Eric Edwards

Father, Lawyer, Banker, political junkie. Boilermaker 🚂

[keepitquarterly @keepitquarterly]

SEC Rule S7-2026-15 would let public companies hide bad numbers for six months at a time. Insiders dump their shares before disclosure, retail buys the bag. Comment is open until early July.

[Alex Prompter @alex_verem]

What timeline are we on man.

There’s a $60 million UFC cage on the White House lawn for the president’s 80th birthday. 125,000 guests. 494 port-a-potties. He compared it to the Eiffel Tower and said maybe they’ll never take it down.

The world’s first trillionaire was minted yesterday. SpaceX IPO. One person now holds more wealth than the GDP of most countries.

The government is negotiating to own a piece of OpenAI. The CEO walked into the White House and pitched it himself. They’re calling it a Public Wealth Fund.

That same government killed OpenAI’s biggest competitor’s models on a Friday night. The reason? A verbal jailbreak claim from an unnamed company. The same jailbreak works on OpenAI’s models. Nobody touched them.

The competitor got blacklisted by the Pentagon four months ago. Their crime? Refusing to let the military use their AI for mass surveillance of American citizens. A judge called it retaliation. The Pentagon did it anyway.

Both AI companies filed to go public in the same two-week window. Both targeting trillion-dollar valuations. One has a government equity deal in progress. The other can’t keep its products online.

The engineers who built the banned models can’t use them anymore. Because of their passports.

And an AI company that spent thousands of hours cooperating with government safety testing got punished harder than any company that didn’t bother.

UFC on the White House lawn. A trillionaire. Government-owned AI. Export controls based on phone calls. Cage fights and trillion-dollar IPOs in the same news cycle.

Watch the film titled Idiocracy. That’s the timeline we’re on.

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

OTD in 1864: 100,000 men vanished overnight, and the greatest general of the age had no idea where they went. This might be the most underrated move of the Civil War.

Context: Grant had just spent ten days locked in trench warfare at Cold Harbor, Virginia, after a frontal assault on June 3 that cost him thousands of men in under an hour. He admitted it was the worst mistake of his career. The armies were so close that soldiers could not lift their heads above the dirt in daylight.

Everyone, including Lee, expected Grant to do what every Union commander before him did after a bloody repulse: retreat north and regroup.

Instead, on the night of June 12, Grant did something audacious. He pulled the entire Army of the Potomac out of trenches that were in some places only yards from Confederate lines. No bugles, no fires, wheels muffled. By morning the Union trenches were empty and Lee's scouts found nothing but abandoned earthworks.

The army marched south, away from Richmond, which made no sense to Confederate observers. Then Union engineers did something almost nobody thought possible: they threw a pontoon bridge across the James River, roughly 2,100 feet of it, over water up to 85 feet deep with a four-foot tidal swing. They built it in about eight hours. It was one of the longest floating bridges in military history.

For three full days Lee was effectively blind, unsure whether Grant was north or south of the James. By the time the picture cleared, Grant's army was across the river attacking Petersburg, the rail hub that fed Richmond.

The siege that followed lasted nine months and ended with Lee's surrender at Appomattox.

Everyone remembers Cold Harbor as Grant's worst day. Almost nobody remembers that one week later he pulled off the maneuver that won the war.

[Kai @kai_xbt]

Good Alexander reveals he believes the US government is intervening directly in the stock market

"I'll make a controversial take that we can play in the future, I believe there's been intervention in US equities and equity futures, and I think Scott Bessent is actively involved. If you've traded war markets like Ukraine or Covid, you get a gappy market, there's not a guy showing up buying the dip in massive size during geopolitical escalation. That's exactly what's happening now."

"It's probably Scott Bessent who was trained by Stan Druckenmiller, who said he likes it when markets don't go down on bad news. So it's probably literally Bessent buying unlimited S&P futures so we can't go down on any bad news. We'll see in a couple years, I think there'll be investigations into this period."

[Anthony Scaramucci @Scaramucci]

Run down the checklist of everything Vladimir Putin would want an American president to do.

-Go after our allies.
-Praise our adversaries.
-Unsanction Russian oil
-Pull 5,000 troops out of Germany.

Trump is doing every single thing on that list.

His tariffs are illegal and the war in Iran can’t seem to end.

That’s the scorecard. Make of it what you will.

[QE Infinity @StealthQE4]

Great analogy:

Forget worrying about a recession, the economy has already died for most people.

[Anthony Scaramucci @Scaramucci]

My dad was a crane operator, earned union wages, putting in the time, and felt pretty good about himself.

He wasn’t Jeff Bezos, but his kids were going to do better than him.

That was the deal in the US and he believed in it.

When you feel that way, you’re basically agnostic to immigration.

But when you’re in decline, when the affordability crisis has you missing mortgage payments, skipping the dentist, watching your kids fall behind where you were at their age, the immigrants become the threat.

Not because they actually are, but because fear needs somewhere to land.

That’s not racism. That’s economics.

Fix the economics and you fix a lot of the rest.

