I remember back in the early 2000s when people thought we were running out of steam on the advancements front. This was roughly around the time when CPU clocks stopped getting faster. Pentium hit 3GHz in 2005, Intel Core Ultra 5 performance cores are generally around this exact speed 20 years later.
Since at least the 640kb quip, betting against progress or the appetite for progress has been a losing bet.
Honestly post 2005 things did slow down dramatically for typical single core workloads.
In the late 90s and early 2000s the mantra was "why waste time optimizing your software? By the time you're done the next gen of CPUs will have made up the difference."
Now the increase is more about moving to GPUs and power efficiency etc. We still have increases, but the rate of speedup has slowed down a lot.
IIRC it was called Clawdbot when Anthropic complained. IANAL but I believe the holder of a trademark is obligated to defend it against infringement. Hard to say that Clawdbot was not potentially infringing, given its purpose. It's not clear how much leeway Anthropic had given his initial choice of name.
I still think Anthropic should've bought Clawdbot/OpenClaw. Feels like a missed business opportunity to expand your market share by capitalizing on the hype.
"now at OpenAI" were my original words - they did the equivalent of an acqui-hire and "protected" OpenClaw in a foundation.
In the context of the seemingly aggressive machinations of Anthropic your hair-splitting without clarifying beyond "OpenAI didn't buy OpenClaw" seems itself misleading and rather counter to helping conversations progress.
It could reasonably cause confusion in the marketplace. Again, IANAL.
If you wanted to find out the actual legal arguments, you could release and promote software for white-collar workers called Mycrosoft Offyce and I am sure you will get official legal answers from Microsoft's counsel.
The example in question is a Trademark for "T. Markey" and the conflicting mark is listed as "Tee Marqee".
Reasonableness is a thing here. Every person in this thread knows why it was called Clawdbot and not (say) Peterbot or cronbot. That we all know that reason is the problem.
Edit, the USPTO does in fact make this blindingly easy to find:
"How do I know whether I'm infringing?" --> "The key factors considered in most cases are the degree of similarity between the marks at issue and whether the parties' goods and/or services are sufficiently related that consumers are likely to assume (mistakenly) that they come from a common source."
> say the officer was black, the defendant was white, and made a video with lots of racist stereotypes. Would we think that was funny and cool? Would we be surprised if the black man had a breakdown in the courtroom watching it?
This is very common in the US? Common enough to be a minor plot point in a current cop show (Cross), which is to say the audience will be familiar with the material. Also explored in e.g. True Detective. No, the Black cop does not get to break down in court while being racially taunted. Either on TV or real life. This is expected by all to be a part of doing his job.
> If you have been public for >N years, and have had >X "clean" quarterly reports, no trouble with the SEC, etc
...staff changes happen, incentives change due to changes in business performance. Enron was apparently clean public company from 1985 until sometime after Andrew Fastow was hired in 1990.
If high-resolution transparency has any value, it doesn't make sense to do it a few times and then stop.
Longer periods between audited (aka "accurate") results will lead to compounding errors. Fewer people at the company will have a clear idea of how the company is doing. Audits are like CI for finances.
I agree that would be preferable if reporting were less expensive and (legally) risky, and what you're describing is definitely closer to the original intent of the rule (that of giving investors the information available to management), but it would make being a public company even more burdensome than it already is, and the number of public corporations is already in decline.
> it would make being a public company even more burdensome than it already is
Every company doesn't have to be public. The US taxpayer underwrites US securities markets, and companies that trade on our public markets have access to some of the deepest pools of low-cost liquidity in the world. But companies are obviously free to list elsewhere.
> the number of public corporations is already in decline.
Separate problem. IIRC HBS studied this and basically the issue is we stopped enforcing our anti-competition laws a while back[1]. So we end up with a fraction of firms that each sector would financially support. Both because it creates giants that are much harder to compete against, and because it allows mergers between competing firms that AFAIK could be deemed illegal under existing laws.
1 - See, for example the Robinson-Patman Act, whose dormancy allows big box retailers to exist. This law has never been repealed.
When companies stay private longer, private capital stays tied up for longer, decreasing public liquidity and keeping bad private investments afloat for longer. Part of the creative destruction of the dot com bust was the legion of badly performing companies that went public and were thoroughly rejected by public investors, offering an exit to later investors and employees. Right now badly performing companies can limp along tying up liquidity and locking up employee equity only to head to an eventual bankruptcy or bad IPO.
