Mo Hanaf @Mohanaff

Most impressive thing I’ve ever seen. I would like to invest my entire net worth in Cognition now

Aside from the shocking substance of this story, what's amazing is how it was unearthed by Cole. The short version: The Russians were able to penetrate Jared Kushner's iPhone and extract screenshots and data. Then, a Russian intel official was captured by Dutch intelligence (!) and flipped. The Dutch believed Kushner may have been acting on behalf of Russia, so pursued him as an intel target and were able to get into his phone. They did not find any evidence of Russian collusion, instead they watched him moving hundreds of millions of dollars from slush funds created by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, one of them housed in Israel's central bank. Incredible reporting, and if Democrats have any sense, they will pull on these threads and learn a lot more about this money.

Ryan Grim @ryangrim

2 days ago

Explosive story many years in the making, now out in Vanity Fair by Matthew Cole (who will be on Breaking Points next week, and publishing soon in @DropSiteNews): Saudi Arabia and the UAE set up multi-billion slush funds for Jared Kushner to use. Iran-Contra 2 here (except

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Haven’t seen $META Zuck be so cocky ever. Seems we up for a big surpise if that Watermelon is as big as Zuck is saying.

I never knew this was how our states got their abbreviations! 😅 This guy is hilarious!! 😂🤣 I was laughing out loud!😂 Enjoy, if you need a laugh!👊🏻😂

The Man City scandal explained 💰⚽️

Once met a prospective LP. Minutes before the call, I looked him up and saw he was a schoolteacher... I was confused. His dad had invested in the Home Depot IPO and held on. Every $1K invested then is worth ~$17M today, beating Apple ($4.5M)

Acquired Podcast @AcquiredFM

a month ago

Home Depot is a much bigger business than you think it is. And unbelievably, it has generated the highest total return of any company in the S&P 500 since it's IPO in 1981. Episode live in your podcast players now!

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Strong liability enforcement could be helpful in the AI debate. If your agent swarm goes rogue, you’re liable. If your weakly protected model gets jailbroken, you’re liable. If you serve a weakly protected OSS model, you’re liable.

Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead. You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement. I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible. But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier. Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want. Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well. So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it. If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.

🦔Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told an audience yesterday that he intervenes in markets with "asymmetric information" and dared traders to bet against him. "I am the house now." Today Treasury announced it will buy back up to $6 billion in longer-term government debt, triple the normal level. Three weeks ago it was $2 billion. Two weeks ago it was $4 billion. Now it's $6 billion. The market responded by selling bonds. The 10-year yield rose to 4.841%. Government debt is past $40 trillion and crude oil topped $100 a barrel today. His former mentor Stanley Druckenmiller said publicly that Bessent has gone too far. My Take I think Bessent knows $6 billion doesn't move a $40 trillion market, but the government can't afford 5% yields because the interest payments alone would eat the budget. He has to try to push yields down even when the tool isn't big enough for the job. He said "I am the house" yesterday and today the house tripled its bet and the table moved against him. Borrowing costs for mortgages and car loans follow Treasury yields, so when yields go up your next mortgage rate or car payment goes up with them. If the Treasury keeps escalating buybacks to force yields down, they have to issue new short-term debt to pay for it, which adds to the total debt pile and eventually pushes prices up. So either yields stay high and you pay more to borrow, or the government prints its way out and your groceries cost more. I don't see a version of this where us regular folk don't feel it. Hedgie🤗

Obama’s former deputy national security advisor just exposed how the International Criminal Court actually works: The ICC was built to go after African dictators. That’s who they actually prosecute. Then they indicted Putin — and Washington celebrated. “Standing up for international law.” Then the exact same prosecutor charged Netanyahu with the exact same crimes against humanity. America immediately sanctioned the ICC and their families. One set of rules for African leaders. One set of rules for Putin when we hate him. A completely different set of rules the second it touches Israel. This was never about justice. It was about who is allowed to be above the law. Clip from Hasan Minhaj’s interview with @brhodes.

The sociologist Susan Pickard chose career over motherhood. She writes about being the last of her line. compactmag.com/article/daught…

Van Jones: Why can you spend $60 million and get whooped like this? The Democratic party is now Blockbuster. These kids are Netflix.

Warner Bros lost $50 million on Tenet. Then they made a decision that has sent $1.2 billion to their rival Universal so far. Tenet came out in September 2020, mid-pandemic. It made $365M on a $200M budget. Not enough. Warner Bros panicked. Three months later they announced every 2021 movie would go straight to HBO Max the same day it hit theaters. They didn't warn a single director. Christopher Nolan had made them The Dark Knight, Inception, and Interstellar over 20 years. He said filmmakers went to bed working for the greatest studio and woke up working for "the worst streaming service." Then he took his next movie shopping. His asking price was simple. Pay for the film, promise it plays in theaters only, and give me 20% of every ticket. Universal said yes. That movie was Oppenheimer. $976 million. Best Picture. Warner Bros begged him to come back. He said no. His new film The Odyssey just opened to $264 million, the biggest debut of his career. The cheapest thing Warner Bros ever lost was $50 million.

