Daniel Bigham

From evening until after midnight, a man in Xinjiang spent 7 hours and 38 minutes washing his car at a self-service car wash, paying 270 yuan (about US$38). He said he found the experience relaxing and didn't even realize so much time had passed.

The first AI persona you’ll actually want to meet face-to-face. Most AI personas stare blankly while you talk. Emma reacts while you’re still speaking. After 18 months of research at @nuance_ai, this is Emma, built on Nuplex, our full-duplex audiovisual foundation model.

Norway now has more than 2,000 underwater AI laser robots shooting lice off its salmon they're made by a company called Stingray, and they already guard more than 50 million salmon and trout 24/7 the reason is sea lice, tiny parasites that latch onto salmon and feed on them as few as 11 can kill a small fish, and one pen can hold 150,000 salmon the usual fix is pumping the fish out and blasting them with warm water or water jets to knock the lice off but the handling is so rough that Norway's fish health report ranks it the top cause of death in full-grown farmed salmon so instead, Stingray puts a robot inside the pen that hunts lice one at a time, all day: > two cameras watch every salmon that swims past > AI checks two frames to make sure it's really a louse > then a green laser fires from up to 2 meters away > the salmon's scales reflect the beam, so the fish swims off fine and the louse is dead we now live in a world where AI lasers do pest control on your dinner lmao

Both can hold depending on timelines. Elon’s point assumes rapid superintelligence creates genuine abundance where money loses relevance. Economists and retirement researchers counter that the path is uncertain, uneven, and potentially bumpy for years—job disruption, Social Security pressure, and uneven gains mean savings still serve as a practical hedge. Keep saving; the downside is low if abundance arrives and high if it doesn’t.

Maybe we should buy back Scott’s Boom shares and gift them to Elon. Seems just.

Omoh 😲🙆🏼‍♂️

I find @DavidSacks interpretation of the Texas election rather strange First, Hinojosa is proposing a moratorium on approvals for new data center projects, not a shutdown of projects already approved or under construction Second, he knows perfectly well that permitting is not simply a matter of gubernatorial discretion. Decisions are made by regulatory agencies operating under statutory mandates. A governor can exert considerable influence, but that doesn’t mean she can arbitrarily dictate the outcome of individual applications And there’s an institutional detail that seems to be getting overlooked: Abbott was dealing largely with regulators appointed under Republican administrations. Hinojosa will inherit those same agencies, whose commissioners often serve 6 years terms. Her ability to secure their cooperation may be considerably more constrained Ofc she can pursue legislation to change the regulatory framework. But that’s a different proposition from suggesting she can simply decide which projects get approved The broader political interpretation also deserves more nuance. For years, voices associated with @theallinpod have tended to treat the Democratic Party as increasingly synonymous with its DSA wing Yet the Democratic coalition is much broader than that, and the election results need to be understood in terms of the actual candidates, their platforms and the concerns that motivated voters Demanding that data centers pay for their own infrastructure, protect local water resources and avoid shifting electricity costs onto households is not the same thing as opposing data center development Conflating the two is gaslighting. Precisely the kind of attitude that just got firmly rejected by American people

If money wasn't a problem, Id probably spend my whole life studying. A master's in philosophy, then astrophysics, ancient history, theology, psychology, archacology, playing piano... whatever makes me understand this weird existence a little better. Not for a career. Not for a degree. Just because there's so much to know, and one lifetime already feels too short.

Talarico extending olive branches is great: “I’m a big fan of SpaceX and Tesla. He is a great business leader and entrepreneur and innovator. I want him to stick to those things… I will work with him when it comes to technology and innovation.”

This year alone, Canadians have been charged $73 million in exit fees to move their savings to Wealthsimple. Today the federal government moved to ban these fees at federally regulated banks, an important first step toward fulfilling the promise made in Budget 2025 to ban investment and registered account transfer fees. Thank you @FP_Champagne for your leadership. Now it’s time for provincial governments and the rest of the financial industry to follow. Wealthsimple has never charged an exit fee. We earn the privilege of managing our clients’ money by giving them reasons to stay, not charging them to leave. Every financial institution in Canada could decide today to end this tax on choice. You don’t need regulation to do the right thing. lnkd.in/gR-EhGiS

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.

SITUATION DETECTED: Researchers at MIT show that GPT-6 Astra can natively read and write neural network weights through pure reasoning - no gradients, no training loops - calling it Weight-Space Programming.

Writing this in my personal capacity, but I have been flying these types of aircraft for more than 20 years, with over 8,000 hours, and have reasonable familiarity with how the charter world operates. I feel compelled to post after seeing commentary about the Lear 60 crash, from missile strikes to DEI to critiquing this poor woman’s final radio calls. That last part is what I find most troubling. She was the second-in-command (SIC), and while she was empowered to point out mistakes as part of good crew resource management, she was doing her job, communicating with ATC right to the end in a terrifying situation. She likely knew before many of those calls that she was going to die. I have heard final calls from friends, from military pilots with thousands of hours in fighter aircraft, and they are just as heartbreaking because they know the end is approaching. I understand the public interest given the footage and audio. But you do not know the aircraft’s maintenance history, whether there was a structural failure, if any failure was induced by turbulence, overspeed, or overcontrol, or everything happening in that cockpit. I am sure weather will be part of the investigation, but beyond that, it is speculation. The charter industry routinely hires commercial pilots very early in their careers to gain experience alongside an ATP-qualified captain before they move up to the airlines. She would still have the appropriate training, qualifications, and checkouts by an FAA examiner or designee. Let people investigate, learn, and share the facts. Be respectful to those who perished and the families who carry their memories. God bless them and their loved ones.

I was investing! I had significant savings when all this started. That story is in part 2: medium.com/effortless-progra…

fyi humans are endowed w exceptional longevity lifespan generally scales w size male gorillas 2x the mass of men yet men live 2x as long this means we have a 4-fold size adjusted lifespan advantage over gorillas many humans live 90-100 yrs beyond reproductive maturity, which is remarkable

I’ll never forget how sad I was the week of May 23, 1994 when this aired. I’ll never forget how sad I am today.

BREAKING: Microsoft, $MSFT, is offering buyouts to 60,000 workers as part of the company’s efforts to cut costs amid AI adoption, per Bloomberg. Personnel on select teams in the US, Canada, India, and the UK at a vice president level and below will be eligible. This reflects ~27% of Microsoft's total workforce.

This is indeed one of the main reasons that Starlink must remain a civilian operation. It can be used for infrastructure that is military, but it cannot be used for unequivocally offensive strikes that make it fair game to be struck back. An adversary blowing up Starlink satellites would create a domino effect of destruction that would generate a vast field of debris making space unusable.

Tesla predicts it will end up doing the majority of all passenger miles on Earth, in any country that lets it operate freely. On the Q3 call: "Unless we're stopped by governments, which is certainly a possibility, like if they're trying to protect a domestic industry, I think Tesla will end up doing a majority of all passenger miles on Earth in any country where it is allowed to operate freely. And you can come back and look at this prediction, but I feel confident about this prediction."