> Part of the creative destruction of the dot com bust was the legion of badly performing companies that went public and were thoroughly rejected by public investors, offering an exit to later investors and employees.
That's not how I remember it. I remember lots of publicly traded company shares being gobbled even though their business plans[1] were essentially:
1. Collect underpants
2. ?
3. Profit
"Going for marketshare" and not making a profit was still popular as recently as Uber/DoorDash/etc. Cisco still (AIUI) hasn't reached back to is DotCom peak.
Are the current multiples of many tech stocks sensible?
I'm having a hard time responding to someone who's using a South Park episode as a discussion point. Like how can I debate a point made by a show that makes content reacting to the popular perception of certain ideas? That's like 2 levels removed from the actual true details.
Anyway the difference now is that those companies still exist they just take round after round of private investor capital and the employees are offered shares that will never be tradable. Were those businesses would go bankrupt in a few years before now they can take 5-10 years. Time value of money being a thing, your money will be locked up for longer in a bad investment than it would on the public markets.
> I'm having a hard time responding to someone who's using a South Park episode as a discussion point. Like how can I debate a point made by a show that makes content reacting to the popular perception of certain ideas?
The South Park episode came out in 1998, when the profitability of tech companies was… questionable, but their popularity was very high. It was social commentary on the zeitgeist and group think of the time. And it turned out the irrational exuberance was not justified for the valuations, as everyone learned post-2000.
And have we learned anything since then? What are valuations and P/E multiples now? And it goes back centuries in the past as well, so 'modern tech' is hardly the driving force:
Your original post stated "the legion of badly performing companies that went public and were thoroughly rejected by public investors". The historical record shows that these companies going public were not "thoroughly rejected".
If you're using South Park and "social commentary on the zeitgeist" as a way to think about markets, I think we're not going to have a productive conversation. A public equity market in the US has a technical definition that I'm using here. You're constructing a narrative out of these things that really makes no sense. When one said that public investors reject an investment, that means they mark the price of the equity down by selling shares for a lower level.
> If you have a bad quarter, you’re not penalized as much if the surrounding months are good.
GE used to smooth their earnings to accomplish exactly what you describe here. This was not good for investors, or transparency, or ultimately GE itself[1].
There's ample reason to want more frequent, not less frequent, results from companies.
> the whole corporate machinery that takes 3–6 weeks after quarter end to churn out reports
> internally executives should be tracking performance daily
Executives would also be better served by having more timely access to the same data they will eventually disclose. Why would executives want to drive blind for more of the time?
Part of it is the sophistication. Take the Tomahawk: assumed range of ~1000 miles , estimated accuracy of 30 feet. Can launch from above or below water. Etc.
The other part is the limited production runs. Until last month, the DoD was generally purchasing ~100 of these annually. There's no scale economy in making these, so those 100 missiles need to support the entire production & R&D of the product.
It's worth reading up on the history of the Sidewinder development for the other side of this coin. Radically cheaper than the conventionally-developed alternatives at the time. It's grown legs in more recent marks but the first few variants were really not sophisticated at all.
Missiles definitely do not always work. I have seen film of a Sea Slug missile (with war head) falling over the side of a Royal Navy ship, without the motor firing properly. Apparently there was a void in the solid propellant.
The USA's written constitution should not be used as an exemplar of written constitutions in general because the founders didn't even enforce it the day after it was ratified. It took a civil war to even turn towards the words as written. The document itself was more aspirational than a reflection of how the founders intended to live and govern.
As a result of all of that, we have developed a culture of sophistry around simple words. We pretend the Constitution binds us, but in practice the structures that govern the country are much more opaque and therefore more difficult to change.
(This is why every so often we have to ratify a new amendment codifying rights that are clearly enumerated in the articles of the Constitution or in an earlier amendment. At some point, the sophistry tips over and we have to amend it to say what was plainly written in at some earlier point.)
iPhone 17 Pro is $1099, Google Pixel Pro is $999, Galaxy S26 Ultra is $1,299.
Flagship phones are expensive. Apple mostly just does not make low-spec phones, and cheap phones are generally low-spec (or their makers would charge more).
Since at least the 640kb quip, betting against progress or the appetite for progress has been a losing bet.
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