When the keynote starts I want to hear all of you go absolutely fucking wild for Elon and the Tesla team. completely over the top. They did what everyone said was impossible. Our cheers need to be proportionate to how insane this moment is

if Treasury's amendment passes, the Bank of England must support innovation as a secondary goal, raising odds of proportionate rules for sterling stablecoins. the amendment changes no rule, approves no issuer and names no chain, so liquid L1 and L2 tokens get no direct exposure.

Yuga Labs drops new game for the Bored Ape community. @yugalabs and @BoredApeYC have just launched 'Mudwater' - a @Solana-based trading card series. Bored Ape and Mutant Ape NFT holders are both eligible to claim now. Interestingly, every Mudwater card trade carries effectively a 2.5% tax which will be used to buy back $APE from the market and distribute it to holders of the new cards proportionately.

TRUMP PAUSES IRAN STRIKE FOR DEAL President Donald Trump said the U.S. will hold off on a planned attack on Iran if a rapid agreement is reached to curb Tehran’s nuclear program and fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Trump said Iran and other Middle Eastern countries requested time to finalize a deal, adding Israel supports the pause while the U.S. remains ready to strike if talks fail. Iran denied seeking a pause and said its forces remain on the highest level of readiness. Earlier, Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi warned any new U.S. or Israeli attack would prompt a “proportionate response.” Saudi Arabia urged dialogue and de-escalation.

I agree with @DavidRBellamy that people are totally miscalibrated on the risk of AI designing dangerous viruses. We should not be talking about AI-engineered bioweapons like it is the literal end of the world. The upside from medicine is going to be so much larger than the downside from engineered bioweapons. In addition David's points, there is actually an even more fundamental point here in our favor, which is evolution. As soon as you release an engineered virus into the wild, the virus is no longer under your control: it will evolve however it wants. And, what viruses want is to maximize their ability to replicate. The thing that maximizes their ability to replicate is to infect as many people as possible, which means being extremely contagious and not killing their hosts (dead hosts don't spread virus). The viruses that are most evolved for human biology are the common cold viruses: extremely contagious and not at all lethal. Viruses that kill humans do so by accident, usually because they are new to human biology (e.g. COVID, when it first jumped, or flu when it jumps from birds). If you stick a bunch of machinery into the virus to kill humans, I guarantee you that machinery will disappear from the virus very quickly. In response to this, I hear people say things like "the AI could engineer a kill switch so that the virus doesn't kill the humans initially but then once it has spread through the entire population the AI will hit the switch and kill all the humans." No. What would actually happen in practice is that the kill switch would accumulate deleterious mutations because there would be no evolutionary pressure to preserve it, and would quickly become non-functional. Evolution is fundamental. There is no way around it. For AI readers, trying to engineer a virus by setting its initial genetic code and then releasing it into the wild is like trying to train a model by setting the initial weights and then hill-climbing on a hidden training mixture you have no control over. And you're not even allowed to run any experiments in advance! You may be able to influence the behavior of the model in the first few iterations, but you will quickly lose control. There are big dangers. AI will be great at making one-off, non-replicating biological weapons, which are also scary (but much less scary than replicating bioweapons). AI will be great at helping people to weaponize existing pathogens, which is also a major danger. Also, a misanthropic model could get creative: it could release viruses repeatedly to counteract the effects of evolution, for example. Many people could die this way. Sensible surveillance is important, as is having proportionate controls on wet lab equipment. But we don't live in the dark ages anymore, we're not going to have a smallpox or black death-style pandemic where 50% of people die. COVID killed ~0.1% of humanity. A pandemic 100x worse than COVID would be horrific, but it would also not be civilization-ending. I get the sense that many AI researchers (with the notable exception of Dario personally) actually expect that AI in biology will do more harm than it will do good. This could not be further from the truth. As someone who likewise falls into the very small group of people who have actually physically made viruses with their own hands and has also worked on frontier AI, the upside here is huge, and the downside is not anything like what is being portrayed.

ELON MUSK: "Optimus will be the biggest product ever, but it is a very complex problem to solve. It's one of the hardest things to solve, to make an autonomous humanoid robot that can do tasks that, if you simply ask it to do something or show it a video, it can do the task without any programming. No one's ever achieved this, and there are many challenges in the design of the robot to achieve sufficient dexterity and to be very reliable and have long wear and tear, meaning it needs to be out in the field and not break down. Otherwise, you've got sort of a 70 kilogram robot that just flopped over and you've got to carry it out like a body, you know, it doesn't have wheels. And we don't want Optimus to go haywire. So it's a lot of work to scale, to get the design right and to scale production. This is going to be the hardest product to scale manufacturing that we've ever made at Tesla because everything on the robot is new. And the difficulty of scaling the production ramp is proportionate to the newness of the parts in the robot. With Optimus, there is no supply chain. So we've had to build up a supply chain in its entirety or in-house the production. The Optimus production line that we're building out in Fremont in place of what used to be the Model S & X production, it looks incredible. It's quite stunning to see."

Vacation looks very different depending on where you work. Over the course of the year, Germans hold the OOO crown. But not consistently! Swedes and Italians trade places in July and August, and in August, the French take over. Brazil breaks from the European pattern on summer break length. India books vacation days at the last minute. And birthdays are popular days off, but only the big ones. Turning 31? Not worth celebrating, apparently. We teamed up with @deel to look at how startup and tech workers around the world actually take vacation, not just how many days they're offered, but when they take them, how long, and whether they take them at all. North America is stingier than Europe. Most "vacations" are a single day off. Long weekends spike on Mondays and Fridays in summer. And no matter how hard the Europeans work to make their summer holidays count, Christmas break wins everywhere. The British are proportionately at their desks in peak summer; the Dutch over Christmas. Except Armenia, for some reason. Full piece: