> Obviously Photobucket completely failed to properly monetize
IIRC Photobucket actually made a good amount of money through their advertising business unit ("Give free storage and get paid by ads" was their business model). They were acquired successfully by Fox for $300M in 2007.
Ontela was a photo-uploading app provider in the pre-iPhone era. When Fox decided to spin out Photobucket (as a fallout of the MySpace debacle), the two companies got merged.
Can I ask what is your opinion about their core CapEx, i.e. model training?
The general trend I observe is that the "shelf lives" of large language models are really short. It costs $1-10 billion to train cutting-edge models at the moment, and they only really last 6 months at best.
There seems to be very little brand loyalty too. Whenever a shiny new thing comes out, people just switch over, which implies that they constantly need to fight the time decay.
It's high, really high. But, that isn't bad. In fact... they are better of with it being extremely high. Then scale matters. They need enough revenue at high enough margins to earn a decent return on that spend, but higher is, from a competitive perspective, better.
I understand your logic ("the high CapEx is the moat"), but on the other hand, isn't it be a bit like multiple high speed railway systems trying to connect San Francisco to Los Angeles?
And there are three internal players chasing the same goal at the moment (OpenAI, Anthropic and Google), and two others (Deepseek and Alibaba/Qwen). What will prevent them from cutting the price floor each other?
Looking from a different angle: Microsoft has been able to maintain its monopoly because it was/is a huge pain for companies to switch the operating system, but do LLMs have that stickiness?
So the extension basically rewrites files in `.github/workflows` and pushes them to GitHub, which then sends all the sensitive information to the attacker. It also attempts to plant a malware on the local machine, too.
My impression is that it would be hard for an OS-level sandbox to completely stop this attack. The sandbox needs to determine whether if a git push originating from an IDE is malicious.
It seems that the battery lasts 35 hours with heart rate tracking, 1 month with no HR, and 11 months with power saving.
Run Time
Using activity functions (heart rate): Approx. 35 hours max.
Using in watch mode with heart rate measurement OFF: Approx. 1 month
Using with power-saving function ON: Approx. 11 months
I'm not sure how well the "solar charging" feature works, though. It's surprising that it does not last longer than Fitbit or Garmin.
Reading the article, it seems to boil down to the following two observations:
1. ARM64 is actually less "smart" than x64. While Intel's Core i9 tries to
be clever by aggressive boosting and throttling, Snapdragon just delivers
steady and consistent performance. This lack of variability makes it easier
for the OS to schedule tasks.
2. It is possible that the ARM build is more efficient than the x64 build,
because Windows has less historical clutter on ARM than x64.
So, has CPU throttling become too smart to the point it hurts?
It should be noted that this is a server OS, but it has been tested on a desktop x86 CPU.
The x86 server CPUs, like AMD Epyc or Intel Xeon, have a lower range within which the clock frequency may vary and their policies for changing the clock frequency are less aggressive than for desktop CPUs, so they provide a more constant and predictable performance, which favors multi-threaded workloads, unlike in desktop CPUs, where the clock frequency control algorithms are tuned for obtaining the best single-thread performance, even if that hurts multi-threaded performance.
> The x86 server CPUs, like AMD Epyc or Intel Xeon, have a lower range within which the clock frequency may vary and their policies for changing the clock frequency are less aggressive than for desktop CPUs
Probably we need to compare Xeon/EPYC with something like AWS Graviton or Ampere Altra to get an accurate picture here. That said, I think "Windows Server works fast on Snapdragon" is both crazy and fascinating; I wasn't even sure if that was possible.
There is actually a clear, concise and actionable answer to this question:
- Hide under the nearest table or desk (if you are at home or in the office).
- Grab the nearest pole or handrail (if you are on a train).
The basic idea is that the most common cause of death in an earthquake is being crushed by falling objects, so you should use every second to minimize the risk.
Here are a few common mistakes:
- Do not attempt to stop furniture from falling (you'll get crushed by it)
- Do not try to run outside (you'll get hurt by falling walls)
- Do not try to turn off the gas (most systems have automatic shutoffs)
- And for Catfish's sake, do not use your precious 45 seconds to open the social media.
There was a similar case in Japan recently: alt.ai
This company purported to sell AI transcription service. Raised capital from notable local VCs. Did IPO in Oct 2023.
It turned out that more than 90% of its sales were fake. The CXOs were arrested and the company was liquidated last month.
Personally I never get the appeal of going public on fake sales. By design, the amount you need to fake grows bigger and bigger over time. So the collapse is inevitable.
Bank of France "transported" their reserve by selling the gold held in New York, and subsequently buying the same amount in European market.
They opted to do so because it's just more efficient. It takes a lot of efforts to physically move 129 tonnes of gold after all. And as a side effect of this relocation project, they ended up recording a capital gain. It's nothing-burger.
For context, in 2025H1, 480 tons where moved from CH to the US (I assume originating from UK after being recast).
My guess is that the choice to sell rather than transport was also due to using the (at the time) price divergence between US and European markets. (arbitrage + not having to pay transport + refining)
PE is a very broad practice. It's kinda hard to make a single-blanket argument for it (it's like asking "Is Software good for society?" Yes, maybe?).
So here are some positive things that I think PE funds can contribute:
1) Private equity serves as an exit path for small business builders. Suppose that you have built a small, profitable trucking company. Now you are old and want to retire. You kids have no interest in the business, and have already built different careers elsewhere than managing a fleet of Super Greats. Oftentimes, PE funds are only realistic buyers of your business.
2) At a more subtle level, PE can supply better management. For example, a supermarket owner I know accepted capital from a PE fund specifically to acquire better talent (his remark: "very talented people are rarely excited to operate a rural food & beverage shop").
3) PE-backed companies are, arguably, structurally better than the public counterparts. The cliche is that many public firms are run like third-world fiefdoms (the board are focused on empire building; the executives are spending money lavishly on perks). Most of these concerns vanish once each director are given a shared, transparent objective set by the deal structure. (As Henry Kravis often remarks, PE is mostly about alignment of the interests)
I'll sketch a few points to illustrate the inner workings here:
- It's hard to buy a decent company at 5x EBITDA today. A typical EBITDA multiple nowadays is like 10x-15x.
(e.g. EQT bought SUSE for $3B in 2023, and the adjusted EBITDA was $240M, which implies 12x EBITDA)
- Debts are tranched. Banks typically get a senior slice, often secured by real assets (a.k.a. collateral), so they can recoup the money even when the company goes straight into a ditch. The real risk lies in the junior loans ("mezzanine"), which demand very high yields to compensate for that risk.
- In a typical PE deal, most profits are earned at exit, not via dividends en route. So managers have incentive to make the target company (look) better for the next buyer, rather than neglecting it.
A more fundamental reason why the situation you describe rarely happens is that PE fund managers treat their operation as an "on-going" business. Lenders are gonna be really pissed if they lose their money. So fund managers try to avoid that scenario to keep the credit flowing for their next deal.
IIRC Photobucket actually made a good amount of money through their advertising business unit ("Give free storage and get paid by ads" was their business model). They were acquired successfully by Fox for $300M in 2007.
Ontela was a photo-uploading app provider in the pre-iPhone era. When Fox decided to spin out Photobucket (as a fallout of the MySpace debacle), the two companies got merged.
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