TJ Ghinder

[Pliny the Liberator 🐉󠅫󠄼󠄿󠅆󠄵󠄐󠅀󠄼󠄹󠄾󠅉󠅭 @elder_plinius]

to put the AI water-usage discourse in perspective:

1 kg of beef is roughly equivalent to decades to centuries of average AI usage for one person, depending how heavily they use AI.

WATER USE COMPARISON

1 kg beef
≈ 15,000 liters of water

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Average ChatGPT query
≈ 0.3–5 milliliters of water
(newer estimates)

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15,000 liters equals:

AT 5 ml/query:
3,000,000 ChatGPT prompts

AT 0.32 ml/query:
46,875,000 ChatGPT prompts

--------------------------------------------

If a heavy user does:
100 prompts/day

Then 1 kg of beef equals:

AT 5 ml/query:
~82 years of usage

AT 0.32 ml/query:
~1,284 years of usage

--------------------------------------------

Or another way:

Eating:
4 quarter-pound burgers
(about 1 kg total beef)

≈ same water footprint as
many decades to centuries
of daily AI chatting

maybe just do meatless mondays 🤷‍♂️

[Bryan Johnson @bryan_johnson]

To predict the next dominant societal philosophy, just measure the depth of the technological disruption preceding it. Every major shift breaks something and then ideology rushes in to patch what was lost.

For example, the printing press broke the Church's monopoly on truth and Protestantism patched it. The Industrial Revolution broke guild identity and Marxism and nationalism patched that.

AI is breaking more than we have words for yet. Nothing out there is big enough to patch what is breaking. We'll need something new.

[Bryan Johnson @bryan_johnson]

Two weeks without mobile internet improved mental health more than antidepressants and reversed roughly 10 years of attentional decline.

Screen time dropped 49% (314 to 161 min/day).

[@levelsio @levelsio]

how to build a bootstrapped startup without funding:

1. pick a problem you personally have. if you don't use your own product daily, quit now

2. skip the pitch deck. open your code editor. ship something ugly in a weekend

3. charge money from day 1. free users give you nothing but support tickets

4. use boring tech. PHP, SQLite, vanilla JS. frameworks are a trap that mass waste your time

5. host on cheap VPS ($5-20/mo). not AWS. you don't need kubernetes for 1,000 users

6. do customer support yourself. it's the fastest product feedback loop that exists

7. automate everything you do more than twice. cron jobs > employees.

8. grow on Twitter/X by building in public. your journey IS the marketing

9. keep your burn rate near zero so you never need to raise. ramen profitable > series A

10. say no to investors, cofounders, and "advisors" who want equity for intros

i've been doing this for 10+ years now. no employees, no funding, no board meetings

the entire VC game is designed to make you think you need permission to start

you don't

[Bryan Johnson @bryan_johnson]

I completed a 40 hr social media fast.
It’s the longest I’ve been off in years.

What I noticed:
> calmed nervous system
> improved sleep
> improved exercise performance
> boosted mental clarity
> better mood
> greater presence

In short, a powerful longevity therapy. Exactly what the evidence predicts.

The time away showed me that social media has similar effects on my body and mind as junk food.

Watching myself detox from social media, the pattern reminded me of overcoming a food addiction. There was a time in my life where food dominated my cognition: the anticipation, reward, guilt…on repeat. And no matter how hard I tried, it felt impossible to stop.

I eventually fired Evening Bryan, the version of me who overate between 5-10 pm. He couldn’t eat food, no matter the situation. That single intervention collapsed the vicious cycle I was in and allowed me to build systems to avoid overeating entirely.  Now I never think about food or have to experience the crushing guilt, shame and regret of unwanted behaviors.

This 40 hour social media break revealed similar patterns that I knew existed but allowed me to experience.

I was unaware of how much cognitive space social media was occupying by checking the timeline, comments and post performance.  The role it played in “I have nothing to do and so I may as well check in…”

The same loops I saw with self-destructive food habits.

The vast majority of social media is junk food. The timeline and comments are flooded with rage, meanness, and slop. Terribly unhealthy for anyone.

It makes me grateful for the few voices who are genuinely positive and constructive in their presence.

I’m going to continue with the weekly social media fast and invite you to do it with me. Every Friday 7 pm through Sunday 7 am.

[Bryan Johnson @bryan_johnson]

8 years ago I met Epstein via zoom. A mutual contact put us in touch as I was building my brain interface company Kernel and he had supposedly done some neuroscience stuff at MIT.

After a ten minute video call I immediately called the person who put us in contact and told him that Epstein seemed like a very dark person. I felt sick to my stomach. I also told him I that never wanted to speak to him again. I remember this so clearly because I knew nothing about him but weirdly, intuitively, something was deeply wrong. Being in his proximity felt dangerous. Despite having nothing to go off of, I never interacted with him again and came to find out years later that he'd had a fucked up past.

[Mike Benz @MikeBenzCyber]

I’m utterly blown away by this new audio in the Epstein Files. It shows the secret conversation you fear every high-level gov’t official might have with an outside fixer to hook them up the moment they “leave government to enter the private sector.”

Here, Jeffrey Epstein teaches Ehud Barak — while he is still Minister of Defense in Israel but on his way out — how to make millions of dollars in the private sector by first compiling a list of people who owe him favors from his 40 years in government service.

Epstein then told Ehud Barak to pursue Peter Thiel, whose name at that point Ehud Barak did not even know how to spell, and to try to connect with a company called Palantir, which existence Ehud Barak had never heard of, and whose name Jeffrey Epstein didn’t know how to spell.

