@Shoulder_Brah @stevehou Those dudes are largely clueless and usually wrong
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Justin Levine
2.2K posts
@stevehou flight attendants have the best understanding of global economics because they have fwbs in every destination they fly to
so yeah get in on the puts
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Fuck. This is the read of the week. I know it's long, but do it. Or if you're lazy, have #AI summarize it for you.
John Ʌ Konrad V@johnkonrad
I want to be clear about what I’m arguing and what I’m not. I am not arguing that Trump planned this from the beginning. The P&I club withdrawal was a cascading system failure that no central planner could have predicted or orchestrated. What I am arguing is that the administration has, whether by design or adaptation, assembled the tools to exploit this moment. The DFC facility is the option. The incomplete P&I coverage is the strike price. The Jones Act waiver and Venezuela sanctions easing are hedge positions. The Navy’s deliberate pace is time decay working in America’s favor. The strongest version of this thesis is not “Trump is playing 4D chess.” It’s that the administration holds more options than anyone realizes, and the insurance mechanism, not the Navy, is the real lever of power. The man who launched the SHIPS Act, tariffed Chinese shipping, killed the IMO carbon tax vote, brought CMA CGM to the Oval Office, signed the most ambitious Maritime Executive Order in decades, and then made the U.S. government the insurer of last resort for the world’s most important shipping lane does not lack a maritime strategy.
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My rough markets pressure gauge for Trump continues to build. Dow, gasoline and long bond yields moving in the wrong direction ahead of midterms. Percentage change over the past four weeks shown in the bottom pane.
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@Micro2Macr0 Regional NSW (Australia) about AUD0.50 increase per litre, from AUD1.80 to AUD2.30. times by 3.8 for gallons. Times by .7 for USD
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I'm seeing a $.70 cent increase here where I live, since the war started.
What are you guys seeing?
Charlie Bilello@charliebilello
Gas prices in the US have moved up to $3.79/gallon, their highest level since September 2023. The 30% spike over the last month ($2.92/gallon to $3.79/gallon) is the biggest we've seen in the past 30 years.
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Justin Levine retweetledi
Apparently factory working conditions were not uniformly awful in the 19th c. Beautiful things can only be created in a beautiful setting.
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Thankyou for this Brian. May I ask, did you always know you were going to publish the Wurlitzer story in this context? Or did you ask grok for example businesses where the Disruptor becomes the disrupted? Because it's such a great example, very physical, and also appeals to other senses as you imagine the organs etc
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Justin Levine retweetledi
Justin Levine retweetledi
last week might have been the moment El Salvador became Dubai 2.0, and nobody is talking about it:
> safest country in the western hemisphere for 4 years in a row
> no middle east war or fallout risk
> 0% tax on all foreign-sourced income
> 0% property tax
> dollarized economy
> bitcoin is legal tender, 0% cap gains tax
> inflation under 1%
> 90-min direct flights to Miami for <$200
> 4-6 hour flights to SFO and NYC for <$400
> world-class surfing
> democratically elected president w/ 85%+ approval rating.
> first country to give open-source AI developers full legal protection
> first country with a sovereign order of NVIDIA's B300 chips
> @elonmusk grok AI in 1M+ public school kids' hands
> democratically elected president with a 85%+ approval rating
> world-class surfing
> locally grown coffee, tropical fruit, grass-fed beef - not a supermarket import economy
> huge variety of climates - volcanoes, mountains, lakes, and beaches — 12c in the highlands, 34c on the coast
> strong christian culture and deep sense of faith
> same timezone as US East Coast
> country investing massively in public education
> beautiful colonial architecture across country
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Justin Levine retweetledi
When I grew up, and Matt isn't that much younger, you did want your kids to spread their wings. You could rent a place cheap. I could afford to live in Santa Monica at 22 years of ago. Those days are long gone. Have to update the mental model based on changing conditions.
Matt Walsh@MattWalshBlog
A lot of parents think that you reap the rewards of parenting by kicking them out of the house and reclaiming your “independence” or whatever. So the reward is just going back to your pre-parenting state? No, the reward should be a family that you love and get to enjoy until you die. The reward should be raising children who one day also become companions, and eventually caretakers. The reward is not, or shouldn’t be, 30 years in a silent empty house and then dying under florescent lights in a nursing home.
