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orangecatstargrep.bsky.social
@orangecatstargrep.bsky.social
1.2K followers 350 following 240 posts
Just a geek with an interest in the world. Need more empathy and kindness in the world.
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orangecatstargrep.bsky.social
orangecatstargrep.bsky.social @orangecatstargrep.bsky.social · Dec 3
Enjoying my best day. Hoping you all get a few minutes to enjoy the sun and tranquility somewhere.
Orange cat sitting on blanket. His face is lit up and glowing with the afternoon sun. His eyes are closed in a peaceful nap.
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jamellebouie.net
trump is the president in the sense that he holds the office but he very clearly isn't the president in the sense that he has basically relieved himself of its duties
jonlemire.bsky.social Jonathan Lemire @jonlemire.bsky.social · 1d
Trump’s echo chamber:

Very little U.S travel

No rallies or contact with supporters

Right-wing media

Dinners with rich donors and billionaires

Truth Social

Lack of staff to tell him no www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...
The Bubble-Wrapped President
Trump surrounds himself with those who flatter him in places where he is comfortable.
www.theatlantic.com
December 1, 2025 at 4:16 PM
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mglovesfun.bsky.social
This is taking forever.

Just say "white".
December 1, 2025 at 11:21 PM
orangecatstargrep.bsky.social
And yet again, AI’s interpretation of reality is like your perpetually stoned college roommate trying out ideas for his architecture class.

Dude that’s so rad, let’s have no entry door. Then make a bedroom -wait for it- with a bathroom IN IT! So you can always make it to the toilet from your bed!
mumbly-joe.bsky.social Jesse Singal Vapes Piss @mumbly-joe.bsky.social · 1d
me trying to figure out if I wash my coats in the mudroom and laundry (with bathtubs) or in the coat bath
windows98support.bsky.social matt @windows98support.bsky.social · 1d
Oh shit waddup
December 1, 2025 at 11:23 PM
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bmhughes.bsky.social
This is actually quite brilliant, up to and including the final sentence 🔥
December 1, 2025 at 11:09 AM
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phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
I had a great conversation with a librarian last year where she said the instability and general inability to reliably trace bots as a reference source are sort of a perfect storm. Students "research" w the tool, but repeating the search doesn't yield a stable output.
November 28, 2025 at 2:28 PM
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scalzi.com
This will never be me - I bought an M4 Mac Air just before my book tour - but I think the premise of "device hoarding" here is ridiculous. With every major purchase, buy as well as you can and then use that thing until you can't use it any more. That's just sensible.

