Founder at Encoded Brands and Bruiser. Formerly AKQA, BBH.
Marin County, CA
Joined March 2007
- Tweets5.8K
- Following1.7K
- Followers690
- Likes3.5K
Nick Strada retweeted
liz warren: we’re gonna stop the mayonnaise company from buying a hot sauce company
elon musk:
Nick Strada retweeted
What’s happening in the AI-powered reverse engineering and decompilation is absolutely insane. Pretty soon all software will be de facto open-source.
AI is coming for everything and everyone.
Nick Strada retweeted
This is the doom I predicted a few days ago, coming for Photoshop. A clean-room open-source reimplementation.
No prizes for guessing that they decompiled Photoshop to source code, processed that to some kind of non-code specification language, then fed the spec to an LLM with an instruction to generate Rust.
Adobe just got nuked. And closed source is dead, dead, dead.
github.com/storytold/photocr…
Nick Strada retweeted
Fuck you. Whoever made this site. You win.
I’ve never had a site get my blood boiling like this before
This is so messed up.
opusfived.dev
Nick Strada retweeted
“I don’t think people are down for me being 20 times wealthier. It leaves a bad taste in people’s mouth.”
“I come from an academic family. I’m not even sure how I ended up with all this money.”
“That’s a real issue for our societies.”
“There’s no getting around these issues. We have to figure out ways to bring people along and explain how they’ll participate.”
“I actually believe this; but I’m not the right person to explain it.”
He doesn’t miss:
“This is not sovereignty. This is anti-sovereignty. And whoever’s telling you this works needs to be fired because they are hurting your country.”
“My biggest criticism of regulation outside of America is: please get technical experts to do it.”
“Those companies are exfiltrating, not intentionally, your alpha to the company that provides the model. It is literally the opposite of what you’re trying to do.”
“This is literally the way to export every one of your secrets to some other company.”
“It’s only because the people doing the regulation don’t actually understand the technical material.”
Nick Strada retweeted
Regret the tone of my post on data centers yesterday.
What I should have said:
There were reasonable concerns about data centers 18ish months ago: water, taxes, jobs, electricity prices, the environment and what they would do to small towns. Well-structured data center projects have largely addressed these concerns today and we should be celebrating this.
On balance, data centers are awesome for America in every way.
On water: U.S. data centers use a fraction of what golf courses use. A lot of the numbers from 18 months ago were off by over 1000x. Newer data centers use closed-loop systems or recycled water. Should be required by every town approving a data center project.
On taxes: looking only at sales-tax exemptions, as Ronan Farrow did, is the wrong way to evaluate this. Data centers pay significant property taxes. Loudoun County, which is the wealthiest county in America, now collects on the order of $1 billion a year from data centers. In Quincy, WA, data centers are more than half the property-tax roll. Over time, property taxes can go to zero while government spending increases in these towns.
On jobs: this has been unambiguously awesome for blue collar Americans. Demand for electricians, plumbers, welders, HVAC techs, and contractors has gone vertical, and it is not a one-time construction job. These buildings get upgraded and expanded over time. That is why the building trades are fighting for them, and why some unions are now treating opposition to data centers as a reason not to endorse politicians.
On power: the original fear was that households would pay for the incremental electricity demand in the form of higher prices. That is why the ratepayer-protection deals and the new large-load tariffs exist. The right structure is: the data center brings or pays for new generation and signs a contract long enough that existing customers are protected. Where that is happening, utilities are cutting or freezing residential rates and saying so on the record. Where it is not, people are right to object. Electricity prices are going down *today* in a number of large states because of data centers.
On the environment: data centers overwhelming use natural gas today, which is the cleanest power source outside of nuclear, solar and wind. And the companies that are building the data centers are committed to carbon neutrality such that an equivalent amount of solar will likely be built. Maybe more importantly, the data centers need batteries to function effectively and these batteries can also sell energy back into the grid (which recently prevented blackouts in Texas). Over time, data centers will run on solar plus batteries.
