jmyeet
But I have questions:
1. How often do GPUs fail? I've seen figures that this is as high as 9% annual failure rate for DC GPUs;
2. How easy is it to get replacement stock? At what cost?
3. If you trade in, what value do you get for your GPUs?
4. What is the availability like? How does NVidia decide who gets the next wave of GPUs? That's NVidia's big power here. It's a bit like how Boeing and Airbus decide on customer order and if you upset them, you may lose other orders. This happened to Qatar Airways over the A380 [1].
5. How long are the current form factors and interfaces going to last? How long before the power requirements get larger than what DCs are currently built for? Blackwell GPUs use a lot more power than, say, 2 or even 1 generation ago did.
GPUs are a huge cost factor, allegedly more than 50% of the cost of a data center [2]. If you take a bath on the trade in and are forced to do it because you can't compete with the current generation's performance-per-watt, that's not a good situation to be in.
[1]: https://www.arabnews.com/business/qatar-airways-in-mystery-a...
[2]: https://orennia.com/insights/what-it-actually-costs-to-build...
Whatever the cause, it seems like climbing to avoid turbulence in or near thunderstorm conditions when the pilot knows there is ice already was probably unwise. A more prudent course was probably to divert around it and/or to descend to de-ice the plane. If so, would this rise to the level of pilot error? I don't know but maybe.
35,000 to 37,000 feet, combined with turbulence from the weather, means this could come into play. We still don't know and may not know for some time, especially given the severity of the impact and what may or may not have survived. But you can't rule it out.
[1]: https://aviationweek.com/business-aviation/learning-test-pil...
1. The so-called coffin corner [1] where the minimum safe speed for aerodynamic lift and the speed where the plane will stall narrows to a dangerously narrow window. This is caused in part because the speed of sound decreases at high altitude. Turbulence can throw you out of this window; and
2. It seems likely that control was lost because of ice. In released ATC recordings (which are awful to listen to, be warned) the pilot mentions ice. This is likely because of the bad weather over south Florida right now.
The pilot requested a new flight path and I believe tried to ascend from 35,000 feet to 37,000 feet and ended up in a spiral, banked at ~60 degrees, descending at ~30,000 feet per minute, crashing into the ground.
I'm not a pilot but I suspect there will be some element of this that is pilot error or at least could've been avoided and/or mitigated by an experienced pilot.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffin_corner_(aerodynamics)
Korea? China ended up getting involved to support the North Korean government so China (and the USSR) didn't have a US client state on their border.
Laos? This was bad because China supported to Khmer Rouge.
Vietnam? Military assistance to the North Vietnam government to resist a US imperialist invasion. Did China invade? No. Do they occupy it now? No.
The rest are basically just minor border disputes with Vietnam, Burma, India, etc. And China hasn't really been involved in any foreign military action since 1979, 47 years ago. I'll stack that up against the US in particular as well as the European colonial powers (even in modern times).
When exactly has this been "rinse. repeated"ed since?
Separate countries? All but ~10 countries on Earth including the US and all of Europe have what's come to be called the One China Policy. Taiwan is not recognized as an independent nation. It's really Schrodinger's nation, both independent and not at the same time and God forbid anybody opens the box and forces the issue.
I'm no fan of Donald Trump but this was one of his rare Ws. At a NATO summit in 2018, he warned Europe about the dangers of dependency on Russian energy and basically bullied Germany into building an LNG plant, something that was critical to Europe after Russia invaded Ukraine 4 years later [1].
Biden as Vice President to Obama warned Europe of the same thing in 2016 [2] regarding Nord Stream 2.
So American administrations have consistently and repeatedly warned Europe about the dangers over 6+ years. So how can anyone argue that "[Russia would] never start a war in Europe" when the US said basically that?
[2]: https://www.dw.com/en/biden-warns-europe-against-dependency-...
Yes we have much higher interest rates in the 1980s and 1990s but house prices as a function of wages have doubled in that time [1]. Here's another view: mortgage debt service as a ratio to personal income [2].
Whichever way you look at it, the current situation is significantly worse and significantly more expensive in real terms so 10%+ interest rates of the past were actually better in real terms.
The real problem is that housing is too expensive. And that's because it's become an investment, people's retirement funds. It should be absolutely impossible for people to hoard housing.
[1]: https://www.longtermtrends.com/home-price-median-annual-inco...
The problem with outsourcing all your manufacturing so you can mildly increase profits and destroy any organized labor is that whoever you outsourced it to holds you hostage.
Any talk of this is just propaganda to sell weapons and increase the "defense" budget.
