Peter Ndirangu™ @Peternd49

Every time you plug a USB device into a Windows machine the operating system writes a record to the registry. That record persists indefinitely after the device is removed, after the device is destroyed, and after you have forgotten the device ever existed. The registry keys that store this information are located at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\USBSTOR and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\USB. Every device that has ever connected gets an entry containing the device type, manufacturer, product name, hardware ID, and a unique serial number specific to that device. A separate key at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\DeviceClasses stores the timestamps of first connection, last connection, and last removal for every device. Windows also writes the drive letter assigned to the device and the volume name into additional registry locations. The Windows Event Log adds another layer. Event IDs 2003, 2004, and 2100 in the Microsoft-Windows-DriverFrameworks-UserMode log record connection and disconnection events with timestamps precise to the millisecond. The practical implications go in two directions. From a forensics perspective this is invaluable. Digital investigators can reconstruct exactly which USB devices were connected to a machine, when they were connected, how long they were connected, and what drive letter they were assigned. That evidence has been used in criminal prosecutions, corporate investigations, and data theft cases. The registry does not lie and it does not forget. From a privacy perspective every USB device you have ever connected to a Windows machine has left a permanent trace that survives removal of the device itself. A flash drive containing sensitive data that you destroyed still has its serial number recorded in the registry of every machine it ever touched. The only way to remove these records is manually deleting the relevant registry keys or using dedicated tools like USBDeview or DriveCleanup. Windows does not offer a native cleanup mechanism for this data. Your machine remembers every device. You do not have to.

Security Trybe @SecurityTrybe

a day ago

Windows keeps a permanent record of every USB device you’ve ever plugged in even after it’s removed.

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China published the most uncomfortable paper on vibe coding. ETH Zurich tested 100 developers in a controlled, commercial-grade vibe coding environment to see who actually succeeds. The findings are brutal. The researchers tracked computer science achievement, written communication skills, and general cognitive reasoning. They wanted to see what actually predicts vibe coding proficiency when you never touch a line of source code yourself. Two major predictors emerged. Written communication proficiency mattered. The ability to structure thoughts and articulate intent unambiguously in text directly impacts what the AI builds. But that wasn't even the main takeaway. Computer science achievement was a massive, dominant predictor of success. Even when researchers controlled for general intelligence and reasoning skills, CS background still heavily dictated who built working software and who completely crashed. In fact, CS knowledge contributed roughly twice the unique predictive variance of writing skills alone. Why? Because vibe coding isn't about writing code. It’s about debugging logic. When an AI agent builds a complex application and quietly breaks an edge case under the hood, a non-technical user looks at the glowing UI and assumes it works. They don't know what questions to ask. They don't know what logic to challenge. They lack the mental models to recognize architectural catastrophe. You can prompt your way past syntax. You cannot prompt your way past a fundamental lack of engineering intuition. The hype told us that learning to code is dead because language is all you need. The data just proved the opposite. To truly master the vibe, you still need to understand how the machine thinks.

STOP SETTING SMALL TRADING GOALS! Want to know the most dangerous mistake ambitious developing traders make when setting career goals? Hint: It isn’t aiming too high. It’s setting the bar way too low. Let me share a story from our prop desk. During a recent monthly review with Team Max, one of our traders announced his numbers: he pulled in $1 million in net trading profits in August. When he first sat on the desk, his lifelong dream was to make $1 million in a year. Last month, he did it in 21 trading days. Max had an even better month, and I wanted to get his reaction to his monster performance. After the meeting, I reached out to Max directly on Gchat: Me: "You ever think when you were starting you would make 2m plus in a month?" Max: "Def not lol" A couple of years back, we actually kicked around the idea of publicly tracking Max for the trading community to see if he could break $1M in a month. At the time, he hadn't broken this level yet. We ended up scrapping the project as we were worried it would focus on the wrong things. Fast forward to today: Max cleared over a couple of million dollars last month alone and is heading into his second consecutive 8-figure year. For him now, a million-dollar month isn't even close to the benchmark he aims for. Yet during that exact same review, a couple of our younger traders who made solid six figures were lamenting their month. They felt dejected comparing their numbers to the seven-figure producers on the desk. Three years into their careers, an outcome that would stun 99% of independent traders felt unsatisfying to them. That psychology reveals a critical truth about trader development: Arbitrary P&L Goals are Self-limiting: When you fixate on a dollar target early in your career, you anchor your ceiling to who you are today—with your current limited skills, risk tolerance, and PlayBook. The Process Multiplier: When you double down and triple down on your daily process, build technology, trade alongside elite traders, collaborate, and push size on your A+ setups, your growth becomes exponential. Your early career goals end up looking comically small in the rearview mirror. Happy, But Never Satisfied: As Chris Mullin, former NBA Hall-of-Famer, used to say, and as we preach to our desk constantly. Even after pulling millions out of the market, this desk spent the meeting dissecting where they left money on the table: leaving 25% on the Bitcoin breakout, breaking down what worked on MRNA, and focusing on pumping the brakes during low-opportunity tape. Trading can be a tough game at the start, but the upside is limitless when you stop capping your potential. Don't let arbitrary dollar targets limit what you can accomplish. Double down on your process, surround yourself with peers who raise your standards, pump the brakes during slow markets, and aggressively press your A+ setups. Your ceiling is far higher than your wildest imagination. #Trading #DayTrading #SMBCapital #PropTrading #TradingPsychology

