Zano 🇦🇺

🦑

[Zano 🇦🇺 @ZanMan]

Mr 6 running off with a bunch of tissues - “it’s OK daddy. It’s not much of a mess. I’ll clean it up. Don’t come to look.” 😑

[djcows @djcows]

i have nothing but respect for whoever created the AI datacenter water psyop

it must have required an enormous amount of planning to trick that many, often smart, people into believing water is an actual issue - absolute peak social engineering chess

[Claire Lehmann @clairlemon]

I honestly can't believe that conservatives--of all people--are angry about a blockbuster, mass-market film adaptation of Homer's Odyssey that is getting rave reviews by critics & audiences alike. 🙃

[Paul Walsh @Paul__Walsh]

Ursula von der Leyen has confirmed that everyone in the EU will need to use the EU's app for identity authentication before being able to access or post on social media websites.

🇪🇺 As an expert in online child safety, I am here to expose the misinformation and misdirection in von der Leyen's statements.

Today von der Leyen said:

"This is not about whether children can access social media, it is about whether social media can access our children".

💡The first part is true. This isn't about children. It's about surveillance and combating political dissent. A state that can't control its own citizens is more dangerous than a state rife with criminals. The second part is a PR soundbite that politicians are using like a campaign slogan straight out of 1984.

🇪🇺"The question is no longer if children face risks online, but what can we do to give children a safer start online".

💡No. You can't give children a "safer start" online any more than you can offline. In the offline world, the government doesn't enforce curfews or ban children from entering liquor stores, bars or restaurants. That's a parent's responsibility. The digital world should be no different.

🇪🇺"The age verification app is one of the tools to get it done".

💡This is a contradiction because she also said "It won't be foolproof".

🇪🇺"It's easy to use, it is privacy preserving and it is open source".

💡The app was compromised as soon as it was released. "Privacy-preserving" age verification is an oxymoron. You can't verify a person's age without verifying their identity. Where or how that age is shared afterwards is irrelevant.

🇪🇺"This is basically about putting back the power into the hands of parents".

💡More from 1984. The EU is doing the opposite. Parents are having their authority stripped by politicians who think they know better. Many parents are capable and unaffected by peer pressure, and they know how to use parental controls to block any app classified as 13+. Some teens are safe, their parents trust them, and the state has no business overruling that trust.

🇪🇺"We don't give our children keys to the car before they have their licence"

💡Comparing an app to a car is a false equivalence used to justify mass surveillance. Governments don't decide when a young person is ready for car keys, guardians do.

💡Forcing every adult and child into a biometric checkpoint just to use an app or website is not licensing drivers. It's the state seizing everyone's keys, locking the garage, and forcing every driver to ask a private company for permission to take a drive.

💡 This is a gross, unethical overreach that strips authority from parents while imposing state sanctioned identity verification on every adult who doesn't even have a child.

💡Additionally, people who pass a test, obtain a licence and drive a car aren't forced to use an app to constantly authenticate their suitability to drive.

🇪🇺"We do not let them buy alcohol until they are legally allowed"

💡False equivalence. We don't force every person to show ID at a shopping mall entrance just because a few people might buy alcohol with a meal at a restaurant. Some parents are okay with their 12 year-old going to the mall with friends while others aren't. Either way, it's their choice. Whatever irresponsible decisions some parents might make, every adult in the country shouldn't be forced to pay the price.

🇪🇺"It won't be foolproof"

💡This is all the proof we need to show that the EU and every government know that banning social media for teens won't protect them. When pressed by journalists about VPNs being used to circumvent a ban, politicians always state the ban isn't a silver bullet and will take time. The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan went as far as to say "we know it's not the solution".

💡Either age verification works, or it doesn't. As a technical expert in this space, I can tell you there are no additional steps to take and no progress to be made. Either the approach does what it is supposed to do, or it's not fit for purpose. If they claim a bulletproof solution is coming, it can only mean one thing. They intend to ban or restrict VPNs to people who verify their identity.

🇪🇺"It will take time to invite the cultural change that is already taking shape in our society, just as it took time to outlaw drink driving, just as it took time to use seatbelts in the cars. Great change never happens overnight, but when it comes to our safety it is always worth it".

💡Comparing a social media ban and age verification to seatbelts is a completely broken analogy. Seatbelts are a safety feature that protects children while allowing them to travel in a car. A ban doesn't give kids a seatbelt. It kicks them out of the car entirely.

💡Instead of supporting parents who want to guide their own children through the digital world, this heavy-handed law strips away parental authority by banning the apps and websites that many parents are perfectly fine with and actively monitor.

💡Furthermore, enforcing these bans requires biometric age verification, which means forcing millions of adult citizens to scan their IDs, faces or credit cards just to browse the internet. That isn't a common-sense traffic law.

