Dimitris Vardoulakis

If you paid even a penny in federal income tax last year, you paid more than: Tesla Southwest Disney Live Nation HP United PayPal CVS Health Palantir Citigroup PG&E 3M That's right. They paid $0 in federal income tax. It's time for big corporations to pay their fair share.

If you can't see we're in a five alarm fire, then I don't know what planet you are on.

A father playing and making duet on The Beatles' Don't Let Me Down with his child might be the best video you'll watch today.

I’ve covered Eric Swawell since he was a member of the Dublin City Council. Shortly after being elected to Congress in 2013, his behavior towards women was known by all levels of our local government and the Alameda County Democratic Party.

@NittaSatya @prfsanjeevarora I was at Google at the time when the controversy happened where an engineer claimed lamda was "sentient". It was an ok chatbot, but nowhere near chatgpt, not even close.

@prfsanjeevarora @prfsanjeevarora they did have LAMDA which they chose not to release.

I don't think Google had a chatGPT equivalent in late 2022. (But I agree that if they would have had one, they would probably not have released it.)

HOW IS NOBODY TALKING ABOUT THIS!?!?!?!? THEY PRINTED 5 BILLION OF THEIR OWN TOKENS THEN WITHDREW IT AS USDC!?!?!?!??!

Preemptively stating that you are going to pardon your entire staff and yourself before leaving office is one of the biggest admissions of guilt I have ever seen.

What an odd way to admit that your staff are committing crimes, and to let them know they won’t get in trouble when they commit more.

Pete Hegseth has cut ALL educational funds for active-duty service members at Harvard and Princeton (despite him attending these schools) in favor of Christian-affiliated colleges. Our service members deserve the support they need to finish their studies, regardless of which school they attend or their religious beliefs. I’m again calling for Hegseth’s resignation on the grounds of limiting academic freedom and disregarding the separation of Church and State.

This is a threat of genocide and merits removal from office. The President’s mental faculties are collapsing and cannot be trusted. To every individual in the President’s chain of command: You have a duty to refuse illegal orders. That includes carrying out this threat.

Applebaum's piece is worth reading slowly because the specific details are doing work that the summary can't. Danish military commanders - inside a NATO alliance the United States founded - had to sit in a room and war-game whether their forces would shoot down American planes and kill American soldiers. Some of them still haven't fully recovered from running that exercise. The most popular app in Denmark during Applebaum's visit was one that identifies American products so users know not to buy them. NATO has invoked Article 5 exactly once in its history. On behalf of the United States. After September 11th. Allied troops went to Afghanistan and some of them died there. Trump told reporters those allies "stayed a little back, a little off the front lines." The families of soldiers who didn't come back heard that. Now Trump is in the middle of a war in the Persian Gulf with the Strait of Hormuz locked, oil prices spiking, and he's telling NATO allies - the same ones he insulted and tariffed and threatened - that he's "demanding" they come help solve a problem his own decisions helped create. Applebaum's conclusion is precise: he doesn't connect what he does on one day to what happens weeks later. Allied leaders have drawn their conclusions. The rupture, as Mark Carney called it, isn't coming. It already happened.

Trump's character, corruption, and cognitive trajectory were well-established. You could sooner criticize the scorpion for stinging. But the Republicans who ignored it, enabled him, and are, even now, still his sycophants deserve all condemnation and removal from public life.

Fucking outrageous. And highly illegal. "Trump has grifted his entire life. Now he’s just taking it. The State Department transferred $1.25 billion in foreign aid to Trump’s Board of Peace, pulling $1 billion from international disaster assistance, $200 million from peacekeeping operations, and $50 million from international organizations. Money that Congress authorized for hurricanes and refugees, moved without a congressional vote, into a fund that Trump created by executive order and controls personally. When reporters asked the State Department about it, a spokesperson said they had nothing to announce at this time. The Board of Peace has one defining characteristic. Trump controls it forever. He named himself chairman for life. No audits. No transparency requirements. No conflict of interest rules. Countries pay $1 billion into a fund he runs to get a seat at the table. It has transferred nothing to Gaza, disclosed nothing about its spending, and received $1.25 billion of your disaster relief money without a word of explanation. When he leaves the White House he keeps the fund. That is not a loophole. That is the design." He’s Not Grifting Anymore. He’s Just Taking It. open.substack.com/pub/meidastouc…

Our president is a deranged lunatic and should clearly be removed from office. He’s only there because of Republican Members of Congress.

