Researcher and writer: @palladiummag, @unherd, @im_1776, @AntigoneJournal, @FDRLST. Classics, political philosophy, governance futurism.
San Francisco Bay Area
Joined October 2012
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My article on what is at stake in the Odyssey.
Civilization must be actively recovered through cunning and endurance. Remember what matters and read reality clearly. It is best to live in an expansive age; the second best is to battle all the way home.
xitter.cf/palladiummag/status/20…
Battling All the Way Home
Homer’s Odyssey offers a window into the Greek view of life, which can teach us what moral excellence truly means.
Read the new article by @StephenPiment (link below):
You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used
Go to him now, he calls you, you can’t refuse
When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You’re invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal
“Here is my talk. First I’ll show some graphs of exponential curves to convince you Something Is Happening. Then I’ll give you some advice that I just made up.”
People who tell parables based on exponential curves are almost always wrong.
It’s not that there aren’t exponential curves. It’s not that things don’t sometimes rapidly change.
It’s that the people telling parables have no good ability to predict how things will turn out.
This is why one should ignore life-advice from posters, especially those with exotic perspectives.
I've glorified poverty and dilapidation largely because I've always assumed I'd be poor forever regardless of what I did. I figured I might as well learn to get enthusiastic about poverty, dysfunction, and obscurity if it was inevitable.
Now that I've escaped it, I ask myself: "What the hell do I do now?"
What do I actually want?
After years of training myself to "want" a poor life on the distant (rural) margins, now that I no longer have to do that I have no idea what it is that I actually want. Always, I've let my blackpilled perspective on my own station interrupt my ability to want anything. If it wasn't ultra-cheap, I simply forced myself to not want it, period.
Now? I could realistically make it work almost anywhere with careful planning. Could get into all sorts of businesses, try anything, make any number of interesting or edifying gambles or ventures... this is solely because of careful, anxiety-inducing levels of fiscal caution and extreme frugality.
If you've ever wondered why it is that I seem "all over the place," it's this exact thing. It's this combined with becoming a father and realizing that the dilapidation and poverty I've forced myself to "want" isn't actually what I want to give my kids.
Stephen Pimentel retweeted
I don't like this false patriotism of saying that the west is powerful because we don't do rigor in school. No. You're wrong. Rigor is of supreme importance. This modern kumbaya special snowflake lack of rigor is heresy. I want my kids reading homer in greek, doing calculus.
“The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”
–– Daniel Patrick Moynihan
This was always deeply false, but it had the air of plausibility in 1985, when Moynihan wrote it.
After successfully ruling the Roman Empire for over 20 years, Diocletian resigned and retired to an isolated fortress-palace in what is now Split, Croatia. For the last few years of his life, he grew a vegetable garden.
At the moment, I’m more interested in what the bond market says about AI labs and less interested in what their executives say.
Stephen Pimentel retweeted
Socrates uses the principle of non-contradiction to discover the parts of the human soul.
Stephen Pimentel retweeted
“The lack of ideas or––put more simply––of gods causes an inexplicable moroseness, almost like a fog that the sun fails to penetrate. The world turns colorless; words lose substance, especially when they are to transcend sheer communication.”
–– Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil
“Why do people who leave nothing unchallenged still make demands of their own? They live off the fact that gods, fathers, and poets used to exist. The essence of words has been diluted into empty titles.
In the animal kingdom, there are parasites that clandestinely hollow out a caterpillar. Eventually, a mere wasp emerges instead of a butterfly. And that is what those people do with their heritage, and with language in particular, as counterfeiters.”
–– Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil
Stephen Pimentel retweeted
“As a historian, I am skeptical; as an anarch, I am on my guard. This contributes to my well-being, even to my sense of humor. Thus, I keep my property together––albeit not for myself as the only one. My personal freedom is a perquisite. Beyond that, I stand ready for the Great Encounter––the irruption of the absolute into time. That is where history and science end.”
–– Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil
“As a historian, I am skeptical; as an anarch, I am on my guard. This contributes to my well-being, even to my sense of humor. Thus, I keep my property together––albeit not for myself as the only one. My personal freedom is a perquisite. Beyond that, I stand ready for the Great Encounter––the irruption of the absolute into time. That is where history and science end.”
–– Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil
“The lack of ideas or––put more simply––of gods causes an inexplicable moroseness, almost like a fog that the sun fails to penetrate. The world turns colorless; words lose substance, especially when they are to transcend sheer communication.”
–– Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil
“Why do people who leave nothing unchallenged still make demands of their own? They live off the fact that gods, fathers, and poets used to exist. The essence of words has been diluted into empty titles.
In the animal kingdom, there are parasites that clandestinely hollow out a caterpillar. Eventually, a mere wasp emerges instead of a butterfly. And that is what those people do with their heritage, and with language in particular, as counterfeiters.”
–– Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil
An AI bubble can pop for reasons having nothing to do with AI capabilities.
As someone with a portfolio of energized land assets here is what I am seeing:
1. Neoclouds are disorganized and poorly capitalized. Some are definitely better than others however.
2. Hyperscalers are intractable, bureaucratic organizations that take 3 months to do an NDA and want 18mo escrow periods. We built our portfolio by competing against these terms because of our speed and simplicity. The more future assets orgs like ours win, the bigger the problem for the hyperscalers downstream (see 3).
3. There are delays in the existing pipeline that will catch people off guard in 2027. Hyperacalers will (obviously) react by focusing on their own internal compute needs over any third party. If the third party is a model company, they will tell them to go through their model router where they will also take a non-trivial vig. Them telling Ant they have no compute for them (rumored in Ant’s S-1) if true is a huge tell that this is already happening.
All of this is to say that it does look like there will be a lot of partially stranded compute and compute sitting in inventory in 2027 than is currently forecasted. This is bought and paid for but effectively underearning (below total cost of capital) or collecting dust. We see this as true for everyone - model companies, hyperscalers, neoclouds except ONE (you can guess which one).
This dislocation will benefit two kinds of orgs: the non-bureaucratic big scalers who can build industrial scale quickly and the nimble, well capitalized players feeding them.
2027 will be a turbulent year because it will clear out a bunch of wrong/bad bets. It will also be a consolidation year for a few.
There’s a strong pullback in the valuations of neoclouds. Watch if this spreads to AI labs.
finance.yahoo.com/markets/st…
