Hedge fund manager by day. (just my burner account so I can rant freely without getting cancelled.)
Trader of Shrunken Heads, Spanish Bulls and Grizzly Bears.
Garry Kasparov: The Army That Enters Ukraine Will Not Return to Russia
Putin will use any ceasefire in Ukraine to prepare for an invasion of NATO countries.
Russia is preparing for war. The goal of such an attack, according to Kasparov, would be to demonstrate that NATO no longer exists as an effective alliance. The statement was made by one of the leaders of the Russian opposition, Garry Kasparov, during an interview on the YouTube channel Forum of Free Russia.
> “I don't know how much it would affect the overall geopolitical situation, but for Putin it could become the achievement he currently lacks,” the politician said. “NATO is gone. It doesn't work. We crossed the border, and they're over there doing something.”
> “The Americans are not really in the game here, so I would consider this scenario very likely. And this isn't just my opinion. It's what everyone is talking about—if not publicly, then at least behind the scenes at conferences. It has long ceased to be a theoretical threat. It is now a threat that must be taken into account in practical terms.”
Russia is actively expanding its military infrastructure along NATO's borders. This is evidenced by satellite imagery showing the construction of new military bases, weapons depots, and the deployment of large quantities of military equipment. After the war in Ukraine, Russia reportedly plans to station 115,000 troops near NATO borders.
Analysts identify several regions where these forces could be concentrated. According to expert assessments, the number of Russian ground troops near Finland's border could increase to 80,000 personnel. Within a matter of weeks, Russia could transfer hundreds of thousands more troops from other parts of the country to its western frontiers.
Another major concern is military reform. Instead of relying on small combat groups, Russia is creating large divisions of up to 10,000 troops and is actively studying lessons from the war in Ukraine, including the mass use of drones.
> “We've been saying this many times, and you don't have to be a great researcher to understand one simple fact: the army that leaves Ukraine will not return to Russia,” Kasparov said. “That means any ceasefire in Ukraine, if one becomes possible, does not mean Russia will transition to a peaceful footing.”
> “Maybe I've missed something. Maybe I need new glasses or even a microscope to find any sign that Putin's Russia is preparing for peaceful life. Everything happening—in finance, the economy, propaganda, and education—is geared toward war, and specifically a long-term war. And that war is not against Ukraine. It is a war against the free world.”
The world’s first seaglider factory is complete!!
A quarter million square feet dedicated to bringing our product to the world.
Today: A blank canvas
By this time next year: Viceroy and Squire seagliders on the assembly line
1 Seaglider Way
Game on
Stupid move by Trump. Newsom's poll numbers should surge off this. He's probably privately elated to be targeted like this. Newsom needs to figure out, though, how to connect to middle America or he hasn't gotten a prayer in 2028.
MSNOW's @ProfMMurray nails it: Trump's investigation isn't about finding a crime. It's about sending a message.
Go after Donald Trump and he'll send the DOJ after you, your family, and anyone else who stands in his way.
"Gavin Newsom is someone who has brought the fight to the President in terms that are incredibly personal...I will also note, I saw Jennifer Siebel Newsom's documentary that just filmed at Tribeca. The entire movie is about the way in which political retribution and the internet and social media are used to target women and to keep them out of political office. Here, it seems that the targeting of @JenSiebelNewsom and her husband is intended perhaps to send a message to him as a rival, but it certainly sends a message to any other dissenters, any other potential rivals, that this is what is waiting for you on the other side. If you go against Donald Trump, this is what you can expect. And that's intended to be a deterrent."
A school district in Louisiana says some of its teachers will receive bonuses of more than $50,000 this year thanks to increased tax revenue linked to a Meta data center https://t.co/nE62a4y0J4
FYI one of the 🐼team members who has a severe allergy to vacations is pushing to release part 3 - "cooking the books" of our $TE whistleblower series tomorrow
Should we let him do it?
Yann Lecun published the most heretical AI paper of the year.
