Em for You

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[Roger Entner @RogerEntner]

AI is now driving fiber demand end to end, and it’s starting to constrain build plans. Data centers are buying capacity first, everyone else gets what’s left. 🧵
#Telecom #Fiber

[The Beatles Legacy @TheBeatlesPMcC]

25 mai 1969, McCartney a finalisé chez lui l'écriture d'une berceuse qui se transformera en classique du rock.
Alors qu'il était chez son père assis au piano, Paul remarque une pile de vieilles partitions. Parmi ces partitions, un poème de Thomas Dekker, écrivain contemporain de Shakespeare. Il aime les mots, il adapte, il modifie, il crée sa propre mélodie et sa propre musique.
Il sait déjà que ce titre est un candidat parfait pour le medley d'Abbey Road.
Ce qu'il ne sait pas encore, c'est que ce titre sera considéré comme l'un des plus beaux chefs-d'œuvre de toute sa carrière. Ce qu'il ne sait pas non plus, c'est que depuis plus de cinquante ans, elle est la chanson pop/rock la plus reprise par les écoles de chorale du monde anglophone.
"Golden Slumbers", Chicago Children’s Choir, 2017.
"Golden Slumbers", The Beatles, 1969.

[Object Zero @Object_Zero_]

The Electricity Grid

I post a lot of stuff about the electricity grid, here the CEO of the largest grid in America (PJM) lays it out pretty clearly.

• What worked for 2 decades… no longer works
• This is structurally different from history
• You are facing an era of scarcity
• The situation is not tenable

PJM are facing a demand explosion. Now a demand explosion in some industries is +500% demand. But this is infrastructure, this is tens of trillions of dollars of assets and it takes time to mobilise and deploy things at this scale.

In infrastructure, when demand growth shifts from +1-2%/yr to +8%/yr, then you suddenly need to be building 4-8 times more assets per year, than you previously did.

If you were deploying $1 trillion / yr to grow at 1%, you now need to deploy $8 trillion / yr to grow at 8%.

Suddenly you need to deploy many trillions of dollars per year to meet this growth. If you cannot get it done, prices will rocket for everyone. Failure leads to inflation.

This is not a PJM problem, this is not even a US problem, this is a global problem. PJM are formally validating what some people have been saying for a while now.

This is not temporary, we cannot uninvent the technologies that have precipitated this change. The world has changed and we must adapt.

Global retail electricity sales are about $3.6 trillion per year, of that, around $900 billion goes to transmission and about $2.7 trillion goes to wholesale generation.

The transmission system many developed countries have is the wrong system going forward. Our transmission systems in the West are built for transporting power from big coal plants to power big towns. That’s not what we are doing now.

We have replaced most of the coal plants with two largely decentralised but highly correlated fleets of intermittent generators (wind and solar), that are growing like fracking wells because they are also quick to deploy.

Their quickness to deploy new generation projects is massively destabilising for the grid. The grid was designed for coal plants. The grid is a $50 trillion machine. It is by far the biggest asset in any country. It isn’t something you can toss away, it isn’t something you can swap out overnight.

We also have new categories of industrial demand (hyperscalers) that will capture an increasing share of GDP. This new demand category is going to set the marginal price of electricity for everyone else, and these guys are not as price sensitive as your widowed grandmother.

This is a difficult problem to address because of:
i) the scale
ii) the capital intensity

It’s also a global problem, because it’s born out of a new technological paradigm. It will not spread around the world at equal pace, but everywhere is going to eventually face it down.

Some people are fleeing to space for solutions to avoid this snafu, but that’s only a temporary fix.

Once the hyperscalers have their demand satisfied, the next demand explosion immediately follows, and this second wave is 20x the scale of the current problem.

The second wave is how do you power billions and billions of robots and billions of autonomous machines, doing work that currently can’t be done?

This industrial revolution is very much a two stage revolution, first you power up the chips, then you power up the actuators.

Chips scale down, actuators scale up.

There’s no Moore’s Law for actuators, they obey Newton’s Laws of motion instead.

This is the crux of the energy problem facing our civilisation. The energy system we have today is the one we wanted 20 years ago. The energy system we will have in 20 years from now, is the one we start building today.

It’s time to build this solution.

[Ken Cuccinelli II @KenCuccinelli]

Whoops. Sorry about inspiring TRILLIONs of dollars of damage done all over the world - with the worst impacts hammering poor people the world over.

Evil.

[Mila Joy @Milajoy]

"We only have 4 million adults in the state of Wisconsin, but 7.13 million are on the voter rolls.” https://t.co/YJgUIV6Yyw

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

Extremely concerning.

[David C Lowery @davidclowery]

Minnesotan discovers there is a wealthy tech and defense hub in the north Atlanta suburbs. Did he expect a banjo based economy?

