Nick Denton

Isaac Asimov: "The fall of Empire is a massive thing and not easily fought. It is dictated by a rising bureaucracy, a receding initiative...

@tphuang That changed quick!

Jensen is getting desperate. China is shutting off a major src of demand for Nvidia chips, transshipment to Chinese SOE DCs. I have pretty solid src that just 6000 out of 100k racks in Meta's Hyperion DC will be Nvidia cards. Google TPUs are supplying most of its future demand. Same w/ Amazon & Trainium. I've said this many times now. The absolute compute per card should not be overvalued. You can achieve same w/ compute w/ more lower cost cards & get better performance through more memory + faster interconnect. On top of that, US data build out is facing logjam due to energy & supply chain issues. You can check the lead time on diesel generators & gas turbine. I overstated optical transceiver issues since the big time has hit supply chain constraint b4 we even got there. Jensen knows Nvidia is facing an upcoming cliff. Altman sees the same issue. Hence all the begging for govt help. At end of the day, Chinese AI labs have shown you can do leading models w/o having unlimited compute, so why do we need to keep proclaiming build out speed that's not achievable?

@Noahpinion Quite moderate overruns in the scheme of things. Spare your sympathy for the Anglo projects like California’s or HS2 in the UK. g.co/gemini/share/4…

Indonesia's high-speed rail was hauled as the Belt and Road's biggest success story. But costs are exploding, Indonesian companies are taking the hit, and they're still on the hook to China for their loans. Oops. asiatimes.com/2025/11/china-…

@Noahpinion @AccelCurious Please expand.

@AccelCurious Well, no

You can bet this is a propaganda move to get the U.S. to drop EUV export controls. In a year David Sacks will be saying "Unless we sell China our EUV, they'll just make their own!" And Trump will fall for it.

@FistedFoucault @LastDaysofRome Ukraine, which also brings a proven military and dynamic arms industry.

@LastDaysofRome To buttress SE Europe/represent the Orthobros

Europe has five pillars at present France Germany Italy Spain Poland It's missing a sixth that would be located in SE Europe. The closest country is Romania, but it is very far from pillar-state, even though it serves as a rampart against Russia like Poland does.

@Noahpinion The US is in a proxy war with China — and Europe and Russia are their respective proxies. There, fixed it for you.

Europe is in a proxy war with China.

@daveg Seems more likely to me that there will be different tiers. Fast cheap ad-supported answers, for the masses, and subscription services for the more expensive queries. As it ever was.

@nicknotned But AI is like telco not the internet, it already has more than 50 million paying subscribers and almost no ad supported services, because it has much more significant delivery costs.

I guess it's obvious in hindsight but the internet was free and ad supported, AI usage is fee based.

@Noahpinion Average merchant fees for WeChat Pay and Alipay are about 0.5%, compared with 3% for traditional US credit and debit cards. Might be boring to you, but all these US oligopoly rents add up. Helps explain why US GDP is so high, while people feel so stretched.

Dear China boosters: NO ONE CARES ABOUT YOUR STUPID PAYMENT APP! PAYING FOR THINGS IS ALREADY VERY EASY EVERYWHERE! Show us some goddamn ROBOTS and DRONES and cars with screens in them and shit! Nothing is more boring than a payment app!!

@daveg Tons of companies have tried subscription services throughout the Internet era. But — with the exception of Netflix and a few others — it was the ad-supported services that achieved massive scale.

@nicknotned Because the internet was never fee based so people never had to pay per use. AI will be like telco.

@pegobry_en The old blogosphere was one big tent, for sure. Elizabeth was friends with @balajis back in the day. And Andrew Breitbart threw the party for Gawker’s LA offshoot. And then new lines were drawn.

Back in the 2000s, @espiers was a HBD fan, interacting with people in that sphere. Now she’s a race communist not because she believes "systemic racism" is real, in fact she knows it’s not, but just because she’s a vicious person. Someone should pub the receipts.

@daveg I read somewhere that developers need the commitment of rails. It’s the state putting skin in the game.

Proving that trams are just buses where the infrastructure cost means everyone has to get out of the way.

@charlesmurray @antlionai All this subterfuge. What a waste of mental energy.

@antlionai Darn it. Fooled again. He's so funny, I should have guessed.

What makes this even more bizarre is that Yarvin apparently realizes that "Roma" refers to an underprivileged population but the connection with "gypsy" still didn't occur to him. Or he really thinks that all Romanians are gypsies.

@pegobry_en @Noahpinion @Steve_Sailer argues that many film directors are inherently right-wing. perplexity.ai/search/33a52d2…

@Noahpinion Currently active or in general? Currently active I’d say BAP, or point you to the website of Passage Press.

Yes. Sadly, with a handful of very good exceptions, this is true.

