Data stuff at Ring. Views my own
Queens, New York
Joined May 2010
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Eli Draluk retweeted
This is - I am not joking - one of the worst things I’ve heard in donkey’s years, it turns one of the great rough character studies in music into Broadway treacle.
Hozier & Jessie Buckley's captivating interpretation of Shane MacGowan’s track “Fairytale of New York” is officially out now. Taken from 20th Century Paddy – The Songs of Shane MacGowan. Listen now wherever you stream music.
found.ee/hozier_fairytaleofn…
Eli Draluk retweeted
Whether or not Alice Huang had been recruited by the Chinese Ministry of State Security has always been a tertiary issue.
What’s quite clear is that:
1. She has been a large Nvidia customer (and a sexual relationship with her is highly problematic from a corporate policy and governance perspective for Jensen on those grounds alone)
2. She is controlling a shell company Megaspeed dedicated to smuggling compute to both US Govenment-listed Chinese AI companies and to data center build outs in China itself - all in serious violation of US law, potentially making Jensen part of a criminal conspiracy to evade US export controls.
3. She is connected to an entire web of Chinese shell companies trying to do the same.
Jensen wasn’t fired because he had an affair with an alleged MSS agent. He was fired because he:
1. Had at least one and now, quite plausibly, multiple affairs with people in his reporting chain in violation of company policy. Something that has gotten numerous CEOs fired over the years, including at Intel and McDonalds.
2. Lied to his board about his
relationship and forced the company to put out false statements to the public, putting it in legal jeopardy.
3. Was involved in a sexual relationship with a Chinese smuggler that had violated US export controls laws and provided her with billions of dollars of Nvidia chips that facilitate that criminal activity.
4. By lying and hiding that relationship from his family, the company, and the public, he put himself in a position to be blackmailed by Chinese intelligence services.
5. He very likely ordered his general counsel to interfere in an investigation by US government into his mistress’ smuggling operation.
6. He presided over stunning and extensive compliance failures to investigate and prevent his chips from being smuggled illegally into Chinese mainland and being provided to PLA affiliated institutions, all in violation of US law.
This is a shocking indictment of him and his record and the board clearly had no alternative but to fire him.
Bombshell story. The spy narrative is collapsing already.
Is there clear & convincing evidence that Alice Huang was a Chinese spy?
- AG says no. (“no conclusions reached”).
- CIA says no. (“not yet convinced”).
- DNI says no (“not entirely accurate and over-torqued”).
- Ranking Democrat on House Intelligence (incoming Chairman) says no. (“today, at least, I don’t know”). This was immediately after he was briefed.
Who argues otherwise? Anonymous officials tell CNN “it strains credulity to believe that she was not acting as an agent of the Chinese government — simply by virtue of the fact that she is a successful Chinese businesswoman working with one of America’s most powerful companies.”
This is their proof after a year of investigating and surveillance? That she was a “successful Chinese businesswoman”?
At this point, the only crime that we know for sure happened is the leaking of the classified memo. Who did that and why?
An investigation should be opened.
Eli Draluk retweeted
Padme’s medical droid: She just lost the will to live.
Me (there for some reason): Wait, what? That’s not a thing.
Droid: Good catch—You’re right, my first diagnosis of “lost her will to live” was incorrect. She actually had a massive cerebral hemorrhage.
Eli Draluk retweeted
I would like to formally request that everyone involved in AI update their priors and abandon the pictured line of rhetoric (pioneered by some of the most misanthropic members of the tech right to grace this site) in favor of an actual positive vision for the world to come.
Eli Draluk retweeted
I made some plots to help visualize why coalition formation in Israel is so difficult right now
We are witnessing an extremely rare situation that political scientists call a "Condorcet cycle" - a demonstration of Arrow's impossibility theorem in the wild!
Eli Draluk retweeted
People bullish the actual bottleneck and not the terminal economics of model co’s is a big part of the issue.
Paul has a great way of phrasing things. He is always insightful 👇🏾
I think this recent volatility continues to reflect the misalignment in the product cycle and the capital cycle. The product cycle itself has gotten more complex not simpler due to the continued presence of multiple competing products and the shifting relevance of open and closed models. The capital cycle is adding complexity on the other side of complexity proving two things can be true. The market can be structurally under supplied compute/infra but the capital complexity to finance the build may be over extended and overly complicated. I observe a lot of frustration about this dynamic. If you are super bullish long term this should be great. I think the issue is people are more bullish about the economics caused by the under supply than perhaps their bullishness on the underlying unit economics of the products on the other side of the shortages. The frustration is driven by not getting/keeping a sustained multiple now on the current economics reflexively driven by the supply/demand imbalance. I wont pretend to know what’s going to happen to alleviate supply or not, or what the economics of the models will look like depending on the slope of supply. I just know this kind of uncertainty usually leads to volatility because the market hates uncertainty more than anything. That means being nimble. Just when you think there is a clear trend, something else will change and make you re-think everything you believe today.
Eli Draluk retweeted
I sympathize with this critique but when George Lucas tried to build a museum in San Francisco he couldn’t get permission for a site.
