We may have to wait for another three years.

Which is also a clue that he isn’t short selling.

There are two ways of making money when a stock goes down. One is to sell the stock short. The other is to buy a put option.

A short sale is extremely risky. Say the shares are at $50 and you think they’re going to go down, so you sell 1000 shares you don’t own (short selling) and agree to buy them back by some date in the future. If you’re right and the stock tanks to $20, you can buy the shares and pocket $30,000. But, if the stock doesn’t sink, you might have to buy the shares for $60 each, so you lose $10 per stock, or $10,000. If there are tons of people shorting the stock, you can get a short squeeze, where everybody needs to buy shares to close out their short position, and because everybody needs to buy, the stock price rockets up, so you get people having to buy a stock that used to be $50 for $200, leading to $150,000 in losses for a 1000 share short where the maximum possible gain was only $50,000.

An option is much safer. There you’re buying the option to sell the shares at a certain price at some time in the future. Say you think a stock is going to crash. It’s currently trading at $50/share. You can buy 1000 put options at a strike price of $40 with a date 1 month in the future. It will cost you something to buy those options, say $1 per share, so $1000. If the stock goes up or stays at $50, your bet didn’t work out. You don’t have to sell the shares, you just tear up the options contract. You’re out whatever you paid for the option, say $1000 here. But, say the stock tanks and it’s now at $20/share. Now your bet did pay off. You can buy 1000 shares at $20 each for $20,000, then immediately exercise your option and sell them for $40,000, netting you $20,000. With put options the upside is significantly smaller, but the potential downside is tiny. It’s just the cost of the options.

Someone predicting a crash within 3 years isn’t going to short sell the shares. Between now and then the shares could continue to rise for a while, and they’d be on the hook for a huge payout in that case. If they buy options the down side is much smaller. They may have to re-buy new options a bunch of times. But in the worst case they just have to let the options expire unused and eat whatever cost they paid for them.

For the coming AI crash, I don’t think it will be very soon. I think there will be a crash. But, I think the government will try to keep the bubble from bursting. Too much of the US economy is now invested in AI. So, even under Biden, or Harris, or Obama they’d try to prevent a catastrophic crash by using taxpayer money to prevent the most damaging bubble burst. With Trump, there’s going to be even more government interference in the market. His backers are crypto bros. They’re the ones making him billions on his meme coins. They bankrolled JD Vance’s political career. If they demand that he rescues their failing companies, he’ll do it. And, since the GOP does whatever Trump wants, they’ll just fork over literal trillions in taxpayer dollars to keep things from crashing. But, eventually there will have to be a crash, because there’s just not a sustainable business model in any of this, at least not at anything like the current scale.

Also, the way short positions work is that the people who are most successful at shorting a stock are the ones who have a megaphone to announce they’ve shorted the stock. They go on as many podcasts, news shows, interviews, etc. as possible to say things are going to crash. Because, the more people who hear about it, the more hesitation there will be to invest, which means the more chances of their prediction coming through.

So, he’s not just some guy who is betting on the bubble bursting, he’s a guy who is now heavily incentivized to cause the bubble to burst so he can make his investors a lot of money.

Which bubble was that?

AFAIK none of the previous AI bubbles really had much investment. There was hype, but it was hype within the computer science, or cognitive science fields. But, maybe there’s a financial bubble bit that I’m missing.

Uber used accounting tricks to hide their true losses for years. They’ve only recently managed to become profitable by squeezing both drivers and passengers at the same time. Is that sustainable? Almost certainly not, but, for the moment, they’re getting away with it.

That’s the only reason I don’t think it will pop in the next 6 months or so. Even Biden or Obama would have stepped in to try to prevent the economy from crashing. But, there’s the Trump factor. First of all, some of his biggest backers are from the AI “industry”. His VP is tied to Peter Thiel, his biggest donors are Crypto and AI bros. The vast majority of his own personal money is tied up in the current Crypto bubble. In addition, he’s obviously so easily bribed. Even if he he wasn’t interested in intervening otherwise, he could easily be bribed to intervene.

Because of Trump, and the fact that the house, senate and judiciary are all Trump lackeys, I think the bubble will survive until at least the 2026 midterms. If the Democrats take back control of the House and Senate they could take control over spending from Trump, which might mean the bubble is allowed to pop. But, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Trump hand over literal trillions in taxpayer dollars to keep the bubble inflated.

