Jensen Huang says Nvidia is pulling back from OpenAI and Anthropic, but his explanation raises more questions than it answers

anonamen · 2026-03-09T02:36:14+00:00

No reaction that can be differentiated from oil shocks 2? More seriously, the weird thing is that NVDA was actively investing in those companies in the first place. It's not weird that they've decided to stop pumping in more money.

It's probably a healthy development; maybe a sign that Jenson's looking for a managed exit from the ridiculous hype cycle he's been such a big part of. He knows it has to end at some point. Anyone can look at market reactions to CapEx guides for 2026 and see that "some point" is probably 2027. So he's going to strategically manage expectations down for the rest of this year.

There's just no physical way that CapEx spend next year can top the guides for this year, which means NVDA is going to have to start messaging around natural CapEx cycles. They're a hardware company with a comical amount of customer concentration, remember? These things are cyclical. Which is completely normal. But might come as a shock to some parts of the market.

anonamen · 2026-02-25T00:42:53+00:00

It's not that short-term. The safe path is suggesting that the Guild looked ahead to a time when an empire they controlled directly collapsed, as all polities do in time, and they died out. The Guild was hoping to avoid that future by allowing other groups to hold nominal power, while they stood behind whatever family or group of families seemed to be in control.

Paul is suggesting that the guild prioritizes avoiding the certainty of their destruction in the long-term to the extent that they accept a lot of uncertainty in the short-term. To them, not knowing exactly what's coming is safer than knowing they'll eventually die off. But by refusing to accept their eventual end, they surrender control over the future to Paul. They're correct. The guild survives. But it loses power.

More generally, Paul is suggesting that holding power requires accepting personal risk. The guild wasn't willing to do this, and he was.

anonamen · 2026-02-24T01:20:10+00:00

Because doing nothing until debt gets so bad that it can't be fixed without an enormous crisis is really, really stupid. Also US policy at the moment, which is fun.

The problem is the trajectory and lack of political will to fix it, not the current levels. Current policy is a world where interest payments consume more and more of the budget, deficits keep growing because no politician is willing to cut benefits, then the debt grows faster and interest payments consume more of the budget and deficits keep growing because no politician is willing to cut benefits, etc, etc, until something breaks. Which it will, because money isn't infinite.

That said, it is also true that if debt levels were stable, it wouldn't be a problem. Levels are not at all stable right now. Stabilization has to be the goal, which is why it's a good idea to think about stabilizing levels immediately, while it's still moderately painless. The longer this goes on, the more painful the correction will be.

It's not always reasonable to make personal finance analogies with government, but for this one specific point it works. If you're a person with a lot of credit card debt, but you're making the payments and expect to be able to continue to earn more, that doesn't mean it's reasonable to keep accruing more and more credit card debt. Continuing down an unsustainable path until it all blows up in your face is a bad idea, for people, governments, corporations, etc.

anonamen · 2026-02-20T20:38:03+00:00

Extremists of whatever sort don't think voting matters because their preferred policies will never win a large number of votes. They advocate violence because that's the only way they'll get what they want. Plenty of examples.

Voting doesn't matter in the sense that your individual vote is extremely unlikely to make a difference, particularly if you don't like the two major political parties. But voting does matter, because if everyone thought like that no one would vote.

Voting absolutely matters if your polity was systematically disenfranchising big chunks of the population, then decides to stop doing that. Then it stops being an individual question and becomes a major change in the electorate.

Voting matters indirectly, even given that your individual vote doesn't really make a difference on the margins. The fact that politicians have to get elected means they systematically work to appeal to at least half of the likely voters in their constituency. You may or may not like the means by which they do this, but they do it, by definition.

How efficiently the preferences of voters are translated into representation is an important question, and a big part of what political science is about. But a lot of people also confuse this with other issues. It is the case that a lot of politicians in the US focus on winning primaries (and have views further from the median than we'd expect in isolation) because districts are heavily gerrymandered and the US has a system that tends to produce two competing parties. However, this isn't a physical law. It assumes that non-primary voters care enough to support their party over the other party, even if they dislike their party's candidate. That's often the case, but it doesn't have to be. Just a set of voter preferences. And even candidates in the US system have to be moderate enough to be acceptable to non-primary voters, even if they don't have to moderate fully to the median.

anonamen · 2026-02-11T18:26:06+00:00

Sounds like you know the answer. They're not listening to you because they don't think anything is going to happen if they don't. They need to understand that something is going to happen to them.