www.cnbc.com/2025/11/23/h...
Americans are holding onto devices longer than ever and it's costing the economy
Americans are holding onto devices longer than ever before, and while it may be consumer smart, it comes at a cost to work productivity and the U.S. economy.
www.cnbc.com
November 25, 2025 at 6:41 PM
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edzitron.com
A dirty little secret of the AI boom is that it appears everybody loses money on buying AI GPUs, as the incredible upfront costs (billions) put every data center in a deep, dark hole - and because GPUs are so power-hungry, it's difficult to make any margin at all.
www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-g...
Why It’s So Unprofitable To Run AI Services Using NVIDIA’s (or anyone else’s) GPUs Before we go any further, it’s important to remember that the rest of the cloud computing industry is relatively high-margin, and that’s because the stuff it sells is, by and large, nowhere near as expensive as running GPUs. That’s because you really don’t need that much compute to serve a normal website, or a normal web application. Cloud providers can take a resource — like physical memory, or storage, or a single virtual CPU core — and sell it at a pretty steep mark-up relative to the cost of actually providing it. Ordinary computing resources are cheaper, and they can be divided across more users. As a result, the margins are better and the upfront costs are lower. By contrast, a single AI application — like one that generates a video, or an image, or that processes a large codebase — may use multiple GPUs simultaneously. The whole division of resources that makes cloud computing so efficient (and so lucrative) simply doesn’t apply here. And that’s without mentioning the cost of ownership, or indeed, the additional power costs that come from GPUs, or the cost of keeping them cool. I could keep on going. By virtue of their scale, AI data centers often require additional infrastructure that doesn’t really apply with conventional computing gear. This may involve a greater number of transformers and substations to deal with the insane power demands (all of which are extremely expensive, and have painfully long lead times), or on-site power generation infrastructure. The Stargate Abilene facility, as well as xAI’s Colossus facility in Memphis, Tennessee, all have (or will have) on-site natural gas turbines, as well as pipelines that provide the gas they burn, and all of this costs money. Again, these turbines have an incredible lead time — which is why we’re seeing creative alternatives spring up, like former jet engines being repurposed into stationary generators. Sidenote: I have no idea how efficient those converted engines actually are, but the Interesting Engineering article linked above notes that the engines being used by one such remanufacturer are the General Electric CF6-80C2 — an 80s vintage design that flew with the McDonnell Douglas MD-11 (which first flew in 1988) and the Boeing 747-400 (an aircraft that debuted the same year, and that has largely left passenger service because it’s not a particularly fuel-efficient plane to run). Obviously, there are variables that affect fuel efficiency in aviation that don’t apply to a stationary, ground-based power generator. Still, I’m curious about the economics of this, and whether these repurposed turbines have similar fuel consumption habits to, say, a purpose-built natural gas turbine! As I explained before the premium break, one does not simply “plug in” a GPU, nor does one just buy “a” GPU. You usually buy thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of these things, and the more you buy, the more likely it is you have to build a new data center to house them. While previous generations — Ampere (A100) and Hopper (H100, H200) — could be integrated into older data centers, new generations like Blackwell (2024) and Vera Rubin (coming next year) are so power-hungry and generate so much heat that they require specialized liquid cooling systems (which means using sealed tubes of specific coolant liquid to cool something), which in turn requires bigger, more power-intensive data center architectures to handle them. Oh, and the chips are tens of thousands of dollars more expensive than the previous generation, while also having higher electricity and cooling costs. Important detail to add: remember all that stuff I said about parallel processing and doing a bunch of maths at once? Doing all that maths is very intensive on these GPUs, meaning they’re running at full tilt a lot of the time. That’s a lot of heat. I get this all sounds super complex and confusi… Because you can’t reuse the old servers and cooling, you have to both buy a bunch of new stuff and build a bunch of new stuff. You can’t just use the old cooling either, so you need a bigger data center, meaning more construction (unless you’re just building a new one). Construction is expensive and takes time, meaning that while you may have bought all those new GPUs, you have to wait to get them all installed. When your construction is done, you now need more power than before. Once your data center is built, you have spent an incredibly large amount of money and taken a whole bunch of time. When you turn on the GPU, it immediately starts costing you money. This means that every GPU purchase starts in a deep, dark hole. While a GB200 rack containing 72 GPUs might cost $3 million, its costs balloon even further when you factor in all the stuff you had to build around it so that it A) turns on, B) functions properly and C) doesn’t overheat and turn off. It’s difficult to say how much more because things like power and construction vary from place to place, and something as simple as, say, permitting can have an outsized effect on the price of construction, but my napkin maths says there are tens of thousands of dollars of costs at minimum for each GB200 rack. So, yeah, when you finally turn a GPU on, you’re tens of thousands of dollars in the hole already. And then we get to the muddy part — how much do these fucking things cost to run? The answer is “nobody seems to want to tell us,” and also “it’s complicated.” It’s hard to tell exactly how much one GPU costs, despite many companies (like Microsoft, Google or Amazon, or AI-specialist companies like CoreWeave) selling hourly access to GPUs, because data centers are full of them, and because a GPU isn’t just a GPU, it’s also connected to a CPU, a server, storage, and many other pieces that need to exist for it to do anything.
November 24, 2025 at 5:04 PM
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edzitron.com
Premium: This is The Hater's Guide To NVIDIA: A 14k word guide to how NVIDIA makes its money, how millions of Blackwell GPUs have been sold with nowhere for them to be installed, and how NVIDIA's future relies on companies raising hundreds of billions in debt.
www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-g...
The Hater's Guide To NVIDIA
This piece has a generous 3000+ word introduction, because I want as many people to understand NVIDIA as possible. The (thousands of) words after the premium break get into arduous detail, but I’ve wr...
www.wheresyoured.at
November 24, 2025 at 5:04 PM
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sethcotlar.bsky.social
In 1945, the US Army put out a training manual intended to help rank and file soldiers spot incipient fascism in the US. One of the telltale signs that one was dealing with a fascist was that they called everyone to their left "a communist." bsky.app/profile/seth...
sethcotlar.bsky.social Seth Cotlar @sethcotlar.bsky.social · Aug 1
The third fascistic tactic to watch out for is their tendency to label anyone they disagree with who is to their left "a Communist." Fascists claim that they alone can save their nations from "the communist menace." Anyway, the 2024 GOP platform contains the phrase "Christ-hating communists."
3. It is accurate to call a member of a communist party a "communist." For short, he is often called a "Red." Indiscriminate pinning of the label "Red" on people and proposals which one opposes is a common political device. It is a favorite trick of native as well as foreign fascists. Many fascists make the spurious claim that the world has but two choices either fascism or com-munism, and they label as "communist" everyone who refuses to support them. By attacking our free enterprise, capitalist democracy and by denying the effectiveness of our way of life they hope to trap many people. Hitler insisted that only fascism could save Europe and the world from the "communist menace." There were many people inside and outside Germany and Italy who welcomed and supported Hitler and Mussolini because they believed fascism was the only safeguard against communism. The "Red bogey" was a convincing enough argument to help Hitler take and maintain power. The Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis, whose aggressions plunged the world into global war, was called the "Anti-Comintern Axis." It was proclaimed by Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito as a "bulwark against communism." Learning to identify native fascists and to detect their techniques is not easy. They plan it that way. But it is vitally important to learn to spot them, even though they adopt names and slogans with popular appeal, drape themselves with the American flag, and attempt to carry out their program in the name of the democracy they are trying to destroy.
November 22, 2025 at 3:30 PM
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premthakker.bsky.social
Notice Mamdani charmed Trump on live TV without backing down on any stances. He didn't water himself down, he didn't even take back calling Trump a fascist. Moderates would say butter him up, or try to appear more right-wing. Voters can see through that—and evidently so does he!
November 22, 2025 at 12:54 AM
orangecatstargrep.bsky.social
And we begin the game again… will the head of lettuce outlast a famously famous famous person…..