How to destroy a beloved brand. Step 1: Put a soulless, data-driven consultant who has never even seen a basketball court or a running track up close in charge. Step 2: He goes direct! And increase profits while destroying the retail distribution system and betraying a multitude of 20-year-long partnerships. Step 3: Motivated and innovative competitors like On Running and Hoka rush to fill the distribution gap Nike left by abandoning its trusted partners. Step 4: Not satisfied, he fires all the stupid creative people who can't prove any of their ideas work with hard data. What could they possibly know? Step 5: Celebrate when milking the brand for every last cent works for about 18 months, even though the data quickly show a disaster is looming. Step 6: OMG? Wut? Step 7: Fire the old CEO and bring in a new one who's been with the brand since day one. He tries his best, but just too much damage was done. Step 8: Get delisted... Go down in history as the greatest example of data-driven idiots destroying one of the most successful creative brands of all time. The end.

Bull Theory @BullTheoryio

a day ago

BREAKING: Nike is getting removed from the S&P 100 after 18 years as the stock crashes 79% in the last 5 years.

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Giant Foundry Press If you want to make nuclear reactor pressure vessels, wellheads, naval cannons, mega crane hooks and tackle, marine crankshafts, basically anything worthy of sci-fi cinema… You need a foundry with a big press, so that you can forge big ingots, and work harden big forgings. You also need an appropriately sized quench bath. Then you need 30 years of cumulative competence with the equipment across your plant operators, your metallurgists and your quality inspectors… Then you can make these things. The horrible truth is that some things are so big they take 4 weeks to cool down (it’s the square-cube law), you can only make 10 per year… it takes a decade of practice to get good. For 10 years almost everything you make will be poor, it will take 3 years of operation just to calibrate your equipment. If you lose this stuff you never get it back, once you lose the last giant press your industrial base starts to unravel, lead times on critical components jump from 8 months to 40 months, it’s suddenly takes 5 years to repair a downed bridge, laypeople don’t understand why... This is why. Only 5 countries in the world can make giant ingots; China, Russia, Japan, South Korea and France… Italy and Germany the recent casualties, India probably ascend to make it 6 in a decade or so.

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I want to have a house like this

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NEWS 🚨: The UN has voted 164 to 1 to adopt a new world map that shows countries at their true relative sizes, with the United States the only country voting against it Before (left) and New map (right)

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Better to play the victim when you’re instrumental in implementing a widespread change of any sort. Be part of the people affected by the change. Blame it on external factors. Never announce that you’re the author of such decisions. Good or bad. Applies to all contexts.

To truly comprehend the scale of China's manufacturing industry, sometimes you have to look at something as ordinary as a plastic bag. This plant in China operates a roughly 200,000 m² manufacturing complex with close to 3,000 circular looms running 24 hours a day. Together they produce around 380 tonnes of polypropylene woven fabric daily, nearly 16 tonnes every hour, or 140,000 tonnes a year. This becomes the sacks carrying rice, grain, animal feed, fertiliser, cement and chemicals around the world. China exported 578,000 tonnes of woven polyethylene and polypropylene sacks in 2024, worth $1.34 billion and roughly 30% global exports in this category. But the scale goes further upstream. China once depended heavily on imported polypropylene, then built an enormous petrochemical industry of its own. By 2025, PP production capacity was expected to exceed domestic demand by almost 12 million tonnes. So increasingly, the polypropylene is made, extruded, woven and converted in China, then moved through the world's largest container port system and shipped globally. Even the machinery tells part of the story. Starlinger, one of the pioneers of these high speed circular weaving systems, is Austrian. Europe remains exceptionally good at building sophisticated industrial machinery, China has become exceptionally good at deploying it at enormous scale and keeping it productive around the clock. China's advantage is having cheap power, raw materials, machinery, suppliers, automation, labour and logistics in the same place, operating at enormous scale. The final product is an ordinary industrial sack used across dozens of industries. It isn't particularly expensive, but producing it profitably at this scale and capturing a huge share of the global market requires an industrial ecosystem that is anything but ordinary.