He opens by arguing Magnus Carlsen isn't good at chess and only gets more unhinged from there.
The Turing Award winner and his co-authors dropped a paper demanding the AI industry abandon its biggest obsession, AGI.
Right now, everyone from Silicon Valley CEOs to politicians assumes AGI is the ultimate goal. A machine that can do everything a human can do.
LeCun argues that this entire concept is a biological illusion.
Humans do not possess "general" intelligence. We are highly specialized biological machines, tuned by evolution simply to survive in the physical world.
We only think our intelligence is "general" because we are completely blind to the millions of cognitive tasks we are incapable of comprehending.
Which brings us to the chess argument.
Magnus Carlsen is the greatest human chess player in history. But compared to a modern computer? He is fundamentally terrible.
Our belief that Carlsen is "good" at chess is pure human-centric bias. He isn't objectively good. He's just better than the rest of us, who are biologically awful at it.
LeCun says we need to stop building AI to mimic human generality.
Instead, he proposes a new North Star: SAI.
Superhuman Adaptable Intelligence.
Instead of trying to build a machine that mimics our flawed, biologically-limited brains, we need to embrace extreme specialization.
SAI is about the speed of adaptation.
It is an intelligence that can learn to exceed humans at any specific, economically important task.
More importantly, it is designed to fill the vast skill gaps where humans are fundamentally incapable.
Things like managing global energy grids in real-time. Or predicting complex molecular structures.
The entire AI industry is obsessed with building a digital reflection in our own image.
LeCun's paper is a brutal wake-up call.
BREAKING: President Trump says the US will be "hitting Iran very hard tonight" and announces that the US will be "taking Kharg Island" in the "not too distant future."
President Trump also says the US will "assume total control" of Iran's oil and gas markets, "much like we have with Venezuela."
A mathematician coined the term "artificial intelligence" in 1955, built the language that dominated AI research for 30 years, and predicted cloud computing 40 years before AWS existed and almost nobody outside the field knows his name.
His name was John McCarthy.
He was born in Boston in 1927, earned his PhD in mathematics from Princeton in 1951, and spent the next 55 years working on a single question that most of his peers considered either impossible or insane.
Can a machine think?
In the summer of 1955, McCarthy sat down and wrote a two-page proposal for a workshop at Dartmouth College. The proposal opened with one sentence that changed everything: "every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it."
He needed a name for the field he was proposing. He chose "artificial intelligence." Before that document, no such field existed. After it, every researcher working on thinking machines had a name for what they were doing, a home discipline to publish in, and a founding document to point to. McCarthy did not just contribute to AI. He created the container it lives in.
The Dartmouth Conference ran for eight weeks in the summer of 1956. It was the moment AI became a real scientific discipline.
McCarthy kept building.
In 1958 he invented LISP, the second oldest high-level programming language still in use today, older only than FORTRAN by one year. LISP was designed for a specific purpose: symbolic reasoning. It could manipulate ideas, not just numbers.
It became the language every serious AI researcher wrote in for the next three decades. From 1958 through the late 1980s, if you were working on AI, you were almost certainly working in LISP.
Inside LISP he invented garbage collection in 1959, the technique that automatically frees up memory a program no longer needs. Java uses it. Python uses it. JavaScript uses it. Every modern language that manages memory automatically is using the idea McCarthy worked out while building LISP.
In 1961 he stood at a centennial celebration at MIT and said something that everyone in the room thought was science fiction. He proposed that computing would one day be delivered as a public utility, the same way electricity or water is delivered to a home. You would not own the computer. You would pay for access to it over a network.
AWS launched in 2006. Azure launched in 2010. Google Cloud launched in 2011. What McCarthy described in 1961 is now a trillion-dollar industry. He was 45 years early.
In 1962 he founded the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, SAIL, which became one of the most important research centers in the history of the field. The researchers who trained there shaped the next 40 years of AI.
He won the Turing Award in 1971. The National Medal of Science in 1990. The Benjamin Franklin Medal in 2003.
