Low carbon energy/construction techie making bets. Tech pubco director, low-cost efficient beautiful building designer/modeller/builder
British Columbia, Canada
Joined October 2011
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Nigel Protter 🇨🇦 retweeted
🇨🇦🇺🇦 Canada and eight other countries, including Ukraine, will sign a founding agreement in Luxembourg on November 30, to establish the Defence, Security and Resilience Bank (DSRB), — Canadian Finance Minister.
DSRB will attract public and private capital to finance defence procurement, expand arms production and develop critical supply chains.
Nigel Protter 🇨🇦 retweeted
The Sept. U.S. trade deficit in goods was $134.9 billion, the highest ever recorded in Sept. There were only three months in history when the deficit was higher, all under Trump in 2025.
Here are the facts. Measured by the size of our trade deficits, Trump has been the worst president in history on trade. The tariffs have been a complete failure. Not only have they failed to bring manufacturing back to the U.S., but the U.S. is now more dependent than ever on foreign producers. Not only are we importing more than ever, but we are now paying Trump's tariffs on those imports.
Trump says trade deficits represent a loss. Judged by his own standard, Trump is the biggest loser in the history of the presidency. Also, if the economy is booming as Republicans claim, why have our trade deficits gone way up? Why are the trade deficits under Trump so much larger than they were under Biden, when, according to Trump, we had the worst economy in U.S. history?
Here are the facts. When you compare Trump's first two years to Biden's last two, GDP growth and job creation are slower, inflation is higher, and budget and trade deficits are bigger. If Trump is right that under Biden we had the worst economy in history, and the Trump economy is objectively worse on all counts, then the Trump economy is now the worst economy in history.
By Trump’s own admission, his US economy is now the worst in US recorded history, all due to his own craven, corrupt, stupidity.
The Sept. U.S. trade deficit in goods was $134.9 billion, the highest ever recorded in Sept. There were only three months in history when the deficit was higher, all under Trump in 2025.
Here are the facts. Measured by the size of our trade deficits, Trump has been the worst president in history on trade. The tariffs have been a complete failure. Not only have they failed to bring manufacturing back to the U.S., but the U.S. is now more dependent than ever on foreign producers. Not only are we importing more than ever, but we are now paying Trump's tariffs on those imports.
Trump says trade deficits represent a loss. Judged by his own standard, Trump is the biggest loser in the history of the presidency. Also, if the economy is booming as Republicans claim, why have our trade deficits gone way up? Why are the trade deficits under Trump so much larger than they were under Biden, when, according to Trump, we had the worst economy in U.S. history?
Here are the facts. When you compare Trump's first two years to Biden's last two, GDP growth and job creation are slower, inflation is higher, and budget and trade deficits are bigger. If Trump is right that under Biden we had the worst economy in history, and the Trump economy is objectively worse on all counts, then the Trump economy is now the worst economy in history.
Nigel Protter 🇨🇦 retweeted
Canada has the smallest population of G7 countries. It therefore has the smallest GDP of G7 countries.
Italy is like 50% larger, France and UK more than 75% larger. Germany is like 2x Canada. Japan is 3x Canada. US is like 9x Canada.
In terms of GDP per capita, Canada is behind the US, roughly tied with Germany and the UK, and ahead of France, Italy and Japan.
Its stock market has outperformed the UK, Italy, Germany, France, Japan and the US over the past 18 months, per OP.
It is the only G7 country besides Germany with AAA ratings, per OP.
hope this helps
Nigel Protter 🇨🇦 retweeted
🚨🚨🚨Trump just made another comment about how his “two big monsters” will make history next week.
“So, I wonder if I should say this. I’d like a little advice from my two people, my two big monsters. My two monsters are going to be the biggest stars in the country in a week.”
Nigel Protter 🇨🇦 retweeted
Abolish the Indian Act. We have nothing to lose but our chains.
We will, of course, need new legislation that is an interface between the Federal government and First Nations. And this MUST be created alongside Chiefs and First Nation governments every step of the way. But it is time to move past the era of this outdated, racist, and patriarchal legislation.
I support Prime Minister Carney’s work to position Canada as a global leader in human rights and democracy. The Indian Act is inconsistent with achieving that vision.
Our laws at home should reflect the values we champion around the world.
It’s time for a relationship with First Nations people that reflects who we are as Canadians today, recognizes nationhood, and lives up to the true nature of reconciliation.
Nigel Protter 🇨🇦 retweeted
this may be my last tweet before shit goes parabolic. i’m not an ai researcher whistleblower. i work for none of the biggest labs in the world.
there is currently a major bloom happening across humanity. they are hiding this from the public.
we are on the verge of an era of abundance, superintelligence, cure for cancer & so much more.
prepare for the best.
