Mel Hocker

"The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” Socrates

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

A brilliant explanation of the sources of wokeism and the foundation behind most of the West’s challenges in recent years.

A very important read.

I would never have found this post except for @X’s auto-translation feature. The original post in French.

[Official Layoff @LayoffAI]

If this graphic does not help convince you we need to pause H-1B, I am not sure what will.

6.9M petitions over 10 years is NOT a program that ONLY fills EXTRAORDINARY gaps.

DO A PAUSE AND FULL AUDIT OF H-1B AND EVERY VISA PROGRAM. PROVIDE FULL TRANSPARENCY INTO EACH!

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Elon Musk just defended America better than every politician in Washington combined.

Musk: “After World War 2, the US could have basically taken over the world and any country. Like we got nukes, nobody else got nukes. We don’t even have to lose soldiers. Which country do you want?”

One nation on earth held a weapon nobody else had.

Total dominance. Zero competition. No risk of retaliation.

Every empire in history that held that kind of advantage used it.

Rome. The Mongols. The British. The Ottomans.

They conquered until they collapsed.

America had a bigger advantage than all of them combined.

And it rebuilt the countries it just defeated.

Musk: “The United States actually helped rebuild countries. So it helped rebuild Europe, it helped rebuild Japan. This is very unusual behavior, almost unprecedented.”

Almost unprecedented?

It had never happened before. Not once in 5,000 years of recorded history.

The Marshall Plan wasn’t foreign aid.

It was the most radical act of restraint any superpower ever committed.

America turned its enemies into allies. Turned rubble into economies. Turned surrender into partnership.

Germany went from ashes to the economic engine of Europe in a generation.

Japan went from unconditional surrender to the third largest economy on earth.

Three years after the war, America was flying food into Berlin.

A city in the heart of the nation that just tried to destroy it.

That’s not policy.

That’s a civilization deciding what it is at the exact moment it has the power to be anything.

You’re being told a story right now.

That America is the villain of history.

You hear it everywhere. Media. Universities. Social platforms.

Musk: “There’s always like, well America’s done bad things. Well of course America’s done bad things, but one needs to look at the whole track record.”

Every nation on earth has dark chapters. Every single one.

The difference is what a country does when nobody can stop it.

And when nobody could stop America, it fed its enemies and rebuilt their cities.

Musk: “The history of China suggests that China is not acquisitive. Meaning they’re not going to go out and invade a whole bunch of countries.”

Probably right.

China has historically built walls, not fleets.

But the real question isn’t about borders anymore.

We’re approaching a moment that mirrors 1945 in ways nobody has fully processed yet.

AI is going to give a handful of people a power advantage that makes nuclear monopoly look quaint.

If someone is going to hold that kind of power, who do you want it to be?

The country that conquered when it could? Or the one that rebuilt when it didn’t have to?

Every alliance. Every trade route. Every economy.

Billions lifted out of poverty.

All of it traces back to one act of restraint that had never been done before.

And carries no guarantee of being repeated.

The most powerful thing America ever did wasn’t building the bomb.

It was what it didn’t do after.

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Giannis Antetokounmpo just dismantled a lie most people never even question.

A reporter looked him in the eye after an elimination and asked the question the system always asks.

“Do you view this season as a failure?”

That is not a question. That is a trap dressed as journalism.

Giannis did not flinch. He did not defend. He asked one question back.

Giannis: “Do you get a promotion every year? No, right? So every year you work is a failure?”

The room went dead.

Then he buried it.

Giannis: “Michael Jordan played 15 years, won six championships. The other nine years was a failure?”

The greatest competitor the sport has ever seen spent more seasons losing than winning. Those nine years were not wasted. They were the price of the six.

This is not just a sports clip. This is a mirror held up to the entire American operating system.

The United States was built by people who treated failure as tuition. Now it punishes anyone who tries to pay it.

The bureaucracy has made risk irrational.

The permits. The compliance layers. The legal exposure. The months of paperwork that collapse because of one technicality.

The cost of attempting something bold in America is now so high that the rational move is to attempt nothing at all.

That is not a policy problem. That is an innovation crisis dressed as procedure.

When the penalty for failing is losing years of work, your life savings, and your reputation, most people do the math and stay in line.

They take the safe promotion.

They build nothing.

And the system calls that stability.

One person refused to do that math.

Elon Musk watched three SpaceX rockets explode before the fourth one flew. Any other founder in any other era would have been buried by the cost alone.

Musk did not see three failures. He saw three datasets that no amount of simulation could have produced.

Every explosion told his engineers exactly where the physics broke. Every crater in the launchpad was a blueprint written in wreckage.

That is the difference between a system that fears failure and a mind that weaponizes it.

An AI model operates on the same principle. It does not reach superintelligence on the first try. It requires billions of errors. It absorbs the loss, updates the weights, and fires again.

To the machine, failure is not a defeat. It is training data.

