BARRETT.
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barrettwrites.bsky.social
BARRETT.
@barrettwrites.bsky.social
300 followers 170 following 23 posts
Sometimes I write things. Sometimes I make things. Sometimes I build things.
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Reposted by BARRETT.
petersagal.bsky.social
As we mourn Rob Reiner, don’t skip this: he was, pretty much, personally responsible for overturning California’s Prop 8 banning same sex marriage.

www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/bus...
How Rob Reiner became anti-Prop. 8 kingpin
Rob Reiner reflects on the critical role he played in getting California's gay marriage ban overturned.
www.hollywoodreporter.com
December 15, 2025 at 1:37 PM
Reposted by BARRETT.
emmaberquist.bsky.social
30 rock "and in food news: you've had enough to eat today"
December 15, 2025 at 5:19 PM
barrettwrites.bsky.social
The Underminer hath spoken again.
December 15, 2025 at 5:21 PM
Reposted by BARRETT.
raypride.bsky.social
Rob Reiner: “Silence in the face of authoritarianism is complicity. Speaking out is a patriotic act. Democracy doesn’t defend itself. It requires participation, vigilance, and courage from ordinary people."
December 15, 2025 at 1:41 PM
Reposted by BARRETT.
maxkennerly.bsky.social
"ICE and CBP must be abolished" is the only reasonable position. We can debate the specifics of new agencies for immigration functions, but these agencies are simply too infected with a culture of impunity, racism, and fascism to continue. They're gangs with badges.
robertscotthorton.bsky.social Scott Horton @robertscotthorton.bsky.social · 1d
Armed ICE agents trapped US citizens in a restaurant and demanded their papers. Federal agents walked into East African restaurants in Cedar-Riverside, MN. They closed and blocked the doors. Then they demanded to see everyone’s papers. Every person present was a US citizen.
Federal agents use chemical irritant on crowd in Somali neighborhood of Minneapolis amid Trump crackdown
Federal agents have used chemical irritant to disperse a crowd in a heavily Somali neighborhood in Minneapolis. This happened Tuesday during a identification checks amid the Trump administration's cra...
www.mprnews.org
December 14, 2025 at 8:49 PM
barrettwrites.bsky.social
Nazi get shot on stage: "put up statues in every public space."

Kids get shot at school: "things can happen."
atrupar.com Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 23h
Trump on the shooting at Brown University: “Things can happen”
December 14, 2025 at 7:51 PM
Reposted by BARRETT.
techdirt.com
Trump Pretends To Block State AI Laws; Media Pretends That’s Legal

The mainstream media just failed a basic civics test so badly that you'd think their brains have been pickled by the kinds of folks who spend all their time on X (oh, wait…). Headlines across major outlets are breathlessly…
Trump Pretends To Block State AI Laws; Media Pretends That’s Legal
The mainstream media just failed a basic civics test so badly that you'd think their brains have been pickled by the kinds of folks who spend all their time on X (oh, wait…). Headlines across major outlets are breathlessly reporting that Donald Trump "blocked states from passing AI laws" with an executive order. Except, that's not how any of this works, and anyone who stayed awake during middle school social studies should know better.
www.techdirt.com
December 12, 2025 at 9:00 PM
Reposted by BARRETT.
ostrichson.bsky.social
NASA created a "sonification" of the sound emerging from a black hole. It's... god-like...
December 12, 2025 at 11:59 PM
Reposted by BARRETT.
robertscotthorton.bsky.social
25 years ago today, SCOTUS elected George W Bush president of the United States by blocking completion of a voting canvass in Florida. A subsequent canvass by the Associated Press showed that Bush's rival, Al Gore, had won the race in Florida—and thus the contest for the presidency—by 700 votes.
December 12, 2025 at 5:36 AM
Reposted by BARRETT.
davidkurtz.bsky.social
BREAKING: At 7am ET, in response to the emergency overnight filing, Judge Xinis issued a TRO barring the Trump administration from re-detaining Abrego Garcia.

www.courtlistener.com/docket/71191...
Memorandum and Order – #114 in Abrego Garcia v. Noem (D. Maryland, 8:25-cv-02780) – CourtListener.com
MEMORANDUM ORDER granting 112 Motion for Temporary Restraining Order; Respondents are enjoined from re-detaining Petitioner in ICE custody until this Court can receive further briefing from the partie...
www.courtlistener.com
December 12, 2025 at 12:48 PM
barrettwrites.bsky.social
@rivianofficial.bsky.social I'm really considering an R3X, but $15/mo for "built-in" voice-operated texts is a really bad experience when every CarPlay option is actually built-in and costs nothing beyond the purchase price.
December 12, 2025 at 12:17 AM
barrettwrites.bsky.social
What the actual fuck.

www.thetimes.com/us/american-...
Leaked files ‘show US wants to persuade four nations to leave EU’
The countries seen as targets to follow Brexit are Austria, Hungary, Italy and Poland, according to leaked details of the US national security strategy
www.thetimes.com
December 11, 2025 at 6:27 PM
barrettwrites.bsky.social
I know there are much larger issues in the world, but... and's.

And's.

AND'S.

It's stupid every time.
barrettwrites.bsky.social BARRETT. @barrettwrites.bsky.social · 4d
All I want from a new iOS is for it to stop correcting "and" to "and's" - a word that doesn't exist and which I've never used in any form of communication.
December 11, 2025 at 5:17 PM
Reposted by BARRETT.
joshtpm.bsky.social
I will believe AI is a thing when Google maps realizes that I don’t wanna take a total freak show route to where I’m going to save a minute and a half on a one hours drive. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
December 11, 2025 at 4:10 PM
barrettwrites.bsky.social
All I want from a new iOS is for it to stop correcting "and" to "and's" - a word that doesn't exist and which I've never used in any form of communication.
December 11, 2025 at 4:38 PM
Reposted by BARRETT.
sarahjeong.bsky.social
are we still on about em dashes and ai. imo human writers should just use the em dashes even harder. we should be out here pummeling out those em dashes like we're emily dickinson
December 10, 2025 at 3:22 AM
Reposted by BARRETT.
brainnotonyet.bsky.social
Student have walked out at Burnsville schools in protest against gestapo activity around the Minneapolis metro.
Students walking out of Highschool in protest some carrying signs and flags some chanting. Students walking out of Highschool in protest some carrying signs and flags some chanting.
December 9, 2025 at 7:01 PM
Reposted by BARRETT.
karlbode.com
what if we were to replace the quirky individuality of lived experience with a homogenized and badly automated blandness shaped largely by the country's weirdest sociopaths and shittiest companies

wouldn't that be nice
December 9, 2025 at 6:56 PM
barrettwrites.bsky.social
By my math, we could just about double that with FanSpark.pro
December 9, 2025 at 5:42 PM
barrettwrites.bsky.social
Found the line between crippling anxiety and incandescent rage, and brother I am using that line as a fucking jump rope today.
December 9, 2025 at 5:17 PM
Reposted by BARRETT.
junlper.beer
these are so clearly only controlled by humans it’s astounding how much everyone gives elon musk for lying to everyone all the time about everything
jjvincent.bsky.social James Vincent @jjvincent.bsky.social · 7d
can't stop watching this clip of a tesla Optimus teleoperator taking his headset off before properly logging out the robot
December 9, 2025 at 6:02 AM
Reposted by BARRETT.
edzitron.com
I am deeply worried for the future.

NVIDIA's revenue is a chain of pain - selling GPUs bought with debt that are rented to unprofitable LLM companies subsidized by VC who sell access to unprofitable AI companies subsidized by VC.

