Joshua Kabler

[Joshua Kabler @JoshuaKabler]

@AngelicaOung I dunno, it's so subjective. I'm not getting negative vibes from red font. I want to see your version of those book covers that would be more balanced! Maybe do a quick AI mockup?

[Joshua Kabler @JoshuaKabler]

Your logic is a bit flawed here. China’s own development path undercuts the pure free-trade optimism you're pushing. China protected its market, built scale behind barriers, and only later competed aggressively abroad—often with accusations of dumping in steel, solar, EVs, and now advanced hardware. Expecting the Global South to industrialize while absorbing the resulting surplus capacity without similar tools is optimistic and naive.. especially when you look at Africa.

[Joshua Kabler @JoshuaKabler]

@HaraldBindeus @shaunrein He was originally from Russia btw..

[Max Anderson @MaxAnderson]

As someone who has personally spent $500k / mo+ on Google Ads for years, I can tell you with certainty:

This revenue growth in Search is artificial & extremely unhealthy for Google’s business long term

Search volumes are declining as legacy search is being increasingly cannibalized by non-monetized LLM queries

Google’s response?

Manufacture revenue growth via short-sighted, highly extractive, customer-hostile tactics. I.e. charge advertisers more for lower quality clicks, including clicks they do not want and explicitly did not approve Google to charge them for

A few examples to illustrate:

For all of its history until recently, Google operated on a 2nd price auction model

I.e. if you bid $5 CPC and the next highest bidder bids $1 CPC, Google charged you $1.01 for the click (one penny more than the 2nd highest bidder) rather than the $5 you bid

This was a genius move by Google early on as it incentivizes advertisers to input their true maximum willingness to pay rather than trying to play the game of bidding low and constantly adjusting to try to stay just ahead of the next highest bidder while still not paying too much

However recently, Google silently deprecated the 2nd price auction and began charging advertisers as much as their bid and budget caps allow, regardless of what anyone else is bidding

It’s a short-sighted cash grab at the expense of the long term health of the advertiser ecosystem

Making thing worse, Google also recently nerfed keyword targeting precision

Google previously had precise keyword targeting settings that allowed advertisers pick individual search phrases to bid on, defined down to the character w/ exact match or phrase match targeting

This was one of the core features that made search advertising magic, enabling advertisers to run extremely precise campaigns based on exactly what their target customer typed

But now, even if you bid on a specific term or phrase using the strictest exact
-match targeting settings, Google will show your ad across 1000’s of unrelated keywords, labeling them as as “exact match (close variant)”

The definition of “close variant” means whatever they want it to and changes constantly. The result is advertisers get billed for clicks that are totally irrelevant to their business and that their targeting settings explicitly forbid Google from targeting. Google does it anyway and there’s no ability to turn this off

So now exact match is broad match, and broad match is just meaningless spam

This is all very bad for advertisers, but for Google, it allows them to show your ad and bill you for clicks across 1000x more searches that were previously going unmonetized (mainly because they’re garbage queries no one wants)

This is how you grow revenue atop declining search volumes

Lastly, and perhaps most egregiously, Google quietly stopped respecting budget caps by a factor of 2x. For example campaigns we’ve been running for years with $1000 daily budget caps suddenly began spending $2000+ per day

And the extra spend is entirely on the garbage keywords Google arbitrarily throws in as “exact match (close variants)” which have no value to our business, but can’t be turned off

Google offers no refunds nor any recourse for overspend or spend on keywords you explicitly did not target

These are not the actions of a healthy business. These are the actions of company whose core business is in decline but desperately needs to pump quarterly earnings so Wall Street will continue to fund insane capex while hopefully looking through their rapidly deteriorating negative free cash flow

Google operated a benevolent monopoly for the better part of 25 yrs

Meaning the value Google captured from Search was but a small fraction of the value it created, and that spread produced a potential energy that justified expectations of high earnings growth far, far into the future

This is now no longer the case

At the alter of AI capex, Google is sacrificing the golden goose

[Joshua Kabler @JoshuaKabler]

@cpk @NateSilver538 The big issue isn't temperature or rain for me, it's the latitude and the corresponding shortness of days during the winter..

