Jeff Diesel @JamesDali2

Dear Secretary Bessent @SecScottBessent, My name is Everett Stern. In 2010 I was a compliance officer at @HSBC. From a back office in New Castle, Delaware, I watched billions of dollars move to drug cartels, sanctioned regimes, and terrorist organizations. The enemies of the United States. I documented it, I escalated it, and when the bank would not act, I took it to the @FBI, the @CIA, and eventually the @SECGov. The result was a $1.92 billion settlement. At the time, it was one of the largest in American history. It was also about five weeks of the bank’s profit. Not one banker was charged. Not one went to prison. I paid a different price. I lost my career, my savings, and my place in the industry I had trained for. I was blacklisted. Every door in American finance closed at once. I slept on a camping cot in a 300 square foot apartment because I could not afford a bed, and I waited tables at @PFChangs to eat. I tell you this not for sympathy, but so you understand that I know exactly what it costs to do the right thing in American finance, and exactly how little the system does in return. I made that sacrifice because I believed it would change something. Yesterday, your department fined @BankofAmerica $1.2 billion for failing to report more than $5 billion in suspicious transactions, some of it tied by your own findings to Chinese laundering networks, narcotics, and the southwest border, alongside 475 apparent sanctions violations touching Russia, Iran, and global terrorism. The bank admitted it willfully violated the Bank Secrecy Act. Fourteen years after HSBC. A bank with “America” in its name. And once again, not one individual charged. Secretary Bessent, I want to say plainly what I believe you already know. The fines are not working. A fine is paid by shareholders, absorbed by the balance sheet, and forgotten by the next earnings call. Bank of America reported earnings this morning. Nobody who set the alert thresholds, nobody who decided the 2024 cease and desist could wait, nobody who chose the backlog over the law will lose a single thing they value. Their lives are untouched. That is the entire reason the behavior repeats. This is money laundering. This is blood money. Money that reaches a cartel buys fentanyl that kills Americans. Money that reaches a terrorist organization buys the next attack. This country has fought a war on drugs and a war on terror for decades, at enormous cost in lives and treasure, and all the while we have allowed the financing to flow through institutions we charter and regulate. Cut off the money and we win. We have never seriously tried. There is also a question of equal justice that I cannot let go. Before I walked into the FBI building to report HSBC, I stopped in front of the Great Seal on the wall and read the words engraved beneath it: “Justice is the defense of our liberty.” I believed that. I still want to. But every day in this country, people go to prison for crimes that are nothing next to moving money for the people who want Americans dead. A suit, a title, and a corporate badge should not be a shield from the consequences that apply to everyone else. If a street dealer goes to prison for what he sells, the banker who moved the cartel’s money should be standing next to him. I also want to raise something that is rarely said in these conversations. Why has no one inside Bank of America come forward the way I did? The answer is that everyone in American banking knows what happened to me, and to the whistleblowers who came after. The last person who spoke up is the only policy anyone believes. That is a culture problem, and it starts with leadership, in the banks and in the agencies that regulate them. This is not a political issue. It has spanned administrations of both parties. It is a national security issue, and I am asking you to treat it as one. Three things would change the math overnight. Refer individuals for criminal prosecution. Not the analyst in the queue. The executives who set the thresholds and chose the risk. One banker in handcuffs would do more than every fine in Treasury’s history combined. End “too big to jail.” An institution cannot be too big to fail and too big to jail at the same time. If it is the first, it must be held to a higher standard, not a lower one. And if Bank of America will not act as America’s bank, review its charter. A national charter is a privilege granted on behalf of the American people. It should be conditioned on not moving money for the people trying to kill them. Secretary Bessent, you said yesterday that these actions send a clear message that even the biggest institutions are not above the law. With respect, the institution was never the problem. The people inside it are above the law, and they know it. Until that changes, I will keep writing letters like this one, and the next bank will keep paying the next fine. I gave up everything I had to stop this. I am asking you to use the power you have to finish it. Respectfully, Everett A. Stern HSBC Whistleblower Founder and Intelligence Director, Tactical Rabbit

Just finished my tax return for 2025. I paid over $6m in federal taxes last year, which dwarfs the amounts I spend on my family. Taxes shouldn't be anyone's largest expense... and certainly not by a order of magnitude (10x). But, until I'm willing to pick up a rifle, I'm certain there's no way to prevent the criminals in D.C. from continuing to rob me. What I find far more troubling is that the document that I'm required to submit along with these funds is over 600 pages long and costs me a fortune to prepare each year. And ... don't forget... if my accountants make a mistake... this document can be used in a criminal trial against both me and my wife. Please explain how anyone could possibly be responsible for knowing, as a matter of law, whether or not every number in a 600 page document is accurate? And the best part? If you send this document to ten different accounting teams, you'll get ten different final amounts. This is all nuts.

