ConPhoto

Dublin Event & Commercial Photographer @ConPhoto
Virtual Reality Voyager & Dreamer @vrr00m
Creative Technologist & Technical Creator @BiscuitRodeo

[Gaurab Chakrabarti @Gaurab]

You cannot buy a new gas turbine until 2030. Order books at GE, Siemens, and Mitsubishi stretch to 2029. Turbine prices have nearly tripled since 2019. Every AI data center needs power and every gas plant needs a turbine. And every turbine has one part that bottlenecks the entire industry: The blade. It has to survive in gas 500°C above the melting point of the metal it's made from and spin at up to 20,000 RPM under 10,000 g of centrifugal force. Each blade is grown as a single crystal of nickel superalloy, pulled through a vacuum furnace at 3 mm per minute. A set of blades costs $600,000 and takes 90 weeks to grow. The same metallurgy powers modern jet engines. Only 3 companies on Earth can build one. China spent $42 billion trying to catch up. They bought a Russian fighter engine, took it apart, and copied every part. Their copy ran 30 hours between overhauls versus 400 for the original. Modern Western engines run 4,000. You can reverse engineer the shape of a turbine blade. You cannot reverse engineer 60 years of metallurgy.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

The people in this photo aren't friendlier than you. Their apartments are just smaller. So small that Parisians basically gave up on living indoors and moved their living rooms onto the sidewalk. And that was the whole plan.

In the 1850s, a city planner named Baron Haussmann tore apart medieval Paris and rebuilt it. He widened streets into boulevards, capped every building at five stories, and added one rule that explains this entire photo: the ground floor of every building had to be a café, a bakery, or a shop. The apartments above were intentionally tiny. Some were single rooms carved out of old mansions. No garden. Barely any sunlight. A private balcony was something most Parisians would never have.

So the café became home. You ate breakfast there. Held meetings there. Received your mail there. By the late 1700s, Paris already had close to 2,000 of them. In 2002, there were still 1,907. Even now, after years of closures brought that number to about 1,410, the coverage is absurd: a 2020 city study found 94% of Parisians live within a five-minute walk of a bakery. When COVID shut indoor dining in 2020, Paris ripped out parking spaces, turned them into outdoor terraces, and let 9,800 cafés and restaurants keep them permanently.

An American sociologist named Ray Oldenburg wrote a book in 1989 called The Great Good Place. He had a name for spots like the Parisian café: "third places." Not your home, not your office, but the casual in-between spots where you actually get to know people. Cafés, pubs, barbershops, the corner store where the owner knows your name. His whole argument was that American suburbs were built with only two zones, your house and your job, connected by a car. No sidewalk café, no place to bump into a neighbor by accident.

The U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a national health epidemic in 2023. Being alone all the time is as bad for your body as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Half of American adults say they feel lonely. Weekly socializing dropped from 5.5 hours in 2003 to just 4 hours in 2023, and it never bounced back after COVID. Americans between 15 and 29 now spend 45% more time alone than they did in 2010.

The scene in this tweet looks like a personality trait. It is a 170-year-old engineering project that works exactly as designed.

[Mehdi (e/λ) @BetterCallMedhi]

the scariest part of this Anthropic story is what it implies about the timeline and I think most people are completely missing it

Anthropic built a model called Claude Mythos that found thousands of zeroo day vulnerabilities across every major operating system & every major web browser entirely on its own without huuman steering

it it found a 27 yo vulnerability in openBSD which is considered one of the most security hardened OS on earth, a 16 yo vulnerability in FFmpeg in a line of code that automated testing tools had hit 5 million times without catching it & it autonomously chained multiple linux kernel vulnerabilities together to escalate from regular user to full system control, this is the kind of work that used to require elite nation-state level hackers working for months
and here’s what should keep you up tonight

Anthropic is so terrified of what this model can do offensively that they made 3 unprecedented decisions simultaneously, they decided to never release it publicly, they contacted the US gov before publishing anything & they formed a coalition called project glasswing with apple/Google/ microsoft/amazon NVIDIA & 40+ other companies to use Mythos exclusively for defense, when the company that built the model is too scared to let it out of the lab that tells you everything about what we’ve crossedd…

but I think the real story that absolutely nobody is discussing is the second order implication, if anthropic built this then google deepmind can build it, if Google can build it China can build it, if China can build it , every state actor on earth will eventually build it, anthropic chose responsible disclosure but that choice is a luxury of being first

the next team that reaches this capability level might not make the same choice and once a model like this leaks or gets independently replicated every piece of software on earth becomes a potential attack surface

and connect this to the Google quantum paper from last week, quantum computers that can crack BTC in 9 min AND AI models that can find zero days in every operating system autonomously, both arrived in the same month, we’re watching the entire security infrastructure of human civilization get challenged from 2 completely different directions simultaneously

I genuinely think we just entered a new era where the offense-defense balance in cybersecurity has permanently shifted, the window between a vulnerability existing & being discovered just went from years to minutes and the only thing standing between the current internet and total chaos is that the people who built this capability happened to be responsible about it, that is an incredibly thin line to bet civilization on

one last thing that I keep thinking about… mythos scored 93.9% on SWE-bench verified & 77.8% on SWE-bench pro, it outperforms every model ever built at coding and reasoning by a massive margin

anthropic built built the most powerful AI model on earth and chose to lock it in a cage because its offensive capabilities are too dangerous…

Mzrc Andreessen declared AGI is here 3 days ago to pump his portfolio, meanwhile the people actually building the most advanced systems are too afraid to release them, that contrast tells you everything about who understands what’s happening and who is performing for an audience

[unusual_whales @unusual_whales]

Look at this.