[Eli Steele @Hebro_Steele]

Landon says it costs $4,000 for a kid to play club soccer. (I'd say its higher.) Let's say there are 14 players on a team. That's $56,000 per team, not counting opportunity cost and travel cost for each family. This is a business. And one that fails to deliver: 1) there are not enough good coaches to go around, 2) parents expect something for their money that they're not getting, and 3) most players are not getting the individual attention they need to improve. Just like the education system favors teacher unions over students, we're favoring the coaching/administrative apparatus over player development.

[Joshua Kabler @JoshuaKabler]

The lead up to the conflict was complex, but the root truth was that Japan was eagerly invading and colonizing it's neighboring countries in its zealous quest to match the European powers. It's actions in China, Korea, Vietnam, and the Phillipines left lasting scars in the populations of those countries. Trying to deny what happened to the civilians in those countries is willfully ignorant.

[Joshua Kabler @JoshuaKabler]

@yatharthmann Source on the mocking?

[Joshua Kabler @JoshuaKabler]

@FriedScones You could honestly say this applies to any tourist destination… ranging from Martha’s Vineyard or Myrtle Beach… different degrees of intensity but its the same anywhere that’s desirable now that global wealth and reduced barriers to travel enable this.

[Joshua Kabler @JoshuaKabler]

@tpgoebel Is a software engineer actually a real engineer? As in did they have to study at an engineering school that teaches how to think like an engineer? Or is it just a job title for a CS major?

[Joshua Kabler @JoshuaKabler]

@morris_que14 It's not like TSMC is putting in much effort to train or recruit good local talent... They are known to underpay compared to Intel and have a crappy, insular work culture that marginalizes non-Taiwanese employees.

[Google Research @GoogleResearch]

Introducing TurboQuant: Our new compression algorithm that reduces LLM key-value cache memory by at least 6x and delivers up to 8x speedup, all with zero accuracy loss, redefining AI efficiency. Read the blog to learn how it achieves these results: https://t.co/CDSQ8HpZoc

[Lukasz Olejnik @lukOlejnik]

McKinsey spent two years telling clients it was ahead of the curve on AI. It built an internal platform used by all 40,000 staff, and claimed AI now drove 40% of its revenue. It turned out the platform had basic security gaps. 22 API endpoints required no login. Impact: 46.5 million internal messages, 728,000 sensitive file names, and write access to the prompts controlling how the AI behaved. Fixed after two years on production. https://t.co/7hk9O8ARwc

[Joshua Kabler @JoshuaKabler]

@AngelicaOung So the country that prevents Taiwan from having embassies anywhere is kindly offering its services to its citizens.

[Joshua Kabler @JoshuaKabler]

@JK_Lundblad @AngelicaOung Tesla's sell very well in China so I think they can indeed compete. Especially on self driving tech.

[Joshua Kabler @JoshuaKabler]

@AngelicaOung Please read the community notes on this. He's discontinuing production on the two models that represent only 3% of total sales volume but require a lot of extra factory space to free up that space for optimus.

[Joshua Kabler @JoshuaKabler]

@phl43 I just wish China's government had handled things better in the early days of the COVID outbreak. Delaying releasing the genome for a month and denying human to human transmission until it was undeniable turned a containable outbreak into a global catastrophe.

[Joshua Kabler @JoshuaKabler]

@AngelicaOung Or this is just a way for Xi to ruin his reputation as part of the purge. They can't say they got rid of him for disagreeing with Xi.

[Joshua Kabler @JoshuaKabler]

@AngelicaOung Personally I feel like its state-influenced if not state-directed. Provide free or low-cost alternatives just to prevent external competitors from gaining profit and/or total dominance in a critical industry. You don't need to worry about being profitable if you have Uncle Xi.

[Joshua Kabler @JoshuaKabler]

@AngelicaOung It's quite easy actually. You won't be able to register the car in the US, same way we can't just import a Kei car from Japan and start driving it around here.