> So, how did the endowments fare? Pitchbook reports that the 50 largest university endowments saw an annual return of 8.3 percent over the past 10 years. And how did a plain vanilla 60-40 Vanguard mutual fund (60 percent stocks, 40 percent bonds) do? It returned 8.38 percent over the same period without the added risk of speculative investments in risky private assets.
> Let that sink in. Endowment funds got no extra payoff for investing in private equity funds or other private assets.
> The lesson? US endowment funds could have made the same return by joining with millions of ordinary people and investing in a plain vanilla mutual fund.
I was wondering why there wasn't a DOJ concern when Amazon Go did the same thing:
> Amazon Go: Early on, Amazon was clear that it was testing “Just Walk Out” tech — and it was known (at least in tech circles) that they had humans reviewing edge cases through video feeds. Some even joked about the “humans behind the AI.”
> Their core claim was that eventually the tech would get better, and the human backup was mostly for training data and quality assurance.
> They didn’t say, “this is 100% AI with zero human help right now.”
> Nate: Claimed it was already fully automated.
> Their CEO explicitly said the AI was doing all the work — “without human intervention” — and only used contractors for rare edge cases.
> According to the DOJ, the truth was: humans were doing everything, and AI was just a branding tool.
> Investors were told it was a software platform, when it was really a BPO in disguise.
There are some pretty major differences between what Waymo does and what a remote driving service (like the Vegas deployment by Vay mentioned upthread). Imagine that the car has a remote connection to a human while driving and the human misses that another vehicle is about to hit T-bone the taxi. Whose responsibility is it to stop?
With Waymo vehicles, it's the car's responsibility to sense the issue and brake, so we say that the car is driving and the human is a "remote assistant". With Vay, it's the human's responsibility because they are the driver.
This ends up having a lot of meaningful distinctions across the stack, even if it seems like a superficial distinction at first.
i continuously asked for an optimized database schema several times and all i keep getting is these damn shakespeare sonnets. starting to wonder if they are on to something...
I had no idea. There was an Amazon Go right in my workplace in 2019 (Brookfield Place) and I got lunches there almost daily. I loved it -- felt like magic, and it was crazy fast. I guess it was just an illusion (as all magic is).
There was something similar run by a German university near the hotel I was staying at. As an American I had to use the cashier like normal but they had signs about how the Amazon-Go like process the students were experimenting with would work, including picture and descriptions on how to help it not be confused.
Elon has also made a lot of claims over the years. Where is FSD or whatever they call it now? The whole solar roof tiles presentation was a lie at the time. P2P Starship travel is impossible but is being "sold" to the public as possible and many other things.
Exactly.
In this case it's pretty clear how Nate was defrauding investors with the claims.
Amazon Go made fraudulent claims, but not only had the legal savvy to hedge those claims, they didn't directly raise fund from investors based on those claims.
Sadly, I think we all know the answer - because laws don't apply to large corporations or wealthy, powerful individuals in the same way they apply to the rest of us.
Easy to hate on this, but the existence of these kinds of things is so fascinating. Hundreds (maybe thousands) of people are out there generating AI click bait because people or system somewhere allows / encourages / pays for this market to exist
They are fascinating in the same sense road accidents or fatal diseases are - some people might like to watch them, but overall there is nothing good about this.
And the feedback loop means we’re doing fuzzing on the human brain! If we can just take the human out of the loop and let the AI post and use a genetic algorithm to tweak its content, we’ll all be getting rooted in no time.
That’s not what’s happening here. The get-rich-quick grifters started selling AI slop manuals. It’s like saying brands that spend a lot on ads are successful. Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
Why would a new exchange result in worse retail fills? They're obligated to get the NNBO price across all exchanges, and much of the retail flow doesn't even hit exchanges at all (internalized by Citadel/Virtu).
I get that quants can get their alpha and whatever higher order terms, but if a consumer is buying to hold or using some other non-day trading strategy, why is this bad?
I'm confused why The New York Stock Exchange opening another NYSE office location has anything to do with monopoly status. The New York Stock Exchange is obviously still going to own both. If it was a monopoly before opening a second location it still will be, same as if it wasn't a monopoly.
> Ultimately, investors mainly care about the returns
Not quite. It also matters how and when returns are generated. Some vol funds make 1–3% a year on average, but they still manage billions because when markets crash, they (presumably) crush it — and that’s when investors need them the most
Ah, sorry about that! Was trying to keep it on the dark mode side, but I may have gone too far in that direction ha - let me see if I can change the color scheme really quickly to be at least white for the text!
