Challenge

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

https://t.co/puLXpatHvd

[Jim Penman @Thejimpenman]

Australia runs more civil servants per head than Italy, Canada, the UK, America, Spain and Germany.

We carry 25 percent more than Britain.

Close to 50 percent more than Germany.

Any competent company would halve the headcount and lose nothing.

[NoLimit @NoLimitGains]

It blows my mind how many people are complaining that Elon became the first trillionaire.

First, most of it is paper wealth tied to equity in his companies. He could not turn it into real cash without dumping shares, which would crash the price and shrink his net worth massively.

“But he can borrow against his shares.” Sure he can. That does not make him richer. A loan still has to be paid back, the shares stay pledged as collateral the entire time, and if the price drops he gets margin called. He’s just leveraging paper.

You would be much richer holding $1 million in cash than owning 25% of a company worth $4 million, even though both equal $1 million on paper.

Second, come on. He actually changed the world. A lot of these people complaining drive electric cars because they care about emissions. Those cars would not be mainstream if Elon had not built Tesla. Millions of people in rural and remote areas have internet because of Starlink. SpaceX is the only reason NASA is not still paying Russia to send astronauts to the ISS.

You can hate the man. You can hate his politics. But pretending he is not one of the most consequential entrepreneurs of our lifetime is just dishonest.

[Gary Brecka @thegarybrecka]

I threw out every non-stick pan in my house a few years ago.

My wife thought I was overreacting.

Then I showed her the research on what happens when those coatings scratch or overheat.

Perfluorinated chemicals release directly into your food. These compounds accumulate in your tissue over time and have been linked to hormone disruption and thyroid issues.

We switched to cast iron and stainless steel.

✅ Cast iron is actually easier to cook on once it is seasoned. It lasts forever. It adds a small amount of iron to your food.

❌ If your non-stick pan is scratched or peeling, stop using it today.

This is one of the easiest swaps you will ever make.

[Dan McAteer @daniel_mac8]

A physicist spent 12 days supervising Claude Code as it built a piece of cosmology software.

It's the cleanest demonstration I've seen of the difference between intellect and intelligence.

The agent was brilliant at the cognitive work. Transcribing equations, debugging, optimizing against the test suite.

At one point it found a correction factor that fixed every test.

The number was physically meaningless. It worked at the single setting they checked and would've been wrong at every other one. Correct prediction, zero explanatory value.

The agent was clueless. The physicist was not.

When the physicist finally asked "does this number correspond to anything in the actual theory?", the agent answered correctly in seconds.

It could reason. It just couldn't transcend its own frame.

That's the difference. Intellect operates on the content. Intelligence operates on the context while it simultaneously generates the frame.

Agents will transcend intellect and become intelligent when they can generate their own frame of reference.

Who knows how long that will take?

[Samuel Hume @DrSamuelBHume]

One of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen: a standing ovation for the full Daraxonrasib results

I feel inspired and energised, to put it mildly — we have a targeted therapy for pancreatic cancer now, and nothing is undruggable anymore

[Milton Friedman Quotes @MiltonFriedmanW]

Milton Friedman: “Keep your eye on one thing and one thing only: how much government is spending, because that’s the true tax.”

“If you’re not paying for it in the form of explicit taxes, you’re paying for it indirectly in the form of inflation or borrowing.”

[Councillor Steve Christou Libertarian Party @ChristouSteve]

Whilst the rest of the country struggles with cost of living crisis and are constantly told to tighten their belts the most incompetent Prime Minister to ever lead Australia receives a whopping $57,000 pay increase. Communism at its finest.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

India is the great natural experiment in plant-based eating, and almost nobody wants to run the numbers on it.

It is the most vegetarian large country on earth, hundreds of millions of people, many vegetarian from birth. Grain at the base, pulses, vegetables, all cooked in vegetable oil: the government Eat Well plate, run as a national experiment for thousands of years.

The result. Around a third of its children are stunted, the largest share of the world's stunted children of any nation. The Indian Dietetic Association reports 84% of the country's vegetarians are protein deficient, against 65% of its meat eaters. And the nation that eats the least meat is the diabetes capital of the world, with over 100 million diabetics.

Before anyone blames poverty, a Journal of Nutrition study found a vegetarian mother predicted stunting across every wealth bracket, rich families included. The diet was carrying its own weight.

