Alex Bihshtein 🇮🇱 🇺🇦 🇺🇸

Coding @honeycombinsurance.
I like integrating awesome technologies into real time decision systems + philosophy and ideas that makes individuals flourish

[Alex Bihshtein 🇮🇱 🇺🇦 🇺🇸 @bihshtein]

@Nikos_17 Haha yes , great poets shape the narrative

[Alex Bihshtein 🇮🇱 🇺🇦 🇺🇸 @bihshtein]

@yaronbrook What about those lonely people who have no one to scratch their back except their domestic demon???

[Alex Bihshtein 🇮🇱 🇺🇦 🇺🇸 @bihshtein]

@sapinker You're logic is brilliant and I'm forever grateful for the intellectual value I've gained from your books, but you will never win the God debate with your evolutionary approach to morality.
Its is true that evolution drives human nature, but it is also true that what drives humans is ideas, and the morality of our society is based in Christian ideas that you accept blindly and call in evolution/ human nature.
The Enlightenment thinkers did nothing to reinvent morality at best, or at worst (Kant) secularized the Christian morality in order to undermine reason.
Ayn Rand has completed the work of the Enlightenment - but I guess to Objectivist philosophy is not popular enough for you to write about ...

[Steven Pinker @sapinker]

From THE GOD DEBATE:

Me:
Why should you care for the needy? Why should you donate blood? Why should you refrain from murder and robbery? You can't possibly say that the only reason to do it is because God will punish you in an afterlife. If God's back was turned, does that mean it would be okay to kill and rob or let people drown or starve? I can think of plenty of secular reasons to do it. Namely, I would not want to be left to starve or drown or die of lack of blood. I would not want to be the victim of murder or robbery. There's nothing special about me, and therefore what I demand of everyone else, I have to accept for myself. It is clear that we would all be better off in a world where everyone helped each other and refrained from hurting each other compared to a society where everyone was a rapacious psychopath. That's why we should be moral. God has nothing to do with it.

Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT):
What happens in Dr. Pinker's argument is that as an heir of Jewish and Christian civilization, he imports, as this kind of commonsensical position, metaphysical propositions about the existence of these human rights that no one has ever seen of or heard of. He cannot show me a human right under a microscope. He cannot prove to me in a mathematical theorem why segregation was wrong, why it was wrong to murder people in the gulag or the concentration camp for the sake of a better tomorrow. He asserts that it's necessary for, again, sort of decency and order and so on, and often it is, but there has to be a stronger reason when you find yourself in a position where what the society says is out of joint with what you think are the fundamental truths about the universe.

[Nikos Sotirakopoulos @Nikos_17]

An underrated contribution of Ayn Rand:
a theory of heroism that decouples it from sacrifice.
For Rand, heroism isn't a tool for death,
and the hero isn't looking up to a tragic end.
For Rand, heroism is an everyday technology
for a life lived at its peak.

[Alex Bihshtein 🇮🇱 🇺🇦 🇺🇸 @bihshtein]

https://t.co/AYUUrAt3z7

[Alex Bihshtein 🇮🇱 🇺🇦 🇺🇸 @bihshtein]

@Nikos_17 Subscribed! Just be careful not to become such an intellectual monopoly that antitrust authorities have to break up your YouTube channel.

[Alex Bihshtein 🇮🇱 🇺🇦 🇺🇸 @bihshtein]

@alxmthew Curious if you have read Atlas Shrugged? You'd find there some incredible illustrations about the dynamics of struggling , lying and many many other things

[Nikos Sotirakopoulos @Nikos_17]

More than ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning’,
the line that captures Kilgore is the next one:
‘someday this war’s gonna end’.

This is why he is the best counterweight to Kurtz.

For Kilgore war is temporary,
which is why he tries to have a good time there:
the surfing, the music, the barbecues,
the effort to bring a homey feeling to the troops.

For Kurtz the war will never end. There is no home.
Only existential horror.

It’s Kilgore who amplifies the size and gravitas of Kurtz.

And Duval managed to do it all in less than 15’ of screen time.

