Yvonne Mburu

chosen to be part of the solution

[Yvonne Mburu @ymscientist]

The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself - Peter Diamandis #UnleashLab2017

[Alex Prompter @alex_verem]

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it.

Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying.

Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence."

Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter."

Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter.

They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created.

One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility."

Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies.

That's the metered intelligence business model.

And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.

[Mehdi (e/λ) @BetterCallMedhi]

I just finished reading palantir’s manifesto & I need you to understand what you’re actually looking at because this is the MOST important document the tech world has produced this year

most people came away thinking «wow what a thoughtful essay about patriotism and technology »…I came away thinking this is the most elegant justification for corporate capture of the state apparatus ever written & I want to walk you through why

krp opens with «silicon valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible » & frames the entire document as a call to civic duty, but read between the lines and what he’s actually saying is that the engineering elite should be embedded inside the defense and intelligence apparatus of the nation, he’s describing exactly what palantir has already done and dressing it up as patriotism

«the question is not whether AI weapons will be built, it is who will build them and for what purpose »sounds like a warning but it’s actually a sales pitch, he’s telling every gov on earth that the choice is binary either you buy from us or your adversaries will build it without you, this is the oldest arms dealer rhetoric in history wrapped in SV vocabulary

« hard power in this century will be built on software »is the key sentence of the entire manifesto because this is where karp reveals the real thesis, he’s saying whoever controls the software layer of national defense controls the nation itself & if you’ve been following my threads you know that palantir’s gotham and foundry platforms are already plugged into the intelligence feeds the satellite data, financial transactions & communications of dozens of govts worldwide through a single ontological knowledge graph that creates a technological dependency so deep that migrating away would mean rebuilding the entire institutional memory of the organization from scratch

this is vendor lockin at the scale of nation states and I’m personally convinced it was designed this way from the beginning

«we should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act » is karp defending palantir’s expansion into every domain the gov used to handle itself, policing immigration, military targeting intelligence analysis public health, everywhere the state retreats palantir advances and what was once a government function becomes a private service that the government can no longer perform without plantir’s permission

and here’s what I think makes it even more concerning, these systems are increasingly autonomous meaning the AI layer is making targeting recommendations threat assessments & resource allocation decisions that humans inside gov are rubber stamping without fully understanding the underlying logic

a bureaucrat inside the pentagon / DGSI sees a recommendation from the system & approves it because the system has been right 97% of the time and questioning it would require technical expertise that no one in the room has, this is algorithmic governance wearing the mask of human decision making

«the atomic age is ending, a new era of deterrence built on ai is set to begin »is the MOST chilling sentence in the document because karp is explicitly saying that ai based deterrence will replace nuclear deterrence as the organizing principle of global power, and whoever builds that ai deterrence layer owns the 21st century the same way whoever built the bomb owned the 20th & he’s telling you plainly that palantir intends to be that builder

«national service should be a universal duty » & « we should only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk »sounds noble until you realize that he is proposing a system where citizens serve the state & the state is operationally dependent on palantir, the public bears the risk and palantir captures the value, soldiers fight wars planned by algorithms they can’t audit built by a company they can’t vote out

[Mindset Machine  @mindsetmachine]

A brain expert just said what no one wants to hear about screen learning.🤯

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

I rarely have reasons to be proud of France these days, but this is definitely one.

France's parliament just voted - unanimously, 170 votes to 0 - a law that institutionalizes the restitution of cultural artifacts looted during the colonial era (the law covers a massive 157-year period).

It's going absolutely viral in Chinese social media because of this speech 👇 by MP @JPatrierLeitus who noted in Parliament that it included items stolen to China during the joint British-French sack of the Summer Palace in 1860.

Patrier-Leitus cites Victor Hugo's famous 1861 letter to Captain Butler, the British officer who wrote to him seeking his endorsement of the expedition - and got the exact opposite.