One month after starting the war in Iran, this is the statement of the President of the United States on Easter Sunday. These are the ravings of a dangerous and mentally unbalanced individual. Congress has got to act NOW. End this war.

Trump’s kids buy into drone companies Trump cancels existing drone contracts Trump’s kids’ companies get military contracts Trump starts wars Trump’s kids’ try to sell their drones to the countries being attacked because of Trump’s wars 👉🏻 This is what corruption looks like.

The President starts a war with Iran. Now, his family looks to profit from it. The corruption is enough to make you sick.

This is an absolutely rotten, evil thing to say. “Stone Age” implies targeting civilians—the innocent men, women, and children he is supposedly trying to liberate from a brutal, oppressive regime. That would be a war crime.

The Army Chief of Staff, a combat veteran with tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, asked Pete Hegseth why he was blocking the promotions of two Black officers and two female officers who had earned them. Hegseth refused to answer. Then he fired him. Nine U.S. officials told NBC News that Hegseth has blocked or delayed promotions for more than a dozen Black and female senior officers across all four branches of the military. Hegseth has now fired or sidelined more than a dozen generals and admirals. He is an out-of-control, unqualified former TV host and nobody in the Republican Party will say a word about it because they don’t want to make Trump angry. nbcnews.com/politics/natio…

@karpathy Reminiscent of Tim Berners Lee's Solid vision en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_(we…

LLM Knowledge Bases Something I'm finding very useful recently: using LLMs to build personal knowledge bases for various topics of research interest. In this way, a large fraction of my recent token throughput is going less into manipulating code, and more into manipulating knowledge (stored as markdown and images). The latest LLMs are quite good at it. So: Data ingest: I index source documents (articles, papers, repos, datasets, images, etc.) into a raw/ directory, then I use an LLM to incrementally "compile" a wiki, which is just a collection of .md files in a directory structure. The wiki includes summaries of all the data in raw/, backlinks, and then it categorizes data into concepts, writes articles for them, and links them all. To convert web articles into .md files I like to use the Obsidian Web Clipper extension, and then I also use a hotkey to download all the related images to local so that my LLM can easily reference them. IDE: I use Obsidian as the IDE "frontend" where I can view the raw data, the the compiled wiki, and the derived visualizations. Important to note that the LLM writes and maintains all of the data of the wiki, I rarely touch it directly. I've played with a few Obsidian plugins to render and view data in other ways (e.g. Marp for slides). Q&A: Where things get interesting is that once your wiki is big enough (e.g. mine on some recent research is ~100 articles and ~400K words), you can ask your LLM agent all kinds of complex questions against the wiki, and it will go off, research the answers, etc. I thought I had to reach for fancy RAG, but the LLM has been pretty good about auto-maintaining index files and brief summaries of all the documents and it reads all the important related data fairly easily at this ~small scale. Output: Instead of getting answers in text/terminal, I like to have it render markdown files for me, or slide shows (Marp format), or matplotlib images, all of which I then view again in Obsidian. You can imagine many other visual output formats depending on the query. Often, I end up "filing" the outputs back into the wiki to enhance it for further queries. So my own explorations and queries always "add up" in the knowledge base. Linting: I've run some LLM "health checks" over the wiki to e.g. find inconsistent data, impute missing data (with web searchers), find interesting connections for new article candidates, etc., to incrementally clean up the wiki and enhance its overall data integrity. The LLMs are quite good at suggesting further questions to ask and look into. Extra tools: I find myself developing additional tools to process the data, e.g. I vibe coded a small and naive search engine over the wiki, which I both use directly (in a web ui), but more often I want to hand it off to an LLM via CLI as a tool for larger queries. Further explorations: As the repo grows, the natural desire is to also think about synthetic data generation + finetuning to have your LLM "know" the data in its weights instead of just context windows. TLDR: raw data from a given number of sources is collected, then compiled by an LLM into a .md wiki, then operated on by various CLIs by the LLM to do Q&A and to incrementally enhance the wiki, and all of it viewable in Obsidian. You rarely ever write or edit the wiki manually, it's the domain of the LLM. I think there is room here for an incredible new product instead of a hacky collection of scripts.