Matt Rosoff

A story indistinguishable from those depicted/dramatized in all the WWII / Holocaust movies and plays and novels we grew up with

NYT excerpt that reads: On Thursday, Mr. Benioff said he had never been progressive even if many San Franciscans thought he was. He said he was a longtime Republican before switching to become an independent voter. At the end of the interview, he turned to a public relations executive. He could be heard asking why her mouth was wide open and if he had said anything he shouldn’t have. “What about the political questions?” he asked. “Too spicy?” Then he hung up. Heather Knight is a reporter in San Francisco, leading The Times’s coverage of the Bay Area and Northern California.

with one of the most incredible kickers i've ever seen

Marc Benioff Says Trump Should Send Guard Troops to San Francisco

Marc Benioff went full Tom Cotton to @heatherknightsf.bsky.social: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/u...

My boss: so how's our fourth quarter looking?

Me, the sales manager at the company that makes inflatable frog suits: well, you're never going to believe this, but

Good on TechCrunch for still pubbing these details, but if how bad are you as a spokesperson if you don't even understand the basics.

techcrunch.com/2025/10/10/s...

The thing about all this is - I thought Silicon Valley business leaders were pragmatists. Do they not see that dividing the country this way is long-term terrible for America, terrible for business? Or have they all given up on society and it's just about, hoard now to escape later?

I've definitely been frustrated and grossed out by scenes on SF's streets in recent years. But it's way better in 2025 than it's been for 7 or 8 years, and sending in the national guard is completely absurd and unncessary.

Marc Benioff Says Trump Should Send Guard Troops to San Francisco

Uh... what? And to think all these years I defended the guy to friends and colleagues who thought he was a blowhard empty suit who didn't really believe any of the pro-school pro-community politics he was spouting. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/u...

Apple nears deal to acquire talent and technology from computer vision startup Prompt AI Apple is in late-stage talks with startup Prompt AI to bring on the company's employees and its computer vision technology.

I used to cover early stage startups, especially hardware and deep tech. And back on that beat today with a scooplette w/ my colleague @kif.bsky.social - Apple acquihiring PromptAI makers of the Seemour app that added cool features to smart home / security cameras... www.cnbc.com/2025/10/10/a...

Happy Friday to you guys

A lot of you think you are running for office in California.

I can’t believe how many of you had the nerve to say sprouts.

Nova lox, plain schmear, onion, caper, sesame bagel, not toasted what are you nuts?

OpenAI claims GPT-5 has 30% less political bias : AI model maker touts effort to depoliticize its product

Love this from @lot49.com -

We would argue that political bias ... is not only unavoidable in LLMs trained on human-created content but desirable.... The more interesting question is how LLM bias should be tuned.
www.theregister.com/2025/10/10/o...

Bong cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuckoo!

How can people believe this stuff? I guess it makes one feel significant to be at the end of time, instead of just another nobody in a long line of stardust. The egos!

No Billionaires

My favorite formulation of this one remains @tomscocca.bsky.social 's: hmmdaily.com/2018/10/16/n... so short, yet convincing

It Is Fundamentally Impossible For OpenAI To Build The Data Center Capacity It’s Promised, As It Would Require 33.8GW of Power, Massive Pre-Ordering Of Custom Transformers, and Hundreds of Billions Of Dollars In Power Infrastructure Alone — And Most Of The Capacity Remains Unplanned In any case, as I’ve explained, the power infrastructure necessary to build out these data centers is immense. For example, the power necessary for a 900MW data center planned in Virginia will be run across three different 300 Megawatt phases, won’t begin construction until February 2027, won’t finish construction until June 2028, and won’t even complete its first 300 Megawatt phase until 2031, despite Google saying it would take 18 to 24 months to build the data center. For OpenAI to build 26GW of compute capacity would require them to secure 33.8GW of power. For comparison, the US Energy Information Administration predicts that the US will add approximately 63 gigawatts of new power capacity in 2025. Honestly, it’s hard to even calculate the amount that this power infrastructure might cost, as things vary wildly based on location (hotter climes require more cooling, and are more susceptible to transmission loss), the kinds of chips used in these facilities, and so on. There are hard, physical limits to the amount of power that you can build, with each massive power project requiring bespoke transformers and infrastructure, each in and of itself requiring anyone planning these massive deployments to pre-order them years in advance. Money can only accelerate so much, and custom projects built with electrical-grade steel cannot be accelerated if the steel itself is in short supply, a problem compounded by tariffs. Even if the steel were available, power companies require massive amounts of surveys and testing to make sure the power is reliably and safely delivered to the end customer. You need to win the approval of local governments — and, crucially, local communities, who might ta…

