Former Valve writer Chet Faliszek, who co-wrote the stories for Half-Life 2: Episode One and Two, has explained why he has no interest in returning to the Half-Life series or working on a hypothetical Half-Life 3. He responded to a fan comment claiming that developing the game “would be so incredibly easy” and that “the plot could go anywhere.” Faliszek clarified that his remarks were not hinting at any current Valve projects. He described any sequel as “a disaster nightmare that I never want to do,” adding that the decades-old established lore “terrifies” him. He likes to write about characters and what they do right away instead of deep lore that fans now study and criticize for every little detail. “I don’t want to touch that with a 10-foot pole,” he said, “or even a grav gun separating me from that 10-foot pole.” We are never getting Half Life 3…..

This Chinese man sells his noodles with only 40 cents per bowl, earning 7 cents (profit) x 500 bowls per day. For 10 years he declines to raise the price because he wants the poorest ppl to afford it. The most moving and encouraging stories I found are always from Chinese media.

Tesla friends: my new interview with @larsmoravy & @woodhaus2 is here! It's all about the history & legacy of the Model S & X. The guys tell some really awesome stories from over the years (& give us a nugget of new Roadster news too). Timecodes and MP3 link below. Enjoy! 00:12:18 Interview Start 00:13:30 How the Decision to Discontinue S and X Happened 00:18:02 S and X Would Need a Complete Redesign to Continue 00:21:55 Next-Gen Roadster News 00:25:03 Signature Numbers 00:29:03 Final S and X Production Numbers 00:29:43 The Beginning of Model S 00:36:20 More Lightning 00:36:48 Old S and X Stories 00:39:26 First Drive of the Model S...Ever 00:45:14 The EV Market and EV Adoption Rate 00:49:36 Adding Dual Motors to Model S 00:51:36 A 3rd Motor in a Model 3? 00:54:37 About the Never-Made Model S Plaid+ 00:56:58 Are 18650s done at Tesla? 00:58:10 Favorite Wheels 01:02:10 Pencils Down on S and X 01:03:22 Parting Message 01:05:07 Drive or Preserve their Signature S's

🚨 SOMETHING VERY BAD IS HAPPENING The stock market keeps trying to push higher. OpenAI and Anthropic are now worth $2.1T. That is 10% of the entire Nasdaq. Look at the math: – $450B burned per year – $50B in actual revenue The entire AI bull case depends on one assumption: Inference gets cheaper. That is how funds justify the math. Spend massively today, scale later, margins explode when inference costs collapse. But that assumption is breaking: - Memory is getting expensive. - Compute is not getting cheap fast enough. - Inference is not falling the way everyone modeled. And if inference does not get dramatically cheaper, the whole AI margin story starts to crack. The loop is obvious: – Big players fund each other – Partnerships look perfect on paper – Revenue moves around inside the same system Everyone calls it growth. I call it the final stage of mania. In 2000, companies added “.com” to the name and valuations exploded: – Small profits – Massive valuations – Perfect stories Then reality hit. Nasdaq collapsed 80%. Now companies add “AI” to the name and reprice instantly: – Small profits – Massive valuations – Perfect AI stories This is the dot-com bubble with better AI branding. And bubbles do not warn you before they break. They break when everyone thinks the story is untouchable. The next move won’t wait for you. Follow and turn notifications on.

One of the big reasons for the current lack of patriotism and pride in our nation’s history is that about 40 years ago our most prominent storytellers in Hollywood just basically stopped telling stories about American history altogether, unless it has something to do with WW2, civil rights, or slavery. I mean they just released a movie about the meteorologist who did the weather report for D-Day. They’ll give WW2 weathermen their own movies before they tell a story from any other era of American history. The Right has attempted to counteract this a little bit, but “conservative” attempts at American history films and TV shows are invariably hokey and kid friendly, the kind of thing you can watch with your grandmother and your 5 year old, and you’ll all be equally informed and bored by the experience. We need R-rated adult-oriented American history stories. Daniel Boone should have his own series. It would be gritty and violent and not for children, but it would also be phenomenally entertaining and put an American legend back on the cultural map, so to speak. The fact that Daniel Boone hasn’t been depicted on screen at all since like the 60s is a travesty. Throw a dart at that guy’s Wikipedia page and you’ll land on something that could be its own feature length trilogy. That’s just one example. How is there not a great R-rated movie or series about Antietam? Or Kit Carson? Or the Panama Canal? How does Theodore Roosevelt not have like 10 movies about different periods of his life? You could go much farther back to pre-American history. A movie about Cortes’s conquest of Tenochtitlan would be tremendous and horrifying and fascinating, and it would introduce into the public consciousness one of the world’s most incredible stories that most Americans know next to nothing about. And on and on. The possibilities are literally endless. All of these movies, if they’re executed to even a B+ level, could make hundreds of millions of dollars and transform the culture in a way that a million podcast monologues never could. If the Right actually wants to reclaim the culture, this is the place to start.

