There’s an irony to Zuckerberg’s and the rest of the oligarchs’ fevered delusions about AI, and it would be pithy if it weren’t so tedious:

They wanted to discard their need for other humans, and all they discarded was their own humanity.

Thanks for posting the text. Not surprising to see Neomi Rao lobbing softballs to the DOJ and signaling what she needs them to say to vote in favor of Trump.

Mon cheries?

While planning is ongoing and details are in flux, discussions have centered on having the firms voluntarily cede the shares to the government, the people said. The returns on the investment could then be directed to public purposes, one of the people said, such as distributing a dividend payment to all American households.

I don’t believe either of these two assertions has any chance of happening.

But such an arrangement could also pose novel governance challenges, given the complications of the U.S. trying to effectively regulate something it partially owns, while also arguably increasing the incentives for a federal bailout.

Even if by some miracle the US has “shares” of the companies not paid for by tax dollars, it creates an anti-regulation incentive, forcing the public’s interest to align with the AI companies’, which is going to be worth at least whatever we would have paid to those AI companies.

Anyone else seeing this GIF as a psychedelic pulsating seizure?

Trump flexing one of his only two moves again: reward friends, punish enemies.

What a shock. Trump is replacing the former AG who was and continued to act as his personal attorney with a new AG who was and continues to act as his personal attorney.

Ah. They found fingerprints but lack any identifying evidence linked to a single suspect. Guess they gotta close the case!

As I understand it, unfortunately most of the memory that has already started manufacturing or been sold will not be usable, since it is specifically packaged HBM for AI servers/systems.

So once the crash happens, that is presumably the beginning of a longer re-supply ramp-up.

I think it depends on the drive sizes, whether you accept used, and if we’re comparing bare to shuckable, but yeah, for drives that I am looking for in the 20-26TB range (new, since I don’t have enough parity/redundancy to trust used drives), it seems more like 2.5-4x cost.

I don’t doubt you found a deal somewhere, but here’s what I’m seeing:

$229 for 12TB used SAS: https://diskprices.com/?locale=us&condition=new%2Cused&capacity=12-12&disk_types=external_hdd%2Cexternal_hdd25%2Cinternal_hdd%2Cinternal_hdd25%2Cinternal_sshd%2Cinternal_sas%2Cexternal_ssd%2Cinternal_ssd%2Cm2_ssd%2Cm2_nvme%2Cu2

That’s admittedly better than $26/TB, but I also had been looking at 20-24TB drives. That’s the other change - the lowest-$/TB (highest value) TB size is has decreased substantially (from around 20-24 in late 2025, to 10-12 now).

To understand the issue, I went back to a book published in 1954, 20 years before I was born: Peter Drucker’s “The Practice of Management.” Drucker explores the different roles inside every business, which I would categorize as builders, sellers and measurers.

…

Measurers are also critical to a business, but different from the other two. The best are hard to find. They work tirelessly behind the scenes, don’t seek the recognition of a front-of-house role, and ideally have a perspective independent from the rest of the organization. Drucker argues that measuring business is important, but customers are earned through building and selling. The best businesses would maximize investment in those two functions.

AI isn’t coming for builders or sellers, but it is coming for measurers. Tireless, independent, efficient and available, AI systems can now measure an organization with a level of objective detail and precision that was previously impossible even for the best employees.

It’s surprising how typical, how mundane, the logic errors CEOs make are. This guy read a book that he admits was released (presumably he means as a signal of its timelessness) 20 years before he was born. It collapses everyone into three groups. He assumes this heuristic is both correct and accurate to modern times, simply because the words have meanings that attach to modern concepts.

But builders in 1954 were making widgets and physical objects. Sellers were often in a store talking to customers who wanted to buy that object. Measurers were bean-counters, barely out of slide-rule days.

All of these types of roles have updated and transformed to the point of being totally different, and now - like with Cloudflare - the main product is information (code and knowledge, packaged as Cloudflare’s site products). Builders, sellers and measurers all just interact with that information in different ways. Each one has different efficiencies and value.

And here at least, assuming that AI is going to capture “measurers” more than others is not a smart CEO’s inspired leadership. It is a symptom of a brain that can’t adapt to the modern era.

Indeed, why would he not assume that the “builders” will be replaced more easily, as most other big tech CEOs think? Isn’t Claude Code the one success story in a sea of AI losses in the billions? Presumably his product can’t infinitely scale, so why would he keep hiring into infinity? (Those assumptions supporting firing “builders” are wrong, of course, but are as valid as his wrong assumption.)

Why would he not assume the “sellers” can be replaced - their entire job is chatting and collating information tailored to prompts as an intermediary, which is the entire purpose of LLMs? (Again, I don’t think they can be replaced, but again, it’s equally wrong in the ways he is wrong.)

The problem, as always, is that CEOs never understand exactly what is happening on the ground. They need these heuristics to give themselves confidence that they understand the whole picture. The problem is at some point, they lose their humility, their connection to the people who are doing the work, enough to care. If Prince cared enough to think harder about what these “measurers” real value is, and what AI’s real competency is, 20% of the workforce might still have a job.

Preview of Paramount-Warner Bros. Merger

Yes, it’s a preview Ellison and Weiss are giving - for Trump. We’ll probably see a social post soon, “Seeing great things at CBS News, I hope the merger is approved soon!” You know, his typical mafia-style signal that a 3rd grader could see through, so Carr and other toadies fast-track the merger.

That is a worst case horror story that everyone should think about, and I’m not usually an optimist, but I don’t think it’s likely.

Ultimately AI is a hype wildfire, and it will eventually run out of fuel - signs are already showing that happening as AI hyperscalers and vendors are ending investments, restricting access and raising prices to recoup unsustainable losses.

At that point, I hope we stay sane and not jump at the first discounts, and just sit tight while prices return to normal. Prices need to fall heavily before we start supporting these AI-first companies again, or else we are going to lock ourselves into that AI-inflated price dystopia.

Much more than doubled. Most high-TB drives are not in stock anywhere, and even if you find a drive, the best deals are around $26-28/TB for used drives, whereas before new deals would be $10/TB. If you’re looking for a specific new capacity, you may be paying $36-40/TB.

Goes without saying, but it’s incredibly hard to speak truth to power even knowing it would likely cost him the job he’s devoted his life to for decades. Most of us have already stopped trusting CBS News, but this is a big signal to all the regular folks that there’s political interference.

The only thing that could make Pelley, Alfonsi and the other departed staff’s actions even better (which of course they don’t owe us, but just saying) would to be to start or join a different organization and keep their reporting alive. The biggest thing which we all still lose if they disappear is that their journalistic and ethical standards are that much harder to keep alive for the next generation.

Hmm. That’s strange, you can’t?

Have you tried being a sleazebag conman born into too much wealth to experience any real human need, spending your life systematically avoiding or discarding all moral responsibility? That’s usually the step people forget.

“b…b… but they said crime was legal as long as I did it!”

I mean, most likely he dies never having experienced a consequence, but I can dream…

Trump on COVID: “If we stop counting, we’d have fewer cases.”

I hope companies, senators, housemembers, politicians with any modicum of power are taking notes.

Trump is a sociopath and follows standard abuser tactics. He will push things as far and as fast as you will allow. It usually doesn’t take much, in fact just a sharp needle, to pop a trial balloon. Maybe going forward you all can do literally do just the absolute minimum of your duty to the Constitution and your constituency, politicians?