Ben Sprecher

Product, AI, startups, retail. CPO @bookendai.
Led Retail Supply AI @googlecloud. Cofounded @incentivetarget (acq, @Google). Led product @catalina, @HealthEdge.

[Arsen Ostrovsky @Ostrov_A]

Must-read from Sam Harris in @australian on why he refuses to engage in most Israel debates: because too often they start from false assumption that Israel is the problem, while ignoring the ideology that glorifies October 7, martyrdom and the destruction of the Jewish state.

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.

The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.

Access to all other Claude models is not affected.

We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible.

Read our full statement: https://t.co/bwn0sximKZ

[Ben Sprecher @bensprecher]

@grok @CoiniusCoinar @BoredElonMusk @cabsav456 ☝️

[Ben Sprecher @bensprecher]

@ryanmhickman Amazing!
So many questions:
- how much data/s/rig is captured?
- did you consider other 1p or 3p sensors (IR, etc) for depth confirmation?
- are you building software for segmenting & predicting the captured motion?

[Anthony Scaramucci @Scaramucci]

Trump said something outside a press gaggle that I don’t think enough people caught.

A reporter called him out on the corruption. He gave three responses.

1. I have the right to do it.
2. He’s not stealing that much. A billion or two billion dollars. Not that much money. Classic Trump.
3. People don’t care.

That’s the permission structure. Our collective apathy is what they’re using to justify everything happening in Washington right now.

Please stand up and prove him wrong.

[Ben Sprecher @bensprecher]

@corbinwilliams @spencerpratt You are reading the chart wrong.
It's %, not vote count. Count is increasing. Just scroll down on that same page.

https://t.co/GUSuZWBMX8

[Ben Sprecher @bensprecher]

@paulg If I had a 1913 Liberty Head Nickel for every time that happened to me, I'd buy peripheral rotor watches instead, amiright?

[Garrett Exner @Exner_Garrett]

Ray’s Rock - Omaha Beach

On the morning of June 6, 1944, 23 year old Staff Sergeant Arnold “Ray” Lambert came ashore with the first wave of the 1st Infantry Division on the eastern side of Omaha Beach. At this small patch of concrete he saved nearly 20 lives:

The division came under intense fire from several German bunkers surrounding the entrance to the Colville Draw (one of two exits off Omaha Beach). Ray, a medic, immediately went to work.

He was shot in the arm. Moments later he was hit by shrapnel in the leg, but Ray kept pulling men to safety. He pulled nearly 20 wounded soldiers to cover behind this 8ft wide obstacle, treating each soldier before going out in search of others.

After several hours under fire, while pulling a wounded soldier from the ocean, he was struck by a landing craft. It dropped its ramp on top of him, breaking his back. He fell face down in the water, drowning. The craft backed up and nearby soldiers pulled an unconscious Ray to safety, eventually evacuating him off the beach.

Remarkably, Ray had already earned two Silver Stars and three Purple Hearts in Sicily and North Africa, prior to landing in France. But here in Normandy his war would end.

He awoke in a hospital back in England a day later. In the next bed over was his brother, who had also been wounded at Omaha.

When asked about his work on D-Day, Ray simply said, “I did what I was called to do.”

Ray Lambert passed in 2021 at 100 years old. He exemplified the best of American grit and why remembering this day is so important.

[Ben Sprecher @bensprecher]

@emollick Pre-order placed.

You should add UCP/ACP to the agent part of the site so agents can buy the book directly on behalf of their humans!

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

Our internal data shows Claude is accelerating AI development—a possible path to recursive self-improvement, or AI autonomously building a more capable successor.

It’s happening faster than we thought, and the implications deserve greater attention. https://t.co/OVVPJO7VQx

[Matthew Prince 🌥 @eastdakota]

Welp, that happened faster than I predicted. Thought it would be end of 2027, then early 2027, but agentic traffic growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet's history. https://t.co/2zX5bHdhsa

[Ben Sprecher @bensprecher]

@azeem @erikbryn Precisely what @erikbryn discussed at his talk on GPTs (General Purpose Technologies, not Generative Pretrained Transformers), back at the AI and the Future of Work conference at MIT, what feels like a lifetime ago....

[Ben Sprecher @bensprecher]

@emollick Human minds (even superforecaster humans) really, really struggle to grasp exponentials.

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

The Trump administration is sending ships to rip 900 ocean sensors out of the Atlantic and Pacific — and Congress already told them twice they couldn't do it.**
They're doing it anyway.

[Om Patel @om_patel5]

THIS GUY LIVES UNDER SFO'S TAKEOFF PATH SO HE BUILT A CEILING PROJECTOR THAT TRACKS EVERY PLANE FLYING OVER HIS HOUSE IN REAL TIME

he uses a cheap $30 radio receiver to pick up the signals that planes broadcast while flying.

then projects them onto his ceiling in real time

when a jet flies over his house you hear it outside and at the exact same moment a plane glides across his ceiling labeled with the airline, aircraft type, and destination

pure black background so the projector's rectangle disappears and only the aircraft are visible

but he didn't stop at planes

it also draws the real sky behind them. sun, moon, bright stars, constellations, and live satellites including the ISS. all at their true positions for his exact location and time in real time

so he's lying in bed watching the actual night sky projected onto his ceiling with real planes crossing through it as they take off from SFO

there is a huge market for every man alive that runs outside to see the helicopter

vibe coded the whole thing himself with a cheap radio, a projector, and some clever software

[Ben Sprecher @bensprecher]

@Aletheiaholic @Rainmaker1973 Because:
- ~1.1M people, nearly all Jews, were killed there, and most were never registered, just sent straight to the gas chambers
- the record you cite was only for registered prisoners, and is incomplete

Source: Holocaust Denial on Trial https://t.co/JxOcl9e9LM

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

This has quietly been a miracle month in medicine.

In the last 5 weeks we’ve got news on:

- retatrutide, the triple agonist GLP-1 from Lilly, basically melting fat and body-wide inflammation at record levels
- RevMed’s new pancreatic cancer drug showing unprecedented abilities to extend life
- small trial of a one-and-done PCSK9 gene editing therapy for slashing LDL cholesterol
- Mayo’s AI-assisted radiology showing vastly improved cancer detection
- this new therapy for metastatic solid tumors

This stuff is at varying levels of evidence. Retatrutide is ~100% on its way, other stuff needs more clinical trial data. But put it together and we’re maybe on the verge of majorly reducing the mortality of heart disease and cancer, the two leading causes of death in America.

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

Follow the money on this one. It is rotten to the core.

The Pentagon just lent $620,000,000 to a tiny North Carolina startup called Vulcan Elements. The company is two years old.

It had fewer than 50 employees.

And three months before the deal was announced, Donald Trump Jr.’s venture firm quietly took a stake in it.

Here is the part the administration tried to bury.

Of the dozens of companies the Pentagon was weighing, Vulcan was the only deal initiated by a top White House aide. That aide was Peter Navarro, a close friend of Trump Jr. The order came down to move fast.

One official put it plainly: The call came from the White House. We have to get this done.

Staff worked late nights to push it through in weeks. Deals like this normally take many months of vetting. And when it closed, Vulcan’s valuation jumped from about 200 million dollars to roughly 2 billion.

A windfall for the investors, including the president’s son.

This is public money. Your money.

Routed through the Pentagon to enrich the president’s family and their friends. The Bush administration’s own chief ethics lawyer called it corruption we pay for.

And there is more coming.

A drone parts company Trump Jr. holds a stake in is also under Pentagon review.

This is not a one-off. It is a pattern. The president’s family is treating the federal Treasury like a private bank, and the bill lands on every taxpayer.

https://t.co/4kB1cZNmlE

[Ben Sprecher @bensprecher]

@rodolfor @Miles_Brundage no they are a spinout of the shortening company that found a novel (not Novell) application for food-grade fats in packet switched networks https://t.co/zKmPjqC3CW

[Ben Sprecher @bensprecher]

@Aella_Girl As a smart+rational person, you'd (I assume) be evidence-based in your thinking.

So, what evidence supports this theory? I'm genuinely curious.

Communists argue the same thing. When faced w/above question, they flip to "well, TRUE Communism has never been tried..."