Serdar Önal

🎱

[Theo Jaffee @theojaffee]

Fable says today is “plausibly the most significant single day in the history of mathematics”

[Daniel Hannan @DanielJHannan]

I am a committed Turcophile, and I have been making this point to Turkish friends for years. Exonyms are a sign of respect, a sign that you have made an impression on another country. No British person would ask Italians to stop saying Londra, any more than Italians would insist on our saying Milano. Germans are right to call Bratislava Pressburg, Hungarians to call it Pozsony. Rohirrim are not so woke as to call Mundburg “Minas Tirith”.
Insisting on “Türkiye” is insisting on Third World status. It is demanding to be treated like some post-colonial failed state rather than as a great and confident civilisation.

[nic carter @nic_carter]

The “it’s not AGI because machine intelligence is jagged” is dumb cope.

It’s obviously AGI. If you had a friend who had a 130 IQ, could write production code flawlessly, could write academic papers of a high research caliber, pass any exam in any field with flying colors, create a sophisticate LBO model, draw technical diagrams perfectly, compose poetry in any language, and could find solutions to significant unsolved mathematical problems, you would call that person a world historical genius. Certainly, no single human has ever had intelligence that “general” before.

Now you think it’s “not AGI” because it sometimes slips up and makes mistakes - so does any human that you would consider “extraordinarily intelligent.”

The professor might forget a colleagues name that he has known for a decade. He is still considered intelligent. The math genius might be a little autistic and shy, unable to maintain polite conversation. Still intelligent. You might stare at the fridge for 30 seconds unable to find the butter, despite 5 million years of evolution perfecting your visual intelligence.

We give intelligent humans a pass when they have jagged intelligence. So why the double standard?

The qualities people list as “necessary for AGI” are important traits to have, but no longer pertain to intelligence. People will say things like “true AGI requires agency, long term goal setting, embodiment, self-direct action”.

But none of those things are intelligence. Those are “things that humans have that AI lacks”. Raw intelligence, AI has it in spades. That other stuff - important yet, but broader than and different from intelligence.

The unwillingness of people to acknowledge that AGI obviously exists and has existed for a while is due to a kind of anthropic chauvinism - a psychological need to believe that humans are superior in every respect, that we possess soft skills that no machine could replicate.

Yes humans are different from machines, but if we are limiting the discussion solely to general intelligence, AI has it already. That battle is over.

If you want to reframe the discussion to matters of human dignity and personhood, fine, but that’s not an AGI question. That’s something else. Just take the loss on AGI already. It’s over.

[Nick Bergson-Shilcock @nicholasbs]

AI’s impact on programming jobs so far is clear: it's made tutorial-level understanding almost worthless, and deep expertise more valuable than ever.

Not that long ago, you could make real money building WordPress sites or Rails apps even if you only sort of understood what you were doing (no shade here; everyone’s got to start somewhere!). You might unknowingly ship 5 MB thumbnails or an XSS vulnerability, but you could still find work, even if you routinely ran up against the limits of your understanding.

Now, Claude Code can build generic, tutorial-grade sites that kind of work in minutes. This is one of the few things both AI skeptics and AI boosters agree on. And we’re seeing this play out in the job market: expectations are up across the board and surface-level programming skills won't get you offers these days.

At the same time, skeptics and proponents can also agree that a much smaller set of jobs now pays more than ever. At the extreme are the hard-to-believe but very real $20–100M offers for top AI researchers that made the news. But there are orders of magnitude more jobs one or two levels below that which still pay exceptionally well. If I had to bet, I’d say there are more programmers making $250k–$2M in 2026 than ever before.

There’s no evidence that AI is hurting those jobs, and plenty of evidence that AI (along with its hype, revenue growth, and VC funding) is creating more of them.

This isn’t a prediction. I’ve long since given up on those. It’s simply an observation based on what we at the @RecurseCenter have seen so far.

[flavio @flaviocopes]

How Axios was compromised 🤯

[Alper Öcal @alperocal]

Bosna Hersek tarih yazdı valla. Dzeko uzatmada omuzu bıraktı ama fazlasıyla değmiştir. Helal olsun. Alajbegovic, Tahirovic, Bajraktarevic harika oyuncular. İtalya da tersten tarih yazdı. Bunların başında Gattuso, bizde Montella olması inanılmaz bir şey :)

[Megan McArdle @asymmetricinfo]

We are getting a wakeup call. We should wake up.

[Serdar Önal @seronal]

@kimmaicutler @TaupeAvenger The irony is that the commuters who'd suffer most from 30-minute trains are likely the same voters who put this board in power. Elections have consequences.

[Serdar Önal @seronal]

This is essentially the Build–Operate–Transfer model in action. A private entity finances & operates infrastructure, takes on all the risk, then hands it off to the public sector once proven.

Folks may hate that CLEAR charged for it but that's exactly the point!

[Serdar Önal @seronal]

This is why we don't get nice things anymore.

CLEAR took the risk, built the infrastructure, and financed it with people willing to pay — not taxpayers. They proved it works. Now the govt deploys Touchless ID solely because CLEAR funded the experiment.

Great win for society.

[Josh Billinson @jbillinson]

We cannot let this crisis be used to further normalize CLEAR. It is an insane thing that should not be allowed to exist. We should not have a Disneyland FastPass system for airports.

[Serdar Önal @seronal]

Ragebaiting in its most delicious form 😅

[TasteAtlas @TasteAtlas]

Learn more: https://t.co/yCug5rDSIo

Today marks the absolute final day of the holy month of Ramadan and kitchens across the Muslim world are working tirelessly to prepare for the massive Eid celebration tomorrow.

When the sun sets and the fasting officially ends there is one legendary dessert that absolutely must be present on every single table. The ultimate king of sweets known simply as Baklava.

[Heather Knight @hknightsf]

Nobody disputes that Mary Lau was driving 75 miles per hour on San Francisco streets when she struck and killed an entire family. On Friday, a judge is expected to give her probation. After that, she could get her license back.

The case raises the question, what is justice?

[Balaji @balajis]

I'm going to make some obvious points.

(1) Blowing up all the oil infrastructure in the Middle East is an insane idea, and may well result in a global economic crash and humanitarian crisis unrivaled in the lives of those now living. We're talking about the price of everything everywhere rising, from food to gas, at a moment when inflation was already high. All of that will be laid at the feet of the authors of this war.

(2) The antebellum status quo of Feb 27, 2026 was just not that bad, but we're unlikely to return to it. Expect indefinite, long-term, ongoing disruptions to everything out of the Middle East.

(3) Also assume tech financing crashes for the indefinite future. The genius plan to get the Gulf states caught in the crossfire has incinerated much of the funding for LPs, for datacenters, and for IPOs. Anyone in tech who supported this war may soon learn the meaning of "force majeure" as funding gets yanked.

(4) Many capital allocators will instead be allocating much further down Maslow's hierarchy of needs, towards useful basic things like food and energy.

(5) It's fortunate that all those progressives yelled about the "climate crisis." Yes, their reasoning about timelines was wrong, and much of the money was wasted in graft, but the result was right: we all need energy independence from the Middle East, pronto. It's also fortunate that Elon and China autistically took climate seriously. Now they're going to need to ship a billion solar panels, electric vehicles, batteries, nuclear power plants, and the like to get everyone off oil, immediately.

(6) It's not just an oil and gas problem, of course. It's also a fertilizer problem, and a chemical precursor problem. Maybe some new sources will come online at the new prices, but it takes time to dial stuff up, particularly at this scale, so shortages are almost a certainty.

That said, China has actually scaled up coal-to-chemicals[a,c] (C2C), and there's also something more sci-fi called Power-to-X[b] which turns arbitrary power + water + air into hydrocarbons. But all of that will need to get accelerated. I have a background in chemical engineering so may start funding things in this area.

(7) Ultimately, this war is going to result in tremendous blame for anyone associated with it. It's a no-win scenario to blow up this much infrastructure for so many people. Simply not worth it for whatever objective they thought they were going to attain. But unless you're actually in a position to stop the madness, the pragmatic thing to do is: scramble to mitigate the fallout to yourself, your business, and your people.