On the towns: Poverty in Quincy, WA fell from 29% to 6%. Data center taxes paid for a new high school, a hospital, a library, police and fire stations. This is happening in many left for dead former mill and farm towns that had no other bidder for the land.
Data centers are actually reindustrializing parts of America and creating the kind of working-class jobs both parties have spent decades claiming to support. That should not be a partisan issue. Data centers can and should be awesome for America and they increasingly, overwhelmingly are. Supporting the outsourcing of data centers to China will likely age just as well as support for the outsourcing of high quality, blue collar manufacturing jobs to China has aged.
When the facts change, I change my mind. I hope that reasonable people who had good faith reasons to oppose data centers at least consider updating their beliefs given the change in the facts over the last 18 months. This really matters for America.
I will say I also think the idea of making data centers beautiful is a good one that has yet to be implemented. Data centers should be just as beautiful as Grand Central Station. We can learn a lot from the railroad buildout. Neoclassical revival ftw.
Might write up open-weight AI tomorrow as this is equally essential to America.
Nick Strada retweeted
Did Iran follow appropriate competitive bidding procedures? Did they obtain permits from city council or buildings? Did they obtain an environmental impact assessment? Was the awarded contractor licensed? Were minority and women business contracting proportions observed? Were union shops prioritized?
The cost of civilization is high, barbarians.
Nick Strada retweeted
Here’s the thing about what’s going on in NYC. There’s now a critical mass of young people who came to New York on their parents dime and treat it like a summer camp, and they’re electing each other.
Young people used to come to this city to make it. Whether it was finance, fashion, art, business, whatever. They knew it would be hard work but they craved success.
So they accepted the fact that they’d be broke and living in a share with three other people and barely making rent for most of their 20s, but would come out the other side better off for it. It was called ‘paying your dues, and the city ran like this for generations.
It was a wildly successful system.
Now they come here with a trust fund and have no interest in jobs or personal success, so they get fake nonprofit work and go into politics and ruin everyone else’s life because they have no real talent or ambition and are angry about it.
That’s how we got here.
Nick Strada retweeted
I watched Elon Musk’s interview with The Economist and heard him claim 250,000 girls were systematically raped by grooming gangs in the UK. It sounded too monstrous to be real, so I did what I always do. I went to check the receipts myself.
I wish I hadn’t. It is worse than the number.
A warning first. If this kind of thing enrages you, if you have children, if you do not have the stomach for it today, stop reading here. You do not have to carry it.
Honesty first, because I do not post numbers I cannot defend. The 250,000 figure is not a documented count. It is an extrapolation scaled up from local cases. Here is the hard truth though: it might be accurate, and it might even be low. Nobody can say, because there has never been a full national audit or an investigation of every town. The number is unproven precisely because the country has refused to go looking for it. That refusal is its own answer.
Here is what the government’s investigations did find. The 2014 Jay Report: in Rotherham alone, at least 1,400 children sexually exploited over sixteen years, and that was the conservative estimate. Baroness Casey’s 2025 national audit confirmed the same pattern across Rochdale, Oxford, Oldham, Telford. Nearly 19,000 children flagged as exploitation victims in England in a single year. The Met is re-examining 9,000 cases. No one knows the true total, because for decades the people paid to count deliberately did not.
Both reports found the convicted offenders in these networks were Pakistani Muslim men. And officials avoided recording that fact out of fear of being called racist. Let that land. They stayed silent about who was doing it because they feared an accusation more than they feared the abuse. Girls as young as eleven were written off as troubled teenagers making lifestyle choices. The system did not fail to see it. It chose not to look.
Then the punishment. Some got what Britain calls serious sentences. Shabir Ahmed, the Rochdale ringleader, 22 years for 30 counts of child rape. Others 35. In much of America a single count could mean life. There, 30 counts draws 22 years, and then they let you out early.
