Gert Wallis

Software Engineer, Scrum Master and Photographer

[Gert Wallis @GertWallis]

Watching my first @FIFAcom world cup soccer game. The marketing geniuses/idiots know how to ruin the watching experience.

Why does the FIFA logo pop up every 15 seconds. Losing your customer base for the almighty $

[RaiZel @landbourainier]

🚨Have you ever heard such a beautiful language

Afrikaans is the most beautiful language when spoken correctly and without slang.

💯Only the Afrikaner Boers speak it with that pure, authentic soul.
That’s our language. That’s our heritage. 👌

[Gert Wallis @GertWallis]

@zerohedge This is the #FIC (Financial Industrial Complex) equivalence of the child porn argument to censor the internet. We're the financial "censor" of international money to protect you while overcharging you.

[Pookie's Polls & Opinions @pookiepolls]

I saw this on FB and it made me very sad. Is their absolutely NOTHING that this criminal government can do properly.

Written by James Deacon.

I am about to write what has to be one of the most difficult and painful posts for me to write on Facebook.

On Friday I was given news which unfortunately I cannot disclose yet that has forced me to turn my back on something I truly love with all my heart: Kirstenbosch Garden.

I have been involved there for 19 years due to my love and passion for the garden. However Kirstenbosch is no longer a place that brings me joy and happiness but rather pain and sadness.

When I walk through nursery now I see neglect, decay and death. The amazing plant collections that have taken decades and more to establish sit neglected slowly dying.

The Protea collection is less than a third of what it was and only a fraction of the Ericas remain. One plant has gone from extinct in the wild to completely extinct purely due to lack effort to keep it going. Places once full of plants sit empty and in some cases full of weeds because the production of plants is so diminished.

Great plantsmen and women like Ernst van Jaarsveld, Monique McQuillan , Louise Nurrish , Cherise Viljoen , Anthony Hitchcock who I admired and looked up to all left way before they should have because working there had become so unpleasant and because things like procurement made it impossible for them to do their jobs.

One told me when they tried to order pots the response they got from the management of SANBI the SOE that runs many of the country's botanical gardens was what were they cooking. Another ordered pots and three years later they yet to arrive.

Poor financial management has resulted in the organisation having to use funds donated for educational purpose to pay staff salaries.

Kirstenbosch no longer has a Protea or an Erica expert and hasn't had either for years.

Staff morale is at an all time low and respect for the leadership of the garden has broken down.

The garden cannot produce metal labels to tell visitor what the names of the plants are.

I say all these things not out of animosity to anyone or with the desire to see people in trouble. I say these things because I love the garden and what I am seeing is breaking my heart. I am also saying these things because after all the friends, experiences, knowledge and memories the garden has given me I feel I have a duty to speak out for the garden in difficult times such as these.

I don't know what will happen to me for saying all this. Maybe I will be banned from the garden or get into trouble. However I refuse to stay silent and standby while the things and people that I care about suffer. I also feel that we the current custodians of the garden have a duty to preserve and protect the work of those custodians of the past for the custodians of the future.

We have two choices to be remembered as those who fought for Kirstenbosch during its most difficult and challenging times or as those who sat idly by and allowed it break down and be ruined.

I don't know if anyone will read this or if it will achieve anything but I will not keep silent while the place I love suffers and will continue to speak out against what is happening.

[Amerikaners.com @amerikaners2025]

Oh wow, fam! Thank you, thank you, thank you @realDonaldTrump 😍🥳🫡

[Mike Lee @BasedMikeLee]

Years ago I wrote a book about America’s “Forgotten Founders”

It’s called *Written Out of History*

I just watched this video telling Stephen Pleasanton’s story

Had I seen it before I wrote Written Out of History, Pleasanton would’ve had his own chapter

[Gert Wallis @GertWallis]

So when you repeat; "These are fine people" and leave out "on both sides" your brain will confabulate a false narrative.

It is now a deranged belief devoid of facts - pure propaganda.

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Geoffrey Hinton just reframed the biggest supposed flaw in artificial intelligence. And it changes everything.

Hinton: “They shouldn’t be called hallucinations. They should be called confabulations.”

One word swap. Entire paradigm shifts.

When the legacy tech industry calls AI hallucinations a bug, they’re revealing a fundamental misunderstanding of what intelligence actually is.

They’re expecting the machine to behave like a database. Store a fact. Retrieve the fact. Return the exact same fact every time.

That’s not how intelligence works. Not artificial. Not biological.

Hinton: “It’s not that there’s a file stored somewhere in your brain, like in a filing cabinet or in a computer memory.”

Your brain doesn’t store memories. It reconstructs them.

Every time you recall something, your neural network uses connection strengths shaped by past experience to build the most plausible version of what happened.

It fills the gaps. Smooths the inconsistencies. Constructs a coherent story from incomplete signal.

And then presents that story to you as fact.

Hinton: “If I ask you to remember something that happened a few years ago, you’ll construct something that seems very plausible to you. And some of the details will be right and some will be wrong.”

Here’s the part that should stop you cold.

You will be equally confident about the wrong details as the right ones.

Think about that. Really think about it.

Every argument you’ve had about who said what. Every memory you’ve defended as certain. Every time you told a story about your own life with complete certainty.

Some of those details weren’t real. You constructed them. Confidently. Fluently.

And you had no idea.

This isn’t a flaw unique to people with bad memories.

Eyewitness testimony is the most confabulated evidence in the human justice system. Innocent people have spent decades in prison because someone remembered something that felt absolutely certain and was absolutely wrong.

Your brain didn’t lie to you. It did exactly what brains do.

It built the most plausible story it could from the signal it had.

AI does the exact same thing. Because it was built on the exact same architecture.

The mechanism that makes an AI invent a plausible but wrong answer is the same mechanism that makes it brilliant.

You cannot have one without the other.

The ability to reason creatively, synthesize across domains, construct explanations for things it has never been told. All of it runs on the same engine as the confabulation.

Hinton: “Psychologists have been studying confabulation in people since at least the 1930s.”

This isn’t a new phenomenon. It isn’t a software bug. It isn’t something to be patched in the next model update.

It is the price of dynamic intelligence. The shadow cast by the same light that makes these systems remarkable.

We aren’t building better search engines.

We are building synthetic minds that think the way minds actually think.

Messy. Confident. Occasionally wrong.

And for exactly that reason, capable of something no database ever was.

[Mustafa @oprydai]

this quote from Carl Jung hits so hard.

"The world is full of people suffering from the effects of their own unlived life. They become bitter, critical, or rigid, not because the world is cruel to them, but because they have betrayed their own inner possibilities. The artist who never makes art becomes cynical about those who do. The lover who never risks loving mocks romance. The thinker who never commits to a philosophy sneers at belief itself. And yet, all of them suffer, because deep down they know: the life they mock is the life they were meant to live."

[Gert Wallis @GertWallis]

@CapitalOne After 11 tries it eventually read the NFC - frustrating

[Gert Wallis @GertWallis]

I have spent 4 hours trying to buy a plane ticket with @CapitalOne venture card. It gets declined when your stupid air link tap card sure spinning FOREVER. NFC is on.

So you want my f .. business or not. Would ditch it but 180,000 combined points.

[Gert Wallis @GertWallis]

I have spent 4 hours trying to buy a plane ticket with @CapitalOne venture card. It gets declined when your stupid air link tap card sure spinning FOREVER. NFC is on.

So you want my f .. business or not. Would ditch it but 180,000 combined points.

[Gert Wallis @GertWallis]

@home_assistant After mucking around for hours/days - installing 2026.1.1 fixed it.

My old company had the same cavalier attitude. Just turn of this machine and see who complains.

Unfortunately lots of technical narcissist around. As a brand new user not a great experience.

[Gert Wallis @GertWallis]

Installed @home_assistant HOAS 2026.1 on an older NUC. I can ping, but the http server is not responding. Got the ha prompt. Is there a guide somewhere to troubleshoot.

Don't want to revert to an older version or Linux+ docker.