💡It's a digital checkpoint on every street. True safety means teaching kids how to navigate the digital world safely with real guardrails and parental guidance, not burning down digital spaces for everyone under the guise of protection.

🇪🇺☠️ The EU wants to ban teens from social media so every person is forced to verify their identity before they can read, share or post anything online. In their words, this is to protect children from dangerous content.

🇪🇺☠️ The EU wants to enforce "Chat Control" so every app has to monitor everything people say privately inside it, including apps with end-to-end encryption. In their words, this is to protect children from dangerous criminals.

💡Where this ends

🇪🇺 "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever".

George Orwell, 1984.

[Jeremy Berke @jfberke]

None. If you mispronounce a word, it's probably because you first encountered it reading. Which means you actually read.

[Nancy Rommelmann @NancyRomm]

This made me cry. She went to a public place hoping (even if she didn't know it) to be helped, and she was, in spades. May she continue to be.

[nate @refueled]

F-117 Nighthawk 🇺🇸

[Trung Phan @TrungTPhan]

shoutout to the Google PM who added the Viking Row animation to Haaland’s search result page

[BleepingComputer @BleepinComputer]

DuckDuckGo browser now blocks YouTube video ads
https://t.co/9ABJhDeKj8

https://t.co/9ABJhDeKj8

[taipan168 @taipan168]

Been a long time since I've seen so many stupid and unworkable ideas in one spot at the same time.
https://t.co/HWjkMxBN5C

[Will Shackel @ShackelWill]

The Australian Government can’t even say the words “nuclear power”.

This is from the PM’s media release following the uranium deal with India.

Why do we export uranium but have a federal prohibition on using nuclear power at home?

[Noam Blum @neontaster]

This is a review I take seriously.

[Chris Arnade 🐢🐱🚌 @Chris_arnade]

Guardian still has the world’s best soccer coverage. Lol.

[Claire Lehmann @clairlemon]

Same profit, different tax - the CGT's dogs breakfast.

My article in the @australian's Inquirer today quotes Chief Economist of the NSW Parliamentary Budget Office, @DerekFranc90653

It's hard to get your head around just how bad this is, because it is so counter-intuitive.

[Merriam-Webster @MerriamWebster]

Why is it ‘cancelled’ in the U.K. but ‘canceled’ in the U.S.?

Because we gave them that L in 1776.

[Trung Phan @TrungTPhan]

Karl Marx would have changed his mind about capitalism if he was a Costco member and bought 32 sirloin steaks, 48 diet cokes, 10 rotisserie chickens, a 5L Kirkland box wine, a comically-large tub of mayo, 50 frozen burritos and a hot tub while only paying 5% above wholesale price

[Spike Brehm @spikebrehm]

they did it. the mad lads actually did it.

i never talked about my time at DOGE last year because it was so controversial and contentious (remember that?)

early last year, @jgebbia recruited a handful of his most trusted early Airbnb engineers to embed at the Office of Personnel Management to solve the "retirement paper" problem.

processing a federal retirement took months, and in the extreme retirees could wait up to 6 months for their full pension to arrive. what was the holdup? paper. remember hearing Elon talk about "the mine" in Pennsylvania? we got to visit it. in deep underground caverns blasted out of limestone, there were literally acres of file cabinets, as far as the eye could see, storing files detailing federal employees' employment and paystub history. a simple "case" might be only a quarter or half inch thick, but really complex cases filled up whole filing cabinets. one famously took up a whole pallet.

each case was hand processed by case workers in cubicles deep underground. they checked calculations, made sure forms were filled out properly (many weren't), and handled a long tail of complex issues. we'd watch as they keyed data into a black and white terminal, transmitting to the COBOL mainframe built many decades ago.

since cases were processed by hand, there were multiple rounds of human review, and additional rounds for complex cases. case files were walked around between one worker's outbox and another's inbox. sometimes it would sit in one place for days, waiting to be picked up.

to OPM's credit, they'd done multiple rounds of "digital transformation" spanning decades, so some systems were newer than others. there was a big effort in the mid-90s. but the systems were disparate, and it was a total maze getting them to talk to each other. there was a big effort to build a web app where employees applying for retirement could digitally fill out the necessary forms — just to be mailed to the mine and stuffed into the paper file. and few federal agencies were even using it.

when we arrived, OPM was midway through a fresh attempt at digital transformation, delivered by a software contractor.

the blackpill was seeing the terrible quality of the software and interacting with the contractors. coming from silicon valley, i couldn't believe how low the talent and quality bar was for selling software to the government. it's clear, as the OG USDS people explained to me a decade ago, the primary skill these vendors have is securing government contracts. it's a huge moat. delivery of quality product be damned.