This wallet has just put an $800,000 bet on boots on the ground in Iran.

They previously were right about the time US struck Iran first.

Unusual.

[The Irish Politics Newsletter @TullMcAdoo]

People often ask how you can spot money laundering on Polymarket. Well, Fianna Fáil Senator Mary Fitzpatrick isn’t even the party’s nominee in Dublin Central, yet over $10,000 was traded on her today, and the bulk of it happened in just two transactions.

[ConPhoto @ConPhoto]

@ai_uncovered Time

[Éireann Your Views @Intern_Fiachra]

This is very sad news. Manchán will be a great loss to the nation and was a treasure trove of knowledge on Irish culture and folklore. I would like to briefly step out of character here and take this moment to urge all men to get the PSA blood test. When caught early, it is very treatable. 1 in 6 of us will be diagnosed with this in our lifetime.

[Vulture Stocks @Vulture_stocks]

If and when the government shuts down so many people are going to default on their credit cards, loans and mortgages.

This is bad news for consumer debt issuers like:
$sofi
$jpm
$bac
$wfc
$c
$usb
$cof
$tfc
$axp
$dfs
$pnc

They hold almost $4 TRILLION dollars of debt combined

They already sit on $413 billion of unrealised losses.

Around 4 million will be directly affected per CNBC and USAfacts.

And roughly $400 million in lost wages per DAY including for active duty military.

If the shutdown goes beyond 1 or 2 weeks it will severely impact the economy and especially the banks.

With so many living paycheck to paycheck it's going to be scary to watch.

The markets will be even more unpredictable and I'd would argue to hold cash in case of a downswing in the $spx and $qqq.

Good luck everyone.

[ConPhoto @ConPhoto]

@Antigravity_HQ @BiscuitRodeo woop-woop

[derek guy @dieworkwear]

I actually have an MA and PhD in architectural history.

The first two photos show the detailing at Amalienburg, a German hunting lodge done in Rococo style. Note the level of detailing.

The third photo shows the Oval Office, which is done in the traditional Cadbury bunny style.

[Logan Weaver @LogWeaver]

Did you know banks sell your debt for 10 cents on the dollar?

Then collectors harass you for 100% of it.

Michael Sheen entered this market in 2023.

But instead of collecting, he erased everything.

Here's how ONE man exposed the BILLION-dollar scam freeing 900 families: 🧵

[ConPhoto @ConPhoto]

@LenzoToggz @fesshole You're not married, are u?

[ConPhoto @ConPhoto]

Some fine crypto BS ads featuring @davidmcw @IrishTimes doing the rounds

[internet hall of fame @InternetH0F]

W residents

[zerohedge @zerohedge]

NVIDIA to Manufacture American-Made AI Supercomputers in US for First Time

https://t.co/7APobQB00B

[cinesthetic. @TheCinesthetic]

MR. ROBOT

[Robert Peston @Peston]

We just learned that the world’s most powerful person, Donald Trump, has a boss: the bond market.

He may not have acknowledged this to himself, yet, but the global financial tumult he caused - and has temporarily eased - has locked him in a fiscal prison.

Because, as I have been saying for 24 hours, he came perilously close yesterday to having caused such an extreme fall in the price of US government debt that it would have become prohibitively expensive for his administration to fund a large deficit - more than 6% of GDP - and also to refinance the almost $8 trillion of government debt that matures in the coming year (almost a third of America’s sovereign debt).

The point is he is totally in hock to the good will of bonds investors.

And when he announced his reckless roster of massive tariffs eight days ago he alienated them, because they feared he would tank the economy such that tax revenues would plummet and the deficit would balloon.

So they sold US government bonds, Treasuries, and the yield on the bonds - the de facto interest rate - soared.

Which is why Trump blinked, and put on hold the more extreme tariffs, except for the 140% on China, for 90 days.

You might think the worst part of this is the uncertainty he has created for businesses and investors for the next 90 days. Since no one in their right minds would make a major US investment till the final tariff determinations are made.

But the cancerous uncertainty is not the worst of it.

The worst of it is he has shredded any respect that overseas governments and investors might have had for America’s economic and fiscal competence.

Shades - you might say - of how Truss and Kwarteng’s unwise unfunded tax cuts undermined the perceived fiscal competence of the UK.

But unlike Truss and Kwarteng, there is pretty much no mechanism for removing Trump.

All of which means that bond and stock markets will remain fragile and volatile - fearful that Trump will regain his mojo and engage in some other fiscal extravagance.

He has also handed a loaded gun to his perceived enemy, China, and his supposed ally Japan.

This matters in both cases, because he is engaged in the mother of all trade wars with China - and Japan wants a trade deal with him that would see it escape mega tariffs.

The loaded guns they have are their massive loans to the US government. Japan owns more than a trillion dollars of US Treasuries and China not much less.

If they were to sell those bonds, or even if they chose not to refinance maturing bonds, that could be a disaster for Trump. Because it could cause another potentially crippling spike in bond yields.

Here is the measure of Trump’s debacle.

He may well have trashed America’s single most important financial competitive advantage, namely that investors have traditionally bought the dollar and US Treasuries at a time of economic and political uncertainty.

No more - because he personally has become the world’s source of economic uncertainty snd anxiety.

So, as I say he, is now in a fiscal prison. And if bond investors, including Japan and China, see him imposing tariffs or cutting taxes in ways they don’t like, they learned yesterday they have the means and power to stop him.

[unusual_whales @unusual_whales]

Good morning to everyone, but especially these traders:

[Joseph Allen @j_g_allen]

Now economists know how scientists felt when he said “inject bleach”