The week only got rougher for Jensen Huang after we wrote the strip; he had to fall on his sword, but a few other people had fallen on his sword recently so he had some sense of how it was gonna go.
Now we're at the part, of course, where people are saying maybe she wasn't a spy, and who knows. I'm not the kind of NSA Spook that would get invited to a podcast for men to divulge a bunch of State Secrets and then somehow not go to jail. I'm just somebody still running their quarantine GPU to render the most recent retro indie darling. All my reasons for being mad are incredibly petty. But this would be essentially the Internet as I've seen it for the last couple weeks - there are about three matters of global import that I can't discern the truth of at all. The old Internet was largely about triangulating from available data; the new one, the Tower of fucking Babel, is a 25/8 demoralization engine whenever it isn't a video of a cat.
Even if she weren't a spy, and that was a great disinfo move if she wasn't, you can sorta look at the 500-650 billion dollars it shaved out of nVidia - which is to say, the altar of the fae ritual sustaining our economy - and say, hey, that sure seems like a lot of money. And it is; the damage from Hurricane Katrina was about 125 billion all told. This is like detonating a bomb in the economy. If I could attack a foreign power like that, to destabilize the prime mover of a breathtaking AI circular finance scheme, I certainly would; that would be part and parcel of the rest of my incredibly modern assault paradigm, which would also include distillation "attacks" on foreign frontier models and the release of free, highly performant, open weight competitors while sovereign fabs come online.
Maybe she was just trying to score a 5080. I dunno. I'd be willing to do some pretty weird shit.
(CW)TB out.
