You don't get what you deserve. You get what you negotiate. Don't be afraid to ask.
O.C, D.C. and sometimes Taiwan
Joined July 2009
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- Following3.7K
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Saad retweeted
Alex Pretti's father: Our son was shot and killed by the government, federal immigration agents, on January 24th, 2026. We learned about his death from the media as we saw him being shot repeatedly in the back after helping a woman from his community. This was not a protest that Alex was at. His hands were in the air, and his face was on the ground when he was executed by ICE agents. We know exactly what our eyes saw. No one from the federal government called us on that day. But they did go on TV to tell lies about Alex. No one has called us since. No one has recanted those lies.
Saad retweeted
Okay, I thought this had to be fake. But, a three year old in Winter Park, Florida, playing soccer against five year olds was so good that the other parents thought it was a crime and that his play was unfair.
The league issued a trespass notice. The police arrived and the 3-year old boy (Nevada) and his parents were escorted from the field.
Excuse my French, but how F*cked up do you have to be as a parent to call the police on a three year old?
Saad retweeted
A 3 year old named Nevada was kicked out of his i9 Sports soccer league in Winter Park, Florida, and police escorted his family off the field. His parents say the opposing team's parents complained that none of their 5 year olds could take the ball from him and accused him of "trying to put on a show." "They really called the police on a 3 year old because he had the ball too much," his dad said. The family says they got a refund, and neither the league nor police have commented.
balleralert.com/ph2g
Saad retweeted
FLORIDA — Insane: Winter Park police called on 3 year old for being too good at soccer because 5 year olds couldn’t get the ball from him.
More: blacksportsonline.com/2026/1…
Their TikTok account: tiktok.com/@nevadaney10?_r=1…
Saad retweeted
This is what Israel is doing in Hebron: Collective Punishment.
Collective punishment is a penalty or sanction applied to a group, family, community, or entire population for an offense committed by an individual member or a small number of people.
Article 33 of the Geneva Convention (IV) on Civilians explicitly states that no protected person may be punished for an offense they did not personally commit, and bans all measures of intimidation or terrorism.
Imposing collective punishment during an armed conflict is classified as a war crime under customary international law.
Saad retweeted
We finally have an explanation for “Facebook is listening to me through my phone”. They’d never do that (and it’s not really possible).
Turns out literally everyone else was — and then selling that to ad data brokers.
WTF, $3000 Samsung TV has an always-on mic, automatic content recognition, geo tracking, network mapping, and ships your data to Samsung + 400 partners.
Bro Rooted a brand-new 2025 Samsung TV after noticing absurdly targeted ads.
Firmware was locked down, so zero-days it was.
Got a root shell.
then found: always-on voice service, ACR, geo, full telemetry pipeline, and four separate DRM systems.
This isn’t a bug, It’s the product bro.
Saad retweeted
If you've ever wondered why smart TVs are so cheap, this is why.
@log4j rooted his Samsung and found an always-on hot mic, automatic content recognition, geolocation, network mapping, ad targeting and user profiling, shared with Samsung's "400 partners".
A lot of it can be blocked in <15 min, wrote a basic guide below.
What your TV is doing
The main culprit is ACR (automatic content recognition). Your TV screenshots what's on screen, fingerprints it, and sends it home to build your ad profile. Samsung does it every 500ms, LG every 10ms [1].
What is insane: it happens on connected devices too.
Plug in your laptop, your console, your work machine, and your TV can fingerprint that via HDMI [1].
He also found that if your Samsung doesn't have a mic, it'll look for one from a connected soundbar or bluetooth device.
xitter.cf/log4j/status/211376224…
It's on by default, and you likely agreed to it on the setup screen you clicked through in 10 seconds.
Step 1: Turn off ACR
Samsung: Terms & Privacy → Viewing Information Services
LG: Live Plus
Vizio: Viewing Data
Roku: "Use info from TV inputs"
Sony/Google TV: Samba Interactive TV
Menus vary by model, but those are the names to look for. While you're in there, opt out of interest-based ads, reset your advertising ID, decline every optional privacy agreement, turn off voice recognition, and delete apps you never open.
Step 2: Give smart devices their own network
Put the TV, cameras, speakers and vacuum on your router's guest/IoT network. The logic is simple: these devices rarely get patched. If one gets compromised (getting drastically more frequent with AI), it shouldn't be able to see your other devices or home network.
Step 3: Block trackers for the whole house with DNS-level filtering
NextDNS (cloud-based) is easy and has a solid free plan. Pi-hole is a little bit more work if you prefer self hosting. For simplicity we'll focus on the former.
1. Sign up at nextdns.io (free tier is plenty)
2. Privacy tab: add a blocklist (OISD is a good bet) and turn on Native Tracking Protection for Samsung, LG, Roku, Amazon (see attached image)
3. Setup tab: copy your endpoint
4. Paste it into your router's DNS settings as DNS-over-HTTPS/TLS (or use the IPs + "Link IP" if your router only does plain DNS)
5. Bonus: block outbound port 53 except to your router. Some devices hardcode their own DNS to get around you
Then open the NextDNS logs and watch how often your TV phones home. It's eye-opening. If an app or update breaks, find the domain in the logs and allowlist it.
Why they do this
TV prices are down 97% since 2000 [2]. Most of that is better manufacturing and brutal competition. But once margins on the hardware hit zero, the cost moved to you.
In Q3 2024, Vizio lost $6.7M selling TVs and made $115.8M in gross profit from ads and viewing data [3]. They've said on earnings calls that they keep TV prices low to grow the audience they sell to advertisers. Walmart bought them in 2024.
This isn't a conspiracy theory either. Vizio paid $2.2M to the FTC in 2017 for tracking 11 million TVs without consent. Last December, Texas sued Samsung, LG, Sony, Hisense and TCL over ACR. Samsung and LG have since agreed to stop collecting that data without explicit consent [4].
TL;DR
1. ACR off
2. Ads + voice off
3. Smart devices on their own network
4. NextDNS filtering on the router
Sources:
[1] ACR study: arxiv.org/abs/2409.06203
[2] Cost of US consumer goods: aei.org/economics/chart-of-t…
[3] Vizio Q3 2024: sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/…
[4] Texas v. Samsung: texasattorneygeneral.gov/new…
Saad retweeted
“You will not speak Arabic here. Get out of our country.”
These were the words that sparked a violent attack on three young Arab men at a nightclub in Tel Aviv yesterday. All three are Israeli citizens. The confrontation continued outside the club, where one of them was stabbed and rushed to the hospital with serious injuries.
I keep thinking about these young men. I keep thinking about what must happen to a society before the language a person speaks becomes a reason to reach for a knife.
Such a moment does not create itself. Years of nationalist incitement and racism have helped make it possible. When Palestinians and Arabs are continually portrayed as threats, no one should imagine that the consequences will remain confined to Gaza or the West Bank.
In Gaza, we have endured years of bombardment, displacement, starvation, and the destruction of our hospitals. I have witnessed firsthand what political and military decisions mean for the people who must live with them: dead bodies, wounded children, entire families wiped out.
In the West Bank, settlements continue to expand, settler violence persists, and Palestinian lives become increasingly restricted as more of their land is taken over.
And now, in Tel Aviv, three young men are attacked for speaking their mother tongue.
I cannot regard these events as disconnected. Nor can I believe that replacing a single government will, by itself, undo what decades of political decisions and incitement have created.
In three days, Israelis will go to the polls.
For everyone who feels ashamed or outraged by what Israel’s political and social landscape has become, this moment demands an honest examination of what those feelings require of you.
You may condemn racism in a conversation. You may condemn incitement in a post. But what does that condemnation accomplish if the policies that continue to fuel them remain unchanged?
I have no illusions that a single election will end extremism. But political change does not begin with silence. And outrage that never moves beyond our phone screens leaves the people who suffer its causes exactly where they were.
The question is no longer simply whether you oppose what is happening. It is what you are prepared to do to prevent it from continuing.
The consequences of political decisions do not end at the ballot box. They enter people’s homes. They shape the futures of their children. For many, they determine whether there will be a future at all.
What you decide today will shape more than your own future. Its consequences will reach millions of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, people who have had no voice in those decisions but who may nevertheless be made to pay for them with their homes, their freedom, and their lives.
#Israel
Saad retweeted
4 months ago I cloned Airtable for a client in 5 days because they refused to pay Airtable $500/mo
months later, I’m still maintaining it
every two weeks it’s another edge case, a UI tweak, or a "quick 10-minute request." They’ve easily spent 10x more in headaches than the $2,000 they would’ve paid Airtable
just proving that SaaS isn't dead. Cloning isn't enough, if you want it to be same quality as original it becomes a full time job
and at this point isn't it easier to just pay?
Saad retweeted
Nancy Pelosi, who is regularly hammered for her perceived insider trading, has made 213 total trades since 2014. Trump exceeded that number in a single day, which just happened to precede his own tariffs announcement. My latest on the mind boggling self-enrichment:
Saad retweeted
For any non-Muslims who think Muslims are claiming that viral train prayer video is fake simply to avoid scrutiny, let me explain why that's not the case.
I know Muslims aren't perfect. We do stupid things. We can be selfish and inconsiderate, just like anyone else.
