It does fit a pattern where the general tone on HN has gone from "AI is going to eat the world of retail jobs and people like us are going to be the biggest beneficiaries" to "turns out that turning JIRA tickets into syntax which compiles might actually be something LLMs are better suited to than upselling fries and wiping tables" :)

it's about the only way of reconciling experimental validity (if the AI can't "fire" staff and remove them from business operations and their P&L account in situations when it would be legal and normal to do so, is it really running a business?) and not having the massive ethical issue of people being arbitrarily fired because a computer glitched. Whether that's what they actually do is tbc.

tbf this is less preparing for inevitable death by writing a will and more preparing for inevitable death by founding a startup which blogs about euthanizing small animals...

It makes them more accurate at the time the insider places the bet. But to maximise profit, they are incentivised to misdirect before they place the bet (and worse still from society's perspective, are incentivised to take counter-intuitive or downright harmful actions to profit at the expense of people who bet on the view that it made no sense for them to do that)

How does this trade work? Nobody knows who the insider is, they only see market direction.

You are a spokesperson or decision maker for an entity which is bet on, like a sports team or the government. You publicly indicate that you are going to do one thing (probably the thing that makes most sense), so the market bakes that into their assumptions and offers favourable odds for bets on doing the other thing. Then you place your bet shortly before you do the other thing.

(it's true that low level insiders might have limited influence on the actual outcome, but the current suspicion with prediction markets is that some of the participants do have that influence, or are being intentionally helped by people that can)

This gets into game theory and doesn't follow a predetermined flow like you're suggesting.

It's a bit like playing poker...does the guy who just went all in have pocket Aces or not?

It really isn't at all like poker and really is a lot like the predetermined flow I'm just describing. Prediction markets regard the actions of politicians, sportspeople or businesspeople as indications of their wider goals for the country/team/business, not bluffs to try to influence their betting action. If a company says they're planning to IPO this year, everybody reasonably assumes that means the board want to make the IPO happen, not that they've already decided against it but reckon they can make a decent amount of spare cash anonymously betting against it happening on Polymarket

It’s not really a game when one player gets to decide the outcome. In poker, the guy who went all in can’t peek at your cards and swap out his hand at the last second.

all comes down to accumulated savings and personal burn rate. Much easier for some people than others to budget for, but generally "software developer" isn't one of the more difficult positions to earn the right to be picky...

So it isn’t difficult to earn the right to be picky. But yet here you are unemployed for two years and burning through savings because of fealty toward a language…

I'm not the OP, and fealty to a language isn't why I was picky. But the reality is many software developers have substantial savings from a combination of well above average wages and non-extravagant tastes, and career paths which aren't based upon tenure, so they can always say "and others are busy accumulating two years of savings they'll never need doing things they don't want to do, because it's the default..."

And unless your investments are self sustaining - ie they throw off enough earnings to support your lifestyle without going into the principal - it is still dumb to have fealty to a language as the only reason you aren’t working.

He talked about a “burn rate” so he obviously isn’t in that position.

I talked about the burn rate. Personally I doubt using a particular language I specialised in would be a dealbreaker if I wrote code for a living, but I find the mentality that one must in all cases spend 40+ hours a week working in jobs less well matched to ones skillset and interests out of fealty to not consuming any part of the principal of ones savings (irrespective of how large they are) or making any other lifestyle changes even more unfathomable.

I didn’t say in all cases. I understand wanting to take a break because of burnout [1], family obligations, to explore a hobby, pursue a passion, etc.

But because of a language preference?

I specialize in AWS consulting + app dev. It’s something I’ve been doing for a decade, I know it well and I even did a 4 year stint at AWS working in the consulting department (full time RSU earning blue badge employee). But I wouldn’t refuse on principle to get a job that required me to spend all day on GCP or Azure.

[1] I really don’t understand burn out though. In 30 years across 10 jobs, when the “shit I have to put up with” got to high I would just get another job instead if toiling away

I shot you an email.

> If you went to a restaurant and it had Confederate flags and pro-slavery memorabilia on the walls, would you think: “Well, that’s just their political view, I don’t have to share it to eat here?”

Even more so if it's not just a personal decision to get a bite to eat, but one taken by a lobbying organization about where to host events promoting speech rights, and the new owner is co-opting their language of speech rights to justify his policy of putting Conferedate flags behind the bar (whilst actually barring more people he doesn't like than the old owner as well as scaring off most of the people who supported the organizations mission and pasting KKK event ads flyers over the top of theirs). At some point continuing to hang out there and host events for ever diminishing numbers of people who mostly seem to reinterpret everything you say as screeds against 'woke' ceases to be a "politically neutral, pro-free speech" stance.

