The Infinitely Prolonged

@wowbaggert.bsky.social

1883 Followers 374 Following

he/him/his Either way - patriot or treason it's gonna be one long hard ride - Melissa Etheridge

It’s easy to dismiss this entirely as “rich people problems,” but AI data centers are increasingly funded — both directly and through private credit — using pension and insurance funds that rely on these (theoretical) payments for future yield to pay out premiums. I’ll give you some examples. Australian AI infrastructure company Morrison, backers of CDC (the largest data center operator in the country), recently convinced Japanese bank SMBC to allow it to invest its pension funds in AI data centers in the country. IPI Partners, a one of the largest private data center investment firms that is now owned by Blue Owl, has a limited partner (read: people funding it) base, per Deutsche Bank, split into equal 25% chunks made up of sovereign wealth funds, family offices, public pensions, and insurance/private pension endowments. The California State Teacher’s Retirement System is the biggest investor in Blue Owl’s publicly-traded Blue Owl Capital Corporation fund. Blue Owl funded Meta’s Hyperion data center and Stargate Abilene, amongst other deals. In 2024, Blue Owl acquired insurer Kuvare, which won the Great Des Moines Partnership’s “Deal Of The Decade” Award in 2023 for funding Meta’s Altoona-based data center, which was, at the time, Meta’s largest data center. CDPQ, one of Quebec’s largest pension funds, invested in CoreWeave’s $7.5 billion DDTL 1.0, as part of its CDPQ American Fixed Income V Inc fund.
The Far Side: A dog hides behind a washing machine, waiting for a cat to step into the dryer, thinking "oh please... oh please..."
Pulp Fiction: "I hate to shatter your ego, but this ain't the first time I've had a gun pointed at me."
Wojack says "Yes."
Labyrinth: "You have no power over me."
Longtime Zuckerberg lieutenant Andrew Bosworth calls donning fatigues with Palantir and OpenAI brass ‘great honor’ Meta’s chief technology officer has called it “the great honor of my life” to be enlisted in a new US army corps that defence chiefs set up to better integrate military and tech industry expertise, including senior figures from top tech firms that also include Palantir and OpenAI. Andrew Bosworth, a long-term lieutenant to Mark Zuckerberg known widely as “Boz”, is one of several senior Silicon Valley executives commissioned to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the corps, called Detachment 201, which the US army says will “fuse cutting-edge tech expertise with military innovation”.
Alien: "It's an interesting combination of elements, making him a tough little son of a bitch."
Aliens quote: "Hey, maybe you haven't been keeping up on current events but we just got our asses kicked, Pal!"
I know that most of you see the Republican Party as nothing more than a Donald Trump personality cult, but it's really more of a hive mind. Wherever the dominant figures in the party stand on a particular issue, that's where just about everyone else in the party stands. When Graham's replacement glides to victory in November in South Carolina, and McConnell's replacement does the same in Kentucky, you'll barely notice the difference in how Republicans do business.
Kirk, from Wrath of Kahn: "But like a poor marksman you keep missing the target!"
From the movie Real Genius: "Well then I'm happy and sad for you"
Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly This was a 2007 Supreme Court judgement that radically raised the bar to win (or even bring to trial) any antitrust case. It says that parallel conduct — actions from companies that, from the outside, would appear to suggest that they’re working together to disadvantage new competitors, or to weaponize their market dominance at the disadvantage of consumers in a coordinated manner — is circumstantial evidence of collusion in a Sherman Act case, and such evidence is, in and of itself, insufficient to launch an antitrust investigation. It made it so that a complaint needs to contain enough facts to show that antitrust behavior is “probable,” not just “plausible”.This is called the Twombly Test, and any case that fails to meet this standard is vulnerable to dismissal at the earliest stages.
Chicago style baby!
