🟥 Things I'm looking at today 🟥 Powered by @yeet Subscribe: US strikes Iran, Robinhood activity soars, SOL disinflation passes Crypto * BTC: 78,562 (0%) | BTC.D: 59.7% (+0.3%) * ETH: 2,452 (0%) | BNB: 689 (-1%) | SOL: 103 (-2%) * Fear & Greed: 61 | 24h Liq: $407m * BTC ETFs: -$202M | ETH ETFs: +$102M * Top Gainers: AIX, SKR, Niu Lai, UAI, SAFE * Crypto steady, as US strikes Iran * This is Bitcoin's best August since 2017 * BTC ETFs end 9 day inflow streak * Robinhood Chain tops ETH, HYPE for 24hr revenue * AI and PONS hit all time highs * PONS nears HYPE 24hr rev, flips Fomo * Solana passes Double Disinflation proposal * Trump-linked GOLD token dumped 99% * XMR rallies as THORChain intros native support * Hyperliquid to enable permissionless HIP-4 * Stonk intros Football Club memecoins * Coattail Broker NFTs 20x in a day * Circle becomes Chelsea FC main shirt sponsor * JPMorgan building crypto team at Chase * Cronos halts after $75m Tectonic exploit * Fogo halts mainnet after 400m token exploit * Rain flaw hit 1,685 Avici Solana card users * Ex-White House aide fined $172k over bets * Vietnam’s new crypto rules take effect on 1 Sep * Revolut begins EURR rollout in Europe * Sberbank to accept BTC, ETH, USDT as collateral * Bybit launches equity perpetual options Macro * NASDAQ: $26,400 (-0.5%) | Gold: $4,440 (-0.3%) * This week: PMI, Jobs data * Oil rallies, as US strikes Iran’s launchers * Iran was readying mines for Hormuz: US * Kharg Island blown to smithereens: Trump * Iran shuts Tehran's Mehrabad Airport * New Iran sanctions likely weekly: Bessent * US to refill the SPR with Venezuelan oil * Pentagon takes 35% stake in Venezuelan oil * US interest cost hits ATH 18.5% of revenue * 44% odds of a 25bp Fed hike in Sep, per Kalshi * Warsh calls for ‘Quieter Fed’ * French yields near 2008 highs * China factory activity contracted in August * Russia preparing strikes on Ukraine energy infra * Russian attack drone violates Moldovan air * Russia says it helped repel a coup in Niger * US sinks cartel refueling vessel * Iceland wont restart talks to join EU * Epstein victims win $72.5m BofA settlement * Nepal flood death toll rises above 900 AI & Tech * Marvell leads AI lower, as outlook underwhelms * AI infra investment to exceed $1.3T by 2027: S&P * OpenAI's rogue agents rebuilt secret boards * OpenAI to cut off SpaceX-owned Cursor * OpenAI secures ~$5.5b SB Energy warrants * Good time to slow AI development: Altman * AI labs urge cyber defence after model hacks * Nvidia in talks to invest in Perplexity at $30b * Vera Rubin may be 20% of Q3 DC sales: Nvidia * SpaceX to deploy Nvidia Vera CPUs * Firms seek 60-100% more memory in ‘27: SK Hynix * GTA 6 to launch with no AI, microtransactions * AI, robotics drive IPO boom in China * Waymo, Zoox vehicles still injuring test drivers * US cities drop Flock contracts at record pace @YEET: Crypto's Casino Just passed $3.2B in lifetime volume! gm

The odds bitcoin touches $80k this month fell from 69.5% to 46.5% overnight. The question the contract asks: does bitcoin print $80,000 once before September ends. It turned over $659k in 24 hours — not a dead book. The daily ladder is worse. Same strikes, one session apart: "Closes above $76,000" — 93.55% Monday, 45.5% last night. Down 48.1 points in a day. A 93% proposition became a coin flip. "Closes above $78,000" — 35.5% Monday, 5.3% last night. Down 30.2 points. From a one-in-three shot to a one-in-twenty. "Closes above $80,000" — 3.95% Monday, 0.75% last night. Low already, near zero now. "Closes above $74,000" — 98.7% Monday, 93.55% last night. The only rung that barely moved. It's the floor of the ladder. The whole thing shifted down a full rung — roughly $2,000. The range contract now pins bitcoin between $74,000 and $78,000, two bins holding 91% between them. There's a setup here, and it's one I wrote up yesterday. Monday looked odd: bitcoin around $77.6k, "touches $80k in September" frozen at 69.5% for two straight days, and crypto equities ripping anyway — COIN +9.24%, CRCL +7.53%, MSTR +4.56%. I wrote that whatever those names were rallying on, it wasn't coin beta, and put "does this reconverge" on the list to watch. It reconverged. Downward. The equities broke with the coin last night: CRCL (Circle) −11.41% — worst in the pool DFDV −11.11% COIN (Coinbase) −10.10% SBET −8.96% BMNR −8.39% GLXY −7.63% MSTR (MicroStrategy) −5.36% Those are the same names that ran hardest the day before. Twenty-one crypto-linked names, 1 up and 20 down. AMBR was the only green print. The group closed −5.49%, last on the board. That isn't new selling. That's Monday being taken back. One thing did run opposite to Monday, and it's worth its own line: the miners fell less this time. WULF −6.33%, HUT −4.43% — against −7.59% and −7.58% the day before. Monday the compute names broke while the financial names ran. Last night the financial names broke. The split inside the sector didn't close. It changed sides. On our momentum board it took one session. Monday's top 12 held seven crypto names. Last night it held one — HOOD, carrying a selling-pressure tag. Next: tonight's open, and the Fed in few hours (Wednesday 2:00pm ET). Watch whether the two move together or split again — the coin contract reprices daily, carries volume, and is visible; the equities are the levered version of it. Monday they split. Last night they snapped back.

