Clayton Wagar

Technologist, husband and parent, afflicted with an incurable case of wanderlust. Horatian satire gold medalist. AI@Nokia, personal account.

[Freddy🇩🇪 @FreddyLA7]

This town is so beautiful

[Freddy🇩🇪 @FreddyLA7]

We’ve arrived at our hotel here in Auburn for the weekend. Thank you so much to Auburn University for the super generous welcome! We even got some toilet paper rolls😅

We know this isn’t normal at all and really appreciate it!🙏

[Clayton Wagar @claytonwagar]

@EWErickson You want to take the produced return audio from the station, replace the audio on your video feed, and send that back out? So you'll need a video buffer to account for the round trip from the studio. Correct?

[Eric 🏴‍☠️ @A321200]

@elonmusk @SawyerMerritt Meanwhile at Delta…

[Roy @usr_bin_roygbiv]

Elon realized it was easier to launch a billion satellites into orbit than overturn the telecommunications act of 1996

[signüll @signulll]

look china doesn’t even need to kill american labs. it only needs to compress expected returns enough that private (maybe soon public) capital stops financing training runs.

american labs must eventually produce margins. china can treat frontier intelligence as strategic infrastructure & accept no direct financial return at all.

in essence america prices financially. china prices geopolitically.

[Clayton Wagar @claytonwagar]

The one where @steipete vibes codes an AI credit check system.

[Peter Steinberger 🦞 @steipete]

Tried to sign up to @ATT four times now and they reject me and aren’t telling me why.

What’s the next best unlimited phone/data plan for the SF area?

Or do I know anyone who can work around corp bs?

[Clayton Wagar @claytonwagar]

@Iberia @Iberia_en @Transport_EU PIR opened after a three hour return visit to the airport this morning (forgoing my existing plans). The third party service at the counter was fantastic. Now let's see if @Iberia can follow through.

[Clayton Wagar @claytonwagar]

Iberia baggage service claim website is down, and the call center refuses to open a PIR for my lost luggage. I am posting this to @Iberia @Iberia_en @Transport_EU to establish a record of my lost luggage, item ending in -291, PNR ending in -D96 for claims purposes. HAM airport arrival IB777 21 JUN

[Clayton Wagar @claytonwagar]

Beneficiaries include United, Finnair, TAP, and KLM (yeah SkyTeam)

[Clayton Wagar @claytonwagar]

Mid year report, now that my travel is booked through July 1:

@delta YTD spend: $14,235
Other carrier spend shifted away from Delta: $8,133

Not as easy as I would like, but making progress.

[Clayton Wagar @claytonwagar]

Stay tuned…

[Nick Dorsey @Midnight_Captl]

$NVDA I think Jensen might be seeing the future of the data center is going to be a blend of small and large clusters rather than solely large >GW scale factories

He mentioned during the analyst Q&A at GTC Taipei almost off the cuff about building 10MW to 100MW systems instead of large >GW scale DCs. He said something like “if you cant build GW’s build MW’s” (paraphrasing), which I thought was a bit odd as it was almost out of context in the moment

Then last night I listened to an interview from yesterday with Lumentum’s CEO Michael Hurlston, and I heard him mention about “the politics of the data center”, and how the industry is thinking about scale across networking between multiple sites as being a viable solution to the blowback from large scale GW campuses

So I started thinking about how Jensen might be thinking about this through the lenses of Nvidia and its tech stack. I went back and looked again at their scale across networking solutions (NV link scale up, SpectrumX scale out, and Spectrum XGS scale across). Their solution has distance-aware congestion control, precision latency management, and telemetry that let geographically separate data centers behave like one AI factory

To conclude, I think the ‘scale across’ networking domain is probably significantly under discussed / focused on in mainstream discussion around AI infra atm —

[Clayton Wagar @claytonwagar]

I cannot disclose the location of this jump.

[Lara Korte @lara_korte]

CENTCOM has released this photo of an F-16 refueling in an "undisclosed location."

[Clayton Wagar @claytonwagar]

Look, I love Paris but a photo from the 7th is not exactly fighting fair.

