iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 8h

What surprises me is people saw coreweave and had a panic but then never took the extra step and asked "Hey these guys are the best connected and best capitalized. How's everyone else doing?" If corewave is looking like shit a lot of other orgs look like a double serving of shit.

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 13h

It's deeply weird to me that yeah at some point all of these guys used to know their shit. I guess once you start believing your own hype you crawl up your ass and turn into whatever slop peddlers these guys are.

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 14h

Not for nothing but if this was a good as everybody keeps claiming then why do we have to have so many people coming up with increasingly elaborate ways to prompt?

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 14h

I don't know what jobs need to hear this but having a weekly show and tell meeting devolve into "This is how I'm using AI" is a waste of time. It's always another flavor of "you're prompting wrong, do it like this.". It requires that I believe your ultimate goal isn't to just fire me.

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 15h

I deeply enjoy these Friday check-ins. Always a good wrap-up of the weeks silly-ass events in this space. I especially enjoy how the implicit question in all of these is "Has the AI space gotten it's shit together and stopped being stupid?" and the answer always seems to be a solid "Nope it can't."

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 16/10/2026

My favorite is managers, and directors thinking they're engineers again after being out of the game for ages. Suddenly they're poking their noses in every engineering talk and giving their two cents which is ultimately just ChatGPT or Claude slop. Just fully not your wheelhouse anymore bro.

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 16/10/2026

All this seems to have done is piss off people in the scene and cause some to just throw their hands up and go underground with their work. Nothing new has been made?

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 16/10/2026

Fantastic set of posts thank you. Just so bewildered by this because what clout is there to be gained if you and every other ass with loose morals does this at the same time? Cool you blew god knows what on a PC port of a game you did nothing but spend money. So what are people meant to do with you?

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 16/10/2026

What pisses me off is this also made a bunch of other projects adopt a similar stance "because linus does it."

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 16/10/2026

I want to say they purchased a bunch of claude max subs and just have the orchestration switch between different subs as they exhaust limits. Assuming the 56k api pricing thing isn't a typo then I think it's there for engagement bait purposes.

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 16/10/2026

The thread is getting pretty long so i'll stop after this but given the current recomp scene seems to be purchasing multiple claude max subs and cycling through them so you can spend 1000 USD to spend 50K+ USD in tokens I feel like eventually these people will have to drop flat license structures.

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 15/10/2026

So question for me is does this actually work as a game? I feel like a lot of this decomp clout chasing stuff is more about the idea that decomp can be sped up (to what economic benefit god knows) but I haven't yet seen much about people actually using the resulting software?

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 15/10/2026

I think another issue is subsidization may present all along the compute supply chain. LLM labs subsidizing tokens, data centers selling compute cheaply that sort of thing. So costs are still nowhere where they need to be to make actual profits happen.

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 15/10/2026

Graphs in this are pretty painful to parse but if i'm reading these correctly Anthropic's claim of being Q2 profitable seems even more suss. I know it's adjusted basis so all the numbers are fake but this data seems to indicate that revenue hasn't grown all that much vs costs.

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

It makes more sense to me that they're very LLM vibe slop forward on their announcements when you remember Sweeney has fully crawled up his own ass and is walking around looking like an Eridian when it comes to LLM junk. Old boy has fully lost the plot.

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

I love that if I want a home loan the underwriter crawls all over my finances trying to decern if I can handle the payments. Meanwhile you can apparently run a company that never earns a single dime of profit, gets kids killed, and I guess that's fine right up until the VC money faucet turns off?

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

You know a tool is good and right-think when it's boosters have to come up with endless qualifiers on why errors aren't indications that the tool isn't ready or not a fit for the project given the scope and associated risk.

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

A lot of these are on piracy focused subreddits. I try to take a breath and remember that these people didn't have a lot of scruples on where software comes from. Just that it's on their plate. You can have endless glazers who don't know any better but that doesn't mean an idea is going to work.

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

It's always future tense promises too. "AI will" "In the future AI" etc. It's because if you try to nail them down on the shit it can do today it just exposes that the demand is mostly social pressure and hype. Which sucks because we're like 3-5 trillion deep into this.

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Honest question. Was there not that much interest in emulating the hardware or was it so niche that as a result the people working at it could only chip away at it little by little? Am I conflating 'possible' with 'being done kinda quick'? It *feels* like plenty of people wanted ps1-ps4 emulation.

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

open models on what hardware with what demand in this scenario? openai and anthropic represent 80%+ of all compute demand in this space. Their customers are also unprofitable ai startups. If they go there's nobody left who's big enough to sustain the bubble. It's all flows through these two dorks.

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

You'll see this then do that award puppet monkey side glance meme face looking at every llm provider that's had to either switch to token based billing or make increasingly expensive license tiers as cheaper tiers get more restrictive. That price he's paying is as cheap as it'll ever get baby boy.

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

100% of the reason LLMs seem to be used for coding so much is because there was SO MUCH material to train on. If you wanted to learn how to make an emulator or mods for a game at some point you have to jump in and try. Putting coding on a pedestal like it's this magic skill is also a problem.

