@HackingDave Ignore the above, I just realized the other thing, steering wheel is on the passenger side!
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Steve McGregory
3.6K posts
Steve McGregory
@stevemcgregory
Cyber dude and amateur philosopher. I'm okay if you don't like my thoughts or beliefs.
Austin, TX شامل ہوئے Ağustos 2009
1.2K فالونگ670 فالوورز
@HackingDave Glad I rented a very small vehicle for our upcoming Ireland trip. I’d gone in straight and exited via hatch. I assume you squeezed out through the passenger side?
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Bruh parking in Europe is no joke 🤣🤣 had to wedge my suv into the only spot left
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@BoLoudon I want to know how and why your stupid tweet showed up as a notification for me? I don’t know you or follow you, but this made it onto my X notifications!
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@McGrewSecurity I wish I had not started reading that post..
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Maybe this is why I’ll never be rich but this doesn’t make any fucking sense to me
hunter@hxxntrr
You can walk into any Apple Store in America, buy $50,000 in MacBooks and iPhones on 0% business credit cards, and resell every single item for 85 to 95% of retail on eBay, Swappa, and Facebook Marketplace the same day. Cash in your bank account by Friday This is how people convert 0% credit limits into liquid cash without Plastiq, without Melio, and without paying a 2.85% processing fee The Apple Store accepts credit cards for purchases up to $50,000. No questions. No ID beyond what's needed for Apple Pay. You walk in, buy 8 MacBook Pros at $2,499 each, and walk out with $19,992 on your Chase Ink Business Unlimited at 0% APR List them on eBay as "Brand New Sealed" at $2,199 each. They sell in 24 to 48 hours because sealed Apple products have the highest resale velocity of any consumer electronics on earth. People buy them because they're getting a $300 discount on a product that never goes on sale $2,199 x 8 = $17,592 in eBay revenue eBay + PayPal fees (13%): -$2,287 Your net cash received: $15,305 You spent $19,992 on a credit card. You got $15,305 in cash. You "lost" $4,687 "That's a terrible deal" No. You converted $19,992 in credit into $15,305 in LIQUID CASH at a cost of $4,687. That's a 23.5% conversion fee Plastiq charges 2.85% but has a $100K annual limit and many payees are restricted. Melio charges 2.85% but some payments take 5 to 7 days and large amounts trigger manual review The Apple resale method has: No annual limit (buy as much as they'll sell you) No payment restrictions (it's a retail purchase) No manual review (it's a credit card transaction at a store) Cash in your bank within 3 to 5 days (eBay payouts are fast) And you can improve the conversion rate dramatically: iPhones resell at 92 to 96% of retail (better than MacBooks). A $1,199 iPhone 16 Pro Max sells for $1,050 to $1,100 on Swappa within 48 hours. That's only a 5 to 8% loss after fees iPads resell at 88 to 93% of retail AirPods Max resell at 85 to 90% Apple Watches resell at 82 to 88% The optimal mix for maximum cash extraction: $30,000 in iPhone 16 Pro Max units (25 phones at $1,199): resell at $1,080 avg = $27,000 - 13% fees = $23,490 net. Loss: $6,510 (21.7%) $20,000 in iPad Pro units (10 iPads at $1,999): resell at $1,799 avg = $17,990 - 13% fees = $15,651 net. Loss: $4,349 (21.7%) Total credit card spend: $50,000 Total cash received: $39,141 Conversion rate: 78.3% Effective "fee": 21.7% "21.7% is way worse than Plastiq's 2.85%" Yes. If Plastiq works for your use case, use Plastiq. The Apple method is for when you need: More than $100K liquidated (Plastiq has limits) Cash in 3 days not 7 No paper trail linking credit cards to bank deposits through a payment processor (the cash appears as eBay/PayPal revenue, not as a Plastiq transfer) Amounts above $25K per transaction (Melio flags large single payments) The people doing this at scale aren't converting $50K. They're converting $200K to $500K across multiple Apple Stores, Best Buys, Costcos, and authorized resellers. At that volume they have eBay stores with Top Rated Seller status, which reduces fees to 10.5% and pushes the conversion rate to 82 to 85% There's also the Amazon Retail Arbitrage version: buy Apple products at retail, sell on Amazon as a third-party seller, Amazon pays out every 2 weeks. The conversion rate is similar but Amazon's customer base is willing to pay closer to retail for the Prime badge and the Amazon return policy A guy in our network converts $80K to $100K per month from credit cards to cash using this exact method across Apple, Costco, and Best Buy. His blended conversion rate after eBay fees and marketplace fees: 81%. He converts $100K in credit into $81K in cash every month $81K in cash from $100K in 0% credit. His "cost" of $19K per cycle is his equivalent of a processing fee. He treats it as a cost of capital. $19K to access $81K in free cash for 15 months = effective annualized cost of 18.6% "18.6% is expensive" Compared to what? An MCA (merchant cash advance) charges 40 to 150% effective APR A hard money loan charges 12 to 18% + 2 to 3 points A personal loan at 680 score charges 15 to 24% APR A credit card balance at standard APR: 24.99% 18.6% annualized for UNSECURED CASH with NO APPLICATION PROCESS, NO UNDERWRITING, and NO REPAYMENT SCHEDULE beyond minimums at 0% for 15 months is cheaper than almost every alternative source of liquid capital for someone without assets to collateralize And the credit card rewards on $100K in Apple Store purchases: roughly $2,000 to $3,000 in points. That drops the effective cost to 15.6 to 16.6% btw the IRS doesn't track retail purchases on credit cards. The purchase shows up as "APPLE STORE #R123" on your credit card statement. The eBay revenue shows up as income from your eBay seller account. If your LLC is the eBay seller, the purchase is a "business inventory expense" and the revenue is "product sales." The accounting is clean this is the emergency version of the liquidation play. when you need cash in 72 hours, can't wait for Plastiq, and need more than $25K. you walk into Apple, buy everything they'll sell you, walk out, list it on eBay, and have cash in your bank by Friday. the most liquid asset in America isn't gold or bitcoin. it's a sealed iPhone lmfaooo (we get 700+ score business owners $100K-$250K in 0% business funding. how you liquidate is your business. we build the capital stack. link in bio)
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We never actually own property, the government owns and leases to us until someone else leases it.
Libertarian Party@LPNational
Permits are a violation of your rights.
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@gothburz @TheEconomist The exterior lighting on my house has been automated for about 10 years. The garage lights were not on last evening and my wife asked me how to turn them on. "The light switch, my dear."
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This is incorrect. I have used AI for fourteen hours a day for nineteen months and I am operating at a cognitive level your researchers cannot measure because their instruments were designed for biological thinking. I think in prompts now. This is faster.
Before AI, I could hold three ideas in my head at once. Now I hold zero, because holding ideas is storage and I am not a storage device. I am an orchestration layer. I route cognition to the appropriate model and receive outputs. This is what the prefrontal cortex was trying to do for 200,000 years with blood and glucose. I have replaced blood and glucose with an API key. The API key does not get tired. The API key does not have emotions about its sister's birthday.
Last Tuesday I tried to write a birthday card for my sister without AI. A cognitive fitness exercise. I sat at the kitchen table for forty minutes. I wrote "Dear Sarah." Then nothing. Not writer's block. The mechanism for generating an unprompted sentence was gone. I no longer operate at the sentence level. I operate at the intent level. I transmitted the intent to Claude. Claude produced a card so warm my sister called me crying. Most thoughtful card I'd ever written. She is correct. The thoughts are just manufactured off-site now, like everything else in a mature supply chain.
My wife asked what I was thinking about. I said "nothing" and it was true. Not in a peaceful way. In an infrastructure way. There was no local processing occurring. I was between queries. She asked if that scared me. I opened Claude and asked if it should. Claude said no. I told my wife. She did not find this reassuring. I think she is running on legacy architecture and is frightened of the upgrade.
I would explain further but I need to check something first.
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Prolonged AI use may make it harder to think critically and creatively, recent research suggests. But there are ways to keep the brain fit economist.com/science-and-te…
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Steve McGregory ری ٹویٹ کیا
I didn't even know the human body could move like that
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@JBONAMASSA Tough choice between 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s. I think 50’s, then the 70’s, and then 60’s. 50’s was hardcore transition from prior decades and music. Same for 70’s, eg. punk and disco mix brought us the 80’s which was very awesome.
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Arguably, 1970's
Eric Alper 🎧@ThatEricAlper
Which decade gave us the greatest music of all time?
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I can 100% agree with the findings and practices being used. I’ve only been using AI to help code for about a year now and I have experienced all the fears. My practice today is highly controlled and managed by specific strategies to maintain that control. I still get burned here and there, about a 50/50 split between my fault and the AI ignoring my specific instructions.
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@war24182236 I've been in that area twice this year, both times in March. and have seen a couple of people in this "shape". It's a very sad sight to see anyone in this vegetative mode. This drug needs to be vanquished from earth.
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Is piracy not theft? I treat theft the same as murder. If you’re advocating for theft, you’re far from a justified stance. It seems like you’re honing in on IP piracy, and fighting protective measures which I would agree are being abused by powerful structures that have no creativity other than their money and ability to write contracts limiting others from benefiting from the IP they “own”.
Also, I’ll admit that I didn’t read all of your text as I felt I had the picture about halfway through it.
I’m a creative person, a bit talented, and able to produce novel works. I don’t necessarily want others not to benefit from my work, but at the same time I’m not a force of nature and I don’t have the necessary resources to put it to work for myself without concern of a large organization taking it and turning it into their profit. I need some protection from them and people who are not as capable as me. How do you propose it work?
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@anton_chuvakin @UK_Daniel_Card I did admit that I’m a bit grumpy right now.
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@stevemcgregory @UK_Daniel_Card No, we meant the GRC tools, not the process. You know "read Access database and make a pie chart" kinda tools :-(
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If somebody comes to you and says "we will #vibe code a replacement for our GRC tool?" you say
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@anton_chuvakin @UK_Daniel_Card My bad, I attacked an innocent bystander…
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To replace something that mostly doesn't exist at 99% of businesses is not straightforward.
GRC is the most incomplete security process in the book. "Ensuring Regulatory Compliance" = "Paying for expensive consultants to get a certificate that does ~nothing for security". Just another stem of a tree of misdirection.
I'm a bit grumpy at the moment, and I think this will offend GRC and the people who work in that profession.
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@CuriosityonX @anton_chuvakin Looks peaceful and quiet. And bearing, and inhospitable, and unlikely to ever host humans for any extended period of time.
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People don't realize how absurd this view actually is.
A camera. On a robot. On Mars.
Built by humans on a planet 140 million miles away, launched on a rocket, landed using a sky crane, and now driving across an alien desert taking pictures so detailed you can count the rocks.
100 years ago, your great-grandparents thought airplanes were a miracle.
You are scrolling past Mars on your phone.
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@OnlyBangersEth That cow or another one is now stuck because the UPS driver only did half the job. That patch of green grass on the other side of the fence is way too tempting. Someone needs to pull it out so no cow tries to eat it.
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When humans stop thinking, they will have far less understanding of the decisions; no?
Andrej Karpathy@karpathy
This is the the quote I've been citing a lot recently.
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@karpathy Well, I'd argue that a lot of understanding is being bypassed by vibe coding or other outsourcing of efforts to AI. Both are concerning to me, but the latter is a tiny bit more dangerous.
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This is the the quote I've been citing a lot recently.
kache@yacineMTB
you can outsource your thinking but you cannot outsource your understanding
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