The headline is a bit sensational, but a very good read. It’s technical but it’s a technical subject. The underlying theme is that the world is all about converting energy into stuff. How we do this defines the sort of world we live in. Today a new, cheaper, cleaner, quieter way is available. Will we keep propping up the old ways, even when it no longer makes any sense?

Shining The Light Of Truth On Fossil Fuel Madness

About a decade ago I was building GPU based grid computing for data centers. At the time NVIDIA had very little of the data center market. It was owned by Intel.

My group was using NVIDIA GPUs to speed up risk calculations for a large bank. It was about 5x cheaper than doing the same job with Intel CPUs. There was a risk, going with a small company like NVIDIA, but the savings were too good to ignore.

Intel made some moves in this direction, notably the Xeon Phi, but it was a “me too” solution, not much better or worse than NVIDIA. And since it was displacing 5x worth of Intel hardware, Intel had very little enthusiasm for the Phi.

Intel also had its own graphics accelerations (GPUs). Depending on how you counted it, Intel owned something like 99% of the GPU market. But these were on-chip GPUs, mostly in laptops.

There was an Intel GPU in a single datacenter part (this is all from memory) but it wasn’t exposed to programmers. It was only for Microsoft VDI remote windows desktops. I tried several times to get access from Intel but was rebuffed.

Long story short, Intel protected its lucrative data center CPUs, particularly from internal competition, and eventually lost to the external competition, NVIDIA. The old lesson: if you don’t cannibalize your own market, someone else will.

NVIDIA Leads GPU Market in Q1 2025 with 92% Share, AMD Drops to 8% and Intel at 0%

TL;DR: pecan groves are sucking all of the water out of the Rio Grande. They have been there for almost a century, but they seem to be a bad use of scarce water. The pecans are all exported and hire very few workers. Have seen similar stories in other places. From High Country News.

The Rio Grande’s pecan problem

Goldman Sachs on Solar. Upshot: too cheap, clean, quiet, scalable to not use it.

The Structural Solar Surge

The Middle Class isn’t optimistic. From A Wealth of Common Sense.

The Vibes are Broken

I saw something about this and thought it was far fetched, but it seems to be real. I imagine funding for this sort of thing is already being cut, at least in the US.

The Rare Mutation That Makes People Immune to Viruses

Sales of Jack Daniels whiskey to Canada are down 62% according to CBC. I wonder how other major US brands are doing worldwide, and if they will recover if / when things stabilize.

Company behind Jack Daniel’s says Canadian boycott is ‘significant’ as sales drop 62%

It was 20 years ago that Katrina made landfall on the gulf coast. I haven’t made many personal statements about it over the years but I’ll say it was a low point in American leadership.

The media was even lower, providing very little useful information and lots of false narratives. During and immediately after the storm a fellow named Michael Barrett kept a liveblog from a data center downtown that was really my only trusted source of information. Thanks Mr Barrett.

Over the years I have sent people links to Michael Lewis NYT article about his return to New Orleans immediately after the storm. Perhaps the best thing written about Katrina and maybe about New Orleans. Today it is paywalled but if you haven’t read it I encourage you to get access and read a first hand account from someone who knows the city and is also an excellent writer.

Wading Toward Home

China has stopped buying American soybeans and is turning to Brazil. In fact, China is investing in Brazilian infrastructure so they can continue buying their soybeans. Farmers want the US government to “do something”. They already did something, that is the problem. Things these days can change on the whims of one man, but this one looks like a door closing.  From Talk Business and Politics (Arkansas) and Iowa Soybean Association.

As U.S. soybean crop matures, anxiety grows over lagging Chinese demand

Arkansas on the verge of agricultural disaster

I think I figured out what this Vibe Coding stuff is. It’s when you are too lazy to Google SubStack and let AI do it for you.😀