Luc Van Braekel

European by birth, American by choice | Tech Entrepreneur | Innovation Enthusiast | Free Speech & Markets Advocate | Atlanticist | In Dutch on @lucvanbraekel

[Orca Wilde™ 🇩🇪 @Orcasandwich]

@UnderSecPD Censorship in Germany has become excessive. It is now very risky and unaffordable to express outrage with the government with in everyday colloquial language. In addition to this, efforts are being taken to identify people on the internet and to flag information in private chats.

[Bitcoin Teddy @Bitcoin_Teddy]

MARC ANDREESSEN: "We had meetings with the Biden admin where they told us to not even start AI companies because there's no way they'll let them succeed."

JOE ROGAN: "What do you do after a meeting like that?"

MARC ANDREESSEN: "You go endorse Donald Trump."

LMAO

[Preston Byrne @prestonjbyrne]

No, but some adult who is buying an Apple device for the first time today will have to show their papers before they can use the Internet.

Here’s hoping this law gets struck down as savagely as it deserves to be.

[Peter H. Diamandis, MD @PeterDiamandis]

If you think SpaceX is a rocket company with an internet business, you're basically valuing Amazon on book sales in 2005.

[JSRGN @JSRGN2]

@HanShawnity Can't even overstate my disappointment in Trump currently. How does one go from winning the war to losing the ceasefire? The incompetence beggars belief. He must have some truly toxic advisers whispering directly in his ear, as Laura Loomer has been warning of...

[Han Shawnity 🇺🇸 @HanShawnity]

As a longtime fan of President Trump, this is painful to see.

One of Trump's greatest successes was his "peace through strength" foreign policy.

He now risks throwing his entire foreign policy legacy away.

Iran attacked four Gulf countries yesterday. The attacks resulted in casualties and significant material damage.

Trump is not only minimizing it, not only excusing it, and not only failing to respond to it, but he's also forcing Israel's hand against Hezbollah, all in a futile attempt to reach what seems to be a capitulationist deal.

Iran is more arrogant and emboldened than ever, and it's not hard to see why.

Trump begging them for a deal, allowing them to drag out negotiations, and failing to respond to blatant provocations makes him look weak and pathetic.

Our deterrence is practically nonexistent.

I wish I was wrong. I hope there's something more to it than we can see. But I'm afraid there isn't.

[Platnium Patriarch @platinumpapas]

New @Tesla FSD update….needs some work. I was super excited after seeing all the posts about how awesome and less annoying it was. Learned the hard way today. Model Y missed the massive red DO NOT ENTER barrier and kept accelerating 😭

[Sir William Browder KCMG @Billbrowder]

This is remarkable: @Alexbrowder_ has just been added to Russia’s sanctions list for his work exposing Russian sanctions evasion through their own cryptocurrency. In case anyone doesn’t know Alexander is in high school.

[Miss Jo @therealmissjo]

Imagine you are a dental hygienist and live in Sweden..

You are employed to help “migrant children” with their dental issues.

As part of your job you examine the wisdom teeth development of the kids and you notice that 80% of those “kids” have fully formed wisdom teeth, implying they are not kids at all but adults older than the age of 18.

You tell the Swedish Migration Agency and they advise you to put it in writing.

When you send exact details, with examples of specific patients you are suspended, investigated and fired for disclosing private information relating to patients.

This happened to Bernt Herlitz in 2017.

When he appealed the unfair dismissal he ultimately lost and was fined about $50,000.

He and his family faced financial hardship and almost lost their home, until some generous benefactors raised money for him. Bernt remains unemployed today, despite staff shortages for dentists in his area in Gotland.

At the time, Sweden scoffed at the tests and claimed they were “discriminatory” but since then they have quietly brought in mass dental testing, for those whose age is in doubt, by the National Board of Forensic Medicine.

Bernt deserves a medal. Not vilification and unemployment.

[Uri Kurlianchik @VerminusM]

Since Trump's idiotic talk with Bibi, Hezbollah has been attacking Israeli towns nonstop while Iran attacked Kuwait, Bahrain, and Iraq. So far with impunity. Weakness invites aggression. Division doubly so. Trump is rapidly becoming more Biden than Biden.

[Eyal Yakoby @EYakoby]

If Israel had attacked four countries tonight, the podcaster class would be up in arms.

Iran just attacked four countries, they haven’t said a word.

Weird.

[Martin Varsavsky @martinvars]

The most important product X gives society is not entertainment. It is forced visibility.

Before platforms like this, institutions had a very effective defense mechanism: silence. A local abuse stayed local. A bodycam video could be ignored. A bureaucratic scandal could die in a regional newspaper. A politician could say one thing in one room and the opposite somewhere else, trusting that the audiences would never meet.

