James High

web developer

[James High @jhigh2000]

@JenMsft Mrs. and I started watching based on your recommendation and now we're addicted. Can't get enough of Taskmaster!

[James High @jhigh2000]

@fjzeit "yoloing certain parts of their system..." Well, we've all been using React.

[Ross Hendricks @Ross__Hendricks]

One of the worlds largest tech cos casually admitting the technology we’re spending $1 trillion annually on might in fact be counterproductive, and will need human oversight every step of the way

File this one in the “what were the signs?” folder

[James High @jhigh2000]

@beall49 @GaryMarcus Thinking the same thing, that there's an ulterior financial motive here.

[James High @jhigh2000]

@JamesMontemagno I would add that every coding task doesn't require AI.

[James High @jhigh2000]

@marcgravell @epragt @raymondh @jonskeet I miss those days. I learned so much from you and Nick C.

[James High @jhigh2000]

@Ross__Hendricks I have been a disciple of Jack Bogle and his stay the course mantra for most of my life and it has served me well, but this is the first time I'm genuinely scared to death of what's to come and am having second thoughts.

[James High @jhigh2000]

@edzitron I hate to say it, but they sort of deserve it. Ok, I don't hate to say it.

[James High @jhigh2000]

@fjzeit This is great! Thanks for keeping us posted.

[James High @jhigh2000]

@LukeParkerDev For starters your average microphone is only rated for 10 million sound waves. After that, the burn-in effect happens and all it registers is "make no mistakes".

[James High @jhigh2000]

@edandersen Congratulations!

[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.

[James High @jhigh2000]

@davidfowl We do. LLMs currently get a free pass tho.

[James High @jhigh2000]

@davidfowl I hope sooner than later there's going to be a reckoning and we'll have to answer annoying questions like "does this help us make more money than we spend" (the dirty profitability word!) and has customer sentiment improved because our software is now objectively better?

[James High @jhigh2000]

@davidfowl There's no satisfying ROI measure for agentic workflows *today*. But it's not unreasonable to ask "Why? What will be objectively better?" to "Teams should adopt agentic workflows and spend $200 to $5000+ per month/per developer". Teams should not have to justify asking "why".

[James High @jhigh2000]

@HedgieMarkets This series is sooo good. Should be required reading!

[James High @jhigh2000]

@RadioFreeTom It that a deal or surrender on the part of the US? Good Lord.

[James High @jhigh2000]

@ThePrimeagen It's 100x per agent, don't you know?

[James High @jhigh2000]

@burkeholland What tasks/domains do you feel are better for Qwen vs GLM 5.1? Does it matter?