[a]: https://t.co/ITat4tmAFd
[b]: https://t.co/bWwiSQcgyt
[c]: https://t.co/FQCqMhy5d3

[Serdar Önal @seronal]

In other words, you should not be worried about AI declaring war on humanity or sending machines from the future to kill you..

However, you should be *very* worried about criminals using it to target you in ways you probably can't even imagine yet.

[Patrick McKenzie @patio11]

Anecdotally the Bad Guys are about 6-12 months behind me and I feel like I’m 6-12 months behind the Cool Kids. (Example: I know what a lobster emoji means but am not clearing space on calendar to install.)

You can use this estimate to inform when life will really start to suck.

[Serdar Önal @seronal]

@vanessahlarson Just a coincidence 😀 Jury summons are based off of DMV records. You can get them even if you're not a citizen. (In which case you go online and let them know you are ineligible.)

[East Med Badman 🏝📿 🇬🇷🇵🇸 @DIAS]

@GigaBasedDad Bitch, Greeks built those incredible things. British people were living in swamps at the time

[Jason Walls @walls_jason1]

Yesterday Mark Cuban reposted my work, DM'd me, and told me to keep telling my story.

So here it is.

I'm a Master Electrician. IBEW Local 369. 15 years pulling wire in Kentucky. Zero coding background. I didn't go to Stanford. I went to trade school.

Every week I'd show up to a home where someone just bought a Tesla or a Rivian. And every time, someone had already told them they needed a $3,000-$5,000 panel upgrade to install a charger.

70% of the time? They didn't need it.

The math is in the NEC — Section 220.82. Load calculations. But nobody was doing them for homeowners. Electricians upsell. Dealers don't know. And the homeowner just pays.

I got angry enough to build something about it.

I found @claudeai. No coding experience. I just started talking to it like I'd explain a job to an apprentice. "Here's how load calcs work. Here's the NEC code. Now help me build a tool that does this."

6 months later — @ChargeRight is live. Real software. Stripe payments. PDF reports. NEC 220.82 calculations automated. $12.99 instead of a $500 truck roll.

I'm still pulling wire. I still take service calls. I wake up at 5:05 AM for work.

But something shifted.

Yesterday @vivilinsv published my story as Claude Builder Spotlight #1. Mark Cuban saw it. The Claude community showed up. And for the first time, I felt like this thing I built in my kitchen might actually matter.

I'm not a tech founder. I'm a dad who wants to coach little league and be home for dinner. I just happened to build something that helps people.

If you're in the trades and thinking about using AI — do it. The barrier isn't technical skill. It's believing you're allowed to try.

https://t.co/cDVdY5mcLv

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Anthropic is getting exactly what it wants here.

Before this fight, Anthropic was the AI company normies couldn’t name. Now Dario Amodei is on the front page of every major outlet positioned as the CEO who told the Pentagon no. Claude’s iPhone app passed ChatGPT in the App Store for the first time the day after the blacklist.

Think about what this dispute actually did for them. Every engineer at Google and OpenAI who cares about safety just watched Anthropic’s CEO refuse to cave under threat from the President, the Defense Secretary, and Elon Musk simultaneously. Dozens of OpenAI and DeepMind researchers filed an amicus brief supporting Anthropic today. On their own time. That’s the most expensive recruiting campaign money can’t buy.

The consumer math is even better. Anthropic’s government contracts were worth $200M. Their revenue run rate is multiples of that from commercial and consumer products. They traded a contract they were going to lose anyway for a brand narrative that writes itself: “the AI company that stood up for you.”

Every AI safety concern a consumer has about ChatGPT or Grok now has a one-word answer: Claude. Anthropic just became the default for anyone who wants AI that won’t hand their data to the military or power autonomous weapons. That positioning used to cost billions in brand marketing. They got it for free.

The lawsuit keeps the story in the news cycle for months. Every hearing, every filing, every quote from legal experts saying the government’s case is weak gives Anthropic another news cycle where they’re the protagonist.

Dario picked the one fight where losing the contract wins the market.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

This article explains clearly why the proposed wealth tax would be so damaging to California. It's not an accident. It's *designed* to be damaging.

https://t.co/AwnN41FR6p

[Kim-Mai Cutler @kimmaicutler]

Maybe the real treasure was all the libertarians that were exposed as authoritarians along the way.