Happy Islamophobia awareness month
Day 9
Today we remember the victims of the Nice truck attack
On 14 July 2016 in Nice an Islamic terrorist called Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel drove a truck into crowds celebrating Bastille Day on the Promenade des Anglais.
He murdered 86 people including 15 children and left more than 450 injured before police shot him. The attack led to one of the most harrowing images of terror attacks in modern history the dead child with their doll next to them, that’s what’s been sacrificed for the sake of Islam in the west growing
Lahouaiej-Bouhlel was a Tunisian living in France. He was radicalised by Islamic ideology and ISIS claimed the attack as the work of one of their soldiers.
Investigators later confirmed the jihadist motive.
This is what Islamic ideology produces. Killers who deliberately target families and children at public celebrations across Europe because they hate the West and everything it stands for.
Fuck Islam. Fuck the ideology that turns men into mass murderers of ordinary people. Fuck everyone who still pretends this has nothing to do with the doctrine.
RIP to the 86 victims.
Silly little Two Time and Chance Au that‘s funny to me. Not sure I’ll do anything with it but it’s nice for me to bounce around in my head.
not tagging this lmao
Brianna Lyman on President Trump’s name being added to the Kennedy Center: “I personally don’t care that much, but I do find it funny, Paul, that you care and that the Kennedys care because no one in your party cared in 2020 when you guys were changing names of hospitals, parks, schools, streets, everything in the name of George Floyd.”
“Wikipedia has an entire page called ‘list of name changes due to the George Floyd protests.’ It is the longest Wikipedia page I’ve ever seen. So people who are up in arms about name changes now were mostly silent. The second point I’d make, I think it’s really disingenuous for the Kennedys and for anyone to sit here and pretend like they care so much about the Kennedy Center because I don’t know how many of you guys have been to the Kennedy Center prior to Donald Trump taking office.”
“I was there in 2023. I wasn’t a VIP box. That should be pretty nice. The seats were stained. I literally sat down, I was like, is this wet? Is this fresh? The floors were dirty. This is a place that was decrepit. And all of this on top of people getting exorbitant salaries. So people who were running the Kennedy Center or who claimed to love and care about the Kennedy Center said nothing when it was falling into disrepair, and President Trump comes in, they are renovating, they cut salaries that were needlessly high, they’re bringing people to come and see the arts for once. It was not that lively of an institution under the Biden administration. So don’t pretend like you care about the Kennedy Center now when you were quiet when it was falling into disrepair.”
Department of Justice Launches Super Intelligence Task Force
This is the takedown of the Millennium.
We have everything.
And they walked straight into a TRAP.
That’s why Trump called it “SUPER” instead of “ARTIFICIAL”—he made the point unmistakable.
Drop 1201
Apr 20, 2018 1:48:56 PM EDT
Q !xowAT4Z3VQ
Anonymous Apr 20, 2018 1:47:20 PM EDT
>>1116248
Trap card played…nice work Q
>>1116307
TRUMP CARD coming.
Q
DOJ LAUNCHES SUPER INTELLIGENCE TASK FORCE ⬇️
@POTUS Trump has made clear that “America stands at the forefront of a new technological revolution in intelligence,” and the Department will be a leader in safeguarding against malicious SI actors.
“The SI Task Force at the Department of Justice will facilitate our partnership with SI Force Chair Jay Clayton as we ensure critical SI technologies serve the American people and are not manipulated by bad actors at home or abroad. The Department of Justice will continue identifying and prosecuting individuals whose use of SI violates the law, including by maliciously targeting American taxpayers, critical U.S. infrastructure, or other aspects of our national security.” -@AGToddBlanche
Read more about the DOJ-SITF here:
DOJ LAUNCHES SUPER INTELLIGENCE TASK FORCE ⬇️
@POTUS Trump has made clear that “America stands at the forefront of a new technological revolution in intelligence,” and the Department will be a leader in safeguarding against malicious SI actors.
“The SI Task Force at the Department of Justice will facilitate our partnership with SI Force Chair Jay Clayton as we ensure critical SI technologies serve the American people and are not manipulated by bad actors at home or abroad. The Department of Justice will continue identifying and prosecuting individuals whose use of SI violates the law, including by maliciously targeting American taxpayers, critical U.S. infrastructure, or other aspects of our national security.” -@AGToddBlanche
Read more about the DOJ-SITF here:
Tomorrow I head to @AASAHQ#NCE in San Antonio. On Thursday, the National Superintendent of the Year will be announced. As part of the process, I had to create a 2 minute introductory video. The product was my favorite part of this process. Check it out.
Ethan’s situation with Gehlee just makes me believe even more that men are only nice to women they find attractive. All that concern he showed her wasn’t just because he was being nice. He clearly had ulterior motives.
GEHLEE IS A WOMAN
#WomenAreNotTrophies
Jesse Livermore made and lost fortunes multiple times.
Stan Druckenmiller shorted $200M worth of internet stocks in 1999 and lost $600M within weeks. Every one of those companies eventually went bankrupt. He was right about the businesses but was wrong on timing.
