Kaarne Marras retweeted
Ukraine hits another Yandex data center in Russia and Cloudflare data shows Russian bot traffic dropping dramatically. Might have an impact right before the November elections.
Kaarne Marras retweeted
If confirmed, this is telling: Russian data centres get hit, and online activity around AfD suddenly plummets. 📉
So much talk about German patriotism… then the connection from Russia goes down. 🤔🇷🇺
Kaarne Marras retweeted
I don’t think people realize just how pro-Russia the AfD actually is, so here’s a non-comprehensive list:
- The AfD has consistently opposed sanctions against Russia and German military aid to Ukraine.
- AfD politicians have blamed the US and NATO for Russia’s invasion, with party leader Tino Chrupalla claiming that the US “provoked Russia.”
- In 2022, five AfD politicians planned a trip to Russian-occupied Donetsk and Luhansk. The trip was cancelled after public outrage.
- AfD politician Steffen Kotré appeared on Vladimir Solovyov’s Kremlin propaganda show, arguing against German military aid to Ukraine.
- AfD politicians participated alongside Sahra Wagenknecht’s movement in “anti-war” protests calling for an end to sanctions, an end to military aid to Ukraine and restored relations with Russia. Leaked documents later revealed that building such an “anti-war coalition” in Germany was one of the Kremlin’s goals.
- Russian documents described AfD politician Markus Frohnmaier as an “absolutely controlled MP” and discussed providing him with “material and media support.”
- A joint investigation by The Insider and Der Spiegel revealed that AfD parliamentary aide Vladimir Sergienko worked with an FSB officer to try to stop or delay German weapons deliveries to Ukraine. Sergienko also funneled Russian money and instructions to AfD politicians for a lawsuit against the German government over weapons deliveries to Ukraine.
- AfD politicians have repeatedly travelled to Russia, including trips to Moscow and Kaliningrad.
- Hans-Thomas Tillschneider declared after Russia’s full-scale invasion that “Russia is defending itself!”
- Tillschneider has written columns for the Russian newspaper Vedomosti, attended conferences in Moscow, congratulated Putin on his sham 2024 election victory and celebrated Putin’s birthday at the Russian Embassy in Berlin.
- Tillschneider also helped shape the AfD’s 2026 Saxony-Anhalt programme, which calls for ending sanctions against Russia, restoring Nord Stream, expanding Russian-language teaching in German schools and reviving student exchanges with Russia.
- AfD politician Tim Schramm volunteered to fight for Ukraine against Russia. The AfD’s NRW leadership responded by launching proceedings to expel him from the party.
- AfD politician Jörg Dornau co-owns an agricultural company in Belarus that used prisoners, particularly political prisoners, as forced labor. The EU later sanctioned the company over its use of forced labor.
- Chechnya-born AfD member Noah Krieger, originally named Murad Dadaev, travelled to Chechnya, attended parliament with Ramzan Kadyrov, met regime figures and took part in Kalashnikov training. Months later, he appeared in Russian-occupied Ukraine alongside Chechen Akhmat fighters, carrying a weapon and declaring: “I am in Ukraine and stand for Russia.”
Kaarne Marras retweeted
Apparently the horseshoe theory has a free speech edition.
Very liberal and very conservative Americans are dramatically more comfortable discussing controversial issues than moderates.
But there’s a catch.
Kaarne Marras retweeted
A fun game is to mark when Trump became president on this chart
It's exactly where you think
At this rate, vivax malaria will probably be found first in the Reflecting Pool.
Kaarne Marras retweeted
It did this while also making no impact in government spending.
I think there's a good case for DOGE as the least effective initiative in US history.
Elon Musk bragged about feeding USAID into the "wood chipper" but now he pretends that whatever happens as a result isn't his fault.
If DOGE had saved the federal government billions of dollars, you can be sure he would be taking credit for that.
But somehow he's not responsible for the consequences of eliminating these programs?
Today at @TheArgumentMag we published a thorough explanation for why we should hold @elonmusk responsible for the deaths of *at best* 700,000 people.
theargumentmag.com/p/elon-mu…
Never has Trump delivered on anything like he did on this. The US surrendered, as promised, and is paying a severe Danegeld to make Iran great again (MIGA!). The libs are so owned.
And so it came to be. Israeli seething over the current deal must be becoming a combustion hazard.
