Erik Pilgrim

@sircalebhammer your have the haircut of a crow 🐦‍⬛ is your funniest line of all time

@Jason How loud is this compared to Nespresso

I loved this espresso machine so much that I invested over $1m in the company... and I'm giving one away to my followers here! (link in reply tweet)!

Australian children take 4 years because they spend so much time in their mothers pouches

@NWischoff You tell them to tell you that you are awesome.

@anishmoonka Looks like a watch you’d buy with kohls cash.

A standard Rolex has about 200 moving parts. The Patek Philippe on Jay-Z's wrist at the Met Gala has 1,580. Patek spent 8 years designing it. Then over 100,000 hours building the first one. About 11 straight years of someone working 24 hours a day, no breaks. It's called the Grandmaster Chime, the most complicated wristwatch Patek has ever made. The inner mechanism alone has 1,366 parts. It fits in a circle smaller than an Oreo cookie. The outer case adds another 214 parts, and the case alone took four years to design. In watchmaking, a "complication" is just any function beyond telling you the time. Most watches in the "grand complication" category have 5 to 7. This one has 20. When it launched, no wristwatch in history had combined that many. It tracks the phase of the moon, accurate to one day's drift over 122 years. It also has five different ways to chime: one that automatically rings the hours and quarters, one that rings only the quarters, one you press a button to hear the current time, one that rings whatever alarm time you set, and one that chimes today's date on demand. The last two had never existed in any watch before. Both were invented by Patek's own president, Thierry Stern, a trained watchmaker himself. The chiming makes this watch nearly impossible to copy. Inside each one are tiny coiled steel wires called gongs. A single watchmaker shapes and tunes each gong by hand, testing every note with their own ears. Just putting one chime mechanism together takes 200 to 300 hours. Then the watch goes into a soundproof chamber where the chime gets recorded and compared against decades of past Patek chimes. Only then is it brought to Thierry Stern. He listens. If he doesn't like the sound, the watch goes back. Sometimes more than once. A rejected watch can take 500 hours of rebuilding before he approves it. This watch holds four power springs in total. One is dedicated to the chimes alone, separate from the spring driving the time. Inside the mechanism is a ball bearing 7.2mm wide. It holds seven steel balls, each 0.3mm across, smaller than grains of fine sand. They handle 1,700 gram-millimetres of twisting force from the chime springs without slipping. The case has 11 holes drilled through it for buttons and pushers, and somehow none of them ruin the chamber that lets the chimes ring out clearly. The case itself flips around to show either of its two different dials. Fewer than five workshops on the planet can build something at this level. Patek Philippe is the one all the others measure themselves against. Jay-Z's version lists at $6.5 million. The unique steel version sold for $31 million at Christie's in 2019. It still holds the record for the most expensive watch ever sold at auction.

@InsiderWire Do something about it or shut the fuck up @AAGDhillon

#BREAKING: U.S. AAG Dhillon warns tech giants and firms excluding Americans from high-paying jobs: “Buckle up, anti-American-hiring buttercups! We see you!”

The progressive left who run our cities, in a nutshell. We don’t need to live like this.

I have a theory that @TomCruise‘s ideal death is on set doing nutty action scene to cement his legend status forever in a way that is non reproducible

@sporadica Assuming he knows what happens after heavy in terms of moving people, it will start at 100 (brave) people and scale from there

trying to genuinely understand this bc this feels...impossible in his lifetime? $7.5T is crazy, but okay, doable. but 1 MILLION people on Mars?? Yea I believe we will get there eventually, but Elon is 54yrs old Either he thinks he's gonna live to 200 or we'll do this in ~30yrs?

@Dee_Floki Congrats, looks like shit.

You can upgrade a dormant space with a simple, sleek, functional modern sliding door.

@ryanflorence Bro saw the mavous beacon

Had "take your kid to work day" and saw my son typing with like only three fingers. I told him no child of mine is going to be keyboard illiterate - $50 to get to 50wpm 90% acc with correct touch typing - $75 for 75wpm - $500 for 100wpm 95% acc two days later:

@shaunmmaguire @SERobinsonJr This is an honorable response to prior corruption.

