Raphael Volz

Very nice, turned that into a Mac screensaver with realistic cloudless night views (Sun, Moon and Stars according to @nasa for your location), and open sourced it at github.com/volzinnovation/ma…

Claude Codeを使って64ビットRISC-VのCPUコアを設計し1か月でFPGAボード上でのLinux起動に成功しました。アーキテクチャはRV64GCで、L1/L2キャッシュ、MMU、BTB、FPU、JTAG/cJTAGデバッガなどを備えています。詳しくは github.com/munetomo-maruyama…

Flávio Bolsonaro: 56.78% Lula da Silva: 43.22% Without extending voting until 7 PM. @grok, confirm this.

If you don't know about the Busy Beaver rabbit hole, our new video is for you. Released yesterday and it's at 100k views already!

To understand why Western leaders all sound the same, you need to understand how a system that has captured its own institutions keeps producing elites aligned on the worst possible line. In 2004, Klaus Schwab created the Forum of Young Global Leaders. Every year, the WEF selects a few hundred people under 40. You don't apply. You get nominated by people already inside and vetted by people already inside. Then come the annual summits, Davos, and a two-week executive program at Harvard Kennedy School built around global governance, climate, global health and "21st century leadership." Emmanuel Macron: class of 2016, the same year he launched his presidential campaign. Gabriel Attal: listed by the WEF itself among its notable members. In 2017, at Harvard, Schwab bragged that his network "penetrates the cabinets" of governments. His words, not mine. Now here's the mistake most critics make. They imagine a brainwashing camp. Two weeks at Harvard don't rewire anyone. The YGL program doesn't create the mindset. It certifies it. The capture happened upstream. The formatting starts at 18. Sciences Po, ENA, Harvard, Columbia, Yale Law. Ten years of being graded by people who already hold the consensus. You learn fast that the reward doesn't go to whoever is right, but to whoever restates the room's beliefs most elegantly. Every essay, every oral exam, every internship in a ministry or a consulting firm teaches the same lesson: the frame is given, your job is to optimize inside it. Obama never went through YGL. He didn't need to. Columbia, Harvard Law, president of the Law Review. Same factory, American edition. So by the time the WEF calls, the product is finished. The program just adds the final layer: flattery. You're told you're one of the few people under 40 who will shape the world. You spend your summers with ministers, CEOs, royals and Nobel laureates who all agree with each other. Imagine what that does to a 35-year-old ego. That's the profile it produces. Very high verbal intelligence, very low dissent. Brilliant at defending the frame, never trained to question it. And a narcissism fed by a network that confirms, year after year, that you belong to the elect. Combine the two and you get leaders who are never punished for being wrong, as long as they're wrong together. Immigration is the perfect test case. Obama, Macron, Attal can tighten a law, announce deportation numbers, harden their tone before an election. Obama deported more people than any president before him. But listen to how they talk about it. For them, immigration is never a civilizational question. It's a flow to manage, a labor shortage to fill, a demographic curve to correct, a moral duty to perform. Whether a nation has the right to remain itself never even enters the frame. Not because they've answered the question. Because their education taught them it isn't a legitimate one. That's why the voter who says "my town has changed and I'm worried" gets a lecture instead of an answer. The leader isn't even lying to him. It's worse: he genuinely cannot see what the voter sees. Twenty years of formatting taught him that this perception is a bias to correct, not a reality to address. That's the real problem with captured institutions. Not a secret plot. A monoculture. Same schools, same summits, same Davos panels, same vocabulary from Paris to Ottawa to Washington. When every leader is selected by the consensus and rewarded by the consensus, the consensus stops being tested against reality. And a ruling class that never gets confronted with reality ends up governing a country that only exists in its own slide decks. Before you vote, ask one question about every candidate: who formatted them, and who do they still need to impress?

