I'm outside the loop so please forgive me, but what is different between substack and a self managed mailing list?
I've been subscribed to a few website/blogs newsletters for years and they appear to work fine, and I think the owners are not particularly technical, there's WordPress plugins.
Substack is trying to turn itself into a social network, so comments on substack posts by other substack bloggers let people find other blogs. This is why half the comments on popular substacks are from other bloggers casually mentioning the articles they wrote.
It also means that if you comment on a substack, other people can find all the comments you made on every substack, by default.
I had very positive experiences with some offsites, where the people 1) had fun 2) felt closer and able to interact more easily with each other (especially when working in a remote environment it's harder to grow closer)
But, like everything else, not all people enjoy them. I have seen people find obvious excuses to avoid them.
NVidia makes up 7.5% of the SP500. If it lost 50%, it would be a 3% loss for the index. The concentration is bad, but it would not cause a drop of 50% retirement funds by itself. If you take an all world index, it's even less.
Still, if NVidia lost 50% of their market share, we would probably see a big collapse of the stock market.
EDIT: to note, the top ten companies in SP500 make up an unprecedented concentration but they're not "mostly AI".
This is what caused the 08' crash. Everything was all tied together so as one massive bank failed it sent a cascading ripple effect through the entire industry which became a sort of black hole that took down many seemingly stable, profitable banks with it.
Of course, but the top ten that make up >30% of the market don't just sell AI. If all of those lost 50% it would be a 15% drop in the index, painful but not jumping-off-building bad
What of most of the rest of the US economy thats keeps trying to shoehorn AI into their workflows and, more importantly, whose stock prices are buoyed by the prospect of theoretical AI-related productivity gains?
An AI collapse would represent a generational buying opportunity for companies like Meta, Google, and MS. It would be bumpy for a bit while things unwind, but eventually all this FCF they have been dumping into AI would start dropping to the bottom line instead. It's like when Meta stopped dumping money in Reality Labs, but on a much larger scale.
For it to be a buying opportunity would require the mega corps to continue growing post bubble pop. This is questionable given how large they already are.
And a lot of their apparent growth post 2022 is AI, but most likely at subsidized, unsustainable prices. So demand that isn't real.
Plus apparently at least for Google, but from other news sources I've seen, at least Amazon and Oracle have basically mortgaged their future in other business units to fund AI, so it's likely many of these other business units will underperform (or already are).
So lots of new debt, unverifiable growth that could be shady, coupled with a slow down of their other businesses could be a really bad combo.
A risk in this situation is that in names that are dominated by passive flows there is a pro-cyclical effect where because the name is valued in terms of the overall index but is also part of said index that you end up with a positive feedback loop - which will eventually be arrested by speculators.
Looking at for example 1965, the top 10 of the S&P500 were, rounded, ATT 9%, GM 7%, Exxon (4%) IBM (4%) DuPont (3%) Texaco (3%) Sears (3%) GE 2%, Kodak 2%, Gulf 1%, for a total of 38%.
This is pretty close to current concentration, but the current top 10% is basically all technology except for Eli Lily at 1.5%, so in that sense it's arguably unprecedented.
There's a good chart here on page 5 of top 10 weights over time, and on 6 of how the 1965 top 10 fared to 2025.
I have this cheap B movie in my head with a primitive people living on an island. They compete in hunting, fishing, building boats, houses, cutting trees, growing crops etc they use sea shells as currency. Someone finds a spot with countless sea shells, 95% of the population spends their days digging up more and more. Almost everyone is insanely rich, everyone except from the dumb people still hunting, fishing, building boats, houses, cutting trees, growing crops etc
The goal of the regulation is to get the operators to comply, which they usually do after fines (EDIT: and litigations and whining, of course), because the costs of infractions are increased if they don't comply.
The issue is they usually comply with the specific law being broken, and then immediately stop complying with a different law
The goal should be to incentivise them to comply with the law as a whole, not to keep deliberately breaking different sections of the law to make profit above the level of fines
That's why people want the level of the fines to go up, to disincentivise the more broad lawbreaking
Imagine regular laws worked that way, where a prior conviction is only relevant if it was for the exact same crime, and you can go around committing dozens of crimes and be treated like a first offender every time because this time you chose robbery and last time it was theft.
Not really, next time they just make a calculated risk decision, if the revenue from non-compliance is quite significant than the fine they have to pay later (if they have to, because I can imagine so many other cases which went unnoticed or didn't result in a fine) there is no reason for them to comply next time. It's not like they will be prohibited from doing a business after n number of compliance violations or fines
Except they did comply for all the cases where they were fined. They're not fined for one-off behaviors, but for how their services are structured. That's GPs point.
If the cost of penalties doesn't exceed the cost of the offence then it's a winning move to offend.
The correct solution to this is to have fines scaled to the value of a company and an exponential doubling of fines for every re-offence that falls under the same category of crime with a cooling off period after a few years.
The fines do scale with noncompliance, if Google were to continue to offend they would get a daily fine that is retroactively applied to the full duration.
Because the goal isn’t to punish, it’s to get them to do what the law wants them to do. The fine is supposed to be a slap on the wrist - the actual desired behaviour is compliance
I think that's a great start and I see a something close to a doubling from 2.42B to 4B but it stops there and this most recent fine is under a billion.
