Alex Chekholko

It’s hard to believe it’s already been 100 days since I received my Neuralink N1 implant. Looking back, the whole journey feels like science fiction that somehow became my everyday reality. The surgery on Day 0 was surprisingly easy. A quick general anaesthetic, a small incision, and the robotic system did the rest — precisely placing the 1,024 ultra-thin threads into my motor cortex. I woke up alert and in good spirits and went home the next afternoon. By Day 3 I was feeling a lot better, and by Day 7 the little scar was already starting to fade. Recovery was genuinely minimal; I felt sharper and more positive than I had been in years after the BCI was turned on. The real fun started in Week 2 when we paired the implant with my brand-new Apple MacBook (my very first Mac). The @neuralink engineers walked me through calibration sessions, and within a couple of minutes I was moving the cursor just by thinking. At first it felt like trying to remember a dream, but by Week 3 it was second nature. Scrolling, clicking, typing — all mind-controlled. The Mac integration was buttery smooth; I went from total Mac newbie to power-user faster than I ever expected. By Day 80 I was ready for the big leagues. That’s when I fired up @Warcraft of Warcraft for the first time with pure thought control. The first raid felt clunky, but once my brain and the BCI synced, it was pure magic. I’m now raiding, and exploring Azeroth hands-free at full speed — no mouse, no keyboard, just intention. It’s honestly brilliant. The freedom is addictive. The social-media side has been just as surprising. Every update I’ve shared has been met with genuine excitement rather than scepticism. Thousands of messages from people with disabilities, gamers, students, and scientists — all asking real questions about the tech and what it could mean for the future. The positivity has been overwhelming and incredibly motivating. 100 days in and I already can’t imagine life without it. The N1 didn’t just give me a new way to use a computer — it gave me a new way to live. Can’t wait to see what the next 100 days bring. Thank you all so much for your support and I will keep you all updated as we continue this journey together.

This feels like cheating. People pay $30-$50 for custom city map posters on Etsy. Someone just open-sourced the exact same thing for free. It's called TerraInk. Its a cartographic poster engine built on OpenStreetMap data. Type a city. Customize everything. Download and print. What you get: → Any city on Earth via OpenStreetMap → Roads, water, parks, building outlines → Full theme and color control → Custom fonts via Google Fonts → PNG export, print-ready The whole thing runs in your browser. No account. No subscription. No checkout. Self-host it with one Docker command if you want it completely yours. 100% Open Source. MIT License. Live app: terraink.app

@yacineMTB For me it was the AlexNet paper and Graves 2013, But deep dream really showed me how much compute was needed. Lambda ran Dreamscope which was probably the most popular deep dream app and had to build a cluster to run it. That was the start of Lambda’s cloud.

1. The Meeting Rejector Situation: Someone sends an agenda-less invite blocking your core working hours. Response: I need to protect my deep work blocks today. Could you send over a brief memo instead? If we still need to sync after, let us schedule 15 minutes tomorrow. Why it works: Defaulting to yes for meetings destroys momentum. Forcing a memo makes the organizer actually think through what they need. 90 percent of the time, the memo solves the problem and the meeting never happens.

@muggeroptical @SaladBarFan See what happened in the LA fire, no one is allowed to rebuild any bigger than what was there before

@SaladBarFan I’m praying for an earthquake to just level the sunset. All the buildings are ancient and would probably collapse

Small single family homes are selling for $4 million in the Inner Sunset and there isn’t a single new unit of housing proposed for the neighborhood. Just so bleak man.

@qualadder @SaladBarFan I should have the right to modify my own house to make it bigger

@SaladBarFan You don't have a right to move to somebody else's town. Why should they let you in just because you want to live there?

@buildhomez @SaladBarFan Not allowed to build bigger than existing

@SaladBarFan Why is there not even teardowns and reconstruction? how is it so broken there's not even that

@jbillinson anyone who wants to do this: use foqos. open-source alternative with the same functionality that you can use with a custom QR code or NFC tag instead of paying $50 for a brick.foqos.app

@VictorTaelin We are so early

Sorry for posting this again, I'm still processing it: It'd cost >>> $743k per year <<< to run Opus-4.6 fast-mode nonstop Literally my company cannot afford a single person using it for daily coding. And that's a shame because the experience is truly magical. I've spent the last 2 days using it on Pi (nearly $500 gone 💀), and it was the first time I kinda got into the flow state while using an agent, because the feedback is just so fast. This is not something I ever experienced before, definitely not with GPT 5.4's own fast mode. I can't wait for this kind of super fast, super high intelligence to be available for a reasonable cost...

