Fair point/question. For many of my HN responses, I first ask ChatGPT for a bit of information about the topic. For the case of GE Cap's wrecking of parent GE with excessive financialisation, I could only loosely remember the details from the 2000s. It is a long time ago! That prompt that I shared gave a reply that was 100s of words. Too much for copy/pasta, and too hard for me to summarise briefly. Instead, I decided to share the prompt. It is not my intention to dodge sources. Plus, the newest versions of ChatGPT is pretty good about sharing sources. (Of course, the quality of sources can be debatable.) In short, it was not my intention to be snarky by sharing my ChatGPT prompt.

EDIT ---- Also, the OP was so brief about GE Cap, I realised that most readers under 30 (maybe 35) will have almost no knowledge or memory of that economic history. I wanted to offer an "intellectual carrot" (ChatGPT prompt) for anyone wishing to learn more. ----

What bothered me most about the original post was the person was putting all vendor financing in the same "bad" bucket. I disagree. I would characterise GE Cap as an infamous example! They were the worst of the worst in a generation (25 years). Most vendor financing is very boring and is used to buy big heavy things with very long operational lives. If the buyer goes bankrupt, it is (relatively) easy to repossess the big heavy thing and sell it again (probably with vendor financing again!).

Very tangentially related comment, but I remember seeing a post on a local Facebook clone with a prompt to throw at Claude to "make a custom YouTube downloader for MacOS", so the general "Here is a prompt to feed an LLM" is somewhat real for some, apparently

Yes, cause google has been giving crap results long before chatgpt was a thing and it only got worse. Before ai it was "let me google that on reddit for you".

It's a good use case really – it'll tell it differently according to what it knows about your background, if you 'just Google it' you'll get the same maybe-appropriate results as anyone else.

Google search has gone way down hill after they nerfed it and then did nothing to prevent the flood of AI slop seo websites. So unfortunately, instead of sharing links everyone now gets sent to the inefficient text generator that hallucinates nonsense and will color the average summary of a topic by whoever trained it and your most recent chat history instead.

Yes.

    > motherload of all heavy industry vendor financing

I doubt they are bigger than other national "heavy industry" champions from East Asia and Western/Central Europe. Without checking, I would guess that the global leaders are Boeing and Airbus.

That’s fair. You become vulnerable to a guy like Jack Welch.

The vendor financing stuff I saw (as a junior / intern at a supplier) in those days was a reflection of that culture. They’d lease capital equipment through GE Capital, and pack it with other stuff to the limit of their accountants appetite for risk. (You can usually roll 20% of the value into services or peripheral stuff) I remember one deal where we had to run around and buy office supplies and tools with a corporate card. I did 4 Honda Civic of laser toner.

GE was reporting their own capital equipment and office supplies as revenue on the Capital side. :) But that is penny ante stuff in terms of what they did.

The AI stuff is a shady variation of that, but likely far worse as we’ve fired all of the watchers.

lol yes.

The POTUS kids are players in Polymarket and Kalshi, and are running crypto grifts.

The SEC fired most of their investigators, hasn’t appointed members to key boards, and cancelled most of their contracts with FINRA. (Which has laid off a ton of people) Nobody is watching.

So there’s an open season for normal corporate bullshit, and if you’re personally committing felonies attributable to you, you make sure you do it in Florida, and pay a vig to the library fund for a pardon.

We’ll have a fun run, then everything starts exploding in mid 2027-2029.

.. yet today we have Kalshi, Polymarket, et al.