@SERobinsonJr I respect this

SPACEX: The California Coastal Commission has apologized to Elon and SpaceX. The agency acknowledged that members made improper statements at a 2024 hearing on SpaceX’s launch cadence at Vandenberg Space Force Base, showing political bias against SpaceX and Elon because of his support for Donald Trump. As part of the agreement, the Commission will not require SpaceX to obtain a coastal development permit for its launch program and agreed not to consider perceived political beliefs, speech, or labor practices of SpaceX or its officers in future regulatory actions. SpaceX will share sonic boom monitoring data with the Commission. The case is Space Exploration Technologies Corp v. California Coastal Commission, U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, No. 2: 24-cv-08893. Gretchen Newsom (Alternate Commissioner) was the most vocal critic, stating that Musk was "hopping about the country, spewing and tweeting political falsehoods". She specifically called out his social media posts regarding FEMA and hurricane relief efforts. Caryl Hart (Chair) stated that the commission was "dealing with a company, the head of which has aggressively injected himself into the presidential race". Mike Wilson (Commissioner) said Musk's "direct control of what could be the most expansive communications system in the planet" and noted that Musk had recently been "talking about political retribution".

@nizzyabi 7 minutes. They have to apologize to get another meeting time after that

what’s an appropriate time to leave a meeting someone hasn’t joined?

@iam_smx This is a really dumb take. Their latest round was over 500B. He’ll get 10% of equity in the company if they are found guilty.

Scam Altman should’ve taken Elon Musk’s $97.4 billion offer to buy OpenAI, because things will not work out well for OpenAI from here

@parthi_logan @googlecloud @trufflesec @ThomasOrTK Yikes. This is nuts. If we got this bill we’d charge back and migrate to azure or something especially given the circumstances. The API key setup seems like a real fuck up on @googlecloud ‘s part

Insane. @googlecloud is not taking responsibility for this and stole $35k from our startup. Thousands of customers affected by the security vulnerability with Firebase keys exposing Gemine API as @trufflesec pointed out. Very disappointed in this as an ex-Googler @ThomasOrTK @sundarpichai

@ryancarson Might be missing some nuance but Gemini flash does this and had for months

This is super interesting

@nickgraynews I did, pretty sure Wyoming llc can purchase assets anywhere and there are no names associated at origin, so no name to disclose

@Pilgrimnow Please read my full post! That is not a good solution for the state of Texas