Ahmed served 14 years and walked free this July, shielded from the deportation his victims were promised by a 1971 immigration loophole. Several offenders held dual British-Pakistani citizenship, which is exactly why removal was promised and exactly why the failure to deliver it is so damning. Qari Abdul Rauf served two and a half years of six and is still in Rochdale, seen shopping in the town where he abused children. Adil Khan, who impregnated a 13-year-old, called his case racist and a laughing matter in court and argued he should stay because his son needs a role model.
And the coldest part. For years the trouble was not the abuse. It was talking about it. Britain’s speech laws have only tightened since, with people jailed over social media posts, one woman handed 31 months for a single tweet. A nation that struggled for a decade to jail child rapists moves overnight to jail citizens for the wrong words online.
That is the whole sickness. Rape a child and you may serve half a soft sentence and stroll home. Post the wrong thing about it and the state finds its spine.
So make the sentences serious and mean it. Deport who can be deported. Protect the people exposing this, not the institutions that buried it. And count them. Every town, every case, no matter what the number turns out to be.
Failed by their abusers, the councils, the police, the courts, and a state more offended by a tweet than by their suffering. Every betrayal preventable.
These are children. Say it out loud, whatever it costs, because the silence is what let it happen.
Thank you, Elon, for the reminder that when something sounds too awful to be true, the only responsible thing is to go check the receipts yourself. The number was unproven. What sat underneath it was worse. 🦋
🤖 Made with AI
Nick Strada retweeted
Not so fast, Belgium.
The city of Los Angeles still has another 29 days to count all the goals from tonight's match.
Nick Strada retweeted
Legacy Media types are calling this Alex Karp interview a “crash-out” so that’s your first clue that he is actually saying something extremely insightful. He is articulating what real “AI safety” looks like in the enterprise.
Not abstract alignment research or certification by a government-run DMV for AI. Real AI safety for businesses is the ability to control their own data, model weights, and compute — so a frontier lab can’t hoover up their proprietary knowledge and turn it into their next product.
As Karp explains, technical customers want “control over their compute, their models, their data stack, and their alpha. They want to know they own the means of production, and it’s not being transferred to someone else.”
Don’t think that can happen? Just look at Figma. According to The Information, Anthropic “blindsided” its then-business partner with the launch of Claude Design. Figma’s founder said Anthropic had not been “consistently honest” with them. Anthropic’s chief product officer had even served on Figma’s board until three days before the launch of Claude Design. Figma’s stock has fallen sharply this year while Anthropic’s valuation has surged.
This isn’t an isolated example. Anthropic has launched Claude Science, Claude Security, Claude Legal, and of course Claude Code — each expanding into categories previously served by companies building on top of their models. The pattern is consistent: watch where value is being created, then move in directly. Dominate the model layer, then use that position to capture the most lucrative verticals.
Dario has argued that open source models powerful enough to compete with Anthropic are “dangerous.” But dangerous to whom? Not to enterprises that want to retain control over their data and workflows. Dangerous to a business model that benefits from customers having few real alternatives at the model layer.
As Karp exposes, true enterprise safety isn’t trusting that a lab’s future roadmap won’t include your business. It’s retaining the ability to choose — at the model layer — who gets to see and use your alpha.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp on what customers actually want, the real business of frontier labs, and the importance of open source models:
“What the technical customers want is control over their compute, their models, their data stack, and their alpha. They want to know they own the means of production, and it's not being transferred to someone else.”
"Who owns the data? Are the prompts secure? Is this being transferred to you?"
"If it was so valuable, and I can make you a billion dollars, wouldn't I say I'll make you a billion dollars and I want 30%? Why are they charging for tokens if it's so valuable?"
Nick Strada retweeted
In 2021 I outlined the vision to build a new highway that protects the free and open internet. Today that vision comes to life as Rumble transforms into $RUM Group Inc.
Rumble will continue to be the cornerstone for creativity.
Quake AI will become the bedrock that creativity is built on.
$RUM will empower human imagination as the world enters the agentic AI economy.