anybody who uses or learns agentic systems, SHOULD READ THIS the install order I run before any new agentic project: 1. PRIVACY: direnv + a real secrets manager install direnv, then plug it into your team's password manager (1Password CLI via op run, doppler, infisical, vault, pick one) what direnv does: loads per-folder environment variables when you cd in, unloads when you cd out. the real move is wiring it into your secrets manager so credentials NEVER live in plain text on disk what this stops: - API keys accidentally committed to git history, the most common AI agent breach pattern in 2026 - credentials leaking from one project into another through your shell history - shared .env files that one teammate quietly backs up to Dropbox - secrets that survive a laptop theft because they were sitting in /Users/you/projects the part nobody mentions: most "my agent got jailbroken" stories actually trace back to one credential the agent had access to that it shouldn't have. scope keys to projects, scope projects to folders, and the blast radius of any single compromise drops dramatically I shipped 2 agents with keys in .env files before switching. the day I plugged direnv into op run I stopped having that whole class of nightmare 2. TOKENS: litellm or portkey as your model proxy one URL that fronts every AI provider (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Mistral, local models). all your spend flows through one place what it saves you: - response caching keyed by prompt hash, cuts your bill 30-60% on repeat tasks - automatic fallback on rate limits (Sonnet hits a 429? falls to Opus, then GPT, then your local backup, no broken users) - per-feature and per-user budget caps, block the call before it costs $200 instead of auditing it after - model routing rules, cheap tasks to Haiku, expensive ones to Opus, never the wrong way - PII redaction before requests leave your network, security side benefit the part nobody mentions: every "$4k AI bill" story I've heard ends with "we didn't have a proxy in front." this is where you put guardrails around spend BEFORE the spend happens I built my own router for 2 weeks. it took 20 minutes to replace with litellm. I will be embarrassed about this forever 3. CONTEXT: uv + git commit on every passing eval install uv (the new Python package manager, 10-100x faster than pip+venv, by the Astral team behind ruff). then commit every time an eval suite PASSES, with the model version and pass rate in the commit message what this preserves: - exact dependency set via uv.lock, you always know which packages your agent was using, no nasty surprises from a quiet update - exact prompt + code state, you can reproduce any past run from a single git hash - exact model version paired to exact pass rate, a paper trail when prod breaks weeks later - one-command rollback to a known-working state when a refactor goes sideways - a compliance story, every prompt version tied to a model version in your commit log the security side: when something blows up in prod, you want to say "the prompt was version X, model was Sonnet 4.6.1, last eval pass rate was 94%." not "I think we deployed on Tuesday?" the first is an incident report. the second is a resignation letter I've lost more agents to "I changed 3 prompts in one session and broke something" than to any actual bug 4. VISIBILITY: mitmproxy in front of every LLM call it's basically a wiretap for your agent. install it, point your agent through it, and now you see every conversation your agent has with the model in real time what actually shows up: - every silent retry your SDK sneaks in when a call fails - the full prompt being sent (including any creds you accidentally embedded) - what the model returns BEFORE your code reacts to it - exact token cost per call, per tool, per loop iteration - responses that quietly trigger your code into doing something you didn't intend, this is where prompt injection lives the part nobody talks about: if a website your agent scraped slipped instructions into its data, mitmproxy is how you SEE the moment your agent decides to follow them. without this layer, you're trusting your agent did the right thing, not verifying I shipped 3 agents before adding this. I have no honest idea what they were doing in production 5. EVALS: inspect-ai (the framework the labs actually use) an eval framework is what tells you "this agent works" with numbers instead of vibes. inspect-ai is the one Anthropic, DeepMind, and the UK AI Safety Institute use for the eval reports you read in their papers. open source, MIT licensed what your homegrown version won't have: - run the same task across 5 different models and compare scores side by side - pre-built tests for risky agent behavior (lying, manipulating, misusing tools) - proper structure for evaluating tool-using agents, not just chat - repeatable scoring, the same input always gets graded the same way - reproducible eval seeds, so a flaky test is actually flaky and not just unlucky I wrote my own eval harness 4 times across 4 projects. threw it out 4 times if you ever want to say "my agent passes safety checks" out loud, the check has to come from a framework someone else can re-run. this is that framework the move that ties this together: keep a /lessons.md in every repo. every weird agent behavior, every edge case, every config change you find at 2am, write it down you will not remember it. you'll come back in 3 weeks and the lessons file is the only reason you still know what's going on lock these 5, keep the lessons file, your next agentic system takes 2 days instead of 2 months p.s. half of "AI agent" content online is people who've never run mitmproxy on their own loop. they don't actually know what their agent is doing. they're shipping demo videos. don't be that guy

