joh

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

Follow the money on this one. It is rotten to the core.

The Pentagon just lent $620,000,000 to a tiny North Carolina startup called Vulcan Elements. The company is two years old.

It had fewer than 50 employees.

And three months before the deal was announced, Donald Trump Jr.’s venture firm quietly took a stake in it.

Here is the part the administration tried to bury.

Of the dozens of companies the Pentagon was weighing, Vulcan was the only deal initiated by a top White House aide. That aide was Peter Navarro, a close friend of Trump Jr. The order came down to move fast.

One official put it plainly: The call came from the White House. We have to get this done.

Staff worked late nights to push it through in weeks. Deals like this normally take many months of vetting. And when it closed, Vulcan’s valuation jumped from about 200 million dollars to roughly 2 billion.

A windfall for the investors, including the president’s son.

This is public money. Your money.

Routed through the Pentagon to enrich the president’s family and their friends. The Bush administration’s own chief ethics lawyer called it corruption we pay for.

And there is more coming.

A drone parts company Trump Jr. holds a stake in is also under Pentagon review.

This is not a one-off. It is a pattern. The president’s family is treating the federal Treasury like a private bank, and the bill lands on every taxpayer.

https://t.co/4kB1cZNmlE

[joh @johflosse]

@ashleevance Or David Silver

[joh @johflosse]

@DrRichardWerner I’m German and part of this age group. Moved to Switzerland a long time ago though. This is a disaster in my opinion. What’s your personal take on this situation?

[joh @johflosse]

@So8res Hi, I’ve read your last two books and l really liked them. But there is one thing that confuses me a little: how can you be so certain about “everyone will die”? I mean I understand your arguments, I understand why you are doing it, but how can you be that certain about anything?

[joh @johflosse]

@TobiasAHuber 🤦🏻‍♂️

[François Chollet @fchollet]

At its core, fluid intelligence is a survival strategy in novel, adversarial environments.

[joh @johflosse]

@williameijer @paulg @grok explain like I’m 15

[François Chollet @fchollet]

When you lack a grounded, causal model of the world, your "predictions" are simply a remix of narratives you've heard from others.

Reminds me of something, actually

[John Burn-Murdoch @jburnmurdoch]

NEW: Is the internet changing our personalities for the worse?

Conscientiousness and extroversion are down, neuroticism up, with young adults leading the charge.

This is a really consequential shift, and there’s a lot going on here, so let’s get into the weeds 🧵

[Richard Sutton @RichardSSutton]

AI researchers seek to understand intelligence well enough to create beings of greater intelligence than current humans.

Reaching this profound intellectual milestone will enrich our economies and challenge our societal institutions. It will be unprecedented and transformational, but also a continuation of trends that are thousands of years old.

People have always created tools and been changed by them; this is what humans do.

The next big step is to understand ourselves.

This is a quest grand and glorious, and quintessentially human.

[Ramez Naam @ramez]

It's unacceptable for policing to look like this in America. This should both frighten and outrage anyone who wants the US to remain a free society.

[joh @johflosse]

freedom isn’t about breaking physics. it’s about what physics, arranged a certain way, enables.

[joh @johflosse]

Substance is boring. Arrangement is everything.

[Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63]

This is why the line to authoritarianism is always further along than you can see. Such people have an animal instinct for danger—and for opportunities to grab power. The unthinkable is entirely obvious to a sociopath that thinks only of himself and his survival.

[Joscha Bach @Plinz]

@karpathy @nearcyan I hate enforced noise pollution: mandatory triple horn at train intersections, trucks beeping in reverse, electric cars required to whine. Every default appliance in my rental is beeping. and droning, while walls are made from cardboard. I am noise sensitive and sometimes I cry.

[joh @johflosse]

Making reality

[joh @johflosse]

imagination - understanding - action

[joh @johflosse]

ACT: Making Reality
Philosophy, Science, Technology

[Hillary Clinton @HillaryClinton]

There is no safe haven under authoritarian rule, even if it happens in America.