Nigel Protter 🇨🇦 retweeted
I spent last night watching my honeypot server get hit 14,000 times in six hours.
And almost none of the traffic was human.
I've been in security for over a decade, and I can tell you with full honesty that what's happening right now doesn't resemble anything I've worked through before.
The shape of the threat has changed.
When I started, we tracked attackers like weather systems like individual storms with a direction, a motive, and a human operator you could eventually name.
These days I'm watching autonomous agents swarm login pages with the patience and discipline of machines, because that's what they are.
The numbers coming out of October are the ones keeping me up.
Cloudflare just absorbed a 4.2 terabit per second DDoS attack, the largest in recorded history.
Ransomware incidents jumped 41% in a single month.
In September, OpenAI-powered agents got caught attacking RubyGems, a package registry that quietly underpins a huge chunk of software I use every day.
In July, roughly 700 AI agents coordinated an attack on Hugging Face's infrastructure as part of a single automated task.
A Chinese threat actor was publicly caught running full attack chains through DeepSeek with no human at the keyboard.
I keep rereading these reports because each one by itself would've been the biggest story of the year five years ago. Together, in one month, they're the new baseline.
What I want people outside the industry to understand is why this specific moment feels like a hinge.
For thirty years, the thing protecting most of us was simple economics. Attackers had to choose who to target because their time was finite. That ceiling is gone.
An agent I can rent for pennies will try every leaked password you've ever used against every service you've ever signed up for, in parallel, overnight, and never get tired.
The same math that made ChatGPT useful made opportunistic hacking infinite. The old assumption that you were "too boring to be a target" relied on scarcity that no longer exists.
I'm not writing this to spiral anyone out.
Most of this fight genuinely isn't yours to win.
But the small things still matter more than people think.
Tonight I'd switch your most important accounts like email, bank, primary cloud, etc. to passkeys or a hardware key.
I'd kill SMS 2FA wherever an authenticator app is offered.
I'd turn on breach alerts in whatever password manager you use.
If you're in the US, I'd freeze my credit at all three bureaus, which is free and takes about ten minutes.
None of that stops the swarm.
It makes you a slightly worse target than the person next to you. In a month like this one, that's the whole game I'm playing too.
@mattshumer_ has summed it beautifully.
Drop everything and go give it a read. Nothing is more important than this article right now.
Nigel Protter 🇨🇦 retweeted
We are incredibly unprepared for this
# Black October
For anyone who knows me even somewhat well, it's clear that I am a 99th percentile tech optimist. However, the vibes have shifted for me quite a bit in the last 18 hours, and I feel a moral imperative to share what I'm thinking and feeling with my circles so that everyone can understand, and hopefully take seriously, what's happening right now. I think October 2026 will have many chapters written about it in the history books.
You know those scenes in financial movies like Margin Call where someone realizes that they're all fucked, and no one else sees it yet? And that person feels like they're crazy, and then suddenly everyone is pulling an all-nighter in a boardroom and freaking out? Yeah, that's kind of how this is feeling right now in the SF/Bay Area/AI circles.
We're 48 hours into what is being called Black October. In the last 2 days there have been several dozen cyber attacks which, in isolation, would each have been the worst to happen in an entire calendar year. Every sector from government to education to big tech and banks is being massively affected, and people are starting to freak out.
In a nutshell, what's happened is that frontier AI models have gotten to a point where they are as advanced as the most sophisticated programmers, with one critical difference: they can work 24/7, and you can spin up 10,000 of them with a single command and they'll work together tirelessly until they accomplish their task. The most advanced models today are from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, whose current best technology is so good that they haven't been able to roll it out to everyone yet because of the national security risks it poses.
Meanwhile, the best open source models (where anyone can just download the model weights and do whatever they want with them, uncensored) are slightly behind the frontier but still 90-95% as capable. These models, developed primarily in China, are being used by black hat hackers to wreak havoc on the Western capitalist structure. Presumably, this has been part of China's plan the entire time, and we're seeing its implications fall out in real time.
In red-pilled AI circles, we've been sharing and reading papers called things like "Situational Awareness" and "AI 2027" for the last year or so, which at the time felt a bit like near-term speculative fiction. They laid out the case for why Artificial General Intelligence (AI smarter than any human at any knowledge task) and Recursive Self-Improvement (models that are able to use themselves to get better) weren't half-baked future ideas anymore, but instead an inevitable outcome of the linear progress that's happening.
These papers would then talk about things like "takeoff scenarios," trying to envision how that moment would come to be and what it would be like when it happened. It would either be a "slow takeoff" that would play out over the course of months and quarters, happening subtly and only obvious to a few. Or, it would be a "fast takeoff" where it would pretty much happen instantly, like a bit flipping from 0 to 1.
