Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Bryan

doomsmoker (just memes)

@doomsmoker.bsky.social

*daikatana ad* JOHN ROMERO'S ABOUT TO HOPE YOU'RE DOING WELL.

However, you're incorrect.

November 20, 2025 at 12:01 AM

Reposted by Bryan

Kate McKean

@katemckean.bsky.social

I need "Stats are down but he played great" to make it into the lexicon.

screenshot of a post from X by the Mirriam-Webster account. Their tweet says Words step up when numbers fail. They are retweeting a post from @david_arid that reads: There was a computer flitch at the end of tonight's Nuggets game that erased all the players' stats, which led to this fantastic screengrab from the post-game show. Then there is a blurry picture from a men's basketball game and the chyron says: Time Hardaway Jr. Stats are down but he played great."

November 19, 2025 at 1:21 AM

Reposted by Bryan

Alder Cheems

@aldercheems.bsky.social

November 17, 2025 at 10:29 PM

Reposted by Bryan

Jacob Weindling

@jakeweindling.bsky.social

Bitcoin is very close to throwing the crypto markets into chaos and I for one cannot wait to see how they improve on the stupidity of the 2022 bear market

Daily chart of Bitcoin rolling over and breaking structure and generally looking like the party is so over

November 17, 2025 at 7:43 PM

Reposted by Bryan

TW

@twesq.bsky.social

what

November 16, 2025 at 3:53 AM

Reposted by Bryan

Gomi

@gomizone.bsky.social

just saw the worst gaming ad ive ever seen

November 15, 2025 at 4:32 AM

Reposted by Bryan

Timothy Snyder

@timothysnyder.bsky.social

I don’t think US taxpayers should subsidize treason against the United States

Mueller, She Wrote @muellershewrote.com · 5d

NEW: The DOJ is in settlement talks with Mike Flynn for $50M. They're robbing us blind. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Michael Flynn, DOJ in Settlement Talks Over $50 Million Claim

The Justice Department has been discussing settlements with two former officials from Donald Trump’s first term who — like the president — claim they’re owed major payouts from the US government as vi...

www.bloomberg.com

November 15, 2025 at 11:24 PM

Reposted by Bryan

Dan of the Year

@downwithdan.bsky.social

lol she got his ass and he knows it

Joyce Carol Oates
@Joyce... 17h O
So curious that such a wealthy man never posts anything that indicates that he enjoys or is even aware of what virtually everyone appreciates— scenes from nature, pet dog or cat, praise for a movie, music, a book (but doubt that he reads); pride in a friend's or relative's accomplishment; condolences for someone who has died; pleasure in sports, acclaim for a favorite team; references to history. In fact he seems totally uneducated, uncultured. The poorest persons on Twitter may have access to more beauty & meaning in life than the
"most wealthy person in the world."

Elon Musk ' @elonmusk
X.com
Oates is a liar and delights in being mean.
Not a good human.

November 9, 2025 at 3:36 PM

Reposted by Bryan

Patrick Matthews

@matthewsp.bsky.social

Maybe—just maybe—sports leagues getting in bed with gambling companies wasn’t such a hot idea…

November 9, 2025 at 6:38 PM

Reposted by Bryan

John Scott-Railton

@jsrailton.bsky.social

YIKES: NSO floats Pegasus spyware used in hypothetical "time of domestic crisis" in 🇺🇸America.

I believe they won't stop lobbying until they get Pegasus into USA.

To hack Americans. 1/

November 7, 2025 at 8:36 PM

Reposted by Bryan

Mega64

@mega64official.bsky.social

Practicing dark magic at Taco Bell in 2005

November 5, 2025 at 11:55 PM

Reposted by Bryan

Ed Zitron

@edzitron.com

Premium Newsletter tomorrow: Meta, Google, Amazon and Microsoft must add $2 Trillion in AI revenue by 2030 or they wasted their capex.

The cost of data centers GPUs may make it impossible to make a profit from AI. Here's $10 off annual.

edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo...

So, big tech has spent hundreds of billions of dollars of capital expenditures, and much of those expenditures are on GPUs. These GPUs, once installed, immediately begin decaying in value, and the more you use them, the more likely they are to crap out, and even when sitting idle, these GPUs have some power consumption — somewhere between 7% and 14% of their power in the case of the H100 — making them a consistent burden on the infrastructure of any purchaser whether they have customers or not. This becomes an even bigger problem for more expensive GPUs like the B200, which has an idle power draw of 140W per GPU.

Extrapolate that out to thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of them, or to the 50,000-per-building of them inside Stargate Abilene’s NVIDIA’s , and you’ve got yourself a problem.

