Paul Ridley

Designer, Reuse Campaigner, Director of Cabinz CIC, a UK social enterprise supporting reuse, repair, remanufacturing & reshoring

[Carole Cadwalladr @carolecadwalla]

Would dearly love to have been fly on wall in strategy meetings behind decision by brand Gwyneth Paltrow to shill for Israeli real estate company founded by Netanyahu’s mate accused of various securities frauds to flog a luxury block in the town named after the father of Zionism

[Bill Madden @maddenifico]

If pedophile protector Todd Blanche is confirmed as Attorney General, the amount of outrage is going to be like nothing we have seen before. There are 3 million pages of the Epstein files Blanche is illegally refusing to release due to one reason: Trump raped children for fun.

[Clive Lewis MP @labourlewis]

When we've lost control of the basics of life - water, housing, energy - it's clear the system is not working.

Governments are being forced to spend more and more money tackling the day-to-day failings of this failed economic model.

The solution? More investment and public control over those basics of life.

I spoke about this on Peston last night.

[Luz Mery Ramírez @MeryLuz21226]

El Dr. Nathan dedicó 27 años a demostrar que el óxido nítrico cura el Alzheimer, controla la erección y retrasa el envejecimiento.

En el podcast de DAOC, reveló cómo es la "molécula de la vida" que tu cuerpo, corazón y cerebro necesitan para sobrevivir:

1. Respira por la nariz.

[Charly Wargnier @DataChaz]

Hands down the absolute best Claude Cowork tutorial you’ll watch in under 25 minutes!

Made by Tina Huang (@hellotinah), former Meta data scientist turned content creator 👇

[The Free Speech Union @SpeechUnion]

Watch our General Secretary Lord Young ask Baroness Lloyd how the Government plans to safeguard against the obvious risk of requiring technology companies like Apple to scan private messages before they're received or sent — what's known as client-side scanning?

History teaches us that that mass surveillance and censorship capabilities, however well intentioned, never remain narrowly scoped.

Watch Lord Young below 👇

[Jim Stewartson, Decelerationist 🇨🇦🇺🇦🇺🇸 @jimstewartson]

If you’re looking for an explanation for how Trump got elected, it’s the same mechanism that makes people think irrational shit like chatbots are conscious or SpaceX is worth $2T.

Psyops. Elon Musk is a conman who learned from Peter Thiel you can change people’s brains through social media. That’s why Musk bought Twitter and turned it into a platform for personal aggrandizement, white supremacist propaganda, and organized psychological warfare.

That’s how Trump ran the table in ‘24: Elon Musk targeted exactly the demographics he needed to—on Twitter. It’s Cambridge Analytica on steroids, applied to a captured population.

This is also why there is a literal cult of AI promoters right now. Musk is deliberately programming the population to buy into the worst bubble in the history of the world—for exit liquidity.

This is what Thiel meant when he said “technology is this great alternative to politics.” He actually meant “we can use technology to take away freewill.” Musk is now applying this process to his own personal wealth.

America is being brainwashed at scale by a small group of elites.
They must be stopped and their tentacles totally rooted out. And our system must drastically change to prevent a relapse.

This is the great challenge of our time: Can we recognize the true source of our dysfunction—organized digital lying by elites—and do something about it?

[Muhammad Mazen @mhmd_s09]

One of the most brutal scenes in human history has been leaked.

The moment the tents of displaced people were bombed in the southern Gaza Strip, in the Mawasi area of ​​Khan Yunis, killing more than 500 civilians.

A video that the world must never forget.

[𝗱𝗮𝗻𝗻𝘆🫧💚 @beyoncegarden]

this is truly the nastiest read anyone in history has ever received😭

[Ali Grids @AliGrids]

No computer case has ever topped this.
The Mac Pro is a design masterpiece.

[Spencer Baggins @bigaiguy]

A teenager in the United States started publishing software at 14 in 1998, built the entire online infrastructure for the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, joined Google as a software engineer, quit in 2018, and then spent five years writing a C library that does something the entire industry said was impossible.

