James Gordon

I know it’s a cliché, but people chasing easy money really are ruining everything

“The poor die defending the rules that keep them poor. Because they mistake obedience for belonging.” — George Orwell

In an antitrust settlement this week with farmers, John Deere agreed to provide software and digital tools necessary to repair tractors and other ag equipment to independent repair shops and customers. The suit credits Lina Khan's FTC case. agri-pulse.com/ext/resources/…

@pulkit_mittal_ 1. Install @duckdb 2. Install/load postgres extension 3. Connect, query and then go start or work for a company that isn’t evil

Google Interviewer: You’re given a single CSV file with 100M rows. You need to reliably persist all of it into a PostgreSQL table by tonight or you’re dead. How would you approach the problem.

utterly unsustainably rabidly insane. makes the Reagan years look like the New Deal era.

The ultra rich are hiding away colossal wealth in offshore accounts. Oxfam's 2026 investigation shows untaxed wealth by the richest 0.1% exceeds the entire wealth of the poorest half of humanity (4.1 billion people)--more than the GDP of France downtoearth.org.in/governance/unt…

Jesus was EXTREMELY gentle with sinners. And he was EXTREMELY firm with people who wore religious language without transformation.

The truth is that none of this gets fixed by fines. You can’t fine insurance companies into compliance with human rights. Executives fear lengthy prison sentences not civil judgements. Start jailing them.

If Jesus had focused more on kitchen table issues and less on unpopular outcasts like lepers and prostitutes, he might have won more support from white working-class Judeans.

Someone should tell @msexcel

Practically everything he found was price-gouging from contractors or outsourcing. The mindbending part of DOGE was that it was going to increase public spending by cutting public staff. Building state capacity saves money.

Rita Moreno is one of just three people to win an Emmy for The Muppets, the other two: Bernadette Peters and Peter Sellers. The comedy timing during her performance of "Fever" while Animal attempts to railroad her is incredible. It was also done in one take "Dat my kinda woman!"

Every dollar earned below $184,500 a year has a Social Security tax of 12.4%. Everything after that cap is exempt. If we lift this cap on the wealthiest earners, Social Security would be fully funded till 2070. The cap should not exist.

what people mean by the rise of the Epstein class in a graphic

Bernie’s team relies on shoddy research – e.g. the job replacement predictions, Hinton’s p(doom) number. The concern of accelerating the ongoing mass extinction is real. But talk to people who have been doing serious research there.

🚨BREAKING: Kentucky family rejects a $26 million offer to turn their farmland into a data center, roughly 10x the area’s going rate. “If it’s my way, I’ll stay and hold and feed a nation. 26 million doesn’t mean anything.”

Software horror: litellm PyPI supply chain attack. Simple `pip install litellm` was enough to exfiltrate SSH keys, AWS/GCP/Azure creds, Kubernetes configs, git credentials, env vars (all your API keys), shell history, crypto wallets, SSL private keys, CI/CD secrets, database passwords. LiteLLM itself has 97 million downloads per month which is already terrible, but much worse, the contagion spreads to any project that depends on litellm. For example, if you did `pip install dspy` (which depended on litellm>=1.64.0), you'd also be pwnd. Same for any other large project that depended on litellm. Afaict the poisoned version was up for only less than ~1 hour. The attack had a bug which led to its discovery - Callum McMahon was using an MCP plugin inside Cursor that pulled in litellm as a transitive dependency. When litellm 1.82.8 installed, their machine ran out of RAM and crashed. So if the attacker didn't vibe code this attack it could have been undetected for many days or weeks. Supply chain attacks like this are basically the scariest thing imaginable in modern software. Every time you install any depedency you could be pulling in a poisoned package anywhere deep inside its entire depedency tree. This is especially risky with large projects that might have lots and lots of dependencies. The credentials that do get stolen in each attack can then be used to take over more accounts and compromise more packages. Classical software engineering would have you believe that dependencies are good (we're building pyramids from bricks), but imo this has to be re-evaluated, and it's why I've been so growingly averse to them, preferring to use LLMs to "yoink" functionality when it's simple enough and possible.

Let me explain what just happened 👇 5 minutes before the President announced a halt to attacks on Iran… someone placed a $1.5 BILLION bet on stocks going up and dumped $192 million in oil. 5 minutes… These trades were 4 to 6 times larger than anything else in the entire market. Whoever did this wasn’t guessing. You don’t risk $1.5 billion on a hunch. There was zero public indication this announcement was coming. No leaks. No press. Nothing. The only people who knew were in the room when the decision was made. Someone in that room picked up a phone. And within minutes they made more money than most Americans will earn in a thousand lifetimes. In a single trade. On a war that cost you $4+ a gallon gas and $16 billion in tax dollars. American citizens funded this war. Politicians are profiting from it. This is not the first time. Every major announcement from this administration has had massive suspicious trades right before it dropped. Tariff reversals. Policy shifts. War decisions. This is the most blatant insider trading operation in the history of American politics. It’s not even close. And it’s happening over and over in broad daylight. You would go to federal prison for trading on a tip from your cousin. These people are front running war decisions with billion dollar bets and nobody will ever ask a single question. Nobody will be investigated. Nobody will be charged. By tomorrow this will be buried under the next satisfying headline. Just like last time. And the time before that. The game is rigged. And they’re not even trying to hide it anymore…

I don't understand how so many people (across all fields) think the result of effective AI adoption in their workplace would be "I do less work" and not "my boss assigns me 3x the amount of work that I used to do."