Hugo wrote (whole letter here: https://t.co/zyWomXJYBn):

"One day two bandits entered the Summer Palace. One plundered, the other burned. Victory can be a thieving woman, or so it seems. The devastation of the Summer Palace was accomplished by the two victors acting jointly. Mixed up in all this is the name of Elgin, which inevitably calls to mind the Parthenon. What was done to the Parthenon was done to the Summer Palace, more thoroughly and better, so that nothing of it should be left. All the treasures of all our cathedrals put together could not equal this formidable and splendid museum of the Orient. It contained not only masterpieces of art, but masses of jewelry. What a great exploit, what a windfall! One of the two victors filled his pockets; when the other saw this he filled his coffers. And back they came to Europe, arm in arm, laughing away. Such is the story of the two bandits.

We Europeans are the civilized ones, and for us the Chinese are the barbarians. This is what civilization has done to barbarism.

Before history, one of the two bandits will be called France; the other will be called England. But I protest, and I thank you for giving me the opportunity! the crimes of those who lead are not the fault of those who are led; Governments are sometimes bandits, peoples never.

The French empire has pocketed half of this victory, and today with a kind of proprietorial naivety it displays the splendid bric-a-brac of the Summer Palace. I hope that a day will come when France, delivered and cleansed, will return this booty to despoiled China.

Meanwhile, there is a theft and two thieves. I take note.

This, Sir, is how much approval I give to the China expedition."

Hugo's letter is so revered in China that a bronze bust of him stands today at the Summer Palace ruins - I believe the only instance of a Westerner honored in China at the site of his own country's crime.

A powerful testament of how much a single act of intellectual honesty can redeem, if not a nation, then at least a name.

Hugo was also prescient: as Patrier-Leitus notes, that day "when France, delivered and cleansed, will return this booty to despoiled China" has indeed come (even though the "delivered and cleansed" part is, overall, pretty questionable in the current context).

This new law doesn't only concern China and the Summer Palace: it concerns ALL stolen artifacts by France during the period ranging between November 1815 and April 1972 - corresponding to the start of the second French colonial empire to the entry into force of the UNESCO convention on cultural property.

It's a massive scope: 157 years, thousands of objects and dozens of nations with potential claims. It's France reckoning with its colonial past in an unprecedented way and the fact ALL of France's MPs voted in favor of the law, without a single exception, is also pretty remarkable.

Hopefully this will also serve as a signal to other countries, especially the UK - the other "bandit" in Hugo's letter.

There is this Chinese saying from the Zuo Zhuan (左传), one of the foundational Confucian classics:

"To err and be able to correct it - there is no greater virtue." ("过而能改，善莫大焉", "guò ér néng gǎi, shàn mò dà yān").

France, with this law, proved its virtue.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The scariest finding in this paper: the subjects couldn't tell it was happening.

UPenn ran this study on 48 healthy adults. One group slept 8 hours. Another slept 6. Another slept 4. For 14 straight days. They tested cognitive performance every 2 hours from 7:30am to 11:30pm.

The 6-hour group's reaction times, working memory, and sustained attention deteriorated on a near-linear curve. By day 14 they were performing at the same level as someone who hadn't slept at all in 48 hours. The 4-hour group hit that threshold by day 6.

Here's the part that should unsettle everyone who thinks they "do fine" on 6 hours: the subjects' self-reported sleepiness flatlined after the first few days. Their brains kept getting worse. Their perception of how impaired they were stopped updating. The cognitive decline was invisible to the person experiencing it.

The researchers found a hard threshold. Any wakefulness beyond 15.84 hours in a day produces cumulative neurobiological cost. That cost compounds every single day you exceed it and does not reset with a weekend of sleeping in.

About 35% of American adults sleep less than 7 hours a night. 40% of those get 6 hours or less. In 1942 that number was 11%. We built an entire professional culture around a sleep schedule that this paper says is functionally equivalent to pulling consecutive all-nighters.