[Baseball by BSmile @BSmile]

50 Years Ago Today: Chicago #Cubs outfielder Rick Monday saves the American Flag from being burned during a game vs. the Los Angeles Dodgers at Dodger Stadium! (April 25, 1976) #MLB #Baseball #History 🇺🇸

[Tony Seruga @TonySeruga]

🚨Oh, look at that—America's "watchdogs of democracy" didn't just fail the vibe check at the White House Correspondents' Dinner last night. They straight-up looted the joint like it was the apocalypse, and the only thing worth saving was the open bar.

While shots rang out, the President was being yanked offstage by Secret Service, and the entire ballroom was one trigger-pull away from turning into a national nightmare, what were these tuxedoed truth-tellers doing? Filing urgent dispatches? Checking on colleagues? Showing one ounce of basic human concern? Nah.

They were playing human Roomba on the tabletops—grabbing bottles of wine and champagne two at a time, stuffing them into camera bags, under jackets, down blouses, whatever fit. One blonde in a black jacket looked like she was training for the Olympic wine-heist relay. Another kept casually nibbling her dinner like it was just another Tuesday, and the gunfire was ambient noise. Bro, the President almost got assassinated. and your priority was playing "how many free Cabernets can I smuggle out before security notices?"

These are the same smug, pearl-clutching hacks who spend every waking hour lecturing the rest of us about "civility," "empathy," "moral leadership," and how we're the ones destroying the country. The ones who cry "threat to democracy" if you question their narrative. The ones who virtue-signal about compassion while calling half the country garbage.

Turns out their moral compass doesn't point north—it points straight to the nearest unopened bottle of Dom.

Congratulations, media. You didn't just expose your hypocrisy; you speed-ran it on camera. While the nation held its breath wondering if the President was okay, you proved you're not elite journalists. You're not even good looters. You're the people who show up to a black-tie event, watch bullets fly, and think, "Perfect—now's my chance for a free case of bubbly."

At least actual looters wait for the power to go out. You did it with the lights on, in formalwear, live on X.

Classy. Real classy.

Now go write your 3,000-word think piece about how this was actually Trump's fault for making the wine too tempting. We'll wait. With our own bottles. That we paid for.

[The Lone Raccoon @FSociety_1942]

VIRGINIA

OK, I am trying to organize my thoughts about yesterday's vote in Virginia. Here is my analysis from my capturing of the election night reporting data.

There was an "f-curve" at 8:59pm that was actually preceded by a near f-curve at 8:43. These 2 updates wiped away what had been a decent lead for "no redistricting". Interestingly, at 9:16 there was another big jump for "yes".

From my analysis, most of the votes from all 3 of these came from Fairfax County, one of Virginia's most reliable vote manufacturing hubs.

My old pet peeve, totals going down rather than up, was way too frequent. 23 counties had at least one case of "negative votes", including Chesterfield's whopping 71,903 deduction at 10:45 this morning (April 22). Augusta had a 11,968 deduction at 10:18. A whopping 13 counties had deductions in the SAME REPORT at 7:41PM on the 21st (for a total of 18,476). This is not acceptable and needs explained. (Other than, "well these numbers aren't official". They are official enough to show on the news.)

And, of course, the referendum was ultimately lost because of mail-in votes. About 10% of the total was mail-in, and about 73% were "yes". We have no way of knowing how many of these were real people casting a vote for themselves, but they added net 137,000 votes for "yes" and that is almost 50,000 more than the currently reported winning margin for "yes". (The same applies for the election of Commissar Spanberger)

In summary, a completely preventable train wreck. I hope that the Republican leaders in Virginia are now convinced that mail-in ballots and machine counting are not our friends. I also hope they start asking the hard questions of counties like Chesterfield.

It's going to be easiest to read this, shrug, and move on. Please don't. Please forward on, especially if you know people in Virginia. But the same thing will happen in every other state, eventually, if its not stopped.

You can see the raw data for yesterday's election at https://t.co/gbCFN6lnyk - select Virginia, unknown party, then statewide or whatever county you want to examine. I'm here if anyone has questions.

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

The world’s most respected political scientist just admitted that governments no longer run the world.

Ian Bremmer's firm writes the risk report every major hedge fund, bank, and government reads before making decisions.

He doesn't do hot takes. He does FORECASTS.

And buried under a 90-minute discussion with Steven Bartlett, he dropped this bombshell:

Anthropic built a model so powerful it could hack every bank, power grid, and water system on Earth.

They didn't call Congress.

They called Jerome Powell and Scott Bessent directly.

Within hours, every major bank CEO was in an emergency meeting.

Jamie Dimon called it a "five alarm fire."

No hearings. No votes. No public debate.

A private company detected a threat, called two people, and the US financial system reorganized around it overnight.

That's not a "government."

