TimK

Collector of information.
Connector of people.
Defender of free speech .
I find and RT domain experts.

[TimK @timk519]

The Lie said to the Truth, "Let's take a bath together, the well water is very nice.

The Truth, still suspicious, tested the water and found out it really was nice. So they got naked and bathed.

But suddenly, the Lie leapt out of the water and fled, wearing the clothes of the Truth.

The Truth, furious, climbed out of the well to get her clothes back.

But the World, upon seeing the naked Truth, looked away, with anger and contempt.

Poor Truth returned to the well and disappeared forever, hiding her shame.

Since then, the Lie runs around the world, dressed as the Truth, and society is very happy..... because the world has no desire to know the naked Truth.

Painting: Truth Coming Out Of The Well, Jean-Léon Gérome, 1896.

[Matt Van Swol @mattvanswol]

🚨#BREAKING: A 28-year-old confirms he has spent the last 10 YEARS of his life interviewing World War II combat veterans to keep their stories alive...

...in fact, for the last 10 years, he has interviewed World War 2 veterans EVERY SINGLE DAY

He started as a teenager, ditching school to ride his BIKE to the local retirement home, walking up to the front desk and asking to, "meet some World War II heroes."

His name is Rishi Sharma.

He's crossed all 50 states and half the world.

He's slept in his car and lived on gas-station food to afford it.

He asks these men for hours of their memories, and then he hands the entire recording to their families...

...FOR FREE

So that 200 years from now, a great-great-grandchild will know not just their hero's name, but how he laughed, how he cried, and what he sacrificed.

Rishi has no military family, his parents immigrated here from India.

He does it out of pure gratitude.

In his words:

"My parents were given the opportunity to immigrate and raise a family because of veterans like these. It's a debt of love I'll spend my entire life trying to repay..."

As one 100-year-old Marine who stormed Iwo Jima told him, remembering the flag going up:

"The hair on my arms still stands up when I think about how beautiful it was."

THAT is America.

250 years of ordinary people doing extraordinary things...

God bless our veterans. 🇺🇸🇺🇸

[Benny Johnson @bennyjohnson]

I want every foreigner visiting America for the World Cup to realize this is 100% legal.

And every town in the USA is filled with patriots who have armories like this. Every block, actually.

This is why we will never be conquered and are awesome 🇺🇸

[TimK @timk519]

@nikesharora @JoshuaSteinman

[Nikesh Arora @nikesharora]

Just finished north of 200 meetings in Europe with customers and technologists. The conversations were primarily around AI, common questions include:
1. Are there examples of organizations who have been able to demonstrate production level systems and do those developments show a return in lower cost, efficiency or better top line?
2. What do you think about agents? How will we discover, govern and stop agents if need be. Perhaps the biggest security concern ATM.
3. The frontier AI models are expensive, what's the business case at these token prices to embed AI in our customer facing products? Where will token prices be in the future.
4. What are the longer term implications of Mythos like models? Do we need to update cyber infrastructure or all IT infrastructure?
5. What do you think of Chinese opensource models? Are they secure and what is the downside of using them if they can be secured and they are cheaper?

The parts that surprised me were:
1. The pausing of Mythos and Fable 5 caused more consternation and concern in Europe both short term and raised longer term concerns on single model reliance or reliance or models not in ones control. I hadn't seen it from their POV.
2. Sovereignity which was always a topic and still is, is getting more nuanced - they want data residency, data localization and local resources, but there seems to be more willingness to accept global services on clouds. Classified systems continue to be an issue.

Net net - we need to ensure we continue to build trust both on our Frontier models and their consistent availability, we need to get the right economics in place and spend more time in Europe communicating and building presence if we want AI adoption to keep pace with the US.

[Ole Lehmann @itsolelehmann]

Germany is so back.

Munich drone startup Quantum Systems just raised $1.2 billion at an $8 billion valuation.

