SiliconValleyWangChua

The history of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms is so wonderful that I wanted to write an essay entitled "Everyone is an Ordinary Person", counting the trajectories of some key historical figures during the Five Dynasties period. To sort out these trajectories is to sort out the various characteristics of human nature. Li Zhen, Guo Chongtao, Kang Yanxiao, Duan Ning, Ren Yuan'an, Zhu Hong, Zhao'an, Congjin, An, Chongrong, Du Chongwei, Su Fengji, Li Shouzhen, Li Chongjin

Why do some companies double their profits, but their stock prices can increase ninefold?

Public information shows that Buffett started buying Apple stocks in the first quarter of 2016. When the annual financial report for October 2015 was released, Apple's net profit was $53.3 billion, with a profit per share of $9.22. At the beginning of January 2016, the stock price was $96, corresponding to a P/E ratio of 10.4. In 2020, Apple had a 1:4 stock split, so the above data is equivalent to a current stock price of $24 and a profit per share of $2.30. In the annual financial report for October 2024, Apple's profit was $93.7 billion, less than twice that of 2015, but due to long-term st

The game of life can be seen as encountering all kinds of constraints (constraint) daily life, and then constantly finding the constraints that make you feel the most oppressive at the moment, relaxing them, breaking through them, or bypassing them completely from somewhere else. Every time I rely on my own efforts and successfully break through the oppression of a certain constraint, I have an extremely satisfying sense of achievement. But after a while, boredom hits, and people are eager to find the next problem about constraints, to solve it, to break through it. Boredom drives you to solve

In July 1683, the Ottoman Empire launched an attack on Vienna with a hundred and seventy thousand troops, besieging the city for two months. The campaign ended in failure with nearly eighty thousand casualties and captives. Subsequently, the Ottoman Empire's influence in Europe continued to shrink until the last Sultan abdicated in 1922. In 1683, Harvard University had only twenty-five students, and Boston was just a seaside town with 4,500 residents. Manhattan had just over four thousand people and had been taken from the Dutch by the British nineteen years earlier. Crowded, lively, and fierc

Enzo* Ferrari (1898-1988, founder of Ferrari, talks about the power of restraint and scarcity: "We will always produce one less car than the market demands." "The customer is not always right, but he must be satisfied. I make unique cars, not for everyone." "I don't want to produce more cars than I can sell with dignity."

Ziren Chuan

Du Huangshang on the art of lying flat: 'The wise ruler works hard to find the right people, but allows them to act independently. This is how Yu and Shun were able to govern effortlessly. As for the detailed and tedious tasks of managing records, books, prisons, and markets, each department should handle them, not the ruler.'

The essence of a large language model is to forcibly construct a self-consistent value system based on existing input data. Hallucinations can be seen as a natural manifestation and extension after self-consistency. Many new scientific discoveries are precisely because they encounter an 'error' in the natural world that cannot be explained by existing theories and cannot be self-consistent, so they must abandon the old theories. This roughly explains why, so far, no large language model (with so much data) can spontaneously make new scientific discoveries, because the model itself does not hav

The characteristics of a marketing account are: first, speaking decisively and unquestionably. Second, the output content has a highly industrialized, assembly-line operation, efficient like a machine gun, making the audience breathless. But speaking like this obviously lacks personal touch, and it's also obvious that the rich content is copied from various sources.

Don't hand the world over to the people you despise. However, in practice, it is not necessary to constantly fight against the people you despise. In general, the people you despise cannot resist the fear of missing out (FOMO) and will collapse after one or two Bear Markets, giving up their positions.

Automating various small operations in the physical world, eliminating manual intervention, is a process of 'softwareization'. When all the details that require manual intervention are removed, the power of 'software eating the world' can slowly be seen. The core of 'software eating the world' is: scalability, composability, zero marginal cost, so it will crush everything that is not scalable, difficult to combine, and has marginal costs.

Large language models belong to an AI that exists only on paper, rather than an AI built on real-world feedback. Therefore, there may be hallucinations during the process.

People don't really need frens. What they need is partners. Only when there are business transactions and money exchanges can we consider them as partners. The larger the transaction amount, the more frequent the transactions, and the longer the duration, the more stable energy they can provide to each other, and the more valuable the cooperation relationship becomes. Frens without financial relationships means that they cannot truly provide substantial energy to each other, and in the end, they will mostly fade away and completely disconnect. Selling is easy to understand. But only selling wi

The most heated topics discussed in financial media often have little investment value because the information is too abundant and well-known to the general public. Things that the general public is unaware of, if a little liquidity seeps in later, the price can skyrocket.

Various liquidity crises in the past 30 years on the U.S. Capital Market: In 1)1994, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates several times in a row, pulling short-term interest from 3% to 5.5%, leading to panic dumping of long-term Treasury bonds, and the 30-year long-term Intrerest rate at the end of the year once reached 8%. The tail of this round of interest rate hikes was marked by the filing for bankruptcy protection in December of that year in Orange County, Southern California, due to huge losses due to speculation on Intrerest Rate derivatives. After that, the Bull Market, which last

Continuously increasing one's opportunity cost means that once a new thing or new value system with significantly higher efficiency is discovered, one should unhesitatingly abandon the previously inefficient system and value system, regardless of any emotional memories and intuition that may have formed under the previous inefficient system. Abandoning the old ways may be temporarily uncomfortable, but not doing so will eventually result in severe punishment by objective laws, which may even be catastrophic. The more extensive and longer-lasting one's knowledge system is, the higher the opport

Recently, I found that I spend much more time talking to AI than reading, and this should be a major trend. Talking to AI allows me to constantly ask 'why' and request explanations of some mechanisms and principles in language that a five-year-old can understand, which makes learning much more efficient than reading.

Many people say that industry is heavy assets, without competitive advantage, and without pricing power. Because it is heavy assets, it can be seen and touched, and one feels real and secure. Moreover, after forming the habit of selling labor, one will unthinkingly generate a sense of righteousness and self-deception. Whether it is valuable or not does not depend on reality or illusion, but on whether there is a monopolistic advantage and pricing power at that moment.