What we need to see is that exponential function. Everyone here should have at least the intuition from Moore's Law and COVID that exponential growth is either your best friend or your worst enemy depending on if it's working for you.
The next fine should've been 8B, and the one after that 16... The regression back down to 1B is counter productive to the goal of inducing compliance and reducing the offender's ability to continue to offend by taking away their resources to do so.
yeah, 8 years later? If someone was born on the last one they're now in 4th grade and halfway to being able to drive. Are these really correlated events?
Yes. And there were many other cases in between, I just lack incentive to dig them up. Feel free to do it yourself. The thing is - their behavior didn't change for better.
Given that Larry Page and Sergey Brin still control Alphabet, still act with impunity, and show no signs of slowing down yes, they are absolutes correlated events.
The big corporations don't really fix their evil behaviour. That's why fines keep on re-emerging.
> because the costs of infractions are increased if they don't comply.
See above. If the fines were to work, it would not become a repeating issue.
I think mandatory jailtimes are the only solution. When the CEOs are suddenly for 10 years in a small room, slowly they will begin to stop their mafia-strategy.
You appear to be arguing with the assumption that "get the operators to comply" is false.
These companies do, in fact, change behaviour in response to such actions; they may hire lawyers to find and exploit as many loopholes as they can, but they do ultimately comply. Even X ultimately complied in response to Brazil, and the EU is a much more important market for Google than Brazil ever was for X.
(Why would you expect to get dollars from an EU settlement?)
> I've never received a dollar from the EU as a victim.
There's this standard assumption that HN users are well educated.
Budgets don't work like that. It's not like the US federal government collects taxes and then deposits bags of gold coins on people's doorsteps.
Taxes, fines, etc are all collected and then they mostly go to a general, undifferentiated budget which is then divided by the various ministries (departments, whatever).
So yes, if you're a EU citizen you did get the money back. As roads, hospitals, research funding, etc.
It‘s nice to have such revenue to fund EU programs on digital sovereignty. European institutions give plenty of money to startups. You need an entry to the program, but when you are in, it can account for 50-70% or more in your early stage funding. And that‘s nice, because you keep more equity.
I find it more interesting that US Americans think letting their companies do whatever they want everywhere (as they currently do) is the better "strategy".
“Everyone opposed to EU policy is a US American” fallacy in play.
As is the “letting their companies do whatever they want everywhere (as they currently do) is the better "strategy"” when this wasn’t said or even implied anywhere.
It is amazing how HN has descended into arguing against people making points by saying they are someone else and saying something completely different.
Looking at the state of the EU tech industry and chuckling.
The point of the EU subsidies is, surely, not to enrich a few people with the right connections but to stimulate a productive ecosystem that supports well paid skilled employment, right? Right?
You don‘t need the right connections. You can be an outsider and spend 10% of the grant to hire a guy who will help you with paperwork and refining the idea to fit in support initiative. Basically, you look around what grants are there, find the ones you like and can align to, find a consultancy and get your 200k-1M€. Just make sure you can show something in the end, as promised.
Honestly, I don’t know what are you talking about. Tech industry in Europe is far from being dead. Not least because for many American companies Europe as market is dead.
Dude, sorry for being rude, it's out of desperation, really.
I worked for a unicorn once and it came with the maxxed-out Mac book and the most meaningless job ever in the industry that should not exist.
I also wrote endless FP7 and ESA proposals for a living, and that was an utter waste of everyone's brainpower and public money.
I am now working in public sector IT, and while the job can seem dull to the outsiders, I at least serve the citizens.
After a fire erupted in my block, I could proudly say to my neighbors after the fact that there were bits of my code here and there that connected the first alert with the firefighters station.
I don't think that's a sustainable model. Also most of those fines goes into filling the gaps in budgets related to recurring costs of maintaining the bureaucratic behemoth rather than funding research or innovation.
We have had figs in southern Germany for decades. Not all varieties grow well here of course but just having figs growing doesn't really tell you much.
(I took Budapest, for the sake of generality, from [1] it is clear that there are significant variations in Hungary)
You can see that the mean temperatures from April to October are about 2 degrees higher in Budapest than in Stuttgart, which is really significant. To give you an idea, that's a lot closer to Avignon (France) [2], which is a Mediterranean climate, than to Stuttgart which is considered oceanic.
I also remember people saying that they could get 2 harvests of figs a year in Moravia (CZ), which you will not get in Germany. Moravia is not Hungary, but it's getting there, climate-wise, and it illustrates nicely the difference a few degrees (mean) make.
This is true with basically every place and a proper guide.
I understand why people don't usually hire a person to walk then around when they're traveling solo or with their family, but if you're a mildly curious person it's a fantastic way to experience museums, archeology and nature.
Then, once, a designer friend was doing some UI and I suggested using icons instead of edit/view text or something like that, and he replied "I don't believe in the thaumaturgic power of icons" and that somehow changed my perspective forever.
I think icons are nice, but using icons instead of labels, is a terrible design decision in principle. It might be acceptable for your power users, or if you know your project is only used by you and your household or something like that. My company just did this for mobile to save space. It's so confusing even though I use our product every day. Humans can read short labels faster than they can decipher icons.
I've been subscribed to a few website/blogs newsletters for years and they appear to work fine, and I think the owners are not particularly technical, there's WordPress plugins.
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