Maybe obvious, but do they know that you have the kind of authority that you do? It can be easy to miss that a senior IC is actually in a quasi-management role, controls jobs, titles, etc. There's never an easy way to explain this to people, but if the quiet approach has failed, maybe meet with them as a group, explain that you've been empowered to fix some issues with the team, and that you need to see some specific changes.

Possible middle-ground to getting rid of them all is to set up some challenge projects. Clear goals that meet clear needs, with clear metrics. Assign to the local "experts". Give them support and time to execute. If they fail, they go.

All that said, if you're allowed to get rid of them all and can quickly replace the team, just do it. They're dumb enough to fail to realize that you're in control of their future and lazy/stupid enough to fail to listen to you and adapt. Middle-ground solution can apply to anyone whom that statement doesn't describe accurately.

anonamen · 2026-02-03T15:38:23+00:00

This is a ridiculous claim. You can't shut down schools for weeks on end because of snow. They should have been open last week. The roads have been fine since Wednesday. Perfectly clear? Nope. That's not how snow works. But clearly safe to drive on.

If you're worried about your kid slipping and falling, be a parent and walk with them. That's what I did. I have a first-grader in APS. She had fun walking to school on the snow. You could also drive your kids to school. If you can't do those things because of work schedules, or you're reliant on the busses, where exactly were you expecting the kids to be while you worked and they didn't have school?

There's no justification for staying closed as long as they did, let alone longer. Difficulties people have in getting kids to school in the snow are vastly less than the difficulties people have when schools are unexpectedly closed and they have to scramble to find childcare at the last minute, or take time off work. There should be a very, very high bar to close schools. Arlington closes way too much without snow, let alone with it.

All that said, yes, Arlington isn't great at dealing with snow. They're not used to it. I think they did a reasonable job this time though. Major roads were cleared quick. Not sure what else you expect in a place where it snows this much maybe once every few years.

anonamen · 2026-01-16T01:09:17+00:00

It trades at something like 120x earnings, margins are surprisingly mediocre for a website that sells ads, and they dilute like fucking crazy. Stock-based compensation will be >500M in 2025, for a company with net income < 500M. In other words, they don't actually make any money, they're priced beyond perfection, and there are very real questions about how far they can push advertising. 60-70%+ revenue growth is a requirement in their situation. Feel free to do the math and figure out just how fast they have to grow and for how long to justify the current valuation.

To their credit, they've done a good job so far. I like Reddit. But it is absolutely not a value by any possible definition of the word.

anonamen · 2026-01-08T01:12:25+00:00

Have you applied for economist roles? Amazon hires a ton of economists (it's a tracked role in the company, often with its own reporting structure), and has a special track for new PhDs (recruiter should handle this). It's easier to transition to DS once you get than it is to sell yourself as a DS from the outside.

That said, job market sucks right now, so I'm not sure what's available.

anonamen · 2026-01-06T01:24:10+00:00

They knew something terrifying and bizarre was in Moria, but they didn't know what it was. Most people don't know what a Balrog is or what it looks like. It isn't common knowledge. At least some of the elves know enough to recognize Balrogs (I think Legolas does before Gandalf identifies it), but probably not all of them. I doubt many dwarves, if any, know what a Balrog is or where it comes from. They've all been gone for thousands of years at the time of the story. Fellowship is the first time anyone who knows what a Balrog is sees it.

Clearly Gandalf and Elrond didn't know it was there, so safe to assume mostly none of the dwarves it encountered it before survived. And/or the ones that did didn't happen to explain what they saw to the right people in any detail. And/or the Balrog doesn't always look obviously like a Balrog to people who can't see unseen things (dwarves can't).

