anton 🇺🇸

the trades labor shortage is real, and it is possible to make a comfortable living in the construction industry - the six figure incomes are there. the problem is how long it takes to access them for americans.

first you have to put up tens of thousands of dollars to go to trade school. then you have to spend years on slave wages as an apprentice and journeyman, before finally getting access to those opportunities.

we don't have years to address the shortage, and americans shouldn't have to wait so long to make good money building up the country's infrastructure.

we need trades reform now!

datacenters for hyperscale ai are a fundamentally new manufactured object, representing a never-before reached apex of industrial capacity and civilizational coordination.

turning them into neoclassical monuments would be a mistake -- a return to neoclassical architecture would be something like a fourth-hand rehash of greek forms (via rome, then 18th c. neoclassical architecture).

if they are to be symbols of progress and an american future, a new aesthetic synthesis is required. we should not be recapitulating previous forms - including the uniquely american monolithic art deco.

yes we need an architectural style for our buildings that is both popular and beautiful, but we cannot allow the history of american industrial architecture to end with LARP.

i suspect 2025 was the last ‘normal’ year; the magnitude of the compute buildout in 2026 & large scale hbm deployments (b200/tpuv7) unlocks the possibility of efficient reasoning post-training on frontier-sized pretrains.

simultaneously, verifiable environments across many domains will proliferate (i expect a gold rush here as with expert labeling in the past). increasingly, models will ‘just work’ on a variety of tasks.

the next step will be for the models to learn to integrate themselves. we may not get this in ‘26 but we should expect progress to continue to accelerate.

happy new year!

it’s very simple. if a us politician or public figure makes a statement which, if true, would benefit china, they are a chinese asset.

if they do this for free they’re a particularly stupid chinese asset.