If you've ever wondered why smart TVs are so cheap, this is why. @log4j rooted his Samsung and found an always-on hot mic, automatic content recognition, geolocation, network mapping, ad targeting and user profiling, shared with Samsung's "400 partners". A lot of it can be blocked in <15 min, wrote a basic guide below. What your TV is doing The main culprit is ACR (automatic content recognition). Your TV screenshots what's on screen, fingerprints it, and sends it home to build your ad profile. Samsung does it every 500ms, LG every 10ms [1]. What is insane: it happens on connected devices too. Plug in your laptop, your console, your work machine, and your TV can fingerprint that via HDMI [1]. He also found that if your Samsung doesn't have a mic, it'll look for one from a connected soundbar or bluetooth device. nitter.gq/log4j/status/211376224… It's on by default, and you likely agreed to it on the setup screen you clicked through in 10 seconds. Step 1: Turn off ACR Samsung: Terms & Privacy → Viewing Information Services LG: Live Plus Vizio: Viewing Data Roku: "Use info from TV inputs" Sony/Google TV: Samba Interactive TV Menus vary by model, but those are the names to look for. While you're in there, opt out of interest-based ads, reset your advertising ID, decline every optional privacy agreement, turn off voice recognition, and delete apps you never open. Step 2: Give smart devices their own network Put the TV, cameras, speakers and vacuum on your router's guest/IoT network. The logic is simple: these devices rarely get patched. If one gets compromised (getting drastically more frequent with AI), it shouldn't be able to see your other devices or home network. Step 3: Block trackers for the whole house with DNS-level filtering NextDNS (cloud-based) is easy and has a solid free plan. Pi-hole is a little bit more work if you prefer self hosting. For simplicity we'll focus on the former. 1. Sign up at nextdns.io (free tier is plenty) 2. Privacy tab: add a blocklist (OISD is a good bet) and turn on Native Tracking Protection for Samsung, LG, Roku, Amazon (see attached image) 3. Setup tab: copy your endpoint 4. Paste it into your router's DNS settings as DNS-over-HTTPS/TLS (or use the IPs + "Link IP" if your router only does plain DNS) 5. Bonus: block outbound port 53 except to your router. Some devices hardcode their own DNS to get around you Then open the NextDNS logs and watch how often your TV phones home. It's eye-opening. If an app or update breaks, find the domain in the logs and allowlist it. Why they do this TV prices are down 97% since 2000 [2]. Most of that is better manufacturing and brutal competition. But once margins on the hardware hit zero, the cost moved to you. In Q3 2024, Vizio lost $6.7M selling TVs and made $115.8M in gross profit from ads and viewing data [3]. They've said on earnings calls that they keep TV prices low to grow the audience they sell to advertisers. Walmart bought them in 2024. This isn't a conspiracy theory either. Vizio paid $2.2M to the FTC in 2017 for tracking 11 million TVs without consent. Last December, Texas sued Samsung, LG, Sony, Hisense and TCL over ACR. Samsung and LG have since agreed to stop collecting that data without explicit consent [4]. TL;DR 1. ACR off 2. Ads + voice off 3. Smart devices on their own network 4. NextDNS filtering on the router Sources: [1] ACR study: arxiv.org/abs/2409.06203 [2] Cost of US consumer goods: aei.org/economics/chart-of-t… [3] Vizio Q3 2024: sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/… [4] Texas v. Samsung: texasattorneygeneral.gov/new…

Dessa is back Even though this demo is impressive, I’ve been more impressed that Ragavan, @RayhaneMama, @AydinPolatDessa @marctyndel continue to show what a small dedicated team can do We should raise our expectations of local models

The biggest, and stupidest, myth in European politics, particularly popular in France, is that Europe suffers the consequences of "austerity" and "neoliberalism". In the biggest 5 countries in Europe, more than half of the population makes its income from the state, less than half from the private sector. This is what makes the problem of reducing the welfare state so impossible: more than half of the voters are net recipients. No surprise that Italy's budget has not been balanced in 100 years, France's in 50 years (ooh la la, l'austérité!!): -France: 30 million from the state versus 21m private sector workers. State spending is 57% of GDP, taxes more than half the economy. The budget hasn't been balanced in the lifetime of most French (since 1974). - Germany: 35 million adults from the state, versus 34 million from the private sector. 10% of the population is registered as severely disabled. Public spending is over half of GDP. Germany has had a continuous budget deficit since 2019. -Italy: 23 million from the state, versus 20.5 million private-sector workers. Public spending is 51% of GDP. Italy has had a budget deficit every year since 1925, for 100 years. - Spain more people get their income from the state since 2024: 18.21 million from the public sector versus 17.9 million people working in the private sector. Since 2025, Spain also had more government employees than self-employed workers (autónomos) for the first time in history. State spending is at 45%, budget has not been balanced since 2007. - UK: 54% of households now receive more in state benefits than they pay in taxes. State spending is 44.5% of GDP, taxes (40%) are at their highest since 1950, the budget hasn't been balanced since 2001, and 1 in 5 new cars is paid by the government through a bizarre state disability scheme (Motability).

