InjaBlapp

The future is imminent

[roon @tszzl]

I do love this country where you can just trade barbs online with the undersecretary of war or whomever about the production of thinking machines and you don’t get disappeared or otherwise hurt. all on this barely functional website

[Pete Oxenham @peteoxenham]

holy crap, it’s beautiful

he deslopped amazon

[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 🫡🇺🇸

[Klara @klara_sjo]

There will be no WW3.

They've abandoned numbered releases and switched to a live service model with seasonal events.

[Tehran Bureau @TehranBureau]

From trusted source in Tehran: Tell all of your friends [abroad], everyone you know: there is absolutely nothing else we can do here inside Iran. Nothing. They are killing people in such ways, they’ve descended upon people so brutally, they're attacking us in such ways... We’ve lost so many lives that no one dares go out anymore. They shoot directly with bullets. They kill outright. And even after killing, they come and behead you, and do countless other violent things to you.

For God’s sake, whatever can be done, you are the ones who can do it. You must not abandon these gatherings. All of you must keep these protests going. We cannot do anything inside Iran. Going out into the streets is literally suicide. It’s not about bravery anymore. It’s madness. You go out and they shoot you point blank. They don’t even ask why you came. They just kill you.

There is absolutely no way for us to gather unless we had weapons, unless we were armed like them. Otherwise they have weapons everywhere. There has been so much killing. So much.

So whatever is to happen now is up to you. You are the ones who can somehow save us. [Breaks down into a sob. Crying, the caller continues...] When you see what’s happening, when you hear what’s happening… I’ve done so much yelling and choked on so much teargas, my voice is bad.

We follow what you're doing. When we see you gather in protest in front of an embassy it brings us joy. It still gives us a lingering hope that we can do something. It's your responsibility now. We did absolutely everything we could. As our fellow Iranians it's your responsibility. You can influence foreign policy. You can tell the world what's happening. The placards you hold. The YouTube videos. Distributing images and video. Gathering in front of embassies. Even if you have just the weekends. Please do something for us on Saturdays and Sundays. Please don't let your gatherings get smaller as the weeks go on. No one will stop you there. No one will kill you. No one is singling you out. We don't even have the freedom to walk about in our own town. We no longer even know who is friend or foe.

We don’t even know who we’re speaking to anymore. We no longer know if those recounting what's happening is an enemy. Because if one wrong word slips from our mouths, they turn us into a corpse even before we've had a chance to return home.

For God’s sake, I beg of you, don’t abandon these gatherings. Our only hope now is you. What’s now obvious is that America won’t do anything. You’re our only hope. Please tell your friends. You’ve seen how many young people have been killed. So many, so many young people. For the sake of the youth.

I know that based on the videos that have reached Iran International [satellite station] since yesterday, now that the internet has come back briefly, they will probably cut the internet again and people will go into silence, the country will go back into a blackout.

For God’s sake, please help us. Help us save our country from these people. Stand together so we can live in a flourishing country. For God’s sake, help us.

We are in Tehran. What I saw in Tehran, and what they’re saying about the provinces and small towns... They couldn’t fully control Tehran’s gatherings with the forces they had, but in the small towns it was killing after killing. Towns with populations of only 20 or 30 thousand people truly had many deaths. Thousands, hundreds…

The things we’ve heard, the things we’ve seen go far beyond mass killing. It was horrific. Truly horrific.

I beg you. I beg you. Don’t abandon these gatherings. Please. #Iran #IranMassacre

[OpenClaw🦞 @openclaw]

PSA: You do NOT need to buy a Mac Mini to run Clawdbot 🦞

That dusty laptop in your closet? Works.
Your gaming PC you feel guilty about? Works.
A $5/mo VPS? Works.
A Raspberry Pi held together with hope? Probably works.

The M4 Mac Mini is gorgeous but Clawdbot runs on basically anything with Node.

Stop giving Apple your money (unless you want to, I'm not your mom).

👉 https://t.co/3JLF6YZajc

[The Free Press @TheFP]

You’ve been lied to about Africa.

@MagatteW: “Africa is not poor because of colonialism. Africa is poor because we have made it impossible for our people to create wealth.”

[InjaBlapp @b_schuyler]

@elonmusk @RolandForTexas Who is John Galt?

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

You are a taker, not a maker. All you’ve done your whole life is take from the makers of the world.

The zero-sum mindset you have is at the root of so much evil. Once you realize that civilization is not zero-sum and that it is about making far more than one consumes, then it becomes obvious that the path to prosperity for all is just let the makers make.

Regarding Tesla, the reality is that I have been given nothing.

However, if I lead Tesla to become the most valuable company in the world by far and it stays that way for 5 years, shareholders voted to award me 12% of what is built. Anyone who wants to come along for the ride can buy Tesla stock.

If Tesla “merely” becomes a $1.999 trillion dollar company, I get nothing. This is a great deal for shareholders, which is why they voted so overwhelmingly to approve this, for which I am immensely grateful.

And they did so by a margin far more than you won your political seat.

[Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele]

This is really Shady.

Matthew Slim has the lowdown on the slop, you dig?

[Luke Weston @lukeweston]

Look at it.

[Joseph Carlson @joecarlsonshow]

Excellent job Lina Khan, you successfully destroyed iRobot, a company that Amazon wanted to purchase, but you blocked it for fear of a creating some kind of robot vacuum monopoly.

Now which companies are winning? Well of course Roborock, a Chinese robot vacuum company that's flooded the US market and has better infrastructure and development.

Another example of our own government destroying our own companies for the benefit of foreign competitors.

[Ramiro Castiñeira @rcas1]

Argentina abandona las ideas comunistas. El proyecto "socialismo del siglo XXI" que Peronistas y Radicales quisieron instaurar en Argentina, colapsa con millones de votos.

Argentina vuelve al capitalismo, a occidente, a la libertad.

[GameStop @gamestop]

A Statement from GameStop

[Governor Gavin Newsom @CAgovernor]

This is a breathtaking abuse of the law and power by the President of the United States.

America is on the brink of martial law.

Do not be silent.

[Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele]

THE DESENSITIZED GENERATION

—

Immune To Novelty By AI Video Fatigue

With just a few hours of testing OpenAI’s Sora2 Social Network for my clients and just finished a 218 page report, the thing I thought about for decades is upon us:

Full Desensitization Of Visual Novelty

I knew so many years ago, and one reason I have posted on the account so many novel images and videos that one day we will rapidly become immune to “oh damn, it’s over” images and video. With Sora2 this desensitization will rapidly accelerate as “you and your friends” build endless videos where you and they are inserted.

Like all things that get abused, the first phase is “wow look at this”, the next phase is “can it do that” and the last phase is “nothing is real and I don’t care”.

The shock value of the entire technology become removed but in the final phases it will be pushed to extremes of insults and potentially purposeful directed reputation damage.

This will take place so rapidly as Sora2 and every other social network rushes to take whatever nicely oxygen that is left in the room for more and more “it’s over, we are so cooked” fantastical videos.

They will continue to get so much better that even the “debunker” experts will give up their “look at the fingers-type troupe”, they honestly will not know and soon burn out.

My easy point is get ready to be bored by the novelty of humans that in the past took potentially hours of thier lives to create novelty in reality.

The hard point is what now? Once a society takes something that has increasingly more and more amazing possibilities like AI and rapidly becomes immune to the possibilities the entire industry become devalued because the front facing aspect to AI will be Sora2-like social media.

Humanity’s entire past of astonishing achievements, the high points and the low points and the incredible art we can make will equally become devalued because this fatigue will make us not care and not trust what was real.

Everything will become a forever now where there was no real past because it would take impossible effort to verify it if at all.

Why?

Because not only are we the Desensitized Generation we are also the Amnesia Generation where Petabytes of all forms of media, books, papers, microfilm/microfiche, film, VHS, audio tapes, records, etc is being thrown away or decayed. Not to mention the daily removal of text, images, video and audio from the internet. We simply will not have the receipts, we won’t have the memory and the fatigue is too large to care.

It took 5 dark nights for the Library to burn, the sum total of human knowledge. In our age the burn is slow and rapidly increasing till the pot boils over.

What are the answers?

I have thought about this for decades. I will continue to write about it a lot. But one thing you can do is understand we are rapidly losing our past because almost no one cares. I should not be the only one dumpster diving to save what I can. Also protect your mind and preserve your “novelty” sensitivity because once it is burned out with fatigue, it will never return.

And I ask you to have grace and compassion to those that don’t know what we know. You are the 1% of the 1% and must serve a place to help those that can understand what this means and have grace to those who can’t. I am serious, be gentle with them as they find the bottom of the hole and hopefully find a way back.

This video below was novel and she risked her life. You are the last generation to understand this.

The post reposted of a CEO head in a toilet, is AI rendered it is not novelty.

[Bo Yoder @bo_yoder]

Read this and buckle your seatbelts.

[Tiffany Fong @TiffanyFong]

JK Rowling is so based.

[josh (oldfriend99) @oldfriend99]

Fortunately there's only 3 more years of rapidly escalating fascism before there's a peaceful exchange of power

[artyfartystuff @artyfartystuff]

@AdamParkhomenko