> U.S. President Donald Trump yesterday fired all 24 members of the National Science Board (NSB), the body that oversees the National Science Foundation (NSF). Many science advocates see it as the latest step by his administration to erode—some would say destroy—the independence of the 76-year-old research agency.
If the US president has always been able to fire them, then they were never truly independent.
TBD, the defining trait of this administration is illegal acts that get overturned later. The point of this isn’t to be right, it’s “you might beat the rap, but you won’t beat the ride” abuse of process.
I reject the premise. The President is not a king, he isn't presumptively allowed to fire anyone he'd like. The statute establishing the National Science Board (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/1863) does not give him any such power, so he doesn't have it.
NSB members are executive officers, the statute is silent on removal, and Article II makes presidential removal power the default. Silence means he can fire them.
Article II says no such thing. Humphrey's Executor established a useful compromise between "the Constitution is silent on removal" and "come on, is it really impossible to fire a postmaster?", but Trump has chosen to defect from that compromise so I no longer feel bound to accept it. Until he reinstates all independent agency heads he's purported to fire, I don't accept any removals he performs without explicit authority as legitimate.
if a court overturns or reinterprets that, then it is the law. America is a common law country, not a civil law country. The process of litigation and court precedent is how laws work in a common law country, so I don't see how your framing of the situation is really all that valid.
In experiments, triggering BTSP is often done using a two-photon imaging + patch-clamp technique, where neurotransmitters are uncaged onto single spines to simulate pre-synaptic input, followed by a current injection to produce a dendritic plateau potential.
According to Iliad 2.645-670, in the direct vicinity of Egypt (notably 1000+ years before those mummies got wrapped) ships from Rhodes (Lindos, Ialysos and Kameiros) and also Crete had taken part in the Trojan War (Knossos and Gortyn, Phaistos and Rhytion).
Yeah maybe my standard is high but PG is just another essayist. I’d rather reach for real literature or historical non-fiction before PG. I will grant for the tech industry it’s some of the more insightful stuff I’ve seen but I don’t need more folk wisdom, I need more screen-free doing and less consumption of text.
Unfortunately I can't say, SAI is very hush hush on what projects it has (until I chooses to announce ofc). All I can say is my (much smaller team) is working on very unrelated stuff
> How is a VSCode fork and a open weight LLM fine-tune worth $60B?
Ignoring future business ideas, Cursor reported reached $2 billion+ annualized revenue run rate in 2026, doubling from 2025. Recent financing rounds reached high-end valuation between $30 billion and $50 billion.
Revenue without expenses is meaningless. Annualized revenue is even worse. It's like a gambler bragging that they spin through $20,000 a month. Yeah, but for how long?
If you give me a billion, I can do an annualized revenue run rate of ~$12 billion just by selling a dollar for 99 cents.
“annualized revenue run rate” is a bogus accounting term. It’s like taking a paycheck and multiplying it by 365. Notice the complete lack of any mention of profits.
Taking my paycheck and multiplying would be an excellent measure of my yearly salary. I don't understand how that analogy is meant to imply that the approach is nonsensical.
But then the analogy doesn't work at all? ARR isn't calculated by multiplying revenue to 30 years and then saying that that's 1 year's revenue; what criticism is being made here?
they pick some month with the higest revenue. Unlike your income, a business makes different amounts each month based on some trends and many other factors, and they can varry wildly.
I'm talking about per-request model remember? With extensive prompt you realistically can have one request every 10 minutes because the agent will be busy for at least 10 minutes executing it. They aren't rate limiting that.
yeah i just canceled my cursor sub and switched back to vscode. work pays for my claude max sub, no point paying for cursor anymore when i can just use openrouter every few months to test other models if i want
I mean the best argument I see for cursor is that you can easily switch between AIs, which is convenient since they seem to run at 80-90% up time (with those 10-20% clustered at West coast working hours). But the big AI companies are likely to keep an edge over Open-source fine-tunes and they are able to subsidize the coding agents in a way Cursor can't.
To add to this, Cursor provides a high value go to market strategy for X.AI's modeling efforts. Cursor's own modeling efforts would require an extreme investment of capital to compete. Capital which X.AI has already spent or is planning to spend.
I don't think we can use normal valuation methods for these AI companies.
Things are moving so fast, and these companies have no moat whatsoever. Purchasing a company for 30x annual revenue (and as others have pointed out, how much of this revenue goes straight to companies like Anthropic?), without knowing if it's even going to exist in 3-5 years, seems bonkers.
I mean, congratulations to the founders on becoming billionaires in record time, but this is uncharted territory.
> AI is "improving" code bases to make subtle errors and edge cases harder to detect debugging without using AI will be impossible. Will a human developer actually be able to understand a code base that has been coded up by an AI?
Huh? It’s just code that you can read. Why do you think the code will be impregnable by a team of human minds?
Because code does not include the thought processes that went into creating the final code. Take a second and have a look at the Linux kernel code base and get into that. It's surprising how some code only make sense if you understand the bigger picture.
So it will be with AI code that has just been generated and blindly added to the code base. It makes everything work but sometimes, perhaps not always, the devil lies in the details.
Take any book, open it up to a random middle section, read it. I can read the words but I don't understand the story. And so it is with code.
So, how does aj engineer new to a code base add new features? They read the code base, understand the architecture and structure and make changes. An agent can do the same.
Why is it hilarious?
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