Germany's per capita electricity generation rose to a peak near 7,800 kWh around 2017 before falling to about 5,950 kWh in 2025. Unlike the UK, it remains above 1970s levels. Data approximate from Ember, Energy Institute and population sources matching the original chart style.

CHART OF THE DAY: The price of natural gas in the US 🇺🇸 and Europe 🇪🇺. Now, imagine running a gas-intensive company (say, a fertilizer plant) in either region. Europe >$30; US <$3

John Cowperthwaite did more for human prosperity than any development economist drawing a government salary ever managed, and he did it by refusing to do almost anything at all. As Hong Kong's Financial Secretary from 1961 to 1971, Cowperthwaite ran one of the most radically free economies the modern world has ever seen. He kept taxes flat and low (the top income tax rate sat at 15%), ran consistent budget surpluses, abolished import tariffs, and blocked nearly every subsidy request that crossed his desk. When British civil servants demanded economic statistics to justify intervention, he refused to collect them. Not out of laziness. He genuinely believed that giving planners numbers gave them excuses. The results? In 1960, Hong Kong's per capita income stood at roughly 28% of Britain's. By 1997, Hong Kong had surpassed Britain. That trajectory happened without natural resources, without foreign aid, and without a single five-year plan drafted by well-intentioned economists from Oxford. Hong Kong had a harbor, people willing to work, and a bureaucrat with enough intellectual discipline to keep the state out of their way. Capital flows toward secure property rights and reliable rules, and flees the moment politicians start allocating it. Every industry Beijing picked as a "priority sector" during those same decades burned through subsidies and produced junk. Hong Kong's industries emerged organically, serving real demand, building real wealth. You benefit from this history whether you know it or not, because Hong Kong's success gave the world a controlled experiment that still embarrasses every advocate of managed development. The control group thrived. The planned economies didn't. Cowperthwaite retired to St Andrews, received a knighthood, and gave almost no interviews. That restraint was entirely in character.

Le pacte social est mort. Voici pourquoi, point par point. 1. Le fait
La préfecture de police de Paris invite officiellement les commerçants à recourir à des agents privés avant les prochaines manifestations.
Traduction claire : l’État reconnaît qu’il n’est plus en mesure d’assurer la protection des personnes et des biens. 2. Ce que c’était censé être 
Le pacte social repose sur un échange simple :
Les citoyens acceptent de payer impôts, charges et taxes.
En contrepartie, l’État assure le monopole de la force légitime, maintient l’ordre et protège les personnes et les biens.
C’est sa mission régalienne première. Tout le reste (santé, éducation, aides, etc.) vient après. 3. Ce qui vient de se passer 
L’État vient de dire, par la voix de sa préfecture : « Prenez des privés, sécurisez vos vitrines, on ne peut plus le faire seuls. »
Ce n’est plus une défaillance ponctuelle. C’est un aveu institutionnel.
La protection de base est externalisée. Les citoyens et les commerçants paient déjà l’impôt et doivent maintenant payer une deuxième fois pour ce que l’État était censé garantir. 4. Les conséquences logiques • Si la contrepartie principale disparaît, le consentement à l’impôt perd sa justification. • On ne peut pas continuer à prélever comme si le pacte tenait encore, tout en avouant qu’on ne remplit plus la mission fondatrice. • La dette, les dépenses, les discours sur « l’effort collectif » deviennent secondaires dès lors que la sécurité de base n’est plus assurée par celui qui prélève. 5. La responsabilité 
Ce n’est pas un accident. C’est le résultat de décennies de renoncements successifs : incapacité à rétablir l’ordre, zones où l’État a déjà reculé, priorité donnée à autre chose qu’à la mission régalienne. 
Macron et les gouvernements qui se sont succédé ont laissé cette situation s’installer jusqu’au point où la préfecture elle-même officialise le repli. Le pacte social n’est pas « en difficulté ». Il est définitivement mort, pas parce qu’on le proclame mais parce que l’État vient de le reconnaître lui-même en demandant aux citoyens de se protéger à sa place. La question n’est plus « comment rétablir le calme ». Elle est : pourquoi continuer à consentir pleinement à l’impôt quand celui qui le prélève a renoncé à la mission pour laquelle on le paie en premier ? Protection d’abord.Impôt ensuite. Le reste n’est que littérature. À bon entendeur.