[Backstage @Backstagebs1]

The fact that “Baba O’Reilly” was created by a simple switch on an analog organ is just so fucking cool.

always assumed it was a synth patch. Human creativity and analog gear will always remain undefeated

[History Knowledge @historyvidos]

26 year olds today: "my anxiety is high, I am overwhelmed by my email job"

26 year olds in 1944:

[Dave Collum @DavidBCollum]

OpenAI attempting to get Federal backstops because the entire system is run by psychopaths who think we are all retards and won't raise a ruckus.

https://t.co/zMdk331be4

[Heidi Blake @HeidilBlake]

For the past 9 months, I've been investigating Andrew Tate's empire of sexual exploitation — drawing on thousands of private messages and sealed court files, as well as interviews with the Tates, their associates & more than a dozen alleged victims. Here's what I found: https://t.co/q1L65EVG1O

[Big Brain AI @realBigBrainAI]

Bestselling novelist David Baldacci on how AI companies deliberately stole every book and academic paper published in the last 70 years:

Baldacci is a named plaintiff in a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in the Southern District of New York, alongside John Grisham, Scott Turow, George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult, and Jonathan Franzen.
They're also representing roughly 60,000 unnamed plaintiffs.

He explains how AI companies arrived at novels as the key ingredient for building superintelligence:

"The AI community searched the world. How do you create superintelligence? They tried everything to try to figure out, how do you do this? They fed dictionaries into it. They did lots of stuff. They finally found the only way to create super intelligence that they needed was to feed novels into the large language models. Novels worked, finished products of storytelling with characters and dialogue and research and events and interactions. That was their Holy Grail moment."

Baldacci points out the obvious path the AI companies could have taken —negotiating with the five major publishers, each of whom represents around 100,000 writers.

Instead, they chose theft. @davidbaldacci continues:

"They decided we're just going to steal them. I'm not saying anything out of school. They've admitted this. They got most of the books from a Russian pirate website where they would go and download the books from there. And they didn't even want their software programs to know they were stealing the books. So they had the software program that would scrape off the copyright page, scrape off the ISBN number on the back, and just download the book itself."

The scale is staggering.

Over the last eight or nine years, every book and every academic paper published in the last 70 years worldwide has been ingested into the large language models at Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta.

Baldacci testified about this on Capitol Hill in July.

He describes the personal toll of being a named plaintiff:

"I've had to give them all of my materials, all of my financial information I've had to give them, let them come in and do a complete scrape on all of my emails, all of my communications. I sat through a nine hour deposition like I've done something wrong. They said, yeah, we've taken your books, we haven't paid you a dime and we didn't ask your permission, but we should be entitled to do it because AI is so cool. That's basically their legal argument."

The parallel case against Anthropic in California has already settled for $1.5 billion, to be paid out over two years to 50,000 writers. The OpenAI and Microsoft case is now past discovery and heading toward a settlement conference.

[Hunter Biden @HunterBiden]

It’s so hard, but the thing my dad did for me was that he never let me go. As much as I tired to run I always knew he was waiting. And I know I tortured him. It still makes me cry to think about what I put him through. But I came back. And he was where he always was waiting to love me.

[Gaffar Yakınca @GaffarYakinca]

🇦🇱 Arnavutluk’un kuzeyinde silahlı çatışmalar çıktı.

Halk, ülkenin tek adası olan stratejik Sazan Adası’nın Trump’ın damadına verilmesine tepkili. Günlerdir süren protestolar sonunda silahlı çatışmaya dönüştü.

[Michael Warburton @For_Film_Fans]

Nearly all the extras in this iconic scene were French expatriates.

Their tears during the stirring rendition of La Marseillaise were genuine—
filmed at a time when the fate of France was still uncertain.

CASABLANCA (1942)

[Sophie Pedder @PedderSophie]

D-Day commemoration, Omaha Beach, June 6 2024

Zelensky arrived, the crowd applauded. And then this happened:

🇺🇸 veteran: You’re a saviour of the people

Zelensky: No, no, you saved Europe

🇺🇸 veteran: My hero

Zelensky: No, you are our hero

🇺🇸🇫🇷🇺🇦

[Voices of WW2 @VoicesofWW2]

June 5, 1944. 3:30am.

Eisenhower woke to howling wind and hard rain. At 4:15am, in a water-soaked tent, his meteorologist James Stagg told him: there's a 24-hour break in the storm coming. One window. Miss it, and the next date is June 19.

He had 5,000 ships and 160,000 men already moving toward France.

He said: "OK. Let's go."

That evening at 8:30pm, he drove to Greenham Common to stand among the paratroopers of the 101st Airborne. He had just been privately briefed they could expect 80% casualties. He didn't show it. He walked through the crowd, shaking hands, asking names, asking where men were from.

One soldier, Lt. Wallace Strobel, said Michigan.

Eisenhower smiled. "Oh, Michigan. I used to fish there. Great fishing in Michigan."

Witnesses said his eyes were wet when he got back in the car.

That night, alone, he wrote four sentences and stuffed the paper in his pocket:

"Our landings have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone."

He misdated it "July 5." His mind was somewhere else.

Meanwhile, across the Channel, Field Marshal Rommel was in his staff car rolling through Germany toward home. His wife Lucie was turning 50 tomorrow. He had brought her a pair of shoes from Paris.

The Germans had no Atlantic weather stations. Their meteorologists had told high command: no invasion is possible in this weather. Rommel genuinely believed they had weeks.

The paratroopers jumped at midnight.

[ZuritaCarpio @ZuritaCarpio]

🇦🇱 Cuarta noche de protestas en #Albania contra un megaproyecto turístico en reserva natural, vinculado a Jared Kushner e Ivanka Trump. Manifestantes exigen suspensión y defienden tierras albanesas.

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

It’s called INVESTOR FRAUD.

Google is buying GPUs from Nvidia through SpaceX to boost revenue IN ITS OWN INVESTMENT.

Google owns 5% of SpaceX.

It’s more circular bullshit financing to justify an INSANE valuation. These people are just stealing from us.

[Arbitrage Andy @ArbitrageAndy1]

26 year olds today: "my anxiety is high, I am overwhelmed by my email job"

26 year olds in 1944: