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Chaos Lever examines emerging trends and new technology for the enterprise and beyond. Hosts Ned Bellavance and Chris Hayner examine the tech landscape through a skeptical lens based on over 40 combined years in the industry. Are we all doomed? Yes. Will the apocalypse be streamed on TikTok? Probably. Does Joni still love Chachi? Decidedly not.
[00:00:08.090] - Chris
Scream! Aren't you enjoying this monologue?
[00:00:10.390] - Ned
I am. I feel no need to add to it.
[00:00:13.200] - Chris
I can do this. I think.
[00:00:17.010] - Ned
I can't hear you at all now. Oh, oh, I heard something.
[00:00:22.340] - Chris
I'm clicking at things.
[00:00:24.400] - Ned
Ooh, clicky click.
[00:00:26.060] - Chris
Where in the ever-loving curse word, curse word, foul language are you seriously telling me I can't change the device?
[00:00:38.970] - Ned
Hello, alleged human. Welcome to the Chaos Lever Podcast. My name is Ned and I'm definitely not a robot. I am a real human person with a scraggly beard, dashed hopes, and a deep desire for connection. Via Ethernet. With me is Chris, who is also here. Hi, Chris.
[00:01:00.300] - Chris
I mean, we definitely opened this one on, on, on a high note. I don't know how we can follow that up.
[00:01:05.620] - Ned
Absolutely cannot top it. We should just end things now. Or we could talk about some tech garbage.
[00:01:12.570] - Chris
Also an option.
[00:01:13.690] - Ned
Okay.
[00:01:14.110] - Chris
Let's do that. Okay.
[00:01:16.680] - Ned
One more reason to avoid Las Vegas. As if you really needed one more. I have so many already. Last week, the Nevada Transportation Authority approved permits that would allow Tesla, Uber, and Waymo to operate driverless vehicles in Clark County, aka where Las Vegas is. The permits allow Tesla to operate up to 5,000 vehicles, while Uber and Waymo are limited to 1,000 each. Now, quick reality check here when it comes to those numbers, because you might be wondering Is that a lot? Too much? According to Robotaxi Tracker, which is an interesting website I didn't know existed until today, Waymo has a total of 3,800 active robotaxis across their 10+ areas. Tesla, on the other hand, has 233 active robotaxis in entirety, unless you count the ones with safety drivers, which takes it closer to 900 across 7 locations. Uber is actually partnering with Zoox— I swear that's a real company— which has a total of 37 robotaxis in just Las Vegas. That's the only place they operate as part of a pilot program. What I'm saying is that the permit limits are aspirational at best for all parties, especially Zoox and Tesla. Tesla has said they would be thrilled to have 2,500 robotaxis in Vegas by the end of 2027.
[00:02:50.630] - Ned
They would be the only ones. I think that is a ridiculous statement, and it's right in line with the standard Tesla messaging: demand preposterous allowances, promise the moon, and then wildly underdeliver. Out of the three companies, the only one I'd actually ride in is Waymo, and that's because I've used Waymo a few times in San Francisco, and it was Fine. It's a little creepy, sure, but I also hate talking to people, so it was a trade I was willing to make. Tesla, on the other hand, has proven time and again that their Full Self-Driving is anything but. And even though the CyberCab is better instrumented than the average Tesla Model Y, I still would not trust it. As a quick side note, And I can't help but point this out, Musk's failed Hyperloop project is also in Las Vegas and currently uses Teslas with regular drivers to transport people. If they can't use the CyberCab there, they shouldn't use it anywhere.
[00:03:58.060] - Chris
Stripe buying AI routing company OpenRouter because, um, reasons? This just in from the I am sure this is something that makes sense to somebody department. Payment processing company Stripe has finalized a deal to buy OpenRouter for, well, we're actually not sure. Definitely at least $7 billion, possibly more, depends on the source that you read. Now, this is eyebrow raising for a few reasons, not least being they were just given a $1.3 billion valuation back in May. $7 is a lot more than $1.3. W-T-A-F. Yeah. Also, just so you're aware, OpenRouter is a company that provides one API as a path to a bazillion possible model providers on the backend is basically the long and short of it. The routing for the request is done based on the current cost of the model as well as its capabilities, your own preferences for what your application is doing, et cetera, et cetera. Far easier to connect one time to OpenRouter than to try to connect to 700 different models.
[00:05:12.320] - Ned
Right.
[00:05:13.220] - Chris
What OpenRouter is not is a company that replaces the shitty, shitty firmware that came with your Nighthawk router. That is OpenWRT. Completely different. And I, for one, want to assure everyone that I was definitely not confused by the sort of similarity when it comes to the name. I mean, it still seems weird for a payment processor to buy an AI middleman, but not as weird as if they had bought an open source firmware vendor.
