In Jensen's 5 layer cake analogy for AI (energy, chips, infrastructure, models, applications), the middle layer (esp the software infra part) is much less understood - and thats where @VAST_Data became a $30B company few people know about, powering @SpaceXAI, @CoreWeave, @nebiusai, @MistralAI, @nscale etc My conversation with Renen Hallak, CEO: 00:00 Intro 00:51 The hidden software layer in NVIDIA's AI stack 02:28 What actually makes an "AI factory"? 05:13 Should Walmart and Goldman build their own AI? 06:20 "We infer during the day, fine-tune at night" 13:16 Announcement: frontier models & sensitive data 15:32 From P vs. NP to founding VAST Data 17:32 OpenAI, Navier–Stokes and 10,000 agents 20:25 The pre-transformer insight behind VAST 21:55 DASE: VAST's "shared everything" architecture 25:18 "Storage was where startups go to die" 27:39 Trillions of vectors: why old databases break 29:01 Are S3, Snowflake and Databricks ready for AI 31:29 Data gravity, vendor lock-in and zero churn 33:13 Training vs. inference: why the infrastructure changes 34:46 Model routing, KV caches, RAG & agent memory 36:59 Identity, permissions and security for AI agents 40:27 Can multi-agent systems unlock scientific discovery? 41:55 DataEnclave: how confidential AI protects data and weights 45:16 Who should be AI's trust layer? 46:37 "Sometimes it scares me": 500 petabytes to 2 exabytes 50:08 Is circular AI financing creating systemic risk 51:32 Why VAST is profitable when AI infra isn't 53:24 What separates the winning neoclouds? 55:06 "Their lunch is being eaten": why hyperscalers lag 59:10 Where will the trillions accrue across the AI stack 1:01:18 NVIDIA: "There's no legal document between us" 1:03:59 What VAST learned from xAI and @elonmusk 1:05:36 "Bad things loudly and often": building at AI speed 1:06:53 More change in 10 years than the previous 1,000? 1:08:39 VAST's endgame: all the data in the world

People say: "I wish one middle-class income could support an entire family like it did in the 1950s." Okay. Then take the entire 1950s package—not just the parts you romanticize. • No Netflix, Disney+, Spotify, or endless subscriptions • One small TV with 3 channels, if you're lucky • One basic car for the whole family • No yearly vacations or cheap flights across the country • No smartphones, laptops, gaming consoles, or internet • Every meal cooked at home from scratch • Kids sharing bedrooms • A house under 1,000 sq. ft. for a family of 4–6 • One bathroom for everyone • Little to no air conditioning in many places • Clothes repaired, reused, and handed down • Eating at restaurants was an occasional luxury, not a weekly habit The comparison isn't just income. The average household today consumes far more space, technology, entertainment, travel, convenience, and services than the average household did 70 years ago. That doesn't mean housing, healthcare, and education aren't more expensive today—they are. But when people compare lifestyles across generations, they often compare a 1950s income to a 2020s standard of living. Those aren't the same thing. If you want the economics of the 1950s, you have to accept the lifestyle of the 1950s too.

Trump offers a bribe of $5,000 in exchange for votes, the bribe is promoted as a dividend and would cost $1.2 trillion dollars. This is a felony under 18 U.S.C. § 597, bribing someone to vote a certain way is a federal crime punishable by prison.

Reminder: Donald Trump’s immediate reaction to the 9/11 attacks was to brag that his building was now the tallest in downtown Manhattan after the Twin Towers collapsed.

I wish social media companies would stop reminding me to wish dead people a happy birthday

Workers of the world unite

Ronald Reagan: “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman…But Anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American…This, I believe, is one of the most important sources of America's greatness.”🇺🇸

These assholes drove right over the coating. It's not even a vehicular traffic coating (which is meant to be driven on), and they're wondering why it's pealing? Was it even cured? These people are fucking stupid and can't own up to their own mistakes.

#factsmatters Vance saying Iran agreed to allow international inspections of its nuclear program, would restore a safeguard from President Barack Obama’s deal with Tehran that Trump threw out. Thanks Obama

Well @ABQSunport you’ve squeezed in so many new concessions that there are only 50 seats at A11 but 3 times that many passengers. Airports exist to serve passengers not vendors - malls exist for that

The machine used to print the world's most advanced computer chips weighs 180 tons and is about the size of a school bus. Moving one takes 40 shipping containers, 20 trucks, and 3 Boeing 747 cargo planes. Even then it does nothing until an ASML team flies in, rebuilds it from roughly 100,000 parts, and stays on site for the rest of the machine's life to keep it running. This is the object US officials suspect may have slipped into China. ASML's answer was close to a logistics lecture. The company says it knows the exact location of every one of these machines it has ever built, 314 of them running worldwide right now, and that none sit in China. It also says the machines stay connected to ASML. If one loses its signal or gets moved, ASML can see it, and a buyer cannot quietly unplug one and haul it somewhere else. The hardware is almost impossible to fake or hide. One company on earth makes it. The mirrors inside come from Zeiss and are the most precise objects ever built. Blown up to the size of Germany, the tallest bump on one would be a tenth of a millimeter. To create its light, the machine fires a powerful laser at drops of molten tin 50,000 times a second, heating each drop to roughly 200,000 degrees, almost 40 times hotter than the surface of the sun. So far no public proof of an actual machine in China has appeared, and ASML flatly denies it. A single one costs about $200 million, and the newest version closer to $380 million. It might be one of the only machines on earth that is too complicated to steal.

He’s trying to bury his tax returns just like he’s trying to bury the Epstein Files. This is the most obscenely corrupt and morally bankrupt administration in American history. And it’s not even close.

The Spanish Flu caused 26% of the U.S. Army to be combat ineffective in 1918-1919. Most estimate say it killed somewhere around 65,000 service members.

Just a reminder: Fuck Alex Jones.

Bibi didn’t just torch support for Israel in the US; he squandered every shred of goodwill Israel ever had, made the country an international pariah, and led the slaughter of thousands of innocents. One of the most disastrous leaders any country has seen in my lifetime.

During the Revolutionary War Gen. Washington mandated soldier inoculations to prevent disease from depleting readiness. In WWI, the mandate for short cropped hair and shaven faces emerged to control lice and facilitate gas masks. But this asshat thinks he knows better.

Happy “Headless Body In Topless Bar” Day, if you're observing it... 43 years ago today, April 15, 1983, the legendary NY Post managing editor, the late Vincent A. Musetto wrote the greatest headline of all time…

But we did get a repeat of Apollo 8, so it's all good, right? LOOK (below) at the list of science that's slashed!. The brightest, pro-science conservatives like Zubrin can see the obvious. This is war on science & every profession that uses facts.

You're simply ignorant. In Operation ELDORADO CANYON, Reagan's 1986 bombing of Libya, NATO members France, Spain and Italy all denied DoD use of bases or their airspace, which made the operation more difficult. Nobody whined about ending NATO over it.