R McGrath

Sometimes when people ask me why I’m wearing a mask I say I’m traveling or have some important thing soon and can’t afford to get sick and miss it and that’s pretty much always true but I think it would be nice if it were more normalized to just say “I don’t want to get sick” and leave it at that

Gosh, explaining complex ideas by way of Dialogues? How insufferable and unprecedented.

Huh? Plato? Socrates? Never heard of them.

EV owner lesson learned;
I thought not using my brakes would make the pads & disks last longer, but they decided to just corrode instead. Turns out they need regular exercise to keep clean and healthy.

So, big tech has spent hundreds of billions of dollars of capital expenditures, and much of those expenditures are on GPUs. These GPUs, once installed, immediately begin decaying in value, and the more you use them, the more likely they are to crap out, and even when sitting idle, these GPUs have some power consumption — somewhere between 7% and 14% of their power in the case of the H100 — making them a consistent burden on the infrastructure of any purchaser whether they have customers or not. This becomes an even bigger problem for more expensive GPUs like the B200, which has an idle power draw of 140W per GPU. Extrapolate that out to thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of them, or to the 50,000-per-building of them inside Stargate Abilene’s NVIDIA’s , and you’ve got yourself a problem. Even without customers, even without IT load, these servers sit burning power, and while a company could turn them off and boot them on for a period of time, these racks are often run in clusters — servers of GPUs that are synced together using high-speed networking — and while I can’t find anything firm as far as how long it takes to set up a cluster, this presentation on cluster design from the CEO of Lambda details a cluster’s sheer complexity, involving discrete networking, software layer and storage methods just to get the bloody thing working. In simple terms, it may be expensive to leave them on, but it’s going to take a bunch of time and energy to restart these things, meaning that they are more than likely left on, slowly burning energy. Imagine how bad that is at a scale of hundreds of thousands of GPUs? Yet things might be a little wonkier, as the reality may be that while hyperscalers have customers, those customers might not be using all their GPUs at all times. Although there may be some customers that agree to a minimum spend or throughput, it’s hard to imagine that these contracts are enough to surmount the destructive margins. And when …

And when I say “destructive margins,” I mean so much more than just the power to run and cool them. There’s the construction of the data centers to house them, the necessary maintenance, and, of course, any and all debt used to buy them. While I can (and will!) say that for every $50,000 GPU bought, big tech needs to make another $100,000, I believe that the hole created by the GPU’s existence is likely larger than just $100,000, with every construction delay, power outage, or moment of idle compute adding dollars to the hole for each and every GPU. Need a very real example? The Information reported recently that Oracle lost $100 million between June and August 2025 on rentals of NVIDIA’s Blackwell chips: In the three months that ended in August, Oracle lost nearly $100 million from rentals of Nvidia’s Blackwell chips, which arrived this year. That’s partly because there is a period between when Oracle gets its data centers ready for customers and when customers start using and paying for them, the documents show. It’s not clear what causes the gap or how Oracle plans to shorten it. So, while we can’t say for sure, there’s a chance a large chunk of these losses were caused by the spread-out deprecation of those Blackwell GPUs — after all, its most recent quarterly earnings included $1.35 billion of depreciation, right? Sidenote: For context, Oracle reported depreciation of $804m in the same period last year, and depreciation of $3.867bn for the whole of FY2025. This should give you a sense of how rapidly these GPUs are becoming a millstone on its earnings. …is there any way to actually recover that $100 million through the margins on these chips? Oracle only has 4.5 years of depreciation on these Blackwell Chips, and The Information reports that those GB200 server racks have a negative 100% gross margin according to internal Oracle documents. If that’s the case, we have a much, much bigger problem, but even if the margins aren’t literally negative…will ther…

Premium Newsletter tomorrow: Meta, Google, Amazon and Microsoft must add $2 Trillion in AI revenue by 2030 or they wasted their capex.

The cost of data centers GPUs may make it impossible to make a profit from AI. Here's $10 off annual.

edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo...

I'm starting to think The Great Beard experiment has run its course. Might keep it until my birthday, but a more youthful face would support the energy I'm trying to bring into the new year.