"I'm fine on 6 hours" is the most common response to sleep research. The first thing chronic sleep debt destroys is your ability to notice chronic sleep debt.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

Seeing New York Times editors say NATO stands for "North American Treaty Organization" on the same day CNN claims Iranians might help the downed pilot who was trying to bomb them because they're happy he's there really illustrates how fucked western journalism is, doesn't it?

I mean, this is some serious baby-brained thinking on display here. That New York Times headline made it through MULTIPLE checkpoints before publication without it ever even occurring to anyone to at least do a quick Google search to find out if the A in NATO really does stand for "American", and, if so, why are there so many European countries in it? That CNN analyst really does have such an infantile, children's cartoon worldview on American wars that she thinks the people being bombed by US fighter jets will want to hug them and kiss them and give them presents when they emergency eject into enemy territory. It's kind of amazing that any of the people involved in either of these incidents are working in news media at all.

If you've ever wondered why so many Americans are so ignorant about what's going on in their world, it's because for generations these have been the kinds of people informing them about world events. These are the news outlets who've been responsible for creating an informed populace. And their reporting is shared with the entire western world.

I constantly criticize the western press for its role in propagandizing the public to manufacture consent for evil wars and normalize an abusive political status quo. You cannot despise these manipulators enough for their role in the world's dysfunction today. But these two incidents highlight the fact that the people running the western press aren't just evil — they're also really, really stupid.

[Mehdi (e/λ) @BetterCallMedhi]

de nouveau, les États-Unis viennent de bombarder l'université Beheshti, l'une des dix meilleures universités d'Iran, après l'université des sciences et technologies c'est la deuxième université ciblée et cette fois ils ont aussi frappé l'Institut Pasteur et la société pharmaceutique Tofiq

arrêtez-vous une seconde et lisez cette liste, une université, un institut de recherche médicale, une entreprise pharmaceutique: ce sont les mêmes institutions qui ont permis à l'Iran de passer de 58ème à 4ème mondial en nanotechnologies, de produire ses propres biosimilaires anticanceréeux exportés dans 50 pays, de développer des nanofibres biomédicales et des kits de diagnostic par nanobiocapteurs

comme je vous l'explique depuis des semaines ici ce sont ces institutions qui constituent le véritable moteur de la souveraineté iranienne

et maintenant ils bombardent l'Institut Pasteur, réfléchissez à ce que ça signifie, l'Institut Pasteur c'est de la recherche médicale, des vaccins, des traitements, de la santé publique, ça n'a strictement rien à voir avec le programme balistiquee ou nucléaire, on est passé d'assassiner des scientifiques individuellement à bombarder les universités et maintenant on bombarde les instituts médicaux, chaque étape franchie élargi la cible et révèle un peu + la vérité sur cette guerre

et je pense que c'est là qu'il faut être lucide sur ce qui se joue réellement, comme je vous l'ai déjà dit à de nombreuses reprises l'Iran est la seule puissance souveraine du Moyen-Orient, la seule qui conçoit fabrique et déploie ses propres systèmes d'armement, la seule qui a construit un écosystème scientifique autonome sous 40 ans d'embargo total, pendant que l'Arabie Saoudite sous-traite sa défense au Pentagone et que le Qatar héberge la plus grande base aérienne américaine de la région

et c'est précisément cette souveraineté qui est la cible, pas le régime, pas les mollahs pas le nucléaire comme le prétend BFM à travers un narratif qui relève encore d’une fois de la manipulation médiatique

c’est la SOUVERAINETÉ de l’Iran qui est précisément visée ici parce qu'un pays souverain au Moyen-Orient c'est un pays que vous ne contrôlez pas, un pays dont vous ne décidez pas la politique étrangère, un pays qui ne vous achète pas vos armes et qui ne signe pas vos accords de normalisation

d'ailleurs je crois que la liste des cibles dit tout sur les véritables intentions car pour moi quand vous bombardez un site militaire vous faites la la guerre à une armée PAR CONTRE quand vous bombardez une université un institut médical & une entreprise pharmaceutique vous faites la guerre à un peuple

