Alien-In-CA

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

This has quietly been a miracle month in medicine.

In the last 5 weeks we’ve got news on:

- retatrutide, the triple agonist GLP-1 from Lilly, basically melting fat and body-wide inflammation at record levels
- RevMed’s new pancreatic cancer drug showing unprecedented abilities to extend life
- small trial of a one-and-done PCSK9 gene editing therapy for slashing LDL cholesterol
- Mayo’s AI-assisted radiology showing vastly improved cancer detection
- this new therapy for metastatic solid tumors

This stuff is at varying levels of evidence. Retatrutide is ~100% on its way, other stuff needs more clinical trial data. But put it together and we’re maybe on the verge of majorly reducing the mortality of heart disease and cancer, the two leading causes of death in America.

[Alien-In-CA @vazic]

@Im_IrushiK @hamalainenhe Hallucinations is how it “thinks”. Catch up on the architecture of the thing

[Alien-In-CA @vazic]

X really missing own version of "Drive" to store files. Hey @elonmusk , when will the team ship "The X Files"?

[Alien-In-CA @vazic]

How is your tokenmaxxing doing dear {%username}?

[Polymarket @Polymarket]

NEW: Amazon has reportedly scrapped its internal AI leaderboard as costs soared, with a senior executive telling staff: “don’t use AI just for the sake of using AI.”

[Nick Davidov @Nick_Davidov]

There are many good counter arguments in the comments:
- H1Bs transition to green cards so there’s more than 700K people here. Yup, based on how many employment green cards are processed per year the total cumulative number of H1Bs who have transitioned in 20 years is slightly over a million
- but they only attack jobs that require a bachelor degree: yup, but 40% of US jobs require a bachelor’s degree so it’s 66M jobs. 700k is about 1% if that.
- but they bring all of their family with them and they overwhelm the system:
Yup, each H1B brings 0.75 dependents on average. So for 700k there is only 525K dependents. Based on the number of H4 EADs issued, only 100K of them are allowed to work.

H1B fraud is bad. Most people on H1B are not frauding. The scale of the impact on American jobs is greatly exaggerated

https://t.co/hpb4xsYzWx

[Alien-In-CA @vazic]

But, of course, there is a caveat. Everyone still pays sales taxes (depends on state), property taxes, built in taxes like ones in gas prices, etc etc. and the mother of all taxes - the inflation.

[Jeff Bezos @JeffBezos]

Yes, the United States has the most progressive tax system in the world. The top 1% pay 40% of taxes, the bottom 50% pay 3% of taxes. We can make it even more progressive by zeroing out taxes on the bottom half. It’s a small amount of the total tax revenue but very meaningful to people in this group.

[Alien-In-CA @vazic]

@forgebitz Nothing new under the sun.

[Preston Stewart @prestonstew_]

Three years ago today Russia announced the capture of Bakhmut. They have now advanced around 14km from the western edge of the town.

[Alien-In-CA @vazic]

@cesarsal1nas @Google It’s part of AI engineering these days to keep context window under certain size. The key part

[Alien-In-CA @vazic]

@EGrumpo34145 @KobeissiLetter I don’t know what you see. Only what I observe in my industry.
Please share more, what millions are you talking about?

[Alien-In-CA @vazic]

@EGrumpo34145 @KobeissiLetter Offshoring has been a thing for 50+ years for many US industries. Nobody like it. But they do like cheap goods.
Most of H1B hires are not millionaires and never will be. US born tech workers have tons of advantages.
Most of wealth are in the boomers hands.

[Alien-In-CA @vazic]

@EGrumpo34145 @KobeissiLetter Wait, I thought H1B visa holders are a cheap labor. That’s what the administration says. And you are saying they a millionaires?

[Alien-In-CA @vazic]

@EricLDaugh @elephant_23 Nether passport nor fluency in English are guarantees for safe driving or even lack of cheap labor practices.
Imagine, say, French lorry drivers are driving safely in France. Without English or the US passport 😂

[Alien-In-CA @vazic]

@AshleyLLouise @garrytan Care to post proof links?

[Alien-In-CA @vazic]

Typical misconception. Dictators would also want total surveillance.
No, communists want something worse - to make sure no one owns anything. All assets belong to the state and its clergy class

[Eric Daugherty @EricLDaugh]

🚨 The Chinese Communists have just TICKETED the Fox News crew, using their abundance of surveillance cameras placed around Beijing!

BRET BAIER: "There are literally cameras everywhere...they see everything...our driver parked illegally for 2 MINUTES and got a ticket for $40!"

"Because they saw it, on the camera."

This is Communism! It's what the Democrats want.

[Alien-In-CA @vazic]

@ZionToAI @KobeissiLetter Go and learn then

[Alien-In-CA @vazic]

The tried and true “Field Application Engineers” or “integration consultants” is back with a vengeance

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Google is hiring hundreds of "forward deployed engineers" to help customers use Gemini.

That term belongs to Palantir. Google just copied verbatim the structure that took Palantir from $16 billion in 2020 to $325 billion today.

The forward deployed engineer model is simple to describe and almost impossible to copy without committing to it. You don't sell software. You embed engineers inside the customer, write the data integrations, design the evals, ship the prompts, and the software shows up later as the thing those engineers happen to be using. Alex named them "forward deployed" because the engineers go to the customer, not the other way around.

Anthropic runs Applied AI on the same model. OpenAI built a deployment team in 2024. Now Google.

The reason is the part the AI bull case keeps skipping. The model itself is roughly 20% of an enterprise AI deployment. Integration, eval design, hallucination guardrails, security review, change management, and getting employees to actually use the thing is 80%. Selling the model alone is selling a fifth of the problem and watching the customer fail at the other four-fifths.

This carries a margin consequence. Pure software runs at 75 to 85% gross margin. Professional services runs at 30 to 40%. Google just told the market that enterprise AI revenue arrives with a services tail attached, and that tail compresses the multiple every analyst was modeling.

There is a second story underneath. Accenture and Deloitte built combined $90 billion businesses by being the deployment layer on top of cloud and SaaS. Google is internalizing that layer because system integrators were not driving Gemini consumption fast enough. The hyperscalers and AI labs are competing with the consultancies now. Accenture is being squeezed from above.

Thomas Kurian runs Google Cloud. He came from Oracle, where consulting was always the second engine attached to every license sold. He knows exactly what motion he is buying.

Palantir's stock did not go up 20x because the software is better than Snowflake or Databricks. It went up 20x because the FDE model gets you 150% net revenue retention and that compounds.

Alex has been right about deployment for a decade. Google just put it in writing.

[Alien-In-CA @vazic]

@ChurchillPath That’s firearms brandishing. Nothing to be proud of.

[Alien-In-CA @vazic]

Power of OSS!

[Zhijian Liu @zhijianliu_]

DFlash for Gemma 4: Up to 6x Faster. ⚡⚡

Great to see MTP land natively in Gemma 4 today. If you want to push it further, try DFlash — open source, same quality, more speed!!

https://t.co/wKcRoibuOB