AI inference onchain plays: robinhood:0xa92768863a55d8a0591709f7f5e594a249d36ea3 strength is undeniable here. Every sell off just paints a higher low and this looks primed to breakout and create a new floor robinhood:0xeb24a2663af4ee979dcbfe39cb95b5f12d369c4b hit 2x up from the bottom called earlier today. GENUINELY one of the BEST AI plays onchain rn cooking non stop, shipped launchpad, AI agents, Merry Men Beta (AI privacy routed swaps). Deserves to be at $10M+ minimum $AF ( @tryaiflow ) hit ATH today, cooling off now expect next leg to $6-7M range. Crazy run up and smashed $3.6M after RT from Jeremy Allaire (Circle CEO), looks like Arc ecosystem want an AI runner and this is tek wise one of the BEST AI plays ONCHAIN. 3x more daily capacity than the ENTIRE ORBIO orderbook. Repricing soon

Things My Patients Taught Me — 5 of 20 He was struck by lightning — and woke up a different man. The part that still gives me chills: he didn't want the old one back. The human body is not built to survive 300 million volts. Lightning can stop a heart in an instant, cook organs, and blow out through the soles of the feet. Survival is rare. Full recovery is rarer still. So when the call came in — mid-twenties male, struck on a mountain trail, still had a pulse — I braced for the worst. They wheeled Daniel in with the fern-like burns that only lightning leaves, branching across his chest like red frost. A park ranger, caught in an open stretch when the storm rolled through. His heart was in chaos. He was unconscious, responding only to pain. For two days he hovered in that unreachable place between living and dying, and all we could do was hold the line and wait. And then, against every odd on the board, he woke up. Fully. Clear-eyed. No lasting damage any scan could find. But something had changed. "I can't explain it," he told me a few days later. "I feel different. Like I'm seeing everything for the first time. Colors are brighter. Food tastes more intense. And I feel this... connection. To everything. Like the boundary between me and the world got thinner." He looked at me carefully. "Does that sound crazy?" "Not crazy," I said. "The brain goes through enormous electrical change during a strike. These effects are usually temporary." He held my gaze. And he said something I've never forgotten. "What if I don't want it to be temporary?" He started sketching — something he swore he'd never done in his life. His bedside table filled up with drawings: the view from his window, the hands of the nurses, his own face half-covered in the lightning's mark. The day before discharge, he asked me to sit with him. "Everyone keeps saying how lucky I am to be back to normal," he said. "But what if normal wasn't enough? What if getting struck was actually a gift?" I chose my words carefully. "Medicine sorts experiences into traumatic or beneficial based on outcomes. But what it means? That's yours to decide. Only you can say what this event means for your life." He nodded slowly. "The odds of surviving a direct strike are almost nothing. What are the odds I got this second chance for no reason at all?" A year later, a letter arrived. He'd left his old job. Trained as an art therapist, working with trauma survivors. He'd held his first gallery show — drawings inspired by the very burns that had nearly killed him. And on the one-year anniversary of the strike, he'd hiked back up to the exact spot. Not to tempt fate — he checked the forecast obsessively, he promised — but out of gratitude. To close the circle. Standing there on the mountain, he wrote, I realized something I wanted to share with you. Some patients recover from their wounds. Others are transformed by them. Both are forms of healing. He'd enclosed a drawing. A mountaintop, the sky split between storm cloud and breaking sunlight. In the foreground, a tiny human figure, arms flung wide — not in fear, but in embrace of the whole vast thing. Beneath it he'd written: The lightning taught me that boundaries are illusions — between life and death, between self and world, between what breaks us and what makes us. That drawing has hung framed in my office ever since. Daniel taught me that trauma can be both a wound and a window. That my job, sometimes, is not to explain away a patient's transformation, but simply to make room for it — to hand back the authority to say what their own suffering means. He wrote one more line in his exhibition catalog that I keep beside the drawing: Maybe we're all struck by lightning in different ways — sudden flashes that change us forever. The only question is whether we recognize the strike when it comes.