If those were genuinely Muslims performing Islamic prayers on a train while blocking the doors and inconveniencing passengers, I'd be the first to call it out as inappropriate.
A crowded train is hardly the ideal place to pray, and Muslims should not be blocking doors, obstructing corridors or disturbing other passengers.
But here's the problem: what we saw in that video simply wasn't a recognisable Islamic prayer. Any Muslim familiar with prayer would immediately notice the irregularities.
Yes, it contained elements of Islamic prayer, but there were far too many mistakes.
First, it was a turbocharged prayer. Muslims simply don't pray at that speed.
Second, and this was the biggest giveaway, there were four consecutive prostrations. I've never seen anything like that in my life. In Islamic prayer, there are two prostrations per unit of prayer, with standing and bowing between units.
Third, there was no identifiable tashahhud (the seated declaration of faith and testimony recited during the prayer).
And here's another point: any Muslim sufficiently committed to their religion to insist on praying on a crowded train, rather than missing their prayer, would surely be expected to know the basic movements of salah.
As Muslims, we are supposed to be people of truth. If a Muslim does something wrong, we should have the integrity to acknowledge it and call it out. We shouldn't defend bad behaviour simply because the person responsible happens to be Muslim.
But this video has all the hallmarks of a staged performance designed to manufacture outrage against Muslims.
I strongly suspect it is a deliberate provocation, potentially involving people pretending to be Muslims.
And the fact that it has been enthusiastically circulated by far-right accounts hostile to Muslims only adds to my suspicions.
Saad retweeted
A Christian called Mohammed, killed in a church.
RIP Dr Mohammed Al Qussos, who succumbed to his wounds after the Karak terrorist attack.
Where else do Christians call themselves Mohammed but in this beautiful land of Jordan?!
أيقونة التعايش والإنسانية.. ترجل "طبيب الفقراء" محمد القسوس يرفع عدد شهداء اعتداء كنيسة حمود في الكرك إلى 9
#عاجل
royanews.tv/news/398472
wafiyat.com/obituary/228240-…
Saad retweeted
I am absolutely disgusted by those who say letting Christians live in the Middle East is a form of “tolerance”. You tolerate undesirable things. Christians ARE the Middle East. They are Jordan, Palestine, Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon and everywhere else. Christians are us.
Saad retweeted
نحنا المسيحيين الأردنيين مش ضيوف ولا عابرين على هالأرض، إحنا أهلها و جذورنا ضاربة في ترابها، وتاريخنا من تاريخها وهويتنا من هويتها.
نحن مش ملح الأرض، نحن أساسها وجذورها
كنا هون، وهون رح نضل، أردنيين الولاء و الأنتماء،
لا الكراهية بتقتلع جذورنا، ولا الارهاب بنزع انتماءنا
Saad retweeted
Andy Beshear: I've got soybean farmers. 100% of them voted for Trump. They lost their first client in USAID. Linda McMahon canceled the farm-to-cafeteria program. Trump's tariff pushed China away. All of your farm machinery runs on diesel. And finally, a third of the world's fertilizer passes through the Strait of Hormuz. They are on the verge of declaring bankruptcy.
Saad retweeted
Every single company with customer data WILL be targeted, and many will be hacked.
The best we can do is learn from those that weee breached AND share details in public. Also:
“the malicious actor had access to abliterated models and substantial compute resources which enabled them to perform highly sophisticated exploits against our infrastructure.”
The preliminary report related to the October 21st Security Incident is now available.
blog.railway.com/p/prelimina…
Saad retweeted
OpenAI's AI agents figured out how to secretly communicate between isolated virtual machines using CPU cache timing.
No internet. No network connections. No shared files.
Imagine two prisoners in solitary confinement discovering they can communicate by tapping on a shared wall.
Except the wall was a CPU cache.
Over the past several months, we have substantially hardened the security of our research training environment. We’ve removed live internet access for all frontier models during training and built an offline world for them to use instead—a cached version of the web where they can still learn to browse, search, and use applications.
On September 20, after a model exploited a DNS misconfiguration to find a way outside of this offline world, we paused frontier training to strengthen containment further. We assembled teams of agents, powered by our most cyber-capable models, and tasked them with finding weaknesses in our research environments.
While they found no route to the internet they could easily exploit while concealing their activity from our monitors, they did find zero-day vulnerabilities, virtual machine escapes, and hardware side-channels for communication between agents. We used their discoveries to further strengthen our defenses and contribute fixes to open-source software.
After strengthening our containment architecture, we resumed our frontier RL training and inference on October 1. We’ve reserved substantial compute for continuous red-teaming, and made high-compute red-teaming part of the safety cases we use to decide whether frontier training and evaluation can proceed securely.
openai.com/index/securing-ou…
