Cindy

sunshine state of mind

[Cindy @kiwisaffer54]

@OutbackNugget @jimmyregard @KobeissiLetter After 5 years we’re in a new playing field anyway. No reason to think the only way is back

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Activist: "Farmers are millionaires sitting on land worth a fortune. They can afford the inheritance tax."

Farmer: "How much did I earn last year?"

Activist: "I don't know. A lot, surely."

Farmer: "Twenty-two thousand. Before the tractor broke."

Activist: "But the land's worth millions."

Farmer: "On paper. I can't eat the field or spend it. The only way to turn it into money is to sell it, and then I'm not a farmer, I'm a bloke who used to have a farm."

Activist: "So sell a corner of it."

Farmer: "A corner doesn't work as a farm. You can't run a suckler herd on the bit that's left after the taxman's had his slice. You sell one field, then the next bill comes, then another field. It ends one way."

Activist: "The land only costs that much because you won't sell it."

Farmer: "It costs that much because a hedge fund three counties over wants it for carbon credits and a footballer wants it for the view. Neither of them has ever calved a cow at three in the morning. They set the price. I get the bill."

Activist: "It's still an asset."

Farmer: "It's a workplace that happens to be expensive. You've decided the value of the shop is the same as the wage of the shopkeeper. Come back in February and watch me not be a millionaire in the rain."

[Cindy @kiwisaffer54]

@chinoalemano 👀

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

There's an actual name for what perfume does to your neck, and dermatologists have been diagnosing it for a century: berloque dermatitis.

The culprit is bergaptene, a compound in bergamot oil that shows up in most citrus-forward fragrances. On its own it does nothing. Add sunlight and it turns into a photosensitizer. UV light hits the bergaptene bound to your skin cells and triggers a reaction that fuses the compound directly into your DNA, cross-linking the strands. Your body reads that as damage and floods the area with melanin.

The result is a streaky brown discoloration exactly where the spray dripped down your neck. Gravity draws the perfume into thin lines, so the pigmentation shows up as drip marks, which is how you tell it apart from a normal sunburn. Once it sets, it can take months to years to fade.

The neck is the worst possible target for three reasons at once. The skin there runs thinner than almost anywhere on your body, so compounds penetrate faster. It sits under direct sun all day. And the alcohol base strips the skin barrier with every application, which lets more of the fragrance soak in on the next spray.

Doctors named this the "atomizer sign," anterior neck eczema right at the Adam's apple, because aerosol perfume lands there so reliably that seeing it tells the dermatologist what to test for before the patient says a word.

The thyroid and hormone panic going around is mostly unsupported. This part is real, dated, and has a diagnosis code. Spray it on your clothes instead of your skin and the whole mechanism never starts.

[Karl Mehta @karlmehta]

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman reveals the assumption about superintelligence he thinks the other AI labs have backwards

"Some of the other labs are making an assumption that a superintelligence that is smarter than all of us put together is both inevitable and even desirable. And that such a system would probably be very hard to control"

"We have to reset that and make the assumption that we should only bring a system like that into the world that we are sure we can control, that operates in a subordinate way to us, that humans remain at the top of the food chain"

"These tools, like any other past technology, are designed to enhance human wellbeing and serve humanity. Not exceed humanity"

"Some of the things that you hear from Elon often, or even others in the field - they're fixating on a world in 2050 or 2075 when they're going off exploring other universes and conquering resources from other planets. A system like that, it is unclear to me how it would have any time for preserving us as a species"

"We have to make a decision as a species to prioritize creating superintelligences that are aligned, that care about humans and want to protect humans. If we just accelerate and cut all those corners, we're taking a massive risk with the future of our species"

He calls it humanist superintelligence: build it only if it is provably controllable, subordinate, and pointed at human wellbeing.

The uncomfortable part: "provably controllable" is a standard nobody in the industry can verify yet.

[Cindy @kiwisaffer54]

@rohitboolc CEOs appear to have good instincts but behave as if they don’t have shareholders with vested interests

[Cindy @kiwisaffer54]

@chinoalemano @ChairmansLedger Interesting take. Thanks

[KaizenInvestor @Kaizen_Investor]

My experience in a market like this is to stay patient. As I previously explained, you can be aggressive in buying stocks in industries that you don’t own and want to be part of it.

