“For example, if one believes that affirmative action is good for black people, does it make sense to demand affirmative action in hostile or dogmatic terms? Obviously it would be more productive to take a diplomatic and conciliatory approach that would make at least verbal and symbolic concessions to white people who think that affirmative action discriminates against them. But leftist activists do not take such an approach because it would not satisfy their emotional needs.” – Unabomber Manifesto To date, the Trump administration has been an absolute tragedy. It has been the acting out of emotions. There are no adults in the room. I’m not saying there would have been adults in the room with the Kamala regime either, but I had some hopes for positive change with the Trump tech-bro alliance and now they are gone. At least truths are being laid bare versus heads being buried in the sands of joy, but I think there was a much better way. For example, I don’t support America funding the war in Ukraine. But the way Zelensky was treated is just dumb. See the Unabomber quote above, between this and the Munich speech, Mr. JD Vance, I hope your emotional needs are being met (at the expense of the good will of our allies). It's the economy, stupid Regardless of anyone’s long-term objectives in the US, be they decoupling from China, bringing manufacturing to the US, bringing lifestyle improvements to US citizens; I think it’s unquestionable that uncertainty about the future was needlessly increased. And unless the uncertainty was the goal, I can’t figure out why things were done the way they were. And if the uncertainty was the goal…uhhh…is our government captured by Russian or Chinese agents? Because that’s who benefits. I don’t trust the news very much. I have no idea if the guy in the El Salavdor prison had a fair trial, if the students being deported are criminals, or even if they are being deported at all. It’s really hard and time consuming to get to the truth about any of these things. However, when markets crash. that is obviously real. With the news, there’s usually no way to trade on it being real or fake, there’s nobody to take the other side. But with big public markets, there’s very deep liquidity if you think they are priced wrong. In addition to the 10% the market is down, the dollar is also down 10%. Considering the market is priced in dollars, it’s closer to 20% down. And even worse on top of all of this, prices are going up due to the tariffs. Was crashing the economy the goal? A side-effect of a greater plan? Because given how this was executed, a 3-week old LLM could have told you shit was gonna crash. And it’s not going to bring manufacturing back. I have done manufacturing in America for years, and anyone with any experience could have told you that this wouldn’t work, manufacturing requires long term investment and long term investment requires stability. What was the real goal here? Elon, you need to reconcile with your daughter Andrew Callaghan did a good piece on Elon’s radicalization. I get it, we have all been there. For me it was Gamergate (which still has a terrible wikipedia page that doesn’t explain what it was). But this doesn’t have to be you forever. You are the closest thing to an adult in any room in America. When you compare America to China, it’s really more like comparing Elon to China. ULA is a little joke compared to CNSA. And look into what percent of US car exports are Teslas. The man is singlehandedly beating the rest of the US combined. If you want any hope of standing against China, your political coalition better include him. Elon has been pretty politically quiet lately. I’m sure he knew exactly what would happen with the tariffs, but he couldn’t stop them. I got fooled too, thought it could be different this time. But it’s no different from 2017. (btw, we are finally beating climate change thanks to cheap solar panels from China) I know the idea of PR is against a lot of what you believe in, but you need to heads down put together a large scale PR campaign, distance yourself from this train wreck, denounce stupid fake right wing conspiracy theories, reconcile with your daughter (from a reader of sci-fi and The Culture, is the trans thing that hard to understand?), resolve your stupid beef with OpenAI (we are all disappointed, but you don’t have a great track record for open source either), and start building a new political party. Pro large scale legal immigration, not a single illegal border crosser. Pro choice (within reason), and also pro gun (within reason). Inclusive and diverse, with an unwavering focus on merit. Anti crime, with an understanding that victimless crime is not crime. Expose higher education and the medical system to the free market (watch how fast prices fall) Free market and trade, but not an unregulated market. Markets require regulation to be free. It’s probably the only shot we have against China. The current Republicans and Democrats are just far too stupid; the Chinese are watching this tariff drama and laughing their asses off. Their plans are measured in centuries. America, do you want to be a protectionist backwater? If so, and all the thymos is gone, then there’s no place for me there. If this is really the way things are going, the only thing for anyone to do is leave. We’ll see how it shapes up in the next few years. But if the racists or the other racists are still running the show, we really are just cooked. Enjoy your handouts to black people and your handouts to white people in a poverty stricken shithole.

