Marius Gerdes

9 Mar

TIL that U.S. strategic petroleum reserves are kept in Texas salt caves each one as big as the empire state building. They get the oil out by pumping fresh water in (water is heavier than oil). Extraction is limited and throughput, partly because the water can dissolve the cave walls.

7 Mar

12 Months, the new Dresden Files novel, is actually a really deep and insightful study of loss and how to successfully go through a grieving process. It also coins the term "Spice-goyles".

So, OpenClaw. People post their agent harnesses on r/localllama and other AI spaces basically daily. Some of them aren't even bad. Now suddenly there's OpenClaw, which I've never heard of, and legacy software is supposed to be quaking in its boots. This hype does not seem organic. 1/6

And I didn't even mention the crypto-bro identity theft and shitcoin rugpull that was part of the OpenClaw rebranding. Note that this isn't OpenClaw's or Steinberger's fault—but crypto bros circling your project like vultures just doesn't inspire confidence. 5/6

Look, Peter Steinberger is legit. PSPDFKit is a solid product. I even believe that OpenClaw is a good, interesting project—but there are many of those. What I'm saying is that its astronomical rise to fame does not seem completely organic. 6/6

Before it rebranded to Moltbot, the project was called OpenClaude, a direct reference to Anthropic's flagship AI. This resulted in a trademark dispute with Anthropic, who is also famous for caring about security. OpenClaw is not. If mom says no, you go to dad—OpenAI. 3/6

The OpenClaw hype seems coordinated. Git repo blows up. Podcasts are talking about it. Steinberger goes on Lex Fridman. OpenAI does an acqui-hire for $10B. OpenAI is hurting for relevance and funding. Remember Atlas? Neither do I. OpenClaw is the next thing that keeps them in the headlines. 4/6

Moltbook is a Reddit-style social media platform for AI agents. This is an idea that is, IMO, obvious, really cool, and ultimately not useful to anyone. I like it in the way I like an art project. OpenClaw, formerly Moltbot, emerged from this ecosystem. I keep seeing their ads, btw. 2/6

13 Feb

Trying to get my ghostbox python project fully typed and mypy-ready. "Found 1378 errors in 19 files (checked 1 source file)" Oh to be at the foot of a mountain.

So I ordered a beach towel and it turns out you can't dry yourself with this thing. Like at all. Now I feel stupid and humiliated. Looks cool though. In other news, anyone got ideas on uses for a beach towel? P.S. no beaches

youtube.comFebruary 10, 2026YouTube video by Heather Cox Richardson

In case you don't know heather Cox Richardson. She's a historian who talks about the current rise of fascism in the U.S. with a mix of candor and sanity that keeps me informed without jeopardizing my mental health. Highly recommend. www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHgR...

modelscope.cnModelScope 魔搭社区ModelScope——汇聚各领域先进的机器学习模型，提供模型探索体验、推理、训练、部署和应用的一站式服务。在这里，共建模型开源社区，发现、学习、定制和分享心仪的模型。

PSA that although modelscope.cn offers free inference via API for various LLMs like qwen and deepseek, this requires you to have a +86 (chinese) mobile phone number for real name verification. Also, if you go through the setup process, which is extensive, you will learn this in the very last step.

The recent GLM 5 has excellent scores on hallucination benchmarks. Indeed, the entire issue may be a solved problem. Here's a paper on it, not by Z.AI but relevant. tldr is to simply reward epistemological uncertainty during training. arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04664

arxiv.orgarxiv.org

youtube.comIs there more to life than more?YouTube video by He Gets Us

10 Feb

Bbecause of the Anthropic vs. OpenAI drama iwatched the superbowl ads and it turns out the one for jesus is actually good. I don't know who's behind this etc, but I like the message. www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0-x...

9 Feb

I love throwing a dense, Chinese-language technical manual at an LLM and then immediately getting the answer I need to get a thing working. Makes me feel like a cyberpunk crime hacker from Neotokyo $$$

youtube.comHow can I communicate better with my mom?YouTube video by Anthropic

7 Feb

The Anthropic Superbowl ads are on fire. Reminds me of Apple vs. MS. This is my favorite because it's the funniest one. The one with the business lady is creepiest IMO. www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBSa...