But I’m happy with the industries and stocks I’m in and I’m not adding yet. I stay patient.

Nobody knows if we reached a bottom or when the bottom will be reached. I’m not smart enough to predict this bottom, so I don’t try.

There is a negative sentiment in the market at the moment.

The week I’m looking at to certainly change it: the week of 20 july. The week the Hyperscalers report earnings.

Sentiment can be negative but AI is here to stay and stocks will go up again. If the market does not realise before that week, they will again when Hyperscalers report earnings.

I’m very happy with the positions I have but I think market can go lower or stay stable for another month. I stay very patient with my cash.

[Clint Awana @clintoptions]

I have a secret to share

After your first $2–$3 million, a paid off home and a good car, there is no difference in quality of life between you and Jeff Bezos. Both of you have limited amount of time on earth; you have twice if not more than Jeff, so you are richer than him. A cheeseburger is a cheeseburger whether a billionaire eats or you do.

Money is nothing but a piece of paper or a number in your app. Real life is outdoors.

Become financially independent; that’s usually 2–3mil. Have good food. Enjoy the relations. Workout. Sleep well. Call your parents. That’s all there is to life. Greed has no end.

Repeat after me: Time is the currency of life. Money is not.

Sooner you figure this out, happier you will be.

[Cindy @kiwisaffer54]

@aleabitoreddit 😂

[Cindy @kiwisaffer54]

@GrindeOptions With what initial investment?

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The PMs producing slop with AI aren't using worse tools.

They're managing AI the way bad managers manage people: throw the task over the wall and expect a finished product.

The guest in this episode has a rule he gives every new hire. Junior employees, eager to please, will hear one instruction and race to the finish line without asking a single clarifying question. They'll hand back something polished and completely wrong. He treats Claude the same way. Same rule. Same fix.

The fix is sequencing. You don't give Claude the full goal on turn one. You layer complexity slowly. You do inventory before prompting. You hide your real goal until the model has enough context to not overshoot it. When Claude starts suggesting next steps you didn't ask for, you stop it. "Stop suggesting next steps" is an actual instruction in his workflow.

The 200 iterations number is the one worth sitting with. Most people run one prompt and evaluate the output. The people producing non-slop run 200 micro-iterations and treat each one as signal. The model isn't generating. You're steering.

Slop, as he defines it in this episode, is micro-hallucinations. Sentences that are technically accurate but feel off. The kind of thing executives catch in the first read. They can't always name what's wrong, but they know. And once they associate your name with that feeling, the credibility damage compounds.

The biology metaphor he uses is the right frame. You're not microwaving output. You're growing it. Slowly, with constraints, with deliberate pressure at each stage.

Managing AI is a management skill. The PMs who get that will produce work that reads like it took three days. The ones still running single prompts will keep wondering why theirs reads like everyone else's.

Don't microwave the output.

[Cindy @kiwisaffer54]

@GrindeOptions K shaped

[Maxi @AllForProgress_]

On a stretch of the River Roding in Barking strewn with waste and detritus, a barrister named Paul Powlesland did something the British state has spent decades failing to do: he cleaned it and made it look like a river again. He now faces legal action.

Yep. He and a group of volunteers hired a digger for £1,000 of their own money and hauled more than 200 bags of filth out of the water - packaging, broken appliances, used needles, even weapons. By any sane reckoning it was a small act of public good, civic spirit at its most potent and wholesome.

For his trouble, he received a letter from the Environment Agency informing him that he is under investigation for working without a permit, an offence that carries up to two years in prison.

The same Environment Agency that found the will to come after a volunteer for cleaning a river without the right paperwork has not, on that same river, prosecuted a single one of the illegal sewage spills that have fouled it for years. Not one. It's too fat, scrofulous, and indolent to fight the sort of people who'd do this. But it has energy to spare for the man with the digger and the bin bags because they expect he's likely to be a reasonable sort of Englishman who pays his taxes and honours procedure, however unreasonable it may be, when levied upon him.

Protecting rivers? They have no interest in that.