SOMEONE JUST OPEN-SOURCED THE SCRIPT BEHIND EVERY FACELESS YOUTUBE CHANNEL a developer built a Python script that turns ANY Reddit thread into a finished, ready-to-upload YouTube Short or TikTok video every faceless YouTube creator making $2k-$10k/month is running this exact workflow now anyone with Python installed can run it for FREE [ the numbers are insane ]: - GitHub stars: 9,000+ - cost to install: $0 - time to first generated video: under 10 minutes - output format: 1080x1920 MP4 ready for YouTube Shorts or TikTok - script length: ~300 lines of Python - typical revenue for a working faceless channel: $500-$10,000/month - price of the "build a faceless YouTube empire" course this replaces: $497-$2,000 [ how the workflow actually works ]: > fetch top Reddit threads via the official Reddit API (no scraping, no Selenium) > screenshot the post title and the top-rated comments > AI voiceover narration (free Google TTS, or premium voices via API) > background footage looped from Minecraft, Subway Surfers, or Trackmania > auto-overlay each comment card synced to the narration timing > export 1080x1920 MP4 ready to upload no Premiere Pro, no DaVinci Resolve, no voice acting, no manual editing press run, get a finished video [ the grift opportunity is wide open ]: > run a faceless niche channel (AITA, Reddit drama, trivia, scary stories, relationship advice) > stack YouTube Creator Fund + TikTok Creator Fund revenue: $500-$10,000/month per channel at scale > spin up 5-10 channels at once with different niches and let them compound > white-label it as a service for small businesses: $300-$1,000 per finished video > wrap a clean UI around it and sell as a $29/month SaaS (multiple people are already doing this) > sell the channel once it grows past 50k subs: typical flip prices $5,000-$100,000 on every "faceless YouTube empire" course you've seen on X is teaching this exact pipeline REPO: 100% OPEN SOURCE, FREE

Love and Deepspace | Fallen Crown Through immortality and oblivion, my path leads to your light. 👑Trailer of Xavier's New Event [Fallen Crown] Is Coming! ┈┈▾Giveaway▾┈┈ 💫Follow @Love_Deepspace and Repost for a chance to win $70 (5 winners) before Aug. 7. 👑5-Star Memory Pair from [Fallen Crown] Event From 05:00 on Jul. 25 to 04:59 on Aug. 8 (server time), the limited 5-Star Solar-Slot Memory Pair [Xavier: Nightvow Mooncurse] and [Xavier: Nightvow Requiem] will be available in the Limited Wish Pool. During the event, a maximum of 150 pulls guarantees two event-limited 5-Star Memories and unlocks the Companion [Xavier: King of Darknight]. *See the specific wish rules in the following event preview. 👑Myth: Where Stars Scatter After 05:00 on Jul. 25 (server time), you can read the new Myth of Xavier: Where Stars Scatter in-game. "When their names are spoken once more... Only then will their unfulfilled ambitions, unexpressed love, and unsolved mysteries transform into stories that are passed down for generations. And to endure the test of time can be seen as a divine miracle. 'Eternity' has always been about stories that can immortalize humanity's joys and sorrows." The prophesied Chosen One, summoned by fate... The Mad King, held captive by the crown... The longing to return to Philos draws the threads of their destiny together. When the fated moment arrives amidst the ruins of time—will you still stand by his side? 👑Event: Cycle Unbound Participate in the event to claim 4-Star Solar-Slot Memory Pair [Xavier: Gilded Mirage], [Xavier: Gilded Dreams], [Deepspace Wish: Limited*10], [Diamond*500], and other rewards for FREE! #LoveandDeepspace# #XavierKingofDarknight# #Xavier#

Anthropic and OpenAI slammed the this week on secondary transactions of their shares as both AI labs race to list. To help @jason and @alex unpack the market-moving news, investors @jefielding @davemcclure and @lessin joined our venture capital panel to make plain which Anthropic investing vehicles are legit, and which may be fake. The group also dug into software moats, large venture funds pressuring smaller firms, the future of LP capital, and the IPO market! 0:00 Guest introductions 1:30 Guest introductions 2:36 Anthropic voids unauthorized SPV trades 9:23 Accredited investor reform & the SEC sophisticated investor test 9:40 Quo (formerly OpenPhone) - Quo gives you a clean, modern way to handle every customer call, text, and thread all in one place. Try it free at 12:25 Naval's USVC closed-end fund as a workaround 17:23 Plaud: If your work depends on conversations — interviews, meetings, calls — you need a Plaud NotePin. You can check it out at and use code TWIST for 10% off! 18:30 Pro-rata rights battles: when Series A investors push seed investors out 20:18 Grasshopper Bank: Time is money. Don't waste either. Go to and get an exclusive $500 cash bonus just for opening an account. 29:55 Pilot: Focus on your product, let Pilot handle your bookkeeping. Pilot provides the most reliable accounting, CFO, and tax services for startups and small businesses. Head to and get $1,200 off your first year. 31:05 Storing wealth in stories vs. cash flows 35:01 Cerebras and Fervo Energy IPOs — meaningful liquidity? 38:36 Will SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI IPOs redistribute capital or compound it? 46:40 The $15M Series A founder who returned the money because of Claude 50:43 Should founders pivot or return capital when the world changes? 57:25 OpenAI's $6.6B tender and Shruti Gandhi's viral SF cost-of-living tweet 1:01:07 Intercom rebrands to Fin: the AI-first late-stage pivot 🎥 Watch the full episode here 👇