I’m French. I want to talk to Americans who are about to vote Democrat. Not to insult you. To warn you. I come from your future. In France we did everything your progressive politicians promise. Free healthcare, free college, generous welfare, strong unions, heavy regulation, high taxes on the rich, a state that takes care of everything. Public spending close to 57% of GDP, one of the highest on the planet. On paper, it’s the dream. Here’s what it looks like from the inside. France hasn’t passed a balanced budget since 1974. Our debt is above 3,300 billion euros. Interest on that debt is becoming one of the biggest items in the national budget. Our hospitals are collapsing despite record funding. Our schools rank lower every year. Young people with degrees can’t afford an apartment in the city they were born in. Our best engineers leave for London, Zurich and San Francisco. And the rich you wanted to tax? They left too, and took the jobs with them. The promise was protection. The result is stagnation. The worst part is that nobody in France voted for decline. Every single step sounded generous, compassionate, reasonable. One more program. One more regulation. One more tax to fund it. Each step alone makes sense. Fifty years of them, and you wake up in a country that can no longer build a nuclear plant on time or keep its streets safe. I love America because it’s the one place on earth where people still believe they can build something from nothing. I came to Silicon Valley as a self-taught kid and it changed my life. That spirit is the most precious thing your country has. Before you vote, ask yourself one question: is the program you’re voting for making America more like America, or more like France? Trust me. You don’t want to be France.

Brivael Le Pogam @brivael

2 days ago

Je n'ai jamais été aussi optimiste. Pas malgré le chaos actuel, mais grâce à lui. Je vais vous expliquer pourquoi l'empire du mensonge construit par la gauche depuis cinquante ans va s'effondrer, et pourquoi ce n'est pas une opinion mais une question de physique. Tout commence

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Dusting off this tweet from April because this gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is *widening*. It's now less "two groups of people speaking past each other" and more a sharp funnel. - Napkin math somewhere around 6B people (~75% of the population) have barely come in contact with LLMs at all. - Around 1-2B (~20%) are casual and infrequent users of free-tier ChatGPT-like products. This group sees derpy chatbots and treats them a bit like a better Google search, a writing aid, or etc. Maybe an agent tries to book you a flight. I have non-tech friends who (reasonably, imo) say they have not much use for it at all. Even many professionals outside of math&code are in this tier. For example, execs and many other functions spend a lot of their time talking to other people, so while they understand what is happening intellectually, it is still second-hand and a bit abstract. - Now we get to professional use of frontier-grade LLMs in math&code. Somewhere around 20M people (0.2%) see first-hand that large, complex projects that used to take them weeks/months can now be completed by agents with a prompt. Building apps, copying apps, translating apps, decompiling apps from binaries... This has all happened very quickly and recently - less than 1 year ago, I was writing code manually by hand, typing memorized computer code commands into a code editor character by character, occasionally pressing Tab to autocomplete a little chunk of code. - And finally we get to the ~5,000 people (~0.00006%) with access to frontier-grade systems internally. The external world has seen the preview. It looks like swarms of thousands of agents collaborating over weeks on software mega projects: minting zero days, running cyber attacks and defenses at machine speeds, discovering new science, advancing the frontier of mathematics. Things that would have taken top professionals in the industry years of work. Meanwhile, human review and comprehension are starting to fall behind. For example, people are still involved in the "archeology" of the OpenAI-HF incident from many months ago. Mathematicians may be poring over the 722 manuscripts on frontier mathematics for a while. The funnel is driven by a combination of factors: 1. The impact scales with ambition, problem size, and horizon. A question with a paragraph answer barely stresses the system. You need a reservoir of big, difficult problems that you really care about. This aspect drives the consumer / professional dimension of the funnel. 2. The jaggedness of the system (which I have written about a lot separately). Capability peaks in domains that are digital, verifiable and economically valuable. This is because LLM capability emerges from reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards on a curated environment mixture driven by revenue potential. This aspect primarily drives the area (e.g. math&code) dimension of the funnel. 3. Access. Free-tier, paid-tier, internal. So this is the weirdness of the moment. The general public has mostly not interacted with these systems. When they have, it looks like a derpy chatbot. The majority of professionals still see only a modest uplift. And a small sliver of professionals are experiencing the vertigo of the curve going vertical. And it is all happening at the same time.

Andrej Karpathy @karpathy

6 months ago

Judging by my tl there is a growing gap in understanding of AI capability. The first issue I think is around recency and tier of use. I think a lot of people tried the free tier of ChatGPT somewhere last year and allowed it to inform their views on AI a little too much. This is

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We're the most technically advanced civilization in history. And the least competent at the same time. SpaceX can catch a rocket. Delta can't land you at JFK on time, makes you rawdog the flight, and loses your bag. Amazon gets you a package in 4 hours. The DMV needs 6 weeks for a license. AI can pass the bar exam. Public schools can't teach kids how to do basic math. Your watch can detect AFib. Your insurance needs 3 weeks to approve a visit. Your car can spot a pedestrian and brake on its own. Your city can't keep needles off the sidewalk. AI can design a new protein. Your hospital can't send you a correct bill. AI can draw a building in minutes. The city takes three years to approve a duplex. Satellites and cameras can track a car across the city. A man with 30 arrests walks out the next morning.

