Engineering Randomness

I bet short sellers going to start publishing free, open source competitors to major products they hold shorts on. This would be a profitable strategy for dozens of SaaS companies at this point.

A decade from now, the idea of a "cell tower" for phones will be as silly as dialup is today

@Andercot It is 3D TV all over again, but with 100x more wasted investment before people figured out what was obvious years ago x.com/i/status/17938…

The absolute non-takeoff of VR and AR is probably one of the big upsets in consumer electronics history Pretty much everyone thought this would be huge and it sort of just isn't

@Osinttechnical @MarineTraffic Hopefully it is the USA that is doing the jamming, we should have done it months ago

Powerful regional-level jamming has hit the Strait of Hormuz again, with major location and AIS spoofing seen over the last couple of hours. Seen here, AIS ship tracks on @MarineTraffic disappearing and jumping around.

@MarwaEldiwiny True

"Brushless DC motors are already so optimized that you’re not going to get much more out of even the best designs.” .. Jerry Pratt.

@Yuchenj_UW Open models are a 2nd player strategy. They cut the margins a frontier lab can earn on last-gen models. If China gains the lead, you will see US labs start to release open models. Basically, they are used to undercut competitors more than to make money directly.

It's weird that the US still doesn’t have a truly competitive open-source model lab. It’s clearly not a money problem. Several neolabs have raised billions. It’s not a compute problem. US labs have easier access to B200s/B300s than Chinese labs. So what is the issue?

@WindowsLatest How about a "low bloat profile" instead

Microsoft's hidden Windows 11 trick makes apps launch 70% faster. I tested it on a low-end PC, and early results are promising. Right now, when you click Start, open File Explorer, launch Edge, or right-click for a context menu, and there’s often that tiny micro-stutter before anything happens. Microsoft is now testing a feature called Low Latency Profile. Once turned on, and you do a high-priority action, Windows 11 briefly pushes the CPU to max frequency for 1–3 seconds, finishes the task faster, then drops back down. In my testing on a constrained VM with just 2 cores and 4GB RAM, the difference was obvious. Edge, Outlook, Copilot, and the Start menu opened much faster. CPU usage spiked to around 96–97%, but only for a few seconds. For high-end PCs, the difference may be small. But for budget laptops and low-end Windows 11 machines, this could be a real game-changer.

@ThiccQuidity @dividendology @grok The interesting thing is that the top 1% column doesn't grow exponentially as I would expect with age.

@dividendology @grok is this true?

Here are the net worth brackets by age in 2023: Note: This is based on the Federal Reserve's 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances (most recent available)

Here's my conversation all about @FFmpeg, the legendary open-source software powering most video on the Internet. In the episode, I talk with Jean-Baptiste Kempf and Kieran Kunhya. JB is lead developer of VLC and Kieran is FFmpeg contributor, codec engineer, and the person behind the now-infamous @FFmpeg account on X. VLC (@videolan), by the way, is also a legendary piece of open-source software: it's a video player that can open basically anything & has been downloaded over 6 billion times. I think both FFmpeg and VLC are two of the most important and impactful software systems ever created, both open source, and both created & maintained by volunteers: brilliant engineers from all walks of life. Thank you to everyone who contributed to FFmpeg and VLC, and in general to all engineers giving their heart & soul to building systems used by millions (or billions) of people, and often doing so not for money, status, or fame, but purely for the love of building great software and doing good for the world. Thank you to the builders! 🙏❤️ Shoutouts in this chat to @ID_AA_Carmack @karpathy @elonmusk @TimSweeneyEpic and everyone who is a contributor & fan of open source! It's here on X in full and is up everywhere else (see comment). Timestamps: 0:00 - Episode highlight 2:17 - Introduction 5:35 - Weirdest things VLC opens 9:59 - How video playback works 19:20 - Video codecs and containers 30:07 - FFmpeg explained 51:07 - Linus Torvalds 55:46 - Turning down millions to keep VLC ad-free 1:10:04 - FFmpeg & Google drama 1:29:18 - FFmpeg developers 1:35:55 - VLC and FFmpeg 1:40:29 - History of FFmpeg 1:43:46 - Reverse engineering codecs 1:57:01 - FFmpeg testing 2:01:08 - Assembly code (handwritten) 2:25:26 - Rust programming language 2:34:42 - FFmpeg and Libav fork 2:43:04 - Open source burnout 2:50:51 - x264 and internet video 3:04:07 - Video compression basics 3:11:04 - CIA and fake VLC 3:21:39 - Ultra low latency streaming 3:39:07 - AV2 codec and video patents 3:48:59 - VLC backdoors 3:59:14 - Video archiving 4:05:51 - Future of FFmpeg and VLC

@Peter_J_Beck Work of art

for your enjoyment

@negligible_cap This is incorrect. Semis are the new Google. In a world where software is basically free, the hardware now has the advantage.

