This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Linked under a discussion about Scott’s AI messaging: Politics is not interior design. Don’t feel bad about skimming the first half, which can be summed up as
The part I wanted to share comes near the end, when he asks why this keeps happening. Selection bias, sure, but also:
Our society really likes countersignaling. Fashion, politics, Internet debate clubs. Historical conspiracy theories. I think a lot of contrarian, edgy statements can be discounted because of this dynamic. Especially when it comes to social media.
This ties into AI and investing. A second order consequence of the AI semiconductor boom in 2022-2024 was a "memory shortage" in mid-late 2025-2026 which saw stocks such as Micron , Western Digital, and SanDisk increase by 10x in a 1-year period, exceeding even NVDA itself, yet based on my own research, only 2 people total predicted the memory shortage second-order effect. All the attention in 2022-2024 was on Nvidia but no one cared about memory . None of the popular bloggers, podcasters or anyone else in involved in AI foresaw the shortage or recommended those three stocks. It just suddenly happened--boom--memory shortage (there is even a Wiki about it). My guess is, the rise of coding agents in early to mid 2025 saw sudden demand for memory, because this requires having to store large projects.
I was under the impression that the median memory chip is probably sitting on a fancy GPU in an AI data center. I do not think that people running vibecoded corporate-sized java codebases is enough to explain the shortage.
There are also higher order effects, though -- some FPGAs face a shortage not because AIs use them, but simply because producing AI chips is so massively profitable that it is very tempting for fabs to upgrade to the latest process generation instead of making peanuts by continuing to build boring 28nm chips.
I think he means the memory is for the coding agent workflow, not the apps generated. I.e. it is for the AI chips, but coding agents (and agents in general) generally require much more memory on the AI server doing inference then chats with users and have grown in usage a huge amount in the last year. The AI coding agents tend to operate with much longer context then your run of the mill chatbot talking with a user (even a chatbot that's doing some thinking). Memory requirements for the KV cache on AI inference server scale linearly with context length, a 500K used context agentic coding session (not hard to hit at all, context length limits for paid plans can reach up to 1m tokens, equivalent to a book 2500 pages long) is going to use about 50 times as much memory in the KV cache on the AI inference server then a chat conversation that maybe (if you're really chatty) reaches 5-10k tokens
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link