𝒶𝓁𝓅𝒽𝒶𝑔𝑒𝑒𝓀-𝒮𝓅𝒶𝒸𝑒𝒞𝑜𝓂𝓂𝓈𝒢𝓊𝓎🛰️🛜

An AlphaGeek is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.

[Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele]

BELL LABS

Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey opened in 1962 and quickly became one of the world's leading research centers.

Thousands of scientists and engineers worked here, helping develop technologies that shaped the modern world.

You are using dozens right this second.

I had the privilege as a kid to spend some of the 1970s in this place. I can’t put into words the electricity I felt each time I was there. It bristled with intellectual and engineering brilliance. It helped shape my research and experiment first, go to market later or never lifestyle for worse or for better (ask me in a few decades).

I met 100s of folks that just got paid to think. To just think about anything and build it or research it.

It was THIS and only this where generational shift changes take place.

None of the folks that tolerated my machine gun of questions had anything but love for thier life and what they did.

I have never been in a place like this since.

The best startups in the world hav pressure to go to market. Or prove to some committee. It was a moment when a forced monopoly caused a rip in the fabric of reality and made this model work. The funding and the thinking was to pay back humanity for the opportunity they were granted.

In my late teens I dated the daughter of the Chief Patent Attorney for Bell Labs and got super chanted on understanding the patents and how to find them in research libraries. This opened doors up to many opportunities in my life.

I got to see the future we live in today before Nixon was president.

We suffer from very short term thinking today and we suffer from the consequences of believing innovation only comes from a Stanford University dropout.

Before the government broke them into shattered pieces innovation was bubbling up by all ages and sexes one of the biggest was a goofy guy in his late 60s that owned no shoes and had a gray ZZ Top beard. He would take me from office to office and brainstorm. It apparently was his job. But I don’t think anyone had a proper title. He had no degree. But everyone stopped when he entered and in 29 minutes he would help solve the problem of the week.

I miss the promise and possibility.

I miss the many brilliant minds.

I miss this place.

[Yuval Noah Harari @harari_yuval]

We simply do not know what will be required by the job market in the coming decades. What matters most is the capacity to remain flexible, and to have a wide range of skills – intellectual, physical and social.

[Cogs of War @Cogs0fWar]

China doesn't need to beat America's AI. It just needs to write the rules everyone else has to follow. https://t.co/tNHNJfdvZE

[Rush Doshi @RushDoshi]

This is an interesting question. My take: I do not quite accept the notion that China did not seek to "weaponize" rare earths and instead stumbled into a position of advantage. For at least 16 years, and likely more, the purpose has been an economic weapon. This is not like, say, solar or EVs, where excess capacity is sort of an accident.

Here, for example, is a semi-authoritative book cited by @JohnF_Sullivan on rare earth strategy written in 2011 for the state China Economic Publishing House the year after the Japan situation:

"What magical quality do rare earths possess that makes the usually arrogant and domineering Americans so furious? What magical quality do rare earths posses that leaves the usually wealthy and arrogant Japanese grief-stricken? China is the only country in the world capable of supplying all 17 rare earth elements, particularly holding a larger share of heavy rare earths that have prominent uses in military applications. To change China’s international position in the rare earth industry, since 2009, the Chinese government has launched a vigorous rare earth defense war, adopting a series of rectification measures including suspending approval of mining rights, controlling total mining volume, reducing export quotas, raising export tariffs and and severely cracking down on rare earth smuggling."

A key purpose of these post-2009 steps, which PRECEDE China's weaponization against Japan in 2010, was to hone a better coercive instrument.

Then there is some empirical evidence suggesting PRC action in this sector was about leverage.

First, most obviously, China used this as a coercive instrument in 2010. That shows, for at least 16 years, they have understood it as a critical leverage point.

Second, China's government has for decades manipulated the price of rare earths to prevent anyone else from achieving scale - dropping the price to kill foreign investment. Why did they do this when they already had 90% market dominance? The logic is toward control, not profit, and it is not the result of disaggregated independent Chinese market actors (which do not exist in this sector).

Third, related to that point, if this industry operated on economic logic, we would probably see more fragmentation. Indeed, for a brief time, we did see that before 2010. But then the PRC sharply consolidated the rare earths industry into state-backed companies. They shut down, arrested, harassed, and outright expropriated private actors. This was partly to ensure greater state control over external flows - the better to maintain leverage. The quote above refers to that effort.

Fourth, I do not think China's controls on rare earth minerals were modeled off U.S. controls. For example, the October controls went far beyond any U.S. controls. China's idea was any product, anywhere in the world, with .1% value coming from Chinese produced rare earths, required a license to be sold to anyone else in the world. The closest analogy -- and Chinese scholars have said this directly -- is to U.S. financial sanctions, not export controls.

