UnTribal Thinker

Not in your tribe.

[UnTribal Thinker @devsdd]

CLINCHING EVIDENCE of Pakistani involvement in terror attacks against India.

For neutral observers who don't know whether to trust #India or #Pakistan.

@ShashiTharoor @asadowaisi please share with people from countries you visited to make India's case.

Cc: @PMOIndia @BDUTT

[Sir Escanor (𝘏𝘰𝘱𝘪𝘶𝘮 𝘚𝘭𝘢𝘺𝘦𝘳) @EscanorReloaded]

CEOs are quietly realizing the AI replacement plan has a problem.
Two problems, actually.

One: the token costs for running AI agents are now exceeding what they were paying the employees they fired.

Two: when the tokens run out, the AI stops. Just stops. No continuity. No workaround. Just a spinning wheel where your workforce used to be.

You fired humans to save money and bought a subscription that bills you into a corner.

The employees you let go knew what to do when things broke.
The AI just invoices you for the outage.

And then there’s the permission problem nobody wants to talk about.

To do its job, the AI agent needs access. Full access. Your systems, your patents, your contracts, your future plans. Everything you spent years building, handed over to a process that has no loyalty, no discretion, and no skin in the game.

You didn’t hire a replacement.
You gave a stranger with no soul the keys to everything you own.

Enjoy.

[UnTribal Thinker @devsdd]

😂😂😂😂

[UnTribal Thinker @devsdd]

@nntaleb Does that include your friend @GadSaad?

[Assal Rad @AssalRad]

“Post-warning strike”

What an insane way to describe bombing a residential building DURING A “CEASEFIRE.”

[Uzi @UziCryptoo]

You can't tax rich people on unrealized gains from stocks because "it's not real money until it's sold."

So explain to me why my property taxes keep going up based on the unrealized value of my house?

I didn't sell it.
I didn't cash out.
I didn't make a profit.

But somehow I'm paying taxes on paper gains every single year.

Interesting how "unrealized gains" only become a problem when wealthy folks are involved.

[Mamane Gondwana @mamaneshow]

"Se débarrasser des archives papier et les remplacer par des archives numériques leur permet de supprimer l’histoire. Un jour, vous trouverez le message « la page n’existe pas », et le lendemain, vous les verrez nier que cela ait réellement eu lieu".
Julian Assange

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Stanford neuroscientist published a paper a few years ago that quietly answered one of the oldest questions in human history, and almost nobody outside his field has heard of it.

The question is why we dream. Not what dreams mean. Why they exist at all. Why your brain spends a third of its sleep hallucinating images instead of just resting like every other organ in your body.

His name is David Eagleman.

He runs a lab at Stanford. The paper is called "The Defensive Activation Theory", and the moment you read it the explanation collapses every other theory you have ever been taught about dreams.

Freud said dreams were repressed desires. He was guessing. He had no brain scans. He had no electrodes. He had a couch and a notebook and a century of credibility that nobody has been able to fully scrub off the subject since.

Modern neuroscience replaced him with the memory "consolidation theory". The idea that dreams are your brain sorting through the day, filing things away, deciding what to keep. That story is partially true. Sleep does consolidate memory. But it does not explain the single strangest thing about dreams, which is that they are almost entirely visual.

You do not dream in pure sound. You do not dream in taste. You do not dream in smell. You dream in pictures. Vivid, detailed, often impossible pictures that activate the back of your brain so hard a scientist scanning you would think your eyes were wide open.

Eagleman started from one fact almost nobody outside neuroscience knows. The brain is territorial. Every region holds its turf through constant electrical activity. The moment a region goes quiet, its neighbors start invading. They take the silent territory and reassign it to themselves.

This is called "cortical takeover", and it is not slow. It is not a long process measured in years. In experiments where adults are blindfolded, the visual cortex starts processing touch and sound within an hour. One hour of darkness, and the territory is already being annexed.

