Possible scenarios (ranked in order):
1/ Your country makes the best cheapest products. You export, and your citizens also buy the best.
2/ Your country doesn’t make the best/cheapest; but your consumers enjoy them (Brazil below).
3/ Your country doesn’t make the cheapest/best AND your country blocks access to your market. So you pay more for worst products, and you don’t export. Plus your local companies become less globally competitive as they are protected.
#3 is the worst. It’s what Europe did when America thrived. And it’s what many in Washington recommend today.
The Economist: “Brazilians are going gaga for Chinese brands…Affluent Brazilians drive cars made by BYD, use phones made by Huawei, watch televisions produced by Hisense, order meals with 99Food, a delivery app, and shop online at Shopee.”
https://t.co/OJQNWxBZnT
Staying married, a happy household, evidence of the parents working hard, childhood sports and watch all competitions, lots of hugs, reward merit, punish only egregious misbehavior, don't yell, restrict social media, monitor messages through 8th grade, the real expectation is college and academic excellence without pressure from parents, get children reading books early, no pacifiers, respond to needs not wants, babies sleep on their own through the night by 6 months, identify develop and support any talent or aptiude, one sport after age 10 is ok, communicate openly and easily with kids through grade 12, allow mistakes, and leave them alone in college. And then hope.
Jeff Bezos explains the Wandering Rule behind real invention:
"When I sit down to work on a problem, I know I don't know where I'm going."
"To go in a straight line, to be efficient, efficiency and invention are sort of at odds."
"Real invention, not incremental improvement... real lateral thinking... requires wandering."
"You have to give yourself permission to wander."
"A lot of people feel like wandering is inefficient."
"I don't know how long the meeting is going to take if we're trying to solve a problem."
The useful distinction:
Use efficiency when the path is known.
Use wandering when the problem is still being discovered.
Most teams kill invention by demanding a straight line too early.
“He stopped because it was hard.
It required discipline, dedication, and hours and hours of time. Everyone stopped.
I didn't stop.
Was there ever a time where you almost quit?
No.
Failure is not an option when you come from where I came from.
When you grew up in the San Fernando Valley and your father makes about 300 bucks a week and you don't get any allowance and you have to have a paper route at nine to be able to go buy an ice cream and you're also saving for a car because when you're 16 you know your dad can't afford it.
Failure is not an option. It's binary: Success or death.”
— Michael Ovitz
SoftBank’s investor presentation is one of the greatest things ever made. I’ve been thinking about it all day. These are the real slides shown in a speech where Masayoshi Son said he wouldn’t retire for at least another decade. The goose stuff is perfect.
https://t.co/sk9cDhdWIE
I wrote about this a lot in my book, especially in my second unfinished book that I have been working on for many years and recently let @jarad1821 read.
Focus on the process, not the outcome. If your process, reasoning, and judgment are sound, the results usually take care of themselves over time. Conversely, if your reasoning is weak, even a good outcome is luck disguising as judgment. 🌹
The 128GB number is the part everyone's repeating. The number that actually decides whether you'd use this box is 256.
That's the memory bandwidth, in GB/s. A 5090 moves about 1,800. An H100 moves 3,350. Local token speed is bound by how fast weights get read out of memory, and this APU reads them at roughly a seventh of a gaming GPU.
So the headline does something quiet. Qwen3 235B runs here at about 11 tokens a second, which sounds impossible on 256 GB/s until you notice the model is mixture-of-experts: 235B total, ~22B active per token. The chip only moves the 22B it needs. The "235B" on the slide is a storage stat. The 22B is the speed stat.
Run something dense and the trick drops. Llama 3.3 70B, where every parameter fires on every token, does about 5 tokens a second on the same box. Readable. Not something you sit in front of for eight hours.
That 3x win over a 5080 lives in the same place. A 5080 has 16GB of VRAM and can't hold a 235B model at all, so it spills to system memory and crawls. The APU wins that matchup on capacity. Change the test to a model that fits in 16GB and the 5080 walks away on speed.
Now look at the workload in the pitch: point Claude Code at localhost. Agentic coding is the worst possible fit for a bandwidth-starved box. One task is dozens of sequential model round trips, each waiting on the last, each streaming at 11 tokens a second. The exact use case used to sell the $5,280 in savings is the one that exposes the bottleneck.
The same Qwen3 235B runs at 1,500 tokens a second on a Cerebras wafer. That's the real comparison: 1,500 versus 11, and how much of your day goes to watching the slow one think.
The box is a real deal for what it is. A quiet, private, $1,800 machine that runs big open models at conversational speed for one person. The frontier stack it's sold as replacing answers at 50 to 100 tokens a second with quality no open 235B matches yet. It pays for itself in 9 months only if your time is worth nothing per token.
Charlie Munger: "I'm no good at exits. I don't like even looking for exits. I'm looking for holds."
"Think of the pleasure I've gotten from watching Costco march ahead. Such an utter meritocracy and it does so well. Why would I trade that experience for a series of transactions? It's a much less satisfactory life than rooting for people I like and admire."
"I say find Costcos — not good exits."
Anthropic Quant Andrej Karpathy:
"You literally have to put in 10,000 hours to learn Claude "
14-min workshop from the one of the smartest quant in AI - how he's actually uses it
all the most important tips are right here in this video
bookmark & watch - it’s absolutely for free