Scaffold to Heaven
Riley has been driven insane by a… company hinging on a single Australian man that appears to be bamboozling the British State with complex financial chicanery, and now you all have to hear the story of how NScale started out as a landlord for bitcoin miners and became the government’s best hope for a “Sovereign AI” but that has only a scaffolding yard to its name. Except it also doesn’t own the scaffolding yard either.
Comments (90)
A Norwegian guy if he was Australian: Hvordan g’day?
New British Datacenter scam to look into, Lonestar Data. Datacenters in and on the moon. Yes, IN the moon
0 respect from Britain's existing premier LLM, smh.
Mr. Huang is helping me find my sovereignty.
It really feels like every executive is basically just Herr Knock from Nosferatu: Just so fanatically obsessed with their inhuman, indifferent object of worship that they gladly sacrifice their employees in order to appease it
A fifth great awakening
Best episode since the last one about ONE AUSTRALIAN MAN. Classic TF!
Literally anglican protestants in 1700s through American revolution become calvinists in 1800s through industrial revolution, become techno-futurists in 1900s through market liberalism, and finally become effective altruists in 2000s through computing revolution, still maintaining rebranded versions of concepts like work ethic, kings divine right and apocalypse/rapture, i.e. meritocracy, ceo genius and singularity. Same old bullshit, new hat, Christians aint had any good new ideas since they cribbed their first draft off of caligua, aristotle and platos' notes
Could just repost this as a Trouble in River City episode lol
Wait, has TF been CanCon this whole time?
Can’t believe no one commented on Archon Energy. We’re getting gnostic scams now
BAE didn't build the AFV that vibrates you, that was General Dynamics.
bring back sexy “bonus” voice 🗣️
Shaving my poodle in the scaffolding yard
I wonder if they could get a master of accents on to do a Norwegian-Australian one
Do hogs know about the game youraislopbores.me ? Seems very TF coded
Investigation for future episodes: Are the fossil fuel energy companies pushing and funding AI as an excuse to drive more energy use?
This was an excellent an informative episode -- profoundly depressing, but useful. Who would have thought that the CEO of an American company was an unscrupulous hack. Keep up the good work.
1:06 Yandex isn't an alternative to Facebook, it was built as an alternative to Google with a bunch of other services like e-money or courier platform. Russian alternative to Facebook is VK, it was 1000% better than Facebook during it's golden era circa 2010-16, and it's founder is a typical insane tech guy Pavel Durov who's now mostly famous for making and running Telegram
Ah, good ol' VK. Excellent for getting Warhammer 40k rulebooks back in the day lol
Reading the description I thought this was another Greensill meltdown
Riley has so much lore
All the unsecured hard drives falling out of Line God ( Up ) like a cluster munition as it topples across the UK
its always been true, but it's never been clearer that the world economy is just a bunch of frat guys playing poker with their friends, except the blind is your retirement account
Grift to the Scaffold
Wind in the Willows characters on British banknotes is something I never considered and now desperately want. The Piper at the Gates of Dawn included, naturally.
Putting Toad of Toad Hall on a bank note would feel like giving Farage an undeserved win tho...
Disappointed no one made a single Mass Effect joke about the giant sovereign AI plot that's as much a political monster as a mechanical one and that's going to eat shit miserably. But I can't think of one either. Oh well.
With all the stuff about Nscale I kept expecting a model railway line.
Pleased to be reminded of any of Hussein’s epic trolls, which are so British in character it explains why I forget he’s Canonically Canadian
This one's a strong candidate for unlocking to the free feed imo.
I wonder if that would be legally advisable idk? But agree
the only guy they should have on the money is Alan Turing all the other guys should be mercilessly printed off the money
put the cambridge spies on there it'd be funny
I can tell from the run time that riley is unwell
Okay. After years of listening you have finally succeeded in melting my brain, but thankfully I know where there’s some scaffolding to help me rebuild it.
Ai Calvinism it's going to be lit
Portaka’aba was right there, just saying
You are being too nice describing MicroSlop MOU as an investment, it's a commitment to buy the product, so even if they built God in the scaffolding yard they'd only get to keep whatever margin they can squeeze out of running the datacenter. It's more like if you're mate is thinking of starting a Turkish barbers and you tell him you'll definetly get your haircut there than an investment
About the Loonie - When $2 coins were issued several years after the loonie, the government tried to push a nickname for them: Dubloonies. Needless to say, it was a terrible name and didn't stick, and we went on to call them "Twoonies".
it fucked me completely up when I found out I'm younger than the toonie
Re: Farage’s tantrum over the new banknotes, the pre-Euro coins in Ireland also had animal designs to emphasise the importance of agriculture to the Irish economy; and these too were denounced by cranks and weirdos when they were first adopted. Back then, the designs were criticised as “pagan” rather than “woke”, but it shows how tediously consistent reactionary thought is
And what do you call this data centre in a scaffolding yard? The aristocrats
Can't work out if November was tired or just sultry AF this episode
Why not both?
i feel like im listening to an audio version of Industry season 4.... wtaf is going onnnnnnnn in the worrrlllddd 😅🫠🥳
I too had that thought. Very Tender
You need to make this episode freely available!
great. The last time TF was ahead of a story, Credit Suisse still existed...
"Is it resistance to techno-feudalism or mere NIMBYism" is a hair I no longer have the will to split.
Some of the worst people I know in office are running around trying to ban data centers, and I'm not going to complain about that.
OBR? More like O(BES)R. Amirite?
Wait is this whole clownshow just the Empty Lot from Yakuza 0?
