AMISU

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[AMISU @RahmanKhamis]

@tech_twi 15K

[Day @Daywrotethis]

A man who reads old books cannot be fully captured by modern stupidity. He has dead kings, prophets, poets, killers, saints, drunks, generals, and madmen whispering in his bloodstream. The feed has no chance against this.

[AMISU @RahmanKhamis]

@tech_twi 13k

[Gummi @gummibear737]

Iran was trying to use the North Korean model to get a nuke: create sufficient conventional deterrence so you won’t be challenged in acquiring one (it’s called the Seoul Hostage Problem).

This has been explained over and over since day one.

Everyone claiming shifting goalposts or no imminent threat has been lying.

The reason North Korea was allowed to get nukes is because Seoul (and its 10 million inhabitants) is within artillery and rocket range of North Korea.

During the 1994 nuclear crisis, the Clinton administration seriously considered airstrikes on North Korea’s Yongbyon reactor but backed off precisely because of the artillery threat to Seoul.

Iran was trying to accomplish the same by stockpiling missiles and drones which would have had the same deterrent effect. The proof is what Iran has been doing in the past month: attacking all its neighbors in order to pressure the US to stop attacking it

Beyond this, they were building medium-range ballistic missiles that could reach Paris and London, meaning all of Europe could be held hostage as they built a nuclear bomb.

The reason Iran has not built a nuclear weapon until now is not because it couldn’t, but because it knew it would be attacked and denied this capability.

So by allowing them to continue developing this conventional deterrence, you would be allowing Iran to get a nuclear weapon.

And unlike North Korea, Iran is led by an eschatological death cult

Reagan saw nuclear mutually assured destruction (MAD) as both morally bankrupt (because of the innocent-body-count problem) and dangerously fragile because it assumed flawless rationality between adversaries…this means it only takes one irrational actor to destroy the world.

Working backwards from the conclusion that Iran’s Islamist regime must never have a nuclear weapon, it was necessary for the US to attack Iran to deny it the conventional capacity to hold the entire eastern hemisphere hostage.

Every European leader knows this and behind the scenes praises the US for this action. But they are cowards, held hostage by their own internal Muslim populations, and so adopt these ridiculous public positions.

This was never about Israel. And if your argument is that Iran should be allowed to get a nuclear weapon then you are a fool and a traitor to western civilization…you’re a useful idiot

[outside five sigma @jwt0625]

your finger press over ~10 ms closes a switch in a keyboard matrix, during which ~10¹³ electrons flow through pull-up resistors and scan circuitry. Firmware encodes the event, and a microcontroller emits a USB or Bluetooth HID report of a few dozen bytes.

the OS services an interrupt in a few us, maps scan codes to characters, and updates 10²~10³ bytes of state in DRAM, stored as charge from ~10⁸ electrons on capacitors refreshed every ~60 ms.

your browser constructs an HTTPS request of 1~5 kB, which the TCP/IP stack segments into ~1.5 kB payloads matched to the Ethernet MTU. These drive a network interface with SerDes operating at a few GHz, shoving 10⁶~10⁸ electrons per bit.

electrical signals propagate a few cm across copper traces, then drive optical transceivers where electrons jump a semiconductor bandgap to emit 10⁶~10⁸ photons per bit at telecom wavelengths. These photons traverse access, metro, and backbone networks, undergoing a dozen electrical <-> optical conversions at endpoints and regeneration sites.

these photons might further go through hundreds to thousands of kilometers of fiber, amplified every ~100 km by erbium-doped fiber amplifiers via stimulated emission, wavelength-routed by ROADMs, might even bounce off google's MEMS optical circuit switches a few times, and eventually reconverted to electrons by photodiodes at termination and routing boundaries.

at the data center, packets are reassembled and delivered to inference servers where GPUs perform matrix multiplications involving ~10¹² model parameters over milliseconds, with transistors toggling at 10¹⁶~10¹⁷ times per second.

those parameters were produced earlier by training runs lasting weeks to months, using ~10⁴ accelerators drawing who knows how many megawatts of power, shoving 10³⁰~10³³ electrons through transistor channels for the 10²³~10²⁵ floating-point operations.

