jaffer

Roger Federer for life❤️ |Drunk on life & hooked to freedom. Often found Exploring, Traveling, and Mountaineering | a Snow Leopard paramour |Chicago|

[Yonan @yonann]

Jason Alexander says he feared visiting Palestine as a Jew until 10 Palestinians protected him during an Israeli army raid in Ramallah

“How much of a risk would I be taking as an American Jew walking into Palestinian cities? And Mohammed said, ‘The greatest dishonor that could happen to a religious Muslim is to allow harm to come to an invited guest’”

“And he said, ‘Jason, if they had to, they’ll take a bullet for you.’ And what was so interesting about that trip is, we were having lunch in Ramallah with a bunch of actors and artists at a sort of outdoor restaurant”

“And the Israeli army was conducting a raid on a bank that they thought had terrorist ties a couple blocks away. And they must have, to announce themselves, just shot into the air. And I remember 10 of those guys at the table surrounding me. And I went, ‘Oh my God, he wasn’t kidding. They’re not going to let me get hurt’”

[@jason @Jason]

Be extremely intentional with your friendships — not acquaintances, not business partners, actual friends

Try to pick high-integrity people — the right people

Invest time in those relationships

Cut or downgrade folks who are transactional or who don’t show up for you

Reallocate that time and energy to the right people who do

It's ok to be cutthroat about this, as life is the memories you create with your friends and family.

Invest in making moments.

[Yashar Ali 🐘 @yashar]

Ben Affleck says the day will come when someone can order up an episode of Succession with a plot they have in mind.

He says that could create an extra revenue stream to replace lost DVD revenue.

Affleck says AI isn’t going to end the film and TV business, but certain parts of the industry will be dramatically affected:

“I wouldn’t like to be in the visual effects business. They’re in trouble because what costs a lot of money is now gonna cost a lot less….And maybe it shouldn’t take a thousand people to render something.”

But he says the cost savings will mean more television programming, not less:

“You might be able to get two seasons of House of the Dragon in a year instead of one.”

[Jim Stewartson, Decelerationist 🇨🇦🇺🇦🇺🇸 @jimstewartson]

AOC growing on me. This is spot on. I’ve heard no politician with a better take.

She is not saying it’s going to murder everyone. She is saying what it’s actually doing to society, and what it will lead to—a cognitively disabled population with a monthly bill for knowledge.

[Paul Sufka, MD @psufka]

Medical billing is incredibly complex and has favored insurance companies forever.

Now that AI is helping with billing, insurance companies are mad.

Physicians aren’t doing more work - we just finally have a tool to manage the manufactured complexity of billing.

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔Someone is buying Japanese used books by the ton. Not novels or comics. Philosophy, history, medical law, Edo-period cultural texts. Multiple buyer accounts all ship to one logistics center in Okayama Prefecture that won't answer questions. Export records show over 50 tons, roughly 100,000 volumes, shipped to the US since last year. No buyer has been identified.
Separately, court documents confirmed Anthropic's "Project Panama" bought millions of books in the US, cut the spines off, scanned them, and shredded the originals. An internal memo said the goal was to "destructively scan all the books in the world." Similar operations have been reported across Europe.

My Take
Anthropic's US book operation came out in court filings earlier this year. Project Panama. Millions of books, cut the spines off, scanned, shredded. Their VP chose the codename so nobody outside the company would find out. That story broke and apparently the same operation just moved to Japan. Anonymous buyer accounts, a warehouse in Okayama that won't take questions, and 100,000 volumes of specialized academic texts that nobody buys to resell.

I don't know how you build a trillion-dollar industry on material you had to acquire in secret through middlemen because you knew the public would object. Authors spent years on those books and now they're fed through a scanner and thrown away so a chatbot can sound smarter. If the data was free to use, they wouldn't need codenames and anonymous warehouses. The lawsuits over who owns this material have barely begun and I think the copyright exposure across the whole AI industry is enormous. Anthropic's internal memo said the goal was every book in the world, which describes the foundation of the product.

Hedgie🤗

[@jason @Jason]

Not cool

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association says insurers paid out nearly $1 billion more than usual from AI-assisted hospital documentation in 2024-2025. Hospitals use AI to scan records and find secondary diagnoses that human reviewers missed. More diagnoses means higher reimbursements. But treatment levels haven't gone up.
BCBSA's SVP of data science said AI is "identifying more billable conditions, not sicker patients." Insurers now deploy their own AI to deny those same claims. Patients pay for both through higher premiums.