@daveg Alternatively, when does US meme money begin to spill over into companies like Nio or even Alibaba?

At what point do US meme stocks capitulate and Chinese suppressed ones normalize?

@Noahpinion This the Pax Americana you’re talking about? Pictured: crater ponds in Cambodia. Yeah, I think Southeast Asia is doing fine without y’all.

Everyone enjoying a world without Pax Americana?

@curtis_yarvin So an executive president with a 7-year term, as France had in the late 20th century. Would that do it?

Imagine expressing this in one variable: term length. A one-week term maximizes democratic control over the monarch. But that monarchy is incredibly weak. Four years: stronger. Life: much stronger. Hereditary: insanely strong How much power do we need to get our straws back?

Oligarchy beats democracy, every time. From mass immigration to plastic straws. Say you want your straws back? You can’t have that. How can democracy win? By getting stronger. The strongest move? Elect a monarch to flush the oligarchy. Paper straws are flushable. So are NGOs

@pegobry_en @esaagar More likely he was a source than an agent.

Once more about Epstein... Since the latest outburst in The Discourse I have read up more on Epstein, particularly from people who believe Epstein was an intelligence asset (I listened to @esaagar on the Andrew Schulz podcast), because I always want to hear the steelman case against what I believe, and I have to say that the more I listen the MORE I am convinced that Epstein was just a random rich sex pervert who had sex parties a la Diddy. What's more, it's the things that the conspiracists POINT TO which convince me that Epstein COULD NOT have been a spy. 1. "He was a college dropout who became a math teacher and then became super rich." So, there's an amazing French TV series titled "Le Bureau des légendes," which I believe is available in the US under the title "The Bureau" and has been remade as a US series as "The Agency." It was made in cooperation with the French spy agency DGSE and every intelligence expert I'm aware of says it's the most realistic spy show out there, and it's specifically about undercover agents. One of the plotlines is about the DGSE getting an agent to get recruited as a seismologist in Iran to get close to the country's scientific elite. You know how they got an agent to pose as a seismologist? They recruited a student at a top science school and MADE HER DO A PHD IN SEISMOLOGY. The reason she was able to pose as a seismologist is because she WAS a seismologist. Because obviously if she WASN'T a seismologist, she'd immediately get exposed after six months working around real seismologists. And because the best covers have the maximum amount of actual truth in there. If they want somebody to be a lawyer, they MAKE HIM GO TO LAW SCHOOL AND PASS THE BAR WITHOUT CHEATING. If the Mossad or CIA or anybody else wanted to create this Gatsby-financier type character, they would NEVER, EVER, in a MILLION YEARS approve the following cover story: "Ok, so, he dropped out of high school, became a maths teacher at an exclusive prep school, and this allowed him to become close to a guy and get hired at Bear Stearns, and then he gets some other rich billionaire to sign away his fortune. Yep, makes sense. And then he's going to pose as this super rich guy, but he's not going to have a real hedge fund and we just have to hope nobody asks too many questions." No, first of all, the Mossad would recruit somebody named JAMES WORTHINGTON IV, not Chaim Jewstein, they would make sure he had an Ivy League degree, they would make sure he got hired LEGITIMATELY at JP Morgan and then AFTER FIVE YEARS they would set him up to start a hedge fund. And that hedge fund would be a REAL hedge fund, which would hire REAL analysts, who would have no idea that this isn't a legitimate hedge fund, and who would make REAL trades. The seed money would come from the intelligence agencies, and they would provide a backstop if necessary, but 80-90% of the activity would be totally legitimate. 2. Gatsby characters actually exist Did you read The Great Gatsby? Fitzgerald wrote that novel because such characters actually existed. Gatsby was a fraud, but he was not a creation by any intelligence service. Gatsby-type characters who have the gift of the gab and the schmooze and find ways to con (whether in the literal sense or in a broader figurative sense) rich people out of their money happen all the time. That's about 80% of Republican-consultant world and 70% of Democrat-consultant world. One of the heirs to the Hermès family fortune signed away 4 billion euros to his gardener. To this day nobody knows exactly why; the assumption was they were lovers but apparently that's not true; probably he was just the only charming and interesting person in his life. Many such cases. There was a huge financial scandal in France when Liliane Bettencourt, then the richest person in France (L'Oréal heiress) turned out to have suffered from dementia and had been preyed upon by all sorts of grifters who got her to sign away huge chunks of her fortune. You have NO idea how often this happens because most of those stories get squished because they are hugely embarrassing--IF they are found out, which obviously is not always. And of course some of these guys get a head too big and fly too close to the Sun and crash out. Like Epstein. Epstein clearly had a gift of the gab, of schmoozing. He probably also managed to acquire real skills in the area of wealth management. Again, all of the stuff about Epstein that screams "sketchy" also screams "NOT SPY". Another obvious example: the mansion. Would an intelligence-created Epstein type have some sort of swanky Manhattan residence for the parties/sex parties? Sure. Would it be THE biggest mansion in all of Manhattan? NO, OF COURSE NOT. That's CERTAIN to attract unwanted attention. The only person who would do that is a narcissist sociopath weirdo who very much does NOT have an intelligence handler. 