X breaks that arrangement. It does not make everyone wise, fair or accurate. It does something simpler and more disruptive: it makes it harder for powerful people to decide in advance what the public is allowed to notice.

That is why so many institutions hate it. Not because X is always clean. It is not. But because the old system was not clean either. It was just slower, narrower and easier to manage. The gatekeepers confused order with truth because order was good for them.

The public square is messy because society is messy. The answer to bad information is not to restore a priesthood of approved narrators. The answer is faster correction, more evidence, visible debate and permanent memory.

When a platform forces a government, a company, a university or a media outlet to respond to evidence it would rather ignore, that is not chaos. That is accountability arriving without permission.

[Luc Van Braekel @lvb]

@AndreWGMI @om_patel5 Optoma GT2100HDR, according to https://t.co/SRXUVacrvA

[Om Patel @om_patel5]

THIS GUY LIVES UNDER SFO'S TAKEOFF PATH SO HE BUILT A CEILING PROJECTOR THAT TRACKS EVERY PLANE FLYING OVER HIS HOUSE IN REAL TIME

he uses a cheap $30 radio receiver to pick up the signals that planes broadcast while flying.

then projects them onto his ceiling in real time

when a jet flies over his house you hear it outside and at the exact same moment a plane glides across his ceiling labeled with the airline, aircraft type, and destination

pure black background so the projector's rectangle disappears and only the aircraft are visible

but he didn't stop at planes

it also draws the real sky behind them. sun, moon, bright stars, constellations, and live satellites including the ISS. all at their true positions for his exact location and time in real time

so he's lying in bed watching the actual night sky projected onto his ceiling with real planes crossing through it as they take off from SFO

there is a huge market for every man alive that runs outside to see the helicopter

vibe coded the whole thing himself with a cheap radio, a projector, and some clever software

[𝐍𝐢𝐨𝐡 𝐁𝐞𝐫𝐠 🇮🇷 ✡︎ @NiohBerg]

Absolutely every politician currently crying about "not politicising Henry Nowak" has at least one tweet politicising George Floyd.

Seriously, search his name in their history and you'll find one for all of them.

[Ole Lehmann @itsolelehmann]

luckily bookmark rot is an easy problem to fix now

here's how to turn every X bookmark you've ever saved into a second brain your agent has full context on:

1. export your bookmarks. i use twitter-web-exporter (free userscript) or the BookmarkSave extension. you get one file with every bookmark + the full text + the author + the link

2. drop that file into a folder. if you already run an llm wiki / obsidian vault, drop it straight in so your bookmarks join the rest of your knowledge

3. point your agent at the folder (claude code, codex, hermes, whatever you run) and tell it: "read this export and turn every bookmark into its own markdown note with the original link and a couple of topic tags"

that's it, your agent has read all of it.

now you can ask "what have i saved about pricing" or "pull everything i bookmarked on claude code" and it answers across the whole pile

takes maybe 10 minutes

after that they actually get used, and every new bookmark folds into the same brain instead of rotting in a tab you never open again

[Luc Van Braekel @lvb]

@Norton1Lisa @Turbinetraveler He admitted ownership of the device, and explained that the name change was not recent (so long ago that he had forgotten about it) and it was not done as a prank for this flight.

[Preston Byrne @prestonjbyrne]

Americans aren’t ignoring Ofcom’s fines. Ofcom is ignoring America’s laws.

It’s ridiculous, deeply unserious, that a foreign government should think it can override the First Amendment on American soil.

The UK won’t be able to engage in this charade forever.

[🇺🇸 Kyle Bass 🇹🇼 @Jkylebass]

Texas is the growth engine of the Western world.

With 32 million people, Texas generates nearly $2.9 trillion in GDP. Elon @elonmusk ‘s new Terafab project in Grimes County is projected to add another $1 trillion to the Texas economy over the next decade.

At current pace, Texas will surpass France 🇫🇷 in GDP by 2031.

For comparison: France has 66 million citizens and a GDP of roughly $3.3 trillion. Yet Texas GDP per capita is nearly twice that of France.

President Macron and his government should take a hard look at why a single U.S. state is creating wealth at this scale.

This piece from the Economist gets the gist right but the dynamism and understanding of the sheer scale of what’s happening is missed.
https://t.co/Jz454PEpkV

[Mary Katharine Ham @mkhammer]

A reminder that Alfonsi was reporter on a 13-minute 60 Minutes feature this year that opened w a German police raid on a man’s apartment for posting a cartoon they didn’t like. There were no critical questions for the German speech police and zero pro-speech figures interviewed.