Moderately Successful Geometer

Awaiting the referee reports. In the formal sense, a man of letters. Now in a million pieces, picked up for deliberation by the people reading at home.

[Moderately Successful Geometer @cg_geometry]

"I had not thought it would be like this."

[Moderately Successful Geometer @cg_geometry]

@McJuggerNuggets Barbaric.

[Moderately Successful Geometer @cg_geometry]

If you thought our culture was materialistic before, just wait until knowledge is fully devalued.

[Moderately Successful Geometer @cg_geometry]

Any big new theorems autonomously proved today?

[Moderately Successful Geometer @cg_geometry]

@disneytipsguy Slip slop, slippity slop.

[Moderately Successful Geometer @cg_geometry]

@ZitoSalena Pittsburgh is great. (We lived there for four years and loved it. Two of our kids were born at Magee!) And, I agree: there's no disputing taste.

But, as sorry as I am to say it, I cannot recommend the pizza. I lived in New Jersey for even longer. I cannot tell a lie.

[Moderately Successful Geometer @cg_geometry]

I'm extremely glad that I earned my Ph.D. (and developed a publication record) before ChatGPT was invented.

[Steve McGuire @sfmcguire79]

He adds that AI use by students AND faculty could lead to a “shell university, where AI generated work is being passed off as human, and then in turn evaluated by another AI, again passed off as human.”

[Moderately Successful Geometer @cg_geometry]

@memeticsisyphus Are there lane markers in the deli?

[Moderately Successful Geometer @cg_geometry]

Where are all these Canadians proudly insisting that they're Americans?

[Morgan Dorian Trias (parody) @Morgue_XiiV]

The reason all people from the USA are Yanks is because the dumbasses forgot to *name* their country. They just vaguely described what it is and where it is. So they call themselves Americans as if Candians and Brazillians etc are somehow less American despite being from America.

[Moderately Successful Geometer @cg_geometry]

@Morgue_XiiV Canadians and Brazilians aren't American. You just gave their English demonyms. Are you confused?

[Moderately Successful Geometer @cg_geometry]

Any big open problems autonomously solved today?

[Moderately Successful Geometer @cg_geometry]

Which big open mathematical problem has been autonomously solved this week? Or, did the LLMs go on vacation?

[Moderately Successful Geometer @cg_geometry]

@spicey_lemonade @chenna1985 He's not the best mathematician in the world, but he's among the best.

[Moderately Successful Geometer @cg_geometry]

They're playing Electric Light Orchestra's "Livin' Thing" in this Starbucks, and I'm immediately reminded of BOOGIE NIGHTS, which I saw only once, almost thirty years ago. This tells me that the choice to use it at the end of the film was -- I hate to admit -- a stroke of genius.

[Moderately Successful Geometer @cg_geometry]

It won't work this time, because Google won't let OpenAI and Anthropic do it. Google's pockets are too deep, and it's an existential issue for them.

[Silicon Valley Fodder @Playerinthgame]

When will people understand that this predatory pricing model will always be true of anything coming out of Silicon Valley? It is literally their only model. 1. Operate at a loss so everyone signs up 2. Wipe out competitors 3. Slam users with profane monopolistic costs

[Moderately Successful Geometer @cg_geometry]

@thebigjohnnyd It was an existential issue for Google. If they hadn't adapted, OpenAI and Anthropic would've drunk their milkshake.

[Moderately Successful Geometer @cg_geometry]

In both TRUMAN SHOW and ETERNAL SUNSHINE, Carrey took excellent roles and performed them well.

[DepressedBergman @DannyDrinksWine]

Roger Ebert & Gene Siskel hated Jim Carrey's performance in "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective" (1994). Ebert even predicted that Carrey won't have much of a career.

After watching "The Truman Show" (1998), Ebert not only gave a thumbs up, but admitted that he didn't get much of what Carrey was doing at the beginning of his career, but over the course of 4 years he understood and started to appreciate his performances. Ebert & Siskel aired an entire episode for him.

Ebert interviewed Jim Carrey before the said episode. During that interview, Carrey brought up the thumbs down review and said,

"I really like to look at life as the negatives are things to learn from, or things to to tell you it's not all gonna be roses. That's how I looked at it [thumbs down]. I thought, 'I hope the movie does good but a lot of people aren't gonna like it.'"

P.S: On this day, 28 years ago, Petere Wier's "The Truman Show" (1998) premiered in Westwood, California.

[Moderately Successful Geometer @cg_geometry]

@Andr3jH How long does it take to accelerate to 99.99999% of the speed of light without splattering against the rear wall? (Maybe 4-8 years, then again to decelerate.) Worse, how does one do this while not disintegrating upon contact with interstellar debris?

