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Reposted by Serenity "Peas on Carbonara 👻" Dee 🍜

Mohamed @dfghjkltt.bsky.social · 2h

Oh people, have mercy on the heart of a mother who is afraid of losing her child.
I beg you, I beg you, save my child's life from cancer.
I have pleaded with every word of supplication to no avail.
Oh Lord, be with my little one.

tinyurl.com/pus32vn7

🙏🏻

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Serenity "Peas on Carbonara 👻" Dee 🍜 @sapphixy.bsky.social · 3h

and cynical you are about physicians in particular or humanity in general, I promise you that there are things physicians have been caught doing which will absolutely render you speechless with shock, horror, or simply awe at the requisite intestinal fortitude

Serenity "Peas on Carbonara 👻" Dee 🍜 @sapphixy.bsky.social · 3h

and then there's what physicians are absolutely sure they'll get away with in terms of conduct

suffice it to say, if you can think of something shady a physician can use their privileges to do, not only has someone done it, a lot of someones have done it

and I promise you that, no matter how jaded

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Serenity "Peas on Carbonara 👻" Dee 🍜 @sapphixy.bsky.social · 3h

and then there's also a problem of arrogance on the part of many physicians, with some specialties/areas of practice being really prone to it

becoming a surgeon of any kind requires a basal lack of humility; you must have the confidence to think you can make someone healthier by cutting them open

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Serenity "Peas on Carbonara 👻" Dee 🍜 @sapphixy.bsky.social · 3h

(not entirely unfounded, in fairness) that you know more about your patients' health than they do

these two things combined lead to a *lot* of standard of care issues

and there's often little recourse for a patient other than to seek a new physician, which is its own trial

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Serenity "Peas on Carbonara 👻" Dee 🍜 @sapphixy.bsky.social · 3h

I feel like I can expand on this a little

it's a truism amongst clinical researchers and public health researchers that physicians are, at best, rather, um, _selective_ about what evidence-based medicine they'll practice as opposed to just anecdata and personal biases

and then there's the belief…

Serenity "Peas on Carbonara 👻" Dee 🍜 @sapphixy.bsky.social · 11h

for professional reasons I can't disclose because of NDAs and laws and creepy weird stalkers, I know a lot about the … quirks … of both major types of doctor

suffice it to say I see at *least* one public headline about a physician doing some reprehensible shit a day, on average

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Serenity "Peas on Carbonara 👻" Dee 🍜 @sapphixy.bsky.social · 4h

so when this finally implodes who's going to be buying NVIDIA at a fire sale price

if I had the spare cash I'd be buying AMD stock rn

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 5h

It is no longer reasonable to trust that any of this will happen. NVIDIA is having to buy its own GPUs and rent them to their customers, OpenAI cannot build 26GW of data centers, and every data center project is a financial black hole.

www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-bubbl...

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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 5h

Yet even if these data centers get built - and one analyst told me only 30% of them are viable - they are dead weight debt vehicles of what will be near-obsolete GPUs that *everybody* has been buying - all built for AI compute demand that doesn't exist.
www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-bubbl...

And Even If They Build Them, These Projects Are Dead Weight Debt Vehicles
Private equity firms make money by investing in things that they eventually sell, with the average holding period being around 5.8 years.

How, exactly, does that work when you’re building data centers full of GPUs that will, after five years, be five generations behind?

How, exactly, does a private equity firm cash out on an asset that everybody else appears to be building, and who exactly do they sell it to?

And what happens if the GPUs inside die after three years? Who pays to replace them, and what do they replace them with?

In the best case scenario, we’re watching a situation where private equity investors pile tens or hundreds of billions of dollars into assets that start decaying the second that they’re built, ones that are commoditized by the very nature of the supposed “popularity” of generative AI and the single vendor — NVIDIA — that everybody is buying GPUs from.

There is little to differentiate one data center from another outside of its location, and at some point you have to wonder if that will matter when only one company — OpenAI — appears to actually need these massive amounts of compute.

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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 5h

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...