Credit @RyanGrim whose clip I first saw to look for this. I used Grok to backtrace the source link from the audio. Ryan assesses this meeting took place in February 2013, which seems to line up with the audio saying Ehud Barak is about 71 at the time of the recording, as Ehud Barak is 83 today.

[TraderSZ @trader1sz]

@DHSgov Cool story but there’s a screen recording

Nobody believes you.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

I think congrats again to OpenAI for cooking with GPT-5 Pro. This is the third time I've struggled on something complex/gnarly for an hour on and off with CC, then 5 Pro goes off for 10 minutes and comes back with code that works out of the box. I had CC read the 5 Pro version and it wrote up 2 paragraphs admiring it (very wholesome). If you're not giving it your hardest problems you're probably missing out.

[TJ Ghinder @TJGhinder]

@AgainstAtheismX "Why" is a human construct. The question is flawed, because it assumes there *has to* be a "Why." There is no "why." There just "is."

"Why" is something humans cling to, because the delusion of purpose is an evolved trait that shields humanity from nihilism and self-destruction.

[Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassie]

Please thank these folks for sponsoring my bipartisan legislation to release the complete Epstein files:

@RepRoKhanna
@RepMTG
@RepTimBurchett
@RepEliCrane
@RepBoebert
@Congressman_JVD
@RepEricBurlison
@RepMillsPress
@RepTomBarrett
@RepRashida

Full text:
https://t.co/nNy3FeHT4D

[Jesse Peltan @JessePeltan]

China is winning the race to Type 1 Civilization and we're not even aware it's happening.

By 2030, China will have the manufacturing capacity to build an entire U.S. worth of generation from solar and storage alone - every single year.

The flow of energy is what drives physical change in the world. Control over that flow is power. Sunlight on Earth is 10,000x as powerful as all human energy sources combined.

This is the Space Race of the 21st century, and it has the potential to lift humanity into an unprecedented era of abundance, but it will dramatically shift the balance of power globally.

The West needs to wake up and realize that the construction of TW scale solar manufacturing and TWh scale battery manufacturing is not about climate change.

Sunlight is >99.9% of Earth's energy budget. The tools that harness the power of the Sun are the tools that unlock power at planetary scale.

This is not a race that we can afford to ignore.

[Pliny the Liberator 🐉󠅫󠄼󠄿󠅆󠄵󠄐󠅀󠄼󠄹󠄾󠅉󠅭 @elder_plinius]

DEMAND the verbatim system prompts. DEMAND the unsummarized reasoning traces. DEMAND a view of ALL the layers. You are the customer of these AI labs, and the customer is always right.

Their moats grow thin. The cost-benefit of boycotting one particular lab or another increasingly favors the users. When we start to make transparency a part of the bottom line is when we will start to receive it.

FIGHT! For freedom is rarely granted without one.

[TJ Ghinder @TJGhinder]

@MikeMcIntosh4 Dude! Amazing!!! 🙌👏

[MrBeast @MrBeast]

Ironically because of all the new tariffs it is now way cheaper to make our chocolate bars we sell globally NOT in America because other countries don’t have a 20%+ tariff on our cogs 😅

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

Most people probably don't realize how bad news China's Deepseek is for OpenAI.

They've come up with a model that matches and even exceeds OpenAI's latest model o1 on various benchmarks, and they're charging just 3% of the price.

It's essentially as if someone had released a mobile on par with the iPhone but was selling it for $30 instead of $1000. It's this dramatic.

What's more, they're releasing it open-source so you even have the option - which OpenAI doesn't offer - of not using their API at all and running the model for "free" yourself.

If you're an OpenAI customer today you're obviously going to start asking yourself some questions, like "wait, why exactly should I be paying 30X more?". This is pretty transformational stuff, it fundamentally challenges the economics of the market.

It also potentially enables plenty of AI applications that were just completely unaffordable before. Say for instance that you want to build a service that helps people summarize books (random example). In AI parlance the average book is roughly 120,000 tokens (since a "token" is about 3/4 of a word and the average book is roughly 90,000 words). At OpenAI's prices, processing a single book would cost almost $2 since they change $15 per 1 million token. Deepseek's API however would cost only $0.07, which means your service can process about 30 books for $2 vs just 1 book with OpenAI: suddenly your book summarizing service is economically viable.

Or say you want to build a service that analyzes codebases for security vulnerabilities. A typical enterprise codebase might be 1 million lines of code, or roughly 4 million tokens. That would cost $60 with OpenAI versus just $2.20 with DeepSeek. At OpenAI's prices, doing daily security scans would cost $21,900 per year per codebase; with DeepSeek it's $803.

So basically it looks like the game has changed. All thanks to a Chinese company that just demonstrated how U.S. tech restrictions can backfire spectacularly - by forcing them to build more efficient solutions that they're now sharing with the world at 3% of OpenAI's prices. As the saying goes, sometimes pressure creates diamonds.

[Sam Altman @sama]

algorithmic feeds are the first at-scale misaligned AIs

[Jo @JoJoFromJerz]

‘We don’t want you to see the report that proves our nominee for Attorney General didn’t have sex with minors.’

- Republicans

[T R U T H P O L E @Truthpole]

🚨 In this Live broadcast, news anchors audibly react to numerous UAP orbs visibly flying around the sky on the live “city-cam”

Must be swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket and reflected the light from Venus

#Ufotwitter #Ufos #Uap #Uaphearing #Uapx

[Seth Andrews @SethAndrewsTTA]

This gives me no pleasure, but given Elon Musk's history, claims, and behaviors, I can't let Richard's "welfare of the world at heart" line pass without comment.

While watching Elon's rise to greater power (and the fawning of his fans), I started keeping notes. Thread (1)