Everyone knows real assets beat bonds in a hyperinflation. Fewer people know what the German state did about it afterward. In 1923, hyperinflation wiped out mortgage debt in Germany. A landlord who owed 100,000 marks in 1914 could clear it in 1923 for what was, in real terms, spare change. Property owners came out the other side holding their buildings free and clear. Bondholders and savers came out with nothing. The government noticed. In February 1924, three months after the Rentenmark stabilized the currency, Berlin passed the Third Emergency Tax Decree. It did two things. First, it "revalued" old mortgages at just 15% of their gold value (later 25%), so creditors got a sliver back and owners kept most of the windfall. Second, it created the Hauszinssteuer, the house-rent tax, on every residential building built before 1918. The rate was set as a share of the building's pre-war "peace rent," typically 20–40% depending on the state. The logic was explicit: the state saw a pool of unearned gain sitting in real estate, and it wanted it back. The tax was designed to replace the mortgage payments that had just disappeared. It also solved two other problems. The government was broke, and Germany had a severe housing shortage. A fixed share of the revenue was earmarked for subsidized construction. The results were dramatic. The Hauszinssteuer became one of the largest revenue sources of the entire Weimar period, bringing in around a billion Reichsmarks a year by the late 1920s. It financed the famous Weimar housing estates, including Bruno Taut's in Berlin and Ernst May's "New Frankfurt," and a large share of the roughly 2.5 million dwellings built between 1924 and 1931. Several of them are UNESCO sites today. Politically, it was poison. Many of the owners were small middle-class landlords. Some had never held a mortgage and got no windfall at all, but were taxed anyway. Landlord associations became a permanent lobby, and the grievance fed into the middle-class resentment the right wing, including the Nazis, exploited. Private rental investment collapsed, since the tax plus rent control left no margin. Brüning cut it in 1931 during the Depression and allowed owners to buy their way out. The Nazi government abolished it entirely in 1942–43 through a final lump-sum redemption. Nearly twenty years of clawback. The lesson for anyone treating farmland, timber, or real estate as a hedge against a sovereign debt crisis: the hedge worked. And then the state spent two decades taxing it away, with the political cover to do so precisely because the gain looked unearned.

Bwana IG, I have seen that you have purported to order a thorough investigation into the abduction of Alex Kiprotich, the Associate Editor of the Standard Media Group. That investigation, like all the others you have ordered, will go nowhere because it was done by police officers outside your command. You are clueless about the operations of the National Police Service. I do have more information as to the happenings in the Service than you do. The National Police Service was taken over a long time ago by Mr. Kipchumba Murkomen and Mr. Raymond Omollo, with the concurrence of Mr. William Ruto; orders are directly issued to your DIG, Eliud Langat, and DCI Mohamed Amin. You are just a flower girl leading a shell, and you will be sacrificed at the right time and blamed for the excesses in the Service. Let me bring you up to speed. Mr. Alex Kiprotich was preparing for an assignment in the Mau Forest, where thousands of Mau evictees from the Kipsigis community have been conned out of millions of shillings in compensation money by officials of the National Government Administration under the direction of Mr. Murkomen and Mr. Raymond Omollo. This money has been paid by the duo to their brokers and proxies. Alex was to publish an exposé giving a blow-by-blow account of how the funds have been stolen, leaving the evictees helpless and in anguish. A late-night meeting on Monday evening between Mr. William Ruto and Mr. Kipchumba Murkomen sealed the fate of Mr. Alex Kiprotich, where it was decided that he had to be stopped. The DCI, Mr. Mohamed Amin, was instructed to put Alex under 24-hour surveillance. The DCI assembled a team headed by one Mr. Zachary Kariuki, who, though retired, has been recalled by Amin to coordinate this squad trained in abductions, killings, and cover-ups. This is the team that abducted Alex Kiprotich and was instructed to abandon the earlier plan to eliminate him after the abduction was captured live and provoked public outrage. This team of 60 rogue police killers is responsible for the abduction of businessman Jimmy in Mlolongo, as ordered by DIG Langat, Zizo Abdulaziz, Lawyer Molu, and killed Rachel Wandeto after you and Kipchumba Murkomen visited her in hospital. That is why, even after Mr. William Ruto told Kenyans that the killers of Rachel Wandeto would be arrested, it has not happened and will not happen. Bwana Kanja, before you order investigations into the abduction of Alex, kindly first release the findings of the previous investigations you ordered into the death of Rachel Wandeto, the attack on Witima ACK Church, the attack on Mwiki PCEA Church, the attack on Kariobangi PCEA Church, and the killings and mayhem in Ol Kalou, to name but a few. You have no report to release because no investigations were carried out, and none will be carried out. You cannot investigate your seniors, and police cannot investigate themselves. IPOA is dead, and the rule of law has been suspended. I can see you crying at the International Criminal Court in The Hague next year. |Photos courtesy of SG|

