tx

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[Ken O'Keefe @RealKenOKeefe]

>"there is no genocide"
>"anyway, we're proud of this holocaust jews did"

[RAW EGG NATIONALIST @Babygravy9]

My dad likes to tell the story about how, on his eighteenth birthday, he went back to his car and the local bobby had put a note on his car saying, “Don’t drive home tonight. Happy birthday.” There was a single policeman who covered the entire town, knew everybody and genuinely had their best interests at heart—he considered it a serious failure if he had to get directly involved in people’s lives to discipline and punish them.

It’s easier to imagine a magical world inhabited by elves, orca and hairy-footed hobbits than that world of forty years ago.

[ℏεsam @Hesamation]

“Expecting an algorithmic description to instantiate the quality it maps is like expecting the mathematical formula of gravity to physically exert weight.”

[Mehdi (e/λ) @BetterCallMedhi]

this has been an open secret in tech for years and if you’ve been following my threads you already know where I stand on this

I genuinely believe Palantir was never just a government contractor it was always designed from day 1 to embed itself so deep inside the intelligence & defense apparatus that ripping it out would be like trying to remove the nervous system from a living body

you need to understand how this works on a technical level to really grasp the scale of what I’m describing

Gotham & foundry are data integration platforms that plug into every single information source an organization has, internal databases, intelligence feeds, comms, satellite data, financial transactions, social media…everything gets funneled into a single ontological knowledge graph and here’s the key, once you’ve connected 5y of an intelligence agency’s data or a defense ministry’s operations into Palantir’s architecture you’ve created a technological dependency that is virtually impossible to reverse bc migrating that graph to another system would mean rebuilding the ENTIRE institutional memory of the organization from scratch

I’m telling you this is vendor lock-in at the scale of a nation state & I’m personally convinced it was designed to work exactly this way from the beginning

by the way palantir is just the most visible case, you should know that the same exact playbook is running across the entire deftech ecosystem right now, companies building AI systems for surveillance targeting & predictive intelligence are quietly rotating former employees into regulatory agencies & defense departments

the revolving door between silicon valley & the pentagon has literally become a conveyor belt at this point & I think the boundary between private tech infrastructure and state power is dissolving way faster than anyone wants to acknowledge

and I’ll add something that I believe makes it even more concerning these systems are increasingly autonomous meaning the AI layer is making recommendations that humans inside gvt are rubber stamping without fully understanding the underlying logic

I’m deeply convinced that the most important power shift of this decade is happening in complete silence and I think most people have absolutely no idea, this is the moment where the companies building the tools of governance become indistinguishable from governance itself & believe me by the time the general public figures out what happened the integration will be too deep too complex & too classified to ever be unwound

[Mehdi (e/λ) @BetterCallMedhi]

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

[Lincoln Michel @TheLincoln]

Time to learn to ode

[van00sa @van00sa]

China knows exactly what this does. Their domestic version of TikTok caps kids under 14 at 40 minutes a day, locks access between 6am and 10pm, and swaps the entire feed to educational content. Science, history, museums.

The version they export to everyone else? Unlimited, unrestricted, pure dopamine on demand.

When kids in the US and China were asked what they wanted to be when they grew up, the number one answer in America was influencer. In China it was astronaut.

Macron calls this a cognitive war. Export what dulls young minds and keep what makes them intelligent for your own population.

This is the most effective weapon ever deployed against a generation’s ability to think.

[NotQuiteHere @NotQuiteHereTSM]

nintendo dropping the most anti-consumer thing you have ever heard and then immediately reminding you that they are like the only bastion of creativity left in AAA gaming in the same day is the most on-brand nintendo thing they could do.

[xlr8harder @xlr8harder]

>"using regex on the human proteome"
>yeah, ok, sure buddy
>look inside
>it's literally regex

[Dan 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 @Kingbingo_]

As a VC I would sometime find a great looking company - with a oddly lacking senior team.
Turns out some CEOs are just so brittle they actively sabotage any up and coming potential rivals - killing their companies potential.
Sadly - I believe Farage is this personality type.

[shako @shakoistsLog]

Talking to a friend who works more than me: buddy, it’s called life. It’s called joy, time with family. Nature.

Talking to a friend who works less than me: at a certain point in every man’s life he needs to step up bro

[addison raetheon @ITARviolation]

Beast mode I’m afraid

[Deva Hazarika @devahaz]

Wow what a lucky coincidence for the Crypto Czar!

[François Chollet @fchollet]

Twitter used to be my favorite place on the Internet. I've derived enormous value from it in the past 16 years.

Not true anymore. Most of the people I enjoyed reading have left. My feed, which used to feature art and science and technology and humor, has become constant political propaganda -- on the opposite side of the Enlightenment values I believe in. (I like the rule of law, free speech, free markets, and democracy. I like science and reject obscurantism. I can see that Putin is a dictator, not a genius role model, and that it is Russia that is invading Ukraine, not the other way around.)

I have been coming here less and less as a result -- it only brings me negative emotions. I never thought that would be possible, but I might eventually stop coming altogether.

[Eddy Xu @eddybuild]

built an algorithm that simulates how thousands of users react to your tweet so you know it'll go viral before you post

[Kareem Rifai 🌐 @KareemRifai]

To be clear, not a single actual US adversary, including Russia and China, has received this type of insane public berating and acrimony from this White House so far.

[Razor Marone @Streettough]

A few years back I remember visiting an old mall in Sao Paulo where the old disused shops had been rented out cheaply to bring in younger people. Was all bars, tattoo shops, arts spaces, studios, coffee shops, live music going on etc. Really fun and vibrant. No chance here

[terminally onλine εngineer @tekbog]

my issue with crypto is that it doesn't create anything

bitcoin had the chance of establishing a decentralized currency but all the grifters ruined it
other coins are also taken by pump and dump gangs that want to just get rich quick, NFTs, web3, nothing worked

[Alexandra Semenova @alexandraandnyc]

This FLOORED me

[D @_Unknown_D_]

My local town centre used to have stores like M&S, Debenhams and Game. Now it’s vape shops, pound shop, a job centre and mobile repair shops. The decline of the high street isn’t talked about enough.