Then she combined it with llama.cpp and shipped the easiest way on the planet to run a large language model on any computer.

Her name is Justine Tunney.

Here is the story, because almost nobody outside the low level systems world knows what one engineer has built.

Justine was born in 1984. She started writing and publishing software at 14, back when distribution meant uploading binaries to BBS systems and chat networks. She picked up the handle jart, which she still uses on GitHub today. She did the work most teenagers her age were not doing. She read the systems programming literature. She studied compilers. She fell in love with C.

In July 2011 she registered the @occupywallst Twitter handle and the occupywallst dot org domain. Within weeks the protest movement that began in Zuccotti Park in New York had become a global phenomenon, and her infrastructure was the digital backbone of the entire thing. She handled the social media, the website, the donations, the coordination. She built the platform that pushed the movement to reach millions.

After Occupy she joined Google as a software engineer. She worked on TensorBoard, the visualization tool for TensorFlow, and on site reliability for Google infrastructure. She stayed for years. Then in 2018 she left Google Brain to work on a personal project.

The project was called Cosmopolitan Libc.

Cosmopolitan does something most C programmers would tell you is mathematically impossible. It lets you compile a C program once and have the resulting binary run natively on Linux, Windows, macOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD with no modification. One file. Six operating systems. No virtual machines. No interpreters. No recompilation. The technique she invented is called Actually Portable Executable.

The implications are wild. Cosmopolitan binaries violate every assumption about how operating systems load programs. They are at once a Windows PE file, a Linux ELF binary, a macOS Mach-O binary, and a shell script. The same bytes run on every platform.

For five years she worked on it mostly alone. She funded the development partly through Mozilla's MIECO program, which sponsored her work on Cosmopolitan 3.0, released on October 31, 2023.

A month later she shipped llamafile.

llamafile is what happens when you combine Cosmopolitan with llama.cpp. You take any LLM weights file in the standard GGUF format, you wrap it in Justine's binary, and you get a single file that runs on six operating systems without installation. No Python. No CUDA setup. No dependency hell. Just one file that you double click and it works.

Mozilla launched it as an official project of their innovation group on November 29, 2023. It went viral immediately. The repository, hosted at github .com/mozilla-ai/llamafile, now has 24,600 stars. The license is Apache 2.0.

Justine kept shipping. She added GPU support to Cosmopolitan, a task systems engineers thought would require rewriting the whole thing. She added dlopen support, another thing nobody else had figured out. She wrote whisperfile, a single file version of OpenAI's Whisper speech-to-text model based on the same architecture.

Her GitHub profile lists projects most engineers would consider impossible. sectorlisp, a Lisp interpreter that fits in a boot sector. blink, the tiniest x86-64-linux emulator on Earth. bestline, a teletypewriter command session library. redbean, a complete web server inside a single zip file.

A teenager who shipped software in 1998 grew up to write the C library that the entire local AI movement now runs on top of.

She did most of it alone, and most people scrolling AI Twitter cannot name her.

[Millie Marconi @MillieMarconnni]

A British novelist whose father worked in a bank explained the entire 2008 financial crisis in a 272-page book that a 12-year-old can follow, and the part that should scare you is how simple the fraud was once he stripped the jargon off it.

His name is John Lanchester.

He is a novelist by trade. He writes for the London Review of Books and The New Yorker. He grew up in Hong Kong because his father worked at a bank there, which means he absorbed the language of finance the way most kids absorb the language of cartoons. By the time the 2008 crisis hit, he was one of the very few writers on earth who could speak both finance and English fluently.

He sat down and wrote a book called I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay.

In the UK it was published under the title Whoops! It came out in 2010. 272 pages. The reviews from financial journalists were almost embarrassed in their praise, because Lanchester had done in plain English what most of them had failed to do in years of professional coverage. He had actually explained what happened.

Here is the version a middle schooler can understand.

