I've been somewhat skeptical of the addressable market (doesn't fiber + cell tower network offer good enough coverage?) but I know so many people who have put it on their RV, their boat, or are using it rurally that I've started changing my mind. And the service really is better than cell phone networks, which are far too patchy to provide reliable service at decent speed.

And you can put it on standby mode for $5/mo, so you're not even really locked into $50/mo if you're occasionally doing travel where you want to stay connected.

And in places like Africa, they've had to tightly rate limit new customers because demand is so high.

Is it meant to draw equivalence between crypto and Tesla/SpaceX? That each has roughly similar (i.e., low) value to humanity, or value as businesses?

Is it that the metric of whether a person makes others money is invalid?

The comment seems coy, possibly to avoid making any claim at all, but it must not be that because that wouldn't be very sporting.

Acronis did not have DOD contracts.

Other companies (Huawei) have been deemed risks under different laws, or by Congress, but they also didn't have direct DOD contracts.

Do you have any evidence for your assertion? Did you check if it is true before posting?

But GPT 5.3 Codex is great. Significantly better than Opus, in the TUI coding agent.

Its products are sequences of electrons, instead of atoms. But so are power plants. And in the context of what happens when they're hit by missiles, a factory, data center, and power plant all behave the same.

They are required to notify Congress (they have not), prepare a report with specific sections (they have not), and the reasons must fall within a set of categories outlined by statute (this does not).

There will be a court fight and they will lose, just like they lost the tariff battle, because of poor competence.

(Trump's post on Truth Social was actually fine. He said the USG would stop doing business with Anthropic, which is within its legal right. Hegseth's follow-on post is the problem. It is possible that Trump did not expect or want Hegseth to do that, that this was meant as bluster to bump along the negotiations; Hegseth has a recent history of stepping out of line within the administration and irritating people like Rubio.)

Is your view that contracts with the government should be meaningless? That the government should be able to unilaterally, and without recourse, change any contract they previously agreed to for any reason, and the vendor should be forced at gunpoint to comply?

If you do believe this, then what do you believe the second order effects will be when contracts with the government have no meaning? How will vendors to the government respond? Will this ultimately help or hinder the American government's efficacy?

Non-coding work is thinking about the system architecture, thinking about how data should flow, thinking about the problem to be solved, talking with people who will use it, discovering what their objectives are.

Producing 40k lines a code per day simply means you're not doing any of that work: the work that ensures you're building something worth building.

Which is why the result is massive, pointless things that don't do the things people actually need, because you've not taken any time to actually identify the problems worth solving or how to solve them.

It's a form of mania that recalls Kafka's The Burrow, where an underground creature builds and builds an endless series of catacombs without much purpose or coherence. When building becomes so easy when it was so hard -- and when it becomes more fun to build and watch codex's streams of diffs fly by, than to plan -- we forget the purpose of building, and building becomes its own purpose, which is why we usually so little actual productive impact on the world from the "40k lines of code a day" cohort.

One household uses about 30 kWh per day.

20 kW * 24 = 480 kWh per day for the server.

So you're looking at one server (if parent's 20kW number is accurate - I see other sources saying even 25kW) consuming 16 households worth of energy.

For comparison, a hair dryer uses around 1.5 kW of energy, which is just below the rating for most US home electrical circuits. This is something like 13 hair dryers going on full blast.

They got angry about China, the Philippines, India, Kenya.

Oddly, it’s never the people in those countries complaining that they got a better paying job!

Only rich people who think, apparently, that this new middle class ought to be kicked back to the farm fields.

If they start showing much higher returns on assets, then one of the many infra providers just builds a data center, fills it with GPUs, and rents it out at 5% lower price. This is the market mechanism.

Looking at who owns the compute is barking up the wrong tree, because it has little moat. Maybe GPU manufacturers would be a better place to look, but then the argument is that you're beholden to NVIDIA's pricing to the hyperscalers. There's some truth to that, but you already see that market position eroding because of TPUs and belatedly AMD. All of these giant companies are looking to degrade Jensen's moat, and they're starting to succeed.

Is the argument here that somehow all the hyperscalers are going to merge to one and there will be only one supplier of compute? How do you defend the idea that nobody else could get compute?

Of course they are losing money in total. They are not, however, losing money per marginal token.

It’s trivial to see this by looking at the market clearing price of advanced open source models and comparing to the inference prices charged by OpenAI.

Actually, why not colonize Venus instead? Sure, it will be hard, at first, with all the sulphuric acid and intense heat and whatnot, but we colonized America, so why not Venus?

Open source models are available at highly competitive prices for anyone to use and are closing the gap to 6-8 months from frontier proprietary models.

There doesn't appear to be any moat.

This criticism seems very valid against advertising and social media, where strong network effects make dominant players ultra-wealthy and act like a tax, but the AI business looks terrible, and it appears that most benefits are going to accrue fairly broadly across the economy, not to a few tech titans.

NVIDIA is the one exception to that, since there is a big moat on their business, but not clear how long that will last either.

Ultimately I doubt LLMs have much of an impact on code quality either way compared to the increased coordination costs, increased politics, and the increase of new commercial objectives (generating ads and services revenue in new places). None of those things are good for product quality.

That also probably means that LLMs aren't going to make this better, if the problem is organizational and commercial in the first place.

Of course it is. You have 3M, Target, General Mills, Cargill, and US Bancorp on here, among others.

If you are looking for some revolutionary call to action, you're looking in the wrong place. And you're misunderstanding what's happening.

It is a really big deal for these very conservative, large, rich companies to be telling the federal government to cut it out, even if it is written in generic legalese.

The letter is not for you. It is for the administration. And it is extremely clear.