Fifth, this is not a case where "there are many different actors, and they often overperform in search of particular targets." The industry has for a long time just been a few actors, tied to the state, acting at the state's direction. China's cultivation of leadership in this sector dates back to the 1960s, accelerating in the 1980s, with direct involvement of Deng's family in the 1990s and Premier Wen in the 2000s.

The empirical evidence seems to indicate a conscious desire to dominate this sector. One can debate whether or not such an intention was justifiable given U.S. control over chokepoints like finance.

But I think it is hard to advance the claim this was just the independent action of market participants that happened to accidentally create a position of extreme concentration and dominance.

[Ashutosh Maheshwari @asmah2107]

The reading list that taught me how to think about agentic architecture.

Bookmark this.

1. Brewer's CAP Theorem (2000) — trade-off thinking
2. Netflix Hystrix docs — circuit breaker pattern
3. Martin Fowler: Saga Pattern — distributed rollback
4. The Twelve-Factor App — stateless service design
5. AWS Well-Architected Framework — blast radius thinking
6. "Thinking in Systems" — Donella Meadows
7. Designing Data-Intensive Applications — Kleppmann
8. Google SRE Book Ch.13 — cascading failures
9. OWASP LLM Top 10 (2025) — agent attack surfaces
10. Anthropic: Building Effective Agents (2024)
11. LangGraph docs — stateful agent patterns
12. Microsoft AutoGen paper — multi-agent orchestration
13. Gartner: Agentic AI Hype Cycle (2025)
14. EU AI Act Article 14 — human oversight requirements

Classic distributed systems stuff.
Applied to the next layer of the stack.

Follow for annotated breakdowns →
@asmah2107

[Thierry from arvy 🇨🇭 @ThierryBorgeat]

🚨 We may be looking at the rarest market setup in 50 years.

The S&P 500's four historic drawdowns since 1972:
– 1973 Inflation: -43%
– 1987 Liquidity: -30%
– 2000 Tech: -47%
– 2008 Credit: -55%

Each one was driven by ONE dominant risk.

Right now, all four are present at the same time.

1. INFLATION
A commodity supercycle. Energy, metals, agriculture all in multi-year base breakouts. The Fed's preferred inflation gauge has been above 2% for 18 of the last 24 months.

2. LIQUIDITY
The largest equity supply shock since 2000. SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic raising ~$275B combined. Google flipping from $60B/year buybacks to $80B net issuance. Over $1 trillion of IPO and lockup supply hitting the Russell 3000 in 2026.

3. TECH
Semiconductors trading 73% above their 200-day moving average – the largest stretch since March 2000. Climax run signals across the AI complex. Micron, Palantir, SMCI, the SOX index, all showing the textbook O'Neil sell pattern.

4. CREDIT
Apollo, KKR, BlackRock, Blue Owl, Cliffwater, Partners Group – all gating redemptions on their evergreen funds in the last 90 days. The private credit machine is freezing in real time.

Never in 50 years have all four risks been simultaneously present.

But here's the part nobody talks about

While the AI Big 10 has gone vertical, quality stocks have been left for dead.

– Berkshire Hathaway: trailing the S&P 500 by hundreds of basis points
– Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Pepsi: trading at multi-year relative lows
– HEICO, Union Pacific, MSCI: making boring new highs while everyone watches Nvidia
– Healthcare vs. S&P 500: 25-year relative low

The last time this happened?

December 1999. Barron's ran a cover titled "What's Wrong, Warren?" – mocking Buffett for being a dinosaur, for missing the internet, for refusing to pay for growth at any price.

Berkshire was down 19% in 1999 while the Nasdaq was up 85%.

What followed:
– Berkshire +29% over the next 24 months
– Nasdaq -78% over the next 30 months

The setup today

Four historic risks stacked simultaneously, while the boring, durable, cash-flowing businesses that always survive these regimes have been treated like dead money for years.

The math doesn't get more asymmetric than this.

Quality stocks aren't out of style.

They're being orphaned.

That's when generational positions are built.

The boring stuff hasn't worked for a long time.

History suggests that's exactly the moment it starts to.

[Cointelegraph @Cointelegraph]

🔥 BIG: Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, and Coinbase are forming a consortium to launch a new stablecoin to rival Circle and Tether, per The Information.

[Tom Warren @tomwarren]

Microsoft is announcing a Surface mini PC today for developers. The Surface RTX Spark Dev Box has Nvidia’s new Arm chip inside and 128GB of memory, and arrives later this year. Full details 👇https://t.co/feQCXisZhY

[Future Spaces @SpacesFuture]

↕️ 333 in 13 Amazon LEO Launches

197 in LA8
72 in LF3
64 in LE2
~LV0
~LN0
__
^https://t.co/SD1QkAoBCP
🔠

[Future Spaces @SpacesFuture]

↕️ #LV1 Amazon LEO on its First Vulcan LVOS with LEO Optimized Centaur V at VIF-A
__
'https://t.co/sYORCYyYEs
"https://t.co/Chp5ffKZFj
¹²https://t.co/jSy6L53Lre
¹🖼️

[Dan Blumberg @dblums]

"This is the greatest time to be alive — if you actually want to understand something."