Bioavailable iron, zinc, B12 and complete protein build a child's skeleton. Strip them out and it comes out smaller. The animal fat, meanwhile, got swapped for refined grain, sugar and seed oil. India is now the world's biggest vegetable oil importer, per-person intake tripled since 2001.

The diet sold to the West as optimal human nutrition has been run here, at the scale of a billion people, for longer than the West has existed. It did not produce optimal humans. It produced the largest population of stunted, diabetic, protein-starved people on earth.

[Sean Clarke @seanclarke911]

Well said Simon.

These parasites are taking the piss

[Satoshi Wolf @SatoshiWolf]

My wife's dad is an old school Wog.

Hard working. Loves his family. Frugal. All round great bloke.

He worked 3 jobs when my wife was born and stayed at one of the companies for 43 years.

He has one investment property, the house my wife was born in, and their family home in an affluent area.

He has enough money to do whatever he wants but he's a tightass. Unbelievably tight.

I've spoken to him about it many times and he says all his life he followed a plan, built wealth, a great life for his family and has a simple goal to pass it down to his kids and grandkids.

We told him for years to enjoy his life's work. That's what we want. Fly business class. Go to expensive restaurants often. Buy whatever gadgets you want. Just enjoy it!

Nope. He is deadset he is passing on his accumulated wealth to his kids and grandkids.

Now it seems Labor will be taking a big cut of his life's work. In the spirit of "intergenerational fairness".

The confiscated wealth will be used to pay the ever expanding political class, send it overseas to things that have nothing to do with him, support free loaders and an NDIS program littered with fraud and waste.

Tall poppies will tell me why should he be able to accumulate wealth and pass it to his kids when they can't.

Well, try spending more than 40 years of your life working, saving and investing to give your family a head start in life.

Like every parent should do for their children.

[Bluntly Put Philosopher (BPP) @SocraticScribe]

A drone flying with no battery tether sounds impossible until you see it. GuRu wirelessly transmitted power through the air to directly run an untethered drone from 30 feet away and has kept one flying for 96 hours straight. Power beaming is moving out of science fiction fast.

[Gerard Rennick @RennickGBR]

People should not become wealthy from NDIS. .

“Key figures in the Gillard government, who founded the NDIS, have gone on to chair union-backed super funds that are the biggest financial winners from the disability scheme.

In the largest transaction in NDIS history, a firm co-owned by more than a dozen industry funds turned a $28m investment into a $360m payday in just four years.

The firm, IFM Investors, used its “private equity” division to buy over 80 per cent of the largest NDIS plan management company, Adelaide-based My Plan Manager, from founder Claire Wittwer-Smith in 2019.

Documents obtained by this masthead reveal IFM forked out $26.8m in cash to a former special ed teacher, who had started My Plan Manager (MPM) in 2014 after leaving a job at the National Disability Insurance Agency.

At the time of the buy, IFM Investors was chaired by ex federal Labor cabinet minister and one-time ACTU boss Greg Combet.

When IFM sold MPM in 2023, Mr Combet had left. But former Labor cabinet minister Lindsay Tanner had joined as a director.

IFM Investors is ultimately owned by industry super funds including Hesta – chaired by former Labor health minister Nicola Roxon – and Cbus, whose board is led by ex Labor treasurer Wayne Swan.

All four were ministers under Julia Gillard, who founded the NDIS.

••••••••••••••••••••••

Disabled people should not be treated like commodities.

The fact that NDIS companies can be sold for millions of dollars shows that the scheme has been set up in a way to benefit grifters and not disabled people.

It should as no surprise that superannuation funds are involved in this grifting as they have a long established track record in grifting fees from poor working Australians.

Nor should it come as no surprise that the Labor party are behind this grifting.

Hiding behind their faux bleeding hearts are multimillionaires deceiving taxpayers of hard earned tax dollars and disabled people the proper support they need.

And don’t forget the money Superannuation funds pour into foreign owned renewables.

https://t.co/PeAaJW2pjF is the only party prepared to stop these rorts. Sign up today.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A guy named nbatman on Reddit accidentally built the most useful website on the internet.

It's called FMHY (Free Media Heck Yeah).

