However it was more complicated than that. Porche owned 50+% of Volkswagen at the time of Volkswagen buying them. Porche got over extended and leveraged buying Volkswagen . The management family is closely connected since the start and at the time in early 2010s 20% government ownership rule was just getting stuck down by European courts .
Database backup tools are used primarily in enterprise context. (In)Ability to donate is not a function of personal spending preferences
A fair amount of people work here at orgs on here would absolutely be able to swing couple of hundred bucks per month in sponsorship or licensing or donations for a critical tool in their infra toolkit without lot of effort.
Particularly so, with the rising frequency of AI deleted my prod posts.
> gatekeepers directly or indirectly control research funding.
Perhaps funding like public grants could be controlled by few? Should not the case for private money?
Relatively common health issues older people tend to get fair amount of private funding after all.
Rich people tend to be older and they are lot more likely to see amongst their friends and family Alzheimer's and Parkison's or even cancer and so forth and be worried about it and thus donate money to them.
In somewhat related (i.e. old people health concerns) life extension research gets all kinds of wacky non traditional research lines get funded all the time, I don't understand why would Alzheimer's would be any different.
If you're a wealthy person lacking a neurobiology background, how do you decide which research efforts are the most promising? Which labs do you back?
Generally, you rely on experts.
Who typically became experts by adhering to the conventional wisdom set by gatekeepers.
"Science advances one funeral at a time" feels apt.
Sadly, the problem isn't confined to Alzheimer's.
Whenever only a few people decide what is "right," the same pattern of stifled innovation will generally manifest itself not by design or from malice, but because it's hard for a small group to be 100% right on what works and what doesn't -- especially on matters as inscrutable as neuroimmune diseases.
I don't think the problem is nearly as big as people claim. Experts are often right!
While there are counter examples and inefficiencies in the system (and there are idea of addressing this, by distributing some part of the money in other ways), we have far bigger societal issues because people do not believe in science, especially where there is an industry lobby sowing doubts.
So I really want to push back against the the idea that the scientific system is broken. While there are real issues, this is still very misleading.
What also happens is these gatekeepers end up being those requested to review papers. When a paper comes up for review that challenges the status quo these gatekeepers nit-pick the paper and recommend it not be published. This happened to my wife on numerous occasions. She has a few unpublished papers because of this. What she found in her research has since become the common accepted knowledge in her field after a few funerals.
Life extension seems like the kind of thing that can get private funding with relative ease specifically because they aren't trying to compete with the government. There are a lot of private foundations that give out grants too though.
Life extension in the private sector is dominated by hocus-pocus and unwarranted optimism. The genetics of mortality is amazingly complex. See this open access monster paper that came out in Nature this week—admittedly “in mice” on mortality and genetic of longevity.
It was and still is a negative filter, not a positive one. Meaning it is easy to reject work because there typos and basic factual errors, absence of them is not a good measure of quality. Typically such checks is the first pass not the only criteria.
It is valuable to have this, because it the work passes the first check then it easier to identify the actual problems. Same reason we have code quality, lint style fixed before reasoning with the actual logic being written.
Perhaps it also conveys different type of meaning by having them in this context.
Errors [1] in community discussion threads like this are positive signals that I am human not a bot. A couple of decades ago, I would be unhappy with myself for it, today accent and idiosyncratic writing are perhaps signals[3] that you are human.
[1] i.e. not proof reading for them, not introducing them deliberately.
[2] I can only see one typographical error (it->if) and many grammar errors, did I miss something ?
[3] Not definitive and not as a personal signature, as it can be easily faked/replicated, but the variations at scale is for now not seen in models. Today's model instances do not get unique personas, accents, idiosyncrasies in writing that would make them unique.
It is a price signalling problem both in the API and the subscriptions.
Difference between $3/MTok and $5/MTok does not reflect the capability difference. Similarly the subscriptions have extra Opus specific allowances. I prefer Sonnet for most tasks it is good enough, but sometimes I am forced to use Opus because am out of Sonnet for the week. It feels like Opus is unwanted second option.
If they priced Sonnet closer to $1/MTok like other models it would signal value of Opus better.
The GOOG and AMZN deals announced earlier this week would be considered part of the same Feb'26 round. I.e. it would have the same seniority rights as that round.
It is not uncommon to keep a round open after the formal announcement for a bit so that few investors who could not close for whatever reason are part of it. It can be hard to line up everyone at the same time, especially when they are public companies.
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Specific to your point on why valuation can be lower than market at the same time - Goods(and stocks) while feel to be homogeneous, divisible, fungible, they are not. Size can value of its own.
A block of 10% shares may be worth more (or less) than unit share price, because them being available together has a property of its own, making it either more desirable when someone wants to acquire or harder to sell because there is not enough demand if all of them get dumped at the same time
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In this deal terms, just cause few ten millions are trading at $850B, or some investors can put in say $1-2B doesn't mean you can raise $40B at the same valuation.
There isn't depth in the market to raise $65B (including the AMZN deal) at $850B valuation. There is always some demand at any price point in the demand supply curve, you will probably find few people who will buy few shares at $10T, or $100T or some ridiculous number but that doesn't mean you can raise a large round on that.
Strictly speaking it is not even $350B per se, i.e. Google and AWS benefit from this as vendors. It very much like vendor financing with convertible debt. Meaning it is worth that much to them, but not to you and me because we are not getting some of the money back as sales that boosts are own stock.
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[1] In the same vein, price can also depend on what you are getting in return, hard immediate dollars is the highest value. However if you are getting shares in return, you can usually negotiate a premium depending on risk of the shares you are getting.
The recent SpaceX - Cursor deal is a good example, any founder would likely take say $10B all cash offer over the $60B from SpaceX, or price would be closer to cash if it GOOG, AMZN, APPL shares instead - proven deeply liquid market etc.
Issues with C# not withstanding. It is not inherently bad idea for small models to trained on only specific languages like a JS/PY only model with declarative languages like HTML, CSS YAML, JSON, graph etc thrown in, probably could be more efficient for local use.
Fine-tuning / LoRA on basis the org code base would be make it more useful.
This is actually an amazing sweetheart deal for Cursor. Many times with these high profile acquisitions, most stock is tied to LPA's and employment at the company, and also earnout provisions. The company then finds a way to parachute them out early, which both voids the earnout and their employment, thus they never vest most of the units and the few units they do vest get bought out at 409A valuations which are typically much, much lower.
In the case of Cursor this is an amazing boon as SpaceX listed at an almost 100x multiple which is absolutely staggering. Had SpaceX stayed private they could have 409a'd Cursor and got it for effectively ~100M$ cash.
However it was more complicated than that. Porche owned 50+% of Volkswagen at the time of Volkswagen buying them. Porche got over extended and leveraged buying Volkswagen . The management family is closely connected since the start and at the time in early 2010s 20% government ownership rule was just getting stuck down by European courts .
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