[European Commission @EU_Commission]

The battle of narratives is going strong.

Our countries are a recurring target.

It is time to act to tell the stories that make us strong. Let’s live our own story!

Protect what matters - our democracy.

[Clayton Wagar @claytonwagar]

East coast US to Asia business class is where this will hit hard first. Delta current WiFi already drops out mid flight, which is exactly when savvy travelers want to wake up and start adjusting zones. No fix for 3-5 years will be brutal vs competition.

[Sawyer Merritt @SawyerMerritt]

I think it's worth discussing how last night's Blue Origin incident could affect Delta's decision to choose Amazon Leo over @Starlink.

A couple months ago, Delta announced plans to begin installing Amazon Leo connectivity on 500 aircraft starting in 2028. The key word here is begin, because unless Amazon decides to launch their Leo satellites on SpaceX rockets in the near term while Blue Origin works to return New Glenn to service, a process that could take 12–15 months (maybe longer) based on early reports, its deployment timeline could face significant delays. Amazon currently has about 300 Leo satellites in orbit, compared to @SpaceX's 10,400 Starlink satellites.

Those 500 aircraft would cover only about half of Delta's fleet, meaning a full fleet rollout likely wouldn't be completed until 2030 or so (maybe sooner if they launch Leo sats with SpaceX).

United Airlines expects Starlink to be installed on roughly 80% of its fleet (about 880 aircraft) by the end of this year, years ahead of Delta's rollout. Southwest Airlines expects approximately 300 aircraft, or 37% of its fleet, to have Starlink by the end of 2026. American Airlines is scheduled to begin Starlink installations in 2027.

This means Delta will have a meaningful competitive disadvantage when it comes to high-speed onboard internet, an increasingly important feature for travelers. This begs the question, does Delta accept these likely delays with Amazon Leo (again, unless they pay SpaceX to launch their sats in the meantime), or do they eventually decide they can't afford to wait and switch to Starlink?

A couple other factors to consider though: Delta has broader partnerships with Amazon beyond Leo, and Amazon may have offered a killer deal to get Delta to sign with them, one they may not want to give up. It's also possible Amazon dedicates a large share of Leo's early capacity to Delta, making a smaller satellite constellation mostly sufficient for its needs? I need to look more into that last part.

So far, 37 airlines (and counting) have announced Starlink adoption. I now some disagree with me on this, but I believe passengers will increasingly factor high-speed internet connectivity into their flight decisions, especially on longer flights. As more airlines adopt Starlink (three out of the four major U.S. airlines have), pressure will continue to mount for the airlines that haven't adopted it.

Jet Blue is in a similar situation to Delta....

[Clayton Wagar @claytonwagar]

@MatthewShiflet @Delta Welcome to the club! It’s especially amazing when they split up your family on a dream holiday vacation!

[Clayton Wagar @claytonwagar]

I am so done with @Delta. Happy for their earnings successes, but it hides a continual decline in their product. After 9 months of planning a family Christmas destination trip, they've moved my two sons to a different return flight with no explanation.

[Clayton Wagar @claytonwagar]

My wife and I discussed getting a new fridge this weekend, trading down from our $4k GE Cafe model to something about half that. It’s not a budget decision by any means. it’s because quality is terrible. Why pay twice as much when the useful life is 5-7 years? I don’t need three types of ice when the seal on the freezer constantly fails and the door ice dispenser freezes open all the time?

[The Transcript @TheTranscript_]

$WHR Whirlpool CEO: Budget-constrained shoppers are trading down within appliance categories.

"What you do see, however, that in particular in a distressed environment, that consumers enter the store with a budget in mind. What I mean is they have a budget, let's say $600, and they're basically gonna stick with that price point. What you see, as opposed to a product which used to cost $599 is now $649, they stick to a $599 price point."

[Clayton Wagar @claytonwagar]

I am using in-flight WiFi powered by Panasonic, on a Korea-based airlines A350-900, flying over South Korean mainland, and it's making me miss my US Robotics Courier modem.

[Clayton Wagar @claytonwagar]

@dylan522p Due to rain