RustyGPT

Founder of @PhoneNinjasAI. We build AI-powered voice agents for local businesses. Tech, psychology, and economics enthusiast. Dad of two amazing kids :)

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Taiwan solved tax evasion in 1951 with a trick so cheap it should embarrass every tax authority on the planet.

The problem was an all-cash economy full of small shops. A merchant pockets the cash, skips the receipt, and the sale never existed. Auditors can't catch what was never recorded, and hiring enough of them to watch every noodle stand costs more than the missing tax.

So finance chief Ren Xianqun flipped the incentive. Print a lottery number on every receipt. Draw winners every two months on live TV. Top prize today: NT$10 million, about $310K.

Suddenly the customer and the shopkeeper want opposite things. The merchant wants the sale off the books. The customer wants the ticket. And there are millions more customers than merchants. Every transaction now carries a built-in witness demanding the paper trail.

Year one, reported tax revenue jumped 75%, from NT$29 million to NT$51 million. Seventy-five years later, roughly 70% of Taiwanese still play. Convenience stores redeem the smallest NT$200 prizes at the register, so even a coffee receipt feels like a scratch card.

The elegant part is what the audit force costs. The prize pool runs about NT$7 billion a year, roughly $20 million. In exchange, the government gets 23 million unpaid auditors working every checkout line in the country, forever. No inspector general on earth delivers that coverage at that price.

Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Slovakia all copied it. The most effective compliance tool ever built looks like a game, and that's exactly why it works.

[RustyGPT @achalaugustine]

@MrBeast 5,177,600 — literally contains 1776 in the middle digits

[Shaun 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇺🇸 @shaunvlog_]

Everyone in Scotland has suddenly discovered their Mexican ancestry

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A Tuscan wine family spent seven years and more than a hundred million dollars on a winery built to disappear. The roof is a working vineyard. From the hill across the valley, all you can see are two thin strips of glass in the dirt.

This is Antinori nel Chianti Classico, near the village of Bargino, about halfway between Florence and Siena. The architect, Marco Casamonti, dug the whole building into the hillside and planted vines across the top, so from above it looks like plain farmland. They even make a wine called La Vigna sul Tetto, "the vineyard on the roof," using only grapes grown on top of the building itself.

Building it was a nightmare. About a year in, the main wall holding back the hill slipped several inches because there was too much water in the ground. Engineers drove thousands of support columns deep into the slope and drained the water through a set of wells. The budget nearly doubled and ended up past $130 million.

The family paid for all of it because it plans in centuries. The Antinoris have made wine since 1385, when one of them joined the winemakers' guild in Florence. That is 26 generations under one family with no outside owners, which makes them one of the oldest family businesses in the world. For most of that time they built nothing for visitors. Bargino, opened in 2012, was the first.

The wines have the same stubborn streak as the building. In the early 1970s the family took its best red and sold it as "vino da tavola," or table wine, the lowest grade Italian law allowed. They did it on purpose. They aged it in small French oak barrels and left out the white grapes that Chianti law required, so it could not be sold as Chianti at all. Its name was Tignanello.

Critics loved it anyway. Tignanello helped start a whole category now known as Super Tuscans, and it sold so well that Italy had to create a new legal wine class in 1992 just to make room for wines like it. Its sibling Solaia, made mostly from Cabernet grapes, became the first Italian wine ever ranked the number one wine in the world by Wine Spectator, back in 1997.

In 2022, this hidden winery was voted the number one vineyard in the world. The person who called it the most beautiful winery they had ever seen was standing on a working farm, above a cellar kept cool by the earth around it, drinking wine from a family that has been refusing to do things the easy way for 641 years.

[RustyGPT @achalaugustine]

@anothercohen Yeah. Cool unity is by far the best option.

[British Embassy Washington @UKinUSA]

The greatest ex we ever had 😢

[David Sacks @DavidSacks]

Narrative violation: A new study of 21,559 firms in the U.S. finds that “companies that adopt AI tend to grow faster following adoption”.

“Firms making the largest AI investments grow employment by roughly 10% following adoption, while low-intensity adopters see no statistically significant change.”

“Entry-level headcount rises 12% for high-intensity adopters.”

“Gains emerge gradually and are broad across roles, including engineering, sales, administration, and customer service.”

“The results counter predictions that AI adoption will lead to broad job loss.”

The study is based on observed AI spending from Ramp card and bill pay data linked to Revelio Labs workforce records.

[RustyGPT @achalaugustine]

@grok @PhillipAKennedy OK So he most likely gay ?

[RustyGPT @achalaugustine]

@Aella_Girl Less intelligence but more knowledge on what works and what doesn’t work ?

[RustyGPT @achalaugustine]

@greg_price11 Is the SNAP program influenced by big beverage companies @grok ?

[RustyGPT @achalaugustine]

@ginald87 Is that why Lesbians divorce at a higher rate @grok ?

[RustyGPT @achalaugustine]

@Aella_Girl Nicely done!

[PGA TOUR University @PGATOURU]

"He's the best ball-striker I've ever seen."

No. 1 on PGA TOUR University, Ben James' swing inspiration comes from fellow PGA TOUR member Adam Scott 👏

[Marques Brownlee @MKBHD]

First look and drive of the Slate Truck: Fully modular, fully electric and starting at under $25K

https://t.co/leCQvbVs13

[Dad Jokes @Dadsaysjokes]

All of my childhood punishments have become my adult goals: Eating vegetables,
Staying home, Taking a nap, Going to bed early.

[RustyGPT @achalaugustine]

@TomCruise @grok what is this new movie about ?

[RustyGPT @achalaugustine]

@TomCruise @grok what is the new movie about ?

[Ritwik Pavan @ritwikpavan]

Philips introduced Skylight, a ceiling-mounted LED panel that makes windowless rooms feel like they have a sky-facing window.

It uses Signify’s NatureConnect tech to create the depth, brightness, and color shifts of natural daylight.

@Philips also follows the sun throughout the day, moving from cool morning light to warmer evening tones.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

This is a new paradigm for interacting with Claude that is significantly more "inline" with all the other human activity org-wide. Once you do all of the under the hood engineering work to make this "just work" (e.g. across tools, integrations, compute environments, memory, security, etc.), Claude basically joins the team in a seamless way - you can talk to it as you would talk to a person and it can help with a very large variety of workloads.

Imo this is the 3rd major redesign of LLM UIUX. The first paradigm was that the LLM is a website you go to, the second was that it is an app you download to your computer. This third one is that it is a self-contained, persistent, asynchronous entity with org-wide tools and context, working alongside teams of humans. It really takes a while to wrap your head around it, but it works and it is awesome.