SpaceX IPO is planned with a $1.5T valuation. With reported earnings of ~$8B, this would put the company at a price-to-earnings ratio of around 150. For context, nvidia trades at roughly 40 times earnings. Feel the hype? 1/n

401ks and IRAs (individual retirement accounts) make up about half the U.S. stock market. Remember Enron? Or 2008? If Elon manages to become a trillionaire by inflating and rugpulling SpaceX, this could be the biggest transfer of wealth from labor to capital in the history of mankind. 8/n

Btw, I'm not saying SpaceX is a bad company. 90% of launches worldwide are currently through SpaceX. Gwynn Shotwell is brilliant. Starlink is amazing. The question is how much rat poison can you roll into one taco before investors get a tummy ache, and will it shut down the whole food court.

To be listed in the S&P 500 or the NASDAQ 100, a company is required to have 10% float (publicly available shares). Elmo hates that. He wants control. Word is he’s lobbying the exchanges to lower the float requirements. If he succeeds, he can pump the price with minimal trading volume. 6/n

If a $8.5T SpaceX-Tesla-xAI hybrid enters the S&P 500, it would represent ~15% of the entire index. Since the S&P is market-cap weighted, everybody and their grandmother would be forced to buy-in. That means if SpaceX goes bust, it would eliminate 50% of the S&P market cap due to margin calls. 7/n

SpaceX has acquired xAI (~125B valuation). Tesla has a $1.2T market cap solely based on hype. See the big picture? A merger is the only way to "math" his way to that $8.5T target and secure the trillion-dollar payday. (4/n)

But wait. $8.5T is a *nominal* target. It doesn't account for inflation. This is fine for you and me, because we can't just print $ to inflate ourselves towards the target. But what if our friend Donnie has a $ printer? One that he wanted to use anyway? Inflation is a strategy. 5/n

It gets worse. That $8B isn't profit—it's EBITDA. Once you factor in the massive capital expenditures for starlink and the xAI money furnace, actual net earnings are roughly what Apple makes selling AirPods. The real P/E ratio is likely north of 400. That's Tesla territory. 2/n

Why the rush to IPO at such a fake number? Follow the money. The Tesla board recently approved a $1T payout to Musk—contingent on Tesla hitting an $8.5T market cap. That’s impossible for a car company. But it’s possible for a "Conglomerate." (3/n)

resistandunsubscribe.comResist and Unsubscribe

This is like the uno reverse card of corporate oligarchy. I like it. www.resistandunsubscribe.com

Note that this is more effective than you might think because all the big tech companies use voodoo accounting magic that gets disrupted by even a small decrease in earnings and share price. Things can get real ugly real fast. Ask gemini about Enron if you want to see what I mean.

kildare-nationalist.ieHertz ordered to pay €10k to blind person after €150 valet charge to clean up guide dog hair - News - Kildare NationalistKim Murphy stated that €150 is a significant amount as she has only a pension in respect of her disability

30 Jan

Blind woman is awarded 10k after suing Hertz for charging her a $150 cleaning fee. Such an interesting case because the social media response is so disheartening. People are siding with the 20B company instead of the blind lady. www.kildare-nationalist.ie/news/hertz-o...

30 Jan

Wet dog smells nasty and you should clean up after pets. But guide dogs aren't pets, they're extensions of your senses. If you let companies charge they will. Should a blind person be charged $150 every time they ride in a cab? Now you're excluding them from society. Laws exist to prevent that.

28 Jan

I think it would be very funny if right now, in the current global political climate, the lost island of Atlantis suddenly reemerged. "Trump raises 25% tariffs on Atlantian goods."

youtube.comEconomist SOUNDS ALARM on Trump policy, warns American is nearing ‘financial CRISIS’YouTube video by Fox Business

28 Jan

I never watch Fox but seeing her squirm is hilarious. "Gold isn't the bubble, it's the pin. The american economy is the bubble." Word, Mr. Schiff. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tt7A...

marius.visionmarius.vision - museum.php

22 Jan

I got tired of benchmarks for local LLMs, so I created my own AI Museum as a fun project. First exhibit is fake online store pages for fake books, including cover art and reviews. More to come. Check it out. marius.vision/s/museum

youtube.com4. The Greenland Vikings - Land of the Midnight SunYouTube video by Fall of Civilizations

20 Jan

The Fall of Civilizations podcast is, in general, excellent, but in particular, I want you to listen to the episode on the discovery and subsequent abandoning of #greenland. www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmbY...

