Tim Wood

This job: CTO for a small asset-manager.
LoC politics/tech/cars/music/low humor.
Hip-hop name: Pumpa Nickel.
Pronouns: I/me/mine
Bsky: livecut
For 🇺🇲🇺🇦🇮🇱.

[Tim Wood @livecut]

There is no bottom. #47

[Michael McFaul @McFaul]

Rubio is right. The US remains the "world's sole global superpower." But the United States is much weaker today than it was 2 years ago. Trump and team have fought with allies, blown up the global trading rules, destroyed U.S. soft power tools, and dragged us into a needless war in the Middle East.

[Tom Nichols @RadioFreeTom]

Trump doesn’t really have a conception of national security because he has no conception of any interest beyond himself and his own circle

[Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @ReichlinMelnick]

UPDATE: Dulce Diaz was in fact a U.S. citizen and the Trump admin has now acknowledged the fact and issued her a passport. Below was DHS’s angry (and utterly false) claim to the contrary.

Proof that, yes, ICE has at times detained US citizens in error.

[Tim Wood @livecut]

@JudiciaryDems A convenient Aileen Cannon clone?

[Senate Judiciary Democrats 🇺🇸 @JudiciaryDems]

Katie Lane is the first Trump 2.0 judicial nominee to receive a NOT QUALIFIED rating from the American Bar Association.

She’s never even tried a case.

There are 3,000+ licensed attorneys in Montana. Pick a different one.

[Ned Price @nedprice]

The biggest news isn't that Trump is appointing someone without a national security background to a position that, by law, requires "extensive" experience. It's that Pulte earned Trump's trust by using **mortgage** records to pursue perceived political enemies. Now this top henchman will have access to some of our most sensitive intelligence and exquisite capabilities. That's why this is so noteworthy -- and concerning.

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

As the family IT guy its so disappointing how bad of an experience technology is for non-technical people.

I had the distinct pleasure of building educational software for kids full time for a summer while in college (s/o to @WilliamsonMark), and I remember they did weekly/biweekly user testing where a group of toddlers would come in and we'd record them using the software in various states and then adjust accordingly.

Every single session was SHOCKINGLY illuminating. Like, I expected after a number of these I'd empathize more and build better toddler software one-shot right? Hell fucking no. Every user study was so educational. I learned I simply can't enter the mind of a toddler.

Do TV companies, Netflix/Roku/etc. do user studies with elderly people? Do they realize how dogshit and impossible to navigate their interfaces are?

Asking some elderly family members to "sign up and schedule an Uber to pick you up for the airport" is like mission impossible. I thought they were exaggerating, then I tried the experience and holy shit man. Try cold finding, installing, signing up, and scheduling an Uber on a 5 year old iPhone with max font size. Its insane.

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

I've got an agent in a loop optimizing a renderer with the goal to minimize frame times (and tests to measure). It got times down from 88ms to 2ms and allocations down from ~150K to 500. Sounds good, right? Wrong. This is exactly why agent psychosis is a big fucking problem.

As an experiment, I rewrote the Ghostty core render state in Go, with access to identically laid out data structures as Ghostty and the exact same validation tests. I made a purposely naive renderer (simple, correct, but slow). 88ms per frame with 150,000 allocations (horrendous, lol)!

I then kickstarted a Ralph loop to bring the frame times down. I told it it can't modify input data structures or the public API or tests (they're correct), but it can do anything else it wants. It got to work.

It has worked for about 4 hours. I've spent around $350 on this experiment so far. The results?

88ms => 1.5ms
150K allocs => ~500 allocs

Incredible right? Nope.

My hand-written renderer I ported has frame times (same benchmark) of ~20us (0.020ms) and 0 allocations in the update path.

This is the problem with psychosis and lacking systems understanding. If you don't understand the system, you're going to accept that this is an incredible result. If you understand the system, you'll see better solutions immediately and can do roughly 75x better on throughput.

The people who blindly trust agent output are in the former camp. They're sheeple, overdrinking from a fountain of mediocrity.

Standard disclaimer: I use AI all the time. I like AI. The point I'm making is to not blindly accept results. Think. Analyze. Learn.

[Melo @POFFADER]

@PeteHegseth You cheated on your wife, you get drunk, you divorced multiple times. Have different kids by multiple woman. Killed 175 school children in Iran. The list is endless. You are a fake Christian

[Tim Wood @livecut]

@mattvanswol The same way one of 'em became president.

[Perragrande @perragrande31]

@QasimRashid

[Cathy Young 🇺🇸🇺🇦🇮🇱 @CathyYoung63]

"President pardons his supporter who goes on to molest kids" would have been a MASSIVE scandal for any other administration

[Tim Wood @livecut]

@EricTrump @jkbjournalist "Click bate" 🤣

[Tim Wood @livecut]

@MarkMeadows The Bible is full of murder.

Why aren't you in jail?

[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.

[Qasim Rashid, Esq. @QasimRashid]

BREAKING: Adam Hoffman has been released from jail for "good behavior."

Hoffman is the 49-year-old Waco, TX attorney who faced life without parole for repeatedly raping a young boy, until Texas AG Ken Paxton offered him 1 day in jail and no need to register as a sex offender. A judge increased his sentence to a whopping 60 days. He got out in 30 days.

This is MAGA's vision for the USA. Full story: https://t.co/cU1WnZKAfr

[Tim Wood @livecut]

@mehdirhasan Insane is no obstacle to a MAGA argument.

[Tim Wood @livecut]

@ChristineX2024 @PLeonardNYDN In other words, both feet in s-it.

[Tim Wood @livecut]

@KerryHolmekb Fake.

[Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassie]

The President’s Big Beautiful Bill, the Iran War, and Republican spending bills will create a $2 trillion budget DEFICIT in 2026.

Financing just the new debt costs more than all federal road & bridge projects, and we will be making those new interest payments each year, forever.