Is this a financial hallucination? @elonmusk was not even in the world’s top ten richest people until 2020. Now he is the world’s first trillionaire. It is absurd, but not fake. This was not some slow, stately climb through the billionaire league table. Musk crashed into the top ten during Covid, rode the Tesla mania, fell back when markets turned, then launched into another universe as SpaceX was marked at a much higher valuation. As others have pointed out to me, this wasn't luck. This was 24 years of SpaceX history being priced in by public markets, helped a bit by the addition of an AI business. That is the story in this animation. These are shares, private valuations, collateral, market mood and a huge wager on the future, all compressed into one ridiculous number: $1.3 trillion as of today. Once the financial system agrees to treat paper wealth as real, it becomes real enough. It can be borrowed against. It can be pledged. It can buy control, influence and time. It can decide which companies get funded, which technologies get built and which version of the future attracts capital. That is the mad part. Musk’s fortune is both real and ridiculous at the same time. Real, because markets, banks and investors have endorsed it. Ridiculous, because a large part of it can move violently when sentiment changes, a rocket explodes, Tesla rerates, or investors decide the future is worth a different price. This feels like a chart about modern wealth becoming stranger, faster and more detached from anything most people would recognise as money. What do you think? Music: Mr. C-137 by Basixx, Epidemic Sounds

The computer is being reinvented in the agentic era: - The model is the new CPU. - The harness is the new OS. - Hallucinations are the new bugs. - The context window is the new RAM. - Skills are the new apps. - Markdown files are the new config. - Evals are the new QA. - Context is the new moat. - Permissions are the new firewall - Trust is the new bottleneck. - Prompt is the new programming language - Agent is the new software. Anything you dream of, you can build. This is the greatest time ever to be building with computers.

AI feels like puppet magic from cultivation novels. Prompt = spell Context window = spiritual power Tokens = spirit stones Hallucination = qi deviation Turns out we didn’t build AGI. We just learned how to control digital puppets.

Couldn't help myself. Forward deployed engineer or AI engineer sounds dry as cardboard, so I asked my team to come up with the most creative job titles describing what they do... The current list: - Transformer tamer - LLM whisperer - Hallucination exorcist - Token daddy - Weights guy - Human out of the loop - Latent freak - Gradient guru - RL gym junkie - Inference dealer - Nothing-but-the-harness - Benevolent prompt injector - The metaharness - Context window's context window Who can top this?

Scientists are investigating a little-known mushroom from China’s Yunnan province after it was linked to one of the most unusual types of hallucinations ever recorded. When Lanmaoa asiatica is eaten raw or not cooked thoroughly, some people experience vivid visions unlike those caused by well-known psychedelic substances. Rather than seeing abstract colours or distorted landscapes, many report encountering crowds of tiny human-like figures. These miniature characters are often described as resembling elves, fairies, clowns, or gnomes, and are said to climb over furniture, emerge from doorways, leap into bowls of food, and interact playfully with their surroundings. Medical reports suggest that around 90% of documented poisonings involving this mushroom include these rare “Lilliputian hallucinations,” making it one of the most distinctive poisoning syndromes associated with any fungus. What has puzzled researchers is that laboratory testing has found no trace of psilocybin or any other recognised hallucinogenic compound. Instead, scientists suspect the mushroom may contain an entirely unknown chemical capable of producing these extraordinary effects. Symptoms usually appear between 12 and 24 hours after the mushroom is eaten and may continue for several days. Although the hallucinations can be intense and unsettling, researchers reviewing hospital records have found no confirmed deaths directly attributed to this type of poisoning. One researcher, a doctoral student at the University of Utah, has spent years studying the mushroom throughout China and the Philippines. By combining DNA sequencing with chemical analysis, the research team has narrowed the search to a small group of candidate molecules, but the exact compound responsible has not yet been identified. If the mystery molecule is eventually discovered, it could represent an entirely new class of hallucinogen and provide valuable insights into how the brain creates our perception of reality. Learn more: '''It sounds so impossible': Student studying fungus that makes users hallucinate tiny people may be on the verge of a scientific breakthrough." LiveScience