ethan_thorne

Currently building

[ethan_thorne @ethanthorne123]

You’ll be a lot happier when you realise it’s You vs You not You vs other people. We live in a world of abundance

[Mullvad.net @mullvadnet]

The UK government spyware demand means that the government decides exactly what should be censored on every mobile device. They say they will start with nude pictures (if you don’t identify yourself as an adult). But it could at any time be expanded to anything the government disapproves of. Today, 30 people are arrested every day in the United Kingdom for writing something online that the government classifies as "grossly offensive". It is obvious that they will use this tool to restrict free speech.

Currently, there appears to be no requirement to report findings outside the device. However, with both legal and technological decision-making power taken away from individuals and transferred to the government, that is only a pen stroke away.

This means that the government could also use this system for total mass surveillance.

And they can do so in secret.

The government recently, in secret, tried to pressure Apple (which is now agreeing to client-side scanning) to build backdoors into its end-to-end encrypted cloud service. They can do this under the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, also known as the "Snoopers' Charter" – a law that makes it illegal for tech companies to disclose secret demands from the government.

[Signal @signalapp]

Our statement on the UK government’s demand that all content on all devices sold or used in the country be scanned, on the presumption of nudity, using a dystopian combination of age verification and content scanning. This proposal will not safeguard children. It endangers us all.

https://t.co/VdWe9uhi8p

[𐙚⋆ @voidwithverses]

“An enemy will agree, but a friend will argue”

— Russian Proverb

[GB Politics @GBPolitcs]

🚨NEW: Restore Britain has not been invited to appear on BBC Question Time for the Makerfield by-election special, despite polling in third place

[ethan_thorne @ethanthorne123]

He’s laid in front of a car on the ground hurt while a group of people with no physical marks say they were assaulted?

[Europa.com @europa]

🇬🇧 Bodycam footage has been released showing Henry Nowak begging for an ambulance before being handcuffed behind his back.

Nowak: "I've been stabbed"

Officer: "I don't think you have mate"

Follow: @europa

[Stijn Spanhove @stspanho]

🏃‍♂️ I've gamified my own run so I can race my own ghost with the Meta Ray-Ban Display.

I built a web app for the glasses, loaded a previous GPX from Strava, and dropped game mechanics on top.

Pick up coins when you keep pace, sprint zones reward extra points if you push, and a mini leaderboard on the lens shows how you're tracking against your past self in real time.

Best part: it actually works. Seeing your ghost 20 m ahead is a way stronger nudge than any number on a watch. 😅

[Emerson S @Em_Nomadic]

Wanna learn robotics?

@tnkrdotai is GitHub for robotics. One place. Find real projects. Learn from real builders.

Come build with us 🌎

[Tom Dörr @tom_doerr]

User-friendly ROS framework for autonomous PX4 drones

https://t.co/u3Nafbh6XB

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

At nine years old, the man dancing in this video was the only kid cleaning toilets at a Kentucky reform school.

His parents were raising two sons in Bangkok during a coup and decided it had stopped being safe. They put Jensen and his older brother on a plane to an uncle in Tacoma with almost no money. The uncle went looking for a cheap school that would take two foreign boys and landed on Oneida Baptist Institute in Clay County, one of the poorest counties in America. The uncle, who thought the place was a respectable boarding academy, had actually enrolled them in a reform school for difficult kids.

Jensen was the youngest student on campus. His roommate was a 17-year-old recovering from a knife fight, still wrapped in tape, the toughest kid there. Boys carried knives. To reach class you crossed a rope footbridge while older kids shook it to throw you off. He got called slurs every single day. His assigned job was scrubbing the bathrooms for a hundred teenage boys, while his brother worked the tobacco fields the school ran to fund itself.

Two years in, his parents reached the US, saw what was happening, and pulled them out. He tells the whole story cheerfully to this day. His words: everybody had chores, we just figured that was what kids did.

