Flatiron Hobbit

American Dynamism 🇺🇸 🇮🇪 Halo 2 Legendary Campaign Survivor ⚔️ ex-europoor, language enthusiast

[Flatiron Hobbit @FillboBiddins]

@VitalikButerin @ethereumfndn @aerugoettinea Small typo:

"*Available chain consensus. Ethereum is, and with lean consensus will *cotninue* to be..."

[Palmer Luckey @PalmerLuckey]

Anduril is so much cooler than people think Anduril is cool. You think Anduril is cool? Okay. Wait till you see the products we haven't even started to hint at.

Half a dozen game-changers in their own right, each of which could easily be a $1B+ startup on their own.

[Silicon Carne @siliconcarnesf]

Tesla vient d'allumer à Corpus Christi (çà ne s'invente pas...) la première raffinerie majeure de lithium des États-Unis, et ce qui me frappe n'est pas le made in USA. C'est que Musk a balancé l'approche standard à la poubelle pour repenser entièrement le procédé from scratch.

La raffinerie tourne sans acide sulfurique. Six étapes au lieu de huit à douze, un million de véhicules électriques par an en capacité nominale, 50 GWh à terme. Pas de sulfate de sodium toxique à gérer derrière, juste un résidu minéral quasi inerte qu'ils appellent analcime. Sur le papier ça sent le storytelling, sauf que l'usine tourne vraiment depuis janvier et que l'investissement a dépassé le milliard de dollars.

C'est la réponse industrielle à quinze ans de dépendance chinoise sur le raffinage. La Chine contrôle la majorité du lithium raffiné mondial, pas parce qu'elle a les gisements, mais parce qu'elle a absorbé les externalités environnementales qu'aucune boîte occidentale ne voulait assumer. Tesla prouve qu'on peut contourner le problème au lieu de le subventionner.

[Palantir @PalantirTech]

Because we get asked a lot.

The Technological Republic, in brief.

1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.

2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible.

3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public.

4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.

6. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.

7. If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm’s way.

8. Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.

9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.

10. The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed.

11. Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.

12. The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.

13. No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet.

14. American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war.

15. The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia.

16. We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . . Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn.

17. Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives.

18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.

19. The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all.

20. The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.

21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.

22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

Excerpts from the #1 New York Times Bestseller The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, by Alexander C. Karp & Nicholas W. Zamiska

https://t.co/8igjazz1On

[brian @bdguan]

just spent 2 weeks in china. went into it thinking we're cooked. came back more bullish on america than ever. here's why:

1. chinese citizens are way more chronically online. on the subway, train, anywhere, literally everyone is glued to their phone. gaming, short form, wechat. "don't walk and look at your phone, it's dangerous!" announcements flood crowded areas. their tiktok isn't any better, its still garbage, soft-core porn, etc.

2. everyone's using AI — deepseek, kimi, doubao. but nobody's afraid of losing their job to it. here it feels like there's an existential crisis every week. in china, nothing. i think the CCP won't let companies mass-layoff workers. great for short-term stability. terrible for long-term competitiveness on a global scale.

3. china doesn't produce weirdos. i sat in on a class at tsinghua (china's MIT). not one student spoke unless the professor read their name out loud. no questions. no debate. chinese education produces world-class executors, not contrarians. it does make it a safer place to live though.

4. china doesn't have christianity but it has something america doesn't have: a shared story everyone believes in. every person age 25-70 watched their country go from abject poverty to skyscrapers in one lifetime. that kind of collective proof has a deep unifying effect. compare that to how divided we are right now. america has a huge meaning vacuum that needs to be filled.

nevertheless, i return back to my home in america reinvigorated. because everything i saw confirms one thing: china optimizes. america innovates. and the innovators always win.

[Palmer Luckey @PalmerLuckey]

The real bank for real Americans doing real things!

The cutting-edge business model is based on next-gen concepts like "don't let your client's money disappear", "care at all about national security", and most importantly, "the market sometimes goes down".

[Citrini @citrini]

Strait of Hormuz: A CitriniResearch Field Trip

The Field Report from Analyst #3 is live.

https://t.co/rwJffd8l81

[colin @bonyromo]

None of us are going to heaven

[cartoon.the🦄.eth @cartoonitunes]

I’ve been reverse engineering Ethereum’s first contracts.

Recently I did a deep scan of all 12,609 contracts deployed during the Frontier era and found 1,650 still holding ETH, totaling over 38,000 $ETH (~$80M at current prices) locked in contracts.

🧵

[DCinvestor @DCinvestor]

the Chair of the SEC, folks

[Air Katakana @airkatakana]

when learning a language what you need to do is quite literally memorize a large chunk of the dictionary, and many people are not willing to do this for obvious reasons

[pk @pk79z]

I don't think anyone in CT will ever eclipse the aura of this tweet.

Fully hedged a 20 million USD bet with 72 cents.

[Uttam @uttam_singhk]

me vibing with random strangers i met 30 min ago at a crypto conference side event

[Stani @StaniKulechov]

Aave Labs is proud to donate to Trinity College Dublin, making it the first crypto donation to an Irish university and helping support the local community.

[chibie.eth @stchibie]

met this dude in church,

me: i’m here in buenos for a crypto conference, you use crypto?

him: nah, i have zero knowledge about it.

me:

[Neeraj K. Agrawal @NeerajKA]

A group of everyday Americans was forced to learn how Ethereum works and this was the result

[Bridget @bridge__harris]

The four most important charts in crypto:

- Stablecoin supply ($308B)
- Polymarket volume ($3B in Oct)
- Perp volume ($1.3T in Oct)
- Aave vs banks ($60B in AUM)

[Morgan Barrett @MorganBarrettX]

I love how Palmer lucky just showed up to Joe Rogan and talked about exactly what he wanted

Peter Thiel fell into the trap of being polite to Joe and ended up sitting through a 45 minute explanation of why the Pyramids were actually a power plant