Having a London domicile often leads to an overstating in venture capital raised for the UK ecosystem.
For example, I've funded Polish and Indian startups that chose the UK as their legal domicile because we couldn't be bothered to hire a legal team to draft a contract to Polish or Indian specifications.
Builder.ai [0] is a great example of that - it was an Indian startup that was domiciled in London to simplify raising capital from Gulf investors.
Startups like Builder AI use London because a.) they want to raise money from filthy rich Arab investors and b.) those guys are not known for doing much due diligence. They go more by vibes and hype and who's on the existing cap table. Also c.) they are very comfortable with London because it was so much easier back in the day to launder or siphon away funds from their home countries. London is an extremely popular destination for Gulf Arabs.
You'll get a lot of shady startups of that kind in London for this reason.
Not all Arab investors are bad - for example, funds associated with the Emirate of Abu Dhabi (eg. ADIA, Mubadala) has been extremely successful in their investments explicitly because Tahnoon studied engineering in San Diego (and rolled at Gracie's gym) back in the day.
Additonally, for every failed investment like builder.ai a fund like QIA and MS Ventures has had multiple other successful investments.
The perception of "shadiness" in the London VC scene arises simply because a subset of non-American VC simply does not care about value investing and product-led growth.
Additonally, it's not like the UK doesn't have good VCs and Growth Equity investors - for example Index Ventures and Ballie Guiffold both have a solid track record.
Being overly congratulatory and being overly pessimistic about the UK scene does more harm than good.
LoL, the Mubadala and ADIA funds are the most corrupt of them all. There's obviously the stuff that happens over the table, but there's a shit ton that happens under the table. This doesn't translate into VC and the startup world directly, but indirectly as they follow a fund of funds model with VC investing, and those VC funds don't tend to do their due diligence.
I have yet to see one direct startup investment from Mubadala do well. Compare that to a regional fund like BECO or Wamda (both composed of ex founders).
Does this also impact US metrics for capital raised? My understanding is that the Delaware C-Corp is still the startup standard for founders from anywhere in the world to raise global capital, which I imagine skews where the capital actually ends up flowing if they are actually building a company in a foreign location and just using the Delaware entity as a holding co.
Somewhat, but not to the degree as you see in the UK, Singapore, or HK.
Until a couple years ago, it was difficult for someone without a SSN to create a Delaware C-Corp and even despite current political instability, the depth of IP, capital, and R&D available in the US is difficult to replicate outside China, Japan, and maybe India.
It should be based on the number of successes relative to the amount raised or ROI and that picture is quite different. In that sense London is way behind SV.
But it isn't true. For the rest of the world SV is still the place to go to, one way or another. The difference is just too big. What you could say is that London is the place to try to raise money if you can't raise in SV. But you'll have to realize that your chances of success are dramatically lower that way to the point that you're going to end up a with a small fraction of the stock yourself after the inevitable dilution through follow up rounds because you couldn't raise a large enough round to begin.
VC in London is harsh, both for the start-ups and for the VCs. What does happen is that a company manages to stay alive long enough to raise a secondary round in the USA, but then you can't really make the original claim in the TFA.
> But it isn't true. For the rest of the world SV is still the place to go to, one way or another.
We are using different meanings for the same phrase. SV is the best place to raise, IF YOU CAN AND ARE WILLING TO RAISE THERE. But not everyone can, nor does everyone want to. And of the locations that are not in the US, London dominates.
And hell, Americans raise in Boston, Seattle, NYC, and so on. Not even all Americans move to SV, let alone people who may not even get a visa to enter the US.
Eh, I know quite a few. LegalTech, hardware, obviously fintech, quite a bit of AI. But I work at a London startup so my social circle might be different to yours.
Isn't a vote being verifiably tied to a person actually a bad thing? Then you can actually check what e.g. your wife or kids voted for and punish them if they vote wrong. Or get people to pay for votes, but doing that at scale is obviously hard.
Maybe this isn't what you meant by verifiable, but there are systems with this property and they are bad.
The property you are talking about is generally called "deniability" in the literature, whereas the GP is talking "verifiability" ie. being able to verify your own vote is cast correctly. They are both valuable, sometimes mutually exclusive, but not necessarily, see eg. https://petsymposium.org/popets/2024/popets-2024-0021.pdf
No, because they have no idea what your true ballot ID was.
They can force you to show them a ballot, the idea is that all ballot ID's get made public. You could be showing them anybody's and they'll never have any way of knowing.
It seems you mean something simailar to Selene voting system where a tally board is published containing tracker vote pairs. Each voter can decrypt their tracker once the voting phase closes to check the vote and also means to fake the decryption for claiming another other tracker from the tally board as yours.
Not necessarily. In Colorado they handle this by putting the ballot in a blind envelope inside a trackable envelope. I can verify the details of the receipt of that trackable envelope to the tallying center where it is verified as untampered and opened under video with multiple people present. The unmarked envelope is added to all the rest of the ballots to be counted.
So then you can verify your vote reached the tallying center, but not that it was tallied correctly. Someone can look at your vote and count it wrong.
