I saw headlines such as ANPA bought Khaby Lames company for ~$900M but nobody is pointing out how sketchy it looks.
What I gathered, the $975M deal was paid in stock = 75,000,000 new ANPA shares to the sellers which is roughly $13 a share.
If they really issue 75M new shares (vs ~12.5M outstanding, ish), doesn't that basically destroy the scarcity and force the price to re-anchor closer to the $13ish deal valuation? Like post, deal you're at ~87.5M shares, so even a ~$1B valuation is like $11/$13 a share not $60/$100/$180.
And... $975M for an influencer operating company sounds totally crazy if there isn't any real revenue/EBITDA that supports it. Does anyone have the actual numbers for Step Distinctive / Khabys business? Any comparable deals where an influencer brand was valued anywhere close to this?
> Hong Kong-based Rich Sparkle Holdings (ANPA) reported to the SEC on Jan. 9 it was acquiring Lame's Step Distinctive Limited, and announced the $975 million all-stock transaction closed in a press release two days later.
> Rich Sparkle boasted the deal would offer a "structured, exclusive, full-chain, platform-style commercialization system" around Lame, who would be a "controlling shareholder," and whose likeness would be replicated by an "AI Digital Twin."
> Soon after, Rich Sparkle's stock skyrocketed over 650%, reaching a high of $180.64 per share on January 15, with Lame's stake worth $6.6 billion (based on his 49% ownership of Step Distinctive, which gave him a 41% stake in its buyer), though due to limited disclosure requirements for foreign entities, it's unclear whether Lame sold any shares.
> Rich Sparkle had first listed on Nasdaq six months prior in July, in a small offering of 1.25 million shares priced at $4 each with an implied enterprise value of about $50 million, according to SEC filings, and it disclosed 2024 revenue of under $6 million from "designing and printing high quality financial materials."
> Rich Sparkle's sudden shift in focus, explosive stock growth and quick crash---it's dropped as low as $41, 77% from its peak---has some critics raising "red flags."
> Lame, who has over 160 million followers on TikTok and 78 million on Instagram, only commented on the deal 11 days after Rich Sparkle announced it had closed, saying "Congratulations to the team at ANPA very excited to be a shareholder and looking forward to doing great things!" (Lame and Rich Sparkle have not responded to Forbes' requests for comment).
> Based on Rich Sparkle's most recent stock price, Lame's net worth appears to be $3 billion, but given its tiny float of less than 5%, Forbes would value it based on its financials and not its stock price, meaning he's nowhere close to being a billionaire.
I don't see any evidence that r0fl's comments are astroturfing. Sometimes people are just enthusiastic.
I appreciate your concern for the quality of the site - that fact that the community here cares so much about protecting it is the main reason why it continues to survive. Still, it's against HN's rules to post like you did here. Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? Note this part:
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [email protected] and we'll look at the data."
I was extremely excited until I looked closer and realized how many of these look like ... well AI. The article is such a good read and would recommend people check it out.
Feels like something is missing... maybe just a pixelation effect over the actual result? Seems like a lot of the images also lack continuity (something they go over in the article)
Overall, such a cool usage of AI that blends Art and AI well.
It's very cool and I don't mind the use of AI at all but I think calling it pixel art is just very misleading. It's closer to a filter but not quite that either.
That is reductive, why not call all everything CGI then? Or call CGI pixel art as well? As we’re talking about “art”, it’s necessarily going to be subjective, but pixel art has certain style aspects such as use of 2x1 lines (https://www.the-pixel-artist.com/articles/top-ten-things-new...). This is just an example, while I’m not saying that every convention must be met in order to qualify as pixel art, not having any doesn’t make a useful definition of a genre.
Yeah it leaves a lot to be desired. Once you see the AI it's hard to unsee. I actually had a few other generation styles, more 8-bit like, that probably would have lended themselves better to actual pixel-art processing, but I opted to use this fine-tune and in for a penny in for a pound, so to speak...
Yup, I'm a big fan. They'd be the first to admit that making true pixel art is very hard, and getting the AI to do it even somewhat consistently requires a lot of tuning and guardrails / processing.
At some point I couldn't fiddle with the style / pipeline anymore and just had to roll with "looks ok to me" - the whole point of the project wasn't to faithfully adhere to a style but to push the limits of new technology and learn a lot along the way
1. Interactive Debugging - It would be great if users could click through the code line by line to see how execution flows.
2. UI Improvements – There's a lot of whitespace. Consider:
- Moving the title to the top left to free up space.
- Flattening the buttons for a cleaner, more modern look.
3. More Context – A brief explanation of why visualizing goroutines is useful (e.g., debugging race conditions, understanding concurrency) could make it more accessible to newcomers.
4. Goroutine Analysis – Could be cool to highlight:
- Goroutines that are still running after execution ends.
- Common concurrency issues like improper synchronization or goroutine leaks.
While there are numerous similar services popping up each week, utilizing large language models such as GPT, we believe that the quality of our product sets us apart as more than just another AI generator, but rather as a valuable coach.
This blows my mind. I used to use Uber a bunch, and I built relationships with drivers such that I could just text them and get a ride at a certain time for a discount.
Ultimately, I wonder if Uber is prime to be disrupted if drivers got together and funded a few engineers to build a city-scale service for the hailing and payment aspect.
>Ultimately, I wonder if Uber is prime to be disrupted if drivers got together and funded a few engineers to build a city-scale service for the hailing and payment aspect.
Apparently a whole bunch of folks are trying to do just that.
I was going to provide just one example, but a web search[0] shows a whole bunch of these efforts in a variety of locales. As such, I just provided the web search results here.
