"The thing that you learn and begin to appreciate more than anything else when you're an options trader is viewing life through this risk-reward framework." Watch these truth bombs from our CEO:

The best compliment I can give the @HP OmniBook Ultra 16 RTX Spark is that after finishing my review, I still want to keep using it. There’s a lot going on with this laptop, and most of it is excellent. Unfortunately, there’s also one drawback you’ll notice before you even turn the thing on. Our latest review from @Daniel_Rubino: ⤵️

"The Taiwan Relations Act of the United States is always a hidden danger to Sino-US relations." Zhao Ziyang, then China's premier, to NBC's Tom Brokaw, 1987. Asked what troubles him about relations with Washington : > "the major obstacle or the greatest difficulty and the thing which we worry about is the question of Taiwan" > "The United States is deliberating for the adoption of some trade protectionist legislations." Taiwan and tariffs. 39 years later, the same two problems. Who keeps creating them ?

The neocloud boom is the most exciting thing happening in AI infrastructure right now, and it's also where the gap between talking and building is widest Every week I see another team announce they're "becoming a cloud". Some raised for a different idea and found that GPU capacity is the thing customers are actually paying for. Rental rates keep moving up, demand keeps outrunning supply and the capital is there, so it makes sense that people are jumping in What a lot of new entrants learn the hard way is that the business barely lives in the GPUs. You can wire money for hardware in an afternoon. Then you need power that's actually contracted, a site with the right cooling, networking that holds up under real training loads, and a crew that can get all of it live on the exact date you promised your customer That ready for service date is everything. A customer who signed for capacity in March has a model to train, a product to ship and their own investors to answer to. If you slip by two months, you've pushed their whole roadmap back So the providers who win this cycle look a bit boring from the outside. They've brought clusters online before. They know the local electrician by name. They plan for the transformer arriving late and the permit taking longer than it should. They treat a delivery date like a promise to someone else's business That's also what lenders and customers will pay up for. Plenty of buyers want to work with smaller and more flexible providers because the big clouds can't always give them the capacity, the timing or the price they need. That demand is real and it keeps growing. What they need is confidence that the capacity will actually show up The long tail of compute providers is here to stay and it's healthy for the whole market. Over the next couple of years the ones who execute will pull way ahead, and the teams who can bring a cluster online on time, every time, are going to be worth their weight in gold At Aethir we spend a lot of time on exactly this, because getting the compute to show up is the whole job If you're building in this space, go hire the people who've done it before. They're the scarcest resource in AI right now

The thing about AI is that the GPUs show up before the revenue does. Financing the future would be a wonderful business if the future would agree to arrive before the interest payment. So credit bridges the gap, and lenders are getting pickier about what they'll bridge. There's a CoreWeave bond yielding roughly 15%. There's a five-year loan against customer contracts averaging three years, which is a meaningful allocation to optimism. Three customers make up 72% of revenue, so a lot of different loans quietly depend on the same people paying their compute bills. Meanwhile Meta, a formidable cash machine attached to a slightly more formidable shopping list, is selling equity. SpaceX has a roughly $40B GPU lease commitment, which is committed financing, not $40B sitting in a bank account. The bear case doesn't need AI to be useless. It just needs the cash to arrive late. New in The Sequence Opinion, "The AI Credit Crunch" 👇

The thing about PRs in the age of coding agents is that I can build almost any feature or fix any bug with significantly less effort than it takes to read over and test a PR. There are exceptions, but I think the way we manage open source projects is going to have to change.

The best part of Artie’s culture right now is the part I had nothing to do with. At the beginning of September, Randall, our first intern, suggested an office run club. Two days later it was on the calendar as Randall’s Run Club: they run at least 5km together every week. Then William opened a climbing channel. After all-hands, the crew went to Dogpatch Boulders, and now it’s the tradition after every all-hands. Last Friday, Ben asked if there was a chat for NYT games, because he’d “mogged hard in the mini” that day. There’s a channel for it now. People spend all day building together. The fact that they want to run, climb, and do the crossword together too is the thing I’m proudest of this quarter.

The data on probiotics is not convincing: - Studies after antibiotic treatment point to slower recovery of the mucosal microbiota with a probiotic - Meta-analyses still show benefit in some cases: preventing diarrheal disease and recovery from viral diarrhea - The product range is enormous and every person's microbiome is its own case, so results don't transfer - Find a well-designed study where a specific probiotic did the thing you want, then stick with that product Dr. Justin Sonnenburg on @hubermanlab

The reason you're not creative. Not motivated. Not focused. AKA the stuff that came easy to you as a kid. Is that every form of "relaxing" in our society is SMASHING our minds with serotonin and dopamine. TikTok. Video games. Drinking. WATCHING sports. If you're doing these to relax, your mind is never at rest. Like a dude spending every waking minute in a strip club. You'll become numb to things that used to drive you wild. Your motivation to chase plummets. When you relax, you have to actually relax and empty the mental bucket. Drop it all. Read. Pick up an instrument. Lift. Keep your phone in a drawer far away from you. DEPRIVE yourself of the easy serotonin and dopamine. All that gusto you used to have as a kid will come right back. Then USE the drive on what matters. AKA the thing, the work. Then ACTUALLY relax again. 99% of people are on a treadmill. They do low-focus, low-creativity, ass work... Then get home and scroll, eat sugar, play video games/scroll/watch Fox News/CNN, wank, binge Netflix and repeat. Like the guy in the strip club, they can no longer enjoy the "curves" of life because they're in overdrive... staring at ass and tits 24/7. You're not getting old or dull or necessarily suffering from ADHD. Your brain just hasn't had a breather in years.