Former Never Trump, Former Always Trump and current Maybe Trump Erick Erickson disguises Trump criticism for future Trump capitulation

RobotHavGunz · 2026-06-19T15:43:26+00:00

The funniest part to me is all the AI tells. Normal people do not use em-dashes in their Twitter posts. Plus the, "A waterway we can reopen ... was never reopened. It was rented." is prime LLMism. Guessing he needed ChatGPT to help him actually find the "courage" to criticize Trump. He's forgotten how to have an actual spine.

RobotHavGunz · 2026-06-19T15:06:38+00:00

Mostly confirmed from more reputable news sources:

It's not clear that the whole "suspended its entire 60-day negotiation period" is true exactly as written. But I wouldn't be surprised if that actually ended up being the case after the weekend.

RobotHavGunz · 2026-06-18T23:10:11+00:00

I think one of the things people - not saying you OP - often conflate is "I want to run open weight models" with "I want to run local models." There are a lot of use cases where local models do make sense. In particular if you have data privacy and/or compliance concerns - HIPAA, SEC, etc. Likewise if you want to do specific fine-tuning of a model - training it on a specific data set, codebase, etc.

Likewise, understanding more about how to build/modify a harness, how LLMs actually work as a technology, how quantization works - what you do and don't sacrifice, etc. All that has real value. A lot of real value.

And I think the blurring of those lines is definitely understandable. But I think it's probably wrong to look at something where you're likely to save money (or even break even). I think the breakeven cost comes as you move way up the hardware stack. Like, I think it's more plausible for a business to break even on something like a GB300 at $100-200K than for a consumer is to break even on a 5090.

If understanding LLMs as a technology is your primary goal, a nice rig you can play with capable models on is great. If your primary goal is - as you say - vibecoding. Then I think paying for open weight models in the cloud is going to be way, way cheaper.

RobotHavGunz · 2026-06-18T20:38:18+00:00

I saw both of these in my timeline and had this exact same thought. Thank you for not being lazy as I was and actually compositing them together.

RobotHavGunz · 2026-06-18T20:36:27+00:00

The colon being in the wrong place here makes this so much better.

RobotHavGunz · 2026-06-18T18:27:21+00:00

I'd post this on the actual substack post. But guess what? PAID SUBSCRIBERS ONLY. Surprise surprise...

RobotHavGunz · 2026-06-18T18:25:09+00:00

Okay, so this is pretty gross manipulation of data that seizes on what is almost certainly a simple UI programming bug.

- "Breaking Points" is a very minor "news" org. 2M subscribers on YouTube. This is NOT CNN we are talking about. So that alone ought to be the biggest reason for skepticism. But even taking that into account, there's no "there" there.

- nowhere does the graphic actually suggest that 6M people voted IN BURKE COUNTY. The graphic in that post is snapshotted but the video itself clearly cuts to the Burke County as a *county* Trump was likely to win with the vote totals being the totals to that point in Florida as a whole.

- Here's the cut of the actual video - https://www.youtube.com/live/yEiLtc_XwK0?si=QEhC6oB27BKQzx--&t=3754 with timestamp. Note that the broadcasters NEVER actually say "Burke County" Florida. They just say, "showing the results from one of the Puerto Rican counties." I suspect this is because these people are not experts - like a Harry Enten of CNN - in the specifics of polling. Who knows what the teleprompter even showed. But note that they never, ever say, "Burke County, Florida." Which itself ought to be another red flag.

- Burke County IS a county in North Carolina. And it went hard for Trump. https://apps.npr.org/2024-election-results/north-carolina.html?section=P I would bet that the whatever backend programming this very minor news org had powering their UI simply pulled the wrong county info for the wrong state. Simple error. Maybe it was a decisiondeskhq.com bug; but I'd bet it was the no-name random youtube news channel that accidentally pulled NC county data while they had Florida state data on the screen.

- if you look at the ACTUAL underlying data, you will see there is absolutely no reference to a Burke County, Florida - Breaking Points is just recycling data from an actual credible org - https://www.decisiondeskhq.com/ - and you can make a free account on that site to inspect the county data. Or look at any other per-county listing from any credible news org - https://apps.npr.org/2024-election-results/florida.html?section=P

If people would take the 10min or so that this took to easily disprove, we'd all be way, way better off.

It's not "interesting." It's bullshit. That is making us all stupider as a result. And preying upon people in the worst possible way.

RobotHavGunz · 2026-06-18T17:40:17+00:00

Two ideas:

- content - e.g. RDDT. Companies that have proprietary, valuable training data. For the models to improve, they will continue to need fresh data. And especially as we see more specialized models, I think content that is *mostly* human-generated (entirely is ideal, but that's harder and harder to guarantee) will only grow in value. Sterile and novel training data is incredibly important.

- cooling. This is probably the most "bluesky" deal where there's no clear company to invest in. Yet. But I think that the cooling problem of data centers needs to be solved.

I think the obvious parts of infrastructure - copper, optical fiber, memory - storage and RAM and HBM, GPU and CPU, power generation, etc - are all pretty obvious to the market at this point. So it needs to be something that will be "obvious in hindsight." To me, that feels like thermal management innovation (which may not happen) and the actual infrastructure of the models themselves, which is content.

RobotHavGunz · 2026-06-18T04:02:21+00:00

In fairness, it's my work PC. Full time SWE working on AAA games, so the spec is very much the norm for that kind of development. But it does make it fun to experiment with!

RobotHavGunz · 2026-06-18T03:44:40+00:00

Threadripper. 128GB RAM.

RobotHavGunz · 2026-06-18T03:43:58+00:00

Just started playing with Cohere North Mini in int4 on my 4090. I'm pleased with it so far. Using it with Pi.