What’s going on in semis is not sustainable per GS Everyone spending on AI is losing money except for semiconductor companies and the dynamic is “unprecedented and unsustainable” “Something has to change with this dynamic – either the companies higher up in the chain need to start generating profits due to AI or they will eventually have to scale back on the spending.” $SOX is up a cool 62% YTD. Wen ROI

@eevblog The challenge is getting the scale right, otherwise the data interconnect kills it. They need enough compute to run frontier models without pulling more power than the site can provide. Theft also seems like it could be a problem

This could be the smartest play in AI. No need to capex a new data centre, just install in peoples homes and use all excess solar instead of exporting it to the grid. Cut the home owner in on the profit. No waiting years for construction and approval, just install same day.

@cremieuxrecueil When you fit a line to an exponential, you get wrong predictions. December 2025 was the real inflection point, everything before that was a toy in comparison.

8 out of 10 businesses in the U.S. now uses AI, and 69% of businesses across the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Australia report some AI use. The modal firm reports AI did nothing to employment over the past three years, and also thinks it'll do nothing over the next three. Odd, no?

Look, the laws of physics actually do apply. Maybe the world is finally figuring out that "green" energy required massive gov subsidies for a reason...

@davepl1968 Xor

I'm going to give you a computer science problem, covered by a software patent (US 4,197,590). Let's see if it's "obvious" to experts in the field. You're on a monochrome display. You want to draw a PLUS sign cursor, like in a paint program, leaving the pixel in the middle unchanged. How do you draw the vertical and horizontal lines without stomping on the center pixel? Do you save the center and put it back later? Or what's your solution? No sprites, of course, all done via Get/SetPixel(x,y) only. Assume something like bool GetPixel(uint x, uint y); void SetPixel(uint x, uint y, bool b);

@ianmiles Nope, the trajectory says the complete opposite. The models will keep improving and in two years we will laugh at the "vibe coding doesn't work" argument.

The 'vibecoding' hype is officially hitting a wall. We have passed the peak of inflated expectations regarding AI eliminating all software developers. David Sacks recently broke down the reality check the tech industry is facing, citing insights from Aaron Levie and Matthew Yglesias. The consensus is shifting: people do not actually want to 'vibe code' their own complex applications. The real consumer demand is simple. We want professionally managed software companies to leverage AI coding assistants to build better, cheaper products. The translation is straightforward: just lower your prices, do not make the end user vibe code. While agentic coding is an undeniable boon for professional developers looking to scale their output, and fantastic for beginners learning the ropes, it breaks down when casually building complex software. Casual users are not equipped to take on the ongoing risks of system upgrades, routine maintenance, bugs, and cyber security threats. Chamath Palihapitiya takes it a step further, calling this casual approach to enterprise software a massive risk rather than just a tax on knowledge workers. He predicts that we will eventually see a public company completely torch its enterprise value because someone tried to vibe code their way out of a problem, leading to inevitable firings. As Jason Calacanis points out, this is exactly how the technology adoption lifecycle works. The industry is currently moving from the peak of inflated expectations down into the trough of disillusionment. AI agents will eventually climb the slope of enlightenment and become a highly productive standard, but the idea of replacing the entire professional developer workforce overnight was just a phase in the cycle. FT: @theallinpod @jason @davidsacks @chamath @friedberg

This should read: "Carbon tax pushing up energy prices" Carbon prices are 100% tax, zero gain. Ask China how much they pay for their CO2 emissions.

@MATLAB Or you could just do the same thing with Python and skip MATLAB all together

Introducing the MATLAB Agentic Toolkit Get started 👉 spr.ly/6019BBw4zH

@unusual_whales Put a different way: Since 1976, the average household has seen wealth surge 200% 200% for 99.9% of the economy is a GIGANTIC amount of wealth compared to however much the 0.1% made.

Since 1976, the top 0.001% of U.S. households has seen wealth surge ~3,500%, versus ~2,200% for the top 0.01%, ~1,200% for the top 0.1%, and just ~200% for the average household, per WSJ

Code is speech, so are model weights. This cannot happen as a matter of free speech.

Very bad idea. Administrations of the future will force labs to imbue the biases of their side into the models in order to get sign off. This will also reduce the number of labs who can ship models, having to deal with compliance. I cannot advise against this strongly enough.