[Moderately Successful Geometer @cg_geometry]

Oof. If I take C, do I have to keep the German bits?

[CoffeeWithTheClassics @CoffeewClassics]

This is much harder, if you dig into it a bit.

Extremely rough breakdown, off the top of my head:

A: the Icelandic Sagas, the Eddas, Kalevala

B: Adam Smith, David Hume, Walter Scott, Robert Burns, Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Carlyle, George MacDonald, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ibsen, Strindberg, Undset, Pushkin, Dostoevsky

C: Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Austen, Dickens (plus all nearly English lit thereafter), Blake, Byron, Shelley, Yeats, Locke, Hobbes, Swift, Erasmus, Spinoza, Hans Christian Andersen, Nietzsche, Kant (Konigsberg), Schopenhauer (Danzig), Tolstoy (his home is just south of the B/C line in Russia)

D: Descartes, Voltaire, Rousseau, Molière, Hugo, Balzac, Proust, Sartre, Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Kafka, Rilke, Freud, Wittgenstein, Popper, Hayek

E: Cicero, Ovid, Virgil, Dante, Petrarch, Machiavelli, Aquinas, Montaigne, Montesquieu, Cervantes, Aristotle, Sappho, Homer, Hesiod (note these Greeks were from the north, not Athens)

F: Plato, Socrates, Thucydides, Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus (Athens is just south of the E/F line), Herodotus, Seneca (not from Rome, but from Spain originally), Averroes, Maimonides (Cordoba), García Lorca, St. Augustine, Camus, Derrida (North Africa).

[Moderately Successful Geometer @cg_geometry]

Wait -- how did "Fugazi" come to mean fake? They weren't, like, huge phonies, as far as I could tell.

[Bull Theory @BullTheoryio]

🚨Michael Burry just said Elon Musk and Nvidia's deal is built on fake numbers.

Burry published a detailed breakdown calling the entire structure "Fugazi", his word for fake.

He is alleging that billions of dollars in Nvidia chips are being hidden off balance sheets, and that American retirees are unknowingly funding the whole thing.

Nvidia, the world's largest AI chip company sold $5.4 billion worth of its most advanced GPUs, the GB200, to a company called Valor.

Valor is not a real operating business. It is a special purpose vehicle, a shell company created specifically to hold these chips and nothing else. Nvidia also invested $1.9 billion of its own money directly into Valor on top of the sale.

Those 100,000+ chips are now physically inside xAI's data center. xAI is Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, the one that builds Grok. xAI is using every single one of those chips right now to run its AI models.

But here is what Burry is flagging.

Neither Nvidia nor xAI owns those chips on paper. Valor, the shell company holds legal title. That means $5.4 billion in GPU assets do not show up on Nvidia's balance sheet as inventory.

They do not show up on xAI's balance sheet as assets. They are legally invisible to both companies.

Nvidia gets to book the $5.4 billion as a completed sale and record it as revenue. xAI gets full use of the chips without owning them. And the risk disappears into a shell company in the middle.

Now here is where American retirees enter the picture.

Valor needed $3.5 billion in debt to fund this structure. Apollo provided it. Apollo is one of the largest asset managers on earth with $1.03 trillion under management and $834 billion specifically in private credit.

Apollo raised the $3.5 billion, packaged it into debt securities, and sold those securities to Athene.

Athene is Apollo's own insurance company. It sells fixed and indexed annuities, retirement savings products, to ordinary Americans.

When a retiree buys an Athene annuity, they believe their money is sitting in safe, stable investments. That money is now inside a structure funding Elon Musk's AI data center.

The numbers inside Athene are most alarming.

Athene holds $74.2 billion in reserves. It has moved $217 billion in assets into a captive insurer based in Bermuda, meaning those assets sit outside normal US insurance regulation and oversight.

Of the entire portfolio, 34.7%, equal to $103 billion, is classified as Level 3 assets.

Level 3 is an accounting classification that means there is no observable market price for these assets. No outside party can independently verify what they are actually worth.

The leverage sitting on top of those unpriced assets is 16 times.

Burry's says:
Every step of this structure is technically legal and publicly disclosed. But the entire thing was deliberately engineered across 8 to 12 steps to move credit risk off balance sheets and away from any market pricing.

- Nvidia books the revenue.
- Apollo collects the fees.
- xAI gets the computing power.
- And retirees sitting at the bottom of a 16x leveraged Bermuda insurance structure, holding $103 billion in assets with no market price carry the risk without knowing it exists.

[Moderately Successful Geometer @cg_geometry]

@lilbabygandhi "Vanilla ice cream is so boring" blah blah.