Giannis described this process for the human body. Musk proved it with hardware. AI is automating it at scale.

And here is where the stakes go from personal to civilizational.

The country that builds the most powerful AI will set the rules for the next century. That is not speculation. That is the new arms race.

China is not slowing down because a launch failed. They are studying the debris and building the next one before the smoke clears. They have structured their entire system to absorb failure at speed.

America has structured its system to avoid failure at all costs.

And the cost of that avoidance is already showing up on the scoreboard. The lead is shrinking.

The nations that win the next fifty years will not be the ones with the cleanest records. They will be the ones who learned the fastest. And you cannot learn fast if your system treats every failure as a funeral.

The spectators need a clean scorecard so they can sleep at night.

The operators know that progress does not announce itself. It compounds in silence. It looks like a flatline for years before the curve goes vertical.

America does not have a talent problem. It has a permission problem. The talent is here. The willingness to risk is being regulated into extinction.

The country that treats failure as data will own the future.

The country that treats failure as disgrace will watch from the sidelines and wonder what happened.

[Big Brain AI @realBigBrainAI]

Citadel CEO Ken Griffin on why the AI boom might be the most overhyped tech cycle we have ever seen:

This year alone, data center spending in the United States is projected to exceed $500 billion.

And Griffin wants to know what all of that money is actually buying.

"You're not going to generate this kind of spend unless you're going to make a promise. You're going to profoundly change the world."

In his view, the scale of the capital commitment demands the scale of the promise.

And when the promise has to be that big, hype becomes inevitable.

"Is it hype? Of course."

Griffin isn't arguing that AI is worthless. He sees real impact in certain areas like call centers and software engineering.

But for the broader white collar workforce, he's far less convinced.

He points to a recent Harvard paper that coined the term "AI work slop." It looks impressive on the surface, but falls apart the moment you look closer.

He saw it firsthand inside Citadel. A colleague running their commodities business handed him a report generated by an AI engine.

"The first few sentences like, 'Wow, that's really insightful.' And then you go down below that and it's all garbage."

For Griffin, this is the defining tension of the current AI cycle. The industry needs to promise transformation to justify the investment. But the actual productivity gains, for most jobs, haven't shown up yet.

We have seen this pattern before.

Transformative technology attracting massive capital well ahead of proven results.

When the hype finally settles, will AI have actually changed anything at all?

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Yann LeCun just exposed AI’s fundamental flaw. We’re celebrating systems that can’t do what insects do effortlessly.

LeCun: “The biggest difficulty is not to get fooled into thinking that a computer system is intelligent simply because it can manipulate language.”

Language feels like intelligence because we experience it as the highest form of human thought.

So when a machine produces fluent, articulate, convincing text, the instinct is to conclude it understands.

It doesn’t.

LeCun: “It turns out the real world is much, much more complicated.”

Language is actually the easy part.

A sequence of discrete symbols with a finite number of possibilities. Predicting the next word is a tractable mathematical problem. Impressive at scale.

Not understanding. Pattern matching in symbol space.

The real world is something else entirely. A high-dimensional, continuous, noisy signal that changes every millisecond in ways no text corpus can capture.

Physical reality doesn’t come in tokens.

LeCun: “Which your house cat is perfectly able to deal with. But not computers yet.”

This is the Moravec paradox.

The things that feel hard to humans: writing essays, solving equations, passing bar exams. Computationally straightforward.

The things that feel trivially easy: walking across a room, catching a falling object, folding a shirt. Extraordinarily difficult for machines.

Your house cat navigates a complex three-dimensional physical environment in real time.

Predicts trajectories. Adjusts to surprises. Understands cause and effect through direct interaction with the world.

The most powerful AI systems ever built cannot do what your cat does before breakfast.

That’s not a minor gap. That’s the entire frontier.

Language is the easy problem that looks hard to humans.

The physical world is the hard problem that looks easy because evolution solved it billions of years ago.

We’re pouring hundreds of billions into making language models marginally better at the simple problem.

The actual intelligence problem remains unsolved.

LeCun has spent fifteen years on this. Not making chatbots more fluent. Giving machines the ability to understand, predict, and interact with physical reality the way animals do instinctively.

The benchmark that matters isn’t passing a bar exam.

It’s folding a shirt. Loading a dishwasher. Navigating an unfamiliar room without a map.

We built systems that can write your dissertation before we built systems that can tie your shoes.

That’s where AI actually is.

Everything else is autocomplete at scale.

[David Ondrej @DavidOndrej1]

https://t.co/hvec7e4OI7

[Under Secretary of State Jacob S. Helberg @UnderSecE]

WE IN AMERICA HAVE NO INTEREST IN BEING POLITE AND ORDERLY CARETAKERS OF THE WEST’S MANAGED DECLINE!

[Ken Cao-The China Crash Chronicle @Ken_LoveTW]

Japan Quietly Upgraded Its Military — With Taiwan’s Help. This TSMC Move Just Made a Taiwan Invasion Much Harder.

