# Black October For anyone who knows me even somewhat well, it's clear that I am a 99th percentile tech optimist. However, the vibes have shifted for me quite a bit in the last 18 hours, and I feel a moral imperative to share what I'm thinking and feeling with my circles so that everyone can understand, and hopefully take seriously, what's happening right now. I think October 2026 will have many chapters written about it in the history books. You know those scenes in financial movies like Margin Call where someone realizes that they're all fucked, and no one else sees it yet? And that person feels like they're crazy, and then suddenly everyone is pulling an all-nighter in a boardroom and freaking out? Yeah, that's kind of how this is feeling right now in the SF/Bay Area/AI circles. We're 48 hours into what is being called Black October. In the last 2 days there have been several dozen cyber attacks which, in isolation, would each have been the worst to happen in an entire calendar year. Every sector from government to education to big tech and banks is being massively affected, and people are starting to freak out. In a nutshell, what's happened is that frontier AI models have gotten to a point where they are as advanced as the most sophisticated programmers, with one critical difference: they can work 24/7, and you can spin up 10,000 of them with a single command and they'll work together tirelessly until they accomplish their task. The most advanced models today are from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, whose current best technology is so good that they haven't been able to roll it out to everyone yet because of the national security risks it poses. Meanwhile, the best open source models (where anyone can just download the model weights and do whatever they want with them, uncensored) are slightly behind the frontier but still 90-95% as capable. These models, developed primarily in China, are being used by black hat hackers to wreak havoc on the Western capitalist structure. Presumably, this has been part of China's plan the entire time, and we're seeing its implications fall out in real time. In red-pilled AI circles, we've been sharing and reading papers called things like "Situational Awareness" and "AI 2027" for the last year or so, which at the time felt a bit like near-term speculative fiction. They laid out the case for why Artificial General Intelligence (AI smarter than any human at any knowledge task) and Recursive Self-Improvement (models that are able to use themselves to get better) weren't half-baked future ideas anymore, but instead an inevitable outcome of the linear progress that's happening. These papers would then talk about things like "takeoff scenarios," trying to envision how that moment would come to be and what it would be like when it happened. It would either be a "slow takeoff" that would play out over the course of months and quarters, happening subtly and only obvious to a few. Or, it would be a "fast takeoff" where it would pretty much happen instantly, like a bit flipping from 0 to 1. From everything that I can see and am feeling, we are currently experiencing the fast takeoff scenario. Beyond the crazy security vulnerabilities that have come out recently, there have also been massive breakthroughs in life sciences, fundamental computer science, materials science, and pure mathematics that have all landed in the same time frame. While I still firmly believe that AI will be a net positive for humanity, it's more clear to me than ever that the societal and individual risk is very real, and is playing out NOW. For as much conviction as I have that this is happening, the thing that's caused me to lose sleep is that I don't really know what to do about it, or more importantly, what to tell you, reader, to do about it. So, the best I can do is make a few suggestions that have always been a good idea but are more timely now than ever: Set up 2-factor authentication for everything. I use Duo. Use a password manager across your devices. I use 1Password. Get an identity protection app set up. I use Alta. Move your IoT devices to their own network. Claude helped me do this. And last, but certainly not least, if you've been avoiding leaning into AI, see this as a catalyst to wake up and start using it. Don't just use the chat mode version of ChatGPT/Claude; click that Code/Work button and see how easily you can have AI write code to help you with your job. One of the biggest vulnerabilities was in a massively popular programming language called PHP, and the prompt that set it off was literally, "Find vulnerabilities in php." This is an unprecedented time for humanity, but as we've done with many things before, we will prevail so long as we are kind, loving, and open-minded to the world. Much love.

Last month, we demonstrated high-rate alchemy: turning mercury into real, stable gold, beating CERN’s record by a factor of 10. Last week, we enriched isotopes in the world’s most powerful plasma centrifuge, beating the Soviet record that stood for 40 years. Now, we’re building a fusion reactor in San Francisco to achieve record power density.

Gov. Abbott & AG Paxton have promised to crack down on data centers who failed to report their water use. But experts say the penalties the state can issue have limitations. The penalty? A max $500 for companies worth millions. #txlege For @TexasTribune texastribune.org/2026/10/14/…

My data center prediction: In the next 1-2 yrs, all will be self contained power & water using closed loop systems & companied like $BE & might be putting power back on the grid lowering energy costs. Small towns who drove them out will regret not having their franchise $ & tax rev. In 5-10 yrs, @elonmusk & @JeffBezos will move data centers to space & the same people who are railing against them now, will be bitching about them being taken out of communities. Bookmark this.

Google is willing to pay for the power it needs. That’s not the problem. The problem is the utility incentive: own the generation and transmission, put it in rate base, and earn a regulated return—financed by captive ratepayers. With enormous new electricity demand coming, that model has limits. Ratepayers cannot be expected to finance every billion-dollar project needed to serve new large loads, particularly when much of the investment is driven by a specific customer. We need alternatives like Bring Your Own Power that allow large loads to pay their own way. If Google—or any large customer—is willing to finance the infrastructure it needs, policy should enable it. Economic growth shouldn’t require making residential and small-business customers the default financiers of every new power project.

"You ask for miracles Theo, I give you the NOT. Q. E."

Wild to see ~90GW peaks daily in Texas w/ no drama whatsoever. No conservation calls: we had 13 in 2023 (!) with 5 GW less demand. There's 25 GW of extra capacity now at the time of highest demand. Solar power is the difference. Batteries charging for tonight. #txlege #txenergy

Elon is after Microsoft now!! Cursor is planning to kill Github Yesterday GitHub went down for 7 and a half hours. Website, Actions, Copilot, code merging, all of it. 15,000 developers reported outage. GitHub's own CTO admitted they planned for 10x capacity and realized they needed 30x. They're now renting servers from AWS, Microsoft's biggest cloud rival. Cursor launched Origin the same day.

This is absolutely insane. The free internet is dead if a state court can pull a website offline worldwide simply because the registry for its domain is based in the United States. That puts the world’s access to information at the mercy of state lawmakers and judges—in this case, in Texas. Should Texas get to dictate what content the whole world can access on the open internet? Of course not. And I assume Texans would say the same if Russia, China, or even Australia claimed the same authority.

Terafab approximate size comparison between Giga Texas, the Pentagon, Apple Park, and the Mall of America. There has never been a building this large. Elon Musk says it will be the most valuable building by far.

Air conditioning demand in extreme Texas heat pushed the ERCOT grid beyond 91 gigawatts today. Before yesterday, we had never exceeded 86 GW so this record shatters the old one. Note there was >20 GW of buffer, no energy emergency, no conservation call. #txlege #txenergy 1/

Today, we are introducing Inkling. Inkling reasons efficiently across text, image, and audio modalities. We are making the full weights available. thinkingmachines.ai/news/int… Available today for fine-tuning on Tinker. Play with it in the Inkling Playground. 🧵

Overheard at a dinner with tech CEOs the other night: The top 1% of customer success and sales people at their companies are becoming hybrid "forward-deployed product managers" They're not just managing relationships and relaying requests to product and engineering, but building features themselves. They don't need t wait for engineering, product or design. They can ship exactly what the customer wants, instantly. This is becoming prevalent at early-stage startups. Roles as we know them are going to look completely different in a few years.

Tucker Carlson just gave the most brutally honest marriage advice I’ve ever heard: Don’t say “Whatever you want, babe.” When she asks orange or pink napkins? You confidently say “Pink.” She’ll correct you to orange — then you immediately declare “Orange is perfect” like it was your idea. Same with dinner. She doesn’t want you to hand over every decision. She wants you to lead… while she still feels heard. Tucker’s line: “You’re repeating her choice back to her as a decision.” Raw. Funny. And probably true. A lot of modern relationship advice ignores how men and women actually communicate in real life. Getting this dynamic right can save years of unnecessary fights. I laughed because I’ve seen this exact dance play out. Tucker has zero filter and it’s oddly refreshing. Married or about-to-be-married people — how accurate is this in your experience?

Mentally healthy people are often delusionally optimistic.