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Gabriel

@gabrielu.bsky.social

160 followers 390 following 42 posts

South American member of the educated middle-class, born in the closing decades of the last century.

https://cfalso.ghost.io/

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Gabriel @gabrielu.bsky.social · Oct 12

Possibly germane in the current context, something I wrote a few years ago about why the last Argentine dictatorship does not generate the degree of nostalgia one sees for its peers in Brazil or Chile

(tl/dr, terror and mismanagement ended up affecting the elite.)

cfalso.ghost.io/a-dead-gener...

Reposted by Gabriel

Financial Times

@financialtimes.com

Good morning, Asia. While you were sleeping, one of our most-read articles was about the ChatGPT maker’s cash burn on.ft.com/43oDIi3

November 13, 2025 at 12:27 AM

Reposted by Gabriel

Eileen Clancy 🧿

@clancyny.bsky.social

I screenshotted the interface to encourage people to try it. But he did far more than make the interface.

He set up a nice structure in a database with powerful search. Split pages, extracted metadata, formatted it, indexed it, and poured the data into the database. :)
github.com/paulgp/epste...

Epstein Document Search
A searchable database of Epstein court documents using Meilisearch for fast, full-text search capabilities.

Overview
This project processes court documents related to the Epstein case, extracts metadata (case numbers, page numbers, etc.), and indexes them in Meilisearch for easy searching. It includes a clean web interface for querying the documents.

Features
Full-text search across all documents
Page-level indexing for precise results
Metadata extraction including case numbers, document IDs, and page numbers
Filter by folder to narrow searches
Highlighted search results showing matching terms
Expandable results to read full document pages
Project Structure
.
├── website/
│ └── index.html # Web-based search interface
├── prepare_for_meilisearch.py # Process documents for indexing
├── split_json.py # Split large JSON files for upload
├── house_dems.pdf # Sample document
└── house_dems.txt # Extracted text from sample document
Note: The actual document folders (001/, 002/) and generated JSON files are excluded from git due to their size

November 13, 2025 at 4:43 AM

Reposted by Gabriel

Jay Willis

@jaywillis.net

If my time zone math is right, Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler published this gem about two hours before the WSJ published their story hahaha

Fact Checker Analysis
Trump and Epstein had a relationship, but there's no evidence of Trump wrongdoing
A year ago, we scrubbed the public record. Here are our updated findings.
Today at 2:03 p.m. MT

The Bottom Line
As we have documented, 17 women have claimed Trump engaged in sexual misconduct. A Manhattan jury found that Trump sexually abused and defamed one woman on our list. But no credible allegation has emerged to connect Trump to any of Epstein's crimes. If the full file is ever released, we are confident that no connection would be found.
Rest assured - if Trump were prominently mentioned, it would have been leaked by now.

July 18, 2025 at 12:44 AM

Reposted by Gabriel

Tim Onion

@bencollins.bsky.social

Michael Wolff, Steve Bannon and Jeffrey Epstein taking time out of their day covering up the world's most famous pedophile ring to complain about Ta-Nehesi Coates.

From: Steve Bannon I
Sent: 4/23/2019 4:06:36 PM
To: Michael Wolff _________________________________1
CC: Jeffrey Epstein [jeevacation@gmail.com]
Subject: Re: Announcing the 2019 Hillman Prize winners
Importance: High
Fix always in
On Apr 23, 2019, at 9:06 AM, Michael Wolff <
> wrote:
Look at the judges on this thing: the right-thinking establishment to a tee (to a Ta-Nihisi).
On Tue, Apr 23, 2019 at 2:57 PM Steve Bannon < wrote:
Pile on

November 13, 2025 at 3:56 PM

Reposted by Gabriel

Faine Greenwood

@faineg.bsky.social

turns out Larry Summers really was a raging sub-literate misogynist creep this entire time, who could have known

November 13, 2025 at 4:31 PM

Reposted by Gabriel

@banalplay.bsky.social

every few years it's revealed that the NYT was sitting on information about some horrific thing that public knowledge of would have changed the country's course and for some reason a ton of people still give them money. you can play those games on other sites

November 12, 2025 at 10:41 PM

Reposted by Gabriel

Ed Zitron

@edzitron.com

Me, two weeks ago
www.wheresyoured.at/big-tech-2tr...

As we speak, big tech is hoarding masses of GPUs, and by extension, masses of depreciating assets that will without fail lead to a massive impairment loss, which will come directly out of their earnings, and when they’ve spent tens or hundreds of billions of dollars on GPUs, these impairments will be extremely harsh, and come directly out of earnings.

So, on top of spending hundreds of billions of dollars in capital expenditures, big tech is also conjuring a giant anvil above their heads. GPUs start losing value the moment you buy them, and by purchasing hundreds of billions of expensive, ever-rotting assets, big tech guarantees their revenues will take a hit sometime in the future, and likely multiple times as each generation ages.

Let me put it in really simple terms, and use a hypothetical example.