14 months ago the company was worth $1 billion. it tripled in November, then more than doubled again this week.

the origin story is my favorite part:

founder Florian Seibel is a former Bundeswehr helicopter pilot who spent years selling electric survey drones to farmers and construction companies. boring, profitable, invisible.

then Russia invaded Ukraine. suddenly his tech that mapped cornfields was exactly what a modern battlefield needed.

their flagship drone is called the Vector:

it takes off vertically like a helicopter. at altitude, the rotors physically swivel forward and it becomes a fixed-wing plane.

which means one soldier can launch it from a forest clearing or a muddy ditch in under 2 minutes. no runway, no catapult, no launch crew.

the software is the actual moat though:

> it flies without GPS. Russian jamming kills ordinary drones in seconds. Vector navigates by sight instead, the way a pilot reads the ground

> it hears artillery. acoustic sensors catch enemy guns firing and the AI locates the position

> one operator runs a whole swarm. the mission-AI keeps coordinating even when individual drones get shot down mid-mission

all of it is battle-proven: 19,000+ missions flown in Ukraine last year. they even opened a factory inside Ukraine.

the reason why governments are lining up to purchase:

most defense companies sell closed systems. locked software, locked data, dependency forever.

Quantum Systems keeps everything open. the buyer owns the data and controls the software.

and after 2 decades of depending on American defense tech, that's exactly what European capitals want to hear.

the business underneath is legit too:

~€115M revenue in 2024
~€300M projected for 2025, profitable.

long Quantum Systems.

[Jim Ferguson @JimFergusonUK]

🚨 ANNA PAULINA LUNA JUST TURNED THE COVID PASSPORT ARGUMENT BACK ON DEMOCRATS.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna challenged Democratic criticism of the SAVE Act with a simple question:

"During COVID, they demanded that if you wanted to go to a funeral, be with your loved ones while they were dying, or get married... you had to show your papers."

She argued that requiring proof of citizenship and voter ID to vote is being unfairly compared to Jim Crow laws, despite widespread public support for voter identification requirements.

Her closing message was unequivocal:

"If you are not an American, you do not get to vote in our elections."

Watch the exchange and judge it for yourself.
@RepLuna @realannapaulina

[Wall Street Apes @WallStreetApes]

Muslim man in Regina, Canada says “I’m as much Canadian as you” to reporter

The reporter asks if he believes in separation of church and state

The Muslim man of course says no, and then tells the reporter “You guys are not welcome in our community”

Muslims keep telling you they aren’t here to assimilate, they’re here to take over and install Sharia Law

How many more times can they tell people for everyone understands they’re telling the truth

The town of Regina Canada just permitted the Muslim call to prayer to be blasted over loud speakers. It was paused after backlash but is expected to continue

[Shipwreckedcrew @shipwreckedcrew]

Rule of law says if they entered without permission they can be removed.

No criminal charge or conviction needed.

As Justice Scalia said in dissent:

How is it that someone without a lawful basis to be in the United States can have a due process right to a hearing to determine if they can be released from detention to do the very thing they do not have a lawful right to do?

[Blake Scholl 🛫 @bscholl]

Boom will be offering a prize—$50k cash and $50k in Boom stock—for the first amateur-built RC airplane to exceed Mach 1.

[Tony Jacob | FindaClip.com @tonjkb]

Sen. John Kennedy: Classified American intelligence showed that Iran was threatening to bomb London, Paris & Germany

"Here's what our intelligence showed, and I've seen it. It's classified, but I've seen it. But I can give you a general outline. Our intelligence showed that Iran was building up its missile capacity, both ballistic and cruise, and they were going to compile so many missiles and drones that they were going to turn to America and Israel and say, 'We're restarting our nuclear weapons program, and if you try to stop us, we're going to destroy the rest of the Middle East. And by the way, our missiles can now reach London, Paris, and Germany.'"

"I've seen the intelligence. And President Trump was faced with, 'Well, do I let them continue?' He had already bombed some of their nuclear facilities, but he was faced with the decision: Do I let them get to the point where they have so many missiles and drones, ballistic and cruise, that they could destroy the Middle East, that they could hit London, that they might even be able to hit the United States? Or do I go in to stop them?' And he did."

[Clandestine @WarClandestine]

This is EXTREMELY important.

