I think we lost our way, but hopefully we will get back on track.
Software that you own, not rent.
Data that is yours, unless you choose to share it.
Running locally on your machine unless you choose to run it in the cloud.
Make it fun.
Clearly, we were too focused on the financial aspects of blockchain tech vs. the decentralization/ownership pieces.
Personally, I've been observing the market & focusing on building decentralized, local first applications.
@hthieblot there are too many!
1. macromedia - flash + shockwave had amazing content. there was the shockmachine on which you could play games and watch digital shows by Stan Lee when he launched his internet media company - 7th portal, accuser etc.
2. geocities
Israel is explicitly warning Christian and Druze residents in southern Lebanon not to hide Muslim residents among them as their forces advance.
Not a peep from Sheryl Sandberg.
It's now unarguable that the war on Iran is one of the most blatant crimes of aggression in history.
You now have not 1 but 2 external participants of the US-Iran talks (Oman’s foreign minister and the UK's National Security Advisor) who confirm that the US and Israel attacked despite Iran effectively meeting US conditions for a deal - ensuring it could never build a nuclear weapon, permanently.
As per The Guardian article (https://t.co/1cQk0tPiX9), Jonathan Powell "believed the path remained open to a negotiated solution to the long-running issue of how Iran could reassure the US that it was not seeking a nuclear weapon," and "UK officials [...] were impressed that Iran was prepared for the deal to be permanent."
Concretely, this means the war wasn't a failure of diplomacy but a deliberate destruction of it.
And it also means that the US and Israel have irresponsibly plunged the entire world in an unprecedented energy crisis, affecting the livelihoods of billions of people worldwide, when it was completely avoidable.
It's beyond me how you can look at this and not conclude that the real threat all along wasn't Iran but the US-Israeli axis - they're the only parties at the table who wanted war and are making every person on the planet pay the price for it.
Extraordinarily, even the UK National Security Advisor is now basically saying this.
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.
Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth ordered the strike that murdered every one of these girls from the Shajareh Tayebeh School in Minab, Iran
And they did it for Israel
We don't even need the Epstein files to know we're led by child slaughtering demons
I was in a 2 hour briefing today on the Iran War. All the briefings are closed, because Trump can't defend this war in public.
I obviously can't disclose classified info, but you deserve to know how incoherent and incomplete these war plans are.
1/ Here's what I can share:
If you sum up the last 20 years of the US-Iran relationship, it reads like this:
US: Do not peruse nuclear weapons
Iran: Ok we signed the nuclear proliferation treaty
US: Too bad, you’re getting sanctioned
Iran: Ok
US: Stop pursuing nuclear weapons
Iran: We’re not; we’re generating energy just like other countries.
US: Sign a deal and have us inspect what you’re doing
Iran: Ok, deal signed, inspectors welcome
US: Too bad, deal canceled and you’re getting more sanctions
Iran: Ok
US: Stop pursuing nukes or else
Iran: Look, we did everything you’ve asked
US: Too bad, we’re gonna bomb you anyway. That girl school looks like a good target *BOOM*
Israel: *bombs Iran
Iran: *defends itself
Israel: “The evil regime of Iran is targeting our civilians”
US: “Iran is cutting heads off babies”
NEW:
🇺🇸🇮🇷 Trump now says that IRAN bombed themselves
Trump claims that Iran bombed the elementary school that killed 175 people in Tehran, despite they are carpet bombing Tehran.
If anyone saw this in their city or town, they would think:
"This is what liberation looks like. We are so grateful to the foreigners bombing our civilian and economic infrastructure and dropping bombs in our neighborhoods."
Iranian girls in particular are swooning with joy:
The Hollow Men
American capitalism is rotting from the head down. We have replaced the "Owner-Operator"—the risk-taker-with a new, parasitic class of corporate bureaucrat: The Risk-Free Insider.
By "Insider," I am not referring to a specific title. I am referring to the entire administrative state that has captured the modern corporation. This includes the Directors who exist solely to collect fees, the Executives who exist solely to collect bonuses, and the Managers who exist solely to hire consultants.
These are the hollow men of the boardroom. They are masters of PowerPoint. They wear the right suits. They say the right buzzwords about "governance" and "ESG." But they are mercenaries fighting a war with someone else’s ammunition.
In a functioning economy, authority is tied to liability. If you make a bad decision, you lose your own money. That fear of loss is the only thing that keeps a business honest. It forces you to cut waste, obsess over the customer, and stay late to fix what is broken.
Today, we have severed that link.
We have rigged the game so that heads, the Insider wins; tails, the shareholder loses.
If the stock goes up, the Insider collects a massive performance bonus. If the stock crashes due to their own incompetence, they are fired with a "Golden Parachute" worth tens of millions. They are gambling with the house’s money, and they never leave the table poorer than they arrived.
This looting starts in the boardroom.
We have normalized a "Country Club" culture where directors are selected based on social profiling rather than their ability to build a business. The modern board member is often a professional tourist—paid an average of $350,000 a year.
Let’s be brutally honest about what that number represents. The average director is paid nearly five times the GDP per capita of the United States. They earn more for attending four quarterly lunches than the vast majority of Americans earn in five years of hard labor.
And for what?
Most of these directors are "over-boarded," sitting on three or four boards simultaneously. They treat directorships as a gig economy for the elite. They fly in, rubber-stamp a compensation package they didn't read, and fly out. They collect checks from companies they do not understand, do not use, and certainly do not love.
They are not there to ask hard questions. They are there to be collegial. They are there to protect the other Insiders.
And what happens when these boards hire executives who also have no personal capital at risk?
We get the Delegation Economy.
When a Risk-Free Insider faces a crisis—bloated expenses, a broken supply chain, or a stale product—they do not roll up their sleeves. They hire a consultant. They pay a strategy firm millions of shareholder dollars to produce a 100-page deck telling them what they already know.
This is not management. It is intellectual money laundering.
They use shareholder capital to buy an insurance policy for their own careers. If the plan fails, they can blame the consultants. They delegate the work because they are terrified of the responsibility. They would rather preside over a slow, comfortable decline than risk a bold mistake.
While American Insiders are busy optimizing their severance packages, our global competitors are optimizing their products. They are not slowed down by bureaucracy. They are not waiting for a slide deck. They are outworking us.
If we continue to fill our C-suites with administrators instead of operators, we will lose our edge. We will see iconic American franchises hollowed out by fees, managed for the benefit of the Insiders, while the true owners—the shareholders—are left holding the bag.
The time for polite governance is over.
If we want to save the American economy from mediocrity, we must demand a return to the "Owner’s Mentality." We need leaders who treat shareholder capital with the same reverence they treat their own savings. The era of the Risk-Free Insider must end.
@Grady_Booch LLMs are very useful and increase productivity by A LOT! They automate and speed up so many processes.
But that's not as good from a marketing perspective as:
"AGI!!! ROBOTS!!!"
"TRILLIONS!"
"No one needs to learn to code"
Next up, stop learning to think 🤦♂️
@DCinvestor@shawmakesmagic Actually experimenting with this rn. Running deepseek 7b on a machine with 2x 4090s.
Far cry from the SOTA models which are approx 600-700b params but I think the key is tuning + augmenting with RAG on your own data.