Episode #192: 18 October 2025

Fourteen posts map a week where chip geopolitics, AI realism, and spaceflight take center stage. Nvidia says it is 100% out of China, pushing labs like DeepSeek toward domestic hardware, while replies weigh Huawei scale-up strategies and Andrew Ng’s call for fab diversification. Investors put $133.7M into General Intuition to tackle spatiotemporal reasoning from game data. Elon Musk shares Jensen Huang hand delivering a compact DGX Spark to Starbase, a nod to a 2016 bet on DGX-1 and the march toward smaller, thriftier compute. Harvard data shows data centers carried nearly all H1 2025 US growth, with water strain a growing side effect. Andrej Karpathy labels current AI agents slop, urging patience on autonomy. Starship’s Flight 11 footage doubles as engineering data. Black hole theorist Alex Lupsasca joins OpenAI for Science after GPT-5 Pro solves symmetry generators in minutes, with peers flagging verification needs. Elsewhere, a faux-identity proxy war on X spotlights misinformation, Nova Labs faces backlash over a Helium browser cease and desist, and Paul Graham praises cash buffers with Replit as a case study. Devs joke that modern stacks are reinventing PHP. Apple’s iPhone 17 Air is a niche win, and Tesla clashes with ISS over Elon Musk’s pay ahead of a November vote.