[Alex Bihshtein 🇮🇱 🇺🇦 🇺🇸 @bihshtein]

1. When gpt4 came out - it enabled me to code in minutes things that would take days/weeks and I probably never take upon myself in the first place. The agentic systems are mainly automating repetitive work.
2. If you're not smart enough to solve something in one day, you probably need to learn first instead of randomly trying different combinations of what you already know

[Alex Bihshtein 🇮🇱 🇺🇦 🇺🇸 @bihshtein]

@mbateman Yes, I think there are really two arguments here, first one is false and second one is not happening.

1. The new "agentic" systems are bigger leap than gpt4 was.
2. The system working time capacity is going two quadruple every year and so its intelligence

[Nikos Sotirakopoulos @Nikos_17]

Was fascinated to discover than at his peak
anti-capitalism, Hitler refers to America as
an absolute enemy (together with the UK),
and as the 'money country'.
He uses it as insult, but it's a good identification.

Reminds me these great lines from Atlas Shrugged:
“If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose—because it contains all the others—the fact that they were the people who created the phrase ‘to make money.’ No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity—to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words ‘to make money’ hold the essence of human morality."

Of course Hitler, with his economic illiteracy and his looter-mentality, could not grasp the 'making money'
concept.
But he was instinctively right: for whatever HE stood for, he SHOULD consider America the main enemy.

PS: on Hitler's anti-americanism and anti-capitalism,
I recommend the book by Brendan Simms 'Hitler: Only the World was Enough'.

[Nikos Sotirakopoulos @Nikos_17]

Happy birthday to the biggest rebel in history.

Where others saw humans as basket cases,
she saw in us the potential of the hero.
Where others saw us as tribal serfs,
she saw freedom as existential necessity.
Where others saw unintelligible chaos,
she saw a world we can understand,
and make a happy home.

New tradition: on Ayn Rand's birthday,
I'll be re-reading (or re-listening)
my favourite chapter of her work.
This year I'm picking Chapter 6 of Atlas Shrugged
(the Rearden's party one).

[Alex Bihshtein 🇮🇱 🇺🇦 🇺🇸 @bihshtein]

@uriberger88 Yes! Here is a cool use-case , a voice model that can hold long (4-8 hours) conversations , and then summarize them, for example you could talk about your professional carrier and it will create a detailed professional bio

[Alex Bihshtein 🇮🇱 🇺🇦 🇺🇸 @bihshtein]

@uriberger88 Second that, I once tried to make llama scout identify a simple and clean logo in an image that is always located in the same corner, no matter what prompts I've tried it kept failing miserably

[Elica Le Bon الیکا‌ ل بن @elicalebon]

@AnaKasparian The Iranian people want outside help and are calling for the crown Prince. Try listening to the people who are living through the massacre instead of speaking your western propaganda over them, you heartless monster.

[Alex Bihshtein 🇮🇱 🇺🇦 🇺🇸 @bihshtein]

@ElliotMalin thanks for sharing, Ayn Rand wrote this essay several decades ago describing the phenomenon as anti-conceptual mentality.
Here is the brief : https://t.co/PQyAsumVDf
The full essay the is part of "Philosophy who needs it" and portrays 4 concrete characters - on of them is a university professor

[Joo @JoosyJew]

It’s only the 10th day of 2026 and we already have a strong competitor for ‘Man of the Year’

Absolute GOAT.

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

I’m a Marine Corp veteran, trained by LEOs when I served in US embassies on how to handle unruly individuals or protestors.
1) If you are the guys with guns, you are the ones responsible for the situation. Doubly so if you outnumber the person you’re engaging.
2) You do not need to use force except to control the situation in order to deescalate it. Minimal force required.
3) You are NOT here to look for excuses to use more force. Even if the person gives you an excuse which “justifies” using force, that doesn’t mean using force is de facto the right move.
4) “Let the other person retreat” often resolves the situation just fine! Don’t surround people, back them up against a wall, etc. Your job is to control the situation. “I put myself stupidly in danger” is not an excuse to escalate “because I’m in danger.”
5) People will feed off of your energy. If you come rolling up like a fascist thug ready to break skulls, people will meet you at that level. If you show up calm, professional, and having a friendly chat, often that brings the temperature down.
Everything I see from ICE agents is they are relishing violence and exercising power, needlessly escalating situations, looking for opportunities to shoot their weapons and beat the shit out of people.
~ Alexander McCoy

[Alex Bihshtein 🇮🇱 🇺🇦 🇺🇸 @bihshtein]

@compound248 @ZohranKMamdani @yaronbrook sounds familiar