3. Epstein was Jewish and was connected to a lot of Jews and Zionists When discussing Epstein, everybody talks about a famous Mossad op where they did create a character in Syria who was this socialite who threw big parties in Damascus and got access to the Syrian elite and Syrian government secrets that way. What they usually fail to mention was that while that agent was Jewish, he posed as a NON-JEWISH Egyptian businessman. For pretty obvious reasons. If some guy named Moshe Ben Judah was throwing swanky parties in Damascus, OF COURSE everyone would NATURALLY assume he was a Mossad agent. Seems pretty intuitive that when Epstein got his start in the world of providing various financial services to the super rich, he leaned on his Jewish identity, that his early clientele had more Jews than non-Jews, and that those Jews would tend to introduce him more often to other Jews, and that many of those Jews would also happen to be supporters of Israel in some sense. Which makes total sense if Epstein was this social climber character. And makes ZERO sense if Epstein was a Mossad creation. If he was a Mossad creation, A. they would have picked someone non-Jewish or given him a non-Jewish identity, and B. every bank or institution or individual that would have given him his start in that world would have been somebody THREE CUTOUTS AWAY from ANYTHING remotely smacking of Jews or Israel. 4. Epstein was connected to Israeli Prime Ministers This one is the final straw, because it is by far the most retarded. In fact it is so retarded that I cannot believe that anybody makes this argument with a straight face. Epstein was connected to several Israeli Prime Ministers, and in particular after his premiership Ehud Barak would come stay at his mansion. Can I just point out that this is INCONTROVERTIBLE EVIDENCE that Epstein was NOT a Mossad agent or asset in any way shape or form? Like, how fucking retarded do you have to be to believe that the Israelis had this amazing asset at the heart of the American elite, and then the Prime Ministers, who would obviously know about this asset, would DROP BY TO HANG OUT WITH HIM PUBLICLY? This would be like if, while Kim Philby was in MI6 as a Soviet double agent, and Khruschchev came on a state visit to the UK, he stayed in Philby's flat and had dinner with Philby at his club in full view of everyone. Of course Khrushchev would NEVER in a MILLION YEARS come anywhere NEAR Philby PRECISELY because he was an enormously important Soviet agent!!! Like, how DUMB can people be to believe this? Imagine that Nixon or Kissinger or Carter or whoever in his post-White House life, knew from his days in the government that Boris Popov, this key figure in the Soviet Communist Party who knew everyone and schmoozed everyone, was actually a CIA. And so Nixon is travelling to the Soviet Union on a goodwill tour to give speeches or promote his book or whatever, and he thinks "Oh yeah! Why don't I go hang out with Popov! He's one of our guys, I'll just hang out at his dacha for a couple days, have lunch with him at the Arbat." The word for this is TREASON. It's INSANITY. And, of course, if, in this TOTALLY ABSURD BIZARRO UNIVERSE, Nixon had this idea, then the Popov in question would NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS agree to such a thing. He would fake an illness. He would have an aunt in Kamchatka that suddenly died. And probably as soon as Nixon came back to the US, he would be arrested and sent to Guantanamo for the rest of his life for deliberately trying to expose a key CIA agent. Which is how everyone with knowledge of the facts would interpret such an action. And the whole notion would be so absurd that Popov would FREAK THE FUCK OUT and almost certainly either disappear forever or turn, thinking that the entire notion was a scheme by the Americans to get him killed by his own people for some reason. I CANNOT find the words to convey how DEEPLY DEEPLY RETARDED it is to say "Oh, Epstein was super chummy with Ehud Barak, therefore he probably was a Mossad agent."

@daveg Don’t we just end up with databases, again? (With natural language queries and fuzzier results.)

Ironically, LLMs were supposed to remove the need for structured data as they relied on non deterministic responses to natural language. But now there is a trend to things like markdown indexing or JSON prompts which use name/value pairs just as a form would. So we are back to structured data.

@Noahpinion Cuius regio, eius media socialia. It’s the only way that the dissension can end.

I'm a digital nativist. I love people immigrating to my country and becoming Americans, but I'm sick and tired of foreigners poisoning American discourse with their extremist politics from halfway around the world.

I create a lot of presentations, but hate the way that PDFs are managed online, so have built a tool that outputs them as shareable single html pages with embedded images, that is indexable by search engines and AI. pdf.swysiwyg.com