je crois que le but ici est d’essayer d’amener l’Iran à l'état de client, à l'état de dépendant, à l'état de tous ses voisins qui ne savent rien produire sans l'aval de Washington et c'est EXACTEMENT ça que cette guerre révèle

la souveraineté scientifique et technologique d'un pays est perçue comme une menace existentielle par ceux qui ont bâti leur hégémonie sur la dépendance des autres et c’est aucun doute LE SIGNAL LE PLUS IMPORTANT QUE VOUS DEVEZ COMPRENDRE DE CETTE GUERRE

un signal que vous endenterez jamais sortir de la bouche des officiers des chaînes d’info payés à dérouler le narratif atlantiste de l’OTAN qui n’est rien d’autre que de bruit sans valeur

ce que vous regardez c'est la destruction méthodique de la capacité d'un pays à penser, à soigner, à innover et à exister en tant que nation souveraine

je l'ai dit et je le répète, vous ne bombardez pas des universités et des instituts médicaux quand vous êtes en train de gagner une guerre, vous les bombardez quand vous avez décidé que la seule façon de gagner c'est d'empêcher un peuple de produire de l'intelligence et c’est exactement ce se passe ici

[Mehdi (e/λ) @BetterCallMedhi]

a nuclear scientist just got killed in an airstrike in Iran and honestly i need to talk about this because western media won't & i think most people don't understand what they're looking at

as i've been explaining for weeks now in multiple threads, Israel through Mossad has been assassinating Iranian scientists for over a decade and i genuinely think the Fakhrizadeh case is one of the most terrifying operations in modern intelligence history

this man was killed in 2020 by a remote controlled ai-powered machine gun smuggled into Iran in pieces over several months, the whole thing weighed a ton, it was mounted on a pickup truck on the side of the road and operated via satellite from a Mossad command center 1 600 km away, 15 bullets fired in under 60 seconds, the AI compensated for the satellite delay the recoil and the speed of the car in real time, that's how far they're willing to go to eliminate Iranian brainpower one by one

but here's what i find fascinating, the assassinations didn't break the ecosystem because it runs too deep, so they escalated, US just bombed Iran's university of science and technology, one of the oldest and most prestigious in the country and if you've been following me you already know why this matters

these are the same institutions that took Iran from 58th to 4th in the world in nanotechnology in 20y that produce the engineers who designed the Arvand rocket engine and the maneuverable reentry vehicles, that trained the physicists behind the MRBM to IRBM leap to 4 000 km on Diego Garcia, i've been writing about this scientific ecosystem for years and everything happening right now is the logical continuation of what i already laid out

and i think that's the part nobody wants to say out loud, this war was never about nukes or regime change, i believe it's about dismantling the only sovereign state in the Middle East and i mean the ONLY ONE

look at every other country in the region, Saudi Arabia outsources its entire defense to the Pentagon & couldn't fight a war in Yemen for 8y without American logistics and still lost, the UAE bought F-35s in exchange for normalizing with Israel, Qatar hosts the largest US air base in the region at Al Udeid, Bahrain hosts the US Fifth fleet, Kuwait, Iraq Jordan are military protectorates in everything but name none of these countries design manufacture or deploy their own weapons systems, none of them have an indigenous defense industry, their sovereignty ends where the next Lockheed Martin contract begins, if Washington calls tomorrow and says stop they stop because they literally cannot function without american hardware

Iran is the ONLY country in that entire region that built everything from scratch under 40y of total embargo because NOBODY would sell them anything and that's exactly why they're the target

they know the only way to stop this machine is to kill the people who build it…and when killing them one by one wasn't enough to crack an ecosystem too deep to break, they started bombing the universities directly and i'll say this as clearly as i can

you don't bomb a university when you're winning a war, you bomb a university when you've realized the real threat was never the arsenal it was the intelligence behind it and you have no idea how to stop it

[Librarianshipwreck @libshipwreck]

This article gets at one of the really troubling aspects of generative AI: the way it’s driving a breakdown in trust. Whether it’s writing or images, it’s becoming harder to trust the things you see and the people around you. It puts everyone on edge and on the defensive.