@levelsio @_Borriss_ I hope it is true

Tesla self driving approved in Netherlands on April 10th After that every EU country can essentially "copy" the approval and instantly approve it in their country too So by end of 2026 it's likely we'll have Tesla Full Self Driving in most of the EU 🇪🇺

@levelsio CP2077 is more like a movie

This is why I had to stop playing Cyberpunk 2077, it's so tedious, it's not a game

My net worth peaked at $1.2 million. None of it was real. I don't mean that philosophically. I mean it was located on servers that have since been turned off. I own eleven properties in the metaverse. Three in Decentraland. Four in The Sandbox. Two in Voxels. One in Otherside. And a beachfront villa in Horizon Worlds that I bought for $214,000 because Mark Zuckerberg called it "the next frontier." The frontier closed last week. It's a mobile app now. Last year I mass DM'd 340 people the phrase "you don't understand how early we are." I have since stopped doing that. Not because I was wrong. Because most of them blocked me. I got into metaverse real estate in November 2021. Everyone was buying. Someone paid $450,000 to be Snoop Dogg's neighbor. In a video game. With no legs. The avatars didn't have legs. I thought that was bullish. "The legs are coming," I told my Discord. "Legs are a roadmap item." Three hundred people reacted with rocket emojis. I called myself a "digital land baron." I put it in my Twitter bio. I put it in my LinkedIn headline. I said it on a podcast that had eleven listeners. Three of them were bots. The rest were my alts. My virtual property has more square footage than my actual apartment. My actual apartment has furniture. Location, location, location. My most valuable asset was a plot next to a virtual Gucci store. Gucci left in 2023. The store is still there. Nobody's in it. It's like a mall in Ohio but with worse graphics and no food court. I held. Diamond hands. That's what we said. "Diamond hands." It means refusing to sell while your investment loses 94% of its value. We turned financial paralysis into a personality trait. A guy in my Discord paid $2.4 million for a 618-parcel estate in Decentraland. Prime district. High foot traffic. I asked him what "foot traffic" meant when the platform had 38 daily active users. He said I didn't understand the technology. I didn't. I still bought more. We had a DAO. A decentralized autonomous organization. That means we voted on decisions. There were nine of us. Three never showed up. Two voted on everything without reading it. The other four were me and my alts. We voted to "acquire strategic parcels." The vote passed unanimously. I voted four times. My portfolio peaked at $1.2 million. I told everyone. I made a spreadsheet. I projected 40x returns by 2025. I made a pitch deck. The pitch deck had a slide that said "WE ARE BUILDING THE DIGITAL ECONOMY." The slide had a rocket emoji. That was my entire financial model. In 2023 I bought a Bored Ape for $189,000. It's worth $14,000 now. I don't talk about the Ape. I still use it as my profile picture. People ask me about it. I say "I'm long-term bullish." Long-term bullish means I can't sell it without crying in a Panera. My mom asked me what a Bored Ape was. I said "digital art on the blockchain." She asked why it cost more than her car. I said "you don't understand Web3." She said "I understand you live in a studio apartment." She's not in my Discord. Justin Bieber bought one for $1.3 million. It's worth about $90,000 now. I felt better about mine after I heard that. That's community. WAGMI. We're All Gonna Make It. We said that every day. In the group chat. While the floor dropped. While the volume dried up. While 95% of all NFT collections went to zero. We're all gonna make it. None of us made it. But we said it with conviction and a laser-eye profile picture. That counts for something. It doesn't. But we said it did. That's decentralized consensus. Meta spent $84 billion on the metaverse. I need to say that again. $84 billion. More than the GDP of Luxembourg. More than the GDP of Iceland, Luxembourg, and Malta combined. They spent it on a platform where the avatars had no legs, the graphics looked like a 2006 Wii game, and the peak user count was lower than the lunch rush at a Chipotle in Des Moines. They just pulled Horizon Worlds from VR headsets. It lives on as a mobile app. My beachfront villa is now a mobile app. Location, location, location. Zuckerberg renamed the entire company for this. Facebook became Meta. A $900 billion company changed its legal name because the CEO watched Ready Player One and said "I want that." Reality Labs lost $10 billion in 2021. $14 billion in 2022. $16 billion in 2023. $18 billion in 2024. $19 billion in 2025. That's not a strategy. That's a speedrun. They laid off 1,500 Reality Labs employees this year. Shut down three VR studios. Killed Supernatural. Put the entire VR social vision in a casket and said "we're pivoting to AI and wearables." The pivot took four years and $84 billion. I pivoted too. I'm an AI real estate investor now. I bought a virtual plot in an AI-generated world that doesn't exist yet. The founder said it was "the intersection of spatial computing and large language models." I don't know what that means. I gave him $40,000. He has a whitepaper. It's 47 pages. I read the title and the tokenomics section. The tokenomics section is a pie chart. I love pie charts. They make everything look like a plan. The project has a roadmap. Q1: "Build community." Q2: "Launch beta." Q3: "Scale ecosystem." Q4 is blank. Q4 is always blank. That's where the exit scam goes. My accountant asked me to value my metaverse portfolio for tax purposes. I said $1.2 million. He said "current market value." I said $6,400. He stared at me for eleven seconds. I know because I counted. He asked if I had any other investments. I showed him my NFTs. He stared for longer. I told him they were "cultural artifacts with long-term provenance." He asked if I'd considered a 401k. I told him a 401k was "legacy finance." He told me to leave his office. The metaverse is dead. I don't accept that. I am a digital land baron. I own eleven properties across four platforms. I have a beachfront villa in a mobile app, a plot next to an empty Gucci store, and a cartoon monkey that cost me more than my actual car. Location, location, location. The location is nowhere. But I'm early. I'm always early. That's the same as being wrong except you get to say it with confidence.