I think that's fine and the best we can do, but the person I replied to said you can verify your vote is tallied correctly. That implies checking what the actual vote was.
All true, but this is no different than any other ballot in the state. At a certain point you can choose anonymous ballots or you can choose trackable ballots.
Receipt-freeness (i.e., a secret ballot) is usually the desired property. Yes, a lot of people like you state they desire verifiable votes. But that's where you need to respond to the points the person above you is making: how is such a system not also susceptible to coercion and bribery?
(However you would verify your vote, imagine the person who is coercing you is just standing over your shoulder with threat of force. An example might be an abusive husband who does not want to allow their wife to vote freely/against him. A briber might simply force you to allow them to look over your shoulder before they'll pay you off.)
Vs. paper ballots in a polling place: a coercer would not be permitted in the poll booth with me. I get to vote, and when I leave, … I can tell them whatever, but it does not need to match my vote. It utterly defeats bribery, as the briber has no way to verify that I'm doing what they way.
Yeah but it feels terrible. I put as much as I can into Claude skills and CLAUDE.md but the fact that this is something I even have to think about makes me sad. The discrete points where the context gets compacted really feel bad and not like how I think AGI or whatever should work.
Just continuously learn and have a super duper massive memory. Maybe I just need a bazillion GPUs to myself to get that.
But no-one wants to manage context all the time, it's incidental complexity.
I agree with essentially everything you said, except for the final claim that managing context is incidental complexity. From what I know of cognitive science, I would argue that context management is a central facet of intelligence, and a lot of the success of humans in society is dependent on their ability to do so. Looking at it from the other side, executive function disorders such as ADHD offer significant challenges for many humans, and they seem to be not quite entirely unlike these context issues that Claude faces.
Already should be. Though given the speed difference, when every equivalent of a human-day of work has been done, rather than every 24 hours of wall clock time.
Even with humans, if a company is a car and the non-managers are the engine, meetings are the steering wheel and the mirror checks.
I switched from Windows 11 to macOS after a disastrous upgrade experience and drastic downgrade in performance on my Windows laptop.
I mean Windows 10 wasn't great but I got used to the taskbar searching the web somehow and the dual config menus everywhere and so on. But 11 was just terrible.
macOS has its pain points but man oh man what a disaster Windows is.
I have had Linux on my personal desktop and laptop forever so that hasn't been an issue, only used Windows for work.
If you are heavily using LLMs, you need to change the way you think about reviews
I think most people now approach it as:
Dev0 uses an LLM to build a feature super fast, Dev1 spends time doing a in depth review.
Dev0 built it, Dev1 reviewed it. And Dev0 is happy because they used the tool to save time!
But what should happen is that Dev0 should take all that time they saved coding and reallocate it to the in depth review.
The LLM wrote it, Dev0 reviewed it, Dev1 double-reviewed it. Time savings are much less, but there’s less context switching between being a coder and a reviewer. We are all reviewers now all the time
I write notes that are very explorative and rambling on some topics. Like I have probably 100+ pages of notes on programming language design where I use my notes as more of a working memory than a cohesive document. In other cases I'll do competitive market analysis by looking at most products in a category and scrawling down first impressions, strengths, and weaknesses.
In some cases yes I'll synthesize that myself into something more coherent. In other cases an LLM can offer a summary of certain themes I'm coming back to, or offer a pseudo-outsider's take on what the core themes being explored are.
If something is important to me I'll spend the time to understand it well enough to frame my own coherent argument, but if I'm doing extremely explorative thinking I'm OK with having a rapid process with an LLM in the loop.
Usually studying a test book is reconceptualizing it in whatever way fits the way you learn. For some people that's notes, for some it's flash cards, for some it's reading the textbook twice and they just get it.
To imagine LLMs have no use case here seems dishonest. If I don't understand a particularly hard part of the subject matter and the textbook doesn't expand on it enough you can tell the LLM to break it down further with sources. I know this works because I've been doing it with Google (slowly, very slowly) for decades. Now it's just way more convenient to get to the ideas you want to learn about and expand them as far as you want to go.
The times it's wrong has become vanishingly small. At least for the things I use it for (mostly technical). Chatgpt with extended thinking and feeding it the docs url or a pdf or 3 to start you'll very rarely get an error. Especially when compared to google / stack exchange.
Look I agree this whole thing is wrong, but to say this instance of regime change, unprovoked attack, war, whatever you call it is UNIQUELY unconstitutional is obviously wrong.
Every US President since the end of WW2 has waged war without a formal declaration of war from Congress. And presidents from both parties will continue to do so.
This is not to say it's right or good. But there is surely widespread agreement that it is constitutional to do things like this, and there has been for nearly a century.
A regime is not a single person, e.g. Mr Maduro largely continued from Mr Chavez.
If it is true that Mr Maduro has been abducted, there will surely be changes to the regime in Venezuela. A complete change of regime, however, is not guaranteed. And trying to do it might require more application of forcer, with all the attendant risks of that.
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