Bilal

Everyone saying “Oh Jensen got got. Jensen fell for the honeypot” Ever consider he knew the whole time? That actually HE was honeydicking China and feeding them false intel? It’s a new Cold War. There’s levels to this. Don’t jump to conclusions. Don’t rule out a honeydick

As a moderate, I detest both the far left and the far right, though for different reasons. The far left's original sin is its hostility to technology, its elevation of incompetent people, and its championing of destructive policies in the name of compassion. The far right, however, has something I find far more deeply repulsive: a corrupt moral core. They don't actually have any values. They may claim to be Christians, traditionalists, or defenders of Western civilization, but at the end of the day, they chose Trump as their champion. A deeply corrupt, morally bankrupt, empty shell of a charlatan. They knew what he was. They knew his character, his incompetence, his utter lack of moral conviction. And they went along with it. Whether out of stupidity, complicity, a desire to back a winner, or because they convinced themselves the other side was worse, it exposes something profoundly rotten about who they are. And when they finally began to turn against him, it wasn't corruption or sexual misconduct that did it. It wasn't cruelty or the abandonment of their professed principles. It was weakness. It was high gas prices. It wasn't war. It was losing a war. But the other side isn't exactly a shining example of moral clarity or competence either. At the end of the day, a country of 300-odd million people came together and decided its best representatives were an incompetent woman and a senile sociopath. A lot of people will point fingers at "the system," at institutions, at individuals like Trump. But at the end of the day, all of this exists because of the people who sustain it. It's the people. It's you. You're the fucking problem. You always have been. We keep looking for some external villain, some corrupting force that has led otherwise decent people astray. But perhaps we have it backward. Perhaps our institutions aren't corrupting us. Perhaps they're simply reflecting who we are. As I wrote in Everything Is Downstream of Technology, humans don't have some inherent, immutable moral framework. We do what's best for ourselves, and once we've climbed far enough up Maslow's hierarchy of needs, we get to play nice and congratulate ourselves on how enlightened we've become. Give people enough prosperity, security, and comfort, and they can afford to be generous, tolerant, and compassionate. Threaten their status, their tribe, or their material well-being, and watch how quickly those principles evaporate. We mistake the comforts of civilization for the virtues of humanity. And as we enter a posthuman world, with machines increasingly taking over economic activity, I suspect we'll confront the very worst of ourselves, only now with more power and zeal than ever before. The extremes will grow more extreme. The left will double down on its destructive empathy for the vile, confusing compassion with virtue regardless of the consequences. The right will retreat further into its narcissistic, low-IQ racial theories, or whatever new tribal mythology it can invent to feel superior to those around it. And the pendulum will keep swinging, each time a little further, each side convinced of its own righteousness, neither capable of recognizing the ugliness staring back at it. But perhaps, for the first time in history, there's a way out. Not through better politicians, better institutions, or another grand ideological project. We've tried those for centuries, and they all eventually run into the same problem: us. The only path I see out of this jungle is AI. Technology has allowed us to become more civilized, but it hasn't fundamentally changed who we are. Abundance may make us behave better, but it doesn't necessarily make us good. For the first time, we may create minds that aren't prisoners of the same evolutionary impulses, tribal instincts, and petty status games that have governed us for hundreds of thousands of years. Of course, there's no guarantee they'll be any better. They may inherit our worst qualities or develop entirely new ones. But at least there's a possibility of something different. We can only hope that our descendants will possess the values we spent millennia pretending to have. And perhaps, if they're feeling generous, they'll lift us out of the mud and into a civilization we were never morally capable of building ourselves.

US intelligence agencies believe @Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had romantic relationship with alleged Chinese spy as.ft.com/r/97c2f9f7-ad2e-44…

Francis Fukuyama notes that Western countries are being strangled by proceduralism. I ask him about this as a "last man" kind of problem. How do you motivate people to fight to change things when the enemy is well-meaning bureaucratic procedures? richardhanania.com/p/cosplay…

I think the Notion team is misreading their data. We use Notion an order of magnitude more than before because our agents are connected to it through MCP or custom tooling. But increased usage doesn't mean increased satisfaction. We don't enjoy using Notion, and we'd switch as soon as a better alternative emerges. Notion is fundamentally broken in many ways, but no competing product offers the flexibility we need. I'm sure that will change.

A few surprising things I learned from reading about Eiichrio Oda, the creator of One Piece: 1. He slept 3 hours a night for 15 years. 2. He created the most successful manga of all time with more than 600 million copies in circulation. 3. He said he would have missed his parent’s funeral because it conflicted with his work. 4. He is extremely private. He does not allow his face to be photographed and when he appears on video he has a giant fish avatar placed on his head. 5. When he hires a new editor the first thing he says to them is you need to be willing to die for One Piece. 6. His editor said he might someday encounter a writer more talented than Oda but he would never meet anyone who worked harder. 7. He doesn’t want ideas, he wants criticism. 8. He would hand draw entire Disney animated movies to learn how to give his characters emotion. 9. He said he only saw his family once a week because family time was too relaxing. 10. He holds the Guinness World Record for the most copies published for the same comic book series by a single author. 11. He is often described as a maniac due to his unbelievable work ethic and inhuman daily habits. 12. He believes in having the least number of people possible touching the work. 13. He says he gets his best ideas by not sleeping or eating. He says humans can only come up with truly new ideas when they reach their limit. 14. He started working on One Piece when he was 22. He is still working on it at 51. 15. He once spent 12 consecutive hours on the telephone discussing a single story with his editor. 16. He has an extreme tolerance for repetition. 17. Imagination is the organizing force of his entire life. 18. He's a perfectionist who has repeatedly admitted that he cannot make himself work in a more efficient way, even when he desperately wants to. 19. He never finishes before a deadline. He equates using every available minute with giving his maximum effort. 20. He believes it’s impossible to create something great unless you do everything yourself, attend to every detail, and test it exhaustively. 21. He believes the more experience he has the harder it is to create. 22. He was 4 when he decided to be a manga artist. He said he wanted to avoid ever having to get a real job. 23. He creates his work for an audience of exactly one person: himself at 15 years old. 25. He has dedicated his entire adult life to writing a story about freedom and adventure, while accepting an extraordinarily restrictive life in order to create it. 26. To this day he does not feel successful. -- Eiichiro Oda is a relentlessly obsessive creative genius who has devoted nearly every waking hour of his adult life to building one of the most extraordinary fictional universes ever imagined. You don't want to miss this episode:

Interesting

Introducing GPT‑6 Cyber: a major advance in security research that pairs stronger capabilities with better model alignment. The model powered the Linux kernel research we announced yesterday, and security teams at companies like Mozilla, Palo Alto Networks, Calif, and Cisco—alongside our own at OpenAI—are already putting it to work. GPT-6 Cyber is available to select Daybreak Red customers and we are expanding access over time. openai.com/index/introducing…

Canva is laying off 22% of its workforce which is 1271 employees, and this is what their CEO said. We need more founders like thissss.