Ten companies bought $10bn of GPUs each to sell AI services, each requiring billions of dollars of data center infrastructure to go on top of them to make them run. As a result, one of the companies — let’s call them BallWeave — has had to take on an absolute shit ton of debt to buy them. BallWeave eventually runs into solvency issues, and has to start selling off masses of GPUs, massively reducing the market value of these GPUs by 30%.

This causes the other 9 companies to have to take an immediate impairment — a $3bn haircut directly off of their balance sheet. There is no spreading it out.

This is a problem, in part because $3bn is a lot of money, and in part because that’s more than the revenue being generated from AI. The impairment has an immediate negative effect on their assets, while also directly eating into their income, because this shit is almost certainly being financed.
This hypothetical scenario is quite real, and it can hurt you, and will hurt any and all companies buying masses of GPUs.

One last thing: Remember how I said that there are many ways to calculate depreciation over the useful lifetime of an object? Well, the depreciation rate is always the difference between the initial value of the item and its salvage value — which means how much a company can expect to make when they dispose of the item, either by reselling it or literally scrapping it for parts. So, for the sake of illustration, if a GPU costs $50,000 and has a useful life of five years, after which it has a nominal salvage value of $10,000, the amount said company could mark down as depreciation over that lifespan is $40,000.

This is simply me talking out loud, but I worry that there’s no real way to accurately predict what that salvage value of an enterprise GPU will be. It’s contingent on a bunch of factors — namely, how long these cards last in real-world conditions, where they’re experiencing near-constant utilization, as well the pace and the quality of Nvidia’s future releases.

It’s bad, and only compounds the fact that they’ve already created a giant, ugly, unsustainable hole on top of their earnings.

November 10, 2025 at 5:09 PM

Reposted by Gabriel

your #3 source for absurdist true crime 🔨

@davidgerard.co.uk

A useful model for "AI agents" is that they're the current excuse meme for AI. They're not a thing that works at all, now or in the fabulous future. But they're *such* good material for hypecrafting.

November 10, 2025 at 10:12 AM

Reposted by Gabriel

Ed Zitron

@edzitron.com

Amazon just sued one of the largest power companies in Oregon after it failed to power up two data center (one without enough power and one with no power at all) campuses that were meant to be ready *in 2021*. Sure hope this isn't an industry wide problem!
www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/amaz...

November 10, 2025 at 6:13 PM

Reposted by Gabriel

Ed Zitron

@edzitron.com

Me in March, me in August. Nobody bothered to see if CoreWeave even has the capacity to serve its OpenAI deal, or cared that Core Scientific, who had never built AI data centers, didn't seem to have the capacity either
www.wheresyoured.at/core-incompe...
www.wheresyoured.at/ai-bubble-20...

As of now, Core Scientific holds, according to CEO Adam Sullivan, "the largest operational footprint of Bitcoin mining infrastructure," and per the above analyst quote, it's very obvious that you can't just retrofit a crypto mining rig to start
"doing Al," likely because the GPUs are different to the ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) used in crypto mining, meaning the server hardware is different, which means the entire bloody thing is different.
Nevertheless, CoreWeave's S-1 repeatedly mentions that it's made an agreement with Core Scientific for "more than 500 MW of capacity."
Right now, however, it's unclear how much capacity Core Scientific actually has, despite both its and CoreWeave's suggestions. Core Scientific, as of February 2025, had approximately 166,000 bitcoin miners — which, I should add, are likely all application-specific chips that only mine bitcoin!, which means that none of that has (or, potentially, any of their data center operations have) anything to do with GPUs or compute for Al.

Even if the deal goes through, CoreWeave's second big loan, which likely sits at around $8 billion, will come due in October 2025, just as OpenAI begins to pay its fees for compute...which assumes that the compute will be available. Having spoken to some infrastructure providers, there are doubts that this will be the case — and plans are reportedly being made to provide redundancy if CoreWeave fails to deliver on time.

November 11, 2025 at 5:49 PM

Reposted by Gabriel

flyingrodent

@flyingrodent.bsky.social

Has anybody asked the dickheads who spent years squealing idiot abuse at anyone who said the War On Terror was dumb and murderous bullshit what they make of western leaders queuing up to shake hands with Mr Al Qaeda In Syria? I want to hear them blame this one on post-modernism.

November 11, 2025 at 7:13 PM

Reposted by Gabriel

Alan Lester

@alanlester.bsky.social

This is really scary: even former Tory Davie, the disproportionate coverage of Reform and relentless attention to right wing anti-immigrant talking points have not been enough. Right wing networks want complete capture.

Davie and Turness resignation statements in full www.bbc.com/news/article...

Tim Davie and Deborah Turness resign: BBC statements in full

Director general says "mistakes have been made" but "allegations that BBC News is institutionally biased are wrong".

www.bbc.com

November 9, 2025 at 7:35 PM

Reposted by Gabriel

Jonathan M. Katz

@katz.theracket.news

It is, and what goes unsaid is that the piece in question a) opened with one of the most blatantly racist ledes I’ve read in years* and b) was by Jeremy Peters, who for the last decade has functioned as effectively a Heritage Foundation-type operative inside the Times newsroom

It's ME(Jaime) @exceedhergrasp1.bsky.social · 5d

This is fucking brilliant, and you should read it: lithub.com/maybe-dont-t...