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…

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Reposted by Serenity "Peas on Carbonara 👻" Dee 🍜

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 5h

Oracle needs 4.5GW of compute capacity to handle OpenAI's $300 billion compute contract. They have only got the land for 2.6GW, and there isn't a chance they have that before 2028.

They are guaranteed to breach their contract with OpenAI.
www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-bubbl...

“Gigawatt Data Centers” Are A Pipedream, Taking 2.5 Years Per Gigawatt In Construction and Even Longer For Power, And Oracle’s 4.5GW Of Compute Won’t Be Ready Before 2030, Guaranteeing A Breach Of Its Agreement With OpenAI
As I discussed a few weeks ago, Oracle needs to build 4.5GW of data centers to honour its $300 billion compute contract with OpenAI, and hasn’t even decided where it’s putting 1.9GW of that compute.

What we do know is that 1.4GW of that compute is meant to be built in Shackelford Texas, with “the first building scheduled for delivery in the second half of 2026.”

Remember, it’s about 36 months of lead time — if not more — to get the transformers necessary to build the power necessary for these large data centers, and it appears that Vantage Data Centers is “in the early planning stages” as of late July 2025, and Vantage only just raised the $25 billion to develop the data center, which has yet to break ground. As discussed, the Shackelford site will require at least 1.82GW of power — requiring power structure at a scale that I’ve yet to find a comparison for.

It takes 2.5 years per gigawatt to build a gigawatt datacenter meaning that there isn’t a chance in hell Oracle has the capacity necessary before the end of its contract with OpenAI, guaranteeing that it will breach it within the next few years, assuming that OpenAI actually has the money to pay for the compute, which it will not.

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Reposted by Serenity "Peas on Carbonara 👻" Dee 🍜

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 5h

1GW data centers are entirely different to the smaller ones built in the past. They have different power, cooling and construction problems, and *nobody* has built one yet. And for every 1GW of power, you only get 700MW of IT load/compute capacity.
www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-bubbl...

1GW+ Capacity Data Centers — And Their Associated Power — Are Entirely Different To Building (and Powering) Smaller Data Centers
Kleyman also added that a 1GW data center is a vastly different beast than smaller, 200MW projects.

There are ALWAYS little energy/power gremlins you have to worry about. Now... take that statement and apply it to gigawatt-scale deployments. So... At 1 GW+ scale you're looking at a few issues that could creep up. This includes grid stability, harmonic distortion, voltage regulation, and fault current limits, which become far more acute. Here's the thing... with this level of scale, even minor inefficiencies or mis-sizing can turn into big risks. The system needs holistic protection design (switching, relays, breakers) to handle large fault currents, and transient behaviors (inrush, switching surges) can drive huge stress on components. Here's the REALLY important thing to remember... Cooling, water supply, redundancy, and electrical layout (bus duct, conductor sizing) also scale non-linearly. That means... what’s manageable at 100 MW becomes a design headache at 1 GW. There was an interesting McKinsey study which notes that scaling existing data center methods to GW size demands as many as ~290 separate generator units in large architectures, which dramatically multiplies maintenance, coordination, and failure modes.

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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 5h

Meanwhile, OpenAI has made Fidji Simo their CEO of Applications, and reports say that she now is responsible for making ChatGPT profitable. She's being set up as an Elizabeth Holmes figure, and we have to make sure Sam Altman actually takes the blame.
www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-bubbl...

I get that you think “wow, OpenAI has the monopoly over 800 million weekly active users, that’s exactly like what Google has,” except…Google is a massive operation precision-tuned to make sure ads are seen all the time, in a constant ever-increasing push against their users to see how far it can push them, with massive ad sales teams, decades of data, thousands of miles of underground cable, and unrivalled scale, all of it built on top of something that can be relied upon, unlike Large Language Models.

And guess what, even if it were possible, Sam Altman has now made so many promises of such egregious sums of money that it is effectively impossible for Fiji Simo to succeed. It isn’t Fiji Simo’s fault that Sam Altman promised Oracle so much money! It isn’t Fiji Simo’s fault that Sam Altman has said that she has to make the company $200 billion in 2030! It certainly isn’t Fiji Simo’s fault that Sam Altman has to build 26 Gigawatts of data centers and has plans to promise to build many, many more!