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Justin Levine retweetledi
The Capital of Iraq, Baghdad, has restarted its old tramway system to revive tourism. The country was ravage by war a decade ago 🇮🇶🚋
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Justin Levine retweetledi
That is because there is no narrative that goes beyond the monosyllabic or any attempt to turn his distorted view of the social order into a critical mythos in Banksy. there is just the surface image of pale social gestures in his work that are so vague that the meaning is given in an instant and then forgotten. Perfect consumable political kitsch.
A protestor holding a flower or a kid holding a fighter jet, or a judge beating a protestor, or a kid pantsing a soldier, it makes sense given that he’s an older genxer or later boomer, and so his artistic view was in some way informed by his spiritual grandfather Norman Rockwell (forthcoming book has an essay on this). Like the girl with the black eye in the principal’s office, it’s that type of peevish little rascals motif boomers love as applied to pressing social commentary and world events. Banksy always seems to suggest the “what if we were innocent like children?” And what if we pulled the same pranks on the powerful, but in turn this just leads to huge, sweeping contrasts between things, and a political aesthetic morality designed for children, or low info consumers.
all of the most important world issues are not viewed with or given reprieve by the spiritual force of childhood innocence in his work, but are thinned down into a childish understanding of the world. The space between activist zeal, slacktivist laziness, the need to buy something that makes you a “heckin good person”. and political stupidity is where banksy thrives.
Of course one has to realize that in the medium of street art stencil work, you naturally have to abstract visual forms and make things vague, they need to be punchy and snappy as a lot of activist street art and protest art is, and there are numerous good examples of this. But when banksy entered a fine art context, and when he became the voice of mainstream liberal politikitch, then the lack of aesthetic narrative beyond the merely given is warranted.
Orthon von Bismarck@Orthon_Spaceman
This is not really a "yet you participate in society" kindof point, rather I think that the case of Banksy and successful "underground art" in general speaks of an intrinsic weakness of CULTURE and art to act as a critical instrument against this particular type of process.
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@iekoob @WAppleyard “well executed brutalism" lol no brutalism is for unimaginative people who hate other humans.
The new town hall station was also made by someone who hates humans.
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@WAppleyard But it’s not well executed brutalism nor aesthetically pleasing. It’s really disappointing to me. I’ll have to see Anzac station when I’m back next. The photos I’ve seen look like it’s a more successful design but I’m not sold if this is the general vibe of the whole munnel
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Just had a quick look at Melbourne’s new Town Hall station. Yikes. Who ever did the design work on that needs to never work on infrastructure in Australia again. Bleak, austere, grim. So much grey with some TAFE like splashes of orange and yellow. Hopefully it functions well 😕
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Justin Levine retweetledi
This is why it’s important to exercise regularly.
Lift some heavy weights, go on frequent walks, do some endurance training every once in a while…
you will thank yourself when they’re on round 5 of “AGAIN, uppy, spin, AGAIN!!”
Maia Bittner@maiab
one of the big surprises I’ve had is that I’m just not physically strong enough to parent small children well
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@maiab Isn't part of the challenge that adults have to lean down to the kids height constantly? Am surprised we don't have more hunchbacks 🤓
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one of the big surprises I’ve had is that I’m just not physically strong enough to parent small children well
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Justin Levine retweetledi
“Where will the next really big revolution come from? Digital biology”—Jenson Haung, Nvidia
Engineering technology will replace pharmaceutical companies.
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Chatgpt/Claude have been dead since they lobotomized themselves several years ago. Google Gemini the only monolithic LLM in competition to grok right now. Both are really good, albeit fit different use cases. You can drop all of Scott Adam's books into Gemini and ask how Scott would think about a certain topic or news article. Really powerful, don't write Google off just yet!
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Product is 10/10.
Marketing wise? I don’t use chatGPT to talk about life, and sort of blew off Grok.
Started using it for Search, and was blown away.
