asphaltmodified

These guys have gotten incredibly rich by fleecing the government with subpar tech that was designed for rentseeking rather than performance. A smart Dem agenda item would be to build internal tech capacity. The fact that it would punish these guys is just a silver lining.

mf you're from Detroit and you dress like that.

aaand we are officially in the hide-your-neighbors stage

These watches appear to be ripoffs of famous designs. Likely from some factory that normally produces "homage" watches and they just swapped out the branding.

So many of the foundational sins of the field - a belief in 'precise description' (incantation) as a universal force; the assumption that the human brain is not just a machine, but a relatively simple one; the unwillingness to define exactly what a 'simulation' is - are in this single page

Actually, wait - how long do GPUs last, exactly? Four years for training? Three years? The A100 GPU started shipping in May 2020, and the H100 (and the Hopper GPU generation) entered full production in September 2022, meaning that we’re hurtling at speed toward the time in which we’re going to start seeing a remarkable amount of chips start wearing down, which should be a concern for companies like Microsoft, who bought 150,000 Hopper GPUs in 2023 and 485,000 of them in 2024. Alright, let me just be blunt: the entire economy of debt around GPUs is insane. Assuming these things don’t die within five years (their warranties generally end in three), their value absolutely will, as NVIDIA has committed to releasing a new AI chip every single year, likely with significant increases to power and power efficiency. At the end of the five year period, the Special Purpose Vehicle will be the proud owner of five-year-old chips that nobody is going to want to rent at the price that Elon Musk has been paying for the last five years. Don’t believe me? Take a look at the rental prices for H100 GPUs that went from $8-an-hour in 2023 to $2-an-hour in 2024, or the Silicon Data Indexes (aggregated realtime indexes of hourly prices) that show H100 rentals at around $2.14-an-hour and A100 rentals at a dollar-an-hour, with Vast.AI offering them at as little as $0.67 an hour. This is, by the way, a problem that faces literally every data center being built in the world, and I feel insane talking about it. It feels like nobody is talking about how impossible and ridiculous all of this is - it’s one thing that OpenAI has promised one trillion dollars to people - it’s another that large swaths of that will be spent on hardware that will, by the end of these agreements, be half-obsolete and generating less revenue than ever. Think about it - let’s assume we live in a fantasy land where OpenAI is somehow able to pay Oracle $300 billion over 5 years. Said money is paying for access to Blackwell…

Every single AI data center is a toxic investment, with most of its value tied up in GPUs that will be multiple generations behind by the time these things turn on - and then die in 3-5 years.

All to build for AI demand that doesn't exist.
edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo...

We close the day with more followers than those we lost, fantastic!

We're almost three quarters to our 200 followers goal before the #Kickstarter for #KOKOTÖNA goes live on Oct. 12th

Thanks #TTRPG folks for all your help, more surprises coming soon!

www.kickstarter.com/projects/elc...

#RPGLatAm

wait, you're making her work sound Lovecraftian 😂

relatable four panel comic

US conservatives under Obama would sometimes wistfully post training footage of Russian special forces, like "look at what the real manly countries are doing instead of our woke baby military" and then all those VDV guys got annihilated within the first 3 days of the Ukraine invasion

So Curtis Yarvin sucks intensely but he hasn't wielded any actual power and I have no impression he has broken any laws - being a sick, monstrous idiot being entirely legal - it is the majesty of liberal democracy that he has nothing to fear.

He ought to ponder that, but won't.

I think part of the trouble is that we white Americans & Canadians see that non-white immigrants here are often low status & middle/low income & assume the admission standards are low & “they aren’t sending their best”

when actually those are often rich educated people & we are Doing A Racism

Again, this - not the fascism, or the budget cuts, or the neverending bureaucratic creep - is what will eventually drive me & many others out of academia/into retirement

bsky.app/profile/mcop...

We have allowed the lazy, grifting Silicon Valley charlatans into the front door, & in doing so, we have learned just how many of our own colleagues & administrators simply are not interested in the actual business of education. It's incredibly demoralizing.

bsky.app/profile/mcop...

illustration of a woman with a heavily bandaged face kneeling on the floor, she has opened a present, she holds a hammer that was inside the box, she looks back towards the person (unseen) that gave her the gift.

"The gift"
or
"Are you fucking kidding me?"

South Shore Residents Return To Ransacked Apartments After ICE Raid: 'It Looks Like Hell' A "now renting" sign outside touts granite countertops. Inside, residents are trying to make sense of the raid that made their already neglected building even worse.

ICE is running around Chicago harassing people for not being white.

Just a year ago, that was illegal in the United States and now it’s commonplace.

That’s not making America great again.

A black and white drawing of Kratos and his son walking away from a boat with the world serpent far in the background.

I’ve reached a point in God Of War where my viking son is being a real jerk to everybody. I didn’t know this would be a tween-parenting simulator. It’s amazing. Here’s some fan art by me :)

It’s no use soft-pedaling the extent of the problem, ignoring the suffering inflicted on ordinary Americans, or minimizing the Herculean work that will be needed to repair our system.

Justice Anthony Kennedy tells @npr.org's @ninatotenberg.bsky.social "very worried" about our country, and that "Democracy is not guaranteed to survive."

Kennedy wrote Citizens United and was the fifth vote in the rest of the Roberts Court's anti-democratic decisions.

www.npr.org/2025/09/27/n...

There's going to be more Universes Beyond sets over in universe sets next year.

I like Star Trek but I'm not sure if I don't like where this is going.

it’s very funny that there’s a large amount of big rightwing influencers intent on trying to tell everyone that jimmy kimmel being sacked had nothing to do with trumps government

A drooling scarecrow swaying in the autumn night breeze. A crow is perched on his right arm.

A salivating stickman.

The annual pumpkin display at the entrance of Governor Pritzker’s personal residence on Astor Street. He is the pumpkin king. Illinois produces the most pumpkins, including canned, than any other state in the U.S., twice as many as the next five states combined.

THIS WHOLE THREAD. HOW DID I NOT KNOW THIS?

It is possible to cherish the BBC as an institution while also saying that BBC News is failing very badly, day after day, in its duty to inform and that it always fails in a right-wing direction. It desperately needs to recover its integrity

Too late, Batman. Once this Tylenol floods the city's water supply, my wiki won't run out of editors ever again

When I was a competitive debater, my coaches kept reminding me that I am not there to convince my opponents, I am there to convince judges and the audience. Same principle applies.

I understand Miller doesn’t like being called Goebbels, but maybe - and I’m just spitballing here - he should stop plagiarizing Goebbels speeches

In early 2025, beaver activity in the Brdy Protected Landscape Area, Czech Republic, contributed to the restoration of a wetland ecosystem. A family of beavers constructed a series of dams that coincidentally accomplished environmental goals of the Czech government, which had delayed its proposed project since 2018 for bureaucratic and financial reasons. The beaver-built dams saved the Czech government approximately US$1.2 million,

imagine if a family of beavers randomly showed up right now and finished whatever thing you've been putting off