David Veksler ₿🔑👌

Bitcoin advocate. Cypherpunk. Liberty maximalist. Ex-Ukrainian. Enemy of fiat money, fiat food, fiat education.

[David Veksler ₿🔑👌 @HeroicLife]

It is a crime that you need to have an opinion on Bitcoin.
If the government did not steal your savings through inflation, you could focus on your career, let your savings grow, and ignore the pet projects of a cult of cypherpunks.

[David Veksler ₿🔑👌 @HeroicLife]

Nobody credits the compiler because it's deterministic and provably correct. You never read what it emits because you don't have to. AI's the opposite -- you have to read and validate the output, which Torvalds himself admits. A compiler earned invisibility by being trustworthy. AI hasn't, and that's the whole disanalogy.

[David Veksler ₿🔑👌 @HeroicLife]

For a decade, Bitcoin was the cleanest public-market bet on a digital future. Internet-native money, an exit from fiat, fixed supply against open-ended monetary expansion, technological inevitability priced into one liquid asset. If you wanted asymmetric exposure to where technology was headed, Bitcoin was the proxy you could actually buy.

AI took that role. The marginal serious dollar now has better targets: chips, compute, energy, data centers, model labs, and the incumbents repricing around all of it. Public investors get there through Nvidia, Microsoft, TSMC, Broadcom, and the power and data-center buildout. Private capital chases the labs directly. Bitcoin still has liquidity, brand, and ETF access. It is no longer the default vehicle for that bet.

That reshapes its market structure. Frontier-risk institutional capital flows toward productivity and compute scarcity, where upside ties to cash flows and productive output. Bitcoin offers neither. Retail speculation doesn't disappear — it intensifies. People locked out of private AI upside keep chasing convexity, mostly in altcoins, because that's where the lottery tickets are. But retail convexity-chasing is not a deep institutional bull market. Altcoin rallies start to look like artifacts of liquidity cycles rather than the center of capital formation.

The bear case usually stops there and calls Bitcoin demoted. It misreads which thesis is dying. AI displaces the narrative thesis — Bitcoin as the flagship speculative bet on the future. That thesis is probably done. But it was never the durable one. The durable case was always monetary: neutral reserve collateral, censorship-resistant settlement, a hedge against sovereign debt and debasement, eventually a bearer asset an agent economy might need. None of that depends on Bitcoin winning the future-tech narrative. The narrative was a tailwind, not the foundation.

So Bitcoin isn't dead. It's demoted from owning the future to a narrower, harder job: proving it's money. That's a worse story and a cleaner test. The speculative capital that came for technological inevitability is leaving for AI, and good — it was never the demand that mattered. What's left has to believe Bitcoin is money. We're about to find out how much of it ever did.

[David Veksler ₿🔑👌 @HeroicLife]

A lot of secular parents think they're teaching their kids science when they feed them dinosaur trivia. Mostly they're reproducing the intellectual structure of creationism with the Bible removed.

Here is the tyrannosaur, magnificent in its design. Here is the triceratops, magnificent in its design. Here is the stegosaurus, magnificent in its design. Memorize the names. Admire the features. Buy the plastic figures.

What's missing is the unifying idea of biology: evolution.

The problem isn't that dinosaurs are boring or unscientific. They're fascinating, paleontology is real science, and fossils are real evidence. The problem is that most child-facing dinosaur content doesn't teach kids to think biologically. It teaches them to collect facts about spectacular creatures. This one had horns. This one had armor. This one had a club tail. This one would win in a fight. That's not Darwin. That's a bestiary.

And dinosaurs are uniquely suited to the bestiary treatment, because a child can't observe them. He can't watch a velociraptor hunt, compare variation across a population of stegosaurs, or test a hypothesis about sauropod behavior. He receives authoritative reconstructions from books, toys, museums, and movies, and takes them on faith. The mode of engagement is admiration of received marvels. Which is exactly the creationist mode.

Real biology, by contrast, is everywhere and observable. The pigeons on the sidewalk are living dinosaurs — you can watch them eat, fight, mate, and raise young. The ants on the patio run a society you can disrupt and study. The dog asleep on the floor is a case study in domestication, artificial selection, inheritance, and adaptation to human environments. The weeds in the driveway are competition and dispersal in real time. None of this is a consolation prize for not having a T. rex. It's the living evidence dinosaurs can only point at.

So the secular parent proudly rejects creationism, then teaches life as a catalog of separate amazing creatures with special features to memorize and admire. That's the creationist habit of mind, stripped of God.

Dinosaurs can be a bridge to the real thing — common descent, adaptation, tradeoffs, ecosystems, evidence, uncertainty. But the bridge usually goes uncrossed. The kid gets the names, the sizes, the weapons, the rankings, and the merchandise, and never gets the one idea that makes any of it make sense.