Maybe Don’t Talk to the New York Times About Zohran Mamdani

It’s remarkable, the people you’ll hear from. Teach for even a little while at an expensive institution—the term they tend to prefer is “elite”—and odds are that eventually someone who was a studen…

lithub.com

November 9, 2025 at 1:05 PM

Reposted by Gabriel

David M. Perry

@lollardfish.bsky.social

If you liked that @lithub.com.web.brid.gy essay on not talking to the NYT about Mamdani, read this @nplusonemag.com piece by the same author on working class higher ed and its enemies.

www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

Memos of Blood and Fire | Peter Coviello

So if you ask me about the signature strength of the department where I work, I will tell you. It is world-caliber field-defining research, wedded to a fantastically dynamic practice of instruction, a...

www.nplusonemag.com

November 8, 2025 at 7:30 PM

Reposted by Gabriel

Chris Person

@papapishu.bsky.social

When I was growing up my dad was in the ad business and had this movie on VHS, which was weird for an American, but this scene imprinted on me permanently. youtu.be/6iAecAtJVdE?...

Distortion of Truth by Association

YouTube video by Dim Sum

youtu.be

November 8, 2025 at 6:13 PM

Reposted by Gabriel

Chris Person

@papapishu.bsky.social

Anybody who has watched the Times pull this shit for ages knows this game. Good piece.

When writing to a journalist friend, I just said that it's a bit unravelling, right now, to be on the receiving end of this kind of belated real-time education in elite
metabolization. Like so many other bits of Times coverage, the whole of the piece is structured as an orchestrated encounter.
Some people say this; however, others say this. It's so offhand you can think you're gazing through a pane of glass.

gazing through a pane of glass. Only when you stand a little closer, or when circumstances make you a little less blinkered, do you notice the fact which then becomes blinding and finally crazymaking, which is just that there is zero, less than zero, stress put on the relation between those two "sides, or
their histories, or their sponsors, or their relative evidentiary authority, or any of it.
Instead, what you get is a piece making the various more or less bovine noises of
studious grey-lady impartiality, with the labor of anything resembling "appraisal" surgically excised.

November 8, 2025 at 6:12 PM

Reposted by Gabriel

flyingrodent

@flyingrodent.bsky.social

Why do you think they’ve laid waste to the postwar international system? They’ve done it because if it still had any force, then the most important leaders in numerous white person countries would soon be serving decades in jail for knowingly abetting war crimes.

November 8, 2025 at 3:42 PM

Reposted by Gabriel

รℓσαɳε ℓყรɓεƭɦ 🏳️‍🌈

@sloanelysbeth.bsky.social

✨corruption💫

The Guardian @theguardian.com · 4d

Developers met ministers dozens of times over planning bill while ecologists were shut out

Exclusive: Leading ecologists say warnings over threat to wildlife have been ignored in drive to build 1.5m new homes The scale of lobbying of ministers by developers on Labour’s landmark planning changes, which seek to rip up environmental rules to boost growth, can be exposed as campaigners make last-ditch attempts to secure protections for nature. The government published its planning and infrastructure bill in March. Before and after the bill’s publication the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, and housing minister Matthew Pennycook have met dozens of developers in numerous meetings. The body representing professional ecologists, meanwhile, has not met one minister despite requests to do so. Continue reading...

www.theguardian.com

November 9, 2025 at 9:08 AM

Reposted by Gabriel

La vache est fachée

@vacheestfachee.bsky.social

"Store employees are now required to smile if they are within 10 feet of a shopper.

They also must make eye contact with and wave to or greet the customer.

If they’re within four feet, the employee should ask how the customer’s day is going or if they need help."

🙄 Won't stop the boycott, y'all.

Target is now requiring its employees to smile more

As the holiday season fast approaches, Target is urging its employees to add a little more “jolly” to their work routine.

www.wilx.com

November 7, 2025 at 7:55 PM

Reposted by Gabriel

Mike Black

@mikeblack114.bsky.social

It'd be nice if there was a natl paper that had a local beat with tons of feds but Bezos's rag is doing Furlough Fun puff piece BS

Anyway air traffic being snarled is a pain and SNAP is a travesty, but also not getting a paycheck for going on 6 weeks kinda sucks too, esp working for 4 of them

November 8, 2025 at 6:03 AM

Reposted by Gabriel

Mike Black

@mikeblack114.bsky.social

I know everyone thinks all feds are like GS-15s in NoVa with a consultant spouse pulling down six figures, but in reality land shit is starting to Get Bad even for those of us with decent financial resources

Mike Black @mikeblack114.bsky.social · 5d

Hell yeah

Developing a fall back option of camping on Senator Foghorn Leghorn's front lawn when I get foreclosed on, I am a constituent after all

Sahil Kapur @sahilkapur.bsky.social · 5d

GOP SEN. JOHN KENNEDY: It may be 2026 when we'll come out of the shutdown.

REPORTERS: 😳

KENNEDY: I'm not kidding, you guys. I mean, you see what I see. Okay? This shutdown is going to last a long time. What's going to get us out of it?

November 8, 2025 at 6:03 AM