Twitter's own first published transparency report under Musk acknowledged they suspended 3x as many accounts (for policy reasons other than spamming) in six months as they had done over an equivalent period just before he acquired it.

I was not dismissing the comment's claim, simply the poor evidence. This is better evidence, albeit uncited.

tbf those investments weren't traded on a liquid market, and I suspect Founders Fund are less worried about short term setbacks than your average mutual fund or mug punter.

But of course we also know that Musk-run public companies are immune to normal dynamics of worrying about next quarter's returns (or even worrying about the CEO publicly torching his brand equity) so the very last thing I'd imagine happening is SpaceX becoming risk averse and profitability focused

> Founders Fund are less worried about short term setbacks than your average mutual fund

Fidelity has been an investor since 2014. The only new money flows will be index and retail; everyone else has had access for years.

Those funds have more capital to allocate to profitable publicly traded companies than they did to speculative bets on unicorns, and more importantly now have an easy offramp if their investment thesis isn't as aligned with the Kardashev scale as the true believers.

The risks they care about will be more "Starlink growth slows" or "orbital datacentre has horrible operating economics" than "Starship launch anomaly" though, and I agree it'll make zero difference to how SpaceX operates both because Elon isn't afraid to tank valuations and because retail loves him unconditionally. And the bull case for SpaceX is still stronger than the bull case for Tesla which happily trades at valuations north of $1b.

That feels like a surprisingly weak moat though; costs have already fallen to the point where launch isn't the biggest cost of space hardware any more, the competition is hotting up, and whilst launch costs give Starlink an advantage over other LEO satcomms constellations, other countries have strategic incentives to underwrite the existence of that competition, and once those assets have been sent to space it's a straight fight for subscribers in a remote broadband connectivity market which is definitely real but also looks... actually not that huge, relative to a trillion dollar valuation, unless they're able to drop their prices to wired broadband levels without service degradation. Launch cadence is a bigger advantage for SpaceX than cost, but again something other entities plausibly will match, when the demand is there.

The real question is what comes first: viable commercial large scale infrastructure in space that might create new demand for SpaceX launches, or the competition?

SpaceX is pitching their own orbital data centres as a ready to go source of demand for lots and lots of Starship launches, but the unit economics of those vs boring old ground-based server racks and solar farms look dubious even before one considers just how convenient a justification it is rolling Elon's loss making businesses into the IPO.

The cadence point is understated. SpaceX launched 130+ times in 2025. The next closest was around 15. That's not a gap that closes in 2-3 years even with heavy subsidies, because it's not just the rocket, you need to account for the operational framework of doing it every 3 days.

the cadence is very important, but I don't think the operational framework is much of a moat (not having reusability and/or actual demand is a bigger obstacle to overcome). SpaceX went from 30 to >130 between 2021 and 2024, launching most of the satellites currently in orbit in the process.

You don't do that without pre-planning or being very very good at what you do, but most of the competition (including those that will fail) is targeting that. They don't need to scale as big or as fast as SpaceX to deliver enough comms satellites to orbit to kill any hopes of Starlink becoming a permanent low-latency connectivity monopolist. Plus of course most competitors in the connectivity space are able to spend a fraction of their overall hardware budget launching on SpaceX...

>That feels like a surprisingly weak moat though

Lol, the classic "I can build a reusable rocket in a weekend" comment.

> If we take this as face value, and say that the absolute best case scenario is there are literally no other uses for AI but helping programmers program faster, given 4.4 million software devs, with an average cost to the company of $200,000 (working off the US here, including benefits/levels/whatever should be close), those 4.4 million devs with 20% productivity would save roughly 176 billion dollars a year.

I don't think that's necessarily out of line with struggling to return a profit to investors though: an individual company is only ever going to capture a tiny fraction of the productivity improvements it enables its customer base to make[1], its own cost base is unusually high for tech, and investors are seeking a 10x+ return on an $852B valuation for a company that isn't even the market leader in that segment (which isn't the only segment, but it's the optimum B2B one). You can have a great business with a great value proposition and a sustainable moat and still not generate the desired returns on investment at a $852B valuation.

[1]and that's productivity improvements over the best-known free models, not productivity improvements over reading StackOverflow