[Maria Dubovikova @politblogme]

One of the most heartbreaking examples of nonverbal communication to emerge from Iran.
I cannot call this a mere propaganda piece. It is the unbearable truth, laid bare through the profound art of cinematography and animation.

[nature @Nature]

A growing body of legitimate science has been exploring the benefits of red light therapy for several conditions, from ADHD, to retinal degeneration, to dermatology

https://t.co/XZ4oet5VNE

[Max Blumenthal @MaxBlumenthal]

NY Times has essentially confirmed that Israel played a role in stimulating the violent regime change riots that left around 3000 dead in Iran this January 8 and 9, but which were marketed in the West as pro-democracy protests.

It was well understood by the Mossad that those riots would help stimulate military action by Trump.

Israeli intel merely needed to convince the feeble-minded president that a wave of decapitation strikes would unleash a massive upheaval to immediately topple the Islamic Republic. The January riots were presented to Trump as a preview of what was to come.

Western media, including the NY Times and The Guardian, played a central role in legitimizing Israel's deception by falsely characterizing the violent regime change riots as mere protests, massively inflating the death toll and covering up the fact that many were murdered by the Israel-backed rioters themselves

The whole of Western media and the Western human rights industrial complex deliberately misrepresented the real character of those riots. But now that the war they helped to instigate is going badly for the US and Israel, that same media is now free to reveal a few kernels of truth.

[Kganki Chávez Mphahlele 🇿🇦 @Absolute_Kganki]

“If the United States say that Thabo Mbeki must die today because it is in the national interests of their government, they will decisively act on that.” - President Thabo Mbeki 🇿🇦🇮🇷🇵🇸🇺🇸🇮🇱

President Thabo Mbeki gives a brief summary of multilateralism, the South African relationship with Iran and Palestine, the antagonism of the relationship by Israel and the United States. He further touches on the allegations that Iran bribed South Africa to take Israel to the ICJ, Marco Rubio’s explosive statements, etc.

[Natural Philosophy @Naturalphilosy]

“Practice any art… no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.”

- McKellen reciting Vonnegut

[Hanny Hendrix @HansTheTrapper]

unmuting for a quick chuckle is peak corporate psychosis

[Steve Sweeney @SweeneySteve]

Today I$rael tried to kill me in a targeted airstrike in southern Lebanon as I was reporting on was the targeting of bridges and the forced displacement of 1 million people, an ethnic cleansing operation on a larger scale than the Nakba

I have absolutely no doubt that this was deliberate. Despite claims there were no warnings ahead of the strike and no notifications sent to the Lebanese Army who allowed us to film

As we have seen in Gaza they want to silence journalists who document and report their war crimes

It is the western powers who provide political and military support for I$rael, arming it to the teeth to carry out genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing here in Lebanon. They are not simply complicit, but active participants and should be held accountable for their actions.

But if I$rael thinks today’s strike will silence us and keep us out of the field they are very, very mistaken

[Kyle Potter @kpottermn]

NEW: In a letter to employees, United CEO Scott Kirby says the airline is prepping for oil to hit $175/barrel &
“doesn't get back down to $100/barrel until the end of 2027.”

United is shaving 3% of off-peak flights - “think redeyes, Tues/Wed/Sat flying” - this spring & summer.

[Ken Opalo @kopalo]

This is the sort of humiliation that should ignite an aggressive push to end aid dependency once and for all.

For how long must the Continent’s peoples and nations depend on the fickle generosity of strangers?

[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

[Google DeepMind @GoogleDeepMind]

Our breakthrough AI model AlphaGenome is helping scientists understand our DNA, predict the molecular impact of genetic changes, and drive new biological discoveries. 🧬

Find out more in @Nature ↓ https://t.co/rnZCJivxwe