Sergey Kotlov

🇵🇹Portugal in 2021: "Invest EUR 500k, naturalize in 5 years" 🇵🇹 in 2025: "We took 4 years to process your application. We put golden visa investors at the back of the line for ideological reasons. But don't worry, we'll count your wait time toward your naturalization timeline." 🇵🇹 in 2026: "We changed the law, so now you'll only be eligible for naturalization in 2035, and the time spent waiting won't count after all. Oh, and the processing time for naturalization is itself another 3 years. So you can look forward to a Portuguese passport in 2038, 17 years after you invested. Unless, of course, we change something else by then. Anyway, thanks for the half a million euros."

@yongfook Depends on what kind of context you’re giving. I created a skill Daily brief which takes my calendar, email and gives overview in a specific format, extract tasks and write them down. I could write the context every time but it’s tedious

Are Claude Skills really necessary? Given the entirety of everything it knows, it seems moot to give it a tiny prod of extra context for certain things. FWIW I'm using Claude to code Ruby and it's pretty much nailing every request with Opus 4.5

My accountant recently told me I owe €35k to one of my companies. I knew it was a mistake but proving it meant checking a year of transactions and invoices. So I instructed Claude Code to go through it all. 1 hour later - sorted out. The irony? It took me more time to format the results for the accountant to digest :)

A photograph (yes, a photo!) by Egyptian artist Karim Amr

The secret power of agentic coding is that something like “update all page headers in this app to use proper icons” is prompted in 10sec and takes 3h to code by hand. Using agents is delegating to competency, as @jasonfried said recently. Most people just never had that before.

Using a mocap suit to kick yourself in the balls with a robot is a great metaphor to close out 2025.

I have reviewed the article “The Bear in the Baltics: Reassessing the Russian Threat in Estonia,” published by the European Council on Foreign Relations. Its authors, Jennifer Kavanagh and Jeremy Shapiro, conclude that Russia is currently incapable of carrying out a successful armed attack against Estonia and that the level of threat is exaggerated. This is precisely where the core problem of this analysis begins. The entire argument is built on theoretical models, force-balance calculations, and deterrence concepts, while completely ignoring the decisive factor of modern warfare: accumulated combat experience under real battlefield conditions. Today, only two states in the world possess actual experience in conducting high-intensity interstate war — Ukraine and Russia. All others, including Estonia and the vast majority of NATO members, rely on exercises, staff simulations, and doctrinal assumptions that have not been tested in full-scale combat. Estonia, despite its high level of preparation, lacks practical experience in: •conducting operations under conditions of sustained enemy artillery dominance and high fire density; •operating forces in an environment of persistent surveillance and strike capability enabled by tactical and operational-level UAVs; •maintaining logistics and command-and-control resilience under systematic fire strikes against rear infrastructure; •executing defensive operations and maneuver while continuously absorbing losses, degradation of units, and uninterrupted fire pressure; •adapting tactics, force organization, and command systems in real time, rather than after a completed training cycle. This is not a criticism of the Estonian Defence Forces. It is a statement of fact: combat experience cannot be substituted by doctrines, exercises, or alliance membership. A separate and particularly dangerous error in the article is the emphasis on Russia’s “exhaustion” through personnel losses. Russia is structurally insensitive to human losses as a constraint on warfare. Its military-political system is historically designed to: •sustain mass mobilization; •accept extremely high casualties as permissible; •substitute quality with quantity through forced rotation and replacement. Those who treat manpower losses as a decisive deterrent factor for Russia project Western assumptions onto an adversary to whom they do not apply — and this is precisely how wars are lost. The greatest damage done by this article is that it fosters a false sense of strategic confidence. It reassures decision-makers that Russia is “not ready,” “not capable,” or “will not dare.” This same logic underpinned strategic failures in both 2014 and 2022. The most dangerous assumption made by the authors is that war is the outcome of a rational cost-benefit calculation. In reality, Russia wages war according to a logic of political inevitability, imperial revisionism, and a willingness to accept virtually any cost. Russia will attack — this is not a question of capability, but of timing and conditions. And the longer European decision-making centers rely on such reassuring, detached analyses, the more severe the shock will be when reality disproves them.