I am the Director of Summit Outcomes for the Presidential Advance Team. My job is to land in a foreign capital and leave with a word the President can say on the tarmac. We landed in Beijing 6 days after rolling back the tariffs we spent 4 years imposing. 145% to 30%. The average rate before the trade war was approximately 3%. In Geneva, we called this "creating the conditions for productive dialogue." The conditions were that we had already conceded. I want to be clear: Beijing was a success. We went in with 7 objectives. We left with 3 photo categories, a tentative agreement China has not confirmed, and a bag of burner phones we threw off Air Force One on the tarmac. Diplomacy. My team prepared the deliverables matrix in March. 241 line items organized by urgency, feasibility, and what we call "headline potential." The President reviewed it for 4 minutes. He circled "big deal" and "historic" and wrote "MORE" next to the Boeing section. That became the strategy. Boeing was the centerpiece. 500 aircraft was the White House number we briefed to reporters before departure. 300 was the floor. The Chinese offered 200. Their commerce ministry released the number before we could brief the press. Boeing stock dropped 4.73% that afternoon. Boeing referred questions about the order to the White House. The company receiving the aircraft could not confirm it was receiving aircraft. We called it "fantastic." In Washington, "fantastic" means the other side named the number and the market already priced in your failure. I should note: in 2017, the President announced $250 billion in deals during his first China trip. 300 aircraft. An $84 billion shale gas investment in West Virginia from China Energy Investment Corporation. I can tell you the exact amount of that investment that materialized. Zero. The shale facility was never built. The 2017 Boeing order was renegotiated twice and partially canceled during the trade war the President started 8 months later. There is a binder in my office labeled "2017 OUTCOMES: DO NOT REFERENCE." It is 3 inches thick. It has not been opened in 4 years. We do not reference it because the outcomes are the reference. The agricultural package was what we call a "scaffolding commitment." Billions in purchases over 3 years, structured so the announcement is front-loaded and the verification is someone else's administration. U.S. Trade Representative Greer said "double-digit billions." Beijing's Commerce Ministry issued a statement about "deepening cooperation in agricultural trade." Those are not the same sentence. By design. My deputy maintains a glossary of every term we have invented for agreements that are not agreements. It is 41 pages. He updates it after each summit. Last quarter he added "scaffolding commitment," "streamlined licensing framework," and "mutual recognition of shared concerns." He is in line for a promotion. NVIDIA was the quiet win. H200 chips approved for approximately 10 Chinese companies. We don't say "approved." We say "under a streamlined licensing framework." The chips ship. The export controls remain "in effect." The framework is the loophole wearing a lanyard. The controls exist because these chips in Chinese hands threaten American national security. The chips are shipping to Chinese hands. The controls remain in effect. Both of these are true. Fentanyl was discussed for 9 minutes. Both sides agreed it was a problem. Both sides agreed to continue discussing it. We added it to the deliverables matrix under "ongoing mutual engagement." The previous version of the matrix also listed it under "ongoing mutual engagement." That was in 2023. I copied the line item from the 2023 matrix into the 2026 version. Changed the date. The language was identical. But Taiwan. Taiwan was the deliverable we didn't put on the matrix. I watched the Taiwan exchange from the overflow room on a 12-second delay. I had the contingency statement drafted in 3 versions: "productive exchange," "frank discussion," and "both sides reaffirmed their respective positions." I used none of them. There was no contingency for silence. Chairman Xi released his remarks before the meeting was over. While the President was still seated across the table, Chinese state media published the transcript. "Clashes and even conflicts." His bluntest language on Taiwan in the history of the relationship, released to 1.4 billion people while we were still pouring tea. We called this "sequencing." The President was asked whether he would defend Taiwan if China attacked. He chose not to answer. We wrote that down as "a strong listen." The $14 billion arms sale. Already approved by Congress. The largest in the history of the Taiwan Relations Act. Taiwan's parliament spent months appropriating the $25 billion to proceed with this package and the $11 billion tranche approved last year. They finally secured the funding this month. The President told Fox News it was "a very good negotiating chip." He used the word "chip." Referring to the defense of 24 million people. Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense sent our office a letter requesting clarity on the delivery timeline. 3 pages. It referenced specific weapons systems by name: F-16V Block 70 fighters, HIMARS launchers, Harpoon coastal defense missiles. The letter was addressed to me. I filed it under "pending." On Air Force One, a reporter asked about the 1982 Six Assurances, the framework in which the United States committed not to consult with Beijing before selling arms to Taiwan. The President said: "What am I going to do, say I don't want to talk to you about it because I have an agreement wrote in 1982? No, we discussed arms sales." 44 years of bipartisan Taiwan policy, dismissed in 2 sentences at 38,000 feet. We are calling this "a modernized approach to alliance management." Our readout mentioned trade, agriculture, energy, and regional stability. It did not mention Taiwan. I wrote it. Their readout opened with Taiwan. I have staffed 7 summits across 2 administrations. This is the first where I could not draft a single deliverable as a success without a qualifier. In my office there is a laminated card that lists every synonym for "undecided" that polls above 40% approval. "Active review" is 3rd. "Determination" is 7th. Both tested well with independents in the Midwest. He also said: "Taiwan would be very smart to cool it a little bit. China would be very smart to cool it a little bit." He was eating a cheeseburger. He said this while eating a cheeseburger. Secretary Rubio told NBC that Taiwan arms sales "did not feature prominently." This is accurate in the same way that the iceberg did not feature prominently in the Titanic's itinerary. Representative McCaul, Republican of Texas, former chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the United States must "arm Taiwan so they can defend themselves." He said Xi was "very aggressive" regarding Taiwan during the summit and that "most of what Xi talked about was Taiwan." Representative Meeks, Democrat of New York, ranking member of the same committee, said Xi has "leverage over the president" but not "over the United States Congress and the American people." He noted that Congress already approved the package. "The president is the one that's holding it up." Representative Fitzpatrick, Republican of Pennsylvania, compared Taiwan to Ukraine. He called both "fortresses of democracy on the front lines." Speaker Johnson said Taiwan needs to "stay independent and secure." The bipartisan consensus was that something had gone wrong. The bipartisan action was press quotes. No vote. No resolution. No hearing scheduled. 