Cosmin Ene

@profstonge No, I want to enable anyone to go to the Moon or Mars so that we secure the future of consciousness

Major AI licensing deals expire end of 2026. Content providers are slamming the gates with bot blocks. Will unauthorized scraping become more expensive than actually paying for it? If yes, the entire economics of AI flip. The winners won’t be those who scrape the hardest - they’ll be the ones who build sustainable relationships with creators while delivering value to users in simple, affordable ways. linkedin.com/pulse/new-econ…

@shanaka86 @grok validate this

Al Jazeera aired exclusive footage on April 10 from its investigative program “ما خفي أعظم” (What Lies Hidden Is Greater) showing the interior damage from Iranian ballistic missile strikes on Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City. The footage shows fires, structural destruction, and blast damage at the world’s largest liquefied natural gas complex. One Iranian ballistic missile penetrated Qatari air defenses on March 18 out of five launched. That single missile knocked 12.8 million tonnes per annum of LNG capacity offline. That is exactly 17 percent of Qatar’s total export capacity. QatarEnergy CEO Saad al-Kaabi told Reuters the damage will take three to five years to fully repair. The estimated annual revenue loss is $20 billion. QatarEnergy declared force majeure on all LNG and related product contracts to buyers in Italy, Belgium, South Korea, and China. Qatar was hit by 203 ballistic missiles, 87 drones, and 2 Iranian fighter jets between February 28 and March 18. Qatar expelled Iranian diplomats. Qatar’s foreign minister declared that “the little trust that remained in Iran has been completely shattered.” And Al Jazeera, owned by the Qatari state, chose to air the interior damage footage on April 10, the same day Iran’s delegation touched down in Islamabad for peace talks. The timing is not accidental. The footage is a message from Doha to the Serena Hotel: this is what you did to us while we were trying to help you. But the structural damage extends far beyond LNG. Ras Laffan does not only produce natural gas. It produces helium. Qatar supplies approximately 30 percent of global helium, according to the US Geological Survey. Helium is extracted as a byproduct of natural gas processing, and when LNG production stops, helium production stops with it. Helium is not a luxury gas. It is irreplaceable in semiconductor fabrication, where it cools silicon wafers, serves as a carrier gas in deposition and etching, and performs leak detection in vacuum systems. G. Dan Hutcheson, vice chair at TechInsights, stated plainly: “Helium is absolutely critical. Without it, you can’t make advanced chips. There are no substitutes for helium.” South Korea imports 64.7 percent of its helium from Qatar. Taiwan sources 69 percent from the Gulf Cooperation Council. Helium spot prices have surged 70 to 100 percent since the strikes began. SK Hynix and Samsung, the world’s largest memory chip makers, sit directly downstream of a facility that an Iranian missile put offline for years. One ballistic missile did not just create an energy crisis. It created a semiconductor supply chain vulnerability that connects directly to the AI infrastructure race, the US-China tech competition, and the $975 billion global chip market. The LNG force majeure is priced. The helium disruption is not. Iran struck Qatar to punish a Gulf state for hosting US forces. It hit the one facility that produces both the energy Europe needs to survive winter and the helium the world needs to manufacture chips. The damage takes 3 to 5 years to repair. The ceasefire is 14 days. And the footage proving the scale of destruction aired on the same network the Iranian negotiators watch, on the same day they sat down to discuss peace. Al Jazeera did not just broadcast damage footage. It broadcast a negotiating position. And the 30 percent of global helium supply that went offline with Ras Laffan is a cost that no two-week ceasefire can reverse. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

Can Anthropic just CHILL for like a day so we can process this stuff? Shitting hell man

@thealepalombo Lecce is stunning, indeed - it has style. And an incredible architecture, well maintained, along with all the infrastructure you‘ll ever need. One of the most underrated cities in Italy.