So gallium is a byproduct of bauxite mining but requires some sophistication. China produces 60% of the world's aluminum. India is the second largest producer but doesn't have the infrastructure to extract gallium. That will probably change. But it is a sophisticated process so you need an entire supply chain for that too. China has that. India does not (currently).
But India would avoid the geopolitical issues of being dependent on China or Russia.
The first difference is that somebody is typically getting paid for any content you consume. You buy books, TV shows, movies, magazines, whatever. Or you borrow them from a library who bought them. Or you pay a subscription for a streaming service. Or you use an ad-supported platform. If you bought any commercial IP and then reproduced it one million times so you can train a whole bunch of people at once, well that's a crime. So why isn't it a crime when AI companies do it?
The second is that you can only produce so much output. You can't be cloned a million times to produce a million times the output. Software can be.
LLMs are kind of like a billion people sharing one NYT account, 1 Netflix account and so on. And that's simply not sustainable.
I also believe that the lifespan of IP is way too long. Software shouldn't be patentable because it's ultimately math and math formulae aren't patentable. Other patents should generally have much shorter lives. Books, music, TV, movies should have much shorter copyright periods, say 10-30 years total.
AI companies ingesting all the IP on earth for free is like saying there is no IP at all. Some will agree with that. I don't. But again, I would have less of an issue with it if we as a society owned the output.
If I search for "how do I fix a shower that won't drain?" then you will get a mix of results that will include articles, Youtube videos, etc. But also links to plumbers in your area seem entirely relevant to that query, no? I find it strange how many of the most militant anti-advertising purists ignore this completely.
As for creating things of value, there's a problem: housing has become the best performing asset in many developed economies and it is fundamentally parasitic and destructive. As an example, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand analytically created the best-performing portoflio and it was... 100% housing [1].
Demand for housing in many places is inelastic. It enjoys huge tax benefits. And you can leverage it better than most asset classes. Plus it's become a political goal of many governments to have ever-increasing house prices.
So if you want to build a factory that makes widgets that you want to sell, that involves a lot of risks. Why would you when you get a better, easier and safer return from just buying more housing?
If you want a healthier, more equitable economy you absolutely have to decommodify housing. There's simply no other way.
[1]: https://www.rbnz.govt.nz/-/media/fd9fa649c29340d7b9f466ba41b...
1. AI. $26T total addressable market ("TAM");
2. Broadband: $1.6T TAM, split roughly 50-50 between fixed and mobile broadband; and
3. Space: $370B TAM.
In 2025, this resulted in revenue of $18.67B and a loss of $2.6B. Those aren't trillion dollar company numbers.
Now TAM is a bit of a fake number but how it's used and the relative values can reveal useful information.
The first is that space launches do not remotely justify the valuation. It's just not a massive market.
The second is that the company is burning moeny like there's no tomorrow on AI.
Lastly, getting back to your point, I believe that mobile broadband is an interesting opportunity but how big is an open question. You'll still need to comply with regulators in every country you offer service, just like all the mobile telcos do, and I don't know if it's cheaper to build and maintain ground-based towers vs Starlink satellites that have a projected lifespan of 5-6 years. Also, how many do you need? Coverage over Siberia is of limited value. Dense population centers are your primary source of customers.
I believe SpaceX would be a significantly better company if it had stuck to space launches and Starlink. It would be worth a lot less but AI might kill it through all the debt. Of course, Elon needed to do that to rescue his own disastrous Twitter than xAI "investments".
Additionally, Google is very good at building and managing data centers (including their own networking hardware) and they even have alternatives to NVidia through their longstanding TPU hardware. It can't compete with NVidia's best offerings for sure but it gives them a path to independence.
I believe SpaceX will be merged with Tesla at some point when things turn south. OpenAI? I don't know what their future is. These mega-IPOs just seem like desperate attempts to cash out before it all comes crashing down.
The real problem is that there is no moat. Chinese labs have seen to that. And I believe that it's the policy of the Chinese government that nobody, especially a US tech company, ends up "owning" or "winning" the AI race.
And on the hardware front, China is building their own alternatives as they've been forced to develop EUV/DUV lithography from scratch [1].
I just don't see how OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX survive. Then again, Tesla shouldn't survive either but here we are. As they say, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/how-china-built-its-manh...
Consider the primary use case for Anthropic: coding. Well, if you're using Claude Code or some variant, you can easily use OpenRouter to simply use whatever free tokens you can get. You may not even care what LLM you're using under the hood for a given task.
That's simply not a trillion dollar moat.