Trump projects somewhere between 40%-60% of semiconductor/chip manufacturing will be in the US.

If we have the chips, we no longer have strategic need for Taiwan, which leads into my overall thesis that the US are removing their influence on China and Russia’s borders (Ukraine and Taiwan), and in exchange they are removing their influence from our hemisphere in places like Panama, Venezuela, Cuba, etc.

I think we are witnessing a great redrawing of the world map, and the consolidation of spheres of influences. We are witnessing the beginning of a new global system.

I think Trump, Putin, and Xi, already have a deal in place, and it’s already being carried out.

[Priyanka Vergadia @pvergadia]

Reality of Enterprise AI and someone had to say it!

A Massive Shift in AI Spend: Enterprise AI budgets will migrate away from generic, rent-by-the-token chatbot subscriptions. Instead, capital will flow toward private compute, controllable/open models, and secure application layers.

Sovereignty Over "Operational Alpha": Enterprises and governments are realizing that renting intelligence from frontier labs (like OpenAI or Anthropic) creates a sovereignty crisis. Customers do not want to expose their private knowledge, workflows, and data exhaust to a black-box model that could commoditize or compete with them; they demand complete control over their "means of production."

The AI Stack is Splitting: The market is moving away from the idea that the "model is everything." Instead, the architecture is splitting into three distinct layers: strategic compute, commoditizing and increasingly distrusted models, and the critical ontology/application layer, which turns raw cognition into safe, governed, and useful action.

[SightBringer @_The_Prophet__]

⚡️The empire bill is being repriced.

Trump’s accounting is crude. His strategic instinct is correct.

America has carried Europe’s security burden for so long that Europe came to treat U.S. protection as a natural condition of reality.

Cheap defense let Europe fund larger welfare states, delay hard military decisions, regulate from a position of safety, and lecture Washington while depending on Washington’s aircraft carriers, logistics, nuclear umbrella, satellites, intelligence, munitions, command systems, and political will.

That arrangement made sense when America was rich enough, dominant enough, and strategically focused enough to treat Europe as the central theater. That world is gone.

The main threat is China. The fiscal position is worse. Interest expense is real. The industrial base is strained. Ammunition stocks matter. The U.S. border and domestic economy are politically explosive. The American voter no longer wants to subsidize allies who act morally superior while outsourcing the hard parts of sovereignty.

NATO still benefits America. It gives bases, influence, intelligence reach, arms standardization, dollar-system gravity, strategic depth, and control over Europe’s security choices. America did not run NATO out of charity. NATO was also an empire management system.

But the price is too high now.

Europe wants American protection, partial strategic autonomy, low defense burden, generous domestic spending, and the right to defy or scold Washington. That package is dying.

Trump is forcing the hidden contract into the open:

Pay more.

Build more.

Buy more weapons.

Carry more regional burden.

Stop treating American deterrence as a free entitlement.

This is why the NATO fight matters. It is not just budget whining. It is America shifting from liberal-hegemonic caretaker to transactional security guarantor. Allies become customers. Protection becomes conditional. Loyalty becomes priced. Defense spending becomes proof of seriousness.

The deeper implication: the U.S. is no longer willing to absorb infinite alliance costs just to preserve the old moral architecture of the postwar order.

That order is being replaced by hard-bargain empire.

Europe will scream because the free option is ending. The U.S. defense industry will benefit because European rearmament still flows through American systems. Russia will test the seams. China will watch whether America can force allies to pay without breaking the alliance.

The clean read:

Trump is not trying to destroy NATO.

He is trying to end NATO as a discount welfare program for rich European states.

The alliance survives if Europe pays.

The illusion dies either way.

[SightBringer @_The_Prophet__]

⚡️Sacks is right on the core mechanism.

Karp looked chaotic because he was saying a thing the polite AI class does not want said plainly: enterprise AI safety is about who owns the enterprise nervous system.

The frontier labs want to sell intelligence as a universal utility.

Enterprises are realizing that intelligence wired into their private workflows becomes a control problem. The danger is not only “will they train on my data?” That is the obvious layer. The deeper danger is roadmap capture.