Even without customers, even without IT load, these servers sit burning power, and while a company could turn them off and boot them on for a period of time, these racks are often run in clusters — servers of GPUs that are synced together using high-speed networking — and while I can’t find anything firm as far as how long it takes to set up a cluster, this presentation on cluster design from the CEO of Lambda details a cluster’s sheer complexity, involving discrete networking, software layer and storage methods just to get the bloody thing working.

In simple terms, it may be expensive to leave them on, but it’s going to take a bunch of time and energy to restart these things, meaning that they are more than likely left on, slowly burning energy.

Imagine how bad that is at a scale of hundreds of thousands of GPUs?

Yet things might be a little wonkier, as the reality may be that while hyperscalers have customers, those customers might not be using all their GPUs at all times. Although there may be some customers that agree to a minimum spend or throughput, it’s hard to imagine that these contracts are enough to surmount the destructive margins.

And when …

And when I say “destructive margins,” I mean so much more than just the power to run and cool them. There’s the construction of the data centers to house them, the necessary maintenance, and, of course, any and all debt used to buy them.

While I can (and will!) say that for every $50,000 GPU bought, big tech needs to make another $100,000, I believe that the hole created by the GPU’s existence is likely larger than just $100,000, with every construction delay, power outage, or moment of idle compute adding dollars to the hole for each and every GPU.

Need a very real example? The Information reported recently that Oracle lost $100 million between June and August 2025 on rentals of NVIDIA’s Blackwell chips:

In the three months that ended in August, Oracle lost nearly $100 million from rentals of Nvidia’s Blackwell chips, which arrived this year. That’s partly because there is a period between when Oracle gets its data centers ready for customers and when customers start using and paying for them, the documents show. It’s not clear what causes the gap or how Oracle plans to shorten it.

So, while we can’t say for sure, there’s a chance a large chunk of these losses were caused by the spread-out deprecation of those Blackwell GPUs — after all, its most recent quarterly earnings included $1.35 billion of depreciation, right?

Sidenote: For context, Oracle reported depreciation of $804m in the same period last year, and depreciation of $3.867bn for the whole of FY2025. This should give you a sense of how rapidly these GPUs are becoming a millstone on its earnings.

…is there any way to actually recover that $100 million through the margins on these chips? Oracle only has 4.5 years of depreciation on these Blackwell Chips, and The Information reports that those GB200 server racks have a negative 100% gross margin according to internal Oracle documents. If that’s the case, we have a much, much bigger problem, but even if the margins aren’t literally negative…will ther…

October 30, 2025 at 10:01 PM

Bryan

@bryan.broketheinternet.com

Made my own Battlefield 6 propaganda

October 24, 2025 at 2:51 AM

Reposted by Bryan

ʟᴜɪs ʜᴇʀɴᴀɴᴅᴇᴢ ⚡

@beetlenaut.bsky.social

FORMWORK
for ų̵̰̰͑n̸̨͓̯̖̹̯̺̔́̓̊͝t̶̻̺̣̪̓̀͜ȉ̸̖̦̮̹̪̙̩͉̒͂̋́̓͑̀t̶̫̹̤̩͙͓̭̋͛̄́͒̒͊l̵̲̙̒̔̅͝e̸̼̋͗̓͜d̵͈̝̥̹͕͎̹̃̇͘

incept date oct 18/2025
#PS2 #softimage #3d #3dmodelling #gamedesign #leveldesign #indiegame #screenshotsaturday #necrophone

October 18, 2025 at 4:12 PM

Reposted by Bryan

Aaron Rupar

@atrupar.com

Powell: "Both supply and demand in the labor market have come down so sharply so quickly. The fact that the unemployment rate has barely moved is kind of remarkable."

October 14, 2025 at 4:53 PM

Reposted by Bryan

Tim Onion

@bencollins.bsky.social

gothamist.com/arts-enterta...

A few yards away from Schiffman, Finn Cervino of Queens was defacing a poster with a Sharpie. He included a web address for a website predicting the future of AI and wrote “This is not science fiction. This is reality.”

“We’re living in a world where you got friends that are computers — that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” Cervino said. “They’re destroying the world for the dumbest invention I’ve ever seen in my life.”

October 7, 2025 at 7:21 PM

Reposted by Bryan

southpaw

@nycsouthpaw.bsky.social

I’m a career prosecutor who took a $25,000 check from an affiliated entity of Donald Trump’s while investigating Trump University and later left my lobbying firm to become Donald Trump’s personal impeachment lawyer, White House aide, and Attorney General. So don’t you DARE question my integrity.

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · Oct 7

Bondi to Blumenthal: "You lied. How dare you? I'm a career prosecutor. Don't you ever challenge my integrity. Do not question my ability to be fair and impartial."