the inference result is serialized into kilobytes of data and transmitted back through the same chain, again undergoing repeated electrical - optical - electrical conversions across access, metro, and backbone networks.

back on your phone or laptop or whatever, the browser parses the response, updates layout and rendering structures, and issues GPU draw calls that write millions of pixels per frame into a framebuffer at 60~120 Hz.

display interfaces stream multiple gigabits per second to an OLED or microLED panel, where the pixels emit roughly 10⁸~10¹¹ visible photons per frame, driven by ~microamp currents over ~microsecond switching intervals.

those photons traverse a few meters in nanoseconds, absorbed by your retinal photoreceptors, transduced into electrochemical signals, and interpreted by a ~20 W biological neural system.

end-to-end, you have astronomical numbers of highly coordinated electrons and photons, and dozens of conversions between them (ofc not including training), for a single thought from the little intelligence to appear on a screen and read by you.

[Mr. Possible @Mrpossidez]

In the Financial Times publication yesterday, I saw the name of the woman who won “Most Innovative Lawyer, 2025,” and I smiled. She was the first partner I ever worked with in the US. Easily the most brilliant finance lawyer I’ve met. Her command of derivatives math, structured finance, law, negotiation, all of it, so unreal.

I remember how this lady, on her birthday in 2023, was so sick after days of losing sleep yet she was still holding down a call from the hospital just to get the deal done. We had a major deal to close. Her voice was gone but she pushed through. I watched her leave the office at 2am on occasions and she was get back to the office before me by 6am. She was the first partner I worked up that went 48 hours straight no sleep, just pure will to close back to back deals. I locked in with her many times and was high on her energy. A true outlier by all standards.

But the funny thing about these kinds of outliers is that there is an utter absence of performance in their convictions and habits. You can’t really advise them to do or not do things a certain way as it would be like asking them to counting their teeth with their teeth.

And the closer you are to such levels of excellence, the more you realize that the very qualities you admire in such people are often the very qualities that might break them. You stop feeling motivated by them; you start feeling protective of them. I used to think to myself sometimes “I hope she’s okay”. It was less about whether I wanted to be like her. In part because I understood her. I understand the animal in her.

When I saw her name in the FT yesterday, I laughed. I know how many people will read that headline and say, “Someday, I’ll be like her.” But if only they knew what it would actually take - the toll, the sacrifice, the solitude - they might hesitate. They might even walk away. And yet, paradoxically, it’s because we don’t know the real cost that we’re still able to dream. Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe that’s the only way anyone becomes great at all.

[kache @yacineMTB]

on technological progress

we live in a special time

technological progress has been accelerating really quick. it's going so fast that most people don't even notice it but i notice it. i notice it in the cheapening of electronic goods, the rapid improvement of medical hardware, new drugs, costco clothes that cost 30 seconds of labour.

the capabilities of individuals who actually care to try is rapidly increasing. with coding automation tools, good programmers can out lift people who use capital as leverage. software will slowly become more accessible, more open source, more controllable, because as people who can code have the time to code reduced, the quality of "hackable" will become more coveted

technology is the great democratizer. and increasing people's capability to create it by 10s of orders of magnitude through the extreme reduction in cycle time will have huge effects. i spat out cad software to make what i want, in less than hour of my time. we're still early. my 3d printer gives me less pain than a 2d printer, as it whips along and literally spawns a physical construct out of thin air. we're still early. i train models with the compute of the largest university lab from only a decade ago in my basement computer with hacked drivers. we're still early. i have LLM coding agents each going through and extracting the physics models out of 5 repositories an LLM research agent discovered for me, so i can read through them side by side. we're still early

we're still early

very often, people come to me with technical problems that would have taken a research lab to tackle. a specialist, an expert.

two weeks for me and my team. one week if i wasn't a dad who had better things to do. genuinely. million dollar products in a few weeks.

we're still early

i'm barely sweating. i'm barely even focusing. i get more work done talking to my technical friends, thinking in my shower. the actual time spent coding is rapidly approaching 0. and i'm clever. i write software to do things. i write software that uses software to do things. my CAD models are defined as javascript. my training loops are parameterized, injectable, with modules i know fit in the context window of today's coding agents.

we are still early

the future decade will be one of increasing capabilities. the cost of creating tools goes down, the doers become the tool makers. the doers know what tools to build, and now, they can. they'll build the tools, turning their gained power into leverage. those tools help build more tools, and the exponential increases.

the line keeps on going up. the tiger keeps roaring forward. some of us are getting thrown off. i'm going to hold on for as long as i can

[AMISU @RahmanKhamis]

@RobertBoatengD1 After what Hamas did ?
You'd done same in their position.