Kristjan Kullamägi grew his account to $105M, then gave back nearly $60M in about eight months.
Dan Zanger turned a five-figure account into $42M, then reportedly suffered a 75% drawdown.
Paul Tudor Jones lost 60 to 70% of the equity he was managing on a single cotton trade. He nearly quit trading.
These are some of the greatest traders to ever do it. People who understood markets better than most ever will. None of that made them immune to devastating losses.
I was doing my usual re-listen of “Best Loser Wins” by Tom Hougaard, and two stories really stayed with me.
One was about Adam, a brilliant trader with extraordinary patience and discipline. He had built great wealth through his trading. Then one heavily leveraged trade went wrong and wiped out nearly half of it.
But that loss alone wasn’t what destroyed him. It was his inability to accept it and move on. He abandoned the discipline that made him successful in the first place, started doubling down, and desperately tried to make it all back fast.
He went on to lose everything. His money, his home, his family. He ended up homeless.
Then Hougaard talks about another friend who had been trading full-time for 15 years.
He never made “f**k you” money. He earned what someone in a well-paid corporate job would. He paid his bills, took his family on vacations, bought a nice car, and was home when his kids got back from school.
We spend so much time admiring huge returns and huge accounts. And rightfully so. They’re worth admiring, even aspiring to. But we rarely talk about what it takes to keep what we’ve made, or what we’re willing to give up chasing more and more.
Very very few end up as Market Wizards. Then there is the guy who is home when his kids get back from school.
I put together a list of everything that broke the back of Trumpism.
The gas prices.
The unsanctioned war.
The massive corruption.
The incompetence.
The tariffs.
Playing nice with Russia.
The cruelty against American citizens.
The overly aggressive deportations.
The accidental arrests of American citizens who were Hispanic. The ballroom.
The reflecting pool that doesn’t reflect.
The Qatari 747.
The aggressive redistricting push.
The threats against our allies.
By the way, I’m scratching the tip of the iceberg.
Best. Day. Ever! I was just accepted into the @nearpod PioNear Program 🎉🎉 This small group of people are some of the most impressive educators known! You have no idea how amazing this is and how excited I am! #nce#nearpodcertifiededucator#nearpodleader#podsquad
Vulnerable post: I spend 90% of my time on @chatprd dealing with increasingly creative international token fraud operations, and it makes me want to shut down the company. Mostly to steal Opus tokens on resold promo codes or in the time between a trial start + our fraud alerts infra.
It's cost me tens of thousands of dollars and it gets worse every day. Luckily the company is nice and profitable, but every time it happens it bums me out in extreme ways.
I love ChatPRD, I think at this point we've helped PM, engineers, and founders with millions of products + features. We are still a top 3 writing GPT (completely free!) on ChatGPT, we've kept generous trial periods, and have kept annual sub costs super reasonable, even for the enterprise. We've let people use the latest models when they come out, and have built in new features like prototyping without adding to our fees. We haven't had to limit usage, because our customers have been so great.
Building the product is incredibly fun, it's an actual footprint by which I get to test all this AI stuff, as an engineer, founder, and product builder. I have my little grok bot army that runs ops. We've been pen tested multiple times, SOC2ed, and work with some of the biggest companies out there.
It's my labor of love, and I keep it going (even though there are probably higher leverage things I could be doing with my time.)
But it's horrible to have our small team spend basically all of our time shutting down that Indonesian fraud ring, or that Egyptian code farm, or the Chinese signups that have been on an auto loop for the last 24 hours. I feel like I'm constantly making product calls that trade protecting from abuse vs giving our users an amazing experience (and keeping maintenance overhead low.)
It's basically sucked the joy out of my first little AI win, and I'm really sad about it.
And before you bucket me into dumb-little-vibecoder, trust that I know what I'm doing. I run our firewall like it's my full time job. We are stripe radar'd up to the gills. We have rate limits + so many automated triggers and controls.
But each one of these things ends up touching legitimate users and prospects. And every time I rachet up one control, I end up causing annoyance or pain to a real user. It's a trade that's hard to manage.
And honestly? It's not fun.
It just feels bad to see so many bad people.
So I have some thinking to do, but for now
- free trials are dead on chatprd, sorry kids
- i think in 2027 i might ban all non-US business
- and tbh, may retreat to the warm waters of 100% enterprise business, who are a) willing to pay more and b) have more interesting product needs
And if you're a little solo founder or startup that has dealt with this - I see you. I have some tips + tricks that might help. You're not dumb, and it's not easy.
Ok. Rant over.
Back to building the little wrapper who could 💕
Hi just so you all know I don't Use twitter. I havent used it since online discourse made me so stressed that I had to go to A&E a few months ago. I still make some promotional tweets, but I don't scroll at all. Please, PLEASE be nice to each other
We qualified for the closed qualifier 🫡
It’s so nice to be playing with some of my close friends and ex teammates once more.
they’re all insane 🙏
@s0mcs@Marved6@Subroza@florscnt@FNS
Dem members of Congress and base voters see Hakeem Jeffries very differently. I'll try to make the case *for* Jeffries, from the perspective of members. Ironically, they like him for the same reason voters don't, which is that he's nice and passive. He's NOT Pelosi.
