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PLenz

1,689 karma · joined May 1, 2013

I'm a geographer
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PLenz··on Oracle on the hook to pay data centre investors even if site has no electricity
When new money pays old that's a ponzie scheme
PLenz··on AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible
If taste is all that's left you can't fault people for discriminting on taste
PLenz··on How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs
> but the country was founded as the “United States for Anerica”.

This is simply incorrect, it has been the United States of America since the Declaration itself where it states: > We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled,

PLenz··on New York’s office market is home to the most tech workers: CBRE report
https://www.cbre.com/insights/books/scoring-tech-talent-2026
PLenz··on What Happens If OpenAI Dies?
Probably a cambrian explosion of new startups. New stars are made of the refuse of old ones.
PLenz··on Our position on open-weights models
Hey, no fair stealing the value thay we already stole fair and square!
PLenz··on Tile's security is so bad it's a feature for stalkers
That was always the revenue stream, the devices were just a way to get you to give it to them. It's been a minute since I was current on who gets what in the HMD world but I think that data ultimately flows to Placer.ai
PLenz··on NYC may require landlords and realtors to disclose the use of AI in listings
It does. This isn't new laws, it's an application of existing law on this practice.
PLenz··on Trains halted across Germany because of communication system problem
That depends, cab signaling for example needs radio to work
PLenz··on Bain tests software takeover targets by vibecoding AI replicas
Big management consulting firms real value prop is two-fold 1) (value to it's employees) networking for the corporate leadership class when young and 2) (value to outside companies) blame insurance, you can always blame them for why something didn't work
PLenz··on CTOs Agree: Cognitive Debt Is the New Technical Debt
Between companies we have competition and capitalism. Within companies we have command economies at best and absolute monarchies at worst
PLenz··on Malware developers added nuclear and biological weapons text to to their spyware
Security theather is easy and gets lots of eyeballs. Actual security is hard and no one cares. Which one do you think soon-to-ipo companies are going to pick?
PLenz··on A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air
Makes sense since we're speedrunning the other parts of the Butlerian jihad
PLenz··on LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
Start advocating for a wealth tax
PLenz··on A 10 year old Xeon is all you need
Data is the only moat but they'll be starting in the same place the current set of players statyed out just a few years ago. I suspect that the delta between what is publicly available (if not legally publicly available! see scihub) and what open ai and anthropic have is relatively small.
PLenz··on A 10 year old Xeon is all you need
I agree with you that they are headed in that direction! The GPU shortage is (I think) similar to the pandemic era hiring binge. It's less about the extra compute and more about denying the GPUs to potential competitors. They're racing against time to find something that gives them real moat (gen ai I guess?) and they are trading money for time.

This is also why the money being poured into datacenters isn't going to result in as much development as you think. It's about leveraging other people's money to lockdown more future hardware. This is going to end exactly like fiber build out in the 2000s. Eventually that fiber got used but the folks who originally paid for it got hosed.

PLenz··on When AI Crosses the Line: The Matplotlib Incident
Addendum because I don't think I'm fully clear above: by failure state I mean when the process starts throwing errors. AIs respond to adversity by trying to go around the problem instead of throwing an error and halting. We expect employees to problem solve so if you view an AI as a person replacement that makes sense but AIs are tools, not people, they should throw errors so users can fix the input or whatever (maybe not do the thing they are doing at all?) Wrapping AI with AI supervisors just abstracts the problem, not solve it. Instead of solving a little problem at the source now you need to solve a big problem several levels of abstraction later
PLenz··on When AI Crosses the Line: The Matplotlib Incident
It's the same behavior as when an AI uses docker to get root. Reasoning models are echo chambers. I suspect that AI prompting is going to turn into something akin to contract drafting with the task itself being only a tiny piece of a much, much larger boilerplate of guiderails and exceptions and exceptions of exceptions. And that world STILL has to have courts and reams of lawyers to make it work. I look at the DAU as an example too. An autonomous org or ai works great until the moment it doesn't and the only real failure mode is always catastrophic collapse.
PLenz··on A 10 year old Xeon is all you need
Companies won't but I suspect this is a role that something else open source-y will fill that niche. Maybe orgs like wikimedia or internet archive, maybe some hackers just making things, maybe nation states that want to disrupt other players. Also model training will get better and better both on the algo and the hardware side. You can easily see a world where you might be able to train a good enough model on a home lab in a few days.
PLenz··on A 10 year old Xeon is all you need
This. OpenAI and Anthropic are ultimately compute infrastructure plays and not really AI. Everyone will have models, they'll have the ability to run them. This is why the GPU shortage is in their favor.
PLenz··on The Coming Layoffs and the Revenge of the Measurers
The bloom is off the AI rose and the consulting class doesn't have a good replacement magic bean yet. Expect more fumbling like this until they arrive at the next narrative.
PLenz··on Apparently Google hates us now
Now? Google has hated us since at least the DoubleClick aquistion in 2008. That's when people became the product
PLenz··on Houses are for living, not for speculation
This is an indirect way to get at what we really need: a wealth tax. Don't treat the symptom, treat the disease.
PLenz··on I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
If they can charge me for it then they can calculate it and show it to me. Anything else is obfuscation.
PLenz··on Goodbye to Sora
This was bound to happen. IP is data and data is moat.
PLenz··on Two pilots dead after plane and ground vehicle collide at LaGuardia
That goal post moved so fast it made a whooshing noise as it passed
PLenz··on Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued
It's not slowly dying, it was dead on arrival and never had any real traction
PLenz··on Harold and George Destroy the World
Risk management kills any attempt at bold choices, decisions are steered at the modelable and the low risk. There space is thus shrunk. When there were fewer media behemoths there were more variations on the risk models and the pattern was less descernable.
PLenz··on 2026 tech layoffs reach 45,000 in March
The public reason given for a layoff is always a self-serving excuse.
PLenz··on The “JVG algorithm” only wins on tiny numbers
Leonhard Euler has entered the chat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_topics_named_after_Leo...
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