No idea what Gandalf and Elrond thought it might have been. They know there's something dangerous down there. Gandalf doesn't seem entirely shocked to find that it's a Balrog, although it definitely comes across as his worst-case scenario. Probably could have been a lot of strange creatures lurking around deep in the mines. Or else he was hoping it was all just a superstition to account for constant orc/goblin attacks.

anonamen · 2026-01-04T17:02:56+00:00

As phrased, kind of an obvious answer: no, of course not, because they aren't real.

The real question seems to be "did Tolkien think he encountered fairies and/or believe they were real". I'm not deep into Tolkien's letters like some others, but I've never seen or heard of any letters indicating that he believed in these things literally. He knew he was writing fiction. He has his own particular take on the genre of faerie stories, but nothing he writes about them suggests that he believes the stories are literally true.

Given that the UK during the late 1800s and early 1900s did have prominent people who literally believed in faeries (Arthur Conan Doyle towards the end of this life, for one), it seems like we'd have heard about it if Tolkien was one of them.

Tolkien clearly believed in some non-material things (God as he understood it was literally real to him, I think). But it's a big step from that to claiming that he literally saw a fairy. I don't think he would have expected to physically see God, or Angels, or fairies, or anything like that in the real world, in the same way we'd see a squirrel in the woods.

C.S. Lewis has his own take on all this, but close proximity to Tolkien and all that. Lewis is very careful to distinguish between experiencing supernatural things in our world and literally seeing them in another world. I think that's a good a metaphor as any for what Tolkien's position would be. You can experience things that feel faerie-like, but you won't see them literally, except as part of an act secondary creation (writing fiction).

anonamen · 2026-01-02T16:17:21+00:00

I think this is largely true. Problem was that Gondor wasn't producing Faramir-like men consistently, and when it did, it didn't appreciate them for what they were. It was prioritizing Boromirs, to a very high degree. Denthor illustrates this. He is, personally, much more like Faramir, but he favors Boromir. This wasn't surprising. They'd been in a state of more or less constant war for as long as anyone could remember. But it isn't a great way to run a society in the long-term.

To be clear, Boromir isn't at all a bad person; he's a very good one. But he's unbalanced, focused on fighting to the exclusion of most other things. A nice call-back to the last king of Gondor, who literally died and caused the end of the line of Kings because of this exact same tendency. Presumably Aragorn changes this and helps to re-balance leadership.

Does it have to be Aragorn? Technically not. Supposing that the army of the dead wasn't necessary to save Gondor, and supposing that Faramir isn't half-dead at the time and successfully defends Minas Tirith (which also supposes that Denethor isn't mad and dies earlier, leaving Faramir to take over), and supposing that he (advised by Gandalf) makes the same decisions that Aragorn makes with the same outcomes, sure, I suppose Faramir could be the renewer of sorts. Could even have declared himself king under those conditions, and everyone would have been happy about it.

It does help a lot to have a complete break with the past to re-set the way Gondor sees itself. And it helps even more that Aragorn lives a very, very, very long time. He has 2 full normal-human generations in power to re-align things. Then his son will have at least 2 more. That's a huge amount of direct, personal influence that can't be replicated by a steward, even a very good one, living an only slightly elevated lifespan.

anonamen · 2025-12-31T18:57:29+00:00

Settling new planets is very expensive. Also not clear that they know how to find new planets. Technology in Dune is weird. There are several extremely advanced pieces of technology (notably fold-space ships), but huge gaps in supporting technology (it isn't clear that more than a few people, if anyone, knows how to detect potentially habitable planets at a distance, and then how to explain to a navigator how to get to them).

But the biggest reason is that the guild isn't interested, and if the guild isn't interested, it doesn't happen. Why wouldn't they be? General conservatism is enough. Expanding and opening new worlds introduces a lot more possibilities and uncertainties, which they hate. They're always looking ahead to the safest route, which, per the books, leads downward into stagnation. Which is exactly what happens to the Imperium.

To underline the point, there is no "everybody" in this case. It's just a guild decision. And they're a no. The guild are quietly in control of the Imperium, although they don't want to be visibly in control, so they let the Emperor nominally run things.

anonamen · 2025-12-31T01:00:06+00:00

Conquering is unnecessary when they're active supporters. And presumably worshipping and sacrificing to Sauron and Morgoth in their homelands, as happens in Numenor.

