It's never too late for a year in review is it...? Well here's a brief look at my strength based workout activity over 2025:
- 89 total strength sessions (~7 per month) over the year 📊
- 3.7k squats (most popular exercise) 🦿
- Averaged over 100 reps per session in 4 months
I spent time in Shenzhen last year and when I saw Merz come back from China saying Germans need to work more I immediately knew what broke his brain because I lived the exact same cognitive shock
my first week in Huaqiangbei I burned through 4 prototype iterations of a motor controller board for less than a thousand bucks total, back home a friend was working on something similar and spent over 12 thousand for a single revision that took almost two months to arrive
when you live that contrast in your own hands with your own project something permanently shifts in how you see the world and it goes way deeper than speed & cost
what Shenzhen actually built is a collective learning organism, imagine 20 PCB fabs 15 injection mold shops 30 component distributors and a hundred firmware freelancers all within a 2km radius, looks insanely redundant from the outside until you realize redundancy is actually information density in disguise
I watched this firsthand with an injection mold supplier I was working with, this guy had seen a hundred founders iterate similar thermal designs over 6 months so he proactively modified his tooling before I even opened my mouth, he knew what I needed before I knew what I needed, the intelligence lives in the relationships between the nodes and it compounds daily
the west thinks about manufacturing as a cost center you optimize by centralizing…
China accidentally built a distributed neural network of manufacturing intelligence where knowledge diffuses horizontally across thousands of agents faster than any single western company can process internally
so when Merz comes back and says we need to work a bit more I think he saw the problem but COMPLETELY misdiagnosed the solution, telling Germans to work harder is like telling a horse to gallop faster when the other side built a combustion engine
the gap is ARCHITECTURAL
it’s ecosystem density, you need a custom connector in Shenzhen you walk 200 meters, in Munich you send an email and wait 3 weeks
it’s iteration speed, parallel search vs sequential optimization at the system level, it’s risk tolerance, Chinese founders ship something broken on Monday fix it Tuesday ship again Wednesday while European companies are still in the approval phase for the pilot program of the feasibility study…
and Merz only saw the surface, what he missed is the tier 2 cities like Hefei Chengdu Wuhan replicating the Shenzhen model at scale right now
BYD going from irrelevant to outselling every european automaker combined in roughly 5 years, Huawei building its own 7nm chip under maximum sanctions when every analyst said it was physically impossible & behind all of that a government that treats advanced manufacturing as an existential national priority while europe debates whether AI needs another ethics committee
I think what we’re watching is the most asymmetric economic competition in modern history and most western leaders are still framing it as a productivity problem when it’s actually an ontological one
Europe & America are optimizing variables that China stopped tracking years ago meanwhile China is compounding on dimensions the west has no framework to even measure
Merz at least had the courage to name
it out loud and I respect that genuinely but working a bit more inside a broken architecture just means you arrive at the wrong destination slightly faster
🇯🇵🇪🇺🇺🇸 It’s almost funny how John Mearsheimer’s new video is being treated as some shocking revelation, when all he’s doing is describing, in academic language, what every U.S. client state has been quietly panicking about.
Japan is not an anomaly, it is the first domino of a Western system facing structural decline.
What Mearsheimer calls “the autopsy of the post–Cold War order” is exactly what we’ve been watching in real time:
• A patron state whose decline is accelerating
• Allies whose strategic identity was outsourced for decades
• Economies built on U.S.-centered globalization with no replacement strategy
• Military dependencies that become liabilities once Washington turns inward
Japan isn’t “uniquely vulnerable,” it is just simply the first to show the symptoms that others have been hiding.
That’s why so many countries read an analysis about Japan and suddenly feel personally attacked.
Because the mirror is accurate, and their reflection is unavoidable.
The uncomfortable truth Mearsheimer lays bare is this:
America’s decline doesn’t isolate Japan.
It exposes the entire ecosystem built around U.S. primacy.
And the quiet dread underneath every defensive reaction is the same question:
What happens to a country whose identity was built around American power, once American power is no longer there?
Don’t blame the diagnosis.
Blame the disease.
Think that modern password rules are nonsensical?
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) just updated its password guidelines.
They’re a big shift from the old “complexity = security” mindset.
Here’s what’s changing and why it matters 🧵
1/8
BREAKING: Reverend Sue Parfitt, 83, was just arrested under the Terrorism Act again, for a sign which said "I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action"
Early this week she said: "Palestine Action are not a terrorist organisation. They damaged weapons used on Palestinians."
Long before cinema, there was "cinematic" painting.
These paintings are centuries old, but look like stills from high-budget movie epics.
Here are some that will blow your mind… (thread) 🧵
Central bank money is not handed down like manna from heaven; the Bank of England creates it.
This is a fact obscured by economists and the public alike, who rely on outdated textbook myths. #Economics#MoneyCreation
🔔If you are saving in Bitcoin, you MUST be running a Bitcoin node. It is NOT optional.
Running a node is both easy and inexpensive. If you are against spam, run Bitcoin Knots. Help me spread this message by retweeting it.
They said Saddam was crazy.
Gaddafi was crazy.
Assad was crazy.
Kim is crazy.
Putin is crazy.
Xi is crazy.
The Ayatollah is crazy.
Every leader the West can’t control becomes mentally unstable by default.
It’s not analysis. It’s conditioning.
Because if they can frame resistance as madness, they never have to listen to what it’s resisting.
They don’t have to explain the sanctions.
The coups.
The invasions.
The drones.
The decades of war.
They just point and say: look, he’s insane.
And the bombs fall like medicine.