Can Anthropic jack up the prices? No. There are alternatives. There are open weight models that you can run on cloud platforms and increasingly you can run them locally. Local LLMs are going to be incredibly accessible in 3-5 years. Even now you can run Flash models on something you can buy from Apple. The inference is a lot slower compared to cloud usage but that'll change.
I see the Anthropic IPO as an effort to cash out before it all comes crashing down.
If you're using the collective output of humanity to train your LLM then humanity should own the output. Problem solved.
One can easily understand this as the worker's relationship to the means of production.
If something disproportionately affects black people negatively, it has a significant amount of support from certain voters. The whole origin of the anti-abortion movement in the 19th century was double-pronged to displace midwives (who were often minorities) and that too many white women were getting abortions, which was labelled "race suicide" [1].
Need more? Infant mortality skews heavily by a state being red or blue and by the racial makeup [2]. Iowa is a red dot in a sea of blue because it's particularly white. Compare the US to other developed nations [3].
So this particular issue is with heart disease. And guess what? Black people are disproportionately affected and have worse outcomes [4]. Shocking.
Many people have a shallow view that racism is using slurs. It is not. Racism is systemic. And it's not as direct and nefarious as people in a smoke-filled room getting together to try and create worse heart disease outcomes for black people. It's a series of steps taken such that this problem isn't solved. It's just not prioritized.
You see the same thing with medical misogyny and medical racism. Symptoms are downplayed and ignored. This has been thoroughly tested where doctors have been given a file genders changed and there are statistically different outcomes.
[1]: https://sociology.northwestern.edu/documents/faculty-docs/fa...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
[3]: https://www.americashealthrankings.org/publications/reports/...
Safety regulations are written in blood. They exist because people died because the industries could not and cannot be trusted to regulate themselves.
The most generous interpretation is that people conflate regulation with rent-seeking. These are two entirely different things.
But how do you make Senior+ SWEs? By having a pipeline of juniors who get trained and mentored. That pipeline is cooked now.
There is going to be a brief period where some like Staff+ SWEs are going to make a lot of money by being AI specialists. But the flood waters are rising for everyone. Those opportunities are going to shrink.
It's eventually going to be a problem that the ecosystem has died because there's no new blood and the people there lack the experience and critical thinking to understand what's being done.
I can use AI on topics I know because I can spot the errors. LLMs lie a lot and get things wrong a lot. What happens when nobody can check the output?
One of the ways this manifested was my ability to anticipate problems at work and poke holes in things. This made me incredibly unpopular. You never get thanked for this. Instead you get punished for being right too early. You are negative. You are a naysayer. You aren't a team player. And you were 100% correct and it didn't matter.
Back in 2012 I remember thinking "I don't see how crypto has any applications other than illegal stuff". And I stood by that. Note that morality and legality are two different things. Sending money to relatives in a country that disallows foreign currency transactions may be moral but it's still illegal.
What's frustrating is dealing with the same consequences of being right too early. It's muddied by true disruption. An example that was often brought up was Google. In the late 1990s, it was believed that search was a "solved" problem and there was no money in it. That's 100% true. But you can't ignore any criticism with "people once thought the world was round". It's a useless fallacy to deploy.
The absolutely dumbest people and outright scammers were attracted to crypto. A bunch of people who missed out on Bitcon's meteoric rise didn't want to miss the next meteor or they simply wanted to rug pull before they themselves got rug pulled.
The financial system is an endless series of Chesterton's Fences. So many things work the way they do because of a problem that occurred. They say that safety regulations are written in blood. People died to make those regulations. Well, financial regulations are the same way.
Being able to freeze assets and reverse transactions, for example, is a feature, not a bug.
The real story with crypto is how greed clouds people's judgment. So many people on HN thought they were going to make their bag on crypto and people like myself got shouted down as naysayers.
I really don't know what to do with this information other than those same warnings are beign ignored about AI and in 5 years I will be punished for being right too early. There's simply no market to recoup the trillions invested in rapidly depreciating assets around software with no moat.
Managing a wallet where there is no recourse if your wallet is compromised is simply too difficult when even crypto exchanges get hacked and otherwise sophisticated people get compromised when taking cautious measures (eg [1]).
Crypto really is and always was a race to the rug pull.
[1]: https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/about-3-5-million-los...
Back during Covid, Congress passed and Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act ("IRA"), which actually did a couple of good things.