You know about Critical Race Theory, right? It says that if there’s an imbalance in, say, income between races, it must be due to discrimination. This is what wokism seems to be, and it’s moronic and false. The right wing has invented something equally stupid. Introducing Critical Trade Theory, stolen from this tweet. If there’s an imbalance in trade between countries, it must be due to unfair practices. (not due to the obvious, like one country is 10x richer than the other) There’s really only one way the trade deficits will go away, and that’s if trade goes to zero (or maybe if all these countries become richer than America). Same thing with the race deficits, no amount of “leg up” bullshit will change them. Why are all the politicians in America anti-growth anti-reality idiots who want to drive us into the poor house? The way this tariff shit is being done is another stupid form of anti-merit benefits to chosen groups of people, with a whole lot of grift to go along with it. Makes me just not want to play.

If you give some monkeys a slice of cucumber each, they are all pretty happy. Then you give one monkey a grape, and nobody is happy with their cucumber any more. They might even throw the slices back at the experimenter. He got a god damned grape this is bullshit I don’t want a cucumber anymore! Nobody was in absolute terms worse off, but that doesn’t prevent the monkeys from being upset. And this isn’t unique to monkeys, I see this same behavior on display when I hear about billionaires. It’s not about what I have, they got a grape. The tweet is here. What do you do about this? Of course, you can fire this women, but what percent of people in American society feel the same way? How much of this can you tolerate and still have a functioning society? What’s particularly absurd about the critique in the video is that it hasn’t been thought through very far. If that house and its friends stopped “ordering shit”, the company would stop making money and she wouldn’t have that job. There’s nothing preventing her from quitting today and getting the same outcome for herself. But of course, that isn’t what it’s about, because then somebody else would be delivering the packages. You see, that house got a grape. So how do we get through this? I’ll propose something, but it’s sort of horrible. Bring people to power based on this feeling. Let everyone indulge fully in their resentment. Kill the bourgeois. They got grapes, kill them all! Watch the situation not improve. Realize that this must be because there’s still counterrevolutionaries in the mix, still a few grapefuckers. Some billionaire is trying to hide his billions! Let the purge continue! And still, things are not improving. People are starving. The economy isn’t even tracked anymore. Things are bad. Millions are dead. The demoralization is complete. Starvation and real poverty are more powerful emotions than resentment. It was bad when people were getting grapes, but now there aren’t even cucumbers anymore. In the face of true poverty for all, the resentment fades. Society begins to heal. People are grateful to have food, they are grateful for what they have. Expectations are back in line with market value. You have another way to fix this? Cause this is what seems to happen in history, and it takes a generation. The demoralization is just beginning.

AMD is sending us the two MI300X boxes we asked for. They are in the mail. It took a bit, but AMD passed my cultural test. I now believe they aren’t going to shoot themselves in the foot on software, and if that’s true, there’s absolutely no reason they should be worth 1/16th of NVIDIA. CUDA isn’t really the moat people think it is, it was just an early ecosystem. tiny corp has a fully sovereign AMD stack, and soon we’ll port it to the MI300X. You won’t even have to use tinygrad proper, tinygrad has a torch frontend now. Either NVIDIA is super overvalued or AMD is undervalued. If the petaflop gets commoditized (tiny corp’s mission), the current situation doesn’t make any sense. The hardware is similar, AMD even got the double throughput Tensor Cores on RDNA4 (NVIDIA artificially halves this on their cards, soon they won’t be able to). I’m betting on AMD being undervalued, and that the demand for AI has barely started. With good software, the MI300X should outperform the H100. In for a quarter million. Long term. It can always dip short term, but check back in 5 years.