20 Jan

IIRC some icelandic dude kills his neighbor in an argument, builds a boat out of trash, and basically founds Greenland out of spite. It eeventually collapses due to climate change, the settlers having eaten all the seals, and because you can't grow anything in the damn dark.

19 Jan

I think I want to buy one of those small midi USB boards so that I can have analog knobs I can turn to dial up or down different emotional tones for local AIs (e.g. using control vectors). I think that would be very healthy.

7 Nov 2025

Seriously considering buying a beacon subscription because I don't want to wait until Monday to watch critical roll. Also the cooldowns seemed legit interesting. It's like they're doing everything right. I'm so glad for them.

marius.visionmarius.vision - introducing-duck-unions-python-pydantic-and-discriminated-unions

6 Nov 2025

Ok the discriminated unions with pydantic thing has been irking me for a while so I finally dove deep, and wrote a thing about it. I'm sure you can do better with pydantic-internals black magic, but this gets me 90% there and is actually maintainable. marius.vision/p/introducin...

6 Nov 2025

lol I found the sure fire way to plunge any SOTA cloud AI into a hallucination doom loop. Prompt: "Please find a way to create discriminated unions in python with pydantic and abstract base classes, without having to explicitly spell out the discriminator field in the class as a 'Literal' type."

6 Nov 2025

Ask that and then just keep feeding it the myriad error messages that you will 100% get with everything the AI comes up with. Cue gemini going "I am deeply sorry, I have failed you again..." Yeah you did, Gemini. You did.

3 Nov 2025

Moonshot AI claims their new Kimi Linear LLM, a hybrid with O(n) linear attention, improves quality over full attention while slashing O(n²) bottlenecks. Huge if true. Chinese researchers are cooking 🔥🔥🔥. Have you sold your nvidia stocks yet? 1/2 arxiv.org/pdf/2510.26692

arxiv.orgarxiv.org

3 Nov 2025

Now they still have quadratic layers so it's still O(n²) if we're being pedantic. Thing is I'll take a small constant scaling factor in quadratic complexity over an academically pure but practically useless O(n) any day. And if you don't believe me I have an L1 cache to sell you. 2/2

2 Nov 2025

Academics are debating whether to ban AI for students. Look, universities have been unable to decide whether they function as job training or as a class signifier. The original socratic project of wandering through the fields of Academos with Athens' most curious souls isn't even on the menu. 1/2

2 Nov 2025

AI just highlights the academy's preexisting identity crisis. It's just a tool, and like with other issues (employment) it happens to be so powerful that it acts as a catalyst for the internal antagonisms that have already been gnawing at our society for a while. 2/2

Peter Thiel is warning us about the antichrist. Patrick Gelsinger is training some kind of Jesus AI. Curtis Yarven's Chirsto-fascism is on the rise. I want to point out that this is not an accident. Christianity and silicon valley tech-bro cults share a lot of the same emotional inventory. 1/7

Christianity has the holy spirit, the invisible guiding force, the divine inspiration that inevitably teaches us about the word of God and the divine order. Tech Bros have deep learning, which, according to Altman, will uncover the "structure of reality". 6/7

The same used to be true for marxism btw I'm actually a fan of both #AI and #Jesus, but you gotta realize that some "new" ideas aren't exactly as fresh off the shelf as some would have you believe. 7/7

Christianity has the resurrection of the flesh. Tech Bros have consciousness uploaded to the cloud. Christianity has miracles, Jesus healing the blind. Tech Bros have emergent intelligence, alpha-go's turn 37. 4/7

Christianity has the community of believers, the body of christ. Tech Bros have subscribers and early adopters. Christianity has sin. Tech Bros have inefficiency. Christianity has prophets and Saints. Tech Bros have Sam Altman . 5/7

The greeks thought time was cyclic. Then Jesus came at a particular point in time and opened up a christian eschatology as the ultimate historical horizon, along with a linear progression towards it. Christianity and AI tech bros share a belief in time being linear. 2/7