If a scientific paper makes a conclusion, that doesn't mean its a correct, valid, or properly supported conclusion.

You instead look at the claim and the data and the experiment methodology. It often says something far far less generalizable or significant than the conclusion section of the paper.


The thing about experimental science is that you should not make much conclusions from one study or one paper. Those should wait till consensus is reached, till there are many independent studies confirming the same thing under various conditions.

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