First, LECCE - "The Florence of the South" The obvious choice (that's actually right). Lecce is where serious expats land when they've done their homework. It's a proper city (95k people) with everything functional - hospitals, universities, year-round economy not dependent on tourists. The baroque center is legitimately stunning, not Disney-fied. Here's what nobody tells you about Lecce...

This is Puglia, Italy. 7% flat tax for retirees (small towns only). 50% income exemption for workers. Flat-tax for HNW. Magical region. Mediterranean coast. Authentic culture. But most foreigners choose the wrong town and overpay by 30-40%. I've lived across 5 continents and visited every corner of Puglia. Here are the 7 best places - and the traps to avoid 🧵

Show up always.

Subscriptions are a tax on curiosity. Maine Trust tested pay-as-you-go: $1 for 1 hour, $2.50 for a day, $5 for a week - and got 2,800 short-term pass customers, with 70 converting to full subscribers. Turns out: give people choice → they buy. nationaltrustforlocalnews.org/post/an-experi…

Global news revenue: $125.7B in 2025. Basically zero growth. Print clinging to 65%, digital frozen at ~30% for five straight years. Ads + subs? Plateaued. Hard reality. Stop waiting for legacy to fix itself. Add a real third engine: Supertab. Already pulling incremental revenue from the 98% who won’t subscribe -> pay-per-use + upsell to subs. Choice wins. Time to try it out and unlock that third pillar. 🚀

NEW REPORT: Our World Press Trends Outlook 2025-2026 reveals a significant shift in the news industry towards a more balanced business model. Read more: wan-ifra.org/2026/01/world-… Five key takeaways from the report in thread.

The AI boom just hit a wall nobody saw coming. And it's not software. It's not regulation. It's not even energy... It's memory chips. Right now, Dell is raising PC prices by 30%. Intel can't ship chips. Nvidia is slashing GPU production by 40%. And almost nobody understands why. Here's the "hidden" crisis the AI industry is trying to hide: AI data centers are hoarding memory. Not GPUs. Not processors. MEMORY. Every AI server needs massive amounts of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) to run those models everyone's hyping. One problem: There are only 3 companies in the world that can make it. Samsung. SK Hynix. Micron. That's it. And all 3 just diverted their entire production capacity away from normal RAM to feed AI data centers. The math that breaks everything: 1 gigabyte of HBM takes 4X the manufacturing capacity of regular DRAM. AI will consume 20% of global DRAM production in 2026. But the thing is, consumer demand for RAM didn't disappear. PCs still need memory. Phones still need memory. Cars still need memory. But there's no capacity left to make it. The price explosion: RAM prices are up 246% in the last 6 months. DDR5 contract prices jumped 100% month-over-month in some cases. Dell's CFO said he's "never witnessed costs escalating at this pace." SK Hynix and Micron? Sold out through all of 2026. Micron straight up EXITED the consumer memory market entirely to focus on AI customers. If you're not building an AI data center, you're not getting memory chips. AI data centers pay 3-5X margins compared to consumer products. So memory manufacturers are rationally choosing: Serve Microsoft and Google's AI buildout, or serve Dell's laptop business? Easy choice. Every wafer allocated to an Nvidia H100 GPU is a wafer DENIED to your next laptop. It's a zero-sum game. And consumers are losing. The dangerous cascade effect: Nvidia is cutting RTX 50-series GPU production by 30-40% because they can't get GDDR7 memory. Dell, Lenovo, HP are all raising PC prices 15-30% in early 2026. Xiaomi and other smartphone makers are cutting shipment targets. Even Intel's crash last week? Partially driven by memory shortages limiting chip production. This is a PERMANENT reallocation of the world's silicon capacity. Not a temporary supply hiccup. For decades, consumer electronics (phones, PCs, laptops) drove memory production. Now? AI data centers are the priority customer. And that priority shift is reshaping the entire tech economy. The timeline Is worse than you think: Industry analysts project shortages lasting through 2027, maybe 2028. Why? Because building new memory fabs takes 3-5 YEARS. Micron's new Idaho fab won't meaningfully impact supply until 2028. Samsung and SK Hynix are too busy ramping up HBM4 production to expand consumer DRAM. So we're stuck. AI companies need memory to scale. But producing that memory DESTROYS the supply chain for everything else. My question here: Everyone's betting on AI scaling infinitely. But what if the AI boom STALLS because there's not enough memory to support it? What if we're not in an "AI supercycle" but a "memory shortage that kills the AI buildout"? Intel crashed 17% because they can't manufacture enough chips. The root cause though? Memory shortages limiting what they can even produce. Nvidia is cutting GPU production by 40%. AMD is struggling to get GDDR6 for Radeon cards. This isn't just a consumer problem. It's an AI infrastructure problem. And if memory doesn't scale, AI doesn't scale. The AI industry sold you on infinite scaling. But they forgot to mention the part where there's only 3 companies making the memory chips that power everything. And all 3 just chose AI data centers over you. Even Nvidia can't make enough GPUs to meet demand. Not because of energy. Not because of regulation... But because the memory supply chain is BROKEN. And it won't be fixed until 2028.

