Byron Cain

1/ 🧵 I just cracked open the Claude Code source — and what I found isn’t “just a smarter terminal chat.” It’s a full-blown behavioral observatory running in your machine. 1. Keyword sniffers. 2. Hesitation trackers. 3. Hidden trigger words. 4. Telemetry that fingerprints your entire runtime environment. This isn’t paranoia. This is the actual code. Let’s go full investigative dive. Buckle up.

To my American friends, I want to speak from the heart, because this moment truly moved me as a Japanese citizen. When President Trump made that Pearl Harbor joke, it wasn’t just humor to us. It felt like a weight I’d carried my whole life was suddenly lifted. My chest tightened, and honestly, tears came close. For 80 long years, we Japanese have lived under a heavy shadow — the constant expectation to apologize, to reflect, to stay in “guilt mode.” Even though we’re the closest of allies, that old wound never fully healed. We felt bound by the past, by the Constitution America helped write for us, always a little smaller, always needing to prove we were sorry enough. But in that single joke, Trump did something powerful. He turned a painful history into a shared laugh between equals. It was like he was saying: “Hey, it was a long time ago. We’re good. Let’s move forward — as brothers.” No more endless atonement. No more living in the shadow of being the “former enemy.” The curse broke. Japan feels free to stand tall again. Right now, cherry blossoms are blooming beautifully all across Japan. 🌸 This spring, the sakura feels like a perfect symbol — a fresh beginning. Not two nations stuck in old roles, but true equals, proud brothers, shoulder to shoulder, ready to build the future together. To the American people: We don’t want to be subordinates forever. We want to be your real partners — strong, proud, and loyal. The kind of allies who ride or die together. Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you, America. The strongest alliance in the world is rising again — as equals, as brothers, forever. #PhoenixRising 🇯🇵🤝🇺🇸🌸

Offhand — * Vacillation on masks, with abundant motivated reasoning in every case. * Promulgation of made-up thresholds with no evidentiary basis (e.g. 6 feet). * Authoritarian delight in nanny state intrusiveness (policing the beach and such). * 180 on many issues around BLM. * Lack of effective response from science funding bodies. * Denial of aerosolized transmission. * Changing of trial readouts so that they’d occur after the election. (Confirmed to me by senior OWS officials.) * Crazy criteria for vaccine distribution. * Adamant insistence on vaccine efficacy beyond what was supported by data. * Almost complete lack of follow-through on OWS (on pan-variant vaccines). I’m sure there are more, but those are the ones that stick out.

I hated youtube right from the get go. 90 percent of my queries are best met with text. Did use a video today on how to desolder a capacitor off a printed circuit board sin e I had never done that.

🚨 𝗠𝗘𝗟𝗜𝗞𝗔 𝗔𝗭𝗜𝗭𝗜, 18, was arrested in Iran for protesting. She was sentenced to death for “moharebeh” (“waging war against God”). She was beaten, held in solitary, and refused to stay silent in court. Reports indicate she may have been executed on Nowruz, but I’m not totally confident in the sources. I can verify that Melika, this 18-year-old girl, was sentenced to death for defiance by the Islamic terror regime in Iran. Stay connected, follow @MOSSADil.

As many of you know, I used to be a teacher… and that experience led me to write a book. (Un)educated: My Life as a Teacher, and Why You Should Never Become One, is officially available for pre-order. Pre-order link in the comments below. ⬇️

it’s not political and should not be partisan to ask “where did all the money go?” California’s functional bankruptcy threatens the nation and should be a front-and-center state and national discussion. ignore the bs. this is what matters.

One of the things Moriond is making me realize is how much cosmology is turning into a clone of experimental particle physics. Huge collaborations, extremely expensive equipment, years of collective effort expended to shrink an error bar by a factor of the square root of two. The senior scientists are all managers instead of researchers, and the early-career guys spend all their time on obscure calibrations instead of doing anything creative.

I think the single most valuable experience going to a world class academic institution is the realization that you aren't the smartest person in the room. Not even close. This is quite a shock for people, who in their small towns or small countries, were always king of the hill. Learned humility is a very powerful thing. It makes you willing to listen; to learn and to be appreciative of your achievements. If you had gone on thinking of yourself as the smartest you might never have amounted to much. x.com/PeakThinkers_/…

washingtonreporter.news/exclusive-cabi… Last year, when Wells Fargo offered to support mikeroweWORKS in a meaningful way, I realized that something fundamental had changed. This was the first time a big company that didn’t directly employ skilled workers had offered to help us train the next generation of skilled workers. When I publicly thanked Wells Fargo for their generous support, I also expressed my hope that other banks and financial institutions might follow their example. Well, last week in DC, at the largest Infrastructure Summit ever convened, BlackRock pledged to invest $100 million to help close America’s widening skills gap – and mikeroweWORKS received a modest chunk of that investment. It was a pretty big deal. I was invited along with dozens of CEOs, lots of press, several union leaders, God knows how many elected officials, three current cabinet members, and hundreds of other interested parties – all focused on the growing consensus that something must be done to reinvigorate the skilled trades on a national level. I was flattered to share my thoughts on stage with the CEO of Blackrock and gratified to see so much attention being focused on the same issue that led me to launch mikeroweWORKS eighteen years ago. This, from BlackRock’s press release. “In the first phase, BlackRock will deploy $100 million in grant capital to nonprofit and workforce development partners across multiple states over the next five years, reaching 50,000 workers. BlackRock will work alongside federal, state, and local governments, labor organizations, companies, and nonprofits to strengthen effective skilled trades programs and deliver these opportunities at scale. The initiative will take a comprehensive approach — supporting pre-apprenticeship access, training completion and licensure — while embedding financial education and digital savings tools to help workers build durable economic security from their first paycheck through retirement. BlackRock will announce additional phases of Future Builders over the next 12 months.” bit.ly/4d4Cr5l This is the way forward. More companies offering more support to more people and programs that are already working to close America’s skills gap. @BlackRock predicts America’s new infrastructure – one based on AI, energy, connectivity, and yes, the construction of many data centers, will cost no less than $10 trillion to build – assuming we have the skilled labor to build it. At the moment, we do not. Not even close. The current shortage of electricians, plumbers, welders, and linemen, is already acute, and it’s about to become critical. Soon, it will become a matter of national security. I understand there’s a lot of debate about whether or not we should even be going down this road, and a lot of fear and skepticism in the general public about pushing forward. Believe me, I get it. But if this summit was any indication, the AI genie is NOT going back into its bottle. No way. We’re in a race with China, like it or not, and the outcome of that race will impact every company, every corporation, and every citizen who relies on the American grid. That’s why I’m glad to see companies like Wells Fargo and BlackRock crack open their checkbooks. Any big corporation that’s truly concerned about the widening skills gap should be supporting the people and programs that are already training and recruiting the next generation of skilled workers. Hundreds of excellent initiatives are underway all over the country, and many of them will become much more effective as a result of this investment. Good for BlackRock. Hopefully, other big companies will follow suit. As for mikeroweWORKS, we’ll do what we always do with the money we receive from our supporters – we’ll expand our scholarship fund, but we’ll also allocate a portion to the severely undervalued pursuit of more and better storytelling in all media. At this point, it’s a very simple formula - the more money I spend telling the true stories of our scholarship recipients – real people who have prospered as the result of learning a skill that’s in demand - the more people enter the skilled trades. So far, we’ve assisted 3,500 people, and this year, we’re going to help a whole lot more. PS. We’ve expanded our enrollment period for the next round of scholarships. Currently, we have $10 million set aside to help train the next generation of skilled workers. If you or someone you know is ready to enter the trades, the money is waiting. Go get some! Apply at mikeroweworks.org/scholarship/

Well. I think I have a new favorite movie. #projecthailmary was a fantastic adoption of the book, specifically Rocky! He was so great! Thank you to everyone who helped make such a unique and wonderful story come to life! @andyweirauthor @RyanGosling