Fiji Simo is the fall girl, and it’s very important that history remembers her accurately. It was her decision to take this job — she is likely making incredibly large amounts of money in both cash and stock — but when OpenAI implodes from the sheer force of Sam Altman’s bullshit, we need to make sure she isn’t blamed for putting this company in this mess, even if it manages to die under her watch (assuming she isn’t fired or quits before the end).

Given the strength of feeling amongst the die-hard, I fear that when things inevitably go terminally wrong, Simo will receive the brunt of the blame — because blaming a single person is a lot easier than acknowledging that the business fundamentals behind OpenAI were deranged, and generative AI wasn’t the mass-market business and consumer tool that said die-hard believe it to be.

To be clear: any attempt to frame her as an Elizabeth Holmes will be a cowardly and nakedly sexist attempt to shift the blame from Sam Altman, a c…

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Reposted by Serenity "Peas on Carbonara 👻" Dee 🍜

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 5h

There's growing evidence that everybody loses money renting out AI GPUs. Oracle lost $100m in the space of three months renting out NVIDIA's new "Blackwell" GPUs, destroying their gross margins. They owe Crusoe $1bn/year for 15 years for their Abilene data center.
www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-bubbl...

AI Data Centers Are A Complete Disaster
Oracle Lost $100 Million In The Three Months Ending August Renting Out Blackwell GPUs
The Information reported earlier in the week that Oracle had gross profit margins of 14% on GPU compute sales, making a “gross profit” of $125 million on $900 million of revenue in the three months ending August 2025.

While this could be actual profit, these margins only include the immediate costs of running the GPUs, and while they include (per The Information) “depreciation expenses for some of the equipment,” “other unspecified depreciation costs would eat up another 7 percentage points of margin.” With such thin margins, it’s very likely other expenses will eat into any remaining profitability, and I’m not sure why The Information chose to go with the 14% number rather than 7% (or lower).

Yet all of this obfuscates the really bad parts. Oracle’s gross profit margins appear to be dwindling with every increase of GPU revenue. In August, Oracle made $895.7 million — a month where it lost $100 million renting out NVIDIA’s blackwell chips. While The Information claims that this is “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,” a statement that doesn’t really make sense when you see Oracle’s revenue growing.

This might be because Oracle is signing unprofitable deals:

As sales from the business nearly tripled in the past year, the gross profit margin from those sales ranged between less than 10% and slightly over 20%, averaging around 16%, the documents show.

In some cases, Oracle is losing considerable sums on rentals of small quantities of both newer and older versions of Nvidia’s chips, the data show.
Oracle appears to be losing more money with every customer it signs for GPU compute, and somehow lost $100 million on Blackwell chips in the space of three months. I severely doubt that’s from not turning them on, considering its revenue increased by nearly $200 million between May and August 2025. In fact, I bet it’s because they’re extremely expensive to run, on top of the fact that Oracle has likely had to low-ball Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services to win business.

This is really bad on just about every foreseeable level. The future of Oracle’s cloud business has become inextricably tied to growing revenue by selling AI compute, with The Information reporting that Oracle’s GPU cloud business could equal its $50 billion+ non-cloud business by 2028. Said revenue is predominantly tied to a very small group of customers — Meta, ByteDance, xAI, NVIDIA and, of course, OpenAI — with the latter making up the majority of its future GPU revenue based on the $300 billion contract alone. If Oracle has made a bad deal with OpenAI, the only thing it’s guaranteed is that future margins will be chewed up by the incredible costs of renting out Blackwell GPUs.

Yet Oracle has a far, far bigger problem on its hands in Abilene Texas, where it’s trying to build a “data center” made up of 8 buildings, each with 50,000 NVIDIA GB200s and an overall capacity of 1.2GW, with Oracle on the hook for a $1-billion-a-year lease for 15 years regardless of whether a tenant pays or not.

And as you know from the intro, Abilene might be fucked.

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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 5h

Premium: The AI Bubble's promises are impossible. NVIDIA's customers are running out of money, GPUs die in 3-5 years, most 1GW data centers will never get built, and OpenAI's Abilene data center doesn't won't have the power it needs before 2028 - if it ever does.
www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-bubbl...