𝔰𝔢𝔩𝔢𝔠𝔱𝔬𝔯 @SelectedCinema

3 months ago

Tenet (2020) Christopher Nolan

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I’ve worked on Iran for nearly 20 years. Our options are never great, but I’ve never seen things this bad. For the first time in my career, I’m at a loss. When this war began, I warned that Iran would likely emerge weakened but more aggressive and risk-tolerant—leaving the region trapped in a cycle of military clashes and chronic instability. That has happened. What I underestimated was the leverage Iran would gain through its stranglehold over the Strait of Hormuz. For a moment, the MOU offered a possible way out. It was deeply flawed, but better than the alternatives. Then vague terms and shoddy negotiating caused it to collapse: Iran believed it could retain some control over the Strait; Washington believed the Strait would reopen to international shipping. But the fundamental problem wasn’t the negotiation. It was Trump’s catastrophic decision to go to war in the first place. The result: higher oil prices, economic shocks, depleted US missile-defense stocks, immense regional damage and civilian suffering, alienated allies and very little achieved in return. So what now? We could pay Iran off through sanctions relief, oil exports and access to the international banking system. But after surviving forty days of war, Tehran is angry, distrustful and convinced it holds the stronger hand. Its price is so high – and so humiliating – that Trump will never accept it. We could escalate militarily, which is what the US is doing. But bombing has not produced meaningful Iranian concessions, and Trump appears unwilling to bear the costs of the maximalist alternatives. More pressure means an expensive, dangerous and potentially endless war, with serious risks to US forces and the entire region as we tragically saw this weekend. And it has little chance of success. Or we could encourage the Gulf states to negotiate a regional arrangement. That may ultimately be the most promising path, but the Gulf states are divided, this remains fundamentally a US-Iran conflict, and any agreement will require major American concessions while leaving Iran strategically stronger than it was before the war. So this isn’t very appealing and hard to get to as well. The likeliest outcome is therefore that we are looking at a new normal: recurring US-Iran clashes, periodic American or Israeli strikes on Iran’s nuclear program, Iranian control over the SOH, higher oil prices and a larger, longer-lasting American military presence in the Middle East. But since the costs of all out escalation are too high both sides try to keep it from going there, though there is always a risk. Iran’s leverage will eventually depreciate as countries build pipelines, diversify energy supplies and establish alternative trade routes. But that could take years. Eventually, exhaustion may produce a deal. Iran may decide that controlling the Strait while living under blockade is unsustainable. Washington may accept that it must offer more. The Gulf states may finally unite around a workable diplomatic framework. But not soon. Trump took a situation in which better options plainly existed, started an unnecessary war and produced a strategic disaster that will take years to unwind. For now, we are all stuck with this mess.

A Russian saying on nostalgia: "The past is more unpredictable than the future."

starmer giving off a very “retiring headmaster, last week of term” energy rn

Politics UK @PolitlcsUK

4 months ago

🚨 BREAKING: Keir Starmer has now stepped in and is "urgently looking" at ways to allow all pubs to stay open for England's 1am match against Mexico on Monday

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🟥🇺🇲🇸🇬Un jour, la CIA tenta de recruter le chef des services de sécurité intérieure de Singapour. L’agent américain chargé de l’opération fut arrêté sur-le-champ. À Washington, la panique fut immédiate. Pour étouffer l’affaire, un émissaire de haut rang fut dépêché en urgence à Singapour. Dans la plus grande discrétion, il proposa à Lee Kuan Yew 3,3 millions de dollars afin d’acheter le silence. Lee Kuan Yew refusa net. Froidement, il formula une contre-proposition qui claqua comme un rappel à l’ordre : Singapour n’avait pas besoin de pots-de-vin, mais de 33 millions de dollars d’aide économique. Cinq ans plus tard, il décida de rendre l’affaire publique. Le Département d’État américain nia aussitôt. C’est là que l’offense devint double. D’abord parce qu’ils avaient cru que les dirigeants de Singapour étaient à vendre. Ensuite, parce qu’en niant les faits, ils traitaient Lee Kuan Yew de menteur. Alors, il convoqua la presse et posa un ultimatum sans détour : si les États-Unis persistaient dans le déni, les documents et les enregistrements seraient rendus publics. Quelques heures plus tard, Washington recula. Le Département d’État reconnut intégralement la véracité de sa version. Cette histoire rappelle une vérité trop souvent oubliée : la souveraineté d’un pays ne se mesure pas à sa taille, mais au caractère de ceux qui le dirigent. Quand un État se respecte, même les empires finissent par reculer.’🇺🇲🟥🇸🇬

When George W Bush won re-election in 2004, he said: “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and I intend to spend it.” I’ve waited 20 years plus for a Dem to take a similar approach to spending capital. Tonight we saw @ZohranKMamdani do it. 3 for 3, about to be.

Some common-sense things Trump said today that were nevertheless shocking: Everybody else has ballistic missiles, why can’t Iran? The frozen money belonged to Iran, and the U.S. needed to release it otherwise nobody would trust the dollar system. Why should we steal their money? Neighboring countries use nuclear power for electricity, why can’t Iran? Israel shouldn’t knock down entire buildings in Beirut every time a drone or two crashes harmlessly in the desert. Trump would’ve become Herbert Hoover in a few weeks once oil ran out and the market crashed. He had no choice but to end the war.

The predicament Trump is in, and has been since he started the Iran War with Netanyahu, illustrates why it was so stupid and destructive to start this war in the first place. From the start, there were only two real options: 1) Take seriously all the stated war aims and try to fulfill them, which would require a protracted, self-destructive, devastating, years-long war of the kind Trump spent a decade vowing to avoid, or, 2) End the war quickly and prematurely, and then have to scurry around to find some way to claim that the US "won", which would -- at a minimum -- force Trump to credibly claim he got more than Obama's JCPOA gave, thus justifying all the massive bloodshed, instability and cost from the war. If reports are correct (and it's a big "if"), Trump is choosing option (2). But his case that he actually won anything consequential beyond what the Obama Deal provided is close to laughable, while the losses to the US (and wins for Iran) are self-evident.