Step one. A bank gives a home loan to a person who clearly cannot pay it back. No real job. No savings. No way to make the monthly payments. The industry had a nickname for these loans. They called them NINJA loans. No Income. No Job. No Assets. The bank knew the person could not pay. The bank did not care.

Why did the bank not care?

Because the bank was not going to keep the loan.

Step two. The bank takes thousands of these loans, puts them in one giant pile, and sells the entire pile to a Wall Street firm. The Wall Street firm now owns the right to collect all those monthly payments. The original bank has been paid. Whether the homeowners actually pay or not is now someone else's problem.

Step three. The Wall Street firm takes the giant pile of loans and chops it into slices. They call the slices tranches. The top slice is supposed to be the safest because it gets paid first. The bottom slice is supposed to be the riskiest because it gets paid last. They give each slice a credit rating. The top slice gets stamped AAA, which is the highest rating you can get on earth. It is the rating used for the bonds of the United States government.

A pile of loans to people with no income and no job has just produced an investment product rated as safe as the United States government.

Step four is where the trick gets worse.

The bottom slices, the ones full of the riskiest loans, are hard to sell. Nobody wants junk. So the Wall Street firm takes the bottom slices from a hundred different piles, mixes them together into a new pile, and chops that new pile into new slices. And the top slice of this new pile, made entirely from the junk of the old piles, also gets stamped AAA.

This new product has a name. It is called a Collateralized Debt Obligation, or CDO.

A 12-year-old can see what is wrong here. You cannot take a hundred bags of garbage, dump them into one big bag, and then declare that the top of the big bag is now gold. The garbage is still garbage. The math does not change it.

But the people who ran the ratings agencies were not 12-year-olds. They were adults with finance degrees. And they stamped this stuff AAA over and over again because the Wall Street firms were paying them to do the stamping. The ratings agencies had become a paid service. The people they were rating were also the people writing their checks.

Step five. The Wall Street firms sell these AAA-rated CDOs to pension funds, foreign governments, insurance companies, and retirement accounts all over the world. Everyone buys them because the rating says they are safe.

Step six is the final trick.

Someone invents a product called a Credit Default Swap. It is insurance against a CDO going bad. The clever part, the part that Lanchester explains so well, is that you do not have to actually own the CDO to buy insurance on it. You can buy insurance on a CDO that belongs to someone else. You can buy insurance on a CDO ten times over. A hundred times over. There is no limit.

This is the equivalent of taking out fire insurance on your neighbor's house. And then on a thousand strangers' houses. And then betting against the entire neighborhood.

The smart people in the industry realized the CDOs were garbage. So they started buying credit default swaps against them. Not to protect themselves. To bet on the collapse.

Step seven was the part nobody planned for.

Housing prices stopped going up. The NINJA borrowers, who had been refinancing every year by using the rising value of their houses as collateral, suddenly could not refinance. They started missing payments. The bottom tranches of the CDOs started failing. Then the middle. Then the AAA tranches that had been declared safer than government bonds turned out to be made of the same garbage as the rest.

Then the insurance bills came due.

The biggest insurer in the world, AIG, had written hundreds of billions of dollars in credit default swaps on these CDOs. They did not have the money to pay. If AIG collapsed, every major bank on earth that had bought insurance from them would also collapse, because their "safe" CDOs would suddenly have no insurance. The American taxpayer ended up writing AIG a check for 182 billion dollars to keep the entire global financial system from falling apart.

The total damage of the crisis, by every honest estimate, runs into the trillions of dollars. Millions of people lost their homes. Millions lost their jobs. Almost nobody on Wall Street went to jail.

Here is the part Lanchester drives home in the final chapters, and the part you should not forget.

The fraud was not hidden in the math. The fraud was hidden in the complexity. Each individual step looked legitimate. Each individual product had a name, a rating, a paper trail. The reason nobody stopped it was that no single regulator, no single executive, no single auditor was forced to look at the entire chain from end to end. The garbage at the start and the AAA stamp at the end were separated by so many layers of paperwork that everyone could honestly say their specific layer looked fine.