The AI Bubble's Impossible Promises

Readers: I’ve done a very generous “free” portion of this newsletter, but I do recommend paying for premium to get the in-depth analysis underpinning the intro. That being said, I want as many people ...

www.wheresyoured.at

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Prisonculture @prisonculture.bsky.social · 4h

They are not planning "a violent crackdown" on 10.18. What they are doing is sending a signal to their shock troops to try to cause havoc. But those shock troops will be vastly outnumbered. Go out and protest freely. Do not be cowed.

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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 4h

And yes, they're trying to intimidate us but Pritzker's right -- everyone needs to be out in numbers at these events.

Greg Sargent @gregsargent.bsky.social · 4h

By contrast, JB Pritzker told me that people should flood the No Kings protests precisely in order to let the American people know that something is deeply amiss.

More Dems should be doing this, to send the message widely that we are in real trouble right now.

newrepublic.com/article/2016...

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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 5h

The Speaker of the House is telling the Fox News audience that a peaceful demonstration by Americans on the National Mall will actually be a gathering of organizations the administration has designated as violent terrorists.

Seems bad?

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 7h

Mike Johnson: "We're so angry about it. I mean, I'm a very patient guy, but I've had it with these people. The theory we have right now -- they have a hate America rally that's scheduled for October 18 on the National Mall. It's the pro-Hamas wing and antifa people ... "

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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 5h

The House Majority Whip is also insisting that a peaceful "No Kings" demonstration is in fact a "hate America rally" held for the "terrorist wing" of the Democratic Party.

Really feels like they're trying to manifest a violent reaction to it.

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 5h

Emmer: "This is about one thing and one thing alone -- to score political points with the terrorist wing of their party, which is set to hold a hate America rally in DC next week."

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Kate Heartfield @kateheartfield.com · 7h

Today's newsletter is about the patterns in fake book club and other scam emails sent to authors.

How to spot an author scam email

I’ve grumbled enough on social media about the rise in AI-generated scam emails that now, more than one of my author friends has sent an email to me, asking...

buttondown.com

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Yonah Freemark @yonahfreemark.com · 6h

GOP candidate for NJ Gov complains about suburban “overdevelopment.”

Reality: suburban NJ cities & towns are developing at a very slow pace www.urban.org/urban-wire/w...

In the NYC region, wealthy suburban cities like those in NJ continue to exclude subsidized housing www.urban.org/urban-wire/h...

Housing growth in the NJ suburbs of the New York City region is quite slow.

Wealthy suburbs in the NYC region have very few affordable units.

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Serenity "Peas on Carbonara 👻" Dee 🍜 @sapphixy.bsky.social · 4h

Jesus fuck

Oliver Darcy @oliverdarcy.bsky.social · 5h

Here's the full memo.

Reposted by Serenity "Peas on Carbonara 👻" Dee 🍜

Dorian @dorwright.bsky.social · 4h

What fucking 80 page management guide are all the techno-fash reading that this weird micromanagement tactic is becoming common?

Oliver Darcy @oliverdarcy.bsky.social · 5h

Here's the full memo.

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Serenity "Peas on Carbonara 👻" Dee 🍜 @sapphixy.bsky.social · 4h

Protectobots, which are also the same size as an ambulance and a police cruiser.

And then there's the Combaticons, where a Jeep, a tank, a helicopter, and a space shuttle all have the same size.

Serenity "Peas on Carbonara 👻" Dee 🍜 @sapphixy.bsky.social · 4h

Yeah, conservation of mass/scale was something that they tried to stick to for the 2007 live-action movie but even then they fudged stuff because a fighter jet does not have the same mass as a sports car. But G1 type designs? There's a motorcycle that's the same size as a helicopter in the…

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Serenity "Peas on Carbonara 👻" Dee 🍜 @sapphixy.bsky.social · 5h

The G1 toys are shockingly small compared to the modern toys, let alone the high-end collectibles (Takara MP(G) series, third party figures (licensed or otherwise)), but their relative scaling was also all over the place.

The only really big combiner was Predaking.

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