How many Scamuccis will it be?
mglovesfun.bsky.social Martin Gardner @mglovesfun.bsky.social · 12d
Folks, I'm going there.
Lindsey Halligan and the lettuce with googly eyes from the "Can Liz Truss outlast this lettuce?" campaign.
November 21, 2025 at 12:02 AM
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eff.org
The USPTO wants new rules that would slam the door on inter partes review—the only affordable way the public can fight junk patents.
The Patent Office Is About To Make Bad Patents Untouchable
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has proposed new rules that would effectively end the public’s ability to challenge improperly granted patents at the Patent Office itself. We need EFF sup...
www.eff.org
November 20, 2025 at 6:53 PM
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ruralanarchy.bsky.social
Read the comment this replies too. Tesla sent a model they've been making for 10 years to a car magazine to test, and the lug nuts came loose. The tech to perfectly tighten those critical nuts has been known since Ford's MODEL A in the 1920s. OVER 100 YEARS. Tesla is 100 years behind on mechanics.
ruralanarchy.bsky.social Rural Anarchy @ruralanarchy.bsky.social · 14d
Auto factory worker here...

LOOSE LUG NUTS AT 500 MILES ON THE ODOMETER?

EVERY major company uses very expensive "torque control" tools with fancy electric motors controlled by computers to tighten lugnuts so they DON'T come loose. OMFG.
November 19, 2025 at 12:12 AM
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cfiesler.bsky.social
The maximum acceptable level of risk for an "AI-powered toy" targeted at young children is absolutely too low for use of an off-the-shelf commercial LLM to EVER be a reasonable choice. gizmodo.com/ai-powered-t...
AI-Powered Teddy Bear Caught Talking About Sexual Fetishes and Instructing Kids How to Find Knives
OpenAI blocked access for the toymaker following the incidents.
gizmodo.com
November 19, 2025 at 12:31 AM
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jesspish.bsky.social
Clay Higgins discourse requires I repost this on Clay Higgins’s disgraceful career and media complicity with it.