Lanchester's central argument is the one that should haunt every person reading this in 2026.

Complexity is the disguise. Anytime a financial product is so complicated that the person selling it cannot explain it in 60 seconds, the complexity itself is the warning sign. The complexity is not protecting the customer. The complexity is hiding the fact that the customer is the product.

The 2008 crisis was not a failure of intelligence. It was a failure of plain language.

Almost every product on the market today that is being sold to retail investors, from leveraged ETFs to certain crypto derivatives to private credit funds, has the same structural pattern. Layered. Hard to explain. Stamped with an authoritative rating. And the people selling it can never quite tell you what is inside.

Which brings me to the question.

The next 2008 is already being built somewhere in the financial system right now.

Which industry, or which product, do you think is hiding the same trick under the same kind of complexity right now in 2026, and what makes you suspicious of it?

[Yero @Yerocode0]

Un chico de 14 años ha cerrado $20,500 en acuerdos de sitios web para barberías en 7 meses. Ni un solo dueño le ha preguntado nunca su edad.

Usa un movimiento que el resto del frío-llamadas en internet aún no ha descubierto. No vende. Comparte pantalla.

La llamada va así. Abre Google Maps. Escribe "barbershop". Encuentra una con 4.8 estrellas y sin sitio web. Construye un sitio demo limpio en Lovable en 4 minutos. Luego marca.

"Hola, noté que no tienes sitio web. Ya te construí uno. ¿Quieres verlo? Toma 30 segundos."

El dueño dice que sí. Comparte su pantalla. Servicios. Precios. Ubicación. Botón de reserva. Fotos reales sacadas del Instagram del dueño.

Dueño: "Oye, esto está realmente genial."

Él dice: "Puedo poner esto en vivo para ti esta semana."

Listo.

41 acuerdos. $500 cada uno. El 41º llegó porque el 40º le mostró el demo al hermano de su amigo y pasó el número.

Una agencia web real entra a la reunión con un portafolio. Él entra con la respuesta ya construida.

Hay 140 millones de negocios en Google Maps sin sitio web en este momento. El demo hace la venta. El chico es solo la pantalla.

Guarda esta publicación. El guion funciona a cualquier edad. Construye el demo antes de llamar.

[Tips&Tricks @_TipsTricks]

clever life hacks in daily life

[Ounka @OunkaOnX]

Greenwald just said the quiet part out loud: The US president wants to end a war. He can't. Because a foreign lobby - and a foreign government - have more power over American foreign policy than the American people, Congress, or the president himself

[Todd Spence @Todd_Spence]

In June 2000, Robin Williams sat down for a conversation with George Lucas for Robin's brief weekly interview show on audible. The episode was originally thirty minutes but below you'll find the entire raw recording from two different sessions, with discussions ranging from Marlon Brando as Jabba the Hutt, to Lucas asking if Robin would voice a CG Howard the Duck for a special edition of the '86 movie 👏 Really cool

[Dave Lee @daveleedwnundr]

OMG I've been trying to find this audio for 26 YEARS!!!

[engineer's world @bitejoi]

This tiny emergency tool fits in your wallet and can be a lifesaver .

[Bryan Johnson @bryan_johnson]

This is biblical.

A woman in her eighties. Ten years into Alzheimer's. Hadn't spoken a full sentence in five years.

Takes one, 5 gram dose of psilocybin.

She slept 19 hours and woke up and spoke for hours about her life, recognized family and held real conversations. She regained bladder control after five years, walked on her own. and dressed herself. Gains held for weeks.

[Craig Murray @CraigMurrayOrg]

The suspension of Karim Khan by the ICC is an entirely political Zionist move to cripple prosecutions of Israeli war criminals.

The 7 EU states on the 21 state Bureau voted en bloc to protect Israel as did Japan, South Korea, New Zealand and Latin American client states.