Eli Draluk retweeted
Really nice report. Follow up: why has the fall in AI prices been so fast?
When you plot the price decline against cumulative R&D investment rather than time, you get the elasticity of price declines to R&D investment. By this margin, AI is not unusual – its price elasticity to R&D investment is squarely in the middle of Epoch's considered technologies.
So the AI price fall is historically unprecedented because we've dumped money into AI R&D at a historically unprecedented rate – and that R&D has paid off at a very average rate.
Eli Draluk retweeted
Goldman: We estimate a drag from hyperscaler depreciation expenses on S&P 500 earnings growth of 5pp in 2027, offsetting nearly half of the 11pp boost to earnings from capex spending.
By 2028, the drag from depreciation should offset the S&P 500 earnings uplift from continued capex spending.
Goldman: The AI investment boom is driving nearly half of S&P 500 EPS growth this year, but its contribution will fade going forward.
The mega-cap US hyperscalers are on track to spend $800 billion on capex this year, an increase of 94% vs. 2025. That spending is flowing through to the earnings of the AI infrastructure complex...The AI boom is also having a secondary impact on earnings outside of the infrastructure complex, for example by boosting capital markets activity and consumer wealth.
Both consensus and GS analyst forecasts show hyperscaler capex growing at a slower rate in coming years, which should result in decelerating earnings growth for much of the AI infrastructure complex and a fading tailwind to S&P 500 earnings.
We're making Git hosting more reliable, performant, and scalable.
This post traces 20 years of Git infrastructure and explains how that history led us to design and operate our Git storage, Origin, as if it were a database.
cursor.com/blog/git-at-any-s…
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Eli Draluk retweeted
It’s really incredible the absolute AI GARBAGE that people are comfortable sending to their coworkers and bosses
There’s a good chance productivity will actually *decrease* as AI adoption increases because everyone is busy wading through AI slop
Eli Draluk retweeted
The payment of payroll taxes, and in particular Social Security taxes, opens individual claims to future benefits and hence cannot be pooled with income taxes without adjustment.
The net tax is the difference between the tax and the actuarial value of the claim it buys.
At the bottom of the distribution, internal rates of return on Social Security contributions are higher than market rates, which means that these contributions, rather than being net taxes, truly are net subsidies. This means that the 12.6% "tax", once adjusted, becomes a net subsidy.
As you move up in the distribution, internal rates of return get lower and lower, and Social Security essentially forces workers to buy annuities above market prices, thus hiding net taxation.
This makes Social Security, a redistributive retirement program and a legacy of the New Deal, a contributor to the progressivity of the fiscal system, not the opposite like Zucman's graphs suggest.
Contrary to what you claim, working-class people contribute significantly to funding American society today. Payroll taxes and consumption taxes absorb a high fraction of their income.
For the middle class, the income tax starts kicking in on top of these.
And for the rich, the corporate tax becomes significant.
Eli Draluk retweeted
Let's have some fun.
Imagine CPI is 2% for a full 5 years, Unemployment 1% above NAIRU (5.4%) the whole time, yet Fed refuses to cut.
How many mental breakdowns would you see on CNBC everyday?
That's how you know the Fed doesn't take their mandates seriously.
Eli Draluk retweeted
Absolutely insane statistic: $MU accounts for >50% of the upward earnings revisions for the entire S&P500.
Never happened in history. And probably never will again. One company, out of 500 large caps in the world’s largest index.
Absolutely unfathomable, if you understand this.
Eli Draluk retweeted
several of his most recent papers are about "reputation and sovereign default," amazing
Scoop: Chris Phelan, an adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, is the frontrunner to be tapped as President Donald Trump’s new chief economist, sources tell me and @meganmesserly
politico.com/news/2026/04/08…
Eli Draluk retweeted
AI has become the justification for every layoff. It's the perfect excuse card, but there is a lot of spin involved. Every layoff is some combo of the following five very different AI stories.
1. Nothing changed, we just realized we have too many people. We are going to blame AI, but we are bullshitting. This is the AI as an excuse; it was really sloppy hiring, and we are just blaming AI. (See Block)
2. Growth has gone away so now we have too many people. This may be because of AI if you are a SaaS company. All the customer love is now going to AI. But it's less AI as a productivity lift, and more about you just building a less ambitious growth company. (See Salesforce and most every SaaS company)
3. We spent our money on capex to build AI so now we can’t afford as many people. Management may say it’s about AI making us productive (4 below) but my gut is a lot of it is about Nvidia getting our money so now there is none for you. (See Meta and Oracle)
4 We are really using AI the way god intended us to. We don't need as many people. This is the ONLY version of the story that is actually about a productivity increase. It's real, it's happening, but I wonder if it is even the majority of the layoffs. (See some software engineering departments right now)
@jasonlk raised a fifth reason that doesn't get talked about enough: we just have the wrong people. Maybe we don't need 20 engineers who all know C++, but rather eight who have strong AI skills. This I think should be happening everywhere.
Every time a layoff announcement comes out, I try and mentally categorize per the above.