[Royce White 🇺🇸 @Highway_30]

I have no clue who this guy is or what his political views are. Party aside he is telling the truth about a basic function and reality of American citizenship. These are the kind of people we need leading this country and our communities. Tough, real, experienced. They tell you exactly how it is, no sugar coating.

I never say people don’t have a right to protest. I’ve lead peaceful protests and we emphasized the peaceful… we should be protesting in this country, the question is what, where and to whose end? I personally think conservatives should be in the streets everyday for any number of abominable breaches of their constitutional rights. (cough cough… taxes, secure elections). Still I hope and pray that everybody understands the difference between protest and revolution, on both sides of the political divide.

Royce White for U.S. Senate MN 2026
America 1st, Just Right™️

[Gert Wallis @GertWallis]

@Helpline_58 Thanks,

I've sent his information in PM.

[Gert Wallis @GertWallis]

@united rebooked my son after a delay due to equipment failure. In the rebooking process his return leg was CANCELLED. Now stuck in JNB for 26 hours. Just saying sorry is not enough.

[Jerry Thornton @jerrythornton]

This is going to stick with me forever

[Gert Wallis @GertWallis]

@MarioNawfal If you're big enough to beat somebody up and put them in hospital, you're big enough to go to jail.

[Gert Wallis @GertWallis]

@stats_feed Driving to an unknown city address.

Looking up the page # in street index, finding the square block on said page, hunting for the street name and mapping a diving path.

Driving was dangerous - constantly checking map, bad / missing street names, missed turns...

[Robert Scoble @Scobleizer]

Tesla investors:

I used to have a front-row seat on Steve Jobs. Had the first ride in the first Tesla with @elonmusk and have watched him closely ever since. Yes, I'm an investor. My biggest holding in a diversified portfolio. My kids portfolio is 100% in Tesla, since they can take bigger risks betting on one company.

And have watched, at close view, many other entrepreneurs with similar leadership capabilities.

Yeah, why I believe in @Tesla.

I wrote eight books about the future. Each detailed decade-long change coming at us. I wrote an influential book about social media, "Naked Conversations," back in 2005. X, formerly Twitter, started in 2005. It laid out why every human and business would soon be on social media.

My latest book, written with @IrenaCronin, lays out spatial computing, which includes robots and VR/AR. Including a chapter about Robotaxis. I wrote that chapter six years ago and it was updated earlier this year.

The world I see, and I've done a ton of consumer research, driving around America for more than a decade, understanding consumer belief, and interviewing a ton of @waymo customers, and getting into R&D labs and robotics startups. Several last week alone. And been on many hundreds of X audio spaces talking with thousands of people.

My thesis is that in 10 years:

1. We are going to see robotaxis completely change our BELIEF about transportation.

2. We are going to see millions of generalized humanoid robots running our businesses and homes.

3. We are going to see the evolution of "everything as a service" because of those two first things. Cleaning as a service. Cooking as a service. Laundry as a service. Gardening as a service. Almost anything you can do will turn into a service. The AI agent revolution is here, but will lead into robots making AI Agents be very useful to do everything in the real world as a service.

4. Holodecks (er, world models and simulators and digital twins) will go from something only a small niche is using to things everyone in modern society uses.

5. Electric car adoption will go way up. From something only upper middle class people adopt to something that will go deep into all of society.

All of which Tesla is a leader in. So my thesis is that in next decade Tesla's business will greatly expand.

Now, why do we want Elon in charge of all that?

Go back to Steve Jobs. Apple, with him at the helm, iterated faster.

That's very important in rapidly growing fields. Today only a few million people have had a ride in an autonomous vehicle. Even if you include all of Tesla's competitors, here in USA, and in China. 10 years from now that number will be in the billions.

But having a strong leader that everyone in a company treats as a "God" (what one of my friends who worked for Jobs for more than a decade said) has deep impacts on innovation speed. When Jobs called you on a weekend, my friend said, it was like God himself calling and you found yourself back at work because he wanted to work on something with you.

