Dev

🐕

[Today in History @TodayinHistory]

Voltaire passed away today in 1778.

There are two quotes of his I always come back to:

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

and

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

Technological progress — valuable in itself — requires careful discernment of the anthropological vision that guides it and the ends it pursues. If technological development advances without a corresponding ethical and social progress, the result may be an increase in means without a growth in humanity: “having more” without “being more.” There is a risk that individuals will be evaluated principally according to the outcomes they produce. #MagnificaHumanitas
https://t.co/6i9MWs7jyT

[regular guy @regularguyguns]

Maybe you wonder why I, a mere gun blog, makes a big deal about Flock and similar tech?

OK here’s a real world situation that can easily happen and has likely happened.

Unfortunately to drive on public roads without getting hassled by the cops, your car needs a license plate. That’s tied to you, the owner of the vehicle.

Flock isn’t just a traffic camera, it’s an AI/ML enabled (wait for it) flock of cameras that transmit all their video and audio to the mothership. Not a government server somewhere but, to keep it simple, a big giant cloud computer instance owned and run by Flock, the company.

Government users, as well as Flock employees here in the US and overseas, can log in and query the system based on license plate number or even vehicle description and get a full history of that vehicle’s movements throughout the Flock network over multiple jurisdictions. Someone in New York can track a car from Armonk all the way to Homestead FL if they feel like it from the comfort of their desk.

On a daily level, someone can get a pretty accurate picture of someone’s life just by monitoring their movements via Flock. And I’m using this example to rattle the cage of the “back the blue unconditionally” crowd in 2A.

OK - your car has license plate ABC 123 - and Flock knows this. Someone can enter your tag in Flock and see what you are doing on a daily basis. You leave your home where the neighborhood is under the Flock panopticon. Flock sees you drive to Dunkin’ on Main Street, then you drop your kid off at XYZ Daycare. Then you go to work at the local IT consulting firm in ZZZ industrial park. You go pick up a quick deli sandwich for lunch at Food Lion. You go back to work. On the way home you stop off at Bob’s Guns, and stay for 20 minutes while buying some ammo. Then you go home. Everywhere there’s a Flock camera.

Now Flock knows the following about you:

- You live at 123 Wisteria Lane
- Your kid is in daycare (means he’s likely under 5)
- You work at ZZZ
- You go cheap on lunch
- You own at least one gun

Your license plate is tied to you so they now have your name and assumed-to-be-private details of your life, like that you are armed.

On the reverse of that, the Flock camera outside of Bob’s Guns has been recording the plates of everyone going into the parking lot. No need for a firearms registry when Flock is doing the work.

All of this is done without a warrant and the data is available to anyone with a certain level of access to the system, whether it’s a cop, or a Flock technician in the Philippines. FYI Flock uses overseas contractors for support and AI annotation.

The 2018 Carpenter decision at SCOTUS ruled that pervasive surveillance where one can divine private details of someone’s life is a 4th Amendment violation in absence of a specific warrant.

Flock is illegal, unconstitutional and immoral.

And a danger to everyone, not just gun owners.

[Dev @Poeticrypt]

@ClaudeDevs Thank God because Claude was my go-to for everything until the limits started 🤣 lately it’s been like ill ask a single question at any point in the day, and immediately hit the limit lmao

[mads campbell @martyrdison]

my best friend and i went to the WHCD, and we ended up leaving early because something felt off

it started the second we got there. every event we’ve ever been to, especially at this level, there are layers of security. bags checked, IDs checked, actual process

this time, nothing. we were just asked if we had tickets, said yes, and got waved through

no bag check. no real screening. no line. just thousands of people packed together, being pushed through the doors as fast as possible

it felt wrong immediately. like, viscerally wrong. my bestfriend literally turns to me and says “i think something is going to happen”

and then it did

this cannot happen. not here, not at something like this

praying for everyone, but there needs to be accountability because this should never happen again

[Mandy Arthur @mandyarthur]

Hi @Grok, did Netanyahu approve of and facilitate Qatar to fund Hamas with $35 million a month, even asking Qatar to increase funding leading up to Oct. 7th? Be concise.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue.

On April 21st, the left screen moved first.

I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug.

At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy.

On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me.

At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire.

Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83.

I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags.

My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports.

The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026:

Reviewed.

That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one.

Let me show you my flags.

March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it.

March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it.

April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it.

April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it.

April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it.

That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one.

The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March.

Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012.

Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence.

Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets.

The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade.

I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email.

The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action.

One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared.

One account is a coincidence. But there were six.

Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000.

My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger.

March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes.

The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event.

The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting."

Then the White House sent the email again.

I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread.

I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated.

But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed.

Zero prosecutions.

As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations.

I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations.

The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still.

In my field, we call this price discovery.

[ً @wynrosei]

They ate newborns.
They raped Kids.
He bought sulphuric acid in HUGE Amounts (its known for dissolving bones.)
They buried victims (childrens) Under a golf course.
They practice satanic rituals.
Still we're not angry enough and
Still we let them control US...

[Dev @Poeticrypt]

@OneArmedBoh Hey AQ Infinity just finished its Kickstarter with a 200,000,000% backing, a new world record 🤣 @ArtixKrieger is still going strong

[Joe Wrote @joewrote]

Iran: 'Here are 4 pages explaining we fight the American government, not the American people.'

Americans: 'We can't read all that.'

Iran: 'Here's an AI Lego video calling your leaders drunk rapists.'

Americans: 'Damn. Solid point.'

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Grok automatically translating and recommending 𝕏 posts from other languages is starting to work

[Joe Kent @joekent16jan19]

After much reflection, I have decided to resign from my position as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, effective today.

I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.

It has been an honor serving under @POTUS and @DNIGabbard and leading the professionals at NCTC.

May God bless America.

[Ana Kasparian @AnaKasparian]

Israeli soldiers brutally and violently gang raped a Palestinian detainee ON CAMERA.

Sick society. Absolutely depraved, deranged and disgusting.

The AP sanitizing this with “accused of sexual abuse” when it was GANG RAPE ON CAMERA just shows you how much our media provides cover for Israel’s long list of human rights abuses.

[duck @ExtremeBlitz__]

ChatGPT: “Sorry, I cant talk about that”

Grok:

[‏ً @omgsidewalks]

This is how God must feel when he sees us scrolling on our phones

[Dev @Poeticrypt]

@NoAlphaLimits @grok remind me of this post in 18 months

[Uncensored.AI @GoUncensored]

I expect a mass casualty event on US soil shortly after we "ramp up" the attacks on Iran.

It will of course be a false flag orchestrated by Mossad, the CIA and our military.

It will be to force Americans into getting behind this war.

[Nikola @niktaylorde]

Would you look at that

[Tristin Hopper @TristinHopper]

To any future historians reading this, this era will make a lot more sense if you remember that every name is the opposite of what it really is. The antifascists are fascists, the antiracists are racists, the fact-checkers are propagandists, etc. Hopefully this has been fixed by your time.

[Wealthsprint @NewsandScore1]

@AnthropicAI Outside the Anthropic office in SF "Thank you"