In congenitally blind people, the visual cortex is fully repurposed. It runs language. It runs hearing. It runs touch. The hardware never went unused. It was just reassigned to whoever showed up first.

Now sit with the implication of that for a second.

Every night, when you close your eyes and fall asleep, the sun has set. The planet has rotated. The visual cortex, which takes up roughly a third of your entire cortex, is suddenly receiving zero input. For eight hours. Every single night. For your entire life. And evolution has shaped your brain inside a planet that has been spinning into darkness for billions of years.

If cortical takeover happens in an hour, the visual cortex should have been lost a long time ago. Stolen by hearing. Stolen by touch. Reassigned by morning. Humans should have evolved into a species whose vision works fine during the day and then degrades every time the sun goes down because the territory keeps getting renegotiated overnight.

But that did not happen. Vision works the moment you open your eyes. Which means something is defending the territory while you sleep.

Eagleman's claim is that dreams are that defense.

Every 90 minutes through the night, a precise burst of activity fires from the brainstem into the visual cortex. Pontine-geniculate-occipital waves. PGO for short. They are anatomically aimed. They are not general arousal.

They are a targeted volley of signal launched directly at the back of the brain where vision lives. The cortex lights up as if it is receiving real images, and you experience that artificial activation as a dream. The bizarre narrative your conscious mind invents around it later is just your brain trying to make sense of the noise.

The dream is not the point. The dream is the side effect. The point is keeping the territory occupied.

The evidence for this is the part that should haunt you.

Newborns spend roughly 50% of their sleep in REM. Adults spend twenty. Old adults spend fifteen. The amount of dreaming you do tracks almost perfectly with how plastic your brain is. Newborns have the most plastic brains on earth. Their visual cortex is in the highest danger of being overrun by neighboring senses while it develops.

So evolution gave them an enormous defense budget. As you age, your brain becomes less plastic, the takeover risk drops, and the defense system scales down accordingly.

Eagleman and his co-author ran the same correlation across twenty-five primate species. The more plastic a species' brain, the higher the proportion of REM sleep. The relationship held across the entire primate family tree. Plasticity and dreaming move together. They are two halves of the same evolutionary equation.

A species that ranks higher on flexibility and learning also dreams more. A species that is born ready to walk and survive dreams less. Plasticity is the asset. Dreaming is the insurance premium.

And the prediction the theory makes is the one that quietly closes the case.

Of all your senses, only one is disadvantaged by darkness. You can still hear in the dark. You can still feel in the dark. You can still smelll and taste in the dark. The only sense that depends on light is vision. Which is exactly the sense your dreams are made of. The defense system is targeted at the only territory that is actually vulnerable while you sleep.

Memory consolidation is real. Emotional processing is real. Your brain does do those things at night. But Eagleman's argument is that those functions piggyback on a much older system whose original job was simpler and more brutal. Keep the lights on inside the visual cortex while the planet is dark, or lose it.

For thousands of years, people have asked what dreams mean. Prophets wrote about them. Poets wrote about them. Freud built a discipline on them. None of them had access to the actual answer, which is that dreams may not mean anything in the symbolic sense at all.

They may be the visible flicker of a defense system running in the background, the way a screen saver protects a monitor by keeping the pixels moving even when nobody is looking.

The strangest thing about the theory is how cleanly it explains why dreams feel so real. Your visual cortex cannot tell the difference between a PGO wave and an actual photon. It is the same hardware lighting up the same way. The cortex does its job. It builds an image. Your conscious mind, half-awake, wraps a story around it and calls it a dream.

You are not seeing your subconscious tonight. You are watching your brain defend a piece of itself from being stolen.

Every animal that has ever closed its eyes on this planet has done the same thing.

[conspiracybot @conspiracyb0t]

Quote of the day

[UnTribal Thinker @devsdd]

Pakistanis still peddle lots of lies about Kashmir. Here's me debunking them.