Comparing the coming crash to the dot com crash is like comparing a rough landing to the various crashes on Sept 11th, 2001.

The dot com crash was mostly isolated in high tech. Because it was lead by the Japanese economy starting to fail, and followed by the Sept 11th attacks, the various combined crashes resulted in the S&P 500 falling by about 50% from its peak to the bottom, but it was already back up to the peak value in 2007, then the global financial crisis hit.

This bubble is much bigger. Some analysts say the AI bubble is 17x the size of the Dot Com bubble, and 4x the size of the 2007/08 real estate bubble. AI stocks were 40% of all US GDP growth in 2025, and 80% of all growth in US stocks.

Nvidia’s stock price has gone up 1700% in just 2 years. OpenAI is planning to go public on a valuation of $1 trillion despite losing vast amounts of money. Just 7 US tech companies make up 36% of the entire US stock market, and they’re all heavily betting on AI.

At least when the dot com bubble popped, it left some useful things behind, like huge amounts of dark fibre. But, the AI processors are so specialized they can’t be used for much of anything else. They also wear out, sometimes within months. The datacenter buildings themselves can maybe be repurposed to being general purpose datacenters, but, a lot of the contents will have to be thrown out.

Giuffre agreed to a multi-million pound out-of-court settlement in 2022.

It sounds like the king (his brother) is stripping him of his titles and kicking him out of the royal residence. But his brother (as non-king) is letting him stay on a property on an estate he owns as a private citizen, and paying him a kind of allowance out of his own “private” money.

Andrew is expected to move to a property on the king’s Sandringham estate near the northeast coast and receive private financial support from his brother.

I wonder if he (Andrew) actually owns anything in his own name. The funding for the royals is complex. The “working royals” get about $100m per year as a percentage of revenues from the Crown Estate as a kind of salary / per-diem to do their “jobs”. The Crown Estate had about £16.5b in assets, so the amount they’re paid is only a tiny fraction of its value. The king also gets money from the Duchy of Lancaster which includes land in Lancashire and Yorkshire as well as properties in London. Whoever’s the Duke of Cornwall gets paid from the Duchy of Cornwall which is land in South-West England. Some things you’d think would be owned by the country are actually privately owned by the monarch, like many of the palaces. They also own estates like Sandringham and Balmoral.

So, the monarch owns a lot of stuff privately, which is passed down to the next monarch. The current Duke of Cornwall (often the crown prince) has a billion pound private estate, which then gets passed to the next Duke when the current duke dies or becomes the monarch.

But, I wonder what the rest of them own. It sounds like the monarch is a multi-billionaire, the Duke of Cornwall is just barely a billionaire, and the rest of the royals get paid huge amounts in a sort-of “salary” if they’re willing to do royal-type work (cut ribbons, make speeches, etc.) but they don’t actually own much of anything.

His ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, who had been living with him in the 30-room mansion, will have to find a new home.

That’s interesting. I wonder what that situation was like, and what she’ll do.

https://apnews.com/article/king-charles-prince-andrew-strips-royal-titles-7fad76a46a211ae24b605cbd24e80748

Who was born in 1961 making him…

Drink their blood. Got it.

The really bad experiences I’ve had with straws is at movie theatres. In that case you’re given a pretty big drink in a flimsy cup, and you’re slowly drinking it over a couple of hours.

There’s no way that the paper straw holds up in those circumstances. You also don’t want to drink without the straw, because the cup is so flimsy that if you try to drink from it like a regular cup/glass it’s likely to collapse. I have permanent metal / rubber straws at home, but of course I never remember to bring them with me when I go to a movie, since I only go a couple of times a year.

The only solution I’ve found is to take 3-4 paper straws with me, and change them out over the course of the movie.

Why do dumb people think it’s “all of the sudden”?

Whereas you prefer to avoid any kind of thinking in case it makes your brain warm up slightly.

These guardsmen were ordered to deploy against America

No, they were ordered to deploy in America, and ordered to protect federal buildings and “maintain order”. There’s nothing illegal about that order, or treasonous about following it. They’ve been used that way plenty of times before. Generally when they’re deployed following a natural disaster, one of the things they’re there fore is to deter looting. The whole “natural disaster” bit seems the main thing that the National Guard does these days. Then there are other times where they’re deployed to maintain law and order: the 1992 LA riots, the 1968 riots after the assassination of MLK, etc.