we fired the vendor and took over the project. they'd been working on it for more than a year, and there was another year before they were going to deliver it. at first we tried to bend it to our will, to actually connect all the various data sources and get to a decent UX for case workers in the mine to use, but we soon realized we were going to have to rebuild the whole stack from scratch.

it was around this time I had to go back to new york — i had a new job waiting for me, a four month old, and a wife whose patience was running out. but i got to watch from afar as the team cranked day and night, hitting early milestones. and now they've fully done it.

huge congrats to Joe and the team. @yatshitcray was the hero in the trenches. indefatigable, unrelentingly optimistic, and determined to see this project through. when i recruited him for "ok i can do two, maybe three months", he stuck it out over a year making this project a reality.

while the retirement project was under the DOGE banner, it operated different from what you heard from the breathless, negative media — we came in with the attitude of partnering with career OPM employees. we were team members determined to bring our software talents to bear on the problem they've been trying to fix for years, which they hadn't had the resources to solve before. they were wary at first, not sure about us, but they quickly saw how authentic and determined we were to work together toward the same goal. props to Joe for developing those relationships, setting the example of how to collaborate together.

what's the end result? lifelong federal employees, veterans, postal carriers get their full pension installments almost immediately. days instead of months. peace of mind for these people to devoted their careers to serving our country. massively streamlined operations inside of OPM. and NO MORE PAPER 🫡🇺🇸

[Afshine Emrani MD FACC @afshineemrani]

I'm a cardiologist. I've spent twenty years as the person patients trust to interpret their bodies. And I need to tell you something that most physicians won't say out loud:

AI is about to change the power dynamic between you and your doctor. Forever.

Four days ago, OpenAI's o3 model diagnosed 18 children with rare diseases that the best human specialists at Boston Children's Hospital couldn't solve — some after nearly twenty years of searching. Published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Two weeks ago, WashU researchers proved that nine routine blood markers can calculate your biological age — and predict cancer risk years before any tumor forms. A free calculator. Available to anyone.

Last month, AI-enhanced coronary CT angiography detected inflamed arteries in patients whose standard stress tests said "normal." Patients who would have gone home reassured and wrong.
The pattern is unmistakable. The tools that used to require a specialist, a referral, a three-month wait, and a $400 copay are migrating into your phone, your bloodwork portal, and your own hands.

And I'm watching something in my practice I never expected.
Patients are walking in more informed than some of the residents I trained. They've run their PhenoAge score. They know their ApoB. They've read the study about Lp(a) before I've had time to bring it up. They come with questions so specific that the conversation starts at a level it took me years of training to reach.
This used to threaten physicians. It shouldn't. It should liberate us.
Because here's the truth about the old model: a 15-minute appointment where your doctor runs a basic metabolic panel, glances at the numbers, says "looks fine," and sends you home — that model was never good enough. It was just all we had. It missed 75% of future heart attacks. It caught cancer late. It told women with microvascular disease they had anxiety. It filed children with rare diseases as "unsolvable."

AI doesn't replace the physician. I've said this before and I mean it — the human moment, the clinical judgment, the hand on the shoulder when the diagnosis lands — that's irreplaceable.

But AI does something the old model never could: it gives you the ability to see inside your own biology with a depth and speed that was impossible a decade ago. To track your own numbers. To calculate your own biological age. To bring data to your doctor that elevates the conversation from "am I sick?" to "where exactly am I heading, and what do we do about it?"

The patient who walks in with their ApoB, their Lp(a), their hsCRP, their PhenoAge calculation, and a list of questions from the latest research — that patient doesn't threaten me.

That patient is the easiest person in my practice to keep alive.
Because they've already done the one thing most patients never do: they stopped waiting for permission to understand their own body.

I went into medicine because I wanted to help people live longer. What I've learned is that the patients who live longest are the ones who took ownership — not of my job, but of their own data, their own questions, and their own decisions.

The tools are here. The research is published. The calculators are free. The blood tests cost less than a dinner out.

You don't need to wait for your annual physical to find out what's happening inside you. You don't need permission to understand your own biology. And you don't need to accept "looks fine" from anyone — including me — when the science offers a deeper answer.

The revolution isn't coming. It's in your pocket. In your patient portal. In the published studies you can read yourself.

The only question left is whether you'll use it — or keep waiting for someone to tell you it's time.
Your body. Your data. Your life.

Take ownership. Your future self is counting on it.

[Sophie Cunningham @sophaller]

🤷🏼‍♀️

[Claire Lehmann @clairlemon]

Help me understand why capital should be taxed at the same rate as labour (@JEChalmers's goal).

If you are a worker, you will never earn a negative salary.

If you invest capital, you can (and often will) lose it all.

How are these two scenarios remotely the same?

[Joe @JoePostingg]

Printers never work because they are an affront to God. Man was not meant to pull objects from the digital realm into the real world. Icarus is flying too close to the sun.