Then something happened that isn’t supposed to happen, and I want to be precise about what it was — because the story you know is wrong in a way that matters. The story you know stars the trust-busters: Teddy Roosevelt swinging the big stick, Standard Oil broken up in 1911, the reform laws stacking up — direct election of senators, food and drug regulation, the eight-hour day, and eventually Social Security. All true. All late. The legislation was the lagging indicator, the fever breaking after the immune system had already been fighting for twenty years. The actual first movers were, and I cannot stress this enough, nobodies. Between roughly 1870 and 1920, Americans went on the greatest civic-joining spree in the country’s history — Putnam’s data show more enduring civic organizations founded in those decades than in any comparable period before or since. Unions, granges, fraternal lodges, women’s clubs, settlement houses, mutual aid societies, congregations, the PTA. Millions of people who had every reason to conclude that honesty was for suckers instead went out and found the other cooperators. They weren’t being noble. They were being practical: alone, each of them was lunch. Together, they were a market where decency broke even.
"Great American State Fair" showing joyless, nearly empty fair grounds, and National Guard troops in the foreground
Davey and Goliath, claymation characters!
I’m sorry man, you have an addiction, and I worry it’s ruining your life. What is this producing? What are you actually doing with this time? Because if you’re allegedly 100 times more productive, wouldn’t that, y’know, produce something fairly incredible? I have no idea — and don’t want to put this man on blast — how significant his commitments on GitHub may or may not be, but the return on investment of “obsessively checking your laptop at all times in case you might not be productive” should be something on the order of curing a disease.
Family Guy skin color chart meme
diagram showing the seven states in the Colorado River Compact: Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California
Death By Toys: Great American State Fair Action figure playset Just like the real thing! Minutes of fun includes barely any people! contents: one [1] "giant" crowd of people shows three small figurines, photo of state fair with almost nobody there
GoT: We can only help them from a position of strength.
The frenzied, reality-defying hype around Anthropic, OpenAI and Large Language Models is a direct symptom of a tech industry with nowhere else to go. There are no other industries that have any sign of becoming the next Google Search or Facebook or Smartphone, which is why everybody — the media, the markets, and every hyperscaler — is conspiring to try and keep the bubble inflated through accepting effectively any viable narrative and blessing even the most vulgar of circular financing arrangements. If anybody for even a second breaks the kayfabe that AI is the biggest, most hugest, most important bubble of all time, everybody has to accept that none of this makes sense… …and that there’s nothing else on the other side.
What’s actually happening is that these tools are — at a remarkable price — shoving a lot of stuff out the door. Is the stuff good? No. Do people like or use it? No. Does it make money? Also no. While we’ve discovered the shovelware, that’s all that LLMs have given us — “more” apps, with the vast majority being useless, insecure slopware. This is meant to be the era of agentic coding! This is meant to be the era where any dickhead with a Codex or Claude Code account with $1,000 of free API credits should be able to create the next Salesforce or whatever it was that dimwit Citrini talked about a few months ago. I’m sorry to be a little surly and dismissive, but the AI industry has burned over a trillion dollars and I’ve spent two years being told I’m a luddite and an ape for not celebrating it. I don’t care! I’m not impressed! I’m not coddling this mediocre, expensive crap! Like I said earlier: isn’t the tech industry meant to be a glorious bastion of meritocracy? Isn’t this meant to be a cold, harsh community of rationalists?
An illustration of a sad dog infected with screwworm
"behave." "no."
Movie poster for Brewster's Millions: "You don't have to be crazy to blow 30 million in 30 days, but it helps"
The Gladiator: Are you note entertained? Is this not why you are here??
Smeagol sez "Because It's my birthday and I wants it!"
The Terminator: It is in your nature to destroy yourselves
If you can’t measure how good something is, how much it might cost, or what your return on investment might be, it’s fair to ask why you’re even paying for it in the first place. People are (reasonably!) harping on about the ROI problem, but I think the “can’t really measure the cost” part is an even bigger problem.
King Arthur from Monty Python's and the Holy Grail: On second thoughts, let's not go there, 'tis a silly place!
Possum says: The horrors persist but so do I
beavis: "you mean, ironic?" butthead: "no, an english word, dumbass"
Daenerys from GoT: We can only help them from a position of strength.
Randy Watson and Sexual Chocolate everybody!
Malcolm McDowell, everyone!
Republicans wearing purple heart bandaids to mock John Kerry.
Rush Limbaugh, the innovator of modern Republican hate radio.