The better starting point isn't "look at these extinct monsters." It's "look at the pigeon on the windowsill. It's a dinosaur, and unlike the ones in your book, you can actually watch and learn from it.

[@levelsio @levelsio]

Complaining about things is one, but fixing them myself is another

So I added a [ 🗽 Not woke ] filter to https://t.co/kSbsCmuvBO

"woke" is a bit of a cringe term now, but calling it "Not ESG" would be too difficult

I scraped ALL hotel chains and sites for stuff like "climate change", "sustainability", "ESG", "carbon neutral" and tagged all of them

So now you can AVOID hotels that:
- limit your AC to 25C/77F (common in Europe)
- skip cleaning you room altogether (last 2 hotels I stay in Europe now)
- have no amenities (again I just stayed in them), and other useless stuff that does nothing to save the world at all
- reduce shower pressure to save water so you can't clean yourself
- charge you extra for your CO2 emissions every day you stay (???)

In fact all of this does the direct opposite of make the world better: it makes everyone hate their stay, sweat and have bad sleep, and be grumpy and unproductive all day

Avoid them with my site Hotelist and make the world better! :D

[Richard Hanania @RichardHanania]

India has sent 96 people to America who started billion dollar companies. No one else is even close.

There's only about 5 million Indians in America. Almost one in 50,000 of them is a unicorn founder!

What a holy, special, beautiful people.

I will always fight for them.

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

This has quietly been a miracle month in medicine.

In the last 5 weeks we’ve got news on:

- retatrutide, the triple agonist GLP-1 from Lilly, basically melting fat and body-wide inflammation at record levels
- RevMed’s new pancreatic cancer drug showing unprecedented abilities to extend life
- small trial of a one-and-done PCSK9 gene editing therapy for slashing LDL cholesterol
- Mayo’s AI-assisted radiology showing vastly improved cancer detection
- this new therapy for metastatic solid tumors

This stuff is at varying levels of evidence. Retatrutide is ~100% on its way, other stuff needs more clinical trial data. But put it together and we’re maybe on the verge of majorly reducing the mortality of heart disease and cancer, the two leading causes of death in America.

[David Sacks @DavidSacks]

Apollo’s Chief Economist: Zero Evidence of AI-Related Job Losses

[David Veksler ₿🔑👌 @HeroicLife]

@DrInsensitive Indian medical degrees (such as MBBS) do not automatically qualify someone to practice medicine in the USA.

[Charbel-Raphael @CRSegerie]

This is the final form of geocentrism. The Church didn't learn from Galileo

I'd like to be as certain that this magnifica humanitas will still be at the center of the universe at the end of the century

[Not a Good Jewish Girl✡️ @estherzelda0514]

I think the pigheaded ignorance of the BDS movement is really illuminated best by what they did to SodaStream.

An Israeli company, SodaStream was one of BDS's earliest boycotts, leading to the closure of its West Bank facility in 2015. At the time, the company was the largest private employers of Palestinians in the area, and 600 Palestinians were immediately laid off. Their Palestinian employees received the same benefits, wages, and conditions of Israelis, and all of that was lost due to BDS, who hilariously (and wrongly) claimed that SodaStream was "exploiting" Palestinians.

SodaStream then moved into Israel proper and to a new plant in Lehavim, which is close to Rahat, a large Bedouin town in the Negev. The facility, like the West Bank one, employs the locals: hundreds of Bedouins, particularly Bedouin women, who otherwise lack economic opportunities.

Did this satisfy BDS? Nope. They continue to boycott SodaStream entirely, claiming the factory is part of the Israeli government's plans to ethnically cleanse the Bedouins, which are Israeli citizens of Arab descent. BDS, of course, did not ask the Bedouins, who receive the same wages as Jews, guaranteed by equal rights laws that BDS pretends do not exist in Israel. Those wages are significantly higher than the average income in nearby Arab towns, and SodaStream provides benefits that are rare outside of the urban areas of Israel, like a healthcare plan, pension contributions, and daily transportation. Job satisfaction is very high.

In short, these boycotts just make rich white WASP Westerners feel good. They do nothing for Palestinians or Israeli minorities.

[David Veksler ₿🔑👌 @HeroicLife]

"Nothing is free" -- right, the data is the price. You refuted yourself in sentence one. Who decided it's worth more than a free cleaning? Not the people who took the deal. If you're sure it's underpriced, start a company that pays cash for cleaning data and outbid them. You won't.

[David Veksler ₿🔑👌 @HeroicLife]

Your diagnosis and your cure cancel out:

You say ownership concentrates into a few hands, then propose the fix is letting regular people buy shares in the machines. That's a brokerage account. Anyone can own a slice of the robot economy right now by buying the stock. What you've designed is a strictly worse version: undiversified, illiquid, single-asset risk on a machine that gets lapped by next year's model. You reinvented the index fund, badly, and called it a revolution.

