u/Gary_Glidewell

Hey guys, I wanted to run an open-source project idea past you.

I used to work for FICO.

As you know, credit scores are just a metric used to determine if a borrower is a safe bet. It reflects a lender's willingness to risk their capital on an individual.

Why hasn't anyone built a FICO score for Hollywood talent?

Better yet: Why don't WE build it?

Right now, the media landscape is broken. The streaming giants have infected the culture with algorithmic slop, terrible writing, and focus-grouped ideas. In the current model, Netflix, Disney, and YouTube make a corporate judgment on what they think we should consume, and they force-feed it to us to maximize their own ad revenue and watch-time metrics.

I'm not larping here; I used to do I.T. crap for the studios. I've personally worked for Disney. Everything is done by committee; the reason that the movies and shows are so unbearable is that one or two people in a room of twenty can control the other eighteen via bullying and organizing. Two bad eggs is all it takes to cajole and threaten a room full of normal people into turning Star Trek into whatever-the-fuck it's supposed to be right now.

I don't know about you, but I’m tired of wasting my finite time hitting "play" on a gamble, only to realize twenty minutes in that I’ve been tricked by a shiny trailer. I work a LOT. It's demoralizing to sit down on a Friday night with my wife and kids, hoping for something that isn't DOWNRIGHT OFFENSIVE. When I was young, the worst thing that might happen was that it might be dull. The Cosby Show was inoffensive but dull. What I have to deal with today is much worse; I literally have the wife and kids sititing there on the couch, and 9 times out of 10, I hit play and within five minutes, we have to turn the shit off because we can tell it's going to be the same preachy bullshit that it always is. I JUST WANT TO SEE A SHOW THAT DOESN'T SUCK. I'm so demoralized I'm not even asking for GOOD, all I'm asking for is DON'T MAKE IT PAINFULLY BAD.

What I’m proposing is a crowd-sourced, open-source system that flips the algorithm on its head. Instead of the platforms tracking us, we determine the metrics and track the data.

We can leverage AI to parse the actual DNA of a movie or TV show—the specific screenwriters, the directors, the narrative tropes, the cinematography style, and historical audience data—to generate a localized, independent metric. A score that tells us the exact mathematical odds that we will actually enjoy a story before we ever hand over our time or money to a streaming platform.

This isn't censorship. We aren't telling anyone what they can or can't watch. This is about decentralized curation. It’s a metric built by a community of people who actually love the art of storytelling, designed to completely bypass the corporate gatekeepers.

The tech and the AI models to build this exist right now. We have the ability to build a smarter, community-driven filter to protect our time and celebrate good writing.

What do you think? Would this work?

Anyone who works in tech right now, you know that we are running into real limitations on our ability to get hardware. Every single day, I find myself in a meeting where some project is blocked because:

• We can't convince management that memory costs 400% more today than it did six months ago and it's not coming down anytime soon. There are a lot of old executives in America who really and truly cannot comprehend that computers don't get cheaper every year any more. Compute isn't getting cheaper it's getting more expensive, A LOT MORE expensive. There are two generations of Gen X and Boomer tech executives who've become accustomed to the idea that they can 'refresh' their fleet of servers every four years, get new hardware that performs 50% better while spending about the same as what they spent four years ago. These old guys literally can't BELIEVE that prices aren't coming down (any day now...)

• Then once you bully these old guys back to reality, you have a new problem: a lot of ram is unobtanium, and sometimes you need a particular SKU. This can mean that a DIMM that cost $80 last year now costs $1000, and you buy these things by the pallet.

I can't stress this enough: companies are getting suffocated by the high cost of RAM. And storage prices have also tripled and even quadrupled, in less than a year.

I think that all of us feel like this is "nothing new", because all of us were around for the pandemic. We remember when it was impossible to buy an Nvidia 3090 at any price. We remember when the car lots were empty because there were no chips to put in them. What is happening now is oddly familiar.

But there's one little problem...

We're not in a pandemic. There is no significant disruption of maritime traffic between the USA and China.

Anyone sees where I'm going with this?

If China invades Taiwan while we're distracted by Iran, the hyperscalers will become the biggest companies that have ever existed in all of human history.

For instance, the hyperscalers and the other companies that have been accumulating GPUs in the name of "AI," they currently make up 35% of the US stock market.

Yes, you read that correctly, go look in your wallet, and consider that more than a third of every dollar invested in the US stock market is invested in this narrow band of companies.

If Taiwan is seized, and China cuts us off, it would undoubtedly lead to GPU prices going up tenfold, at a minimum.

GPUs are not like diamonds, or oil, or gold, or silver, or anything else. GPUs are EXTREMELY special because the Nvidia 5xxx line depends on a specific memory type.

The rarity of this memory type RIGHT NOW is what makes Taiwan such an attractive target. There are only three places that manufacture this RAM: Korea, Japan, and Taiwan.

And here's why 2027 and 2028 will be eventful:

There is only one place in the world where the latest Nvidia GPUs can be built, end to end. That's in Taiwan.

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At this point in the post, I'm sure that 95% of you are thinking "why is he telling us something that everybody knows already?"

The interesting "catch" here, is that there will be additional manufacturing coming online in 2027 or 2028. And we're bogged down in Iran right now.

So this would be quite the time to strike.

The implications for Seattle are really interesting. Considering how all of these companies have been doing layoffs, this would lead to two possibilities:

• AI is kicking butt and it's living up to everyone's expectations and there's no "AI bubble."

• Or more likely: men like Zuckerberg, Musk and Bezos are aware that it's only a matter of time until China moves on Taiwan. And when it does, there will be a shortage of GPUs, and the 'blast radius' of the invasion will impact Korea and Japan. Therefore, guys like Musk are (shrewdly) investing in the very thing that will become incredibly scarce when the inevitable invasion happens.

By my calculations, if the value of these companies went up ten fold, they would go from being 35% of the economy to 85% of the economy.

In case anyone has ever wondered what feudalism looked like, it probably looked a lot like that. To put this in perspective, our history courses taught us about megacorps that existed in the 19th century, and the history books tell us that we've "progressed" since then.

But that's not actually true; Standard Oil was the biggest company in the USA in 1900, and it was 3.5% of the economy.

All of the hyperscalers are already bigger than that, and if the US gets cut off from GPUs, those companies would certainly double in size again, because they have the largest pile of GPUs in the world.

The effects on Seattle would be interesting to say the least. Washington is the only state in the USA with an economy where tech is number one, and Washington is the only state where two hyperscalers are headquartered.