Ed Sealing

To you, it might just be another day at work. To the person you're talking to, it might be a turning point in life. Show everyone some love.

Driving on a back country road in the middle of nowhere Pennsylvania and just passed two "No Datacenter" signs in 2 different yards. Not a good sign.

@beffjezos Meet someone at a beer the other day. I mentioned AI and she immediately got madder and said "don't get me started. It's taking so many jobs. They need to ban it". 😲 Jaw dropped. She wasn't in the IT field. The resentment is very real out there.

The amount of ressentiment there is right now is insane. Feeling it as the eye of the storm and the boundary of the polarization on both sides for a day. How did we get here?

Every person's life is a long-running RL rollout contributing a little signal towards the collective intelligence. Like little RL jobs inside each rollout for a larger RL.

@tekbog Curious what the self-help mangas are like.

getting one shot right now

One of the reasons I've been married for 16 years is that my wife listens to me ramble on about tech (AI for last 4 years), and I listen to her ramble about family, friends, and her latest book. Like really, actively listen and learn. She knows way more about AI at this point than most Comp Sci folks. And I get to act like I'm keeping up with our family and friends when I'm around them. 🥰

ok maybe i asked too much. i wanted a guy who can bring me flowers and let me ramble about ai. 💀

This line rings true as well: "By design, content platform algorithmic feeds leverage polarization over policy and rage over reason as a means of keeping users online and active in their sites or apps."

I don't get into national politics, but couldn't pass up reading the DNC "autopsy" on the 2024 election. Honestly, it's pretty terrible. Riddled with inaccurate information and foot notes on every page saying "this is not accurate data contradicts claim". But found this nugget. This is what every national party needs to understand. It's no about race, gender, religion, identity, etc. In the end, it's not the "far-right" or "far-left" that make the decision at the national level. it's the moderate voters. And they make the decision on an individual level. If you want to win, put up a good candidate (or at least one better than the other side does). Period.

@MountainMan133 @BillAckman @JeffBezos @andrewrsorkin 100% agree with this. Fraud and abuse comes from spending "other people's money". If 50% of voters don't see it as their money, then it will just exacerbate the fraud problem. Everyone should have a vested interest in what the Govt takes in and spends. Incentives drive people.

@BillAckman @JeffBezos @andrewrsorkin I’ll disagree on the zero income tax for the bottom 50%. Even if the tax is small, we all need skin in the game when it comes to taxes. If you think waste and fraud are bad now, just wait until half the country has absolutely no skin in the game.

A really important and interesting interview with @JeffBezos and @andrewrsorkin about tax policy, AI, the economy, and space. Unfortunately it is only in audio form. Bezos argues for eliminating tax on the bottom 50%, making the case that the 3% of tax revenue from this cohort should be made up for by eliminating government waste and fraud. I agree. He says that instead of vilifying the top 1% who pay 40% of Federal taxes, we should have a real debate about tax policy. Is making the tax system even more progressive the right answer? Will it generate more revenues or less? Or should we endeavor to eliminate waste and shrink the size of government in order to eliminate tax on an even greater percentage of Americans? On AI, he makes a powerful case for more jobs, in fact a labor shortage, due to growth driven by increases in AI-driven productivity. A must listen. The interview begins at 18:33. youtu.be/NSVpd46EfLo?si…

Why are so many moving to installs via shell-script? The security implications are pretty bad. The world invented signed packages for a good reason.

I wish more people understood that demanding that higher salary or bonus may end up being what gets them laid off or fired. Their boss doesn't set the compensation, the market does. I've personally had good employees that demanded a much larger salary than the market generally provides. I would often give it to them with the warning of "this might be the reason you don't have a job later if the contract tanks and I can't get you in another position". Too few people heed the warning.