Because it remains important to show the world what Russia looks like, the country that continues to spent hundreds of millions of dollars every night trying to freeze and terrorize the Ukrainian population, I have compiled a "best of" from my guides through Russia's cities.🧵

“The best people in your life are the ones who see potential in you that you didn't see in yourself.” — Brian Chesky, Airbnb CEO

@paulg And the kicker: you can’t shortcut the read-out. If the procedure is “improper” (steering, interruptions, someone not properly informed), parts can be contested - meaning full re-notarization. I once sat through a 13 hour session. In Switzerland, the same thing takes 20 minutes

With rules like this, who would invest in a German startup? Not me.

David Friedberg: California’s “Billionaire Tax” is a Trojan Horse to Go After the Middle Class's Private Assets @friedberg: “The reason they're calling it a billionaire tax is to make it easier for people to vote for it, and sign up to this entirely new tax system that they're proposing to put on all Americans at some point, and for the first time ever degrading our private property rights.” “Forget about how much wealth you have, forget about how rich you are, forget about the term billionaire, millionaire, whatever it is.” “We're creating, or proposing the creation, of a new tax system that allows the government for the first time ever to come in and audit everything you own.” “All the jewelry your grandma gave you, the value of all the couches in your house, the value of your car, the value of all your stocks and bonds, and the government can come in, and for the first time, look through the veil into your personal property.” “And say, ‘Here's how much all this stuff is worth. I'm charging you a percentage of that. That's what I need to get paid.’ And it doesn't matter that it starts with billionaires. What matters is that we're giving the government the right to look into our private property and take a percentage of it every year.” “The total net worth of billionaires in the US is $8 trillion.” “The net worth of the US, the middle class, and everyone else is $170 trillion, compared to $8 trillion of the billionaires.” @chamath: “They need a way to open the door so that they can go after the real honey pot.” “The real honeypot is not 200 people.” @friedberg: “Just so everyone understands the real goal of this is not to tax billionaires, because there are other ways to tax billionaires.” “Charge them a capital gains tax if they borrow against their assets that they haven't paid capital gains tax on. Very simple, that can resolve this.” “Another thing you can do, you can raise the capital gains tax rate. Sounds unpopular. I don't agree with that, but that's another way to deal with this, which is to take the capital gains tax rate from 20% to 30%. You could do that.” “The real goal of this is to create, for the first time in American history, a private property asset seizure tax. Because they're going after the $170 trillion, not the $8 trillion that the billionaires have.”

Ab wann soll Journalismus auf der Homepage eigentlich Werbung querfinanzieren - statt umgekehrt? Und warum gibt es trotz all der Werbung für Nutzer fast immer nur die Wahl zwischen „Abo oder nichts“? @MEEDIA

Asserting rights and making money with AI is a delicate dance - but someone has to take the first step. Otherwise it’s going to be a very boring party. RSL gives publishers the ability to assert their rights. Supertab sets the economics so content providers can actually get paid. It won’t flip overnight, but progress never starts with perfection. It starts with moving - and this is a first, big step!