Why does the ejecta cloud appear to be polar? I would imagine that, if anything, the poles are the last bastion of the collapsing magnetosphere,so the ejected gas cloud would be closer to a torus shape.

"we're going to throw even more money at a project that already failed on the first iteration, without addressing any of its flaws."

A lot of very talented and great to work with people I know will not have a job by the end of the day.
If you're hiring, particularly software devs and DevOps, be it remote, in Ottawa, Toronto, or Nice - please reach out and I can put you in touch.

You know how billionaires end up with severe cognitive deficits as a result of becoming surrounded by yes men who constantly tell them their every idea is genius? What if we made a bot that just does that to everyone. I think that would be a good idea.

Anyone who tells you that burger patties made of beats and beans will stick together is a filthy liar.

Tasty though.

Friendly reminder that Tidal ($10.99) is now cheaper than Spotify ($11.99), delivers better audio quality, pays its artists 2x as much, and generally doesn't allow AI slop.

You can move your entire music library over in a matter of minutes.

Another good time to get a friend a house warming gift is after a breakup. Because this place suddenly feels insurmountably cold and empty.

I don't know what I did you deserve this past week, but it can fuck all the way off. I'm at my wits end in a way I haven't been in I don't know how long.

Do you believe that views only count if they interact with your post?
Do you believe that only 20-some people saw your reply to Cody fucking Johnston?

"im clearly being sarcastic" he said in response to half the audience being unclear on whether or not he was being sarcastic.

Having a victorian era woman autumn (becoming isolated and weird)

Pre-crime and thought crimes to now be actively targeted by law federal forces in the USA.

CHOTINER: So your son is 14, is that right?

IKARI: It's complex, Isaac. If—

CHOTINER: And the “robot” he pilots, that’s actually the child of an alien you keep crucified in the basement, which is possessed by the spirit of his dead mother?

IKARI: Look, let me answer the question.

CHOTINER: Sure.

Yet another rubber stamped increase for police services. Fail to protect or serve, fail to stop crime growth, and still get a raise every time.
No one else gets away with such reliably piss poor performance, and yet we're rewarding them yet again.
When will we try something different?

It's random as hell, too. I can still go rock climbing - throwing myself at walls, falling on my ass, and tearing the shit out of my hands - and be mostly fine. But twist the wrong way while clipping my toenails and I've fucked up my entire weekend.

To hell with my pride.

I need work. Desperately. Game dev is my thing, but I’ll clean your basement if that’s what you need.
Programmer (10+ yrs), full-service music/sound.

Credits: Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes, Wytchwood, some cancelled AAA projects.

Please repost.

website -> liamsauve.com

Look you can’t tell me this thing is “intelligently designed” — it goes into a five-minute coughing fit if I breathe wrong. Sometimes it accidentally bites itself. It draws blood.

Oh, HashiConf 2025, you say?
Further my cloud-native design expertise, you say?
Network with like minds, you say?

San Francisco, you say?

Hard no.

like 70% of the worst evil being perpetrated in the world right now is caused by rich men trying to avoid death. this is their underlying hope for AI, and genetic engineering.

if true immortality ever existed we would have a moral responsibility to murder the inventors and bomb their labs.

on the upside kids today aren't being groomed into listening to Schpongle, so who is to say if things are currently bad

"PhD-level experts in your back pocket" is a completely nonsensical description of AI but a pretty good description of social media if you follow the right people

YouTube video by PrivacyLawyer - David Fraser The really bad age verification bill is back in Canada's Parliament

Not convinced? Here are some opinions of tech savvy legal experts on the matter: youtu.be/cBJe3gB2Po4?...

www.michaelgeist.ca/2025/07/risk...

Have you seen this petition yet? Stop Bill S-209’s De-Anonymization of Every Canadian Adult

Canada's proposed Bill S-209 needs to be stopped. Even if you believe that sexually explicit material needs more censorship and restrictions, a heavy handed & poorly defined bill is not the way to do it. It will lead to PII hacks, suppression of charter protections, and real harm.
chng.it/BsffdYsF4b

Again; photosynthesis is not synonymous with plant life. Hank is only comparing plant, animal, and fungal evolution timelines. Regardless of when photosynthesis evolved in single celled organisms, plants (multicellular eukaryotes with cell walls made of cellulose) evolved much later.