[AMISU @RahmanKhamis]

@PayaseVandamme @1BongoIdeas Queen elizabeth sef, dem no impose curfew na afuomu h)

[Pedro Domingos @pmddomingos]

Einstein wasted the second half of his life on a fruitless quest. In the second half of his life, von Neumann invented game theory, computer architecture, implosion nuclear weapons, cellular automata and weather prediction, among other things.

[Jesse Peltan @JessePeltan]

If God wanted us to build Type 1 Civilization, he would have:

1. put a giant fusion reactor in the sky
(emitting blackbody radiation around 5800 K)
2. made 28% of Earth's crust out of a semiconductor with a matching bandgap (~1.1 eV or so)
3. filled the oceans with an alkali metal we could use to store limitless quantities of energy
(sodium or something similar)

That would be a crazy coincidence...

[AMISU @RahmanKhamis]

@KuameGaisie @barkervogues it is not candy to be shared

[David Hundeyin @DavidHundeyin]

The key identifier of an "elite" class is not merely their bank account balance but their ability and willingness to use their economic and political heft to shape the society around them.

That's why a hereditary landowner and member of the UK House of Lords is considered an elite, while your average Premier League footballer (who may have more money than the HoL member) is not. The difference is in the willingness and ability to wield that power meaningfully.

The reason I keep on saying 'Nigeria has no elites' is that I was born and raised among the subset of Nigerians who erroneously consider themselves to be elite, and I am very familiar with their thought process. It is the exact same thought process that you would get from a sugarcane seller in Mile 12 market if overnight he was given a house in Maitama, a Lexus SUV, a beautiful yarinya and N150m in the bank.

The nouveau-riche sugarcane seller would not be concerned with higher thoughts like how to use his newfound fortune to transform the economic reality of Mile 12 market while positioning to benefit from the transformation. Nope. He would only be concerned with ensuring that he keeps hold of what he has, so that he never has to sleep in a wheelbarrow on a side street off Ikosi Road again.

That's exactly what the privileged Nigerian is upstairs - a sugarcane seller who happens to live in Ikoyi. No matter how many decades they have spent in Ikoyi, their reality is still defined by the desperate quest to escape or avoid poverty. Every Nigerian millionaire or billionaire that you know feels financially insecure. Doesn't matter whether they are worth $1m or $25bn - they are all viscerally terrified of sinking into poverty, and the sum of their decision making is a series of short term deals and compromises to avoid poverty, without any kind of higher, long-term guiding principle.

I know this especially well because I was raised in a house where everybody who is somebody in Lagos stopped by once in a while to work on a real estate deal with my old man, and I would regularly overhear everybody from bank CEOs to retired military generals and air vice marshalls saying things "Our leaders are [insert whiny complaint]." And I would wonder - who are the "leaders" that these extremely privileged people sound so oppressed and intimidated by? Is it not their friends and coursemates from Jaji?

Later on it made sense when I realised that once you are in power in Nigeria, you become God, and even your family changes its rules for you. I've seen families override their olori-ebi because one 50 year-old uncle became somebody in Abuja. Conversely, as soon as you leave power in Nigeria, you sink into total irrelevance and people treat you like your body has a smell. The entire Nigerian sense of value and self-worth is welded to money and power. Once you don't have these 2 things, you might as well be wearing Harry Potter's invisibility cloak - even your family and contemporaries stop treating you with respect.

