480: Nvidia Q4 Deep Dive, Ford EVs, Boeing vs Airbus, Post-Quantum Encryption, Microsoft & OpenAI vs Hackers, Mars in 4k, and 1917
"As usual, it’s all about expectations"
There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.
—Willa Cather
🤔☎️🔒🔑⏳🦾🤖 I was reading Apple’s white paper about their transition to “post-quantum encryption” for iMessage, and it made me think about how there must be a lot of old garbled and/or noisy recordings from Cold War intercepts where intelligence agencies couldn’t figure out what was being said *at the time*, but with modern audio tools and AI models like Whisper, it's probably possible to go back and figure it out.
The same goes for old encrypted messages that use weaker ciphers and shorter key lengths and that should now be possible to decrypt with modern cryptanalysis and GPUs.
Not to mention that machine translation can allow dealing with huge volumes of foreign-language text in a way that human translators never could.
I wonder if intelligence agencies around the world (NSA, FSB, MI6, MSS, etc) have stockpiles of intercepts that they periodically try to crack again using more modern tools. This seems likely, but I’m just guessing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The value of most information decays quickly, but some bits have a long half-life (ie. the US is probably not changing how it operates its nuclear arsenal very often — I mean, in Edition #468 I wrote about how they used 80kb, 8-inch floppy disks until 2019). Or some weapon systems projects take decades to run their course — think F-22 or B-21 — so intercepts from long ago could give information that is useful to an adversary.
🧹🔥🏠❄️ I want to do this soon, so as a PSA, I’ll remind you to get your HVAC system cleaned and maintained periodically.
Not only to avoid it breaking, which always sucks, but because even without anything noticeably wrong with it, it becomes a lot less efficient if there’s a bunch of dust caking the evaporating and condensing coils or insulating (in a bad way) the heat exchanger, or reducing airflow through your filter.
You’re burning more fuel, using more electricity, paying more dollars, and putting more wear on the system, which can reduce its useful life and lead to big expenses earlier than necessary.
This was my dad moment for today. Eat your vegetables and get your HVAC serviced, m’kay? 👨🏻🔧🥦
🍿🎥 🎞️ 🎬 Have you bought your tickets for ‘Dune: Part 2’ in IMAX yet?
My friends and I have got ours. This is the kind of film worth seeing on the big screen with 10,000 watts of sound and good company!
🏦 💰 Liberty Capital 💳 💴
🔥😎 Nvidia Q4 🐜 🤖🤖🤖🤖 💰💰💰💰
The contrarian aspect of my personality feels weird writing about Nvidia now that the whole world is obsessed with them. Manic excitement always makes me go 🤨
However, I have to remember that it doesn't matter what others look at or don't look at, it only matters what I'm interested in. I was writing about Nvidia years ago — I wrote about Nvidia in Edition #16, back in the Cenozoic era aka 2020 — at the time the company’s *entire market cap* was slightly more than the amount they gained after their Q4 earnings last week.
There was a period when consensus was that they were just a crypto bubble beneficiary that would mostly go back to selling gaming GPUs now that Bitcoin and Ethereum ran on ASICs and proof-of-stake, and *maybe* over time possibly grow the data center business into something meaningful.
How quickly things can change:
Anyway, let’s have a look at some highlights from their Q4 results and recent transcripts:
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