I've been prototyping an automated peer review project. With current models you get human level peer review for about $0.10 of tokens. For $5 you can rederive every result, check every statistical inference, and audit every paper cited in both directions. There are about 100m papers in the scientific corpus. Most are not important. Many are sloppy. For structural reasons it's essentially impossible to change published work, even to correct a typo. For $500m today you can thoroughly audit every paper ever written. Every p-hacked result, every plagiarist, every fabrication, every citation club, everything. I don't have $500m so instead I build a tree, focusing on the 1% of papers that carry 99% of the signal, doing a cheap first pass looking for obvious problems. I can find 90% of the nonsense for a few hundred dollars of tokens. Any guesses where the biggest surprises will be found?

After six years in stealth, Atomic Machines is out. Our mission: on-demand, universal command of matter. First beachhead: the Matter Compiler, an AI-native manufacturing system that builds working micro-machines from code alone. No per-product tooling. No process development. Different code, different machine.

🚨 side project alert 🚨 Announcing Muse Gadgets, an open source ESP32 firmware and Linux sdk so that you can make hardware devices that work with Muse. Grab an API token from gadgets.muse.ai and point your favorite coding agent at the github repo to build your own peripherals for Muse.

@cixliv @polygrafix Andy is a standup guy. Former mma pro

🇪🇺 EU bankruptcies have now reached the highest level since they started measuring them in 2019 Meanwhile new EU business registrations have been stagnant or decreasing I discovered this after another one of the interior design stores in the Netherlands we bought from suddenly disappeared off the internet, luckily we already received the stuff we ordered (a big stone table) and dodged a bullet Quite expensive stuff and their Trustpilot is full of "where's my €7000 table". This is the second interior design store we bought from that went bankrupt just after we received our things, very interesting So I started looking at EU bankruptcies and discovered they're skyrocketing and new business registrations are stagnant or decreasing They really managed to regulate and tax away any existing business while making people give up to even think of starting a business in Europe

The statue of Prometheus is finally finished. It was cast in Paris, crossed the Atlantic, and was assembled at Starbase. It took us 100 days to go from nothing to this. People of the West, we have lived through an era devoid of dreams, devoid of destiny. But the time has come to reclaim our dream of antiquity. In a few months, we will start building a new city. It will be the most magnificent city in all of history. After all, the great dream of the West has always been to rebuild Rome. Come walk beside us in this endeavor. The world is waiting.

Amazing. These researchers found that there's a spike in Bitcoin activity around the time foreign aid money goes out. Somewhere between 2 and 6 cents of every dollar of World Bank foreign aid disbursements got siphoned off into crypto wallets:

I've been at college for a month and building anything here is ridiculously slow. 3D printers aren't allowed in dorms because they're a fire hazard (microwaves are fine). So you have to use the school's labs (pay 4 cents a gram, ~4x markup) which are a 30 minute walk away, no unattended jobs allowed over 4 hours, every print needs approval from the 19 year old lab supervisor, no bringing your own material, PLA only, bambus off limits. I got a PCB from pcbway from china for a robot and it went to the central package center where a handful of students handle the mail for a few thousand residents. Turns out they couldn't match it to my dorm room so they returned to sender.😂Ordered back in mid august and only received yesteday. I get why so few people here start personal projects. Heard the career fair lines were 2-3 hours long, full of people applying to internships that ask for projects. If college is set up like this, where do companies expect the projects to come from?

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Sometimes reading Ayn Rand feels like getting kicked in the chest

1501: Pope Alexander VI criticizes Gutenberg’s printing press safety “The art of printing can be of great service in so far as it furthers the circulation of useful & tested books; but it can bring about serious evils l..it will, therefore, be necessary to maintain full control”

Financial Times @FT

2 weeks ago

Pope Leo criticises Nvidia’s Jensen Huang over AI safety ft.trib.al/azwdiGc

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This is fake news at its finest.    First off, we’re not ‘banning’ any program. The federal government doesn’t set curriculum or programs.    Here’s the truth: we are holding colleges accountable for leaving students worse off than if they never enrolled. Too many graduates report delaying major life milestones like buying a home or starting a family. Why? Because low return-on-investment programs saddled them with unmanageable debt that was never going to translate into a real-world job.    Federal student loans are not a welfare program for failing college programs. American students deserve education and training pathways that prepare them for the workforce – and transparency about programs that will never pay off.

The New Republic @newrepublic

2 weeks ago

Trump is banning students majoring in degrees that don’t make enough money from taking out college loans. Degrees for social work, art, religious studies, teaching aides, and music will be hit the hardest. trib.al/NmmAzhf

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@LaunchHQ_ Your stuff doesn’t work. Your service customer support is a joke. There is no way to call or chat with anyone. Live chat on website takes you to some stupid diagnostic chat. I tried with car on or off and firmware update and nothing.

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When frontier labs talk of “aligning” models, ask: to what? If they say values, ask: whose? If it’s theirs rather than the user’s: why?

Ralph Lorigo sued 212 hospitals that refused to let patients try ivermectin. In the 72 cases he won, all but 3 survived. In the 140 cases he lost or couldn’t get to court in time, every single patient died. My patient Jason Jones was one of the unfortunate ones, thanks to Texas Huguley Hospital.