[00:05:42.460] - Ned
That would definitely be surprising. When I saw this news, I looked at my phone, I said, "Oh, what the hell?" And my 10-year-old was like, "What's wrong, Dad?" I was like, "Oh no, it's just AI not making sense." One thing that does pull this purchase into the sensemaking realm is that OpenRouter was already a Stripe customer.
[00:06:04.310] - Chris
Stripe had been handling OpenRouter's financial operations for a while now. And by that, I mean like all of their financial operations. So maybe Stripe just saw the opportunity to keep getting that, you know, whatever, 5% revenue on each traffic, but like more so. Why take a cut of the business when you can just take the business. So, yeah, synergies and stuff. Man, this is impressive. I cannot remember a story that actively got more boring the more that I looked into it. I mean, I'm not saying that I fell asleep reading about this deal, trying to make sense of it, but I'm not not saying that.
[00:06:53.420] - Ned
You wouldn't steal a GPU, but you might smuggle one. Senior executives at Supermicro were indicted by the Department of Justice in March 2026, being charged with smuggling systems with NVIDIA GPUs into China to the tune of $2.5 billion. Note that we have some trade embargoes with China on what type of NVIDIA GPUs can be brought into that country. They were violating that, that, uh, co-founder Wally Liao, general manager of the Taiwan office Stephen Chang, and a third-party broker named Willie Sun were all charged, with Wally and Willie in custody and Stephen still in the wind, which sounds like the beginning of a sitcom, but it isn't. The DOJ alleges that Liao and Chang would get friends at Southeast Asian companies to order servers with the Nvidia GPUs in them and then take delivery in Taiwan. The systems would then be repackaged and shipped to China, with everyone involved pocketing a hefty profit. Not exactly the most complicated scheme in the world. Supermicro has conducted an internal investigation since the indictment and announced last week that no one on the current senior management team was aware of any such illicit activity, which might now be true since Liao and Chang are no longer working in Supermicro.
[00:08:24.700] - Chris
Technically correct.
[00:08:26.870] - Ned
The best kind of correct. Joining them are other employees who Supermicro found were derelict in their duties to enforce company policies and code of conduct, which is another way of saying they were helping with the smuggling. The report doesn't outright say that they fired employees who were involved in the smuggling scheme, but it doesn't take much to read between the lines. Supermicro has struggled financially in the past few years, and perhaps they were trying to cash in on the AI craze by selling GPUs to China under the table. It would appear they proceeded with the same level of security as they did with their BMC chips. That's callback, people. Net out.
[00:09:11.870] - Chris
Legendary Nintendo 64 game GoldenEye 100% decompiled after 5 years of effort.
[00:09:20.580] - Ned
Hmm.
[00:09:21.100] - Chris
Now, if you are of a certain age, you will remember the absolute game changer— pun intended? Sure! —that was the Nintendo 64. The Nintendo was awesome and some of the greatest games of all time were released for it, looking at you Tecmo Super Bowl, and the Super Nintendo had legendary games like the original Starflok— Starflox? Starflox! I'm leaving it. And Pilotwings. But the Nintendo 64 was a massive step up, and if you had one, you likely had it for One of three reasons: Mario Kart, Ocarina of Time, and/or GoldenEye. Not necessarily in that order. GoldenEye was an epochal release, which I hope is the right use of that word because I like the word. It had a story mode or whatever, probably. I don't actually know. Uh, what it definitely had was multiplayer mode. Mm-hmm. Far and away the best one available at the time. It made and destroyed friendships, sometimes in the same night. It was that important. Time, of course, marches on, and the multiplayer universe eventually did surpass what GoldenEye had to offer. But time also doesn't march on. Mm-hmm. More than a few people still have incredibly fond memories of the game and would like to replay it.
[00:10:55.820] - Chris
One of those people goes by the name ColdFusion, which is spelled so horrifically I don't even have a zinger about it. And after 5 years, KF announced that GoldenEye was 100% decompiled. This means painstakingly reverse engineering every single compiled function in the game back into human-readable source code that can then be recompiled to get a byte-for-byte identical copy of the original ROM. This is not just modding a game via, like, hex manipulators. The possibilities are now kind of endless. New ports are definitely on the table, but also modifications. New levels, new maps, new costumes, probably nudity. Let's be honest. Almost definitely nudity. Leisure Suit GoldenEye? Who says no? Not I. I am sure there will be an online version as well, which will be fun. I for one am looking forward to get completely destroyed by foul-mouthed 12-year-olds in Golden Gun 4-player mode, which actually, come to think about it, is actually exactly how it went for me when the game was first released.