One of those was the Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax ("CAMT"). For non-Americans, AMTs are a weird thing where Congress basically gives up and decides the tax code is too complex so they give up and say whatever your deductions are, if the AMT produces a higher amount, that's what you have to pay. Every complexity is somebody's special interest so repealing them can be hard. It's kind of why the carried interest tax credit has never been repealed.
Repealing it, as Republicans tried to do, is hard to do because the counter-messaging is "well if the corporate tax rate is 21%, why do you care about repealing a minimum of 15%?". Everybody understands that companies through various tax schemes aren't paying 21% but you can't say that.
But the one I want to talk about is the 10 year plan to increase IRS funding to update incredibly outdated systems and increase enforcement. This was a good measure. And you can tell because the Republican Party lost their minds. They fairly successively propagandized it as the IRS hiring 80,000 agents to go after Joe Q. Citizen. No, it was enforcement against the ultra-wealthy and corporations. So it was killed in 3 years under the guise of "saving money" as well as not persecuting average citizens (which it was never going to do).
It's particularly stupid because money spent on IRS enforcement pays for itself. It's been estimated every $1 spent recovers $7. It pays for itself. But there was no counter-messaging and Republicans could push it through under reconiliation.
Compare that to the 4 year $175 billion increase in ICE funding.
There has been an uptick in coal this year to replace oil imports, which have fallen off a cliff because of the Iran war [2]. The real story of 2026 is how China essentially saved the world economy by doing this [3].
China is dependent on oil and gas imports but clearly sees the writing on the wall. All of these projects are an effort to wean themselves off of oil. So is a lot of domestic policy like the electrification of vehicles. This has had a global impact, reducing global oil demand by almost 2% in the last 5 years [4].
I agree with you on your point that I don't see the connection between batteries and gas vs coal either. If anything, batteries are to stabilize energy demands when the Sun is down.
[1]: https://energyandcleanair.org/china-energy-and-emissions-tre...
[2]: https://tradingeconomics.com/china/crude-oil-imports
[3]: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/10/china-crude-oil-iran-hormuz-...
[4]: https://www.intellinews.com/china-led-ev-boom-cuts-global-oi...
I also think about how sports are portrayed or used as dressing in media. Seinfeld, for example, was from an era where people often went to baseball games and knew all the player stats. People in previous generations would take their scorecards to games [1]. None of that really exists anymore.
[1]: https://www.wuwm.com/2023-04-10/this-baseball-season-try-an-...
If anything, the following of current events overall is way down to what it was decades ago by the general populace. People overall are incredibly ill-informed about so many things despite the wealth of information available.
Three things happened to baseball (IMHO):
1. The childhood funnel is drying up and has been for a long time. Kids now increasingly play soccer instead;
2. Take out the nostalgia and you're not left with much. There are too many games, they're too long and not enough happens. Football is bigger than ever; and
3. Structurally I think baseball made some huge mistakes, such as the soft salary cap system that created dynasties like the New York Yankees who could get rich on broadcast rights for a huge media market. The NFL has managed all of this so much better.
I'm not a huge sports fan but I find the systems fascinating. American sports evolved into a 3 pillar system. Basketball season into baseball season into football season through the calendar year. I wonder if baseball's timing over summer has contributed to this decline.
[1]: https://news.gallup.com/poll/714281/football-top-sport-socce...
When the M3 Ultra 256GB+ models got discontinued the secondary market prices went through the roof. That's not manufactured demand.
All the M5 Ultra Mac Studios have had 3-4+ month delivery estimates within a short time of launch until now. I occasionally check and noticed that the 96GB model has moved up from February to December where I live (pickup or shipping). There's clearly a demand for these things and it's widely believed it's largely AI.
But what's really clear for anything newsworthy or controversial or political is just how much Reddit is botted and brigaded and how easy that is. And Reddit seems totally unwilling to tackle this at all. But you can get something to r/news or even r/all frontpage with even a few hundred accounts.
One example that comes to mind of Reddit enabling this kind of thing is the feature they added where if you click a user they can hide their history. You can still find it, particularly in the LLM era (but it doesn't even require you go to that far), but most people don't go looking because of that extra effort. It's a shame because the botting becomes really obvious.
I honestly think all social media (including Reddit) needs to be required to make public what country an account is posting from, particularly when it comes to politics or anything controversial. My thesis is that you would see just how botted these areas are, how so many accounts with big followings are overseas and likely bots.
You might be tempted to say "they'll just use a VPN". This is a solvable problem however because VPN IP ranges can and will be identified and should invoke more scrutiny. For example, streamers use this kind of thing to find people evading geogating. But also you can't hide latency. Issue someone a challenge and there's only so fast they can respond.