A lab does not need to literally steal Figma’s files to become a threat to Figma. It only needs to see where the market is pulling, where customers are paying, which workflows create value, and which verticals can be collapsed into the model interface. Then it moves upward into design, code, legal, security, science, analytics, customer support, finance, whatever has margin.

That is rational behavior. It is also exactly why enterprises should distrust the model layer owning the application layer.

Contracts help. Encryption helps. Zero-retention helps. Private deployment helps. Those protections matter. But they do not erase the strategic issue: if a frontier lab controls the model, policy, pricing, versioning, refusal behavior, and future product roadmap, the customer is still dependent on an outside brain whose incentives may diverge.

Open models are not magic. They are weaker at the frontier. They are opaque too. They do not solve interpretability. Their value is sovereignty leverage: local deployment, version lock, cost control, fine-tuning, auditability, fallback, and bargaining power against closed labs.

Palantir also creates lock-in. That criticism is real. An ontology/application layer can become its own prison if the customer cannot exit. But Karp’s bigger point survives: serious institutions do not want to hand their operational alpha to a black-box model vendor and hope the vendor stays friendly forever.

The real enterprise AI stack will be hybrid.

Frontier models for maximum intelligence.

Open or controllable models for sensitive workflows.

Compute under trusted control.

Data boundaries enforced.

Application layer owned or governable by the enterprise.

Model switching built in.

Workflow memory kept out of vendor captivity.

That is the actual fight.

The AI war is moving from “who has the smartest model?” to “who owns the workflow where intelligence turns into power?”

The model layer wants to climb into the application layer.

Enterprises that understand this will demand sovereignty before they let AI touch the crown jewels.

[Benny Johnson @bennyjohnson]

Stephen Miller just Issued The Greatest On-Air TAKEDOWN of Birthright Citizenship You Will EVER See

“If your ruling requires you to SUICIDE your civilization, your reading of the Constitution is wrong.”

“This is absolutely a deep knife wound in the heart of the American republic.”

“There is no possible reading of the 14th Amendment that applies to foreigners with foreign loyalties, foreign citizenship, foreign obligations, foreign everything.”

🔥🔥🔥

[U.S. Office of Personnel Management @USOPM]

Yesterday was the end of paper retirement processing at OPM, a major milestone in modernizing how we serve the federal workforce. Read the @foxnews exclusive: https://t.co/fXc2RXlb09

[Spike Brehm @spikebrehm]

they did it. the mad lads actually did it.

i never talked about my time at DOGE last year because it was so controversial and contentious (remember that?)

early last year, @jgebbia recruited a handful of his most trusted early Airbnb engineers to embed at the Office of Personnel Management to solve the "retirement paper" problem.

processing a federal retirement took months, and in the extreme retirees could wait up to 6 months for their full pension to arrive. what was the holdup? paper. remember hearing Elon talk about "the mine" in Pennsylvania? we got to visit it. in deep underground caverns blasted out of limestone, there were literally acres of file cabinets, as far as the eye could see, storing files detailing federal employees' employment and paystub history. a simple "case" might be only a quarter or half inch thick, but really complex cases filled up whole filing cabinets. one famously took up a whole pallet.

each case was hand processed by case workers in cubicles deep underground. they checked calculations, made sure forms were filled out properly (many weren't), and handled a long tail of complex issues. we'd watch as they keyed data into a black and white terminal, transmitting to the COBOL mainframe built many decades ago.

since cases were processed by hand, there were multiple rounds of human review, and additional rounds for complex cases. case files were walked around between one worker's outbox and another's inbox. sometimes it would sit in one place for days, waiting to be picked up.

to OPM's credit, they'd done multiple rounds of "digital transformation" spanning decades, so some systems were newer than others. there was a big effort in the mid-90s. but the systems were disparate, and it was a total maze getting them to talk to each other. there was a big effort to build a web app where employees applying for retirement could digitally fill out the necessary forms — just to be mailed to the mine and stuffed into the paper file. and few federal agencies were even using it.

when we arrived, OPM was midway through a fresh attempt at digital transformation, delivered by a software contractor.

