Hung Lee

Recruiting Brainfood - Issue 492 recruitingbrainfood.substack.com/p/recruiting-b… AI-Linked Jobless Tracker, Lessons from Zapier on AI interviewing deployment, Official English Translation of China's 15th 5 Year Plan and a cool how to on UK DUAA.

Whether the next president is a Republican or a Democrat, can we have someone with at least a little class next time? Because this is embarrassing.

But razing Muslim villages to the ground is totes fine. What a very Christian sentiment. 🙄

#Statement | The Foreign Ministry expresses the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s condemnation in the strongest terms of the blatant Israeli aggression targeting military infrastructure in the south of the Syrian Arab Republic, in a flagrant violation of international law and Syria’s sovereignty.

Most people have no idea of what they believe in. All they can do is memorise some catchphrase and parrot it like a bird. The best way to establish whether they even *understand* it is to ask them to re-formulate, or explain it More often than not, they will get completely lost

The scale and consequences of the failure of European statecraft over the last 20 years are coming into view. This is not going to end well for Europe. We are now reliant on a swift AND favourable resolution to the Iran War to escape with 'just' a temporary economic downturn. Given the realistic course of events, this feels increasingly like having what remains of your chips on red 13 as the roulette wheel spins and the ball might land in any of the other 37 pockets. It is worth taking a (very broad) tour of the events of the last decade and a half to see what that failure has involved, and then a quick look at the likely consequences. First, the EU, despite knowing where it would lead, allowed a powerful and fanatical faction of the foreign policy establishment in Washington, DC to drive the car on the West's Ukraine policy, and thus Europe's relations with Russia. Recall that both France and Germany were against George W Bush's decision to announce in 2008 that Ukraine and Georgia would become members of NATO. The US itself knew that this would be a disaster. In the 2019 Wikileaks cache, it was revealed that William J Burns, then Director of the CIA, had written in a 2008 dispatch when he was ambassador to Russia titled "Nyet Means Nyet: Russia's NATO Enlargement Redlines." In it, he said that everybody he had spoken to in Russia, from "knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin" to "Putin's sharpest liberal critics" warned that Ukrainian NATO entry was considered the "brightest of all red lines" for Moscow. Angela Merkel knew it, too. She said that the Kremlin would view Ukrainian acsession as 'a declaration of war.' Yet Europe went along with the scheme, and continued to refuse the numerous off-ramps along the war -- as recently as 2021, when Russia made a push to have the Minsk II agreement enforced. Europe at this time had significant leverage over both Ukraine (which was reliant on the EU economically) and Russia (as we have seen, through its sanctions regime on Russia since 2022). That was surely enough for a strategically decisive EU to have forced a solution. But it did not. Instead, it allowed a war to erupt between the provider of its energy (and thus the underpinnings of its economy) and (by proxy) the guarantor of its security in Europe's own backyard. This passivity and sense of entitlement has had dire economic consequences for Europe, as is now well accepted, given the ongoing slow-motion deindustrialisation of Europe. But it has also had strategic consequences, with Europe now facing open conflict on its Eastern Approaches, and far greater reliance on both the United States and Qatar and broader Gulf region for its energy security, and much greater reliance on the US for its security. Secondly, the coup de gras: the Gulf has itself erupted in war (obviously a shock to the geniuses in Europe's capitals, the Gulf being such a stable region of the world), driven at least in part by the internal political pathologies of the United States. This threatens Europe with a catastrophic economic shock, while the US uses its leverage (of which Europe gave it much more) to get involved against Europe's own interests. Yet here again, Europe knew the likely consequences of the US policy, and yet went along with it. Even when Donald Trump 1.0 got rid of the JCPOA, Europe wanted to stick to it. But they couldn't because the EU, despite its huge Single Market and capacity to set regulations even beyond its borders, did not have ANY means to resist US secondary sanctions. China had developed CIPS as an alternative to SWIFT. Even Russia developed MIR. Hell, I think even the Serbs have their own version. The EU? Britain? Nope and nope. If the Iran War ended tomorrow and energy was swiftly restored, it is true that this might be a bump in the road. But there is no sign that this will be a short war -- or if it is, there is no sign that a resolution will be favourable for the West -- and the economic consequences are coming into view. Massively higher inflation, large-scale job losses, higher food prices, energy rationing, depression. The human toll in Europe will be monstrous if this is a long war. A serious-minded EU would be straining ever sinew and using all its diplomatic cachet and economic leverage to mediate an end to the conflict. Yet all we get is some weird condemnations of Iran (for fighting dirty, or something) and a refusal to get involved on the US side, even as US President Donald Trump starts applying the leverage for them to do so. Let us apply a little British understatement: these people will not be viewed kindly when the history is written. Monstrously hubristic, conceited, self-satisfied, unbearably pious, strategically purblind, feckless, adolescent in their passions and conceit. These fools spent much, much more time busying themselves with forcing Apple to put USB-C slots on their phones, forcing social media companies to police speech, and worrying about LGBTQ+ rights in Budapest than they did on protecting Europe's economy and strategic position. Shameful. Disgraceful. Grossly malfeasant.