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COLLAPSE OF MEA FERTILIZER FACTORY IS A NATIONAL TRAGEDY Lee Ngugi is a personal friend. He is a legend many Kenyans don’t know. He was amongst the first black bank executives. He was the first black member of Muthaiga Country Club. He quietly built MEA to be the biggest fertilizer company in the region. The new MEA Fertilizer factory in Nakuru is the biggest in Africa outside Morocco. Kenya leaders have repeatedly said we want to promote local enterprises. And in fertilizer in particular, Government has said we want to produce it locally. MEA has the capacity to supply Kenya & the region. BUT MEA has sadly not been given the opportunity to supply the local market as briefcase boys import fertilizer. We import fertilizer from Europe instead of supporting our own. The story of MEA is a sad indictment of how private enterprise that offers opportunities to thousands of Kenya & was to make Nakuru an industrial city is a victim of modern day buccaneers! nation.africa/kenya/news/lee…

History of Central Banking: Central banking was never designed to stabilize economies. It was designed to stabilize governments that spent more than they taxed. The Bank of England launched in 1694 with a straightforward transaction: a consortium of private bankers lent William III £1.2 million to fund his war against France, and in return received the right to issue banknotes against that debt. The template was set on day one. Public debt and money creation arrived as a package deal. The Federal Reserve repeated the pattern, but with better marketing. Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act in 1913, sold to the public as a bulwark against the banking panics that plagued the 19th century. The Fed produced the most catastrophic banking collapse in American history in 1929-1933, followed by a contraction that destroyed roughly a third of the money supply on its own watch. Milton Friedman documented this meticulously in "A Monetary History of the United States." The institution created to prevent bank runs presided over the worst bank runs in recorded American experience. Every central bank in the 20th century eventually broke its commodity constraint. The U.S. severed the last formal gold link in August 1971, when Nixon closed the gold window and defaulted on America's obligations to foreign governments holding dollars. Since that date, the dollar has lost roughly 87% of its purchasing power. Prices you pay at a grocery store in 2026 reflect that slow-motion confiscation accumulated across five decades. Ludwig von Mises identified inflation as a hidden tax before most economists would admit the mechanism existed. New money flows first to government and its preferred creditors. By the time it reaches wages and savings accounts, prices have already adjusted upward. The purchasing power transfer is real and directional: from your savings to the first spenders. Central banks perform a political function, not the economic function they advertise. The institutional story of central banking is a government granting itself the power to manufacture its own revenue without a vote, and wrapping that power in the language of technocratic stabilization. Every financial crisis since 1913 has produced more Fed authority, larger balance sheets, and looser constraints, which means the incentive structure rewards failure with expansion.

Gold and Silver are officially legal tender in Texas! Certain merchants will accept physical metals. In May 2027, it becomes digital and this is how to deposit your physical gold and silver into digital (not financial advice) 👇

Dallas Texas TV @DallasTexasTV

5 days ago

Gold and silver are officially legal tender in Texas starting today

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Uber is shutting down operations in Nigeria and Uganda effective September 2, 2026, as it refocuses investment on African markets where it believes it can provide earning opportunities at scale. The exits follow Uber’s withdrawal from Tanzania in February 2026 and Côte d’Ivoire in 2025, leaving it operating in four African markets: Kenya, South Africa, Ghana and Egypt.