As a teenager he bused tables at Denny's. In 1993 he cofounded a chip company from a booth at another Denny's. That company is Nvidia. It became the first business in history to pass $4 trillion in value, then the first to pass $5 trillion, and it now pulls in more than $215 billion a year selling the chips every AI lab on the planet runs on. Jensen owns enough of it to sit among the ten richest people alive, worth north of $165 billion.

In 2019 the reform school named a building after him. He and his wife paid for it with a $2 million grant, writing a check to the institution where he scrubbed toilets and got called slurs at age nine.

That is who you are watching dance. The kid who cleaned bathrooms for a hundred teenagers and crossed that bridge every day grew up to build the most valuable company in history. When you have survived that and built this, you stop dancing for anyone but yourself.

[Annie? Rauwerda? @anniierau]

"why use google?" webpage from 1999

[Alex Prompter @alex_prompter]

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it.

Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying.

Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence."

Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter."

Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter.

They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created.

One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility."

Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies.

That's the metered intelligence business model.

And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.

[Andrew Gazdecki @agazdecki]

Founders finding out building a startup is 90% sales and marketing:

[Matt Margolis @ItsMattsLaw]

tort law exam ass case

[ethan_thorne @ethanthorne123]

Hot take it starts with drugs and ends with cyber enhancements to make it desirable

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A swimmer just won $1.25 million for one length of a pool. He beat the world record by a hair, except it won't count: he swam in a banned suit, at an event that lets athletes use the same drugs that get Olympians banned.

The swim was never the point. The company behind it, called Enhanced, put up $25 million in prize money, built a temporary arena in Las Vegas, and reportedly spent over $6 million on a pool it tears straight back down. It handed out the broadcast for free and let fans in for nothing. The whole event was built to lose money.

What Enhanced actually sells is a website. It runs an online clinic that prescribes testosterone for men and hormone therapy for women, and ships out the same kinds of drugs its athletes use to get faster, every month like a subscription you forget to cancel. The company has said its goal is to sign up tens of millions of ordinary people at around $399 a month. Its CEO has been blunt: the real prize is the drug platform, and the games are how they advertise it.

It is the Red Bull move. Red Bull sells a sugary drink by paying daredevils to leap from the edge of space, and Enhanced is selling drugs by paying a swimmer to break a record on camera. You watch someone do something that looks superhuman, you start wondering what those same drugs would do for you, and the order button is one tap away.

At $399 a month, that swimmer's entire $1.25 million payday is about what 260 subscribers pay in a single year, and Enhanced wants millions of them. The company, funded by tech billionaires, went public this month. Even after the stock market shrugged and cut its value nearly in half, to around $650 million, it is a giant bet on a product that barely earns a dollar today.

Underneath the headline, the deal is simple. A drug company paid one man to break a record on live TV, so that millions of people watching would want to buy whatever made him fast.

[Aaron Epstein @aaron_epstein]

The biggest hack I’ve seen for founders to close deals faster: just show up.

Get on a plane, fly to their office, meet in person, bond with the whole team.

Instantly replaces weeks of zoom calls.

[Andrew Tate @Cobratate]

People used to have personalities.

A break in work?
A group of people sitting in a room?

Characters emerged and enegry was created.

Now everybody pulls out their phone and stares into the machine.

Nobody talks.

Nobody creates energy.

Sterile world.

Humanity is over.

[Dip Wheeler @DipWheeler]

the boys hit beijing.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

A friend's startup is growing at 93% a month. I pointed out that her net worth is also growing at 93% a month, and that she can thus feel, in her own life, the falsity of politicians' claim that you have to do bad things to get rich. They're just focusing on making users happy.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

Sure you can earn a billion dollars. I've been teaching people how to do it for 20 years. The way you do it is to start a company that grows fast. You don't have to do anything bad to make a company grow fast. You just have to make something people want.

https://t.co/zXWErQqlwV

[alyssa @alyssamariiee11]

It’s illegal to feed wildlife at national parks because they get dependent on handouts and forget how to survive.

Kinda sounds familiar doesn’t it?