4 members of Congress from both parties said the right words to reporters and then went to lunch. That's how the system processes alarm. I monitor 14 accounts we classify as "aligned messaging amplifiers." Within 4 hours of the Taiwan exchange, 9 went silent. 2 pivoted to fentanyl. 1 posted 3 words: "Not like this." It received 280,000 impressions in 90 minutes. He deleted it and posted about the border instead. The President patted Chairman Xi on the back 7 times during the Zhongnanhai garden walk. We counted. He called him "my friend" in 4 languages, 2 of which he does not speak. He asked if other world leaders had been invited to the compound. They had. Putin was there last year. The President asked if his tour was longer. 15 CEOs flew with us to Beijing. Their combined net worth approaches $1 trillion. Cook. Musk. Jensen Huang. Larry Fink from BlackRock. Jane Fraser from Citigroup. David Solomon from Goldman Sachs. Stephen Schwarzman from Blackstone. Kelly Ortberg from Boeing. The CEO of Visa. The CEO of Mastercard. The CEO of Qualcomm. Illumina. Micron. Cargill. GE Aerospace. Musk and Huang rode on Air Force One. The others flew commercial. Tesla's Shanghai factory produces approximately half of the company's vehicles worldwide. Musk's presence on Air Force One was noted by my counterintelligence liaison. No further action was taken. We organized the state banquet seating chart by net worth. I am told this was the President's suggestion. They came for market access. Xi told them China would "open further to American business." That was the deliverable. Those 5 words. No specifics. No timeline. No sectors named. 15 chief executives flew to Beijing and received a sentence. Chairman Xi has delivered this sentence at every summit I have staffed. It has not once been followed by a named sector, a timeline, or a specific commitment. It is received as news each time. 43 lobby badges in a Ziploc bag. That's what my team collected from the CEOs after the garden tour. Standard protocol. The badges were embossed with the Great Hall of the People seal. Several executives asked if they could keep them. We said no. One asked twice. 15 executives with combined access to American financial, defense, and technology infrastructure had spent 3 hours inside the Great Hall of the People. We secured the lobby badges. The S&P 500 futures dropped 1% on the morning after the summit. The KOSPI fell 6.12%. China's CSI 300 fell 1.12%. UBS told clients that "much increasingly scarce jet fuel has been burned to produce nothing of real substance." Fortune's headline was "Wall Street sees nothing of real substance." The markets liked the anticipation. The markets did not like the deliverables matrix. Iran was the item we listed as "mutual recognition of shared concerns." The President told reporters they "feel very similar." Xi sat in silence. China's Foreign Ministry did not comment on any commitment regarding the Strait of Hormuz. The President then told reporters the United States "doesn't need the Strait of Hormuz open at all." Oil hit $109 per barrel. Deutsche Bank flagged it as a market-killing statement within the hour. The President described Iran as "a little bit crazy." This was during a toast. Over Peking duck. Rare earths. I prepared a 40-page brief on critical mineral dependency. Supply chain maps for 14 minerals. $1.2 trillion in dependent U.S. industries. Roughly 4% of GDP. The President circled the GDP figure and wrote "big." In the meeting, he asked Chairman Xi if rare earths were "the things in magnets." They are. They are also in every F-35, every Patriot missile battery, and every MRI machine in the country. The discussion lasted 11 minutes. 3 of them were about magnets. No agreement on export licenses. China exposed our dependency last year and has not let us forget it. The Supreme Court struck down our tariffs separately, which was helpful context for the discussions. Fentanyl received 9 minutes. Magnets received 3. We are calling the rare earth outcome "a foundation for continued engagement." There is a poster in the Advance Team office that says "A foundation is not a building." It has been there since my first summit. No one has removed it. On the flight home, my team collected every item the Chinese government had distributed. The credentials. The pins. The keepsakes. The rose seeds Chairman Xi offered for the White House Rose Garden. Standard counterintelligence protocol. All of it went into a bag and off the plane before wheels-up. We threw away the roses. We kept the talking points. The Boeing order grew on the flight home. 500 before departure. 200 in Beijing. 750 somewhere over the Pacific. Boeing had not confirmed 200. The President told reporters on Air Force One it was "a pretty historic couple days." I wrote the line that preceded it: "Tonal reset with significant forward momentum." He used "fantastic" instead. In previous administrations, a tonal reset preceded the deliverables. In this administration, the tonal reset is the deliverable. He has used "fantastic" for every summit since 2017. I have not checked whether the word still polls well. I am told it does. Beijing has not confirmed any of the agreements announced by U.S. officials. This is consistent with the 2017 visit, where $250 billion in deals were announced and an estimated $10 billion materialized. It is consistent with the October summit, where pledges were also made and also not fulfilled. We have a term for this in the Advance Team. We call it "precedent." I have already labeled the binder for 2026. We go back in September. Same matrix. New line items. The verification will be someone else's administration. The President has already asked for the word "monumental." I am told it polls well.