And this is the pattern nobody's connecting:

Michael Dell just moved $6.25 BILLION to 25 million American kids using federal infrastructure Trump's team built for him. Government does the accounting. Dell gets the PR.

Jeff Bezos just came out of retirement with $6.2 billion to build "AI for the physical economy." 100 researchers. Day one. No board. No IPO. Just: go.

Jensen Huang told Joe Rogan that CUDA, the single technology that made AI possible, was built because ONE guy at Nvidia believed in it when the stock crashed 83%. Nobody voted on it. Nobody approved it. He just did it.

Elon has Starlink turning wars on and off in Ukraine.

None of these decisions went through a legislature.

None of them were debated on CNN.

None of them were on any ballot.

In Bremmer's own words:

"The most important new global leaders aren't countries. They're technology companies writing their own rules."

And once you see it, you can't unsee it.

There are two economies running in parallel right now:

Economy A is the one you see. Elections. Tariffs. Tweets. Midterms. Iran. Congressional hearings where senators ask Mark Zuckerberg how Facebook makes money.

Economy B is the one that actually decides things. 5 CEOs, 3 central bankers, and a handful of billionaires in group chats and private dinners, rerouting trillions and deploying technology that rewrites physics, biology, and labor.

Economy A is theater for the 99%.

Economy B is where the 1% already live.

And the gap isn't closing.

Bremmer's real warning wasn't about China or Trump...

It was this:

We're heading toward a split between "empowered hybrid individuals" with AI as a core relationship, and people we "won't even treat as human beings anymore."

Not different classes.

A different SPECIES.

This is a forecaster who advises Goldman, BlackRock, and the White House telling you the taxonomy of humanity itself is about to fork.

Meanwhile the public is fighting about who's going to win the midterms.

Trump is a symptom. Mdani is a symptom. Farage is a symptom.

They're all reactions to a system average people can feel has already left them behind, but can't articulate why.

But the why is simple:

The people making the decisions that will define the next 50 years of your life stopped asking for permission.

They stopped running for office.

They stopped filing quarterly reports on what matters.

They just build, deploy, and inform the government after.

[Johnny St.Pete @JohnMcCloy]

🧵🔥👀 YOU CANT UNSEE IT. MIKE BENZ HAS A “HOLY SH*T” MOMENT.
WHO IS AVRIL GAINES???
This is the strongest circumstantial evidence that there was foreknowledge at bare minimum IMO of the pandemic. If you watch ANYTHING all the way through this week watch this.

What if I told you she was Obama’s former deputy Director of the CIA … under Brennan. Gets crazier.. She was on a panel for a CORONAVIRUS SIMULATOR was playing out at the SAME TIME the Wuhan Games was going on in Oct 2019. It was funded by BILL GATES.
Present there were all the Pharma execs… former deputy Director of the CIA Avril Haines. One of the topics was RUNNING A SOCIAL MEDIA CENSORSHIP SIMULATOR to stop the spread of MISINFORMATION online .
Who else was in attendance? GEORGE GAO who is the director of the Chinese CDC. Now why would HE be there if this was for a simulation based on a virus that started in Brazil?? Why was there not a SINGLE REPRESENTATIVE FROM SOUTH AMERICA PRESENT?
Now what if I told you that after BIDEN “WON” following Covid leading to the ushering in of mail ins and MASS SOCIAL MEDIA CENSORSHIP about the virus ….that she helped wargame A YEAR BEFORE… that BIDEN made her head of the DNI … she was Tulsi Gabbard’s predecessor.
@MikeBenzCyber absolutely blew my mind. Wait til you see where she was LAST MONTH and who she was WITH. 🧵👇🏻 Every one of these videos will red pill you like you have NEVER BEEN.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The math on this collection should mass-humble every streaming service on the planet.

One guy. A Sony cassette recorder. 10,000 concerts over 40 years. 30,000 individual sets from 3,000+ artists. R.E.M., The Cure, Nirvana, Björk, Depeche Mode, Sonic Youth, Phish, Tracy Chapman, Boogie Down Productions.

His first recording of Nirvana was July 8, 1989 at a tiny club called Dreamerz. Kurt Cobain was 20 years old. The band introduced themselves by saying they were from Seattle. This was two full years before Nevermind existed. That tape is now cleaned up and streaming for free.

The digitization operation alone is wild. One volunteer drives to Jacobs' house monthly, picks up 10-20 boxes of 50-100 tapes each, runs them through 10 simultaneous cassette decks he repaired himself. 5,500 tapes digitized since late 2024. Dozens more volunteers across the US and Europe do mastering, metadata, and setlist verification. Sometimes they contact the actual artists to confirm what songs were played.

The collection went from 171 recordings in January 2025 to over 2,300 by April 2026. At this rate it'll take years to upload everything.