China keeps talking about invading Taiwan.
But while everyone was watching the headlines, something far more important happened.

TSMC—the world’s most advanced and profitable chipmaker—decided to bring 3-nanometer production to Japan. Not legacy chips. Not trailing nodes. The crown jewels.

In this video, I break down how Taiwan and TSMC just helped Japan upgrade its deterrence capabilities at the silicon level—why this move quietly reshapes the military balance in East Asia, raises the cost of a Taiwan invasion, and leaves China structurally locked out of the future.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Truly insane levels of fraud!

18% of home healthcare billing nationwide is coming from one county in California …

[Walter Hudson @WalterHudson]

Vigilantes now rule Minneapolis.

They can block intersections, fail to comply, resist arrest... and nothing happens to them.

This will inevitably result in an equal and opposite vigilante response.

And the only people to blame will be state and local authorities.

[Jon Erlichman @JonErlichman]

“Mediocre people don’t like high achievers.”

~ Nick Saban

[Mel Hocker @mlhocker]

America needs a new transportation system - one that's built for the 21st century!

[JC Vollentine @Theonlyjcvolly]

😳 Yikes - These are the Supports for the Atchafalaya Basin Bridge that carries Interstate 10 & connects Lafayette & Baton Rouge Louisiana!

Someone needs to get to work! 😬

[Mel Hocker @mlhocker]

Statement of Need for a Change and Innovation Platform https://t.co/u6lSyGWEXM via @YouTube

[Clay Travis @ClayTravis]

John Calipari is right on this — allow one player transfer, after that, you have to sit out a year to transfer. We have guys playing for four different teams in four years. It’s beyond ridiculous and bad for the sport:

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

Marc Andreessen: “The best entrepreneurs of the future will be quite skilled at 6-8 things”

Marc is asked how being a founder changes in the age of AI, to which he responds:

“I think there are two ways to have a differentiated edge in general — go deep or go broad.”

Going deep means becoming a specialized expert in your domain.

“There are domains where that really matters,” Marc explains. “In biotech and working on AI foundation models, the deeper you are the better.”

But as AI gets more powerful, Marc would bet that “going broad” will be the winning strategy for most fields. He recommends knowing a lot about many different fields and how the world works — then use AI tools to go deep whenever you need to.

“If you talk to any of the great CEOs, you see this.” Mark explains. “The really great CEOs are great at product, sales, and marketing people, they’re great legal thinkers, and they’re great at finance and with investors and the press. It’s a multidisciplinary kind of approach.”

He continues:

“The best entrepreneurs of the future will probably be quite skilled at 6 or 8 things and then will be able to cross-pollinate and combine them.”

Video source: @tbpn (2025)

[Mel Hocker @mlhocker]

Like a truly advanced transportation system for the 21st century. Waymo is the best we can do? Really?

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

Peter Thiel: “Vertical integration is an under-explored modality of technological progress”

“In my mind, there probably are only two broad categories in the entire history of the last 250 years where people have actually come up with new things and made money doing so.”

The first is vertically-integrated, complex monopolies, which people started building at the end of the second industrial revolution—like Standard Oil and Ford at the end of the 19th century and start of the 20th century.

As Peter points out, this is done surprisingly little today:

“It’s typically fairly capital intensive and we live in a culture where it’s very hard to get people to buy into anything that’s super complicated and takes very long to build.”

But if you can pull it off—as Elon Musk has done with Tesla and SpacEx—these companies can be very valuable.

“Vertical integration is a very under-explored modality of technological progress that people would do well to look at more.”

The other category Thiel has come up with new things and made money doing so is software.

“There is something about software itself that is very powerful. Software has these incredible economies of scale and low marginal cost. And there is something about the world of bits—as opposed to the world of atoms—where you can often get very fast adoption.”

Video source: @ycombinator (2014)

[Mel Hocker @mlhocker]

@elonmusk Christians ended slavery! (Wilberforce)

[🇺🇸RealRobert🇺🇸 @Real_RobN]

CONSPIRACY THEORY NO MORE:

Stephen Miller: “The Democrat Party, via the Biden-Harris Terrorist Administration devised a scheme to import illegal aliens into the country by the millions — granting them ‘parole,’ which gives them work permits, which gives them Social Security numbers, which gives them access to the voting booth — and finally hooking them on welfare like Hunter Biden hooked on drugs, all with the sole purpose of participating in U.S. elections and ultimately overthrowing the Constitutional Republic of the United States.”

The whole f**king is seditious,

[BelannF @BelannF]

LET'S TAKE A WALK THROUGH HISTORY.

Are we in American going to learn what not to do when we know the real history of Islam?

Every country in which political Islam takes power - the civilization collapses. This is history, not a political opinion.

Be sure to watch the entire video, so you will know the truth fo what actually happened.