When Eisenhower was asked why the United States did not allow the 1956 Vietnamese reunification elections agreed upon at Geneva, he answered with unusual honesty. He said that if elections were held, Hồ Chí Minh would win with approximately 80 percent of the vote. So they cancelled the elections. Think about that every time an American politician talks about "spreading democracy." They cancelled the democratic election because the "wrong" person would win. They then spent the next two decades killing people to prevent the government that would have been democratically elected from taking power. And they called the other side anti-democratic. This is not ancient history. This is the logic that still governs every "democracy promotion" operation today. Democracy is acceptable when it produces the "right" results. When it does not, you cancel the election, back a coup, fund the opposition, impose sanctions, and call the government that the people actually chose a "dictatorship." Vietnam exposed this logic completely. Not with arguments. With history. With the receipts.

Batteries are a game-changer for grids and electric vehicles. With prices permanently below $100 per megawatt-hour they're now competing with oil and gas, writes Bloomberg's @davidfickling bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

Economist Editor-in-Chief: Clearly you and I agree, and we’ve both been critical of the Israeli government. Tucker Carlson: Well, I’ve been critical of the Israeli government. The Economist: I’ve been plenty critical. Tucker Carlson: What do you think of what happened in Gaza?

Trump predicted the future.

I think I finally figured out why OpenClaw is amazing and took off like wild fire and why Peter is a genius, as Altman called him. And it's actually a different way of looking at it. It's not a DeepSeek moment for agents. It's a Napster moment. And just like Napster it will eventually force the industry to change. In essence when Napster came out the entire world told the music industry we don't want to buy CDs anymore and if you don't provide us a digital download experience we are just going to take it until you do. It forced the industry to create Apple Music and eventually Spotify. Both essentially killed most music piracy by making it ubiquitous and cheap and good. But it forced change. The same will now happen to software. Here's why: In essence OpenClaw lets you take what vendors don't want to give you: Unified access to countless applications. We all want a personal assistant that can talk to freaking everything and do anything for us in the digital world. But vendors don't want this. They want you locked into their bullshit. For example, none of the messaging platforms want bots on there. None. They all have explicit policies against them and make it hard to do this. WhatsApp doesn't want you on there. Signal. Telegram's bot father is garbage. It's all designed to keep bots out. They were designed for a pre-agentic era when bot = spam. Many other things are like this. The API layers are gated, hoop-jumping bullshit. Go get an enterprise account and wait for approval and yada yada. Want access to WhatsApp? Get a business account and attach a number (what small business has a real number anymore 😂) and messages can't come from a person, etc. Google ads? It's not just an auth, it's go get a special manager account and create an enterprise key and blah blah blah. It's a horrible experience because it was all designed for corporations to control access. Now people are saying, make your app easy to access and accessible to me and my machine avatars and do it in a headless way or you will be dead. Peter hacked around all this by making everything command line in the classic Linux style and using things like an open source library that reverse engineered the web version of WhatsApp. It's all a bit house-of-cards-y because he had no choice. At my company we had a similar idea early (and failed). Basically we wanted to make the best multimodal/computer using model because then it doesn't need an API or access hoops. You just go through the human interface layer and ain't nobody going to stop you. We failed because we weren't big enough and it's really a job for the mega-labs to solve because it is a hard problem and costs a shit ton of money. Peter was much smarter. Make it all command line because that is ready now. Use any reverse engineered library or project or proxy available come Hell or high water and make it work by any means necessary even if it is hacky. In short, he signaled to the software world that they better change and change fast or we are going to do this anyway and you can't stop us. Of course some are foolishly trying. Meta is banning Claws on WhatsApp, etc. They will all try to build their own gated, controlled, enshittified version of this thing. They will fail. And eventually everyone will offer a clear, easy way to get access via API for agents or they will be gone. In essence OpenClaw gave people what they wanted, which was an app connected to everything, even when most of the vendors don't want you to have this.