If at X, I’d put a lot into consumer education.
Grok really is unreal.
Cernovich@Cernovich
Grok is the search engine that Google used to be. The results are actually what you were looking for, and then some. 10/10.
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Justin Levine retweetledi
Just in case you don’t know:
If you want to see a global crisis, let Australia run out of fuel…
Did you know that Australia is the 22nd largest exporter on earth.
15th largest country by measure of GDP.
As far as minerals go, we are the 3rd largest exporter of minerals on earth but per capita, we are by far the largest.
We are the 3rd largest overall energy exporter on the planet, largest of the OECD countries.
We are the Largest exporter of iron ore #1
$87,700,000,000
87.7 billion dollars or 55.9% of the global total.
Largest lithium producer #1
61,000 tons
46.9% of global supply.
Largest exporter of zinc #1
$2,2100,000,000
2.21 billion dollars
Largest exporter for barley #1
$2,370,000,000
2.37 billion dollars
Largest exporter for Bauxite #1
110 million tonnes
Largest exporters of Liquid Natural Gas #1 in volume
#3 in revenue.
$27,400,000,000
27.4 billion dollars
Largest wheat exporter #1
$10,200,000,000
Largest exporter of sheep #1
49% of global supply
$1,500,000,000
Largest exporter of opals #1
90% of global supply.
Largest exporter of manganese #1
$1,390,000,000
2nd Largest beef exporter after Brazil. 12 billion dollars.
$12,200,000,000
2nd Largest gold exporter #2
310 tons annually
34.2 billion dollars
3rd Largest grain exporter #3
14% of global supply.
Large exporter of copper #3
$64,200,000,000 - 7.1%
2nd largest exporter of uranium. #2
4.1 billion tonnes
We have 30% of the known global uranium reserves.
5th Largest exporter of silver #5
Number 8 exporter of aluminium #8
$4.1 billion dollars
4.5% of global supply
26th Largest exporter of oil #26
$7,540,000,000
$7.54 billion dollars
Australia is the 4th Largest coal producer of coal on earth.
We are the Largest coal exporter on earth. 50% of worlds sea born coal comes from Australia.
150 million coming from the mighty Hunter which is the largest single coal export port on earth.
It is completely irresponsible to allow a country that feeds and powers the world to get into a situation where we may need to pull up trucks because we have a fuel shortage…
And you still have to work and get only 50% of your earnings?
You kidding me!
Where’s the money?
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Noticeably fewer hot headlines coming through from @Reuters relative to @Bloomberg regarding the Iran war. May reflect staffing resources but feels like I'm operating in a data vacuum without X.
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Justin Levine retweetledi
Holy shit... Microsoft open sourced an inference framework that runs a 100B parameter LLM on a single CPU.
It's called BitNet. And it does what was supposed to be impossible.
No GPU. No cloud. No $10K hardware setup. Just your laptop running a 100-billion parameter model at human reading speed.
Here's how it works:
Every other LLM stores weights in 32-bit or 16-bit floats.
BitNet uses 1.58 bits.
Weights are ternary just -1, 0, or +1. That's it. No floats. No expensive matrix math. Pure integer operations your CPU was already built for.
The result:
- 100B model runs on a single CPU at 5-7 tokens/second
- 2.37x to 6.17x faster than llama.cpp on x86
- 82% lower energy consumption on x86 CPUs
- 1.37x to 5.07x speedup on ARM (your MacBook)
- Memory drops by 16-32x vs full-precision models
The wildest part:
Accuracy barely moves.
BitNet b1.58 2B4T their flagship model was trained on 4 trillion tokens and benchmarks competitively against full-precision models of the same size. The quantization isn't destroying quality. It's just removing the bloat.
What this actually means:
- Run AI completely offline. Your data never leaves your machine
- Deploy LLMs on phones, IoT devices, edge hardware
- No more cloud API bills for inference
- AI in regions with no reliable internet
The model supports ARM and x86. Works on your MacBook, your Linux box, your Windows machine.
27.4K GitHub stars. 2.2K forks. Built by Microsoft Research.
100% Open Source. MIT License.
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