The effect this has on elite formation is that unlike in other societies where elites gravitate toward different ideas shared by different camps, and then fight for the right to imprint those ideas on their society (Democrat vs Republican; Maoist vs Dengist; Tory vs Labour etc), privileged Nigerians ONLY gravitate toward one thing - economic power. They have no elite sense of identity outside of money in the bank, a 4-wheeled status signaller on the road, and an overpriced house in a neighbourhood that has a constant bad odour and potholes.

That is also why Nigeria's political actors do this thing called "decamping" where they switch affiliation to whatever political party is in power. Their entire conception of the world is built around access to the levers of economic power so that they can avoid ending up in a wheelbarrow in Mile 12 market.

That's literally all there is to Nigeria.

200 million sugarcane sellers.

[Ryan Holiday @RyanHoliday]

You aren't guaranteed tomorrow. Seneca says that "All fools have one thing in common: They are waiting to start." Start today, start now.

[Mr. Possible @Mrpossidez]

If you followed a lion all day long and witnessed the lion’s struggle for life, to eat, and at the end of the day the lion had caught and eaten a gazelle, you would probably be happy for the lion.

If you started the same story by following a gazelle and witnessed the gazelle’s struggle for life, to not be eaten, and at the end of the day the gazelle was eaten by a lion, you would probably be devastated.

The same event. Two different narratives. Two different emotions. So if you chose a different starting point, the same event can create two different judgments in a person. A person’s sense of justice depends LARGELY on which story he follows and for how long. Justice very often is nothing more than the direction we’re facing when the story begins.

[michael @paik_michael]

you can stomach a bunch of small losses taking a chance until you're presented with the one chance that makes you forget about all the paper cuts you took along the way. the problem with completely staying out is when the time comes, you freeze. you've lost that instinct. run it

[Grant Lannin @retirementkeys]

There is genuinely zero competition to anything. It’s actually fucking hilarious

If you give even the slightest fuck about anything you’ll run laps. If you press the absolute tippy-tippy-top of ur toe to the gas the world just crumbles in front of u & gives u what u want. People astonished at how x,y,z was accomplished so “quickly”, u looking confused cuz u literally just stuck to something for longer than 2 weeks

I’m not even sure what ppl r afraid of. Nobody is paying attention anyway. Everyone doomscrolling & ego-protecting in the micro. “Sarah said this, john thinks this about me”. 99% are castrated to the drama / status of their immediate circle. This is a blessing for you. Pettiness will literally control & dictate them forever. There is no escape for them. And they don’t want to escape.

U get to the other side of things and ur like “that’s it? That was all there was?”

I think a part of u wants there to be more, so u create more in ur mind. U make the ad a big deal. U make the hire a big deal. U make the sales call a big deal. U WANT it to be a big deal because that’s more fun than admitting u actually don’t really give a fuck anyway & aren’t afriad of it being hard, but too easy

I hate “managing” because it’s too easy. I want to find product-market fit from absolute zero. I want to get a stranger to wire me $100k. The fun shit. “Building” is too easy. “Do x then do y!. “Yayyy! How fun!”.

Hard stuff is fun. Boring stuff is gay. And ur core problem is ur goals are actually easy & boring which is why u want to make them hard. Its not the goal u want, its the overcoming of a struggle being projected into a goal. And this is true whether its $1k/mo or $1m/mo. We want to target, attack, exhaust, recharge. Without that fundamental process/cycle the psyche deterioriates. With it, contentment is easy. Bur bcuz most wont pick a goal they target this onto themselves in the form of self-attack. Massive waste of time & energy at the absolute highest level. Nothing gayer than that

[ꜱᴘᴀᴄᴇ ᴘᴜɴᴋ @_space_punk_]

this is lowkey how all states of consciousness work tbh

[Sunny Singh @ProfSunnySingh]

🧵Zelensky being publicly berated by US president and VP (a mass media spectacle par excellence) has left western Europe stunned, shocked, and floundering. There was much ‘unprecedented’ about the spectacle but I want to talk about something that isn’t being discussed.

[vittorio @IterIntellectus]

just finished "the art of doing science and engineering" by richard hamming
good book. 8/10. slightly overhyped but still worth reading
recommended but not mandatory
the core message: you can just do things. and you should.

a thread