I also fact-check a Pakistani podcaster’s claims and my counter-claims using ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Grok.

https://t.co/JRVz5mkbSy

#OpSindoorTheRevenge

[Linda Mamoun @mamoun_linda]

Imagine seeing this op ed in any Western newspaper.

[Jeremy @Jeremybtc]

A man with no working truck convinced Wall Street he had built the next Tesla. His company hit $30 BILLION. All he did was push it down a hill with no engine.

> Trevor Milton founded Nikola in 2014, named after the same inventor as Tesla.

> The goal was to build hydrogen powered trucks that would make diesel obsolete. He had no trucks.

> In 2018 he released a promotional video called Nikola One In Motion. It showed a sleek semi truck accelerating smoothly down an open highway.
Investors went wild.

> What nobody knew was that the truck had no engine, no fuel cell, and no propulsion system of any kind.

> Milton's team towed it to the top of a hill, tilted the camera to hide the slope, and let it roll.

> He spent the next four years doing the same thing with words. On podcasts, television and social media.

> Investors were told Nikola could produce its own hydrogen. It could not. They were told the trucks were ready for production. They were not. They were told orders were flooding in. They weren't.

> In June 2020 Nikola went public. Within days the company was worth $30 BILLION, more than Ford.

> Milton's personal stake hit $7.3 BILLION overnight.

> A $32.5 MILLION ranch in Utah followed. A record for the state at the time.

> In September 2020 Hindenburg Research published a report calling Nikola "an intricate fraud" built on "an ocean of lies." Milton resigned within ten days.

> A federal jury convicted him of securities fraud and wire fraud in 2022. Sentenced to four years in prison the following year.

> He never went. He was free on $100 MILLION bail pending appeal.

> He and his wife donated $3.2 MILLION to Donald Trump's 2024 campaign.

> In March 2025 Trump gave him a full pardon. The pardon erased $168 MILLION in restitution to defrauded shareholders.

> Nikola filed for bankruptcy the following month, leaving thousands of investors with nothing.

The company never had a product. The only thing that was real was the $30 BILLION valuation, the $7 BILLION that landed in his pocket and the pardon that made sure none of it had to be returned.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

If a foreign army occupied Texas, American militias would mine the roads.

We know this because Texans will tell you themselves. Proudly.

They have bumper stickers about it.

They have prepared for it.

The entire cultural mythology of the American gun owner is built on exactly this premise:

When "they" come, we will be ready.

"They."

Some imagined foreign force that will one day arrive to take American freedom.

The irony is total and it is never examined.

The people most loudly committed to the fantasy of armed resistance against foreign occupation are the same people who looked at Iraqis mining roads against American soldiers and called them terrorists.

The principle they claim to love, an armed population will resist occupation, they apply exclusively to themselves.

The moment someone else applies it to themselves, in an actual occupation rather than an imagined one, the principle evaporates and what remains is:

"Why do they hate us?"

[Demetrius Remmiegius 🇰🇪 @DemetriusRO6]

“The problem with socialism is you eventually run out of other peoples money.”

Sweetie we’re $38 trillion in debt under capitalism

[Sunny Singh @ProfSunnySingh]

Iran’s diplomat makes a Jane Austen reference. White British male newscaster does not get it. SO much of contemporary British cultural hubris and ignorance (even of themselves) encapsulated in this clip.

[Council Estate Media @cem_uk_]

It's fine for the US to close Cuba's and Venezuela's waters, and it's fine for Israel to close Gaza's waters, but if Iran blocks the countries that waged war against it from the Strait of Hormuz, that's unacceptable?

[Bruno Maçães @MacaesBruno]

Best summary of America I have seen

[UnTribal Thinker @devsdd]

@globeandmail "Fighting continues"? Is it some force of nature like "rainfall continues"?
By this point the media's selective use of passive voice tells everyone who's been paying attention who is responsible for the fighting continuing.

[Ana Kasparian @AnaKasparian]

Loving your country should never be synonymous with loving your government.

[UnTribal Thinker @devsdd]

@nntaleb Tell that to your good friend @GadSaad