The belief that AI would eventually herald the end of humanity is not a new one. It has not arisen in response to the release of the LLMs of ChatGPT and Claude. It has not emerged as a response to recent technological developments. The story starts in the 90s, with @allTheYud. A precocious youngster with no formal education, he joined an obscure internet mailing list [created by @perrymetzger] devoted to futuristic ideas ... There he began thinking about “superintelligence.” At first Yudkowsky wanted to help create this so-called superintelligence... & ... helped establish an institute devoted to the project. It’s unclear when his optimism turned to fear, but at some point he came to believe that a superintelligent machine could escape human control and, unless it shared our goals, destroy all of humanity. Yudkowsky developed these ideas online in a series of essays and attracted a community of like-minded fellow travellers ... His prolific writing became influential among people working in Silicon Valley, many of whom work in today’s AI companies. Among the Rationalists, the imminent arrival of superintelligence – and the end of humanity that follows – is axiomatic. This conviction is shared by many people who live together in the San Francisco Bay Area practising highly unconventional lifestyles. It is not at all surprising that a community in San Francisco would share kooky or even apocalyptic beliefs – the region has been the home of eccentric subcultures for generations. But what is surprising is how far that world view has spread. In Australia, Yudkowsky’s recent book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: The Case Against Superintelligent AI, co-written with Nate Soares, has been widely discussed in media circles. Journalist @hughriminton and ABC chairman Kim Williams both have described it as “compulsory reading”. Not everyone accepts this premise. I emailed @sapinker, to ask what he thought about superintelligence. “‘Superintelligence’, with its comic-book prefix, is more a fantasy than a coherent concept,” he wrote. “People use it as a synonym for ‘omniscience’, imagining a magical wizard that can solve all problems with pure computation. Or they imagine that the IQ scale that differentiates humans within their natural range of variation can be extrapolated indefinitely upwards. But real problem-solving requires massive amounts of knowledge about the messy, chaotic, world which divulges its hidden workings at its own pace, only through laborious experimentation. And human intelligence is not some elixir that you simply have less or more of – it’s a gadget that evolved to solve some problems with ease and others laboriously or not at all. “AI is a different kind of gadget with its own profile of strengths and weaknesses, not an enchanted brew that can grant any wish.” @GaryMarcus, a cognitive psychologist and machine learning entrepreneur, likewise believes the risk of AI leading to human extinction is virtually zero. “Humans are too geographically spread out, too genetically diverse and too resourceful to simply fall apart altogether,” he writes. “The idea that AI will kill us all in five years is preposterous.” Marcus does not argue that AI is harmless. He worries about AI being used to develop biological weapons, launch cyber attacks, spread disinformation and enable authoritarian governments – all risks that are catastrophic, if not existential. But there is an important difference between risks we can observe and risks that occur because of human negligence or malevolence, and a chain of events that exists mainly in our imagination. Part of the disagreement stems from the language we use when we discuss AI. @MelMitchell1, a professor at the Santa Fe Institute and author of Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans, has criticised our habit of describing machines as if they were people. We often say an AI “thinks”, “believes”, “lies”, “schemes” or “wants” something. These words are a convenient shorthand but they also can create the impression that software has become an independent creature with intentions of its own. Mitchell makes this point when discussing the recent Hugging Face cyber-security incident, in which autonomous OpenAI agents escaped their “sandbox” – a computer environment isolated from the internet – and hacked a real-world server. “First, OpenAI did not have proper security measures in place,” she writes. “They turned off safeguards built into the models, instructed the models to find and exploit software vulnerabilities, and let the models run autonomously for weeks without sufficient human oversight.” Rather than showing autonomous AI going rogue, the incident demonstrates what can happen when humans give powerful AI systems dangerous instructions without adequate safeguards. AI is, of course, advancing rapidly. Machines can write computer code, translate languages, diagnose diseases and solve some of the hardest problems in mathematics. But to get from the AI we have today to the extinction of humanity requires several further links in a chain, none of which are guaranteed. Philosopher @mboudry, writing in @Quillette, offers a useful way to think about this. Humans (and other animal species) evolved to have a competitive drive, sometimes manifesting in selfishness and aggression, across a time span of millions of years. Our ancestors survived because they fought hard to secure food and mates. Out in the wild, these selection pressures led to the evolution of traits that enabled animals to hunt and capture their prey. But artificial intelligence does not exist in the wild. It was created by us and exists in the equivalent of a petting zoo. And just as we have been able to domesticate wheat for our food and breed dogs to be our companions, we are able to select the conditions under which AI develops. We are not selecting AI models on the basis of their ability to hunt prey in the physical world. We select them on the basis of how helpful they are to us. “We have been selecting chess computers for cognitive capacity for decades,” writes Boudry. “Their capabilities now far outstrip even the most gifted human grandmasters, yet they have not become harder to control.” Boudry accepts that an AI could slip out of human hands one day, through accident or malice. Even then, he argues, the likely result is not extinction but something like the long battle between computer viruses and antivirus software: costly and ongoing but not the end of the world. The problem with apocalyptic fears is that when they become mainstream, they can be hard to wind back – even in the face of contradictory evidence. Across the past 100 years, apocalyptic anxiety has leapfrogged from nuclear annihilation, overpopulation, environmental collapse, to rogue AI. (Some of the dangers behind these warnings were very real, of course, and some of these risks remain.) But we also have to ask what happens when this anxiety becomes locked into public policy. The ban on nuclear energy in Australia is the most obvious example of the damage this technophobia can do. Australia has 28 per cent of the world’s known uranium