Gary Davis

Product Designer, Industrial Designer and UX Designer for over 20 years.

[Gary Davis @gmdavisUX]

@bcherny Why would you wait until after it’s built before establishing product-market fit? Do that before building.

[Gary Davis @gmdavisUX]

@newstart_2024 So, what this study found is that popular kids have more people they like aka “friends.” That’s the definition of “popular”.

[George Noble @gnoble79]

NVIDIA IS BUYING ITS OWN CHIPS AND CALLING IT REVENUE

And your retirement account is secretly holding the bag.

This scheme is literally straight out of the Enron playbook...

In January 2026, a special purpose vehicle called Valor Compute Infrastructure was created with one purpose:

Buy Nvidia's chips so Nvidia could book the sale as revenue.

Valor raised $5.4 billion and purchased over 100,000 of Nvidia's GB200 GPUs.

But $1.9 billion of that money came FROM Nvidia itself.

Nvidia invested $1.9 billion into the shell company, then sold that same shell company $5.4 billion worth of its own chips and booked every dollar as revenue.

It's the Girl Scout whose dad bought all the cookies and then she wins the sales contest because Dad was the customer. Except this Girl Scout is a trillion-dollar company and the cookie sale is $5.4 billion.

But it gets MUCH worse:

The remaining $3.5 billion in financing came from Apollo Global Management. Apollo structured the debt, packaged it into securities, and then sold those securities to Athene.

And guess who Athene is? Apollo's OWN insurance subsidiary. The one that sells fixed annuities to American retirees as safe, conservative retirement products.

Follow the chain:

Nvidia funds a shell company with $1.9 billion. The shell company buys $5.4 billion in Nvidia chips. Apollo finances the remaining $3.5 billion. Apollo sells the debt to its own insurance arm. That insurance arm packages it into annuity products and sells them to retirees who think they're buying something safe.

The retirees have no idea that their retirement savings are now backed by 100,000 computer chips sitting in some data center that will be worth pennies on the dollar in three years.

Now look at what's happening inside Athene:

$74.2 billion in US reserves but $217 billion in assets have been shifted to a Bermuda-based captive insurer, outside normal US regulatory oversight.

$103 billion of that portfolio (roughly 35%) is classified as Level 3 assets. That means there is no observable market price.

These assets are valued by internal models, not by actual markets.

And sitting on top of all those unpriced assets? 16.6x leverage.

If you're getting flashbacks to 2008, you should be.

Back then it was mortgages bundled into securities that nobody understood, sold to investors who had no idea what they were holding, rated as safe by agencies that never looked under the hood.

Today it's GPU-backed securities. Computer chips bundled into structured credit instruments, routed through an offshore insurance subsidiary, and sold to you as a retirement product.

The collateral is 100,000 GPUs leased to a single customer through an xAI subsidiary. If xAI stops making lease payments for any reason - financial distress, a pivot in strategy, anything - the entire structure unravels.

And Nvidia releases new architectures every year, so each generation delivers dramatically more compute per watt. A 5 year lease on technology that's obsolete in 2 years creates a mismatch that should terrify every annuity holder in America.

Every single step in this chain is technically legal. The SPV is legal, the lease is legal, Nvidia's equity stake is legal, the securitization is legal, and the Bermuda transfer is legal.

But legality and legitimacy are not the same thing.

I've seen every trick Wall Street has ever pulled in my 45 years of doing this.

And what I'm looking at right now is a pipeline that takes AI infrastructure risk, launders it through 8 layers of financial engineering, and deposits it in the retirement accounts of Americans who never agreed to fund Elon Musk's data centers.

In 2008 it was mortgage-backed securities.

In 2026 it's GPU-backed securities.

Different asset. Same greed. With the same ending.

[Justin Skycak @justinskycak]

Never underestimate how much time and effort you can waste by trying to automate a process you do not understand manually.

[Gary Davis @gmdavisUX]

@sciencegirl Don’t play with your food!

[Gary Davis @gmdavisUX]

https://t.co/TMAwLNidgL

[Gary Davis @gmdavisUX]

I've been quietly building something for weeks… now others can actually try it.

No fanfare — still not sure if this solves a real problem or just my own itch.

But here it is: AI Behavior Studio (free beta, bring-your-own-key)

https://t.co/TMAwLNidgL

[Gary Davis @gmdavisUX]

Small workspace for UX designers to treat AI behavior like interaction design: test/iterate prompts with real models, version them, run scenarios, add notes — instead of chat tabs + Notion chaos.

v0.90: client-side only (keys stay in your browser), no sync yet.

[Gary Davis @gmdavisUX]

@calcsam BOOK - Thanks!

[Tim Urban @waitbutwhy]

I still cannot believe that I can:

- look at a world map and tap anywhere to zoom in at street level

- instantly access any song, book, movie, tv show, or podcast ever made

- have any conceivable question and get an immediate answer or video explanation

- take a photo or video wherever I am and add it to my massive, searchable, always accessible personal archive

- video call anyone in my life, at anytime, no matter where they are

- watch live sports on a little wireless glass rectangle

- type out these thoughts and have them read by thousands of people, all over the world, a few seconds later

[Gary Davis @gmdavisUX]

@Cbaum95 @Yashua_Save_Me @Matt_Pinner @AARONHOLMES11 When we raised our kids, letting them walk alone in our safe neighborhood would cause neighbors to call police on us. We don’t want a visit from CPS where we are guilty until proven innocent.

[Gary Davis @gmdavisUX]

@manu_books Unroll @threadreaderapp

[Dom Lucre | Breaker of Narratives @dom_lucre]

🔥🚨BREAKING: Coca Cola is facing backlash across America after it was revealed that they won't let you personalize a can with "Jesus" but allows Satan, Allah and all of the Babylonian Gods and demons.

[Gary Davis @gmdavisUX]

@DT_comic @leeloowrites Funny, but a little too real!

[Gary Davis @gmdavisUX]

🧪 I'm excited to share that I'll be learning something new about AI for 100 days as part of the #100DaysOfAI challenge! Starting April 1st!

Join me via @100DaysAI!

https://t.co/EA3tLDP74c

[Gary Davis @gmdavisUX]

@ScottAdamsSays My old-man brother bought a Tacoma and returned it at a loss. If you test drive, pay close attention to all the blind spots from giant pillars and mirrors. He was afraid he’d get in an accident.

[Andrew Egger @EggerDC]

It's weird how the song Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer takes it as given that you know the names of eight reindeer but then suggests you might not know THE MOST FAMOUS REINDEER OF ALL? Why would I know 2 thru 9 and forget the GOAT

[Gary Davis @gmdavisUX]

@tboypod I can’t believe you missed the great story about Excel being invented by Dan Bricklin as VisiCalc and “imitated” by Microsoft. You should have asked a nerd over 40.

[Gary Davis @gmdavisUX]

@miggi Wow, chatGPT can read minds now! 🤯

[Gary Davis @gmdavisUX]

@martyrmade Honeymooners. Ralph Cramden was a sympathetic oaf. One of the earliest tv shows.