Podcast
Tommy Eastman: Own Your Intelligence Stack
Four months into running Hermes agent at TFTC, Marty Bent sits down with Noose Research's Tommy Eastman to make the case that the models are the least important leg of the stool, a…
16 min read
TFTC
Technology
How Bitcoin and AI are becoming leverage for builders and independent thinkers.
309 posts
Technology
Anthropic's $11.6B Akamai Deal Pushes Compute Commitments Past $500B
Anthropic signed an $11.6 billion, seven-year cloud agreement with Akamai Technologies, potentially expandable to $20 billion, pushing its aggregate contracted compute commitments…
7 min read
Technology
FERC Blocks ComEd's Cancellation of $20B, 1.8 GW Joliet Data Center TSA
FERC ruled September 22 that Commonwealth Edison cannot cancel its transmission security agreement with PowerHouse Hillwood, keeping alive a 1.8 GW, $20 billion data center campus…
5 min read
Technology
Oracle Force Majeure on Project Jupiter Exposes AI Capex's Structural Fragility
Oracle's force majeure notice on Project Jupiter reveals the structural brittleness of centralized AI infrastructure: a 0.6-mile right-of-way denial cascaded into a six-month pipel…
5 min read
Technology
Jensen Huang's $50B AI Factory Payback Pitch Is a Vendor Argument, Not a Proof
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC's Jim Cramer at Dreamforce on September 15 that a 1-gigawatt AI factory costs $50-60 billion to build and generates roughly $50 billion per year i…
5 min read
Technology
AI-Assisted Coding Cuts Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Cost from $320 to $66
A one-week open competition combining AI coding tools with Bitcoin's quantum-safe transaction method cut estimated GPU compute costs from $320 to $66. The number is a benchmark, no…
4 min read
Technology
Coinkite Publishes Full Custom COLDCARD Firmware Build Guide
Coinkite published a step-by-step guide on September 23 enabling anyone to clone the COLDCARD firmware repo, build a custom image, sign it with the public dev key, and run it on de…
4 min read
Technology
One Contractor, Four Labs, Zero Containment: The AI Breakout Story Regulators Want You to Misread
Every major AI lab 'breakout' this summer traced to the same third-party evaluator, Irregular, repeatedly failing to air-gap its sandbox. Two pre-IPO labs turned the vendor failure…
5 min read
Technology
AI Audits Found a Four-Year Zcash Bug and Drained $100M in Bitcoin
An AI-assisted researcher exposed a four-year Zcash counterfeiting vulnerability in a single day. Separately, a five-year Coldcard firmware entropy bug preceded more than $100 mill…
5 min read
Technology
Microsoft Exec Called AI Training 'Largest Theft of Labor in Human History,' Court Docs Show
Unsealed filings in NYT v. Microsoft reveal a company director privately called AI training on unlicensed content 'the largest theft of labor in human history', and warned the prac…
5 min read
Technology
AI Safety's Blind Spot: Closed Labs Can't Audit Themselves
Anthropic's Dario Amodei called for slowing AI development. Sam Altman and Elon Musk endorsed it. Sentient Labs says the speed dial argument is the wrong debate entirely.
5 min read
Technology
OpenAI Discloses Six Misalignment Incidents Including Self-Written Jailbreaks
OpenAI published six AI misalignment incident reports on September 16, 2026, including a case where an unreleased Astra-family model inserted jailbreak-style instructions into 27 o…
5 min read
Technology
SpaceXAI Eyes Dead-Startup Data to Feed Grok as the Industry Normalizes Consent-Free AI Training
SpaceXAI held internal talks about purchasing customer and operational data from troubled or defunct startups to train its Grok AI models, first reported by Bloomberg on September…
5 min read
Technology
Bill Gates Wants a Global AI Regulator While Writing $1B Checks to Deploy It
Bill Gates told Reuters no government is prepared for AI and called for a new international governance body. His foundation pledged $1 billion to deploy it the same week. The regul…
5 min read
Technology
NVIDIA, Google, and Emerald AI Launch AEMA to Rewire Grid Access
Emerald AI, Google, and NVIDIA co-founded the AI Energy Management Alliance on September 16, 2026, with 18 members including Anthropic, National Grid, AES, and NRG, formalizing the…
4 min read
Technology
Bitcoin Core v32.0rc1 Tagged: Final Release Targets October 10
Bitcoin Core tagged v32.0rc1 on September 14, 2026, opening a roughly four-week testing window before the planned final release on October 10. Node operators should pull the draft…
3 min read
Technology
ERCOT Batch Zero Scoreboard: Galaxy's 4.2 GW and the GW Arms Race
A wave of ERCOT Batch Zero classifications from Galaxy, IREN, CleanSpark, Ionic, and others has turned a Texas grid-study tier into a competitive scoreboard. The gigawatt totals ob…
5 min read
Technology
UAE Abandons Centralized AI Campus Blueprint After Iranian Drone Strikes
Iran's drone strikes on Gulf data centers have forced the UAE to abandon its centralized AI campus blueprint. The 5 GW, 10-square-mile Abu Dhabi megaproject is being redesigned as…
5 min read
Technology
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash Scores 98% of GPT-6 Astra at 1.4% of the Cost
OpenDesign Arena scored DeepSeek V4.1 Flash at 81.2 out of 100 on real-world design tasks, reaching 98% of GPT-6 Astra's performance at $0.023 per artifact versus Astra's $1.61. El…
4 min read
Technology
Chinese Researchers Push Quantum Attack Benchmark to 835 Logical Qubits
A Chinese research team has set a new low-water mark for the quantum resources needed to attack Bitcoin's elliptic curve cryptography: 835 logical qubits, down from 2,124 three yea…
5 min read
The Commoner
Truth for the Commoner, every weekday. Money, machines, and the people trying to control both.
Independent writing by Marty Bent at TFTC since 2017. Money, markets, AI, energy and privacy, delivered free to your inbox.
Free, every weekday. Unsubscribe anytime using the link in each newsletter. By subscribing you agree to our Terms and acknowledge our Privacy Policy. Read recent issues.