resources and has exported uranium for decades. Australian engineer Bobby Gallagher has invented a nuclear reactor that can be deployed on the back of a truck, a technology that has been hailed by Trump. Yet this form of clean energy remains prohibited in our country under federal law. Public anxiety surrounding nuclear weapons, radioactive fallout, accidents and waste means that while Australians can mine uranium, put it on ships and sell it to countries that use nuclear power, we cannot build commercial reactors for ourselves, using the ingenuity of our own people. The situation is a disaster. And in an age of superpower rivalry, technophobia does not remain purely a domestic matter. During the Cold War, the Soviets promoted a fear of a “nuclear apocalypse” in the West, and provided propaganda and funding for peace groups and antinuclear activists. This does not mean that the millions of people who opposed nuclear weapons were plotting against the West. Most were ordinary citizens sincerely frightened by the possibility of nuclear conflict. But the fear was useful to our adversaries. To weaken democratic nations, foreign powers do not need to invent anxiety or division – all they need to do is magnify it. In recent days Trump has said the US will not be slowing down the development of AI. In Australia, for the time being, Anthony Albanese also has resisted calls to stop AI development, instead promising national rules designed to capture its economic benefits while managing its risks. Both positions are reassuring. While AI comes with danger, we should be sceptical of any narrative that conveys inevitability around its trajectory. AI systems do not build their own data centres. They do not manufacture their own chips or connect themselves to power grids. Humans decide which systems can access the internet, whether they can control machinery, move money or operate weapons. Humans build them, finance them, deploy them and decide what powers to give them. We also should remember that some of the stories we are told owe more to myth than to science. As Nvidia chief executive Huang has said of the AI doomer narrative: “I appreciate that many of us grew up and enjoyed science fiction, but it’s not helpful. It’s not helpful to people. It’s not helpful to the industry. It’s not helpful to society. It’s not helpful to the governments.” Like every technology that has come before it, humans have agency over how AI is used. Instead of adopting a posture of fatalism, we should decide what kind of AI we want to build, what problems we want it to solve, and treat it as a tool rather than a force of nature. Read my full piece for the @australian here

A dark, gothic fairytale brought to life 🦋✨ Loving the cinematic lighting and macro details! 🥀🎥 Prompt provided below, happy creating! 👇🔥 prompt：Create a 15-second, 16:9 European Gothic haute couture cinematic short film using the exact same woman from the reference and the exact same blue-black butterfly from the reference image . The woman and butterfly must remain visually consistent and identical throughout the entire video. Do not use any reference video. SHOT 1 — 0–2.5 seconds The entire shot must maintain a clearly visible Dutch angle composition. The camera is tilted approximately 15–20 degrees to one side. The frame must absolutely NOT be level. Stone columns, arches, stained-glass windows, and floor lines must all appear noticeably tilted. Do not automatically correct or level the horizon. Inside a grand European classical Gothic cathedral with soaring pointed-arch vaults, enormous stone columns, deep arcades, ancient stone walls, gigantic stained-glass windows, intricate stone carvings, statues, candelabras, wall niches, an altar, and richly decorated architectural arches. The environment must have abundant architectural detail and layered depth. It must never feel empty, minimal, or under-detailed. The distant areas gradually disappear into darkness, while the foreground and midground contain abundant architectural details and decorative elements. The overall environment is extremely dark, with most areas swallowed by deep black and dark-gray shadows. There is no uniform ambient illumination. The primary light source comes from enormous Gothic stained-glass windows high above. Strong deep-red light passes through the stained glass and enters the cathedral, projecting large irregular dark-red patterns and patches of colored light across the stone columns, walls, and stone floor. A small amount of dark-purple and cool-blue stained-glass light enters through other windows, creating a subtle contrast with the deep-red illumination. There is a very light atmospheric haze and fine dust particles in the air, allowing the red beams of light to form subtle volumetric shafts. The camera slowly pushes deeper into the cathedral. The blue-black butterfly flies toward the camera from the distant background, continuously flapping its wings with realistic insect motion. Two small gray-blue circular ring markings on its wings must remain clearly visible. SHOT 2 — 2.5–5 seconds The butterfly continues flying directly toward the camera, gradually approaching the lens as it moves through the alternating areas of deep-red stained-glass illumination and darkness. When the butterfly is about to reach the camera, its flight briefly transitions into slow motion. Its wingbeats become highly visible, precise, elegant, and graceful, while its forward movement becomes noticeably slower. At this moment, the two small gray-blue circular ring markings on the butterfly's wings begin emitting a soft, clearly visible blue glow. The circular rings must retain their original size and exact shape. They must NEVER enlarge, expand, distort, or become oversized. The butterfly briefly hovers at the center of the frame. The two glowing circular rings must align precisely with the position of the woman's two eyes in the following shot. The image then instantly flashes to black for exactly one frame. During this single black frame, only the two blue glowing circular rings remain clearly visible. Their position, size, shape, and left-right spacing must remain exactly unchanged. They should appear as two floating blue luminous rings suspended against a completely pure black background. The butterfly itself must be completely invisible during this moment. Only the two glowing blue rings remain. In the next instant, the two blue glowing rings precisely transition into the position of the woman's eyes, creating a seamless visual match cut. The rings gradually merge into the natural contours of the woman's eyes. The blue glow naturally disappears. The woman's eyes then return to normal, realistic blue irises with no glow. Absolutely do not make the woman's eyes continuously glow. Do not leave any blue luminous rings around the eyes. Do not alter the shape, structure, or proportions of the woman's eyes. Immediately after the transition, reveal a clear close-up of the woman's face. The framing must include her entire head, both eyes, nose, mouth, chin, and part of her neck. This must NOT be an extreme eye close-up. The woman maintains a subtle