Whenever you buy a business, you have to have some idea of the valuation.

The IPOs need to have buyers. The buyers will have some idea of the business valuation, as will the sellers. This is decided before the actual stock starts trading.

Specifically, the "underwriters" will go around finding people willing to buy what is being offered. This gives some idea of where it will begin to trade.

Uh.. The big guys do.

Yeah, but they just do that for inclusion into some investment products that require a dividend.

Share buybacks are always better for the company and investors.

This isn't 2010. Almost all big tech companies are paying dividends now.

Ever looked at MSFT or AAPL’s dividends? It’s a token “here’s your fucking dividend, now go away” percentage. (I’m sure it’s actually to placate funds that require a dividend, but I repeat myself.)

As a retired ‘softie, my spouse still holds a fair bit of MSFT, so I just looked: $0.98…on a $540.00 stock. Yeah, we won’t be living off that in our old age.

Yeah big dividends are for companies that can't do anything better than the money.

Why would you want a dividend? It’s mathematically better for a business to do share buybacks and allow investors to choose when to sell shares so they can minimize tax liability.

That depends a whole lot on your tax jurisdiction, your other income and your investment strategy.

In both scenarios, the shareholder can get the same amount of cash if they want it. Except with a dividend, they are forced to pay tax now.

I suppose there could exist a jurisdiction where dividends are taxed less than capital gains. I would be curious to know if there are any.

Australia has one of, if not the highest rates of CGT in the world.

ASX dividend stocks are popular with retirees in particular because the dividends are fully franked, meaning you get a credit for the tax already paid on the dividends by the company.

If you’re in a low enough tax bracket, this can turn into a tax refund if the tax the company paid exceeds your own personal tax liability.

Interesting, thanks for the info.

No one is saying they want a dividend, I'm explaining how small the dividends of big tech companies are.

It's trivial for those providing internet links to go up the stack and cloud data centers but they typically don't.

Staying in your lane is often a better choice.

Maybe expanding through acquisition is the best of both worlds. So replit might be bought.

I'm not expressing an opinion on whether they should or shouldn't.

Think of MCP like CORBA and COM+ and all those other systems.

The same reasons those were needed is why this is needed.

pi harness composes them just fine if you're specific about what you want to do.

"Find the latest prod JIRAs and analyze the related logs"

It's literally JSON-RPC I'm not sure why you say it's a REST API. It's not even close to a REST API.

In this context/application I see a lot of similarities.

They both provide stateless RPC methods and human readable metadata that makes them easy to route.

You could ask why json-rpc was even necessary for 2.0. I think mostly just for stdio and backwards compatibility.

REST is explicitly not RPC.

In the venn diagram of MCP and REST, there is an (optional) overlap for sure but one does not subsume the other.

Have you written a kernel? Even toy kernels are hard to make without vulnerabilities.

I use AI to shop all the time. I make it find the cheapest option.

I also use it to book ubers and uber eats but I check the result first.

I don't understand this logic.

It's going to take time, but it'll happen.

If you assume the machine will be compromised, is there any way around this?

Confidential computing and hardware security are starting to be an actual thing now. They are mostly used for DRM and I would not trust them when your adversary is three letters long.

Hardware security used to be a joke. Now verified boot, encrypted RAM, key storage in hardware security models and hardware and OS attestation are getting somewhere.

But if you're important enough of a target to a state actor they will magically have some workaround. For your average raid on your home they might actually work depending on the specific setup.

For really high threat models you want zero trust models with E2EE as well as staying anonymous so no one knows where the hardware (and the people which might be much more vulnerable) are located. Tor exists for a reason.

Yep, physical access = game over. A tale as old as time. It doesn't matter who etched the silicon.

Telegram supposedly gets around this by distributing keys over various regions.

But surely intel services are smart enough to get people in there illegally.

90% of Telegram chats live in cleartext on their servers; no one would need to go to those lengths to get chat data from them.

Telegram chats not being end-to-end crypted are encrypted at rest on their servers. In this case telegram definitely controls the encryption keys but distributes them across jurisdictions to mitigate some risks.

There's also no way around a $5 wrench, but you'd be hard pressed to find that wrench for $5.

I'm with you.

But I don't think they see it in ideological terms.

For them, the bottom line is that it's basically going to double cloud revenue over time.

How many times in history do you get to literally increase an existing revenue stream by 100%?