There’s nothing treasonous about that. And the orders authorizing those deployments aren’t illegal orders. If you were one of the racists who wanted to attack MLK’s march from Selma to Montgomery, you might have felt that the national guard preventing you from attacking the marchers were “race traitors” or evil, but history would have shown you were wrong.

In this case, history will probably show that the guard stood around looking tough, maybe made a few arrests. Some of those arrests will historically be seen as violating the first amendment, but some will be seen as normal, boring legitimate arrests. There will probably be some protesters beaten up, but that’s almost certainly going to be the cops rather than the national guard.

Maybe, at some point, an order will come down to load live ammunition and start shooting protesters. If that happens the soldiers who follow those orders might be considered “evil”, but I imagine many won’t follow that order because they’ll see that as stepping over the line.

Also, you really need to read up on the actual definition of treason.

These are evil people arriving to do evil things.

They’re members of the national guard. The typical enlistment period for the National Guard is 8 years. Many would have joined under Biden, and are probably still required to serve out a number of years. If they don’t, then they might have to suddenly pay back the tuition benefits or something. The military, Guard included, isn’t normally something you can just quit if you don’t like how things are going.

ICE employees? That’s another matter. You had to voluntarily join ICE, and many of them have joined in just the last few months. They knew what they were getting into. They’re wearing masks to hide their identities, and all the bad incidents I’ve heard of (people being shot by rubber bullets, being thrown down and injured, etc.) have been ICE not Guard.

I think it’s both. It lowers your inhibitions and lets you do things that you wouldn’t otherwise do: dance on a table, go home with a stranger, call up an ex, etc. But, it also breaks the inhibitions on the various random thoughts people have that aren’t “hidden desires” but are just intrusive thoughts.

For example, “I didn’t want to sleep in a wheelbarrow”, sure. But, you did want to lie down. And, the wheelbarrow was right there. Once you were in the wheelbarrow, you didn’t want to sleep there all night, but you did want to relax for a bit.

So, it’s not like “I want this outcome”. It’s more like there were a lot of small steps between here and there, and a rational brain would have put a stop to things along the way, but a drunk brain doesn’t second guess a lot of those small decisions which result in one big outcome like sleeping in a wheelbarrow.

If you understand how LLMs work, that’s not surprising.

LLMs generate a sequence of words that makes sense in that context. It’s trained on trillions(?) of words from books, Wikipedia, etc. In most of the training material, when someone asks “what’s the name of the person who did X?” there’s an answer, and that answer isn’t “I have no fucking clue”.

Now, if it were trained on a whole new corpus of data that had “I have no fucking clue” a lot more often, it would see that as a reasonable thing to print sometimes so you’d get that answer a lot more often. However, it doesn’t actually understand anything. It just generates sequences of believable words. So, it wouldn’t generate “I have no fucking clue” when it doesn’t know, it would just generate it occasionally when it seemed like it was an appropriate time. So, you’d ask “Who was the first president of the USA?” and it would sometimes say “I have no fucking clue” because that’s sometimes what the training data says a response might look like when someone asks a question of that form.

A schwa is a vowel sound. It’s the sound English uses for unstressed syllables. It sits right in the middle of the IPA vowel chart, which basically means it’s the easiest sound to make. Your tongue is in a central position, and your mouth isn’t open wide or closed.

Many letters in English words tend towards being pronounced as a “schwa” when they’re not the key syllable in the word.

For example, if you say “I gave him a present” the first ‘e’ in “present” is emphasized and the second isn’t, so the second tends to be pronounced as a “schwa”. But, if you say “I had to present the documents”, it’s the second “e” that is emphasized, and the first one turns into a schwa.

It’s also why the English article “a” and “the” are both frequently pronounced the same way (as a schwa) despite using different vowels. The articles “a” and “the” are very rarely emphasized in a sentence, and words that aren’t emphasized have their pronunciation drift towards the easy-to-pronounce schwa.

It’s the first syllable in “salmon” that’s emphasized, so the second isn’t really pronounced as an “o”, (whatever that means) it’s pronounced as a schwa instead.