[00:12:12.180] - Ned
Taxation is theft, and so is abusing utility pricing, stealing water, and taking subsidies. Data centers have become an increasingly unpopular topic in the media, and that's probably because they aren't great for the environment, for the surrounding area, or for people's health. Seriously, check out the Ben Jordan video on how data centers can act like acoustic weapons. It's super creepy. One serious strain data centers apply is to the power grid. Those CPUs, GPUs, and fans are hungry beasts that need to be fed delicious, delicious electricity. So much so that data center size is measured in how many watts the data center will consume. Utilities need to reinvest to keep the lights on, as it were, and data centers are driving up costs while not giving enough back to keep up with demand. To that end, there is a federal bill introduced by Representative Andrea Salinas of Oregon that would impose a federal tax on electricity used by data centers. Called the Data Center Community Reinvestment Act of 2026, the bill would impose consumption taxes of 1 cent per kilowatt on data centers. Oh, and that is only for data centers that have 1 megawatt of capacity or more.
[00:13:31.680] - Ned
Her office estimates the tax could pull in $1.76 billion annually. That's a lot of pennies. Where would that money go? It would be split evenly across 5 government programs: Land and Water Conservation Fund, Housing and Trust Fund, Hazardous Substance Superfund, Highway Trust Fund, and Energy Technology Trust Fund. The bill is currently in committee and being actively discussed. While I doubt it has a snowball's chance in hell of passing before the midterm elections, depending on how November goes, we might see this surge back in January 2027.
[00:14:10.210] - Chris
Like a power surge. Ah, you got it. I get jokes. Spaghetti mystery, which is a great title. I should have just stopped there. Spaghetti mystery that vexed Richard Feynman was finally solved by a guy called Norbert. Now, just so everyone's aware, this story actually happened in 2018, which is not this year, but I just found out about it now. So you get to go along for this very exciting and somewhat delicious ride.
[00:14:46.530] - Ned
I also kind of wish it was 2018.
[00:14:49.070] - Chris
We were so young then. Ah, okay. So here's a fun fact. If you a standard human person, take a single strand of dry spaghetti and bend it with your two little human hands until it breaks, it will break into more than two pieces. Every. Single. Time. You, a normal human person, literally cannot break the spaghetti in such a fashion as to just end up with two pieces, one in each hand. The only way us normies can even approximate it is if we bunch the spaghetti all up like in your fists and break it all at once. But even then, a lot of them are still going to break into more than 2 pieces.
[00:15:38.330] - Ned
But why though? It's God's punishment for being a heathen that breaks your spaghetti in half.
[00:15:46.220] - Chris
The mystery has been around for ages, with Richard Feynman, the only physicist most of us have ever heard of outside of Einstein, Oppenheimer, and maybe Brian Cox. Feynman reportedly spent an entire evening trying to, no pun intended, crack this one. Fed up, okay, that pun was intended, with the lack of progress, a team of MIT mathematicians, Richard Heisser, Vishal Patil, Norbert Stoop, Emmanuel Villermo, and Jörn Dunkel, ended up building a whole-ass machine that can in fact break the spaghetti in two. Every single time. The solution to the problem was pretty simple. In short, the breaking of the dry spaghetti causes a violent snapback that sends a shockwave back down the remaining halves of the noodle. It's just too much energy. Something else is gonna break. Mm-hmm. So the solution, these mathematicers— let's go with that— it's technical. What they did was build a machine that twists the spaghetti 3/4 of the way around and then bend it. So you've got the— you've got the spaghetti twisted, and when you break it, the untwisting counteracts a little bit of the shockwave. Not all of it, but enough that the two pieces don't break a second time.
[00:17:21.440] - Chris
So there you have it. A physics mystery that had been around for decades that I had never heard of until like a day ago, solved by some of the finest scientific minds and a custom spaghetti-breaking machine. And people say there's no more fun in science.
[00:17:42.270] - Ned
I'm genuinely excited about this. I hope you are too. Hey, thanks for listening or something. I guess you found it worthwhile enough if you made it all the way to the end. So congratulations to you, friend. You accomplished something today. Now you can go into your kitchen, find some spaghetti, twist it 3/4 of the way, and break it in half like a champion. You've earned it. You can find more about the show by visiting our website, chaoslever.com, where you'll find show notes, blog posts, and general tomfoolery. Please take a moment to subscribe to our YouTube channel, which is also named Chaos Lever. Look at us being shockingly consistent. We'll be back next week to see what fresh hell is upon us. Ta-ta for now.