He retired from Stanford in 2000. He died on October 24, 2011, at his home in Stanford, California. He was 84.
The researchers at OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic building the models you use today are working in a field McCarthy named in 1955, using memory management he invented in 1959, inside an industry structure he predicted in 1961, toward a goal he spent his entire career insisting was not only possible but inevitable.
He was right about all of it.
He just did not live to see the part where the rest of the world finally believed him.
That's because:
1. $META - Zuck doesn't know what the hell he's doing with AI, just like the Metaverse.
2. $MSFT - OpenAI to zero?
3. $NKE - Moat gone. Competition.
4. $NFLX - Expensive with low growth left.
5. $BABA - Of course. Xi. Trump.
6. $ADBE - AI killed its monopoly.
There are some absolute monster mid-large caps trading significantly below their all-time highs in the US right now.
Notable names in this list include Meta, Microsoft, Nike, Netflix, Alibaba, Adobe, & many more.
On the first day of the war, U.S. precision strikes killed 120 children at a school and 21 civilians at/near a sports hall. Just last night, precision strikes destroyed a drinking water facility serving 20,000 people in 100°F heat. “Very precise, very controlled.”
You have noticed it. ChatGPT feels dumber than it used to. Your prompts that worked six months ago produce worse results now. The writing sounds flatter. The ideas sound safer. The internet itself feels like it is shrinking. Every article reads the same. Every email sounds the same. Every answer sounds like it was written by the same voice.
You thought it was you. It is not you.
Researchers at Oxford and Cambridge published a paper in Nature proving what is happening. They call it Model Collapse.
Here is the mechanism in one sentence. AI trained on AI-generated data gets dumber every generation until it forgets what real human data looked like.
The internet is filling with AI-generated content. Blog posts. Articles. Reviews. Comments. Social media. AI companies scrape the internet to train the next generation of models. Which means the next generation of AI is being trained on the output of the current generation.
Each cycle loses information. Not randomly. It loses the rarest, most unusual, most creative parts first. The researchers call these the "tails of the distribution." The weird ideas. The unexpected perspectives. The things that made the internet feel human. Those disappear first.
What remains is the average. The safe. The expected. The bland.
Then the next generation trains on that. And loses more. And the next generation trains on that. And loses more. The researchers proved this is not a slow decline. Major degradation happens within just a few iterations. Even when some of the original human data is preserved.
They tested it on large language models. On image generators. On statistical models. The pattern was the same every time. The output converges toward a narrow, flattened version of reality that looks nothing like the original data.
The lead researcher put it plainly. "Large language models are like fire. A useful tool. But one that pollutes the environment."
The pollution is invisible. You cannot see which sentence on the internet was written by a human and which was written by AI. Neither can the AI that is about to train on it. And once the tails are gone, they do not come back. The damage is irreversible.
This is not a prediction anymore. It is a diagnosis.
The internet you grew up on was built by humans writing things no algorithm would have written. Strange, personal, imperfect, alive. That internet is being diluted. One generation of AI at a time. And the models trained on what remains are learning a smaller and smaller version of the world.
Model Collapse is not a technical problem. It is a cultural one. The thing that made the internet worth reading is the thing that disappears first.
What the hell is @ZackPolanski doing wearing a shirt to free the Palestinian terrorist Marwan Barghouti who murdered 5 civilians. This is TOO FAR.
h/t @habibi_uk
Cathie Wood said $SPCX has “10-year lead” in reusable rockets while competitors like Blue Origin are still struggling to relaunch successfully.
She also said Starlink’s profitability could be “astonishing” as SpaceX scales satellite internet business.
For the first time in two decades of polling, more Americans sympathize with Palestinians (41%) than Israelis (36%), a reversal from 55% to 26% in Israel’s favor before to the October 7th attacks. Even 57% of Republicans aged 18 to 49 now disfavor Israel.https://t.co/A1nure5zJO