Ralph Baskett

Retreats are bookmarks not endorsements

[Warren Smith @WTSmith17]

How @elonmusk exposed the most pretentious journalist in the world

[VERITY France @verity_france]

L'ancien directeur du CDC, Robert Redfield, confirme SOUS SERMENT qu'ils cachaient les effets secondaires des vaccins contre la Covid-19 :

« Il y a eu des décisions inappropriées de la part de certains pour essayer de sous-déclarer tout effet secondaire, car ils arguaient que cela rendrait le public moins enclin à se faire vacciner. »

« L'une des plus grandes erreurs qui ont été commises a été d'imposer ces vaccins ! Ils n'auraient JAMAIS dû être imposés, ils ne préviennent pas l'infection, et ILS ONT des effets secondaires ! »

[conduct|r @conductr_]

I know it sounds counterintuitive at first: why should you change your identity first in order to achieve your goals? Let me explain.

You do not have a discipline problem. You have an identity problem. The person you are right now is built to produce the life you already have, and anything that does not align with that person gets dropped after a few weeks.

Maxwell Maltz was a plastic surgeon who fixed people's faces and watched them stay the same person underneath. In Psycho-Cybernetics he wrote: "You will 'act like' the sort of person you conceive yourself to be. Not only this, but you literally cannot act otherwise, in spite of all your conscious efforts or willpower."

That is the whole problem. If you want a specific outcome in life, you must have the lifestyle that creates that outcome long before you reach it. Nobody is fighting their goal. They are fighting the gap between who they are and what they say they want.

And you are not undisciplined. All behavior is goal oriented, and you are already very disciplined toward one goal you never picked: staying the same. That is the one you have to change first.

Do this now:

1. Write down where your current life ends up in 5 years if nothing changes

2. Finish this sentence: "I am the type of person who..."

3. Pick 2 things that person does daily and start them now

You are not forcing a new life out of the old you. You are becoming the person that life already belongs to.

[Steve Kirsch @stkirsch]

Claude said kids can't become autistic within hours after a vaccine; it's medically impossible. So I pressed that point and Claude discovered the medical literature supports my claims: Vaccines can seriously alter brain function within HOURS.

[Machina @EXM7777]

indians and filipinos are FINISHED...

Geoffrey Hinton, the researcher behind the deep learning methods that ChatGPT and Claude are trained on, said it clearly:

"for mundane intellectual labour, AI is just going to replace everybody"

let me explain to you what that means...

big companies don't check their own invoices, they pay offshore firms to do it

and because paying humans to read is expensive, those firms only check a small sample... every mistake sitting in the unchecked pile just gets paid, forever

this team came out of stealth this week to replace that entire model

instead of a sample, their system reads every single invoice... but reading is the boring part

here's the smart part, step by step:

> it connects to everything the company knows... the ERP, warehouse data, call transcripts, slack threads, email attachments
> all of that becomes one brain (a context graph)
> so when an invoice comes in, it's not just reading numbers... it knows the contract and the price that was negotiated

and when it catches an overcharge, no human needed:

> it writes the dispute
> negotiates it with the supplier
> gets the money back
> then fixes the contract so the same mistake can never happen again

and invoices are just the first domino...

claims processing, customer support, compliance checks, data entry... all of these jobs exist because companies could never afford to have everything read properly

now they can

that's the mechanism behind this clip... when the man who built the foundations of modern AI says "replace everybody", this is what it looks like in practice

[Eli Albrecht @Elialbrecht]

When I was a lawyer at Gibson Dunn in D.C., we took our summer associates to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. A survivor spoke to us and said something that stuck with me:

Lawyers need to know the holocaust did not begin with camps. It began when Jews were removed from institutions - above all, legal institutions. Judges stripped of their robes. Lawyers disbarred. Then, when law-groups were Judenrein, they codified laws that made discrimination systematic and "legal."

First, you remove the Jews from the institutions. Then, Jews can be discriminated against without representation.

On Monday, Mayor Mamdani announced his 18-member Advisory Committee on the Judiciary. The Committee was promised to be "truly reflective of New York City."

Not one of the 18 is Jewish.

Not one Jewish attorney, former judge, or law professor - in a city where one in eight residents is Jewish and even Justice John Leventhal, recommended by the State's Chief Judge, was rejected.

It is estimated that over 50% of the New York bar is Jewish. That means there is a 0.0004% chance of no Jews being selected to the Committee.

Mamdani’s marginalization of Jews has been ongoing, and few voices on the Left have spoken up.

On Day 1, Mamdani revoked the IHRA antisemitism definition (top priority); he changed the NYPD guidance protecting houses of worship, eliminated Jews from the City's immigrant-heritage map, called for the arrest of the prime minister of the only Jewish state, and now created a Judenrein Judiciary Committee.

My grandmother, Leah, survived Nazi Germany. Before the laws, before the violence, she told me how she was pushed out of her high school groups. Then, once excluded from all activities, she was bullied and marginalized.