It Is No Longer Ethical To Trust Anyone Promising To Build Gigawatts Of Compute I cannot express this clearly enough: there is not enough power to power Stargate Abilene, and there may not be enough before the year 2028, which will be multiple fiscal years into Oracle’s $300 billion contract with OpenAI. If this is the case, OpenAI may have a case to walk away from Abilene — or pay Oracle a much smaller cut until (or if) it can get the power necessary to run the facility. Everything I’ve learned preparing this newsletter has made me question any and all claims by anybody saying it’s going to build a gigawatt data center. I can find no evidence that anybody has constructed one, no evidence that anybody has built the power sufficient to power a gigawatt of compute, and no plans that suggest anybody will successfully complete a gigawatt data center project before the year 2028. Construction is also hard, and prone to both delays and budgetary shortfalls. The amount of money, infrastructure, time and domain specific labor (there’s a shortage, by the way!) required to pull off even a gigawatt of data centers is so blatantly unrealistic that I believe the media needs to actively stop reporting on these without asking very practical questions about their feasibility. While these things might get built at some point, they’re also reliant on massive amounts of debt, all of which is contingent on people still believing that there’s massive demand for generative AI, at a time when everybody is saying that we’re in a bubble. At some point, private credit will stop issuing billions of dollars in debt for anyone who says the word “gigawatt," likely at the first sign that these projects are going over budget and require more money to keep them alive. In simpler terms, data centers are a money pit with few chances of a return.

It is impossible for OpenAI to build the 26GW of compute - which will require 33.8GW of power - that they've promised. It requires massive pre-ordering of custom electrical gear and hundreds of billions of dollars of infrastructure.

Sam Altman is lying.
www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-bubbl...

Cartoon strip by me who is Stephen Collins. The imagery of the comic starts off with a single electron and then each panel zooms out one step - first to the microchip, then the OLED screen, then the iPhone, the person holding the iPhone, and onwards Script: An electron, forged in the first fire of the Big Bang Courses through a deeply intricate maze of transistors and diodes mined with unfathomable ingenuity from our planet’s deep geological past and assembled from all over the world Into a device perfected through centuries of technological evolution to perform a beautifully synchronised pixel dance on an OLED screen in an intricate moving pattern of shifting light [Show a phone screen with an Instagram post featuring Ryan Gosling and bearing the legend:] WATCH RYAN GOSLING EAT A PASTY FOR THE FIRST TIME! whose choreography is powered by an global information network of unknowable complexity which is specifically tailored to the interests of the being observing the screen who is a member of the most advanced species on Earth [Show a shlubby looking GUY idly looking at the Ryan Gosling/sausage roll Instagram reel on his phone while sitting in his pants and a stained t-shirt and eating a massive bag of crisps] with a brain perhaps more capable of reconfiguring these signals into conscious thought than any other for billions of miles around [Guy has a thought]: “Mmm…" in this endless, silent void. [Pull back to show the Earth as a tiny blue dot among the stars with a thought bubble coming from it] "… I want a pasty.” [ends]

Zoom out 🙏 🤩 #wonder

'When authoritarians seize power, it is crucial to recognize courageous defenders of freedom who rise and resist,' the Norwegian Nobel Committee said as it announced Maria Corina Machado as the winner of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize

There’s a better word than “influencers.”

Seems mostly correct but I think there’s evidence Musk always had these beliefs but hid them. But yeah these guys view it as their birthright to be fabulously wealthy.

You love me

It’s like we’re stuck in a hybrid of Idiocracy, Office Space, and Groundhog Day.

Every day we wake up, and it’s the same as the day before, only dumber.

Didn’t that guy break the Peter Thiel - Hulk Hogan story?

California enacts law to prevent sexual abuse in K-12 schools following Business Insider investigation The new legislation comes after a 2023 Business Insider investigation into sexual misconduct at a California high school.

Business Insider wrote up a story on how some of their past investigative work led to a new California law. The story is strangely unbylined.

The reason perhaps? The publication recently laid off the reporter behind that investigation, Matt Drange.

www.businessinsider.com/california-e...

You should read this essay. This quote. This quote.

My French charcutier suggested I make, basically, cassoulet from his smoked chorizo and all of a sudden New Orleans cooking makes more sense.

A Mystery C.E.O. and Billions in Sales: Is China Buying Banned Nvidia Chips?

The chips go up, where they come down, that's not my department says Jensen von Huang: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/09/t...

War of words over Space Shuttle move heats up Exclusive: Houston, we have a custody battle

Two words I never thought I'd see in a headline: 'woke Smithsonian.' www.theregister.com/2025/10/09/c...

Having worked for, and acted as, both types I can tell you that ruthless but competent managers in stable or thriving organizations are good, actually. Empathetic managers are fun, but long-term limited. Incompetent managers and dysfunctional/dying orgs are hell!
www.seangoedecke.com/ruthless-man...