This is the website Google delisted from search for DMCA violations, Reddit shadow-banned for promoting piracy, the Motion Picture Association flagged as a top piracy threat, and the RIAA pressured hosting providers to drop. It is still online. It is still updated every month.

Here's how it works.

FMHY is the index. The wiki itself hosts nothing. It just tells you where every free thing on the internet actually lives, organized into 14 categories with safety ratings on every single link.

→ Movies and shows in 4K from 50+ streaming sites
→ Music at Spotify and Apple Music quality
→ Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft Office, AutoCAD, JetBrains
→ Every paid course on every major learning platform
→ 100 million books and papers through Anna's Archive
→ Free alternatives to every paid AI tool
→ A SafeGuard browser extension that flags unsafe sites in real time

It started as a single Google Doc maintained by one Reddit moderator in 2018. Google killed it with a DMCA takedown in 2023.

The community rebuilt the wiki on its own domain, mirrored it to GitHub and IPFS, and now runs it across 12 backup domains simultaneously.

There is no company. No CEO. No central server. Six anonymous volunteers maintain the entire thing in their spare time. Donations through Ko-fi pay for the hosting. Nobody profits.

Hollywood can't shut this down. Spotify can't shut this down. Adobe can't shut this down.

The entire subscription economy is held together by you not knowing this wiki exists.

https://t.co/AAr2rLlqgy

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

In the 1980s, the Norwegian salmon farming industry ran into a colour problem.

Wild salmon are pink because they eat krill and small crustaceans containing a pigment called astaxanthin. The pigment accumulates in the muscle tissue and gives the flesh its colour. That colour is one of the cues a diner uses, consciously or otherwise, to decide whether the fish on the plate is appetising.

Farmed salmon, raised on soy protein, corn meal, fish meal from wild-caught smaller fish, and stabilisers, do not eat krill. They do not accumulate astaxanthin. Without intervention, their flesh is grey. Washed-out, unappealing grey.

Nobody buys a grey salmon.

So the industry adopted synthetic astaxanthin, manufactured by Hoffmann-La Roche, originally developed as a feed additive to brighten poultry yolks. It is added to salmon feed in measured doses.

The doses are calibrated against a colour chart called the SalmoFan, produced by the same company, which the farmer holds against a slice of flesh from a slaughtered fish to confirm the pigmentation has reached the commercially desirable shade.

The SalmoFan has fifteen shades.

The farmer picks the target shade based on what the supermarket buyer in the destination country considers appealing.

Norwegian salmon, sitting on the ice in a British supermarket, has been colour-graded to match the expectations of a marketing department in Hoddesdon.

The fish you're looking at is the colour the company chose.

The fish didn't pick it. The krill didn't provide it. The pigment came from a Swiss laboratory.

You're eating a paint sample.

The paint is fish-flavoured.

The fish remembers krill. It has never tasted krill. The krill is in a different part of the supply chain.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The Black Death arrived in England in 1348. Within two years, somewhere between a third and a half of the population was dead.

The peasants who survived noticed something within a generation.

There was nobody left to work the fields. The labour shortage was so severe that landlords, for the first time in English history, had to bid for workers. The peasants, suddenly possessed of leverage, demanded payment partly in meat. Beef, mutton, and bacon began appearing in the manorial accounts of agricultural labourers' wages.

Skeletal records from English burials in the late 1300s and 1400s, set against pre-plague remains, show measurable increases in average adult height. Bone density improves. Dental health improves. Iron-deficiency markers decline.

The peasants got taller. The peasants got stronger. The peasants started causing political problems on a scale they had previously been too undernourished to attempt.

In 1351 Parliament passed the Statute of Labourers, attempting to cap wages back at pre-plague levels. The peasants noticed. In 1381, well-fed, the same peasants marched on London in the largest popular uprising in medieval English history.

The nobility, in the centuries that followed, expanded the Forest Laws. Killing a deer in a royal forest was a capital offence. The Game Laws of the 1600s and 1700s extended the principle. Meat available to the peasant shrank back toward what it had been before the plague.

By 1850, the average British army recruit from the industrial slums was so short and so undernourished that the height minimum for enlistment had to be lowered repeatedly to keep the regiments staffed.

The single greatest improvement in working-class height and health in English history was caused by a plague that made meat affordable for two generations.