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

I'm not sure how much more accessible it can be made at this point? Endless free tutorials, libraries of books, armies of communities for each specific language. If you want to learn and still insist that you can't I dunno what to tell you. At some point you gotta meet things half way.

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

"Use the AI or you're fired" Waaawoooo everybody I know uses AI to code! It must be good.

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

To be clear even if it was amazing solid gold product it's still slop. I reject LLMs on a moral basis and as a blatant attempt to replace skill with capital. If I accepted the output when it suits me then it was never about these issues. It'd just be me liking the sound of my own voice.

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

I'm seeing this for PS5 and a bunch of games too. There seems to be a lot of hype around the idea but but then not much on the results being any good? If the take is that it's a starting point then these people have clearly never touched slop code bases. That shit is going to stink forever.

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Almost like tangling up the finances of the tech sector in a data center infra boom that relies on just two customers who do 80% of the purchases was bad. It essentially means any negative consequences amplifies as it propagates out and it all hinges are *two* companies that seem to be in trouble?

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

We're seeing echo's of oracle here. We could easily be looking down the barrel of spacex having oracle like spreads and if this keeps up a potential downgrade in credit down into junk grade and fallen angel status.

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

With SpaceX bonds already trading at 226-231 bps spreads over ten year (7.95%-7.97%) and prices of anywhere from 86.45 - 84.98 dollars in exchange for 100 dollars of bond debt traders are already trading like it's junk rated. If this goes through we'd see 8%+ easily. That's brutal in this economy.

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

My job has reintroduced this but they count pull requests. The no brains use LLM to spew out industrial levels of slop PRs. Clever critters just use static code analysis engines to spot code smells and mine an endless vein of BS code quality and DB efficiency PRs. Outside in they look the same.

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

@edzitron.com, where do you reckon that 22 billion of non-frontier compute spend is going? I was thinking at first some smaller fish trying to stand-up/expand inference providers or regular old data center spend but 22 billy seems awfully small for that purpose.

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I wish pushing back like this didn't get you fired in a lot of places right now. Everyday there are people at my gig who push out slop onto a plate, then get indignant when you get angry because you get to parse through so much slop!

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

God only knows why small businesses (looking at you restaurants and farmers markets) insist on throwing slop images up. Micky D has a ad agency on contract with people who's whole job is styling food with gross shit to make it look good. Just put the food name next to the price you cowards.

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Curious on this one Ed. Assuming this kicks off as you described what number "once in a lifetime economic crisis" that you had to live through would this make?

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

The cult of personality bit seems looming. Decent chunk of the party aren't republicans but rather trump supporters. I have a feeling they wont just switch to democrats when we hit the post-trump part of our timeline but do they just stay home or do we get to watch a fight for the controller?

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Hope your take on debt markets being a little more practical with numbers rings true. It seems like every level of the business world just sees the potential $$$ signs and ignores due diligence. My lack of familiarity means I don't have a very strong reason to assume they wouldn't do the same.

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Imagine trying to convince the pope of all people that you have matched his boss and have functionally minted a new soul. Not only did you show up to try to get him to agree to that but you also wanted to get him to sign off on that take to sell software to business idiots. Just wtf all around.

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

To be clear I don't think this guys take was that LLM slop was bad. He was shifting the blame onto the people who should have been grading the LLMs homework to make the slop not slop. It's that classic "It can't be that bad you're just prompting it wrong." type cope.

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I'll shit all day on AT&T for all their other stuff but yeah nah their fiber is nice. When I lived in Dallas I was shocked that every dinky apartment seemed to have at least one gigabit symmetrical available and some had 5 gig. Colorado had ASS infrastructure by comparison.

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

It very much pisses me off they put us through all that grief just to piss off and get out of the media game entirely.

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Back in the day I worked at DISH when AT&T bought Time Warner and by extension HBO. They played hardball on the contract negotiations and as a result Dish had to drop HBO at the height of Game Of Thrones mania. What a shit-butt week that was to be suck in a call center getting yelled at by boomers.

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I can't tell you how pleased I was that nearly the first thing you mentioned was ELIZA.

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

anthropic cannot resist the siren call of vendor financing. Fucking Broadcom, anything to justify the chip shortage and keep profits high with their price gouging.

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Meanwhile I hear managers regularly ask "when's the last time anyone wrote code by hand" when discussing hiring decisions.

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Wonder if/when they hit the emergency button and pause collecting taxes on gas.

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Wouldn't this further imply that inference isn't actually profitable? It should fall within that operating margin since they've argued that training is capex. Even if they moved all their free users to marketing and other stuff that still means the best they could do was -160% operating margins.

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Oh and because debt is overall more expensive so goes up the mortgage rate which slows sales in what was already historically the most expensive housing market the US have ever seen.

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Howl The Wizard @howl--the--wizard.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Meanwhile the debt issuance of these data centers is so big it's competing with the 10 year treasury bond forcing it to go up which raises interest rates which makes the debt require a higher percentage which competes with the treasury bond etc. etc.

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