I think it’s more like $188,000 in stock, $31,000 in cash, annual pay of $45,000, and you currently have a $60,000 loan. the new loan would be an additional $16,000

According to The Information, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son is planning to borrow $16 billion to invest in AI, and may borrow another $8 billion next year. The following points are drawn from The Information’s reporting, and I give serious props to Juro Osawa and Cory Weinberg for their work.

SoftBank currently only has $31 billion in cash on its balance sheet as of December. Its net debt — which, despite what you think, doesn’t measure total debt but rather represents its cash minus any debt liabilities — stands at $29 billion… They plan to use the loan in question to finance part of their investment in OpenAI and their acquisition of chip design firm Ampere.

According to SoftBank’s reported assets, their holdings are worth about $219 billion (33.66 trillion yen), including stock in companies like Alibaba and ARM.

am I reading this correctly: softbank has $50 billion in debt, equal to about 25% of their total assets? is that… normal? these are genuine questions, not sure whether I’m misunderstanding something/whether this is actually usual

I’m kind of puzzled that he would ditch the editorial staff. major publication opinion sections are pretty uniformly propaganda by and for comfy elites; I’d think he’d like that

also not clear on the connection between the AI story and the clearing out of the opinion section

it has to be. you can’t do better than this. who is going to be like “they told me my child would be gifted but the kid is actually mid at best”

LLMs, text to photo, and text to video models are getting exponentially better year over year.

it is 2025 how are you still saying this shit

somehow it makes it worse to see people getting radicalized about this. makes the fact that we’re in the nightmare scenario acutely real

gamergaters and their descendants are novel (to me). for them the games themselves are just vehicles for what they really care about, which is despising game developers and journalists. they’re far right, but much more specifically than that they’re an anti labor movement targeting the labor that makes and writes about one type of product. their primary goal is to make that labor feel frightened, unstable, etc

if you’ve ever seen chuds cheering mass firings (say by elon at twitter or the white house), gamergaters have the same spirit, except elevated to the top priority

EDIT: which now that I think about it makes it pretty perverse to invoke Luigi - the whole thing that makes the UHC assassination persistently popular is that the target was a person of enormous power and not labor

at some point I read an article comparing the difficulty of settling antarctica with that of settling mars (mars is… much harder), and pointing out that settling antarctica would be so difficult that we have no reason to believe it will ever happen. found that pretty decisive

this was so shocking that at first I thought it must be satire https://youtu.be/VwlBwyJVEfw

:)

EDIT: ok it was a joke

if it’s any reassurance, i’ve understood all your points perfectly! you’re basically making an argument for all UI to be more apple-like

I’ve been listening to faster and worse (see https://awful.systems/comment/6216748 ) and I like it so I wanted to give it ups.

(I think this and the memory palace are the only micro podcasts I’ve listened to. idk why it isn’t a more common format)

more seriously I can’t really criticize automation in complete generality. it’s way too broad a concept. I like having abundant food and talking to gay people on my phone. but we all know the kind of automation merchant is referencing does very little besides concentrate power with the ultra wealthy

automation is good because big tv. once, no big tv. now big tv

the majority of these wannabe digital lordlings are going to end up following one of the many Roman Emperors of the 3rd century and get killed and replaced by their Praetorians.

this is a possibility lots of the prepper ultra rich are concerned with, yet I don’t recall that I’ve ever heard the tech scummies mention it. they don’t realize that their fantasized outcome is essentially identical to the prepper societal breakdown, because they don’t think of it primarily as a collapse.

more generally, they seem to consider every event in the most narcissistic terms: outcomes are either extensions of their power and luxury to ever more limitless forms or vicious and unjustified leash jerking. there’s a comedy of the idle rich aspect to the complacency and laziness of their dream making. imagine a boot stamping on a face, forever, between rounds at the 9th hole

what if a future necromancer were to resurrect and torture all people who did not contribute to their eventual creation. I’m going to advocate for teaching necromancy in schools

canada has come up several times in the last several days and based on my small sample size, americans have no idea that the US government has been unsubtly threatening CA with annexation. these are not politically unconcerned or right wing people either

I think it’s quite funny that they talk about distributing the profits. these guys are all far right creeps. realistically the only thing they’re going to be distributing is calories to the nearby bears

does anyone know why Venmo has a faux social media presentation? a feed, payments visible to other users (??) by default, etc

this is how almost all software works now but because it’s in a sacred place, the car, it is big news