Austin had that for a while when they went and banned Uber/Lyft. They were... ok? The issue ends up being that it's hard to be a one-city service that's mostly used by people who don't live in the city. If I arrive in a random city, the last thing I want to do to get to where I need to go is have to search for which app I need to install and give my CC info to in order to get a cab.
NYC used to have Juno, but it went bankrupt in 2019. I feel like if you can't run a single-city rideshare app in NYC, you're gonna have a hard time doing it anywhere else.
>NYC used to have Juno, but it went bankrupt in 2019. I feel like if you can't run a single-city rideshare app in NYC, you're gonna have a hard time doing it anywhere else.
I haven't used it (I always pay cash, as the drivers are charged ~3-5% per fare for "CC processing" when a card is used), but every NYC taxi has a feature where you can pair with the onboard system and pay with your phone.
Not sure what "pairing" requires, perhaps someone else has used this feature and can comment.
>If I arrive in a random city, the last thing I want to do to get to where I need to go is have to search for which app I need to install and give my CC info to in order to get a cab.
Searching and installing a random app introduces a slight amount of friction, but I don't think payment necessarily has to be that much of a hassle. Just use apple/google pay.
That assumes the app supports on-phone payment options like that. Obviously it's gotten more ubiquitous now, but most of the non-Uber/Lyft apps I've used in the past didn't. They often will require me to make a full account as well, give them name, address, email... I think one of them tried to make me upload a picture of my Driver's License, even thought I was very sure I wasn't signing up to be a driver.
Obviously this all could be easy, but it's amazing how many apps fail to make things easy to onboard. When I've just gotten done traveling for hours and just want to get to some place to relax, the last thing I want is to wrangle new account creation in some app where they're trying to be cheap and haven't hired any UX designers to smooth out the process because "you can rebuild Uber with 3 smart devs" as everyone on HN says.
Already happening in NYC w/ Curb, though many (like me) are staying the fuck away from it and sticking w/ Uber/Lyft. It's a matter of trust and operational complexity (that's not easily "solved" from the ground up), imho
How much more risk? Is this a hit piece by big sugar or something? This article is so sparse on details. Exposure to the sun increases the risk of cancer. Emissions let off by cars increases the risk of cancer. I’m just curious…
The HR has fairly large bounds... 1.03 to 1.25 so there is increased risk but this still does not tell you if people who consume a lot of sugar substitutes also exhibit behaviors that increase their risk of cancers. Such as also consuming highly processed food.
>Compared to non-consumers, higher consumers of total artificial sweeteners (i.e., above the median exposure in consumers) had higher risk of overall cancer (n = 3,358 cases, hazard ratio [HR] = 1.13 [95% CI 1.03 to 1.25], P-trend = 0.002). In particular, aspartame (HR = 1.15 [95% CI 1.03 to 1.28], P = 0.002) and acesulfame-K (HR = 1.13 [95% CI 1.01 to 1.26], P = 0.007) were associated with increased cancer risk. Higher risks were also observed for breast cancer (n = 979 cases, HR = 1.22 [95% CI 1.01 to 1.48], P = 0.036, for aspartame) and obesity-related cancers (n = 2,023 cases, HR = 1.13 [95% CI 1.00 to 1.28], P = 0.036, for total artificial sweeteners, and HR = 1.15 [95% CI 1.01 to 1.32], P = 0.026, for aspartame)
A HR of 1.15 means it increases your risk of cancer by 15%.
Note that if you divide the total cases by the number of study participants, you get a total cancer incidence rate of 0.0326. If we assume roughly equal numbers of participants using versus not using artificial sweeteners and solve for AVG(x, 1.15x) = 0.0326, we get 0.0303 for non-users and 0.0348 for users. So your risk goes from about 3% to 3.5%.
Not nothing, but I'm not sure that really ticks off a worry box for me. Though I don't personally eat much sweetened food at all, artificial or otherwise (work from home and enjoy cooking, so I make most everything from raw ingredients).
Those bounds are fairly wide. Also, my other frustration was an article that has provocative headline, great for sending to your friends, but doesn't do anything but link the study. What are the odds someone is going to read the study? What are the odds they are going to go and learn what HR rate is?
Seems to me all good things for this article to do.
That doesn't necessarily mean that breast cancer can be dismissed. It seems that there are increased numbers of women in both the control and artificial sweetner/cancer populations.
This morning without putting a whole lot of effort into this, I was able to winnow it down to 27.32 bits per word without any other trickery like 5bit packing. You need at most 1 bit per word to identify the real words, so that's 27.32+1 bits without the bitpacking. Doing 6 bits per letter drops that by 25%.
Now having put too much effort in, I'm around 21.6 + 1 bits per word, (17 bit packed) just by using SSP.
viginti_tres, your experience is ubiquitous. I am the exact same age and have noticed a similar pattern for everyone my age. I am sure a lot of people are well intentioned but these simple solutions of finding new friends is just not that simple. Alcohol is extremely prevalent in the US. People are self medicating and using it as a form of escapism.
One thing I have anecdotally noticed is there are some parts of the US that are much more oriented towards drinking than others, such as NYC.
What I gathered, the $975M deal was paid in stock = 75,000,000 new ANPA shares to the sellers which is roughly $13 a share.
If they really issue 75M new shares (vs ~12.5M outstanding, ish), doesn't that basically destroy the scarcity and force the price to re-anchor closer to the $13ish deal valuation? Like post, deal you're at ~87.5M shares, so even a ~$1B valuation is like $11/$13 a share not $60/$100/$180.
And... $975M for an influencer operating company sounds totally crazy if there isn't any real revenue/EBITDA that supports it. Does anyone have the actual numbers for Step Distinctive / Khabys business? Any comparable deals where an influencer brand was valued anywhere close to this?
What am I missing?
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