Nvidia makes real things, grinds to push computing forward and are coincidentally wrapped up in the latest hype cycle in a big way

Software-only startups make nothing but hype and (these days) merely copy-paste existing frameworks and libraries into an AWS account, fill in predefined config parameters, generate zero net new knowledge

Studied applied physics and EE in college, been in high tech eng for almost 3 decades and lived through the evolution of software truth still being discovery into streamlined template filling.

People need jobs in this political system so whatever but I know a lot about engineering across contexts and where the bleeding edge is and know SaaS startups are rarely engaged in pushing the edge out further. It's a jobs program to validate political memes

The creator of this has a good note on how the Nvidia situation relates, under his diagram of their circular deal:

"To be clear: every deal here is legal, publicly announced, and defended by the people in it — Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called the structure "nothing inappropriate in principle." Critics compare the pattern to 1990s dot-com vendor financing and warn it can inflate the appearance of demand. As Bloomberg puts it, a circular deal is legally different from a fraudulent "round-trip" — regulators' term for sham trades with no economic substance designed to inflate results. LARP is a joke about the round-trip. This is the legal cousin it rhymes with."