Patreon Preview – 438. Bloodsport for Billionaires

I think that's 2026 and then coming down the pipeline. I mean, everything you laid out there, things are continuing apace. Anthropic is settling their copyright dispute, their $1.5 billion copyright dispute. I got some emails about it because Too Smart, my first book was included, was one of the titles that was illicitly included into Anthropics training data sets. The problem wasn't that they included the book. It's so funny because the problem is not that they included the book in its training set. The problem was how they acquired the books, which is they mass-downloaded things from Libgen and stuff. So they pirated the books. Shout out to Meta. We love our pirates, don't we? Meta and Drompic. And the reason why they're settling for a whopping $1.5 billion copyright settlement is to avoid the potential criminal penalty of, I think it's $300,000 per book. It's so crazy that they didn't go for that. It's so crazy. I would have gone for that. And I think, I know 1.5 billion, I know the lawyers are drooling over that, but 300,000 a book would have killed the company. Yeah, I think for every title you have in this lawsuit with Anthropic, I think every person gets like and that like split between the authors the publishers and the lawyers I surprised those you know I surprised all the fucking greedy companies involved in publishing a book They want to go for a lick You tell me they could have had a billion settlement? Anthropic doesn't even make money. They don't even make money. And they have to pay out $1.5 billion. Imagine if they had to pay $150 billion. I mean, and that's because they ain't the ones paying it, right? Right. We need to... I'm playing a violin I'm playing a dirge for all the venture capitalists who are actually footing the bill for 1.5 billion. Can we have a moment of silence for our big beefy boys who are doing the Lord's work, who are fighting every day on the front lines, throwing money at firms whose liquidity events they'll never see? A dumb society plants trees for generations that are not currently alive. A smart society makes investments in startups that current generations will never ever get to try the product of because it goes bankrupt. A dumb society plants trees for a generation that's not alive. A smart society cuts down the trees planted by the previous dumb generations. yeah yeah yeah yeah you know and because why you don't need those trees fucking idiots right get rid of them yeah thanks for planting them but dummies you don't need them anymore you're just leaving value on the table i don't need that shirt which does go to i wonder like the the anthropic ipo maybe this uh lawsuit has got some of their investors real itchy and are like you need to go liquid now or else we are not reinvesting in your latest round Although none of this money is drying up Literally before we got on to record I saw that the vibe-coding startup Lovable has just raised $330 million at a $6.6 billion valuation. That sounds right. It's a vibe-coding startup. The whole business proposition is we are a wrapper plus a bunch of other stuff like data pipelining and good UX design and all that kind of stuff. A mesh of models, a bunch of other stuff. We are giving you access to models like Gemini 3.5 and ChatGPT 5. Through that, you will be able to automagically build yourself tools, software tools, a website for this or data visualization for that or an e-commerce platform for your small business. And, you know, the whole, it speaks to the, you know, we're democratizing the tools of coding through a chatbot interface. And there's a big market out there for stuff like that. and that is reflected in this company that was only founded in 2023, getting a $6.6 billion valuation, raising $330 million, a company that I think most people, no, I know the vast majority of people have never and will never hear of this company. No. And God bless them. God bless them for never having to learn about this bullshit One of the dictionaries made vibe coding their word of the year We do live in the stupidest timeline. We live in a society. Okay? You want to know how I got these? You want to know how I got this wealth? I don't know. What would the joker, you know? Yeah, it would be. It would probably be that. You want to know wow, I got these scores. Oh my God. Well, there is a lot to come in the new year. Well, you know, we need, we should do, you know, I always think, I always love it when Paris does the ranking system. We should do something. Well, this episode will come out after that we were on the Tech Won't Save Us livestream with Paris and Brian, where we did get to learn who won the bracket for worst tech person of the year. It's a beautiful choice. Who are you pulling for, Ed? Who are you pulling for? I mean, look, the listeners will already know. It will be resolved. But who are you pulling for? You know, I'm pulling for someone who isn't on the list, but is there always in my heart. You know, the king of kings. you know the son of sons right the herald of the rising sun right the one and only Masayoshi-san but he didn't make it he didn't make it that far the sun always rises in the east it always rises in the east that's who I want to win one year but I think I think the sun has sadly enough set on him and his empire Yeah.