This is what happens when someone genuinely loves their work.

@SEllisonJ @marceldirsus Yeah, yeah, and Ukraine attacked Russia

@marceldirsus I seem to remember that it was the EU that attacked an American company.

Great power competition, but instead of taking on China the Americans try to destroy the European Union

Oh, the irony! Dmitriev uses VPN to access X in order to criticize the EU for censorship against X. He needs to use VPN because X is banned in russia.

@gregisenberg To the point! Just yesterday I told my growth guy “I have a constant feeling that we’re missing something. Like we’re almost there, but not yet”. And he replied, “yeap the same” 😀

the most painful yet thrilling part of being a founder is how close or far you are from "it working" without knowing it

Reminder that despite the Russian-backed kleptocrat Victor Orban having now looted Hungary into its new position as poorest nation in the EU, he and his entire circle live like golden czars, with Orban himself now having stolen a €500 million palace.

In a UN speech today, President Trump said that "all of these [climate] predictions were wrong". Back in 2019 I led a research effort to digitize old climate model projections and assess how well they did. Turns out they got future warming pretty spot on!

It’s not selfish to take care of yourself and live a fun, wealthy, happy life; it’s actually selfish to not have your life together and be a constant burden on everyone around you, either because you are constantly low-energy, emotionally unstable, or financially irresponsible.

@nikitabier And now Zuck knows your opening bid

If Meta offered me $1.5B, I would turn it down too. I love being yelled at by millions of people too much.

Two weeks ago, I said EU-Inc might need your help. That moment is now. 🥁 We need you to submit feedback to the European Commission on what startups need. To get you up to speed what happened since last time: The EU Parliament published their own suggestion how a pan-european legal entity standard should look like. How you ask? By introducing 27 different entities, instead of one. By improving as little as possible, keeping as much legacy and differences as possible, and hot-patching on top of them in different ways. Why did they publish that? No idea. It's unusual at this moment. Likely Brussels-internal power-plays. But the timing is perfect, because the European Commission (the guys actually in charge of this) asked for feedback publicly now. How should a pan-European legal-entity look like? Our answer is simple: 1) ONE EUROPEAN STANDARD So that investors know how it works and you can easily raise globally, so that ecosystems can form around a centralized registry, so that stock-options can be done europe-wide, etc etc 2) FOR EVERYONE Because nobody knows, how startups look like in future and we don't want to have governments niche down access to the entity in oblivion. A downside-compromise of this is btw that we do push not standardization of employment and taxes. I explain the details in the blog post Here your task: 1) Go here to the feedback website 2) Login (they support Google Auth btw which is funny imho) 3) Write a few lines what you expect a true standard for startups should support 4) Share this with friends, coworkers, etc and ask them to also fill it out. The form needs like 1-2 minutes. If we hit a few hundred feedback submissions we already have the most feedbacked consultation in this field ever. If we hit 1000 we break the bank and they can't avoid talking to the startup ecosystem about this. 🏴‍☠️ Feel free to name drop us. Us asking for your support isn't even cheating the system. That's how this process is meant to be done. Politics is weird. 🙈 Feedback Website link – 2 Minutes of your time max. ec.europa.eu/info/law/bette… Please like & share! 🙏

The mass kidnapping of Ukrainian children by Russia is an atrocity. We can't accept a world where children are used as pawns in negotiations. Sen. Grassley and I introduced legislation to support Ukraine’s tireless efforts to bring them home and hold the perpetrators accountable.

A horrifying scene - residential and commercial areas in Kyiv are burning after a massive wave of drone and missile attacks. This is a deliberate strike to terrorize and intimidate Ukrainians. Share this, so the world sees what Russia thinks of peace Video credit: @KaterynaLis

World's first autonomous delivery of a car! This Tesla drove itself from Gigafactory Texas to its new owner's home ~30min away — crossing parking lots, highways & the city to reach its new owner

Pretty useful map of North America labelled by similar European climates: