Sneaky Sasquatch

A Sneaky Sasquatch killin’ Buzzes.

[Sneaky Sasquatch @JohnnyBuzzkill]

@AutismCapital Love this

[Taelin @VictorTaelin]

Just saving this here to document a story and as a self reflection on whether AI is really making me more productive

Yesterday morning I found a way to complete the new HVM approach, that is much faster than before. I spent a few hours writing a spec, and then used Opus to implement. About 3k lines of C code later, everything worked and performance was incredible: 5x faster than HVM4 (stable at ~10x now). So, in one day I had outclassed HVM4. Incredible. I'd never have implemented that so fast manually.

Now, enter today. I want to turn this into a real thing, but I haven't fully read the 3k lines yet. So, how do I trust it? I spent the whole day auditing the code. With AI. Several bugs found, most minor like forgetting to collect() some argument. But then I stumble upon this:

λ{ inl: 1 ; inr: 1 }

This was a test. But wait. This is matching on inl/inr. So the branches should receive the value of the Either. But they were numbers instead. Numbers aren't functions. This makes no sense. So why this is a test?

It then stuck me. The AI completely misunderstood how function arities work. It literally assumed for no good reason that HVM5 was supposed to handle under/over-applied functions. For no good reason. I never wrote that. It never asked either. It just kinda thought "HVM is weird in some aspects, this might be one of them..." - and then it went on to implement a massive system to handle cases that should never happen to begin with. And all of that code is obviously wrong because it should not even exist. It is wrong. It is damage. And it is there.

But it isn't too bad either. I just told Opus that it was wrong. Perhaps not so politely. And it solved it just fine.

But then this begs the question. I spent ~20 hours in this file, and it is STILL not done. I went from 0 to 95% in the first 5 hours. Yet, 15 hours later, it is still not 100%. I suppose that is the real effect of using AI. If I had just written the C file manually in the last two days, would I not be further than where I am *right now*?

Surely, the first version would have taken much longer to drop. But when I'd finish writing all that code, there would be zero, literally zero retarded shit. And, just today, I caught 5 or 6 retarded shit. And the worst part is: I don't know what the number of retarded shit left is, but I'm afraid it is >0.

So if I have to read it all, review it all to ensure there is no retarded shit... what did I achieve by using AI, other than that dopamine anticipation?

[Dudes Posting Their W’s @DudespostingWs]

This needs to be turned into a Hollywood film

[Sneaky Sasquatch @JohnnyBuzzkill]

@SoloRoundtable @BNONews MacroHard

[Autism Capital 🧩 @AutismCapital]

They’re calling it the greatest community notes ever made.

[Sneaky Sasquatch @JohnnyBuzzkill]

@ParikPatelCFA @WheelieInvestor Brilliant!

[Spencer Pratt @spencerpratt]

It seemed cheaper and more secure than putting the fence around my dirt lot where Karen Bass let my house burn down 🤷‍♂️

[Sneaky Sasquatch @JohnnyBuzzkill]

Yes, it’s quite interesting that first ‘discovery” by an LLM is a combinatorics problem. To your point, did it just burn $10mm+ in compute to iterate over the entire solution surface to brute force the answer. I will be more impressed when it can some a problem that can’t be solved via brute force.

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔Microsoft canceled its internal Claude Code licenses this week after token-based billing made the cost untenable, even for a company with effectively infinite cloud resources. Uber's CTO sent an internal memo warning the company burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months. American AI software prices have jumped 20% to 37%, and GitHub (owned by Microsoft) is dropping flat-rate plans for usage-based billing across its products.

My Take
The AI subsidy era is ending in real time. The same company that put $13 billion into OpenAI and built the Azure infrastructure powering most of Anthropic's compute just looked at the bill from a competitor's coding tool and decided it was not worth paying. That is not a productivity failure on Anthropic's end. Token-based pricing is forcing every enterprise customer to confront the actual cost of running these models at scale, and the number turns out to be far higher than the flat-rate experiments suggested.

This ties directly to my Gemini Flash post yesterday. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all raised effective prices in the last six months. Enterprises that built workflows assuming AI costs would keep falling are now watching annual budgets evaporate in months. Two outcomes look likely from here. Either enterprises scale back AI usage to fit budgets, which slows the revenue ramp the labs need to justify their valuations ahead of IPOs, or the labs cut prices and absorb the losses, which makes the unit economics worse at exactly the wrong moment. Both paths land in the same place, the numbers stop working, and somebody has to take the writedown.

Hedgie🤗

[Nick shirley @nickshirleyy]

@GavinNewsom In Californias case it might be good to fight fire with water

[End Wokeness @EndWokeness]

Google just quietly changed their map of LA by using old pre-fire satellite imagery

LA's election is in 2 weeks

[Deedy @deedydas]

The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen.

Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation).

Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there.

Worse yet, layoffs are in full swing. Many software engineers feel like their life's skill is no longer useful. The day to day role of most jobs has changed overnight with AI.

As a result,
1. The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb.
Everyone's trying to align with a new set of career "paths": should I be a founder? Is it too late to join Anthropic / OpenAI? should I get into AI? what company stock will 10x next? People are demanding higher salaries and switching jobs more and more.

2. There’s a deep malaise about work (and its future).
Why even work at all for “peanuts”? Will my job even exist in a few years? Many feel helpless. You hear the “permanent underclass” conversation a lot, esp from young people. It's hard to focus on doing good work when you think "man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire"

3. The mid to late middle managers feel paralyzed.
Many have families and don't feel like they have the energy or network to just "start a company". They don't particularly have any AI skills. They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies.

4. The rich aren’t particularly happy either.
No one is shedding tears for them (and rightfully so). But those who have "made it" experience a profound lack of purpose too. Some have gone from <$150k to >$50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money."

I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here.

Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success".

Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment.

[@amuse @amuse]

CORRUPTION: Gavin Newsom wants to hand his wife's NGO a $12.5M no-bid diaper contract at 3-5X the Amazon price. He asked the legislature to skip competitive bidding. The safeguard exists to stop exactly this sort of corruption.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

@nypost I agree that she is beautiful, but casting a Black woman to play a White woman in a foundational work of European literature is no more right than casting a White man to play Shaka Zulu!

[End Wokeness @EndWokeness]

"Why does an actor's race matter?!"

Ok… now imagine it was this:

[Jeffrey Currie 🆔++ @CommodMkt]

Welcome to the most asymmetric trade in modern financial history.

The thread below lays out why. The opportunity exists because capital has chased the AI trade while ignoring the physical assets AI requires to run — assets that have quietly become the best-performing asset class of the decade. Since October 2020 when we first called for the commodity super cycle: QCI Total Return +217%, GSCI Total Return +205%, Gold +140%. NASDAQ trails at +130%. S&P 500 at +85%. The top three are all commodities. Yet oil cannot get out of its own way while copper and the broader atom complex prints fresh highs . That is the dislocation. That is the trade.

Get long. Buckle in. Hang on for the ride.

Forgive the longer posts in this thread — attempting to mimic my old 10-bullet commodity takes. On to it.

[Sneaky Sasquatch @JohnnyBuzzkill]

@mcuban I like this.

[Sneaky Sasquatch @JohnnyBuzzkill]

@Rooh_Ullah1 @elonmusk Huh?

[Sneaky Sasquatch @JohnnyBuzzkill]

@elonmusk @zerohedge 20T or bust