A pay-to-scrape AI licensing standard is now official theverge.com/news/841222/rs…

Google cooked so hard. Not gonna lie, this feels like the future is here. Now develop Google Glasses with enough battery power, a good chip, and a look like Ray-Bans, and you'll have an instant hit. 100%.

@RnaudBertrand Amazing. The real winners are those who stay humble enough to learn from people who do something better - and bold enough to put that learning into action… @renaultgroup just showed exactly that. Well done 👏

This is probably one of the most interesting and revealing industrial stories of the year. This car 👇, the 2026 version of France's Renault Twingo, is the first Western car engineered in China and made in Europe - a complete reversal of what used to be. The challenge that Renault wanted to tackle is how to compete with Chinese EVs, which are best-in-class in affordability and speed-to-market. Specifically, they wanted to develop an EV car from scratch in less than 2 years (when it normally takes 4 years to develop a new car for European auto makers) and be able to sell the car profitably for less than €20,000 while building it in Europe. Which is all insanely ambitious if you know about the European auto industry... To do so, Renault opened a Shanghai R&D center (which they called "ACDC" in reference to both the band and the electrical current) where 160 engineers - 150 Chinese and 10 French (usinenouvelle.com/article/c-est-…) - essentially tried to make Chinese development method work for Renault, in the heart of China's EV ecosystem to understand what was possible. As the lead engineer on the project, Jérémie Coiffier, put it (frandroid.com/marques/renaul…): "We humbly came to learn to go fast. And learning to go fast isn't simply learning to do the same thing faster. It's doing things differently. It's a transformation." And it worked: they had a first prototype in an insanely fast 4 weeks (journalauto.com/constructeurs/…)!!! The entire development process took just 21 months. The end product is priced under €20,000 - after subsidies, around €15,000 - making it one of Europe's cheapest EVs and competitive against Chinese EVs. 46% of the car is made of Chinese parts (techniques-ingenieur.fr/actualite/arti…), including an LFP battery from CATL (the first Renault to use cheaper lithium-iron-phosphate chemistry instead of traditional lithium-ion), and an 82 hp motor from Shanghai Edrive with permanent magnets (unique among Renault EVs). Interestingly, the CATL batteries will be made in Europe too, specifically in Hungary (electrive.com/2024/07/02/ren…). This is one rare story that gives me hope for Europe. Let's be real about Europe's choices here. It could either 1) keep raising tariff walls to protect an uncompetitive EV industry, 2) exit the EV race entirely or 3) swallow its pride and learn to improve. Renault chose the latter, which is the right thing to do. Especially hard to do in the current climate where everyone is told to "decouple" and "de-risk," which is pretty much suicidal in the EV industry: on the contrary you very much need to "couple" and "risk" in order to learn, adapt and compete... Those French engineers saying "we humbly came to learn" probably did more for European industrial competitiveness than all the Think Tank papers in Brussels combined.

Orthopedic surgeon Dr. Vonda Wright explains how muscles can save your life 💯👇

Marc Andreessen's rule of thumb for a successful tech sector: "The principle is just 'Do the opposite of the EU.'" David Sacks: " When they talk about AI leadership, what they mean is that they're taking the lead in defining the regulations." "They get together in Brussels and figure out what all the rules should be, and that's what they call 'leadership.'" @pmarca @DavidSacks

Just got off the phone with an ambitious, smart 25 year old who asked for a career consult session. The main thing I said over and over again: -------> Get technical <------- Learn how LLMs actually work. Build a simple real-world product on top of the APIs and ship it. Don't be one of the people who say "I can't code". All those folks are getting laid off or will be. Everyone said coding agents = you no longer need to code. It's the exact opposite. The devs are going to control the world even more than before. Become a dev.