Mark Spencer

Creative partner at Ripple Training. I tweet about Final Cut Pro, Motion, Resolve, Filmmaking, AI, and basically anything I find interesting.

[MMA Junkie @MMAJunkie]

Bryce Mitchell gives his thoughts on #UFCWhiteHouse.

"The government is supposed to protect us, not entertain us."

[Jamie Bonkiewicz @JamieBonkiewicz]

This is what happens when everyone around you is too afraid to say, “Sir, that’s fucking stupid”

[George Noble @gnoble79]

SPACEX IS COMPLETE GARBAGE

Run, don't walk from this train wreck.

The numbers are right there in the S-1 filing for anyone willing to look.

SHAME ON YOU ELON MUSK

YOU BELONG IN JAIL

SHAME ON YOU @SECGov and @SECPaulSAtkins for allowing this to proceed.

SHAME ON YOU MORGAN STANLEY and TED PICK

SHAME ON YOU GOLDMAN SACHS and DAVID SOLOMON

SHAME ON YOU Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Citigroup, JPMorgan, Mizuho, RBC, Macquarie, Wells Fargo, Allen & Co, Needham, Raymond James, Stifel, Cantor Fitzgerald, Soc Gen, Mirae, Santander, ING, and BTG Pactual.

Have you no shame? Have you no decency? Have you no honor?

Or is it all about the fees?

And the index providers are making it even WORSE.

Nasdaq changed its rules so SpaceX auto-qualifies for the Nasdaq-100 after just 15 days of trading triggering up to $60 BILLION in forced buying from ETFs alone. S&P Dow Jones Indices is now consulting on whether to fast-track S&P 500 inclusion for unprofitable mega-cap IPOs of this scale.

To Adena Friedman at Nasdaq and Catherine Clay at S&P Dow Jones Indices:

You are about to force every retirement account in America to become EXIT LIQUIDITY for the most overpriced IPO in history.

This is a legally sanctioned wealth transfer from Main Street to Wall Street. The public will be badly injured and EVERY ONE of you knows it.

You all belong in jail for this.

David Solomon and Ted Pick, grow a pair and do the right thing and stop this epic travesty.

How are you able to sleep
at night?

You and your firms are PATHETIC.

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔Robot dogs are patrolling FIFA World Cup venues in the US. Hyundai's Boston Dynamics deployed Spot robots at AT&T Stadium in Arlington with 360-degree cameras, thermal sensors, acoustic pickups, and AI anomaly detection. All of it feeds live video back to security teams.
A viral TikTok claimed they scan faces. Boston Dynamics says no facial recognition. The robots handle perimeter patrols and suspicious packages. Hyundai owns Boston Dynamics and is also a major FIFA sponsor, so this is as much a product showcase as a security operation.

My Take
No facial recognition, fine. But 360-degree cameras with AI anomaly detection pumping live feeds to a security command center is still a serious surveillance footprint at a civilian sporting event. India has workers earning $0.12 an hour to collect robot training data. MicroAGI films the inside of New York apartments. The infrastructure for robotic surveillance is coming together from both ends, and a World Cup with billions of viewers is the perfect place to normalize it because nobody argues against stadium safety.

These robots cost around $75,000 each. Boston Dynamics built them for the military before going commercial in 2019. Hyundai bought the company in 2021. Police departments and corporate campuses around the world are watching this deployment. Two years from now the cameras will have better software, the price will be lower, and nobody will remember a time these things weren't around. That's how surveillance technology scales. It starts somewhere safe and friendly, and by the time anyone pushes back, it's already furniture.

Hedgie���

[Rep. Mike Levin @RepMikeLevin]

There is no world in which this is okay.  

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito did not recuse himself from cases involving Trump’s Treasury Department while his own son was secretly working there as a political appointee and attorney. 

His son's employment was hidden so thoroughly that his name appears nowhere on the Treasury Department website, he has no public resume, and his bar listings are outdated. 

If Alito had recused himself, the secret would have come out. He didn’t recuse himself. 

This is a clear conflict of interest, and the American people deserved to know about it. 