Pelosi was a control freak, she tracked everything and bossed around the caucus with detail-oriented savviness. To give you a specific example, Pelosi made sure that only a few members could have staff with classified clearances, while most could not. That was a mechanism to ensure that just a few Dems would be able to make key decisions on national security.
She also was the Democrat who took over from the GOP Congress first elected in 1994. Gingrich (and his side kick Tom Delay) had taken apart a bunch of important Dem-leaning institutions to run Congress, centralizing control in the hands of leadership and corporate think tanks. That was the 'K Street Project.' It was a Strong Speaker model.
Pelosi had the chance to undo those changes, but she doubled down on the Strong Speaker approach. It wouldn't be a return to the Office of Technology Assessment and powerful caucuses, it would be the Wall Street-funded Center for American Progress and Congressional leadership in charge. She was a pro-choice Gingrich. Subsequent GOP leaders basically kept this arrangement in place, with Trump operating as the de facto latest strong speaker.
If she liked you, you could do anything. If she didn't. you got virtually nothing. She was in charge. When committees selected new members, Pelosi had a big say. When legislation needed to be finalized, that was Pelosi's call and her advisors choosing which lobbyists to listen to. She raised money, she allocated favors, handed out metaphorical parking spots. She knew everything.
The upside is that Pelosi could whip close votes, and could rule the House. She was able to save the ACA when Obama was ready to give up on it, because of her centralized control of the House. She governed. In some ways, she sort of saved the Obama administration. If you liked the direction she wanted to go, you were happy. If you didn't, you were not. But there were a few significant institutional downsides.
The Democratic Party suffered because Pelosi was a God-awful communicator. Just utter trash. She sounded entitled, she stuttered, she gave wandering obnoxious speeches, and couldn't articulate any coherent goals. To have someone that bad as the party front-person, and then to have the rest of the caucus admiring her, well, it made the party look bad.
On an 'office politics' level, the House was a miserable place where a few people made decisions, and all other elected Dems outside of leadership were merely ornamental. Talented House Democrats often jumped at other job opportunities, because the House was a waste of their talents.
On a substantive level, what it meant is that legislation could only be as good as Pelosi's people could make it. A San Francisco out of touch rich lady, and her advisors, were the ones structuring policy. Pelosi cut out much of the caucus, which means she cut out much of the country. That dramatically reduced the quality of what the House was doing.
On a party level, Pelosi's iron-fisted approach meant that no new leaders could emerge. Rather than embracing, say, the Squad, Pelosi went to war with them. That's not to say the Squad was good, just that Pelosi didn't create space for them to do their thing, whatever that might have been. The result was that there were no dynamic young Democratic leaders in the House, which should have been a talent pool for new people and ideas. Instead the House was a slightly younger nursing home than the Senate.
And Jeffries? Like Pelosi, Jeffries is a very communicator. So to outsiders, he seems similar. But he's completely different as a House leader. He doesn't track very much, he doesn't know what is happening in every corner of the caucus, and he doesn't have strong views. He won't set a direction. He'll listen, he will act if there's a consensus, but otherwise will sort of let things play out. You can talk to him about your concerns, he'll listen and be sympathetic. No one is worried about crossing Jeffries.
The downsides to Jeffries are pretty clear. He's widely disliked as a speaker, he makes the Democratic Party look bad because he clearly doesn't have a view of how to govern. He likes Israel and big money, but he'll do populist things if pushed. He proposed no agenda for the 2026 election, so there's no obvious specific mandate. Do something about 'affordability,' sure, but what? He also won't be able to manage the House. He won't be able to whip close votes, he won't set a direction, and the committee chairs or caucuses will likely run the place. When he speaks publicly, he'll lack the credibility to speak for the caucus. He won't be able to negotiate with Trump one on one, Trump will just go around him to other groups of Dems. It'll be chaos.
He's also not creative. Like Pelosi, he isn't going to reverse the Gingrich changes that ripped out the institutional capacity of the House. But he won't be strong enough to manage the centralized control that implies.
The upside is the same as the downside. Chaos. The House Democrats are going to have to set the agenda themselves, through organizing, committee hearings, and pure hustle. An entrepreneurial member or set of members working together on something will be able to get a real hearing for what they want. New leaders could emerge. There will be bitter fights between and among caucuses. Members could demand real structural changes to how Congress works and make it functional again, and Jeffries would probably eventually go along.
I don't know that members have thought through exactly why they like Jeffries or these dynamics. Certainly the newly elected class has different views, they never experienced Pelosi's management and they don't know Jeffries. Still, when I see Jeffries speak, I am not convinced he speaks *for* the Democratic caucus. I don't think anyone does. And that's good, we need all of those new members from Trump-y districts to have the space to find their voice.