This is the thing about our institutions that the public grasps in its bones and the people who run them never will. Our institutions fail, and the manner of their failing is the worst part of it - the bloodless, box-ticking, permission-withholding callousness of bodies that have forgotten they exist to achieve anything at all.

They should all be cleared out; every decision-making body in the building responsible for the dereliction of duty, and for daring to persecute a member of the public, must be hollowed out. The whole thing started from scratch.

Better yet, I'll tell you what an outfit like Progress will do once it gains power; we'll put people like @paulpowlesland in charge of the very body now threatening to jail him. The institutions meant to look after this country - the Environment Agency and a dozen like it - are dying of exactly the defensive, do-nothing culture that sent that letter. They need to be run by people like him who actually give a toss. People with the brains to understand the problem and the plain human instinct to go and fix it themselves, while the rest stand on the bank writing their little sociopathic missives to the ones who already did.

I don't know the first thing about Paul. I've never met him. I don't know what his political preferences are, the shape of his beliefs, what else we would agree or disagree on. None of that means a thing to me. He's a good man, and the right kind of man to make things work; and Progress is an attempt to make the country work, not a club made to serve a certain type or belief profile. A country is made to work by the people who, whatever their politics, cannot walk past a problem without trying to solve it. There are such people everywhere in Britain - on the rivers, in the schools, the wards, the workshops - and almost none of them are running anything, because the institutions have been built to keep that exact kind of person out.

Drop the case against him. Then go further: find the hundred other Paul Powleslands the country is currently ignoring or threatening, and give them the keys. Put the responsibility and the authority, together, in their hands. Britain will be cleaned up - its rivers, and a great deal besides - in no time. It will be done by the people willing to get in the water, not by the ones writing letters about permits from the bank.

[The Eagle flies free @Fa21519230]

🚨🚨 IMPACTANTE: Estudio de resonancia magnética sobre niños pequeños expone algo ATERRADOR: Escanearon los cerebros de 60 niños de 3 a 5 años, incluyendo a Rose, de 5 años y descubrieron que el tiempo frente a pantallas interactivas está causando una pérdida medible de sustancia blanca en sus cerebros en desarrollo. Incluso solo 2 horas al día están ligadas a una conectividad neural deteriorada, así como al desarrollo del lenguaje y la alfabetización.
"Vaya… No esperaba ver nada por el estilo"...
Profesor Mike Nagel, neurocientífico y padre.

[Cindy @kiwisaffer54]

@dannycheng2022 Appreciate this guidance

[Cindy @kiwisaffer54]

@johnkonrad Don’t the journalistic standards around opinion pieces require framing them as such? 🤷‍♀️

[Cindy @kiwisaffer54]

@RosannaInvests The problem I keep running into is not enough cash to size up my positions 😂

[John Ʌ Konrad V @johnkonrad]

There’s a joke that goes with this post…

In the 1990’s three very wealthy old men from New York are sitting at a beach club in Boca Raton, comparing how they each made their fortune.

“It’s a sad story, really,” said Sid. “I built a beautiful furniture warehouse. Business was good, but then times got hard. Thank God for the fire. The insurance payout saved us.”

“Funny, almost the same thing happened to me,” said Ben. “I had a chain of jewelry stores. One night, every last piece got stolen. Terrible. But the insurance company was very generous.”

“That is so strange,” said Martin. “I had a successful art gallery, right on the waterfront, and it fell on hard times too. Then one day a flood came through and washed the whole place away. The insurance made me whole.”

Sid leaned in and lowered his voice. “Wow. But Martin, I have to ask. How do you arrange a flood?”

[Avi Roy @agingroy]

The eye doctor has been taking a photo of the back of your eye for years. You glance at it for two seconds, they file it, you go home.

Turns out that photo was holding onto something nobody was reading.

The retina is the one place a doctor can look straight at your blood vessels and nerve tissue without cutting you open. It’s brain tissue, pushed to the surface. For a long time we knew the signal was probably in there. We just couldn’t pull it out.

A new study in Lancet Digital Health shows an AI can. Feed it that same routine retina photo and it reads out a picture of how the brain is aging.

A photo they were already getting, turned into an early look at the brain.