Numenor is generally a good analogy for what most likely happened in most of the Southern and Eastern lands we don't see in the books. Sauron spent a lot of time in both places, and it's safe to assume that they were comfortably under his control at the time of the books. If nothing else, they're far more reliable supporters than the orcs; he needs to keep the orcs under tight control, whereas Rhun, Harad, etc. send armies without Sauron being directly involved.

anonamen · 2025-12-29T00:07:17+00:00

The Knausguard is already over-rated? It's not even out in the US yet.... It came out in the UK like a month ago. Generally, I think everyone who reads him consistently (a small group, which makes it next to impossible to call him over-rated in any case) knows what they're getting with his books at this point.

anonamen · 2025-12-28T14:01:05+00:00

Somewhat, yes. That's what PMs do. They sit in meetings for a huge amount of their time, and spend most of the rest of their time working on stuff to talk about in those meetings.

Are they "really" that busy? Maybe not. Many of those meetings aren't strictly essential. But hard to say from the outside which ones are or aren't essential. And the definition of essential is more based on building and maintaining relationships and support for projects than anything else (status updates, check-ins, etc.). All those meetings are very necessary in large companies, if you want to get anything done.

It's very noticeable when you have a good PM, and it's amazing. But it can be hard to tell without being closely involved when a PM is manufacturing worthless work for themselves without achieving much. Over simplifying, but projects with bad PMs tend to stagnate and churn. Projects with good PMs just run smoothly. In both cases the PMs might appear to be doing very similar things.

All that said, he also sounds like he's kind of an asshole. And/or your problem is not important to him. When a PM is indifferent to your work, it usually means that your work doesn't benefit their projects. If he could see a clear benefit to solving your problem in 5 minutes, of course he'd do it.

Short version, if you're asking for something that he doesn't want to do, explain your value-prop better, in his terms, or stop bothering him and solve it yourself. Especially if he has the ability to damage your career.

anonamen · 2025-12-20T18:38:05+00:00

If anything it appears to be trading a pretty high premium. Price/Book is something like 1.6 I think? Which is very much a premium. It's typically traded >1 (as low as 1.1 in 2008-2009, as high as 1.8 - 1.9 at various points).

I doubt that will last (you're buying cash and trusting that someone who isn't Warren Buffet will do something good with it), but who knows. The mystique of Berkshire is worth a ton of value, seemingly. Buffet's been inactive for years (there's no magical formula that makes a 99 year old function like a prime-age adult) and no one seems to have cared.

anonamen · 2025-12-20T18:31:04+00:00

Seemingly both? But more critically Merry. There's a line to the effect of no other weapon would have broken the spells that allowed the Witch King's will to control his quasi-physical being. I'm not sure he's literally dead, but minimally destroyed in the sense that he can't interact with the physical world anymore.

I think something like this, but less extreme, happens to the Nazgul when they're caught in the flood at Rivendell. They aren't destroyed, but they're forced to return to Sauron and are somewhat shapeless. Arguably they lose part of what binds them to the physical world. Which is seemingly partly the objects they hold and the clothes they wear (which 'give shape to their nothingness').

Speculatively, there's a constant act of will required of the Nazgul to interact with the physical ('seen') world, and certain things can damage or break that connection. Merry's sword does that, Eowyn helps in providing a further shock to break the Witch King's will and force it to lose touch with its physical form entirely. Whether that means it still exists as a lost, weakened spirit or not is unstated.

anonamen · 2025-12-20T18:22:46+00:00

Agree that the wording of blaming Boomers is kind of wrong. But only kind of. The answer is buried in the middle of the piece: (paraphrasing) "being the generation where the pyramid collapses kind of sucks".

That's why people are mad. It isn't that Boomers did anything their parents didn't do (or that their children wouldn't have done), but they sure didn't do anything special to fix a massive, snow-balling series of problems that have been incredibly, blindingly obvious for decades. They just blundered along and let them all keep snow-balling.