No the empty lot actually had some intrinsic value
Everything is the Salad Oil Crisis
for some reason peter kyle is possibly the member of the government who makes me the most personally angry. There's several people who would happily throw me in a camp and yet somehow this unfunny, stupid version of Matt Hancock beats them all
I think it might just be how obvious he makes it that this government is entirely subservient to business
I see a (Trash) Future where the TF Community crowdfunds the purchase of the scaffolding yard, single-handedly popping the AI bubble and being added to the Wikipedia list of 'Black Swan' events
I will commit a few twoonies to this endeavor
Buying a scaffolding yard with a bag full of Wind in the Willows sterling, M. Bison style.
Firstly, just because they want to buy the scaffolding yard, doesn’t mean the millionaire scaffolding magnate wide boy with 50 gold chains wants to sell it to them, because secondly: at least scaffolders actually build something (scaffolds), sometimes (when he can be bothered to show up)
British Minority Report where precognition is used to object to planning applications before they are even filled
The only morally righteous social use of predictive models
Put Joe Strummer on your money you cowards !
why did i think about serial experiments lain when nebius got mentioned
As an Australian, I’m struggling to work out what Nscale are doing wrong. This is the sort of charming rouge behaviour that defines our national character. It’s Ned Kelly, the Jolly Swagman and the Eureka stockade rolled into one. For those who didn’t get their primary education in an Australian state school the way you make money in a gold rush is stake as many claims as possible divide them into smaller claims then lease the worthless land to whichever desperate Europeans didn’t get robbed on the long walk from Melbourne.
To the people who got a primary education in an Australian private school, there was a secret option in the Gold Rush Learning Activity in which you did not dig for gold in the sand pit at all but simply sold the water and shovels. Then by the end of the activity you had more gold than any of the actual diggers and they said, now hold on a minute...? And a lesson was learned We learned from the best. For a certain definition of 'best'
Riley: "I've been going mad about N scale" Me, looking up from 'Sid Meier's Railroads!' on my phone: "Is this woman talking about model trains?"
Its all plan so you cannot google it and the fraud will never find the broad daylight.
has Riley been reading The Enchantments of Mammon
Put Eva Unit 1 on the money as a compromise.
With this government? Count yourself lucky if it's a Mass Production Eva. Actually, it's this government. It'll be thousands of T-72 tanks, which are powerful on paper but can't actually nullify AT fields and so are functionally useless
shocked by how rule britannia sounds a lot more jangly than I remember
This is a sort of colonial boomerang where you build a country out of your petty criminals whose descendants then come back to scam you?
Well they aren't Americans, so it's not an imperial lassoo!
Nova, several times while I was bench pressing (don't worry, safety bars were on), I laughed at something you said and had to stop lifting until I caught my breath. Thanks for that at the end of a shit week. I needed it.
Smashing my face with a hammer to get that EVA-01 jawline.
trashfuture episodes to rest your head on the desk to
So if ai faithful are indeed Protestants, then Frank Herbert was right. Now we just need the Orange Catholics to counter them
Stargate UK? They should build it in central Stevenage then they could call it Stargate SG1
Criminally underrated joke
I'm a software developer with over 10 years experience in the field. In my new position I've been dropped into a complicated niche codebase creating things in the cloud that no one else at my organization understands. As a pretty major AI skeptic, I still have to admit the latest Claude is extremely powerful and has made it way easier to do more complex work quicker in my new role. For people who don't have a solid fundamental understanding of software development, you could get yourself into all kinds of trouble or just waste a lot of time. You have to check in on the code the AI changes every step of the way and understand what its doing. You steer the model and make manual changes as well. Its able to hold so much codebase complexity in itself and provide useful info/solutions in a conversational way. In my field I'm convinced that for some software development tasks AI models will remain a valuable tool. I think the adoption of AI is mostly a band-aid for dysfunction at best, and a tool of disenfranchisement/tyranny at worst (when its not making slop). This is true in software as well, but AI is just really good at writing code based on conversations. I deeply support people not using AI strictly out of a power/class based analysis in any field, but we need to be up front about when these technologies are good at certain things. Anecdotally, it seems easy to fall into a trap with AI based software work where you just let it do things without always critiquing its outputs. I'm worried about losing my skills, codebases becoming more and more "magic" than they already were, as well as a general rotting of our overall tech knowledge culturally. In 10 years, I think we'll be talking much different about AI as it becomes widespread in my field. I can't imagine it won't, even if Claude Opus 4.6 is the best model we get its revolutionary in specific ways.
Wow that was an essay. This has been on my brain for a while now and the conversation at the beginning of the episode stirred the thoughts.
Hussein, not only do I remember the Evangelion story, I also remember a formal request being submitted to HM Civil Service whose response was a litany of reasons why it wouldn't be done, one of which was "this isn't the right department." Made me proud to be English.
GET THEE AWAY FROM MY BRAZIERS & SUFFUMIGATIONS! you have any idea what thyamatta cost?! Of course you don't! & with the straight of Hormuz & the whole region up in arms... getting olibanum from Lebanon is nigh impossible? Do you know how hard it is to raise Humbaba? & now wishing execs on me! Cruel! Dastardly! May your microchips chip! May your excel macros get cross at your ma!
Ah! Being driven Lucid! Do not recommend
Boat vs plane! Fight, fight, fight!
Furry monie! Google goggol one of us
There was a reason you shipped us to the other side of the world and only let us out when you needed someone to do various warcrimes, you shouldn't let Australians touch the money.
Well America was Australia's prefiguration & they let them touch the monies