Dirk von Mullet

Thoughts on culture, tech, & politics.

[Danny Postma @dannypostma]

Buy yourself a consumer GPU and download an open-source model, because you ain’t going to see those around any longer soon.

[Polymarket @Polymarket]

JUST IN: Mayor Mamdani to disband NYPD’s 600-officer unit responsible for handling protests and crowd control.

[DHH @dhh]

You might want to make sure you have a few open-weight models backed up and some basic gear to run them. Who knows what really happened at NVIDIA, but the world just lost one of free AI's biggest proponents.

[Daniele Scalea @DanieleScalea]

Houellebecq sarà processato in Francia per avere detto quanto segue:
- che ben presto porzioni di territorio francese saranno in mano islamica
- che i francesi sono esasperati dagli atti criminali commessi da musulmani, e tutto ciò che vorrebbero da loro è il rispetto della legge o andarsene dal paese
- che la sostituzione etnica non è una teoria ma un dato di fatto

[Adrian Saville @AdrianSaville]

Extract from Jared Diamond's latest book. You can't make this stuff up.

[ned! @nedsore]

The most mentally ill person you know is currently training to be some sort of therapist

[Lara Logan @laralogan]

Make sure you are listening: they want to use your tax dollars to BRING BACK people who were in the U.S. illegally. Hear it for yourself.

[Walter Kirn @walterkirn]

As grave and insane a cultural development as I can imagine.

All writers and artists must stand against this -- or what we do falls to the level of cake decorating.

Guillotines next if we don't.

[Stephen Storey @StephenStorey]

We are not sending our best.

[Jaxon @jaxoncoder]

Walmart and Kroger are quietly rolling out an internal store technology across America that could either modernize retail or bankrupt the middle-class family budget.

Starting across thousands of locations heading into 2027, traditional paper price tags are being ripped off grocery shelves and replaced with cloud-connected digital screens. Raise the price of bottled water by 20 percent the second the afternoon temperature hits 90 degrees. Surge the cost of ground beef, milk, and sandwich bread between 5 PM and 6 PM when exhausted commuters are rushing home from work. Drop prices at 10 AM on a Tuesday, then hike them right back up the minute the after-school crowd walks through the sliding doors.

Every price change happens wirelessly in seconds from a central corporate dashboard. No store employee has to touch a single shelf.

Walmart has already signed a massive deployment deal with VusionGroup to wire 2,300 American supercenters with EdgeSense digital shelf rails by 2027. Kroger is expanding its own Microsoft-backed system called EDGE across hundreds of supermarkets. Over 60 million digital price tags are already blinking on US grocery aisles right now.

This is not supply chain inflation. This is Uber-style surge pricing built directly into the shelves where Americans buy baby formula, eggs, and medicine.

Last week I sat down for coffee with a former retail pricing director who spent 14 years building supermarket margin algorithms before leaving the industry. What he shared over the table completely changed how I look at a grocery aisle.

"Retailers just turned static shelves into live stock tickers. The question is not whether grocery chains will use instant price changes, because they already spent billions installing the hardware. The question is how much extra money a family of four will lose every week simply because both parents work until 5 PM and cannot shop during off-peak hours."

Here is how the digital grocery pricing system actually works, how it tracks you in the aisle, and the exact phone settings and checkout playbook you need to beat it.

[Dirk von Mullet @MuchoBitcoin]

@jasonwhitlock That’s what low IQ do

[Cassandra MacDonald @CassandraRules]

Chick fil a almost always just hires local American teenagers who speak English, instead of foreign adults, and theyre known for their great service and ability to flawlessly handle long drive through lines.

I think about this often because its not a coincidence that their service is so superior.

Companies need to start hiring American teenagers for jobs that were always meant for them again.

[Matt Walsh @MattWalshBlog]

Karmelo Anthony stabbed a white kid to death and was still able to stay in school and graduate with no issues while his family raised half a million dollars and bought a new house. A white girl made a noise into a Ring camera and had to withdraw from school for her own safety within a day of the video being posted online. That basically tells you everything you need to know about the racial disparities in this country.

[Mike Benz @MikeBenzCyber]

Michel Houllebecq, the author of “Submission” - the international best-selling book depicting France folding to Muslim immigration - was just criminally charged by France for hate speech.

[Walter Kirn @walterkirn]

The more I learn about real technologies that are somewhat hidden at the moment but will be disclosed in the future, including rather monstrous genetic technologies, the more I think it's possible that the "alien narrative" is an attempt to pre-contextualize the emergence of these things.

They will be very destabilizing when they come out. Some are horrifying, others just baffling. Many people will brush up against them unwittingly. Having a place to put them in the mind, having a format in which to understand them, even if it's mythological or made up, would be all-important to their creators and testers.

Just a thought.

[Cernovich @Cernovich]

He is a 60 year old man and marketing professor with huge platforms who can speak for himself. Not some random kid. You’d he first to lead a lynch mob against a teenager who posted a dodgy group text. Sick of this. Everyone is.

[Leo @Leonajardinho]

When I worked at Macy's back in the 80's, people who worked there raised families on what they made. It was their career. 

I remember the guy in electronics retired after 30 years, and my boss in the cash office did the same. 

The guys who worked in the suit department did very well for themselves. 

Despite that, the store profited greatly every year, and we were given a beautiful Christmas party in appreciation. 

What changed in this country? 

When did it become nearly impossible to support oneself at a job that didn't require a degree or technical school?

[corpfessions @Corpfessions]

I work for a small IT company. My coworker is Indian. When I first started there years ago I was slacking off a lot but then at the end of the day I would see I still got way more done than them. I wondered how this was possible - it was very confusing. Fast forwards after years working with this Indian - I've found countless emailed deleted and unanswered, countless tickets where the customer writes back to him angry because he obviously didn't read their first email.

Countless simple tickets where he didn't do the basic troubleshooting. And now that AI is out, he is copy/paste huge walls of text directly out of AI into the email for the customer. Oftentimes the tone isn't right and it doesn't address their problem.

In the most recent case, I him and a customer had been emailing back and forth several times - I jump in the ticket and, with 5 min of basic troubleshooting, could see what the problem is. We do Zoom meetings and he barely seems to be listening. My boss will say his name and ask him a question, and 95% of the time my boss has to repeat his name several times because he is zoned out.

My boss has total rose colored glasses, likes this guy, and would never fire him. Any normal worker from the Western world could easily outperform this guy after a few months. He has worked here 5+ yrs and fails to do the stuff one should know by week 1 of employment. He is worse than useless and has definitely hurt our company over all these years. It would be better to have an understaffed help desk with slower ticket turnaround time.

[Autism Capital 🧩 @AutismCapital]

We got Creatine ID before Voter ID.

[FischerKing @FischerKing64]

In many ways millennial white men have been sacrificed on the altar for the supposed sins of their fathers and grandfathers. A lot of Gen X too. But the Boomers and older kept their jobs while this went on. To me that’s the scandal. Old white men sacrificing their own.