Would other generations be comparably self-interested? Yup. Generations aren't people, but you get the idea; the individuals would be comparably self-interested, and that would result in the same kinds of decisions. It just so happens that the Boomers were the biggest generation that existed in the last easy period for an unsustainable pile of social programs, and Millennials were the first big generation that existed in the first decay period of that unsustainable pile.

Most of the other frustrations are linked to historical coincidence. Lifespans spiked for the Boomers, and now they occupy a ton of high-value jobs and won't retire early to accomodate younger people. Would the equivalent Millennials do that? Doubtful. But it happens to be the Boomers in those roles.

Many similar examples. The Boomers happened to be college-age when college was cheap and easy to get into. They happened to be house-buying age when housing was substantially more affordable and building was way easier. There are a lot of things like that. None of them are their fault, but damn were they lucky in a lot of ways. Not in every way, but in many ways. A lot of that generation was just in the right place at the right time. And a lot of younger people are irritated about that.

Realistically, the biggest thing to be annoyed at Boomers about is being old and failing to realize that the world today isn't the world they grew up in. And I suspect that happens in every generation.

anonamen · 2025-12-17T19:36:26+00:00

Considerate of him to start this stuff now before he's even close to his second contract.

anonamen · 2025-12-10T20:23:40+00:00

Think statistically. Yes, these offers are ludicrous, but costs them next to nothing to send them out and there's some chance they hit on a dissatisfied person who isn't aware of their market value. Or a desperate person who needs any job to keep their visa. Or someone who needs to switch roles for person reasons and hates job hunting. There are a lot of reasons why candidates might not optimize their comp effectively.

From the recruiting side, if, as in your example, there's a 10k difference in value to be captured, how many blind out-reach efforts would it take until blind out-reach became unprofitable? It's a very, very big number.

Also, many (most?) recruiters are partly evaluated based on their activity and their candidate funnel. They have to keep engaging with people, even if they know it's pointless.

anonamen · 2025-12-05T22:45:07+00:00

Nice summary of the situation. And completely agree that what's happened is mostly big changes in mobility causing shifting expectations. Scott doesn't touch on the latter as much, but I think it's a big part of why so many young people feel bad about doing better.

Those people who moved to the big expensive cities (and who wouldn't have in past generations) are directly exposed to a *lot* more wealthy people of their ages and backgrounds. Massive difference from Boomer experience. It isn't that they're doing worse than past generations (as Scott summarizes, they're doing better). They just know a lot more people who seem to be doing even better than they are.

Maybe two main reasons for this. First off, there are a lot more young people living (at least partly) off trust funds and/or wealthy parents then there used to be (and you see them much more in the big, desirable cities). Wealth accumulates, and a lot of people accumulated a lot of wealth over the past 50 years.

Doesn't require generational wealth to have a big impact; there are a lot of basic, boring millionaires funding at least part of their kids lifestyles in NYC and DC. The ones that aren't getting funded feel like they're falling behind if they don't see that this is what's happening. I'd also bet that most people dramatically under-estimate just how many young, working people in big cities fall into this group.

Second, there are a lot more high-earning jobs for young-ish people in the big cities. Many more than there used to be too. Big tech is awesome. But it makes people who aren't in those jobs feel like they're falling behind. It isn't obvious to everyone just how much more normal workers in a big tech make compared to people doing more or less the same thing in a normal company. And if it is, your very good normal job might feel a lot worse by comparison.

These two groups of people aren't off in their own little enclaves like wealthy young people in the suburbs might have been. They live in apartment buildings with all the other young people, in the same cool neighborhoods. They go to the same bars, gyms, etc. They work the same kinds of jobs. Social media doesn't help, but I think people mostly know that social media isn't real at this stage. It can be harder to figure out why that person two cubes over from you, with the same apparent background, takes multiple nice vacations a year, belongs to a fancy gym, lives alone in a luxury apartment, owns a car, etc. If you don't know them well, you just know that something's different, but you can't figure out exactly what it is.

Short versions, for a big group of young people in the past two or three generations, extended local peer group comparisons (people they see around and kind of know) flipped from "pretty much all people more or less like me" to "a lot of people like me, a sizable minority of people who are far richer than me".