Look, a market-centred society will invariably end up as a plutocracy. Market concentration -> r>g -> capital accumulation -> political power. No other result is possible.

🚨BREAKING: Kimi just raised $1 billion. Again. That’s three rounds in under 90 days. The Kimi story is getting wild. $18 billion valuation. Up 4x in three months. Let that sink in. Moonshot is now: → The fastest Chinese AI company to cross $10 billion → The first Chinese LLM startup to close three consecutive rounds in under 90 days → Still raising. A fresh $1 billion round is in progress right now. This isn’t a funding story. It’s a signal. Investors aren’t just betting on Kimi. They’re betting that China’s AI race is far from over, and that Moonshot is one of the horses that finishes. While everyone’s been watching OpenAI and Anthropic, Moonshot quietly became one of the most aggressively funded AI companies on the planet.

De facto Great EU Firewall emerging. This is good news

"rough consensus" rather than "voting" this is the way, though how to get there isn't clear. Maybe retain voting, but make it quadratic voting on topics to be decided, rather than on representatives who inevitably become captured or corrupted

Lebanon faces a deep crisis:1M displaced,thousands killed & injured, vital infrastructure destroyed. Priority:access to medical care. The Israeli offensive must stop. We condemn intl law violations & Hezbollah rocket fire. We support Lebanon’s sovereignty & territorial integrity.

> be Kimi > starts as China’s most prominent AI lab > then comes DeepSeek moment in January 2025 > AI twitter writes Kimi off > 6 months later, comes back with K2 > drops the open model that delays GPT-5 > keeps shipping open-source while OpenAI charges $200/month > valuation jump from $ 4B to $ 10B in 3 months > now raising $ 1B at $ 18B > becomes one of the fastest rising AI startups > now cursor drops the replica of K2.5 as their new coding model Kimi makes ai cheaper to run, at just 1% of OpenAI’s valuation. Insane.

Incredible

Once again, the village of Taybeh—the last entirely Palestinian Christian village in the West Bank—has been stormed by Israeli settlers, who entered a cement factory and a stone quarry, raised an Israeli flag over the site, and announced their control over the area. Father Bashar Fawadleh, the Latin parish priest in the town, confirmed that residents are living under difficult conditions due to military barriers and checkpoints, calling on the international community to witness the reality on the ground and take steps to protect the Christian population. Father Bashar Fawadleh added: “We still have hope. We raise our voice to say that we are Palestinian civilian people. We want to live in peace. We want to live with justice… We ask the world to come and see, to stop these practices, and to allow us to live in safety and peace.” savewestbankchristians.com

According to the State Department's own reporting in their 2022 report on Global Terrorism, state.gov/wp-content/upl… , none of the top ten terrorist groups, ranked by fatalities, were connected to Iran. However, there is evidence that some of them, maybe all of them, have received funding or weapons from Israel or US (USAID, CIA).

@Reuters Why? Is someone attacking them?