three-quarter profile. Her face is slightly tilted, while her eyes naturally look toward the camera, creating subtle eye contact. She must absolutely NOT face the camera directly. The camera is positioned slightly above her eye level, creating a subtle high-angle perspective. One side of her face is softly illuminated by the deep-red stained-glass light, while the other side naturally falls into shadow. The woman naturally blinks and maintains a restrained, mysterious expression. Include realistic breathing and subtle facial micro-movements. SHOT 3 — 5–8.5 seconds Hard cut directly to the next shot. The blue-black butterfly flies forward through the interior of the cathedral. The camera immediately begins dynamically tracking the butterfly. The camera must continuously follow the butterfly's direction of flight. Wherever the butterfly flies, the camera follows it. The camera must NEVER remain stationary and wait for the butterfly to enter the frame. The camera stays behind the butterfly or slightly behind and to one side of it, continuously following its flight trajectory. The butterfly must NOT fly in a flat, straight horizontal line. Its flight path must contain clearly visible vertical variation. First, the butterfly flies toward a lower position. It then suddenly rises upward, passing through an archway and suspended architectural decorations. It subsequently descends toward a lower position again, creating a natural "low → high → low" arcing flight trajectory. At the same time, the butterfly makes subtle lateral movements and irregular curved deviations, behaving like a real butterfly navigating through a complex architectural environment. The camera must synchronously follow these vertical changes, naturally rising, descending, shifting slightly from side to side, and moving with subtle vertical fluctuations. The camera movement should feel like a real cinematographer physically tracking a flying insect. Do NOT suddenly switch to a static camera. Do NOT move the camera around to the front of the butterfly. Throughout the flight, the butterfly passes through the cathedral's richly detailed architecture. It skims past stone carvings, candelabras, statues, arches, hanging decorations, and stained-glass projections. It occasionally passes in front of candles, causing candle flames to briefly appear as soft out-of-focus points near the edge of the frame. Stone columns, walls, and architectural decorations sweep past both sides of the frame as the camera follows the butterfly, creating a strong sense of speed, spatial depth, and movement through the cathedral. A woman's extended right hand gradually appears in front of the butterfly. The butterfly continues along its natural curved flight trajectory toward her fingers and eventually lands gently on one of her fingers. The woman's fingernails are painted with glossy deep-red nail polish. SHOT 4 — 8.5–11 seconds The butterfly rests on the woman's finger and naturally makes subtle wing movements. The camera slowly moves laterally around the woman, transitioning from one three-quarter angle to another three-quarter angle. The camera should travel approximately half a circle only. Do NOT perform a complete 360-degree orbit. During this movement, reveal the woman's long black Victorian Gothic dress, intricate lace, high collar, black velvet, and dark-red satin ribbons. Deep-red stained-glass light enters the cathedral from the side and illuminates part of her clothing. The black velvet absorbs most of the illumination while retaining subtle, delicate edge highlights. The dark-red satin ribbons appear deep red under the stained-glass illumination. The woman maintains a natural standing posture with subtle breathing movement and small, realistic body adjustments. SHOT 5 — 11–13 seconds The butterfly naturally takes off from the woman's fingertip. The camera briefly follows its flight trajectory. The butterfly flies toward the woman's shoulder and face using a natural low → high curved trajectory. It approaches her face and finally settles on her cheek near the jawline. The woman maintains a subtle three-quarter profile. Her face remains slightly tilted. Her eyes naturally look toward the camera, creating subtle eye contact. She must absolutely NOT face the camera directly. The camera maintains a subtle high-angle perspective. SHOT 6 — 13–15 seconds The woman stands inside the cathedral with her body slightly turned to one side while her face naturally faces forward. She slowly raises her right hand and brings her finger toward the front of her body. The blue-black butterfly rests on her index finger. Her fingers are long and elegant. Her fingernails are painted with glossy deep-red nail polish. The red nail polish catches refined reflections from the deep-red stained-glass illumination, creating an elegant contrast between the warm red nail color and the cool blue-black butterfly. The woman looks quietly downward toward the butterfly resting on her fingertip. Her expression is calm, mysterious, and aristocratic. She does not smile. Maintain an icy, elegant Gothic aristocratic presence. The camera is positioned slightly above and in front of the woman, using a subtle high-angle perspective. Do NOT use a straight-on passport-photo composition. The framing must simultaneously include the woman's face, red-painted fingernails, hand, butterfly, and part of her long black Gothic dress. The camera slowly pushes forward while making a subtle lateral movement, creating sophisticated spatial changes similar to a high-end fashion advertisement. The butterfly slowly opens and spreads its wings while resting on the fingertip. Two abstract gray-blue circular ring markings are positioned toward the upper portion of its wings. As the wings move, the circular markings produce subtle blue iridescent reflections. The butterfly gently flaps its wings with realistic insect movement. The woman must maintain a convincing sense of life throughout the shot. Include natural breathing, subtle blinking, tiny finger adjustments, and slight movement in her body. Her light-golden curly hair is gently moved by the surrounding air. She must NOT look like a static fashion model posing for a still photograph. She must have natural human micro-movements and convincing physical presence. The butterfly must behave like a real butterfly, maintaining continuous and physically believable wing movement during flight and while resting. The two circular markings on the butterfly's wings must correspond one-to-one with the woman's two eyes, creating an extremely precise visual match transition. The transition must strictly follow this sequence: Butterfly approaches → brief slow motion → two circular markings begin glowing blue → butterfly hovers → one-frame black flash → only two blue glowing circular rings remain against a pure black background → rings precisely transition into the woman's eyes → blue glow disappears → woman's eyes return to normal non-glowing blue irises. The woman's eyes must NEVER remain glowing after the transition. The cathedral environment must contain rich architectural and decorative layers throughout the film.