@dinosaurs1969 Fantastic, Maykon Replay, The robot man

Podcast is long and info-dense (thanks both!) but worth a listen or transcript skim. Parts that stood out to me - especially on capacity, unit economics, residual value, and bottlenecks. Separate power post (after) to follow. -Lab capacity today and forward: Both OpenAI and Anthropic are at roughly 2 to 2.5 GW today. Dylan estimates both reach 5 to 6 GW by year-end, with OpenAI slightly higher. Both targeting around 10 GW by end of next year. -Anthropic revenue and implied compute need: Anthropic has been adding $4 to 6B in monthly revenue per Dylan's estimates. Straight-line that over 10 months and you get roughly $60B of incremental revenue. At sub-50% gross margins (per The Information), that implies around $40B of compute spend. At roughly $10B per GW in rental cost, that is 4 GW of new inference capacity needed just for revenue growth before any training fleet expansion. -Procurement strategy divergence: Anthropic was deliberately conservative on compute contracting. OpenAI signed aggressively and has better access to capacity into year-end. Anthropic now has to acquire capacity through Bedrock / Vertex / Foundry revenue-share arrangements or spot deals at steep premiums (Dwarkesh suggested 50% margins to the hyperscaler CSPs). Dylan has seen labs sign H100 deals at $2.40/hr for 2 to 3 year terms vs. a $1.40/hr fully loaded 5-year TCO. Standard 5-year contracts at $1.90 to $2.00 yield roughly 35% gross margins. Late-cycle short-duration contracts yield dramatically more for the provider. -Supply chain conviction decay: Labs know they need X compute. Nvidia builds X minus 1. Each layer down the supply chain builds X minus 1 again, sometimes X divided by 2. Conviction about demand attenuates at every step. Anthropic's compute team (ex-Google) spotted a dislocation and negotiated roughly 1M TPU v7s before Google leadership realized the demand. Google then went to TSMC asking for emergency capacity and was told they were sold out. -GPU depreciation thesis: Bears argue H100 spot falls to $1.00 when Blackwell scales and $0.70 when Rubin scales. Dylan argues the opposite. GPT-5.4 is cheaper to run than GPT-4, has fewer active parameters, and is far more capable. An H100 produces more tokens of a better model than it ever could before. TAM for GPT-4 tokens was maybe low billions to tens of billions. GPT-5.4 TAM is "probably north of $100B." His direct quote: "An H100 is worth more today than it was three years ago." In a supply-constrained world, GPU value is set by marginal output value, not replacement cost. -Memory crunch: Roughly 30% of Big Tech 2026 AI CapEx goes to memory. Vendors were unprofitable in 2023 and did not build fabs. Even after the demand surge became foreseeable, it took a year for pricing to move, another 3 to 6 months for vendors to react, and fabs take 2 years to build. Meaningful relief likely does not arrive until late 2027 or 2028. DRAM has roughly tripled in price. He argues this spills into consumer electronics with significant BOM pressure on smartphones, though his volume decline projections (from 1.1B to 500 to 600M units) are on the more aggressive end. -Long-run bottleneck: By 2028 to 2029, Dylan believes the binding constraint shifts to ASML EUV tools. Currently producing around 70 per year, growing to roughly 100 by end of decade. Each gigawatt of AI capacity requires about 3.5 EUV tools. That is $1.2B of tooling supporting $50B of downstream data center CapEx. The supply chain simply cannot scale fast enough.

@msipes @thejefflutz @WilliamShatner If you are taking your kids around at an average speed of 50mi/hr, that’s 4 hours of driving per day

I just don’t get what people don’t understand about wanting more miles. Currently Model X gets 330 miles. And we all know that’s BS. It’s more like 260-270. On top of that when to leave sentry mode on it loses quit a bit per day. Then you lose 10% of your batter capacity within a year. My 2023 max out at 276 miles now. So now in reality I get 230-240. Then they say to charge to 80%. So there it goes down to 248 miles. So you’re getting 200-210 on reality. Guess what? Families drive a lot taking kids around and don’t always have time to stop for 30 mins to super charge.