The end will be gruesome.
www.wheresyoured.at/nvidia-isnt-...
NVIDIA Is Dependent On Endless Debt and Credit - As Are Most Of The Customers Of AI Compute, Creating A Deadly Cycle That Ends In Disaster NVIDIA is currently making hundreds of billions in revenue selling GPUs to companies that either plug them in and start losing money or, I assume, put them in a warehouse for safe keeping. This brings me to my core anxiety: why, exactly, are companies pre-ordering GPUs? What benefit is there in doing so? Blackwell does not appear to be “more efficient” in a way that actually makes anybody a profit, and we’re potentially years from seeing these GPUs in operation in data centers at the scale they’re being shipped — so why would anybody be buying more? I doubt these are new customers — they’re likely hyperscalers, neoclouds like CoreWeave and resellers like Dell and SuperMicro — because the only companies that can actually afford to buy them are those with massive amounts of cash or debt, to the point that even Google, Amazon, Meta and Oracle are taking on massive amounts of new debt, all without a plan to make a profit. NVIDIA’s largest customers are increasingly unable to afford its GPUs, which appear to be increasing in price with every subsequent generation. NVIDIA’s GPUs are so expensive that the only way you can buy them is by already having billions of dollars or being able to raise billions of dollars, which means, in a very real sense, that NVIDIA is dependent not on its customers, but on its customers’ credit ratings and financial backers. To make matters worse, the key reason that one would buy a GPU is to either run services using it or rent it to somebody else, and the two largest parties spending money on these services are OpenAI and Anthropic, both of whom lose billions of dollars, and are thus dependent on venture capital and debt (remember, OpenAI has a $4 billion line of credit, and Anthropic a $2.5 billion one too). Yet it gets worse from there. Who, after all, are the biggest customers renting AI compute? That’s right, AI startups, all of which are deeply unprofitable. Cursor — Anthropic’s largest customer and now its biggest competitor in the AI coding sphere — raised $2.3 billion in November after raising $900 million in June. Perplexity, one of the most “popular” AI companies, raised $200 million in September after raising $100 million in July after seeming to fail to raise $500 million in May (I’ve not seen any proof this round closed) after raising $500 million in December 2024. Cognition raised $400 million in September after raising $300 million in March. Cohere raised $100 million in September a month after it raised $500 million. Venture capital is feeding money to either OpenAI or Anthropic to use their models, or in some cases hyperscalers or neoclouds like CoreWeave or Lambda to rent NVIDIA GPUs. OpenAI and Anthropic then raise venture capital or debt to pay hyperscalers or neoclouds to rent NVIDIA GPUs. Hyperscalers and neoclouds then use either debt or existent cashflow (in the case of hyperscalers, though not for long!) to buy more NVIDIA GPUs. Only one company actually makes a profit here: NVIDIA. Aside: I should add there are also NVIDIA resellers like Dell or Supermicro, the latter of which buy NVIDIA GPUs, put them in servers, and sell them to neoclouds like Lambda or CoreWeave. At some point, a link in this debt-backed chain breaks, because very little cashflow exists to prop it up. At some point, venture capitalists will be forced to stop funnelling money into unprofitable, unsustainable AI companies, which will make those companies unable to funnel money into the pockets of those buying GPUs, which will make it harder for those companies buying GPUs to justify (or raise debt for) buying more GPUs. And if I’m honest, none of NVIDIA’s success really makes any sense. Who is buying so many GPUs? Where are they going? Why are inventories increasing? Is it really just pre-buying parts for future orders? Why are accounts receivable climbing, and how much product is NVIDIA shipping before it gets paid? While these are both explainable as “this is a big company and that’s how big companies do business” (which is true!), why do receivables not seem to be coming down? And how long, realistically, can the largest company on the stock market continue to grow revenues selling assets that only seem to lose its customers money? I worry about NVIDIA, not because I believe there’s a massive scandal, but because so much rides on its success, and its success rides on the back of dwindling amounts of venture capital and debt, because nobody is actually making money to pay for these GPUs. In fact, I’m not even saying it goes tits up. Hell, it might even have another good quarter or two. It really comes down to how long people are willing to be stupid and how long Jensen Huang is able to call hyperscalers at three in the morning and say “buy one billion dollars of GPUs, pig.” No, really! I think much of the US stock market’s growth is held up by how long everybody is willing to be gaslit by Jensen Huang into believing that they need more GPUs. At this point it’s barely about AI anymore, as AI revenue — real, actual cash made from selling services run on GPUs — doesn’t even cover its own costs, let alone create the cash flow necessary to buy $70,000 GPUs thousands at a time. It’s not like any actual innovation or progress is driving this bullshit! In any case, the markets crave a healthy NVIDIA, as so many hundreds of billions of dollars of NVIDIA stock sit in the hands of retail investors and people’s 401ks, and its endless growth has helped paper over the pallid growth of the US stock market and, by extension, the decay of the tech industry’s ability to innovate. Once this pops — and it will pop, because there is simply not enough money to do this forever — there must be a referendum on…
December 8, 2025 at 5:42 PM
Reposted by BARRETT.
gogdog.bsky.social
Good on Penn Jillette. Having to come to terms with your entire political identity and philosophy being wrong is not easy and most people could never do it.
December 7, 2025 at 9:17 PM
barrettwrites.bsky.social
Movie you’ve watched more than six times with a gif. Hard mode: no Stars (Wars nor Trek), LOTR, or Marvel, Disney Animated or Pixar.
December 8, 2025 at 7:31 AM
barrettwrites.bsky.social
The “both sides” narrative isn’t new. I was taught in grade school that the true tragedy of the civil war was it pitted “brother against brother, father against son.”

Downplayed was the natural conclusion that one brother or father was willing to kill their family to own other humans as property.
December 6, 2025 at 8:08 PM