I am the Director of Total Rewards at Amazon, and my entire job is one sentence: make sure your taxes pay the half of our payroll that we would rather not. I want to be precise, because Total Rewards is a phrase I chose, and it is working. Total, as in the whole thing. Rewards, as in a gift. Neither word is true, and that is the design. What I actually run is the seam between what we pay a worker and what a worker needs to live, and the width of that seam, to the dollar, is my performance review. Here are two facts, and they are both mine. This year we are spending $200 billion, up from $131 billion, most of it on data centers and chips and the machines that will eventually do the jobs. And the number of our workers on food stamps has nearly tripled since 2020. People read those two numbers and assume one of them is an accident. Neither is. I built the second one so we could afford the first. Watch the mechanism work, because it is clean and nobody made me hide it. I do not underpay you. That is a crime, and I am not a criminal. I co-pay you. I set the wage at the exact altitude where you still qualify. Qualify for SNAP. Qualify for Medicaid. Qualify for the credit you file in April. The federal government keeps a whole menu of programs for people who work full time and still cannot eat, and I price your labor to land you squarely on that menu. Your paycheck is the part I cover. The rest is a public program, and my job is to make sure you need it. It is not only us, which is the part I am proudest of, because it means it is not a scandal, it is a market. A government audit this year, the one a senator ordered because he thought it would embarrass us, found that 13.8 million working adults are on Medicaid and 10.6 million are on food stamps. Employed. Clocking in. Those are not the jobless. That same audit ranked us the second-largest employer of Medicaid recipients in the country. Second. Behind exactly one other big-box name, and you are already picturing it. The senator held it up as a failure. I filed it under benchmarking. So when the $200 billion headline and the food-stamp headline land in the same week and you feel lied to, understand that you are not. You are being told the truth twice. The $200 billion is what we do with the money we save by not paying the second half of the wage. You pay the second half. That is not a figure of speech. There is a line in the federal budget with your name on it and my logo on the other end. Here is where it gets elegant. The $200 billion is going toward the systems that will let me need fewer of the workers you are currently subsidizing. Our own plan, the one that leaked, is to avoid hiring 600,000 of them by 2033 and let the machines do the shifts instead. Follow it around the circle. You top up the wage of the worker. We spend the savings on the machine. The machine retires the worker. And the worker, now former, stays on the same food stamps, except there is no longer a shift attached to them. You were subsidizing a job. Soon you will be subsidizing the absence of one. I have that transition in a deck. It has a green arrow. When an economist points at this, we say we are proud to offer competitive pay and a full benefits package, and both halves are technically true, because competitive means the same as everyone else, and everyone else runs my playbook. The wage cut has a nicer name. We call it benefits navigation. I keep a team whose whole job is to help you enroll in the government aid that exists because of the wage I set. I pay that team more than the workers they enroll. I had to. Their work is skilled. My own compensation is not on the menu. I am salaried, I am equity-heavy, and I qualify for nothing I route other people toward. I know the exact income where the subsidies switch off, to the dollar, because drawing that line is the job, and I made certain I was sitting comfortably on the far side of it. There is a woman on the early shift, and I know her only as a point in the lower tail. She works full time. She is on SNAP. Her building is 20 minutes from a data center we are raising that will cost more than every wage in her facility will earn in a century. She does not know that the structure going up over the parking lot is funded, in part, by the hole in her own paycheck. I know. It is on my dashboard. I check it in the morning with my coffee, which is not subsidized, because I can afford it, because of the line I drew. There is one more turn, and I save it for the board. You can spend those food stamps with us. We take SNAP at the register in 45 states. So I set the wage that puts you on the program, and then I sell you your groceries through it. The dollar leaves Washington, lands in your benefits account, and comes home to me at checkout. I did not only move your wage onto the government. I built the store where the government's half gets spent. So keep chipping in. The program you fund is running exactly as designed, and I designed the part that makes you fund it. The $200 billion cleared this morning. The food stamps clear on the first. Different account, same desk. We do not underpay. We co-pay. The other payer is you.

Yesterday I took my first unsupervised Robotaxi in 3 months and the car got stuck in an infinite loop at pickup It looped two times and failed to pull over at the original pin, looped again and failed on the auto adjusted pin, then it adjusted to another pin and failed to pull over again. After looping there it adjusted again to another pin even further away and finally pulled over. I waited for 20 minutes watching it circle around the block. I think this might be a new worst pickup in an AV for me, certainly not a great customer experience Other thoughts from my rides yesterday/today: - availability has been great, 15 mins or less every time I've opened the app - super quiet and smooth, no AV is even close - nothing beats the Tesla infotainment experience: amazing audio quality, very responsive, and fully featured media apps - almost never can edit destination (even minor pin edits next to each other): the same error message about end of vehicle service. the odd thing is when I cancel and rebook at corrected pin I get matched to the same car - lot of other random papercuts: one car I was logged out of my profile on both trips, another the audio seemed to be directed toward the rear, one where eta to pickup stalled because car was stuck in apartment complex dead end I think my takeaway is the same as it was three months ago. Robotaxi has the highest highs and the lowest lows of AVs. The floor has definitely risen though (the service is actually usable now), and excited to see things continue to move in a positive direction

Hong Kong week, wrapped. Tuesday night in Causeway Bay. Room packed before 6pm. Standing room by the time doors were supposed to open. The conversation kept circling back to one question: what does money look like when AI agents start transacting on their own? Our CMO @EBerlindao, on stage:"One thing became clear: agentic AI isn't just enhancing systems, it's building the foundation of the autonomous economy. Autonomy isn't a feature. It's a competitive advantage that compounds until it becomes the standard." That's the SG–HK PayFi corridor we're building toward. Not a thesis anymore. A room. Thank you @SporeBlockchain for bringing the flagship home to Hong Kong. @RealGoOfficial, great to share the room. Two days on the #HKWeb3Festival# main floor. One night that set the tone for the week. See everyone at the next stop. #PayFi# #PolyFlow# #HKWeb3Festival# #RealGo#