Getting rich is just following the 5-7 year psyops governments push and back up with tax revenue. 2021-2026 AI 2015-2021 Green energy 2009-2014 Oil and gas 2002-2008 Biotech - Defense contractors 1996-2001 Dot com Just watch the space and invest where the tax dollars go.

Because Iran is throwing missiles at Jordan right now, you need to know something first. Jordan did not grow out of the ground like an old country. It was stitched together in a hotel in Cairo in March 1921 by a handful of British officials who needed a cheap solution and a quiet map. The Ottoman Empire had just collapsed. Britain was sitting on Mesopotamia, Palestine, and a big empty stretch of desert east of the Jordan River. Keeping troops there cost a fortune. Winston Churchill, then Colonial Secretary, called a meeting at the Semiramis Hotel. They joked they were the forty thieves. Gertrude Bell was the only woman in the room who actually knew the tribes and the roads. T. E. Lawrence was there. Sir Percy Cox came from Baghdad with the files. They needed Arab kings who would take British money and not demand a giant army. Faisal, son of the Sharif of Mecca, got Iraq. His older brother Abdullah needed a prize too, otherwise the family would sulk. So they gave him the leftover desert and called it Transjordan. Churchill later said he created the place on a Sunday afternoon with a stroke of a pen. That is not poetry. That is how the country entered the world. Abdullah became emir, then king. The British paid him, trained his force, and used the land as a buffer. After independence the Hashemite throne stayed. Decades later American aircraft and missile batteries moved onto Jordanian air bases because the same strip of desert sits in a useful place between Iraq, Syria, Israel, and the Gulf. King Hussein Air Base. Al Azraq. Muwaffaq Salti. Names on a modern war map that sit on ground first outlined in that Cairo dining room. So when Iranian missiles fly toward those bases, they are not hitting some ancient kingdom that chose this fight in the year 700. They are hitting a state invented to save British cash and keep two Hashemite brothers employed. The joke is old and it is not funny anymore. A hotel table made the border. The border hosted the bases. The bases drew the missiles. That is the whole chain. Read it once more if you have to. Cairo, March 1921. Cheap kings. A Sunday map. A country that still has to catch steel that was aimed at someone else’s war.

Developer uses Claude Code to debloat Android smart TV for 'unbelievable' performance upgrade — TV now smoother than it was new as autonomous agent deactivates apps, shortens animations, all without root access tomshardware.com/tech-industry/…

The First World War did not erupt. Governments built it, financed it, and kept it running long past the point where any rational army would have quit the field. Franz Ferdinand's assassination in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, gave chancelleries and foreign ministries the pretext they needed. The war itself required something more durable than a pretext. It required central banks. Every major belligerent suspended the gold standard within weeks of the opening shots. Britain suspended convertibility in August 1914. Germany, France, and Austria-Hungary followed. This mattered enormously. Under a true gold standard, you cannot fund a four-year industrial slaughter. Governments run out of money and populations refuse further sacrifice. The war ends. Instead, central banks printed currency to buy government bonds, transferring the cost of the war to ordinary wage earners through inflation, a tax nobody voted for and most never identified as a tax. Ludwig von Mises watched this from Vienna and identified the mechanism precisely: inflation allows states to conscript private purchasing power without explicit confiscation. Every loaf of bread that cost more in 1917 than in 1913 represented a transfer from the buyer to the war machine. The death toll reached approximately 20 million people. The fiscal cost exceeded $200 billion in 1914 dollars. Neither number was achievable under honest money. Politicians and generals sustained the catastrophe because central banking made it financially possible to keep going. Remove the printing press and the trenches empty themselves inside three months. Sound money is a hard constraint on state violence. States hate hard constraints.

💰The 4 Tiers of Wealth. The first one is the hardest. Tier 1: $100K. This one's is impressive to me because you honestly can't get here by accident. Its proof that you have good financial habits and discipline, and that you're able to save consistently. Tier 2: $500K. If you're relatively young, like under the age of 45, having $500K means you can CoastFIRE. Tier 3: $2 Million. If you have this much, 4% withdrawn every year is $80,000 per year in retirement, And Tier 4: $5 Million. This is where you stop thinking about money altogether.