Kaarne Marras retweeted
I am so tired of all misunderstandings of Russia's war against Ukraine & the US role:
1. Russia is pursuing a major colonial war.
2. No colonial power has won such a war after World War II.
3. Nations are born out of war & this war has cemented the Ukrainian nation.
4. For Ukraine, this war is existential. In Russia, it is only existential for Putin.
5. Therefore Ukraine cannot give up & Putin will lose (though we cannot know when or exactly how).
6. This war has united Europe & given it a new purpose. The old purpose of the EU was to keep peace internally. The new purpose is to stand up to Russia.
7. Trump has taken the US out of the war & the US is not likely to come back. Trump is Putin's obedient servant (though fortunately dumb & incompetent).
8. Europe needs to take over NATO since the US is abandoning it.
9. The new forms of warfare & the current US incompetence are likely to render the US military & arms obsolete very fast.
10. The EU needs to embrace Ukraine & Moldova & Western Balkans & invite the UK, Norway & Iceland.
Kaarne Marras retweeted
We are so far into "mad king" territory that the White House may not even bother to clarify whether Trump just confused Oman with Iran or is indeed threatening to bomb Oman
Historic corruption.
Breaking News: The Justice Dept. announced a $1.8 billion fund to pay President Trump’s allies as part of its settlement with the IRS. Follow live updates. nyti.ms/3RNhnYh
Some perspective: Before he took office, Jimmy Carter had to put his family's peanut farm in a blind trust lest it prove a conflict of interest. The trust was poorly managed and saddled the Carters with a huge debt. They were eventually forced to sell the farm in 1981.
Trump just got exposed for running the biggest insider trading operation in American history.
Nancy Pelosi traded $5 million in stocks and Congress lost its mind.
Trump literally executed $750 MILLION worth of stock trades in ONE quarter while being President.
His ethics filing just dropped and the numbers are genuinely unprecedented in history:
Between January and March 2026, Donald Trump personally executed 3,700 individual stock transactions worth between $220 million and $750 million.
That's roughly 60 trades PER DAY.
While signing executive orders, meeting foreign leaders, and making policy decisions that directly impact the companies he's buying and selling.
Now here's where it gets really insane:
On February 10, Trump bought between $1 million and $5 million worth of Dell stock.
Three months later, on May 8, he stood at a Mother's Day event at the White House, thanked Michael Dell by name, and told Americans to "go out and buy a Dell."
Dell stock surged 14.6% that day to an all-time high of $263.99.
Since Trump's February purchase, Dell is up 96%.
And 5 months BEFORE Trump bought Dell stock, Michael and Susan Dell donated $6.25 billion to Trump Accounts, one of the largest philanthropic commitments to a sitting president's signature program in modern history.
So the timeline goes: Dell donates $6.25 billion to Trump's program -> Trump buys Dell stock ->Trump tells America to buy Dell from the White House podium -> Stock hits all-time high
And that's just ONE stock...
The same filing shows Trump bought Nvidia stock on February 10. One week later, Nvidia announced a massive chip deal with Meta.
He bought more Nvidia stock one week BEFORE his own Commerce Department approved the sale of Nvidia chips to Saudi Arabia.
He bought Intel stock starting in March 2026. The US government already owned a 9.9% stake in Intel worth over $41 billion. On April 30, Trump posted on Truth Social praising Intel, writing that "Intel Stock continues to rise."
Intel jumped 3% in after-hours and is now up 140% year-to-date.
He bought Palantir stock while his administration was actively handing them billion-dollar government contracts for immigration enforcement and defense.
He bought Robinhood stock while his own Trump Accounts program uses Robinhood as the broker.
He's currently sitting on over 100% profit on AMD, Intel, Bloom Energy, Marvell Technology, and at least 10 other positions.
Every single president since Lyndon B. Johnson has used a blind trust to avoid exactly this situation. But Trump didn't.
His assets sit in a trust controlled by his own children, and the filings show a broker acted as agent on several trades.
The White House says the portfolio is "independently managed."
But here's what independently managed looks like:
Buy Dell stock. Three months later, publicly endorse Dell from the White House. Stock hits all-time high.
Buy Nvidia stock. One week later, your own government approves their chip sales. Stock rips.
Buy Intel stock. Post about Intel on Truth Social. Stock jumps. The government you run already owns a 10% stake.
Buy Palantir. Hand them contracts. Buy Robinhood. Route a federal program through their platform.
Nancy Pelosi got absolutely destroyed for her husband's stock trades.
Her husband's total disclosed trades in his most controversial year were worth roughly $5 million.
Trump just disclosed up to $750 MILLION in a single quarter.
While making the actual policy decisions that move these stocks.
This isn't a left or right issue.
We're talking about the President of the United States averaging 60 stock trades per day in companies his own administration regulates, contracts with, and publicly endorses.
What do you think?
Kaarne Marras retweeted
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.