We are already seeing Step 2 in NYC. Two weeks ago, on a Jewish Holiday, two men were stabbed outside Upper West Side synagogues - one wearing a kippah- and yesterday, Jewish students were attacked. Every 26 hours, there is a hate crime against Jews in NYC.

In NYC, there is a concerted effort to disappear Jews from public life and leadership.

No one on the Left is speaking out. If this discrimination was happening to any other group, the chorus would be deafening.

To be clear, Jews will find a way. Many are already taking their talents elsewhere. When white-shoe firms shut Jewish lawyers out, they built firms that now dominate. Cardozo, Louis Marshall, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg all found a way despite discrimination.

But NYC will be worse off without us. A city government that is judenrein - cleansed of Jews – does not just hurt the Jews, but hurts the city.

The tragedy is not just that Jews were left out of the institutions. It is that the institutions were left without the Jews.

If you see this and have not yet spoken out, I encourage you to do so.

[Azat @AzatAlsalim]

Iranian girl states:
"Islam is neither the religion of Iran nor that of ancient Persia, Islam was imposed on us through torture, massacres, and rape, by enslaving Iranians to convert them to Islam. The Iranians, or Persians, were actually Zoroastrians.”

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Most PM job descriptions still ask for airtight PRD writing.

The best AI teams have already stopped writing them. The reason is structural, not stylistic. A traditional PRD describes how a product should behave in specific situations. Gen AI products are expected to handle almost every situation, which makes that kind of document nearly impossible to write with any precision.

The replacement is a pre baked set of trivia questions for the model, paired with an answer key that scores whether the response is actually good.

Build a recipes app and instead of writing pages of edge cases, you write 100 prompts covering the ice cream flavors users might ask for, score the outputs, and use that offline set as a proxy for what real users will experience once it ships.

@danielmckinn0n spent years as a PM on Llama at Meta and on Gemini at Google. He's been saying the same thing for two years now. Performance on that offline set is the best available signal for whether users will be satisfied. Score well offline, ship it, and let the online numbers confirm or deny the bet.

The skill that used to separate strong PMs was writing a precise spec. Now it's writing a precise test. Most PM training hasn't caught up.

Define the eval.

[Dima Zeniuk @DimaZeniuk]

The Starship recovery team dropped the most epic group photo of 2026

Imagine telling your kids you once recovered a Starship and have the photo to prove it

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Voilà pourquoi je fais Argil.

Détruire définitivement l’entrisme politique et idéologique dans les séries, les films et les documentaires.

[Lara Logan @laralogan]

We’re also glad you didn’t listen.

[Kane 謝凱堯 @kane]

CEO: did you take those press release pics?

Photog: sure did boss, dead eyes of Baphomet staring through a door in Backrooms and everything

CEO: what

[Senator Ron Johnson @SenRonJohnson]

Dr. Fauci is pleading the Fifth because he CAN’T answer truthfully without further incriminating himself — even though he has a sweeping pardon.  

There are so many questions he should answer, but won’t.  

He’s probably not capable of it, but he should be profoundly ashamed.

[Ralph Baskett @BaskettRalph]

?

[Radek Stefanski @stefanski_radek]

Everyone from Weber to Mokyr puts culture at the center of the rise of the West. But nobody has had a long-run cultural series you could drop into a growth model.

So I built one: LLMs read 23,000 books from the Western canon, scoring what each endorses.

Year 0–1920, one chart:

[Ralph Baskett @BaskettRalph]

?

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Karen Hao went looking for the finish line. She found four of them.

Hao: “There are no goal posts for this field and there are no goal posts for the industry when they say that they are ultimately trying to recreate AI systems that would be as smart as humans.”

Every serious project in history opened with a sentence you could fail.

Land a man on the moon and return him safely before the decade is out. A person, a place, a date. You either did it or you didn’t.

Hao: “How do we even define what that means? And when are we going to get there if we don’t know how to define the destination?”

Trillions of dollars are moving toward a destination nobody has agreed to describe.

Not because it’s hard. Because a description can be checked.

Hao: “They can use it however they want to and they can define and redefine it based on what is convenient for them.”

A definition you can revise is not a definition. It’s a lever.

Hao: “When Sam Altman is talking with Congress, AGI is a system that’s going to cure cancer, solve climate change, cure poverty.”

That version needs a regulator to stand down.

Hao: “When he’s talking with consumers that he’s trying to sell his products to, it’s the most amazing digital assistant that you’re ever going to have.”

That version needs a subscription.

Hao: “It was defined as a system that will generate $100 billion of revenue.”

That version needed a signature.

Hao: “Highly autonomous systems that outperform humans in most economically valuable work.”

That version has to survive a lawyer.

Four definitions. One number.

The only version anyone made measurable was the one with money on the other side. The rest were left soft on purpose.

The cure cancer version was spoken in a room with cameras. It was heard in rooms with hospital beds.

Somebody in one of those rooms did the math on the time they had left. Nobody in front of the cameras had to.

A goal with a number can be missed. A goal made of adjectives cannot.

Cure cancer is not a spec. Most economically valuable work is not a spec.

A project that can never be finished never runs out of reasons to raise.

The money can wait forever. The people it was promised to cannot. Every year of waiting comes out of a real life, spent against a date nobody ever wrote down.

Hao: “These are very different definitions that are spoken out loud to the audience that needs to be mobilized to ward off regulation or get more consumer buy-in into the industry’s quest or to get more capital.”

The word was never a description of a technology. It’s an instrument, and it does different work in every room it enters.

That makes it your problem too. Every plan you build around a word this loose runs on somebody else’s calendar.

The actual work never needed the word. A benchmark passes or it doesn’t. Code runs or it doesn’t. Weights are on your machine or they aren’t.

All of that can be checked. None of it can be redefined at a hearing.

A promise that cannot be broken was never made.

[The Rational Animal 🤔 @theobjectivist]

Stossell and those like him keep losing to socialism for one reason: Morality! They refuse to make the moral case, and you cannot beat a moral crusade with a spreadsheet.

Why has John Stossel failed? He says it himself: years spent proving free markets work, and socialists keep winning. He blames bad economics.

But economics was never the battlefield. Everything Stossel says is true, capitalism produces, lifts men from poverty, delivers what government cannot. And none of it will win, because the fight is not about production. It is about the good.

This is the error conservatives and libertarians repeat forever. They argue efficiency while conceding morality. They prove capitalism works, then go silent when it's called selfish, having already granted the socialist's premise: that to live for oneself is immoral.

Capitalism has only one defense: that a man's life is his own, that he exists for his own sake, and his happiness is a right to proclaim, not a sin to excuse.

Say it, and you win. Evade it, and you lose to men with false economics and a bolder claim to virtue.

[Urooj @Urooj978]

The FBI spent 12 months trying to crack one banker’s hard drive.
​They failed.

​The software on that drive was free, open-source, and ran on pure mathematics.

​In 2008, Brazilian police seized 5 hard drives from banker Daniel Dantas. After 5 months of failed dictionary attacks, they sent them directly to the FBI in early 2009.

​12 months later, the FBI gave up and shipped the drives back. Uncracked.
​That software was TrueCrypt.

​When TrueCrypt unexpectedly shut down in 2014, French cryptographer Mounir Idrassi picked up the torch. He had already been refining the code, and shortly after the Snowden revelations, he launched VeraCrypt.

​Today, VeraCrypt is fully audited, open-source, and available on GitHub:
​• Zero corporate oversight: No central company holds your keys.
• No backdoors: No cloud escrow option a court order can bypass.
• Plausible deniability: Supports hidden decoy volumes in case you're forced to give up a password.

​The math is the only lock.

​The encryption standard that kept the FBI out for a year is free to run on your laptop right now.

[Ralph Baskett @BaskettRalph]

"...the man who never stopped talking suddenly went silent."

[Ted Cruz @tedcruz]

Americans buried parents alone. Children lost years of childhood. Families watched businesses they had built over a lifetime disappear.

And while the country suffered, Anthony Fauci was writing in his diary about becoming “the most famous and talked about person in the country” and marveling that his fame was “explosive and really unimaginable.”

There was no camera he couldn’t find. No interview he couldn’t give. No American life he wouldn’t micromanage.

He said one thing to the public, and would write the opposite in his diary.

Today, when the country finally demanded answers, the man who never stopped talking suddenly went silent.

[Silverhand @21xSilverhand]

A NASA fellow claims the topic that fails more engineering students than any other can be understood in 10 minutes at a music keyboard. No integrals anywhere. His words.

The man is Ali Alqaraghuli, a former NASA postdoctoral fellow who now runs two hardware companies.

And the way he teaches it is what makes the video worth it.

The topic is the Fourier transform, the math your noise cancelling headphones run every second of their life. Courses bury it under integral signs. He sits down at a keyboard instead and shows that any sound, however messy, is just simple notes stacked on top of each other, and that there are two completely different ways to look at the same signal.

The move that stays with you is the switch between those two pictures. Once you see a sound the second way, you cannot unsee it, and half of signal processing turns from formulas into common sense.

The comments are the proof. An 80 year old retired cannery maintenance man wrote in asking for part two. A wildlife biologist who analyzes birdsong said the video filled a gap her own analysis software had been hiding from her for years.

One commenter put it best: this is what separates electrical engineers from every other engineer.

One chord. Two ways to see it. 10 minutes. It is in the video.

[Contrarian Energy Construct. 𓃵 🏹 𓂀 @BakkenShale]

@MJTruthUltra Youtube CEO. Communist Susan Wojcicki proudly admitted to censored information on ‘Covid’ -

Wonder how many died from covid vaccine warnings.