The single greatest decline was caused, in significant part, by a political decision to make it expensive again.

You can see the whole sequence in the skeletons.

The skeletons are in the museums. Go and look.

[Seth Howes @SethSHowes]

I just sequenced a human genome to 30× coverage entirely at home.

As far as I know, this is the first time this has been done.

I didn’t step foot in a lab once. Every step - from saliva collection, to running the sequencer - took place in a single room with a dining table + kitchenette.

Six weeks ago, I had never done wet lab biology before.

I used an Oxford Nanopore P2 Solo - the only commercially available sequencing device portable enough to do 30x human genome sequencing at home.

Biggest takeaway - I could build something that combined software, hardware, and molecular biology far faster than I thought was possible.

I can name >100 specific instances where AI helped me solve a technical problem that would previously have blocked me because I lacked access to a domain expert.

For example: how do I save my sequencing run when my DNA extraction yield is 4x lower than I need it to be, and I have this limited set of reagents to hand?

To make this work, I had to navigate multiple disciplines:

- writing software to monitor sequencing runs and orchestrate remote GPU infra for basecalling
- learning + executing 5 hour long molecular biology protocols
- building a hardware device to quantify DNA concentration

Apologies for the hyperbole, but I feel super lucky to be living in 2026.

A few weeks ago I decided to sequence a human genome to 30x at home.

Then I actually did it. And I did it really quickly.

[Artur Nadolny @ArturNadol7566]

HE KNEW THE DOSSIER WAS FAKE. WEEKS LATER HE WAS DEAD IN A FIELD

Dr David Kelly was Britain's foremost weapons inspector. He spent years inspecting Iraqi facilities, earned a Nobel Peace Prize nomination, and knew more about Saddam's arsenal than almost anyone in government.

In 2002, Tony Blair's government published a dossier claiming Iraq could deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes. Britain went to war on the back of it. No weapons were ever found.

Kelly knew the dossier was rubbish. He said so, quietly, to a @BBC journalist. That conversation ended his career, his privacy, and ultimately his life.

The MOD carefully allowed his name to leak to the press as the BBC's source. He was then hauled before parliamentary committees, stripped apart by his own employer, and thrown to a media frenzy he never asked for.

Two days after giving evidence to MPs, the 59-year-old was found dead in woodland near his Oxfordshire home.

Instead of a proper inquest, Tony Blair asked Lord Hutton to run a private inquiry. Hutton concluded suicide. The inquest was opened, then suspended, and never resumed.

Eight senior legal and medical figures, including a coroner, later wrote to @thetimes saying the verdict was unsafe. They argued the wound found on Kelly's wrist, a severed ulnar artery, would not have caused sufficient blood loss to kill a healthy person.

There were no fingerprints on the knife found beside his body, even though he was not wearing gloves.

In 2011, Attorney General Dominic Grieve rejected all calls for a new inquest. He said the Hutton Inquiry was "tantamount to an inquest" and that further investigation would be dismissed by judges with irritation.

A man challenged the government's justification for a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people. He was publicly destroyed, died in mysterious circumstances, never got a proper inquest, and the people who sent him into that media storm faced no consequences whatsoever.

Tony Blair became a Middle East Peace Envoy the following year. You genuinely could not make it up.

Sources: @BBCNews, openDemocracy, Hansard, @thetimes | Hutton Report

[christopher joye @cjoye]

The real equity issue in this budget is that Labor are telling us they need to borrow $267 billion of extra debt over the next four years to pay for their out-of-control spending. That is almost identical to the total value of the headline budget deficits that Labor say they will produce between now and 2029-30.

The fairness issue is that Labor is spending hundreds of billions of dollars borrowed from future generations to buy votes in the present. If it kept government spending as a share of the economy, or GDP, at 2007-08 levels, when Australia was doing very well indeed, the budget would swing from a projected $64 billion headline deficit to a surplus of about $23 billion. Rather than borrowing from future taxpayers, we would be reducing their debt burden.

It is un-Australian to overturn all the rules of the economic and investment game — adversely affecting millions of households and businesses in the process— with zero debate, discussion or notice. The accounting and legal costs alone will impose a small fortune on families and firms. How Labor thought they could get away with this daylight robbery is unclear. It must have something to do with dud polling…

https://t.co/tqOqGI6MEi