Weekend Readings: Air, Goldman, CUDA, Winter, and Satoshi's Pizza Emails

I'm in the middle of a few longer posts, so before those come out, some things I'm reading and thinking about:

1. How Fresh Air Became the Hot New Luxury Thing

Dystopian fiction from writers like JG Ballard has long pushed the idea that the future would involve further separating the rich from the rest of us. And, as predicted, the very air we breathe has become a differentiator.

The Hot New Luxury Good for the Rich: Air

The wealthy have different houses, different cars, different lifestyles from the rest of us. These days, they also want to breathe different air.

The New RepublicShayla Love

2. Goldman is Way Outside 2024 Economic Consensus

Goldman's chief economist Hatzius is way outside consensus with his 2024 outlook:

• 2.3% growth
• Unemployment under 4%
• 15% risk of recession
• Inflation rates fallingto just above 2%.

Goldman Sachs’s Jan Hatzius Has Nailed Big Calls on the Economy. Here’s His Next One. - WSJ https://www.wsj.com/economy/goldman-sachss-chief-economist-has-nailed-big-calls-heres-his-next-one-84122b35

3. NVIDIA Relies on Lockin and Only a Few Big Customers

While it's impossible not to be blown away by what's happening at Nvidia, it is useful to get underneath the headlines and consider customer concentration, risks, capex, etc.

Platformonomics - Follow the CAPEX: Triangulating NVIDIA

Previous CAPEX obsessing Lets compare NVIDIA’s Data Center segment revenue to the CAPEX spending of the hyperclouds (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, henceforth AGM) plus Meta over the last couple …

PlatformonomicsDave Vellante

It is also worth thinking about what could crack CUDA, the intermediate software layer that has been the real lock-in for Nvidia.

How Nvidia’s CUDA Monopoly In Machine Learning Is Breaking - OpenAI Triton And PyTorch 2.0

Over the last decade, the landscape of machine learning software development has undergone significant changes. Many frameworks have come and gone, but most have relied heavily on leveraging Nvidia’s CUDA and performed best on Nvidia GPUs. However, with the arrival of PyTorch 2.0 and OpenAI’s Triton, Nvidia’s dominant position in this field, mainly due to its software moat, is being disrupted.

SemiAnalysisDylan Patel

4. The Midwest's "lost" winter

The Great Lakes and Upper Midwest are experiencing an unusually warm winter, with record-setting high temperatures and dramatically low ice coverage in the Great Lakes. The scarcity of snow and ice is impacting local outdoor activities, commerce, and wildlife, while the mild weather pattern aligns with broader climate change trends that suggest such warm winters may become more frequent.

The Midwest is experiencing a ‘lost winter.’ Here’s what that means.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2024/02/14/record-warm-winter-greatlakes-midwest-snow-ice-climate/

5. The early emails of Satoshi

Newly released email correspondence between Martti Malmi and Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, from 2009-2011. All sorts of mundane and fascinating bits, from pizza preferences, to FAQs, to the struggle to find a use.

Satoshi - Sirius emails 2009-2011

Sirius emails 2009-2011

Back very shortly with more things to think about.