Fair point, but no one is clearly articulating what AWS gets out of this. They don't get the DuckDB IP, that's owned by the foundation. All the work that the team at DuckLabs is putting in growing DuckDB and DuckLake are already in principle converting into compute/storage demand in AWS. So what does AWS actually want and how will it change DuckDB to accomplish it?

Maybe an OLAP db that scales down for serverless?

No, value is determined by what participants in a market are willing to pay for something. The only reason you are able to say that the value of gold is determined by its weight is that gold is a commodity and no matter what you paid for it you'll find others willing to pay market price.

Simon is saying that companies are (today) willing to pay API prices for tokens which is as good as any determination of value.

People said the same thing when he paid $1B for Instagram, for it to look like a crazy bargain a couple of months later.

People also said the same thing when he poured $70Bn into the Metaverse, and they were right.

comparing an acquihire of two people by analogy to a $70B investment is a bit egregrious... this event is pocket change to big tech.

Less than pocket change.

The money is irrelevant but it does show that Zuck is all out of ideas and desperate to keep up in the AI race.

If Moltbook becomes as big as Instagram I’m giving up on tech and moving to the mountains to raise goats.

Blackadder: Sir, I have been unable to replace the dictionary. I am therefore leaving immediately for Nepal, where I intend to live as a goat.

I am a goat.

They will have to acquire Lobstagram next

ROFL

It’ll be disappointing if Moltbook is somehow connected to the Metaverse or represents the best of what Metaverse at Facebook could ever be.

Who exactly said that about the Instagram acquisition?

Yeah I remember the discourse around that acquisition as being a really smart play to shore up the new frontier in social media as Facebook grew stale and uncool.

Tons of critical comments on HN at the time, for one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3817840. And most of the positive ones viewed it as a defensive measure rather than another Google + YouTube story.

Read the linked issue. The bot did not find anything interesting. The issue has the solution spelled out and is intended only as a first issue for new contributors.

Pretty terrible for SpaceX. Of course they paid a crazy inflated price for xAI in an attempt to cash in on the IPO. This just devalues SpaceX and exposes the investors to all the AI bubble risk.

What an empty threat. Apple has 1/3 of the mobile market share in Europe and people here are not locked into the ecosystem, with 3P messaging apps like WhatsApp dominating communication. And they are trying to pull this BS at a time that they are facing ever stronger competition from foldable phones and their inability to do anything useful in AI.

The hardest part is to remember not to do it when sharing screens...

I still do it, for emphasis. Never had anyone complain thus far.

Doesn't sound misleading to me. I read "$5,000 of professional software" as paid-for software that would have cost $5,000.

So clearly it is misleading, because what they mean is definitely along the lines of "we include GIMP while Photoshop costs $999".

I don't think that's misleading. There are a lot of people out there who aren't aware that free software exists that provides a lot of the functionality of software that costs $999. They clearly say "alternatives to".

I was trying to make a point about how funny the parent post was, saying it isn't misleading while misunderstanding it and thinking that it means "paid-for software that would have cost $5,000". But perhapes I didn't understand the comment itself.

I personally think the messaging is fine, but the above comment was a clear example that some people could get it wrong.

But gimp doesn't provide the functionality of software that costs $999. That's why it's misleading. It's probably more like Affinity Photo which is £68.

Whole Affinity pack is 10% of Photoshop while providing more functionality (just Affinity Designer handles vectors like Illustrator while edits pixels as well).

Gimp finally has non-destructive editing, so is almost in same category as those two. And Krita is good for pixels as well.

Which, incidentally, is the software they compare their offering to. The only Adobe software they mention in the comparison is Adobe Premier Pro.

How is it misleading when the sentence includes the word "alternative" from the boot? Are you misreading it and blaming the author?

What's misleading about that? Did you miss the words "alternatives to" in the statement?

He most definitely did not pay $6.6B. The beauty of these OpenAI acquisitions is that they are all-stock transactions so only worth the face value in the make-believe world OpenAI investors seem to live in.

Just a guess, but I'd bet that Johnny Ive isn't exactly hurting for money. Still, the funny thing about paper money is if you have enough of it, and you're well connected (which, again, just guessing, but Johnny Ive might be) you can just borrow against it without having to make a sale or have liquid buyers. Just hope there's no margin call.

Places like EquityZen provide a market place for private stocks.

Your right it's all funny money until they are publicly traded but if they are successful it is still a ton of money. Johnny needs to feed a GulfStream - that isn't cheap;)

I admit I've not been following the Chrome saga, but what does the DoJ mean by Google divesting from Chrome? Will they have to sell the Chrome brand? Will they have to get rid of all Chrome developers? If not, what would prevent Google from keeping all the devs and just rebranding the browser to something else based on Chromium?

I truly don't understand how you could force someone to divest from an open source project. Why would they not simply prevent Google (or any company) from paying broswers to limit our choice of search engine?