The federal recusal standard is clear: a justice must step aside in any case where there is a reasonable basis to question whether he or she can be impartial. A justice ruling on cases involving the department where his son works fails that test. The Treasury Department sits at the center of some of the biggest legal fights of this administration, and challenges to Trump’s $1.776 billion January 6 slush fund could be headed to the Court next. 

The Supreme Court is the only court in America with no binding code of conduct. That is completely unacceptable, and it has to change NOW. 

Congress controls the Power of the Purse, and therefore the Court’s funding. If the Court will not adopt a binding code of conduct with real recusal review on their own, I support withholding their funding until they do. 
 https://t.co/FV2Tkpz7Dk

[Meacham @MeachamDr]

It’s like a meth family moved in….

[The Tennessee Holler @TheTNHoller]

Retired Lt. General @MarkHertling: “I’m sorry for getting emotional, but that comment from @PeteHegseth that diversity is not our strength is bullshit.”

Hertling shows pictures of fallen soldiers to refute Hegseth’s nonsense. Powerful.

(From @BulwarkOnline)

[Hillary Clinton @HillaryClinton]

This is what Trump's done to the people's house:

A third of it is rubble.

Another third is a cage match.

What a metaphor.

[Mark Spencer @markspen]

https://t.co/esSavaP0Eo

[Mark Spencer @markspen]

Link in comments

[Mark Spencer @markspen]

https://t.co/esSavaP0Eo

[Mark Spencer @markspen]

8 tools to improve your AI-driven web search - link in the comments.

[★Briana★ @briana__gomez]

Never getting over this clip. This is what made me realize that James Talarico is different than other politicians. He’s human, he’s helpful, and he strives for a better world for all of us. I think we deserve another James appearance on the podcast @joerogan 👀

[Kevin → Plant Daddy @KevinEspiritu]

While everyone argues about data centers and water, California almonds quietly use up to 80x more, AND the whole industry only survives because of trucked-in "livestock"...

Every February, beekeepers transport nearly every commercial honeybee colony in the United States (around 2.8 million hives) to California to pollinate almonds.

It's the largest "managed-pollination" event on the planet. Almonds cover 1.4 million acres and need bees to pollinate so they set nuts.

So why do we need to truck them in? Well, almonds are grown in huge monoculture orchards, meaning the native bee species are all but eradicated...there's nothing for them to eat most of the year.

To fix the problem WE created, we ship in bees from across the country. I interviewed the creator of the 2019 documentary The Pollinators, which followed this migration and brought a lot of this story into public view.

First off, honeybees aren't native to North America. They were brought from Europe in the 1600s. The "bee crisis" you read about, with national colony losses around 55% last year and some commercial keepers losing 60 to 70% in a single season, is happening to a managed, introduced species.

It's a livestock collapse driven by long-haul transport, pesticide exposure at bloom, hives packed together spreading mites and viruses, and a monoculture diet.

Meanwhile, North America has roughly 4,000 native bee species. Most are solitary, don't make honey, don't sting, and quietly pollinate everything from squash to blueberries.

Research out of UC Davis and UC Berkeley has been direct about this: when blue orchard bees, bumble bees, and other natives forage alongside honeybees in almond orchards, fruit set goes UP, not down.

The presence of wild bees changes how honeybees move through the trees and makes the honeybees themselves more effective pollinators.

So the fix isn't more honeybee hives. It's hedgerows, wildflower strips, bare ground for ground-nesting bees, and uncut field edges, aka habitat for the natives who were doing this work long before we started trucking in livestock.

Honeybees are livestock. Native bees are the wildlife, and we should be planting to include them in our agriculture.

[Charly Wargnier @DataChaz]

that deepfake of Michael Scott introducing @Karpathy to Dario and the Anthropic crew is the absolute best AI video I have seen so far

[Anne Applebaum @anneapplebaum]

Literal definition of Orwellian

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

Community note for the win.🤣

[PoliticsGirl @IAmPoliticsGirl]

This government is putting us in so much danger…

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

This is an official government account in a democracy.

This is what Orbanism looks like. The president bragging, via AI video, that he forced a comedian who mocked him off the air and ‘into the trash’.