You make 71 dollars, you ring up between 600 and 2000 a shift, and you call the difference your stolen surplus. The 600 to 2000 is revenue. Strip out cost of goods, which in retail runs 50 to 70 percent of the ticket. Now you're at 200 to 700 of margin. Out of that comes the rent, the utilities, the inventory system, the buyer who sourced the product before you touched it, the freight that moved it, the marketing that pulled the customer in, the shrinkage, the overhead, and every slow shift that doesn't ring like yours. The number you're staring at as your contribution is mostly other people's work and other people's money before you scanned a single item. But here's the part you genuinely don't see, and it's the whole thing. Whatever gap is left after all of that is not surplus extracted from you. It's the return on capital and risk that you did not put up and would never put up. Someone signed a five or ten year lease before a single customer walked in. Someone fronted the cash for the inventory sitting on those shelves whether it sells or not. Someone took on the personal guarantee on the loan. Someone eats the loss when the location underperforms, when the shrink runs high, when the product doesn't move, when a recession kills the quarter. Someone is liable when an employee gets hurt or a customer sues. You walk in, work your five hours, and walk out with 71 dollars that hits your account whether the store made money that day or lost it. That is the trade. You sold certainty. They bought risk. Your 71 is guaranteed. Their margin is not. You get paid if the shift is slow. You get paid if the store loses money that month. You get paid if the whole location closes at the end of the year and the owner eats the buildout, the remaining lease, and the severance. The owner's return only exists after every fixed cost is covered and every risk has been absorbed. You opted out of all of it. The price of opting out is that you don't get the upside. That's not extraction. That's the deal you took, on purpose, because the alternative was carrying the risk yourself. You want the 600 to 2000. Fine. Go get it. Sign the lease. Front the inventory. Take the personal guarantee. Carry the liability. Make payroll out of your own pocket on the slow weeks. Lie awake over the quarter. The upside is right there and nobody is stopping you from reaching for it. The reason you're standing at the register instead is that you looked at that risk and decided you'd rather have the guaranteed 71. That was a rational choice. It was also a choice, and you don't get to make the safe choice and then claim the risky payout. The radicalizing thing you think you're seeing is just the price of capital and the price of risk, and you're reading it as theft because nobody ever explained that the guy taking the downside is the one who gets the upside. That's not a flaw in the system. That's the system doing exactly what it's supposed to do. Surplus flows to whoever absorbs the risk. You absorbed none. That's why your number is 71, and it's also why your 71 shows up even on the days the store bleeds. If you don't like it, the move isn't resentment. The move is to start carrying risk. Skill, ownership, a stake in the outcome. Every dollar of upside is sitting on the other side of a dollar of risk you haven't agreed to take yet. And on the surplus labor point specifically. The only reason you still have that job at all is the thing you think is the insult. You can do multiple jobs in one body. You restock, you face shelves, you run the register, you handle the customer who can't find something, you clean the spill, you catch the shoplifter, you reset the display, you do returns. All in one shift. All for the 71. A robot that does any one of those tasks reliably in a live retail environment with unpredictable customers and unpredictable mess costs more to buy, install, maintain, and integrate than it saves against your wage. Not because the technology can't do the task (trust me they can). Because the task is actually a dozen tasks bundled into one flexible human who context-switches for free and shows up tomorrow without a service contract. That bundling is the only thing standing between you and automation. The day a machine can do the bundle at a lower fully-loaded cost than your wage plus your overhead, the economic decision flips and you're gone. Not out of malice. Out of the same math you're using to feel extracted. So sit with the actual position. Your wage is low enough and your flexibility is high enough that replacing you is not yet worth the capital outlay. The 71 you resent is also your moat. It's the number that keeps the robot in the catalog instead of in your aisle. The moment you successfully argue your way to a wage that makes automation pencil out, you've made the case for your own replacement. Your leverage right now is being cheaper than the machine. That is not a great place to stand tbh. The way out of it is not resentment about the gap. The way out is to become the person who specs, installs, and services the machine instead of the person it's deciding whether to replace.

@kalomaze Stolen Valor Act violation

bro

@beffjezos 😳😳😳 Clearly I need to be in the datacenter business.

If you think your rent in SF is expensive, just wait until you hear how much Claude is paying in Memphis

Some of the best business advice my father once gave me was "Small businesses need a small bank. When you call 'Jeff', he picks up and has the authority to instantly solve your problem. You can drive down to meet with 'Sally' when you desperately need a loan to bridge a payroll gap, and she can approve/deny on the spot and the money will be there tomorrow. Even a small bank deals in the millions of dollars.". I lived by that with my businesses and it has always served me very well.

I am pretty close to moving our entire business off of @Chase and recommending other companies do the same. I have spent hours on the phone trying to get an issue resolved that gets closed by the "escalation team" without warning or communication. Getting absurd. RT for awareness please 🙏 maybe you folks can help me have them see sense

The left hates Elon and "Billionaires" (represents AI). The right hates Dario, San Francisco & Silicon Valley (represents AI). Add in foreign influence & money to derail U.S. progress and you can mobilize people on both sides against AI & Datacenters. Also, no one wants it shoved down their throat in every product, website, and app. The rush to monetize and pay for the capex is making it worse. Every update of your phone, laptop, app now thrusts subpar AI onto the general public. This button is hurting progress and there's no way to stop it.

The water is just a fig leaf. Really, they hate AI.

The latest IQ test involves data centers and water.

@808_38hz @johnarnold Translation: "I hope America burns so the people I like can be in power". <-- This is the current problem with both parties in the U.S.

@johnarnold One can only pray it goes to 7-8% to destroy what’s left of this disastrous Presidency.

A fire alarm is going off and everyone is ignoring it.

A "Personal Update" is getting a new dog or getting in a car accident. This feels like an industry shift or a canary.

@ChiefEngineerCE @amuse Lookup the "Lump of labor fallacy" it will tell you all you need to know on this issue.

@amuse Give us one reason we should put making us all unemployed a priority.

DATA CENTER DOOMERS: Secretary Burgum reported that the intelligence community has traced much of the opposition to data centers to foreign influence campaigns aimed at slowing American technological progress. The strategy appears to be working.

Shoutout to @Ceph (and @rook_io). Been running a cluster for ~18 months and never once had a failure or problem. I'm constantly impressed by the stability! It just works!

Anthropic HR: "Sir, we have a major reputation problem brewing!" Dario: "Who can we hire that would instantly fix that? The most honest, well-liked engineer there is? Pay them whatever they want!" Andrej Karpathy:

We are certainly closer than we have ever been before... But that's how journeys always work. Our inability to see the future (or accurately predicting the future) prevents us from realizing this was always the path that we were on. This is a special time, but 100 years ago was also a special time, as will 100 years from now.

@EdSealing @pmarca brother. the age of rsi/asi/agi/bci is much more apt for being described as 'going thru the singularity' vs any other time in history, by a notable margin. we have been on a long, compounding journey though. but i think word choice ~matters.

We are, but also we have been for 500 years…