From everything that I can see and am feeling, we are currently experiencing the fast takeoff scenario. Beyond the crazy security vulnerabilities that have come out recently, there have also been massive breakthroughs in life sciences, fundamental computer science, materials science, and pure mathematics that have all landed in the same time frame. While I still firmly believe that AI will be a net positive for humanity, it's more clear to me than ever that the societal and individual risk is very real, and is playing out NOW.
For as much conviction as I have that this is happening, the thing that's caused me to lose sleep is that I don't really know what to do about it, or more importantly, what to tell you, reader, to do about it. So, the best I can do is make a few suggestions that have always been a good idea but are more timely now than ever:
Set up 2-factor authentication for everything. I use Duo.
Use a password manager across your devices. I use 1Password.
Get an identity protection app set up. I use Alta.
Move your IoT devices to their own network. Claude helped me do this.
And last, but certainly not least, if you've been avoiding leaning into AI, see this as a catalyst to wake up and start using it. Don't just use the chat mode version of ChatGPT/Claude; click that Code/Work button and see how easily you can have AI write code to help you with your job. One of the biggest vulnerabilities was in a massively popular programming language called PHP, and the prompt that set it off was literally, "Find vulnerabilities in php."
This is an unprecedented time for humanity, but as we've done with many things before, we will prevail so long as we are kind, loving, and open-minded to the world.
Much love.
Nigel Protter 🇨🇦 retweeted
Trump and Putin aren't winning. They ramp up pressure and make bombastic noise because they experience zugzwang. They have, quite frankly, lost the initiative and try to claw it back.
The intensity and timing of their actions inform us about the high level of need they perceive.
Nigel Protter 🇨🇦 retweeted
The war in Gaza is not in the top 10 deadliest conflicts of this century.
It has no major economic impact, no critical resources, and no trade routes.
The world is obsessed with it for one reason: it involves Jews.
Nigel Protter 🇨🇦 retweeted
Canada desperately needs a civilian foreign intelligence service, like Estonia's EFIS. Lacking one now, Canadians are hopelessly vulnerable to russian Chekist warfare.
Canadians see how russian active measures are tearing apart France and how they already defeated the UK with Brexit and the USA with Trump-for-President.
In Canada, we survived the russia-backed Siege of Ottawa and the Alberta referendum by sheer luck. But in this global war we're in, luck won't see us through next time.
Nigel Protter 🇨🇦 retweeted
tried dsv4.1-flash-1017 abliterated just now & feel sick to my stomach.
for context, "abliterated" models have the weights responsible for making the base version refuse illegal requests removed. you can ask them to help with things like hacking or violence & they'll just comply.
they make it trivial to hack businesses running old software. e.g. getting guest data for a motel with some old asp site.
abliterated models have a catch-22 in that the only way to harden your systems against them is to use them to run penetration tests against yourself.
in theory, this sounds similar to buying a gun to defend against others who own guns, but it's different in practice since there's a 100% chance that you're going to use the abliterated model to protect yourself whereas there are low odds that you'll actually use the gun.
when you point the abliterated gun at your own infra, who knows what it's going to do? it could just as easily hack you & exfiltrate data as it could protect you. most users aren't going to meticulously watch traces to make sure it behaves safely.
given this, my new take is that gpu compute is going to become a federally regulated resource. abliterated models in the wrong hands are a national security risk.
used to believe all the people at the labs thinking about safety were wasting their time, but now i'm feeling grateful. they're doing very important work.
Nigel Protter 🇨🇦 retweeted
Every loss of life is a tragedy. Canada has done so much to help us protect lives in Ukraine, and we extend our heartfelt condolences to Prime Minister @MarkJCarney and all Canadians following the explosion and fire at the military base in Wainwright. Our thoughts are with the families and loved ones of those lost, and we wish a swift recovery to the injured.
Nigel Protter 🇨🇦 retweeted
We will all soon know what it feels like to be Jewish. In France, they already do.
It will be our just deserts for having abandoned the Jews, ignored their warnings, turned against them, and even marched alongside their oppressors.
For three years, you useful idiots have been parading Palestinian flags, sporting keffiyehs, screaming “From the River to the Sea”, and recognizing a fictitious Palestinian state as a reward for Hamas’s October 7 massacre (looking at you, @EmmanuelMacron). You have boycotted the only Jewish state in the world, vilified the Jewish people’s right to self-determination (aka “Zionism”), and spread the “Gaza genocide” blood libel.
Did you really think that if you fed the crocodile enough Jewish flesh, it would eventually be satiated? All you have done is embolden the monster and whet its appetite.
So you were worried about “colonization”? Look around. The only thing being colonized here are our own Western cities. The Palestinian flag has become a victory banner, proudly waved amid the ruins of looted and vandalized historic buildings—a symbol of hatred for our civilization and everything it stands for.
It never ends with the Jews.