Spotify has 100 million tracks. Apple Music has 100 million. Neither has a recording of Nirvana's first Chicago show. A guy with a tape recorder in his pocket does.

[Em for You @emma83217]

Hero.

[Tech with Mak @techNmak]

In 1948, a 32-year-old at Bell Labs published a paper nobody fully understood.

Engineers found it too mathematical. Mathematicians found it too engineering-focused. One prominent mathematician reviewed it negatively.

That paper - "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", became the founding document of the digital age.

The man was Claude Shannon. Father of Information Theory.

At 21, he wrote the most important master's thesis of the 20th century.

Working at MIT on an early mechanical computer, Shannon noticed its relay switches had exactly two states - open or closed. He had just taken a philosophy course introducing Boolean algebra, which also operated on two values: true and false.

Nobody had ever connected these two things.

His 1937 thesis proved that Boolean algebra and electrical circuits are mathematically identical, and that any logical operation could be built from simple switches.

Howard Gardner called it "possibly the most important, and also the most famous, master's thesis of the century."

Every digital computer ever built traces back to this insight.

At 29, he proved that perfect encryption exists.

During WWII, Shannon worked on classified cryptography at Bell Labs. His work contributed to SIGSALY, the secure voice system used for confidential communications between Roosevelt and Churchill.

In a classified 1945 memorandum, he mathematically proved the one-time pad provides perfect secrecy, unbreakable not just computationally, but provably, permanently, against an adversary with infinite power.

When declassified in 1949, it transformed cryptography from an art into a science. It laid the foundations for DES, AES, and every modern encryption standard.

At 32, he defined what information is.

His 1948 paper introduced one equation:
H = −Σ p(x) log p(x)

Shannon entropy. The average uncertainty in a probability distribution. The minimum bits required to encode a message.

Three things followed:

> He defined the bit - the fundamental unit of all information. His colleague John Tukey coined the name.

> He proved the channel capacity theorem, every communication channel has a maximum rate of reliable transmission. You can approach it. You can never exceed it.

> He unified telegraph, telephone, and radio into a single mathematical framework for the first time.

Robert Lucky of Bell Labs called it the greatest work "in the annals of technological thought."

Where his equation lives in AI today:

Cross-entropy loss - the function training every classifier and language model, is derived directly from H. Decision tree splits use information gain, which is H applied to data. Perplexity, the standard LLM evaluation metric, is an exponentiation of cross-entropy.

Every time a neural network trains, Shannon's formula runs inside it.

He also built the first AI learning device.

In 1950, Shannon built Theseus, a mechanical mouse that navigated a maze through trial and error, learned the correct path, and repeated it perfectly. Mazin Gilbert of Bell Labs said: "Theseus inspired the whole field of AI."

That same year he published the first paper on programming a computer to play chess. He co-organized the 1956 Dartmouth Workshop, the founding event of AI as a field.

The man:
He rode a unicycle through Bell Labs hallways while juggling. He built a flame-throwing trumpet, a rocket-powered Frisbee, and Styrofoam shoes to walk on the lake behind his house.

He called his home Entropy House.

When asked what motivated him: "I was motivated by curiosity. Never by the desire for financial gain. I just wondered how things were put together."

In 1985, he appeared unexpectedly at a conference in Brighton. The crowd mobbed him for autographs. Persuaded to speak at the banquet, he talked briefly, then pulled three balls from his pockets and juggled instead.

One engineer said: "It was as if Newton had showed up at a physics conference."

He died in 2001 after a decade with Alzheimer's, the cruel irony of information slowly leaving the mind of the man who defined what information was.

Claude, the AI model, is named after Claude Shannon, the mathematician who laid the foundation for the digital world we rely on today.

[Jeff Eisenach @JeffEisenach]

So, when @GovernorVA does something I agree with I will say so. I agree with this. Now if she would only do some more good things and stop doing so many bad things!

[Jeff Eisenach @JeffEisenach]

@GovernorVA Higher minimum wages kill jobs, especially for young people starting out in the workforce. Also, higher labor costs translate directly into higher prices. Not really an "affordability" thing, is it? Walk me through how this is good for (especially small) business? I'm listening.

[Robert Bryce @pwrhungry]

The backlash against data centers is a part of a cultural shift. Yes, communities are fighting DC projects because of concerns about noise, property values, and water. But the undercurrent is the distrust of AI, and suspicion or even hatred of Big Tech. The backlash against data centers is a part of a cultural shift. Yes, communities are fighting DC projects because of concerns about noise, property values, and water. But the undercurrent is the distrust of AI, and suspicion or even hatred of Big Tech.

[Steve Everley @saeverley]

👀

“One executive at a major electrical manufacturer, granted anonymity to speak freely, said the company has already sold out of transformers for two years at one of its U.S.-based manufacturing facilities — which hasn't even opened yet.” https://t.co/GOTG4AnLDF