AI is too broad and fuzzy to cleanly decompose into a proper hierarchy, but there are a few ways to impose a messy order on it. At the broadest level there’s maybe a distinction between Symbolic AI and Machine Learning (though there are things that you might call “AI” that really fit into neither category, like the Google PageRank algorithm or the algorithm that your GPS uses to determine point-to-point directions). Under ML, you might have some subcategories like Classifiers or Recommenders, and one of these subcategories might be Generative AI. One of the categories below this could be LLM-based generation systems, of which ChatGPT is one example. This isn’t the only way to organize all of this, or even necessarily the best way, but the point I am trying to make is that ChatGPT is just one little point in a vast universe of technologies, somewhat analogously to how a hammer is one example from the general class of tools, alongside screwdrivers, dishwashers, cars, telescopes, and matter replicators.
Schmidt from New Girl, pretending to be a Romney: "I'm Tugg Romney, Tagg is everywhere. Too much Tagg for me."
Murdoch in 1985, with a pile of cookies, says "Careful mate, that foreigner wants your cookie." Murdoch in 2025, with an enormous pile of cookies, says same thing.
ICE T sez: "They call themselves Republicans. It's some real sick shit."
Just one more collider bro. I promise bro just one more collider and we'll find all the particles bro. It's just a bigger collider bro. Please just one more...
This is a mask-off moment for both the ruling class and those captured by capital, and an opportunity to look around you and see who is most-easily fooled. No industry of value needs to mislead you or make you feel bad for not adopting their technology. No trustworthy individual will ever see the need to humiliate or attack somebody for being insufficiently excited about a product. No CEO that talks of a theoretical future as a means of selling you software in the present should be trusted. No technology that makes mistakes with regularity should be defended. And no industry that demands everything from us — our land, our energy, our water, our jobs, our art, our writing, our attention and every dollar we have — should ever be treated with anything but revulsion.
XKCD: Sometimes physicists forget that air exists and rediscover it from first principles.
A possum, floating down in a burning parachute, saying "hahaha wheee!"
"We should improve society somewhat." "Yet you participate in society, curious! I am very intelligent!"
"big thumb guy" meme "You're all going to be left behind by AI!"
The majority of undecided voters I spoke to couldn't name a single issue that was important to them. This was shocking to me. Think about it: The "issue" is the basic unit of political analysis for campaigns, candidates, journalists, and other members of the chattering classes. It's what makes up the subheadings on a candidate's website, it's what sober, serious people wish election outcomes hinged on, it's what every candidate pledges to run his campaign on, and it's what we always complain we don't see enough coverage of. But the very concept of the issue seemed to be almost completely alien to most of the undecided voters I spoke to. (This was also true of a number of committed voters in both camps--though I'll risk being partisan here and say that Kerry voters, in my experience, were more likely to name specific issues they cared about than Bush supporters.) At first I thought this was a problem of simple semantics--maybe, I thought, "issue" is a term of art that sounds wonky and intimidating, causing voters to react as if they're being quizzed on a topic they haven't studied. So I tried other ways of asking the same question: "Anything of particular concern to you? Are you anxious or worried about anything? Are you excited about what's been happening in the country in the last four years?" These questions, too, more often than not yielded bewilderment. As far as I could tell, the problem wasn't the word "issue"; it was a fundamental lack of understanding of what constituted the broad category of the "political." The undecideds I spoke to didn't seem to have any intuitive grasp of what kinds of grievances qualify as political grievances.
Anakin: We're going to create de facto AI standards Padme: For the benefit of consumers, right? Anakin: stares evilly Padme: Right?
Vegan Sicko says "Yes... Ha Ha Ha... YES!"
Zillow intends, based on this deck, to sacrifice everything to AI — code review, vulnerability fixes, policy checks, deployments, testing, and basically having agents take over everything, no matter how small, like having an agent do dependency updates and security hotfixes that could be handled with a simple shell script.
Road sign: "project funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law: Investing In America"
‪Claire Willett‬ ‪@clairewillett.bsky.social‬ · 14m in a way, isn’t causing men to crash out before she’s even done anything just proof that Lupita is perfect for Helen of Troy
Purse Soup! Purse Soup!
Trump in his dumb ugly blue suit uniform
Da pope, everyone!
Wayne sez: Can Confirm
Doctor Lawyer Cop or Man Bear Pig?
From the movie Aliens: "I feel safer already."