Blog

Ideas, approaches and principles that shape my opinion.

A cardboard-craft still life on white paper: a small classical temple in the style of a central bank, its four columns stacked from black microchips with gold pins, and a single teal chip mounted in the doorway.

Is Nvidia Becoming the Federal Reserve of Compute?

September 2, 2026

Nvidia is moving beyond selling chips and helping finance the AI infrastructure built around them.

A cardboard-craft still life on white paper: a small paper graduate in a mortarboard stands where a cardboard path forks. To the left, the path turns dark grey and breaks into scattered fragments that disappear under a torn sheet of cream paper. To the right, three continuous teal lanes widen and sweep away into the distance.

The AI hiring split:
my playbook for new grads and companies

The entry-level squeeze happens through jobs that never get posted, which makes the damage almost invisible to layoff trackers.

A cardboard-craft still life: on the left, a spool of dark cable labeled '.com' with loose cables and scattered cardboard microchip tiles; on the right, a stack of cardboard server-rack units labeled 'AI' — the dot-com era set beside the AI buildout.

AI vs dot-com:
where they rhyme and where they don't

The AI buildout is not just a bet on demand. It is a bet that compute remains scarce long enough to repay the cost of building it.

A cardboard-craft still life: a conveyor of paper payroll cards, each stamped with a worker icon and a dollar sign, feeds into a central press that outputs a row of black server-rack blocks — payroll being converted into compute.

Payroll for Compute

For the biggest technology companies, the most important AI-layoff mechanism is often capital allocation, not direct labor substitution.

Two cardboard masks on a tan background: a smooth, intact face wearing neat red lipstick beside a cracked, broken face with the same red smeared across its mouth

Lipstick on a Sick Face

AI layoff language is used as a packaging trick: it turns budget pressure, weak demand, or management choices into a strategy story.

Halftone illustration of a hazy city skyline in muted blues and reds

The AI Layoff Taxonomy:
A Guide to What's Actually Happening

“AI layoff” is not one story but seven — and only one of them is AI literally doing someone's job. The rest are ordinary cuts relabeled as AI, payroll redirected into compute, org flattening, weak-demand retrenchment, or jobs that are simply never created.