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I'm always amused when people are shocked by people doing exactly what they said they’d do. Everything that has happened over the past week was publicly announced months ago.
Stephen Miran, widely viewed as the architect of Trump's trade policy, published a paper "A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System" in November of 2024, laying out everything that has happened (as well as many things that are yet to come).
Sam retweeted
This was one of my best clip finds honestly
Peter Thiel explains René Girard's theory of Mimetic Desire:
"We're more ape-like than the apes."
"That's how you learn language as a child. You copy your parents. And then that's how human culture gets transmitted. We wouldn't be humans if we weren't these incredibly powerful imitation machines."
"Napoleon said that it was amazing what you could get generals to do if you gave them medals."
"A lot of the builders I would admire the most are ones who had a somewhat idiosyncratic, sustained vision."
"Like @elonmusk going to Mars—it was somewhat out there, but man, it was not a socially conventional idea. But the way in which this was extremely generative was it suggested a whole avenue for growth and for building where if you didn't do it, maybe it would never have happened."
"I would still rank Elon and in some ways Steve Jobs as the two great non-mimetic builders."
"Jobs put together all these pieces, and in some ways they were out there, but he combined them in a unique way to sort of bring forward the internet-enabled phone."
Via @WalterIsaacson
Sam retweeted
so i have been in the sf tech scene for a couple of months now, and i learned the games that ppl play
1. land a $3M lab order in 2 weeks, *26 = ~$80m as the annual revenue
2. schedule all orders to be signed in the same month, and multiply the best month by 12
3. sign $5M LOIs with friend's companies and batchmates. they sign one back (also happens at scale with large labs/compute)
4. buy github stars at 6 cents each
the last company that swapped invoices with a partner reported $220M - and it's bankrupt now
sad that it's a whole gresham's law game right now and if you dont play you just get downvoted
in the least surprising development ever, the billionaires are making the wealth tax a shareholder problem
expect every major company with CA based founders to dump if this passes
Sam retweeted
Didn’t have this on my bingo card.
Pou chèf gang yo ak manm gang yo k ap kenbe kat konpatriyòt nou yo an otaj ann Ayiti:
Mesye nou kidnape yo pa konbatan. Yo se teknisyen nan domèn avyasyon ki fè pati misyon nou ann Ayiti, nan kad yon misyon entènasyonal. Misyon nou an gen sèlman pilòt ak pèsonèl teknik, ki gen kòm travay prensipal fè evakyasyon medikal epi sove lavi moun, pa fè lagè.
Men, nou te kidnape yo yon fason lach pandan yo t ap retounen apre yo te fin achte manje nan yon makèt nan zòn nan.
Se poutèt sa, jodi a nou te lanse yon operasyon militè pou pote yo sekou. Nou gen yon sèl objektif: fè kat konpatriyòt nou yo retounen lakay yo vivan, san okenn mal.
Men, mwen vle pou nou menm, chèf gang yo, konprann yon bagay byen klè: atak jodi a pa anyen devan sa k ap vini si nou pa remèt toule kat otaj yo vivan.
Epi pa pran pawòl nou yo pou menas san fondman. Nou deja fini ak gang yo nan El Salvador, e nou kapab fini ak nou tou.
Nou toujou gen tan pou evite sa.
Remèt nou kat konpatriyòt nou yo vivan, san okenn mal, epi tout bagay ap retounen jan sa te ye anvan kidnaping lan.
Desizyon an nan men nou.
Sam retweeted
There is no way on earth Palo Alto networks will protect me from an AGI hacker. I expect the labs to start. to launching cybersecurity products soon. There’s a lot of synergy there because they get to make the threat and the solution at the same time. Everyone will have to pay protection money.
Sam retweeted
So basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and Archive.org went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.