The more I read about it, the obvious it becomes that the big news story regarding Nvidia is corruption and financial shenanigans, not the affairs or honestly even the spy rumours. The scale and potential consequences of the former far outweighs that of the latter.
@baldur the spy thing implications kinda depend on how many gpus were smuggled through Megaspeed, und it seems like that was a good amount.
@baldur has an Enron sort of vibe
@baldur when it comes to Megaspeed (what a name!) the export control violations are a big deal, not the affair.
What gives me hope is how many so-called reasonable people on the financial side of things came out of the woodwork to suddenly express concerns about nvidia’s business practices once it was allowed to be critical. Maybe one day “all of us has always been against this”.
Nov 15, 2026, 3:43 PM
@baldur I suspect this is why so much of the early response was Jensen apologising dramatically about his unfaithfulness, just to control the narrative away from the financial issues. It didn't work, sadly for them.
@baldur Ed Zitron and Gamers Nexus have both done excellent investigations and explanations of this.
@baldur export controls are dumb. Here's Adam Smith on the matter:
> "The smuggler; a person who, though no doubt highly blameable for violating the laws of his country, is frequently incapable of violating those of natural justice, and would have been, in every respect, an excellent citizen, had not the laws of his country made that a crime which nature never meant to be so." -- _An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations_
And, since I've seen this argument over and over, equating GPUs with enriched uranium is an even dumber takr
In the wake of the AI bubble bursting, the scale of the financial fraud perpetrated by the fossil fuel laundering its money in AI, ...
... will rival the pretexts for the war on Iraq or Russia laundering oligarch cash in 2008 via residential housing markets.
All three frauds had Republican & Wall Street profiting from misery.
Nov 15, 2026, 4:31 PM@baldur People keep saying that folks personal and professional lives are separate, but I'm unsurprised to see that most people act with the same level of integrity and ethics in both spheres
@baldur the spy thing and the affairs are boring and irrelevant, but at least they are news. The corruption and financial shenanigans were already well-known and tolerated.
@baldur doubtful if the spy thing is the whole story. Seems suss that Huang is fired a week after massive Democrat win. Clearly there is a lot of financial sh*t yet to hit the fan from Nvidia's ponzi scheme
@baldur yeah it seems to be less of a spy and romantic entrapment story and more of a voluntary smuggling story, with Jensen Huang sleeping with his handler.
There must be a ton of people now frantically trying to put all the blame on Huang.
It is really unlikely the only implicated in this mess is him. And the ramifications of this scandal are very likely to be much deeper, including political ties in the current administration and other companies.
@baldur And forcing his subordinates to have sex with him
Nov 15, 2026, 6:05 PM@baldur But the latter is no news. We knew for years that NVidia has created a similar circular ponzi scheme as Bernie Madoff in 2008. But by two orders of magnitude larger, and clouded in AI.