"Permanent underclass" is the oldest failed prediction in economics. Tractors, looms, ATMs. Teller jobs went up after the ATM. The work changes. It doesn't run out.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Apple gave itself the worst possible rating. On purpose. And the strategy is smarter than anyone's giving them credit for.

The EU started requiring energy labels on all phones and tablets in June 2025. A to G scale, just like your refrigerator. Covers energy efficiency, drop resistance, repairability, water resistance. Apple's iPhones qualified for an "A" on energy efficiency by their own testing. They voluntarily submitted a "B." Three iPad lines, the standard iPad, the Pro, and the Air, all got "G." The literal worst score on the chart. The iPad mini scraped an "E."

Apple then published a 44-page document explaining exactly why they downgraded themselves. The EU's testing protocols contain ambiguous language on surface materials for drop tests, interpretation of battery workload measurements, and standardization of efficiency calculations. Apple's argument: if a third-party lab interprets the rules differently and scores them lower than what Apple claimed, the PR damage is worse than just taking the hit upfront.

Read that again. Apple would rather display the worst energy rating in its own stores than risk someone else giving them a bad grade they didn't control. That tells you everything about how Apple thinks about brand. They don't optimize for the score. They optimize for narrative control. A self-assigned G is a protest. A third-party G is a verdict.

The 44-page document is the actual product here. Apple is betting that the technical community reads it, that journalists cover the controversy, and that the label system loses credibility before it gains consumer trust. They're speed-running the refrigerator-label playbook: comply loudly, complain publicly, let the regulator defend a system that rates a $1,299 iPad Pro the same as the cheapest Android tablet on the shelf.

The EU projected these labels would save consumers €20 billion by 2030. Apple just made sure every tech outlet is writing about how the ratings are unreliable instead.

[David Veksler ₿🔑👌 @HeroicLife]

China has many legal methods to send in spies: student visas, business visas, tourism, work visas, academic exchanges. China has sent large numbers of people through these for decades, and all documented espionage cases involve individuals who entered legally.
Sending small groups to do a dangerous, detectable illegal crossing in camo — with a high probability of apprehension, biometric collection, and enhanced screening as SIAs — is poor operational security for trained spies. It’s the kind of method you’d expect from economic migrants hiding from both US *and* Chinese authorities.

[David Veksler ₿🔑👌 @HeroicLife]

China has many legal methods to send in spies: student visas, business visas, tourism, work visas, academic exchanges.

China has sent large numbers of people through these for decades, and all documented espionage cases involve individuals who entered legally.

Sending small groups to do a dangerous, detectable illegal crossing in camo — with a high probability of apprehension, biometric collection, and enhanced screening as SIAs — is poor operational security for trained spies. It’s the kind of method you’d expect from economic migrants hiding from both US *and* Chinese authorities.

[David Veksler ₿🔑👌 @HeroicLife]

Global AI computing capacity is doubling every 7 months. Some people think this ends in a bubble.

I'm pretty sure this ends with all baryonic matter in our light cone turning into computronium:

[Jacob L @JacobL1994_]

The Einsatzgruppe Trial established in law that there is no moral or legal equivalent between collateral damage from war, and going door to door executing civilians because of their race.

As such, no amount of collateral damage, however tragic it is, will ever be morally or legally equivalent to the mass deliberate extermination of Jews carried out by Hamas and their accomplices.

Remember that the crime of genocide is determined by intent. Thus, men with rifles and gasoline going house to house looking for Jews to burn is genocide, and military operations to prevent them from doing that again, which unfortunately result in civilian casualties, is not.

[Afshine Emrani MD FACC @afshineemrani]

1/5
I'm a cardiologist. I've been telling you for months that GLP-1 drugs are rewriting medicine far beyond weight loss.
44% less depression. 47% less substance use disorder. 28.7% weight loss. 86% liver fat clearance.
Now add this.
Cleveland Clinic researchers are presenting data at ASCO next week — the biggest cancer conference in the world — showing that GLP-1 medications may cut cancer progression to metastatic disease by up to 50%.
12,112 patients. Seven obesity-related tumor types. Stages 1 through 3.
This class of drugs keeps getting bigger. And the old walls between metabolic medicine, cardiovascular medicine, and oncology keep coming down.

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

A lot of people tried to get GLP-1s banned when they first started making waves

They claimed all sorts of insane side effects we now know to be unreal, from cancer to bone shredding

But we had more than a decade of data when they took off, so the good news can outpace the lies

[Blake Scholl 🛫 @bscholl]

Guys we need to remember what profit is: the difference between how much a buyer is willing to pay for a thing versus what it cost to create it.

Profit happens only when the outputs are worth more than the inputs.

Profit is literally value creation.

Profit is good.