When Tesla’s get to 500 miles per charge; I’ll think about one. BTW there’s an app that allows Waze to work. 🙄 #thinkIdontknow? 🥱😑

Jensen clearly knows the term “supplier diversity.” He’s not naive... it's wise to focus on the picks and shovels that have limited viable alternatives. $NVDA $MU $SNDK $LITE

@bigbird3420 @mattbaran Have you seen the municipal permit and impact fees?

@mattbaran You think a park is why houses aren't affordable? How about houses are all looked at as massive profits. Each company and person making 100k off a 60k house making it 460k instead of 100k-150k

Would you rather have a bigger park (that you have to pay for), or have your housing become more affordable?

@frontisferreum @SandyofCthulhu @douglassmackey Increase supply of houses and apartments

@SandyofCthulhu @douglassmackey So how do we bring down rents?

The bishop of my former congregation worked in for the City of Berkeley. I was his clerk. He told us that when rent control got voted in, the landlords fell into two groups. One group jacked up their rents as high as possible before the law took effect. The others left their rents as was, trying to be nice guys. The "nice guys" then took it in the shorts. Some went bankrupt. Some just abandoned their buildings and let the city grab them for non-payment of taxes. Most followed the policy of never ever letting anyone new back into an apartment when someone moved out. The landlord end-game was if EVERYONE moved out of your complex, you could remodel the thing and then even Berkeley would let you calculate new rents. He said he knew of several apartment buildings in which only one tenant was left, hanging on for dear life. The owner just waiting for the guy to leave. Of course no landlord had any motivation to ever repair, repaint, or refurbish anything in a rent-controlled complex. When I moved to the East Bay I was pretty much pro-rent control. When I left, I thought it was the stupidest idea ever.

Stupid watch on @LucidStew: California High Speed Rail's latest 2026 Draft Business Plan pushes full Phase 1 (Anaheim to SF) to maybe 2040—if ever—with costs ballooned to $126B+ for a watered-down "interim" version (4-hour trips via patched Caltrain/Metrolink lines, gaps, lower speeds). Original $33B dream from 2008 now a joke; Central Valley segment already a money pit with tiny BCR and big losses. Litigation, inflation, funding shortfalls—it's gone completely off the rails. Classic CA boondoggle update. youtu.be/nmy2X05FL8I

In 6 hours, I helped my friend Yaz build what an external firm quoted as ~20 FTE days of Azure Batch infrastructure work — and we spent at least half that time waiting (permissions, quotas, RBAC). She built a complete end-to-end Azure Batch pipeline: SimPy containers built and deployed, batch pools provisioned, blob storage for input and output, and a way to create and monitor jobs. Lesson: the bottleneck wasn't writing code. It was getting permissions, quotas, resources, and meeting governance standards. The final boss? Azure role-based access controls. A sampling of the challenges. - UK South: out of vCPUs, no batch pools - Sweden Central: vCPUs available, but batch pool quota set to zero - Lack of subscription owner permissions - Have permissions, but elevated roles had already expired Yaz was helping a major retailer run supply-chain simulations that were taking hours or days on a laptop. She wanted to fire dozens of jobs into the cloud so the team could iterate on "what if" questions fast enough to actually matter. Some sessions were amazing, building out infrastructure at lightning speed. Yaz said that it felt like "breaking through an invisible barrier." In contrast, our third session was nothing but barriers (ha!), mostly beyond our control. Thankfully, the person in charge of security was on-call and joined our session, and could see the problems we were having. He was opening support tickets to Microsoft and responding to their questions in real-time. The idea of having security on-call during pairing sessions came from Ben Grinnell (Board Member, Capabilities and AI) at Newton Consulting. What a fantastic idea—if you know you'll get stuck on RBAC/quotas, make sure you unblock it in real time. A group CTO from a private equity firm said problems like these will pose the greatest leadership challenge of the last 100 years. That's a bold claim. But in 15 minutes, he convinced me. His argument: every two-day delay used to be tolerable because it was just one of a hundred things that each delayed us two days. Now that coding is instantaneous, those delays are all that's left. It's literally all wait time. I'm so delighted that Ben Grinnell (Board Member, Capabilities and AI) and Tom Kilcommons (AI Innovation Lead) from Newton Consulting will present on their novel AI practices to accelerate creating client value at ETLS San Jose, April 9–10. If you're wrestling with problems like this, you'll see concrete patterns from leaders at OpenAI, Amazon, Disney, and Netflix. Full program below — see you there!