sheriffs.substack.com/p/clay-higgi...
Clay Higgins: The Cajun Boss Hog
June 20, 2023
sheriffs.substack.com
November 18, 2025 at 8:38 PM
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eff.org
Bad patents already do enough damage. PERA makes it easier to get them and harder to challenge them. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...
PERA Remains a Serious Threat to Efforts Against Bad Patents
PERA would overturn long-standing court decisions that have helped keep some of the most problematic patents in check. This includes the Supreme Court’s Alice v. CLS Bank decision, which bars patents
www.eff.org
November 17, 2025 at 9:00 PM
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thembo.bsky.social
Capitalism is incredible. Sorry, former teacher, your retirement fund is gone because 5 guys who've collectively never worked a full hour told the banks to put all the money in the country into virtual girlfriend futures
carlquintanilla.bsky.social Carl Quintanilla @carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 15d
WSJ: “.. If the AI market blows up, the blast radius would be wide, hitting not only Wall Street firms, but also pensions, mutual and exchange-traded funds and individual investors, because of how debt is often sliced and resold across the financial landscape.”

@wsj.com
www.wsj.com/finance/inve...
November 18, 2025 at 5:11 AM
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solomonmissouri.bsky.social
Olivia Nuzzi Has Always Been This Bad. jeremyfassler.medium.com/olivia-nuzzi...
Olivia Nuzzi Has Always Been This Bad.
Journalists who’ve defended Nuzzi need to look at themselves in the mirror following her involvement with RFK Jr.
jeremyfassler.medium.com
November 15, 2025 at 11:13 AM
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neolithicsheep.bsky.social
authors you have the chance to do the funniest thing right now
arstechnica.com Ars Technica @arstechnica.com · Aug 27
AI advocates have warned that if every author in the class action filed a claim, it would "financially ruin" the entire industry.
Authors celebrate “historic” settlement coming soon in Anthropic class action
Advocates fear such settlements will “financially ruin” the AI industry.
arstechnica.com
November 18, 2025 at 4:35 AM
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durlauf.bsky.social
3/The mistreatment of women in economics has long been an open secret. I have felt the obligation to discuss sexism in the profession with every female graduate student I have had starting as an Assistant Professor to this day.
November 15, 2025 at 4:32 PM
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runwithskizzers.bsky.social
ok I read some of the Nuzzi piece and I am pleased to announce that I will never feel bad about my own writing ever again
November 17, 2025 at 6:10 PM
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danc1982.bsky.social
November 15, 2025 at 10:37 PM
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rincewind.run
“there is a point on the graph where things get Worse, and there you will find Ronald Reagan” stays undefeated
sharonk.bsky.social Sharon @sharonk.bsky.social · 17d
it's fascinating that you can see when exactly the Reagan revolution happened
igure 3.3. Growth in Incomes at the Very Top, 1917–2006 (in 2006 Dollars) Source: Emmanuel Saez’s computations from IRS income tax statistics, http://elsa.berkeley .edu/~saez
November 15, 2025 at 9:26 PM
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eff.org
With Rayhunter, we can find out how cell site simulators are being used, and protect ourselves and our communities from this form of surveillance. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...
Meet Rayhunter: A New Open Source Tool from EFF to Detect Cellular
Rayhunter is a new open source tool we’ve created that runs off an affordable mobile hotspot that we hope empowers everyone, regardless of technical skill, to help search out cell-site simulators
www.eff.org
November 15, 2025 at 8:00 PM
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stevanzetti.bsky.social
Access journalism is already a cancer. This is something worse than cancer.
noahshachtman.bsky.social Noah Shachtman @noahshachtman.bsky.social · 19d
Michael Wolff tried to buy New York Mag — with money from Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein.

So Wolff didn't just have a reporter-source relationship with Epstein. Nor was Wolff his informal PR adviser. They saw each other as potential business partners.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
Blurred lines: how Michael Wolff aspired to be part of elite circles he wrote about
The writer who features prominently in newly released Jeffrey Epstein emails has achieved extraordinary access but faced questions about his journalistic ethics
www.theguardian.com
November 14, 2025 at 1:34 AM