My Take
This might be the most American healthcare story I've ever read. Hospitals bought AI to find more things to bill for. Insurers bought AI to deny those bills. The technology cost money on each end and the tab went straight to patients through higher premiums. A billion dollars moved and no one got any healthier. The only thing that changed was the size of the invoices.

Two sides of a trillion-dollar industry found a new tool to fight over the same pool of money and the person in the hospital bed pays for all of it. Premiums go up, denials go up, and the AI vendors collect from everyone. If you want to know who AI works for, stop reading the press releases and look at where the money goes. In healthcare it went straight into the billing department.

Hedgie🤗

[jaffer @sydjaffy]

@ZohranKMamdani @grok what is this number about?

[Rahm Emanuel @RahmEmanuel]

Washington needs a good power washing top to bottom. Five things I would do today to end corruption in Washington across all three branches of government:

1. Ban all stock trading.
2. Ban all participation in prediction markets.
3. Mandatory retirement at 75 years old.
4. Mandatory blind trust for individuals with a net worth more than $1 million.
5. Ban all foreign gifts to public officials, including foreign investments in their businesses or other entities.

[Christopher Ward @modelstrangers]

“Do you have any regret in life?”

Over 50 million views across social media for this conversation with an 88 year old man on a bench.

📸 WATCH!

[VAN MUTOKA @vanmutoka1]

« Si tu as un problème, cela signifie qu'il peut être résolu. S'il ne peut pas être résolu, alors ce n'est pas un problème. C'est une réalité qu'il faut accepter. »
— Gustavo Fring

[Power Beast @powerbeastt]

THE OLDER YOU GET, THE MORE YOU NEED TO:

1. Not be fat

[🕯️ @probablyfineeee]

Keep your problems smaller than your life. A flat tire is a flat tire. A bad meeting is a bad meeting. A canceled flight is just an extra two hours. These things become catastrophes when you let them. But they stay manageable when you remember the depth of your real life the people you love, the work you care about, the beautiful years still ahead. Zoom out. Fit your reaction to the size of the problem.

[voxium @v0xium]

I am done with this shit. It is over. The state of engineering right now is horrible. It has been half a month since I started a new role at a big company. Nobody knows anything here. The specs, code, tests, PRDs, tickets, resolution of those tickets, reports, etc., everything is made by Claude Code. Nobody on my team likes this. They are being forced to ship as much as they can. I have heard multiple times from higher management that pushing code is not a bottleneck, so why are we slow? People are working 12 to 13 hours a day just to press enter. Nobody is reading anything. Humans in corporate are doing nothing on their own. Everyone, literally everyone, from an L1 to an L7 engineer here is doing the same thing. Talk to Claude. There is no sense of victory. Nobody is resolving bugs. In reality, nobody is thinking anymore. Everything is done by LLMs. It is so soul-sucking. I would not mind it, to be honest, if we were at least given the time to check out the code and see what is going where. But no, the goal is to just ship. No matter what happens.

[David Sacks @DavidSacks]

Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.

You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.

I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.

But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.

Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.

Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.

So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.

If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.

[Abhi Rajput @Abhirajputfit]

once you as a man hit 12-15% body fat for the first time you realise every single fitness influencer was right about one thing:

being lean makes everything easier.

your joints feel better. your cardio improves without trying. you sleep better. clothes fit you well. your face looks different. people treat you way different.

the difference between 25% body fat and 12% body fat isn't just aesthetics.

it's literally unlocking a different operating system for your body.

[Jacob Coxon @hilbertspaess]

I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.

[Netflix @netflix]

“I train like I’ve never won, and I compete like I’ve never lost.” — Eileen Gu

🎙️: On Purpose with Jay Shetty

[​𝐥𝐲𝐫𝐚 @sunnkssdseraph]

For a RELATIONSHIP to really work, you gotta understand this: You and your partner are TWO different people, with two different pasts, trying to build ONE future. You didn't grow up the same, you won't always think the same, and that's okay. What matters is HOW you handle it. Communicate without turning everything into an argument. Listen even when you're frustrated. Stop keeping score and start choosing growth. Because every disagreement shouldn't create distance. It should build understanding