@Google @NotebookLM co-founder @stevenbjohnson
on using AI as a second brain, creating the ultimate researcher, and the power of "cognitive uploading."

New FAFO: https://t.co/h5ou7KBf33

[Danny that Guy @DannythatGuy]

MTN says it wants to use its cell towers as a distributed AI computing grid. What does that even mean?
MTB Group CTIO Charles Molapisi said they want to replace the hardware at every tower with GPU’s, which could completely change how AI works in Africa.
The #AfricaTechKin on @ZiFMStereo , full show on link in bio.
#africa #tech #southafrica #mtn

[Balaji @balajis]

Yes. A few miscellaneous thoughts.

(1) First, the new bottleneck on AI is prompting and verifying. Since AI does tasks middle-to-middle, not end-to-end. So business spend migrates towards the edges of prompting and verifying, even as AI speeds up the middle.

(2) Second, AI really means amplified intelligence, not agentic intelligence. The smarter you are, the smarter the AI is. Better writers are better prompters.

(3) Third, AI doesn’t really take your job, it allows you to do any job. Because it allows you to be a passable UX designer, a decent SFX animator, and so on. But it doesn’t necessarily mean you can do that job *well*, as a specialist is often needed for polish.

(4) Fourth, AI doesn’t take your job, it takes the job of the previous AI. For example: Midjourney took Stable Diffusion’s job. GPT-4 took GPT-3’s job. Once you have a slot in your workflow for AI image gen, AI code gen, or the like, you just allocate that spend to the latest model.

(5) Fifth, killer AI is already here — and it’s called drones. And every country is pursuing it. So it’s not the image generators and chatbots one needs to worry about.

(6) Sixth, decentralized AI is already here and it’s essentially polytheistic AI (many strong models) rather than monotheistic AI (a single all-powerful model). That means balance of power between human/AI fusions rather than a single dominant AI that will turn us all into paperclips/pillars of salt.

(7) Seventh, AI is probabilistic while crypto is deterministic. So crypto can constrain AI. For example, AI can break captchas, but it can’t fake onchain balances. And it can solve some equations, but not cryptographic equations. Thus, crypto is roughly what AI can’t do.

(8) Eighth, I think AI on the whole right now is having a decentralizing effect, because there is so much more a small team can do with the right tooling, and because so many high quality open source models are coming.

All this could change if self-prompting, self-verifying, and self-replicating AI in the physical world really gets going. But there are open research questions between here and there.

[𝒶𝓁𝓅𝒽𝒶𝑔𝑒𝑒𝓀-𝒮𝓅𝒶𝒸𝑒𝒞𝑜𝓂𝓂𝓈𝒢𝓊𝓎🛰️🛜 @AlphaGeekAnish]

What parents should know about AI and their kids https://t.co/NnRPMJtmCZ via @markwschaefer

[𝒶𝓁𝓅𝒽𝒶𝑔𝑒𝑒𝓀-𝒮𝓅𝒶𝒸𝑒𝒞𝑜𝓂𝓂𝓈𝒢𝓊𝓎🛰️🛜 @AlphaGeekAnish]

https://t.co/fJ5bIOSOaL
The ETSI TS 104 033 specification, as it is called, is supposed to provide a “systematic security baseline” for the computing platforms that host AI model training and inference.

[𝒶𝓁𝓅𝒽𝒶𝑔𝑒𝑒𝓀-𝒮𝓅𝒶𝒸𝑒𝒞𝑜𝓂𝓂𝓈𝒢𝓊𝓎🛰️🛜 @AlphaGeekAnish]

A pair of American satellites built to catch the Soviets cheating on a nuclear test ban kept detecting unexplained flashes, and the flashes turned out to be the most powerful explosions in the universe coming from billions of light-years away https://t.co/5uQlsHFTFg

[𝒶𝓁𝓅𝒽𝒶𝑔𝑒𝑒𝓀-𝒮𝓅𝒶𝒸𝑒𝒞𝑜𝓂𝓂𝓈𝒢𝓊𝓎🛰️🛜 @AlphaGeekAnish]

The real AI https://t.co/MInt8JrGjS

[¿Por qué es Tendencia? @porktendencia]

"Blue Origin":
Por la explosión de su cohete New Glenn mientras comenzaba una prueba de encendido estático

[Paul Wilhelm @bearcat_pilot]

@SawyerMerritt Not just for Blue Origin. It is a massive setback for Artemis -- US and partners' aspirations.

[𝒶𝓁𝓅𝒽𝒶𝑔𝑒𝑒𝓀-𝒮𝓅𝒶𝒸𝑒𝒞𝑜𝓂𝓂𝓈𝒢𝓊𝓎🛰️🛜 @AlphaGeekAnish]

The SpaceX IPO and Data Centers in Space https://t.co/kuX7QRI0dT via @stratechery