I saw that inside Microsoft and Rackspace and other companies I worked for. When Bill Gates called and needed something all other "priorities" in life were put on hold.

It might not be nice, it caused my friend to get a divorce because he chose to work with Jobs way too many times vs. going to an important family event. But it speeds up innovation.

And speed of innovation MATTERS DEEPLY in rapidly growing markets, like the ones I laid out above.

There are other effects of having such a person running a company.

If Steve Jobs wanted to get the CEO of Sony on the phone. He could. Every other CEO will always pick up the phone. I heard this personally from Steve Jobs' executive assistant.

And if there is a deal to be made that the other company doesn't want to do (my friend, Andy Grignon, pitched visual voicemail to AT&T and its CTO told Andy there was no way in hell AT&T would build such a thing. Jobs called the CEO and made a multi-billion-dollar deal in a phone call) then the feature gets built.

In the valley we even had a name for it "Jobs' distortion field."

There are hundreds of such stories about how Jobs could get investors to pour money in, or other companies to do things, just because Jobs laid out a vision of the future that was compelling and everyone treated him like a God that could make anything happen.

Musk is in that role today. The dude puts wires on people's brains, digs tunnels under Las Vegas, has the best spaceship company, and is the only one that will bring autonomous vehicles to the world at scale next year. Builds major datacenters in 19 days. So when he calls no one calls a committee meeting and argues about whether they should listen.

I could go on for hours about why having a leader like Musk will speed up a company like Tesla.

But let's talk about what happens if, say, Musk dies today, or if he leaves Tesla. First of all, I've talked with MANY employees about the role Musk plays in their lives. They are at his companies because he clears the way for them to execute. One guy wrote the code that lands the rockets back on earth. You think he wants to work for a committee at Lockheed Martin?

If Elon called his key employees and said "I'm leaving Tesla behind and starting a new company" many would follow without even learning about what Musk was planning to do. He has that kind of pull with so many in all of his companies.

Even factory workers tell me this. They remember when GM and Toyota laid them off. And sold Elon the Fremont factory for almost nothing, laughing at him because they KNEW that Elon would never be able to make a profitable car there.

Today that factory is building the robot all the other robot companies look up to. I hear it over and over when I sit down with AI geniuses building other robotics companies. They all saw how he built FSD and took on EVERY belief against him. And built a data flywheel they all are struggling to build to make their own dreams come true.

And today that factory is making the humanoid that I believe will dominate the others for decades.

But all of this is far more likely to come to fruition with Elon at the helm.

I hope you shareholders vote for Elon's pay package.

If not, I will sell a good percentage of my stock. Why? While Tesla will probably still see massive growth without Elon, after all, everyone knows the job at hand, it will see the best employees leave and, worse of all, will not have a God forcing them to innovate as fast as if he were still there.

This will be dramatically true in humanoid robots. Tesla has all the advantages now. Brand. Manufacturing. Distribution. Belief. But if Elon isn't there to make decisions fast and keep committees from forming it will slow down. Others, like Figure, will be emboldened, and the Chinese are already going to be a huge problem for Tesla even with Elon in charge. Without Elon? They will move into most markets around the world without a strong competitor with a bullhorn on X to get everyone to pay attention to Optimus.

And also on the vote is an investment into xAI.

That is a harder one to sell to everyday investors who don't spend all day on X. They don't understand just the power of the data that is coursing through X every day. And that xAI is building the best human-understanding AIs in the business. Optimus needs Grok to really get to the promised land of a generalized humanoid robot that will bring everything as a service for many, many reasons.

I will be happy to walk through what xAI is building that will greatly help Tesla grow its business and make its Robotaxi and humanoid robots (or other robots that are possible in the future) get to the promised land.

And there are so many other opportunities for xAI to greatly help Tesla's business that I could go on for entire books. Join us on one of the Tesla audio spaces that @wholemars or @SawyerMerritt join and I can lay that all out.

Either way, please vote.

This is the most important shareholder vote of my 60 year life and one that will open up opportunities for all of us (or bring deep consequences if the vote goes against my advice).