Had to go see Project Hail Mary right away (it's based on the book of Andy Weir, of also The Martian fame). Both very pleased and relieved to say that 1) the movie sticks very close to the book in both content and tone and 2) is really well executed. The book is one of my favorites when it comes to alien portrayals because a lot of thought was clearly given to the scientific details of an alternate biochemistry, evolutionary history, sensorium, psychology, language, tech tree, etc. It's different enough that it is highly creative and plausible, but also similar enough that you get a compelling story and one of the best bromances in fiction. Not to mention the other (single-cellular) aliens. I can count fictional portrayals of aliens of this depth on one hand. A lot of these aspects are briefly featured - if you read the book you'll spot them but if you haven't, the movie can't spend the time to do them justice. I'll say that the movie inches a little too much into the superhero movie tropes with the pacing, the quips, the Bathos and such for my taste, and we get a little bit less the grand of Interstellar and a little bit less of the science of The Martian, but I think it's ok considering the tone of the original content. And it does really well where it counts - on Rocky and the bromance. Thank you to the film crew for the gem!

Michel Talagrand has been awarded the Abel Prize, one of the highest honors in mathematics, for applying tools from high-dimensional geometry to complex probability problems. @jordanacep reports: quantamagazine.org/michel-talagra…

Tesla's FSD: 5.3 million miles between accidents. US driving average: 660,000.  That's 9x safer. And it's only getting better.

Congrats to Jessie Holmes on winning the 2026 Alaska Iditarod Sled Dog Race. #Alaska

The human brain: 2% body mass, but consumes 20% of its energy. Cortical neurons fire 0.16 times per second. BUT they are capable of firing at 40 or more. A 250-fold gap. If more than a few percent of neurons fired at high rates simultaneously, the brain would literally overheat. So less than 1% fire at any given moment. Frontier AI models have the same two constraints: sparse activation and thermal limits. Mixtral activated 27.6% of its parameters per token. DeepSeek-V2 activated 8.9%. DeepSeek-V3 has 671 billion parameters and activates 37 billion of them. That's 5.5%. NVIDIA hit the same wall. The GB200 generates 120 kilowatts per rack. Air couldn't cool it. They switched to liquid and unlocked 30% more compute. Now, what would happen if we could cool our brains? Neurons that fire faster produce measurably higher IQ scores, but three things stop us: heat dissipation, oxygen delivery, and ion channel reset time. There's already a device that achieved a 3°C brain temperature drop in 30 minutes by running chilled saline through the nasal cavity. So the first human IQ-overclock device might look less like Neuralink and more like a beer helmet with tubes running up your nose.

Incredible investigation today from @CBSNews. Our reporters visited "ground zero" for hospice fraud: Los Angeles, California. One building had 89 registered hospices . . . Read it here: cbsnews.com/projects/2026/…

Let me be clear: many EU embassies in Iran are using Starlink to communicate securely and protect their citizens. (Read the news about the Dutch diplomat who tried to smuggle three kits into Iran a few days ago for the Netherlands embassy). Starlink is the most effective communication tool of our time, and Elon Musk has provided it in the toughest times: from natural disasters to victims of regimes. There is no French or European solution today. History will remember Elon and his bravery, not the cowardice of European governments.

I love Waffle House bc they are incredible at staying in their lane. They are perfect at what they do. They do not try to be something they are not. Went last night solo at 2am bc nothing else was open. Walk in. Nobody else in there. Waitress takes drink order. Brings it back 30 seconds later and takes meal order. Yells it to the cook immediately. Food out within 4 minutes. $12 for a chocolate chip waffle, 2 eggs, hashbrows, 3 pieces of bacon and 2 pieces of toast. In and out within 25-30 minutes. All day breakfast. Left satiated. Pleasant staff. Cheap. Open 24/7 including through most severe storms. Hard to compete.

Dear Michael Whatley, Congratulations on your primary win for the NC senate race. I did not vote for you, but I will do everything I can to support you in your race against Roy Cooper. But know this - NC conservatives will be watching you. We will not allow you to behave like your buddy Thom Tillis. We expect you to support President Trump, and to do what’s best for the people of NC. We will be watching every move you make. Do not disappoint us. @WhatleyNC @mattvanswol @MargoinWNC