Sasha

Listening to an (excellent) Search Engine podcast episode featuring @danbharris, and Dan says something I think is quite profound that I personally try to internalize deeply: "Can you resist certainty?"

The U.S. government says its agents are under attack. The claims reached 380 million views on X. Most of the alleged culprits in the tweets were U.S. citizens, denounced as terrorists, rioters and agitators. Yet none have been convicted at trial. A WSJ investigation tracked the U.S. citizens caught in the crosshairs of an aggressive government campaign to detain and demonize dissenters. Read more: on.wsj.com/3OX2tNT

Remember: these are just the cases DHS *wanted* to highlight. Imagine the incidents that they are covering up.

Radar graphs are among the worst ideas in data visualization. The whole point of them is to show the area and you can usually reorder the labels freely in order to create a desired dramatic effect. Two versions of the same graph: - left one tells the story that AI is rapidly replacing whole industries - right one shows the "jaggedness" and reinforces the idea that humans will always have something that AI won't be able to replicate

New @KnowYrEnemyPod: we spoke with friend of the pod @mattduss about MAGA at war, the conservative movement's long-held fantasies about Iran, Israel's destructive aims, the feckless opposition, and where things are headed. Link below.

The point of calling a bombing campaign “not politically correct” is to make empathy itself illegitimate. Once mourning dead children is reframed as softness, there’s no floor. Anything can be justified as long as objecting to it can be painted as weakness.

Follow the money The Coinbase CEO met with Trump at the WH & hours later Trump attacked banks for opposing stablecoin yields His family has made hundreds of millions from World Liberty Financial, which issues USD1 —a stablecoin that benefits directly! Corruption in plain sight

Striking image from the new Anthropic labor market impact report.

AOC: This is about Congress’ willingness to take on some of the biggest industries that have preyed upon the American people. Everyday working families don’t have big money lobbyists, but big social media companies do, big tech does, big pharma does, big oil does, big tobacco does. And big tobacco was one of the predatory industries that wrote the playbook on how to dupe Congress and how to perpetuate PR campaigns to actually trick the American people. We can all remember how big tobacco originally convinced the American people that smoking was healthy. They suppressed science, suppressed evidence, and then they lobbied Congress to prevent any sort of regulation, and millions of Americans got sick. We found out decades after the fact how dangerous this was. Big oil did the same thing when we found out burning fossil fuels contributed to carbon emissions. Back in the 1970s, Exxon’s internal scientists determined this, and then they sought to bury that evidence. We saw this with opioid manufacturers understanding how addictive their substances were. And now we’re seeing it with social media and big tech.

@McFaul It's a cult.

I honestly am surprised by how the MAGA movement pivoted so quickly from being against forever wars to now cheerleading this war of choice. Trump is right when he said, “MAGA is Trump.” washingtonpost.com/technology/202…

😂 Two weeks. He just lies like you and I breathe air.

😬

I saw a take claiming that Alysa Liu is the embodiment of Nietzsche’s Übermensch. And I think that’s… absolutely fucking right. -Lives from the core of her own values (self-creation) -Walked away at the height of success and returned on her own terms (self-overcoming) -Welcomes and integrates suffering instead of being defined by it (amor fati) -Uses competition to become more fully herself (will to power) -Brings play and infectious joy into a hyper-pressurized arena (“I would only believe in a god who could dance”) -Refuses to be governed by herd mentality -Keeps evolving beyond a static identity -Has unmistakable aesthetic coherence; life as art

🚨 JUST IN: Rep. Tim Burchett drops HILARIOUS RESPONSE to Lindsey Graham calling on President Trump to bomb Lebanon "Lindsey Graham hasn't seen a FIST FIGHT he hasn't wanted to turn into a BOMBING raid! So, I take it with a grain of salt, dude!" Tim's a national treasure 😅

"Disagreeing with the government is the most American thing in the world." Anthropic refused government pressure to deploy AI for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous lethal weapons. It chose principle over profit. We need to see more of this from corporate America.

“I think what Americans intuitively get better than their political elites, their national security elites and even some of their media is this: War is terrible. War has risks - and even if it’s well intentioned on paper, leads to bad outcomes for the Americans who have to fight in it, the American taxpayers who pay for it, and the people on the other end of the war, whom you say you’re trying to help.” - @brhodes

The U.S. thinks the humanoid robotics race is Boston Dynamics vs Unitree. Meanwhile China has dozens of companies shipping humanoid robots that nobody here is paying attention to The numbers tell the story: ~13,000 humanoid robots shipped globally in 2025. Chinese companies made roughly 90% of them. AgiBot shipped 5,168. Unitree shipped 5,500. UBTech shipped 1,000. And those are just the top three. China now has over 150 humanoid robot companies and 330+ unveiled models. Unitree alone plans to ship 20,000 units this year. The Chinese government allocated over $20 billion in subsidies to robotics in late 2024 and early 2025. Provinces are in a "subsidy race," each competing to produce the next national robotics champion. The entire cycle, R&D, supply chain, manufacturing, deployment, is compressed into a single tight loop. Companies go from prototype to factory floor faster than most U.S. startups finish a seed round. I saw this firsthand in Shenzhen. The density is hard to describe until you've walked through it. Factories, component suppliers, assembly lines, test labs, all within a few miles of each other. Someone has an idea in the morning and a working prototype by the afternoon. That's not an exaggeration. That's just how the ecosystem operates when everything is that close together and moving that fast. And there's a dynamic most people aren't thinking about. Robots that build robots is a recursive problem. If China builds a few hundred thousand humanoid robots and those robots help them build a million more, that's not linear scaling, that's full industrial capture. A manufacturing workforce that doesn't age, doesn't strike, and gets cheaper with every unit produced. Every robot off the line teaches the factory something about yield, about process, about cost. The knowledge compounds, and China is 13,000 units into that curve. The U.S. is barely on it. The companies that will matter in humanoid robotics aren't the ones with the best demo. They're the ones building the factory where the process is the product and every unit shipped makes the next one cheaper. Right now, those factories are in China. That should concern everyone

Following the Constitution plays into the hands of the enemy.

@Noahpinion @benthompson @deanwball Then we are no longer a democracy.

Honestly, in the @benthompson vs @deanwball debate, I think Ben is right. There was just no way America -- or any nation-state -- was ever going to let private companies remain in total control of the most powerful weapon ever invented.

A 5% wealth tax is economically equivalent to about a 100% tax on income. This would greatly reduce investment activity and GDP and the income tax revenue it generates. The article doesn't note that such a federal tax on wealth, as opposed to an activity, would be a direct tax and therefore unconstitutional. The article does note that Saez & Zucman - who designed it - think avoidance will be merely 10%. Zucman's home country of France abandoned their broad wealth tax in 2018 because the tax was too difficult to administer and 60,000 millionaires left.