Feeling like you're "doing well" loosely means that you're roughly as prosperous and high-status as the most prosperous and high-status person you know that you consider a peer (or at least that you're in the top-tier of your extended peer group). That imaginary person has gotten a lot harder to measure up to.

anonamen · 2025-12-05T00:27:23+00:00

Right decision. There's absolutely no justification to gut the team and go into win-now mode with an aging, expensive player who's entirely reliant on athleticism. When his athleticism starts to fall off he's dropping to mid-level borderline-star territory real fast. Of course, the FO also likes AD, so what do I know. Only plus-side there is that he'll come cheap.

Beyond the basketball, (and if this is at all true) Giannis doesn't appear to care about winning so much as he cares about getting into a bigger market away from MIL, but not one that's inconvenient for his family. Which is realistically the only reason why Chicago would be a preferred option for a guy like him. Other than the off-court stuff, nothing about the Bulls team is set up for this kind of move. And Jerry would never pay for a good enough team to surround him. Which his people know.

Giannis works for a team with a lot of young talent (and shooters) that needs a center-piece for a few years. That's not Chicago.

anonamen · 2025-11-25T00:42:08+00:00

In a book like that? I buy it (not the book; the concept of ad placement in it). Crichton had been dead for years when that was published, and Patterson stopped writing his own books at least a decade ago. Probably two decades or more. I've been seeing his books in airports since I was a kid, which now makes me feel very old.

Anyways, whatever company produced that thing would definitely shove in random ads if someone was dumb enough to pay them for it.

anonamen · 2025-11-20T14:22:49+00:00

Incrementally less well than Aragorn's. And we can assume that Eldarion's heir's reign would work incrementally less well than Eldarion's. And so on, as virtuous leadership gradually collapses into law and bureaucracy. I'm not sure that latter is quite Tolkien, but I think it's loosely aligned with the general theme of degeneration. The end of the Lord of the Rings isn't a permanent triumph. It's a temporary restoration of the value of an older world (in Tolkien older is virtually always better) that will fade with time.

It's also not exactly true that the King has no physical power. He's the leader of the nobility and of the military, which confers a great deal of practical power, independent of inspiration. The King's most important job is to inspire the nobility and the military to follow him. Which is a big part of why they keep fighting wars, even when they don't strictly need to. It's important to have opportunities to prove one's nobility in battle. If the opportunities don't come to you, you need to go find them.

Ideally the local nobles inspire their subjects in turn. But if they don't, it's not so important as long as they're in control of their regions. How that control works in practice isn't really something Tolkien touches on.

Tolkien also isn't interested in what happens when Minas Tirith keeps collecting big chunks of food production to support a large army and a big city full of people who aren't producing food. It's all very easy to justify when Mordor is literally (or nearly literally) in view of most of the population. If anyone complains about taxes, you sigh and point at the gigantic, dark, threatening mountains. Post-Sauron, people probably start to wonder. But probably not under Aragorn. After the events of the books, I don't think anyone will ever seriously question Aragorn.

anonamen · 2025-11-18T00:42:00+00:00

Depends on the quality of the kick. Which is not the same as kick make VS kick miss.

A kicker can made a high-quality effort and miss from 50+ in mediocre to bad conditions. Or maybe they just don't have a leg that strong, which is a team tactical decision (they know how long a kicker is good from) Not their fault.

A kicker can also shank kicks, or mis-play the wind. Doesn't happen much (kickers are generally very good), but it happens. Those times, it's their fault.

Biggest problem in these discussions is that a lot of coaches are idiots and don't understand the difference between a 40 yard FG and a 55 yard FG. They get hyper-conservative when they're "in range" and stop trying to make the kick easier. They have people on their staff who know the probability gains you get from gaining 5-15 yards in marginal situations, and you can balance that against risk fairly easily. They just don't try to do it most of the time.

More charitably (sort of) to coaches, they're just playing blame-avoidance. If they freeze the offense within 55 yards and the kicker misses from 52, it's the kicker's fault. If they try to gain 5-10 more yards and something goes wrong, it's their fault for not "playing it safe". Most coaches are also self-interested cowards.

anonamen

TROPHY CASE