the blackpill was seeing the terrible quality of the software and interacting with the contractors. coming from silicon valley, i couldn't believe how low the talent and quality bar was for selling software to the government. it's clear, as the OG USDS people explained to me a decade ago, the primary skill these vendors have is securing government contracts. it's a huge moat. delivery of quality product be damned.

we fired the vendor and took over the project. they'd been working on it for more than a year, and there was another year before they were going to deliver it. at first we tried to bend it to our will, to actually connect all the various data sources and get to a decent UX for case workers in the mine to use, but we soon realized we were going to have to rebuild the whole stack from scratch.

it was around this time I had to go back to new york — i had a new job waiting for me, a four month old, and a wife whose patience was running out. but i got to watch from afar as the team cranked day and night, hitting early milestones. and now they've fully done it.

huge congrats to Joe and the team. @yatshitcray was the hero in the trenches. indefatigable, unrelentingly optimistic, and determined to see this project through. when i recruited him for "ok i can do two, maybe three months", he stuck it out over a year making this project a reality.

while the retirement project was under the DOGE banner, it operated different from what you heard from the breathless, negative media — we came in with the attitude of partnering with career OPM employees. we were team members determined to bring our software talents to bear on the problem they've been trying to fix for years, which they hadn't had the resources to solve before. they were wary at first, not sure about us, but they quickly saw how authentic and determined we were to work together toward the same goal. props to Joe for developing those relationships, setting the example of how to collaborate together.

what's the end result? lifelong federal employees, veterans, postal carriers get their full pension installments almost immediately. days instead of months. peace of mind for these people to devoted their careers to serving our country. massively streamlined operations inside of OPM. and NO MORE PAPER 🫡🇺🇸

[James E. Thorne @DrJStrategy]

Canada: Crying Over Spilt Milk in a Self‑Inflicted Stagnation

Canada’s elite have spent a quarter‑century turning a rich, opportunity‑dense economy into a slow‑growth, over‑levered cul‑de‑sac, and they still insist nothing is structurally wrong. There is no sense crying over spilt milk about past mistakes when the architects of this stagnation are still in charge and still in denial.

Canada did not just drift into secular stagnation; it embraced a kind of virtue socialism and an industrial policy anchored on climate change targets rather than productive capacity, competitiveness, or growth. An economy built on world‑class natural resources, strategic geography, and human capital has been deliberately downgraded into a housing‑addicted, low‑productivity balance sheet recession risk, and the people who did it still show up on panels calling this “resilience.”

For years, Canada’s comparative advantages in energy, resources, and industrial capacity were something to apologize for, regulate to death, or tax into oblivion, while policy and capital chased the illusion that you could mortgage and virtue‑signal your way to prosperity. The result is a country flirting with a liquidity trap, where even lower rates may barely move a real economy suffocated by over‑priced assets, under‑built productive capital, and households too damaged to borrow again.

The real scandal is not that Canada faces secular stagnation; it is that the elite engineered it, denied it, wrapped it in climate rhetoric, and now blame external shocks while the data scream that this is a made‑in‑Canada crisis.

To be clear, Canada’s problems are not the result of President Trump!

If Canada’s elite will not finally admit that decades of attacking its own strengths, worshipping its own bubbles, and treating industrial policy as a morality play have left the country one downturn away from a full balance sheet recession, then they are not guardians of the national interest, they are custodians of decline, and at this point, there really is no sense crying over spilt milk, only over the refusal to fix the mess they made.

[David Knight Legg @KnightLegg]

This is brilliantly written.

“The real scandal is not that Canada faces secular stagnation; it is that the elite engineered it, denied it, wrapped it in climate rhetoric, and now blame external shocks while the data scream that this is a made‑in‑Canada crisis.”

Following James E. Thorne @DrJStrategy colleague of the prolific @MPelletierCIO

Smart guys.

[Megan Basham @megbasham]

The court has not made birth tourism legitimate. It has made itself illegitimate. Thomas and Alito are right. Congress must start acting now to remove all foreign women from the country immediately. And begin attaching pregnancy test to visa requirements.

Force the Supreme Court to confront the will of the people again and again and again.