Should you buy your house in a trust or an LLC? I spent a week researching this and read through everyone's comments on my original post The answer is: Probably not I'll tell you what I found. Note that this applies to Austin, Texas so ymmv for other locations I talked to my real estate attorney, got quotes from a trust attorney, and ran the math and stats with various LLMs The answer I kept landing on is that a trust solves a much smaller problem than people think and you give up real money to get it Here's what I found (1) Your name is only hidden from Zillow If you make a trust or an LLC to buy your house, congratulations. Zillow and Redfin and the easy "owner lookup" sites won't show your name. But it takes about 30 seconds to pierce that. Your County Clerk office likely has a free public website. You type in any name and it pulls up every deed that person ever signed, including ones where they signed "as trustee." So if a deed said "Cliffside Oaks Trust" but the trustee signed as their real name, anyone searching that name finds the house instantly. I tested this on a few well-known people in Austin who I knew bought their houses in trusts. I found their addresses in a couple of clicks. The trust didn't hide them at all. It just hid them from the lazy version of the search. The fix is to use a "nominee trustee," usually an attorney, whose name goes on the deed instead of yours. That works. But it costs a bit more, there's more paperwork to manage, and there's a bigger problem coming in point 2. (2) Permits get filed under your real name This is the one that surprised me most. When you do any work on the house, the contractor pulls a permit with the city. HVAC, electrical, water heater, roof, pool, or any type of addition. The permit application usually requires the property owner's real name and contact info, and that becomes public record. I have a friend in Houston who spent a lot of money on a privacy LLC. Then he had an HVAC tech come out, the tech filed the permit under my friend's actual name, and the whole privacy structure was instantly defeated. That document that the HVAC technician files is now public forever. You can fight this by always requiring contractors to file under the trust name. But you have to remember every single time, with every contractor, for every job, for as long as you own the house. That sounds a little annoying to me. (3) Driver's license data is for sale Your driver's license is linked to your home address. In Texas, the DPS sells that data to data brokers. I haven't personally bought a record, but multiple people told me it's in the $5 range, and Texas is one of the more permissive states about this. So even if your deed is clean, even if your permits are clean, your DL still ties your name to your address. And every data broker has it. The same thing applies to voter registration (public record in Texas), vehicle registration, and your insurance billing address. There are six or seven independent leak vectors and the deed is just one of them. (4) Using a PO box for everything is the only real fix, and I'm not doing it If I really wanted to scrub our address, I'd need to put a commercial mail-forwarding address (not a USPS PO box, because DPS won't accept those for a driver's license) on: - My driver's license - Voter registration - Vehicle registration - Banking and insurance billing - Amazon and every package delivery - Every online account I've ever made And then I'd have to keep it that way. Forever. If I buy something from a random Instagram ad, that company likely sells my customer data, and the address gets back into a broker's database somewhere. So I'd also need a data-broker scrubbing service running constantly. That's a real lifestyle. People do it. Billionsiares do it! But I'm not going to. Which leads me to my final point… (5) I'm just not that important I don't own crypto. I don't have stalkers. I'm semi-public on the Internet but not the kind of public where someone is likely going to drive to my house and say something mean to my face. The people who actually need this level of privacy are crypto whales, maybe judges, and people with active threats. I am, thankfully, none of those So if I were buying a house tomorrow, I'd buy it in my own name. I'd file the homestead exemption and keep a few thousand dollars a year in property taxes I would have otherwise lost. Plus I'd avoid the upfront legal fee for the trust and all the paperwork for a thin charade of ownership. Here are a few critiques I expect, and my answers. Please correct me if I'm wrong! (1) "What about asset protection if you get sued?" A revocable trust gives you zero protection from creditors. Zero. The grantor (you) can pull the assets back, so a court can too. Only an irrevocable trust offers asset protection, and irrevocable means you actually give up control of the asset, which is a much bigger decision than people realize. If asset protection is your goal, a trust isn't the right tool. An umbrella insurance policy is. (2) "What about probate and your family if something happens to you?" This was the strongest argument for a trust and I took it seriously. Texas has independent administration, which makes probate way simpler than in California or New York. And Texas allows a Transfer-on-Death Deed for about $25 that lets the house pass directly to a spouse or heir without probate at all. So the "avoid probate" benefit of a trust is real but small in Texas, and there's a $25 alternative that does most of the same work. (3) "Just use a Wyoming or New Mexico anonymous LLC." This came up a lot on replies to my original post. The pitch is: form an anonymous LLC in a state that doesn't require listing the members, register it as a foreign entity in Texas, and put the house in that. It is real privacy on the deed. The deed shows the LLC name, the LLC's home state doesn't publish who owns it, and a casual search dead-ends. But in Texas there's a big tax cost bc you lose the homestead exemption. The Texas homestead exemption is a property tax break for people who live in their home as their primary residence. You file a one-page form with the county appraisal district, and it knocks a chunk off your taxable value (the school district portion alone is $100,000 off the assessed value as of 2024) and caps how much your appraised value can go up each year at 10%, no matter what the market does. On a 2M house in Austin, that's worth roughly a few thousand dollars a year, and the savings scale up from there. On a 5M house in a fast-appreciating neighborhood, the 10% cap alone can be worth tens of thousands of dollars a year once a few years of appreciation compound. LLCs don't qualify. Texas law requires the property to be owned by a "natural person" (or a qualifying trust with very specific language). The second you put the house in an LLC, the exemption goes away. You also pick up annual franchise tax filings, registered agent fees, and a more complicated refinance and resale process forever. And the LLC still doesn't fix the permit, driver's license, voter, or insurance leaks I described above. So you're paying ongoing money and giving up real tax benefits to fix one of seven leak vectors. Now, if you live in a state without a homestead exemption (or with a small one), the math is very different and the anonymous LLC route might actually make sense. Florida, Texas, and a handful of other states have meaningful homestead protections that punish you for moving the house out of your personal name. California, New York, and most of the country don't, so the tax cost of an LLC is much lower there. Run your own numbers for your own state before copying anyone's playbook, including mine. If you're thinking about doing this for your own house, the question to ask yourself is: am I going to go all the way? PO box on the driver's license, scrubbers running, every contractor briefed, every permit reviewed? If yes, the trust is one piece of a real strategy. But if no, the trust by itself is mostly theater, and you're paying real money for the costume. The end! Good luck and not legal advice etc

@polyslyme @ParikPatelCFA Hold shift to drag images or attachments in. Ignorance is apparently not bliss

@ParikPatelCFA Trying dragging in an image Why can’t this basic shit happen smoothly like the actual terminal

Ladies if your boyfriend uses the Claude Code VSCode extension instead of the terminal tool that’s not your boyfriend that’s your girlfriend

@elonmusk @elonmusk hinting after having seen the data

Interesting thread