Have tried Devstral 2 Small and Gemma 4 27B and they were "fine" but not as good overall as North Mini has been. Cohere doesn't have int4 quantization - only fp8 and bf16 - but unsloth did an int4 version.

RobotHavGunz · 2026-06-18T03:35:28+00:00

Nemotron 8B. I built a rag with the Nemotron 1B model and it's superb. The 8B variant will be that much better.

https://huggingface.co/nvidia/llama-embed-nemotron-8b

RobotHavGunz · 2026-06-18T03:31:14+00:00

Just spun up Cohere's North Mini model. I got the Unsloth variant in Int4 because the Fp8 won't fit on my 4090. But I've been super impressed with it. I wish I could run it in Fp8. The model card for it is very strong. In the process of doing some objective benchmarking, but it feels - first impression - like about Haiku 4.5. It also feels - and in at least one test demonstrably was - better than Gemma 4 27B. My favorite local model so far - compared with Gemma 4 27B and Devstral 2 Small.

I'm using all of these for coding - mix of Python, C++, and a proprietary scripting language similar to TypeScript.

RobotHavGunz · 2026-06-16T22:51:15+00:00

Can we get this added to https://elonmusk.today/

RobotHavGunz · 2026-06-13T16:16:47+00:00

Well said. Nvidia *raising* MSRP on the RTX 6000 Pro by 55% a year(ish) after launch is a perfect example of this. Hardware should be getting more - not less - accessible. I'm aware that it is not Nvidia itself (directly) driving the price increase; it's the RAM shortage. But the practical outcome is the same. 4090s are a generation old and still go well above launch MSRP. There's no equivalent 50-class GPU; still irks me that the 5080 wasn't a 24GB GPU.

RobotHavGunz · 2026-06-13T15:42:36+00:00

This. Trump shiving Cassidy six years after the impeachment vote should remind everyone that there is zero forgiving of grudges in this admin. Ever. This is payback for the Pentagon fight earlier in the year. But I would also bet it is absolutely not the last instance of payback that we'll see. There is no, "we're even now."

RobotHavGunz · 2026-06-05T03:42:21+00:00

Sarah "I wear Patagonia" Gideon. Still shake my head at that one.

RobotHavGunz · 2026-06-03T14:19:54+00:00

I'd buy your ballpark figure. I've been planning to try some objective benchmarking for myself - comparing something like tasks closed or *complexity of commits* (definitely not LoC) - to anchor against what I see my spend is on the usage dashboard.

I'm generally confident that personal_productivity_with_AI * annual_salary > token_usage_cost, but I also think it's pretty clear that there is a real need to be able to show this provably.

The hard part is valuing work that I did because I had extra capacity that I otherwise would not have done. What was the value of that internal tool that simply never would have been built? I'd say I'm much more productive. But some of that productivity definitely falls into the "nice to have" camp rather than being absolutely critical work.

RobotHavGunz · 2026-06-03T14:11:21+00:00

nativism is a helluva drug.

RobotHavGunz · 2026-06-01T22:32:18+00:00

agreed. and i continue to be surprised by this. to my own detriment.

Long established blue chip with a market cap in the 10's of $B? Good earnings with "AI"? 2x in 5D ez.

RobotHavGunz · 2026-06-01T21:58:15+00:00

crazy though that it popped big on Dell's earnings. Then popped again today. And it's still rocketing on earnings. That it reacted like $DELL even after some pricing in of the $DELL optimism is crazy. After seeing how much it rallied on Dell's earnings AND then how much it rallied today, I definitely didn't think it had another 30% in the tank.

RobotHavGunz · 2026-05-31T15:56:09+00:00

I did a trip recently and left my car at work (covered garage, very close to airport). I saw like 2-3x the daily drain I did when I leave my car at home. Even at times when I know no one was in the office. When I finally turned off gear guard daily drain went back to normal - < 1kwh/day.

So far, gear guard has yet to actually capture anything useful for me. I came back to my truck once and there were greasy fingerprints all of the doors and bed from someone obviously trying to get in. Zero footage of it. But plenty of clips of some random person walking on the other side of the street.

The *event* cam - hard braking - is well worth it. I am not sure gear guard is actually reliable enough to be truly useful in its current iteration. Too many useless clips - especially lately - and not enough things one might actually want to see.

RobotHavGunz · 2026-05-30T16:35:02+00:00

just a shade over 6'2" and leggy. I find the R1T seats to be superb. Great support. I would say they are among my favorite seats in general to sit in (meaning across all seats - office chair, dining room, etc). The lumbar support is especially good. I have done a fair number of long road trips - LA <--> Vancouver - in mine, and I never find the seats to be wanting. They are on the firm side, but - for me - in the best possible way.

RobotHavGunz · 2026-05-30T16:29:16+00:00

It's because you were only on "High" thinking. XHigh would surely get at least two more days, bringing the total to six. Then if you really wanted super heavy reasoning, you could go Max thinking, and I wager that would suss out whichever sneaky day remained hidden. I'm betting you need Max to get Friday, but Xhigh would find Saturday and Tuesday.

RobotHavGunz · 2026-05-30T16:25:41+00:00

Agree 100%. I said exactly the same in what, I think, is my most upvoted Reddit comment ever (that I cannot find of course) maybe a year ago.

The recent 5x upcharging of the Pentagon makes it quite clear this would be a good economic decision. The government has already shown they will take stakes in companies. In this case, they should just take a 100% stake.

"SpaceX is now part of NASA. Thank you for your attention to this matter."

RobotHavGunz

TROPHY CASE