My 84-year-old grandmother recently came from Brazil to visit me in Portugal. She had a return business-class ticket, was in a wheelchair and accompanied by airport assistance. Still, they almost didn’t let her enter because I hadn’t written an invitation letter. She later went to Ireland to visit my sister and had to enter Portugal again. This time, I prepared the letter and attached my European passport, proof of my address and all our information. Apparently, that still wasn’t enough. They almost rejected it because it wasn’t the specific AIMA form authenticated by a notary. An 84-year-old woman in a wheelchair, with a business-class return ticket and clear proof of where she was staying, was treated like an immigration threat because of paperwork. Then we watch thousands of people enter Europe illegally without passports, visas or any checks at all. Honestly, it’s an absolute joke. Two-tier immigration control in Europe.

The aviation community may be global, but it is tight-knit. Help us rally around Brazilian aviation’s @avioesemusicas who has been diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. A pilot in Texas paid Lito this honor. To learn more about Lito’s situation:

My dad in Brazil recently started receiving WhatsApp messages from a company offering to pay him to review hotels on Google Maps, basically, the more hotel reviews he posts, the more money he makes. Absolutely bizarre, and also a good reminder of how hard it’s becoming to trust online hotel ratings. Pieter built because hotel ratings online are honestly becoming a bit useless. The idea is pretty simple: Hotelist combines ratings from different platforms, looks at real experiences people share online, and uses AI to help find hotels that are actually good. I’m obviously involved too because we travel a lot together, and we personally review many of the hotels we stay at. Some close friends also contribute when they travel. Now we want to slowly expand that circle and find more people around the world who travel often, have high standards, and are willing to give genuinely honest reviews. Hotels can also invite Pieter, me, or other Hotelist reviewers to come experience their properties. An invitation doesn’t mean a positive review. The whole point is to keep the opinions real. Basically: less “everything is amazing,” more “would we actually recommend staying here?” If you travel a lot and would like to become one of the Hotelist reviewers, message us.

Airbnb deletes negative reviews so everything is always 4.7 Google Maps removes negative reviews in many countries as defamation so everything is always a 4.7 Booking sites want you to book so will also happily remove negative reviews for their hotels so everything is always a 4.7 I made a site called (or whatever you prefer, I have both!) It gets ratings from all booking platforms, normalizes them to show the actual score (eg a booking site where most hotels are always between 4 and 4.7 means you can normalize that to a 0 and 5) It also uses AI vision models to rate hotels based on how they look And it browses the internet for actual experiences (think blogs and Reddit posts) to get the real opinion about them outside reviews And it's starting to work, I just stayed in this beautiful boutique apartment hotel called Woo Suites in Athens for $400/night. Clean, nice minimalist interior, working cold AC, central, excellent staff, great healthy breakfast, and we found it through Hotelist! It's free, I don't make any money on it (actually I lose thousands per month on it to collect data via APIs and web scrapers) and there's no affiliate money bs like other booking sites (they will increase ranking of hotels if they pay sites a higher commission!) Tell your friends please!!!!!! 🙏

Urgent appeal for Lito Sousa, fighting Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Please share this reel far and wide. Make sure to tag these institutions who could include him in life-saving trials: Quer ajudar o Lito? Compartilhe este reel na sua rede e marque as instituições abaixo. Cada segundo conta: 📌 @ionis_pharma — Ionis Pharmaceuticals — ION717 trial @broadinstitute — PRiSM trial (NCT07444580) @harvard @mayoclinic Every share and tag can make a difference. Time is critical.” #lito# #SaveLito# #CreutzfeldtJakob#

I normally don't do these things but this guy is really special! His name is Lito (@avioesemusicas) and he's famous in Brazil for making really fun airplane videos, I watch them all the time too He explains how airplanes work in normal ELI5 language, and also explains airplane crashes etc, lots of people credit him for helping them stop being scared to fly as Lito showed how safe it is If you ever read Hacker News, you know about prions, which they love to discuss, they're one of the scariest things you'll ever read about, as they can flip seemingly at random in your body and cause Creutzfeldt–Jakob, a terminal disease I'm Dutch so we had a big outbreak of mad cow disease in the 1990s when I was a kid and I remember it well. You can get it from eating infected meat (but it's very rare), or prions can flip in your body randomly and cause it, or you can have surgery and one of the surgery tools can have it on them from previous patients The issue with that from what I read is that it's close to impossible to wash off, and it won't die at extreme heats either, you just have to throw away all surgery tools (which you can't) 85% of Creutzfeldt–Jakob is a randomly flipping prion though, so that's most probably Anyway, Lito here can participate in a promising trial by @Harvard @broadinstitute @ionispharma @mayoclinic but the next batch is only in October, so he's hoping the internet (like this tweet) can help him get in earlier, so he has a chance And that trial hopefully helps us find a cure for this crazy disease So if you can spread this, do so! This guy is really awesome, THANK YOU ❤️

The more dysfunctional public services are the more you force people to go private and fend for themselves This moves you into the direction of Brazilification Rich people will pay for their own walled condos with private security, bulletproof cars, private healthcare, and everything will be high quality but only for the rich. At the same time the rich will build constructions to not pay tax or just flee the country because why would they not? This pushes down tax income for governments meaning they will have to increase taxes to pay for the already dysfunctional government services Meanwhile poor people get further isolated, they don't have money to go private so they rely fully on public services which are now worse than they were before. And they get isolated even more and now you have a 2-tier society of rich and poor fully divided This forces the poor to start robbing the rich and now you get even more private security and rich fleeing the country and less tax income "Brazilification" It's a vicious cycle Now if you had safe cities, great public services, great healthcare, you would never have this problem. You'd have both rich and poor participating in the functioning system. And rich would be happy to pay more because they get a great liveable society!

I remember as a PC guy how I bought my first Apple device, a MacBook Pro, in 2013 I bought it because that's what my brother had (a pro VFX guy) and also a lot of people in startups around then switched to MacBooks Back then Windows had become such a POS to use I'm starting to feel we're reaching a similar moment with Apple I just saw @dhh's Omarchy's foundation announcement and this video by @theo is also accurate Apple has given a consistent big F U to developers for over a decade, but at least their software worked well enough. The last few years that changed and you start seeing really dumb and messy bugs everywhere especially in iOS but also MacOS As an example every time I open my camera from my iPhone's homescreen to quickly picture somethig that quickly happened (like a plane flying by slow) I miss it because my Camera app goes into a weird blur freeze or just stays black Just basic software things Apple can't even do anymore A big reason for this of course, may I say it, is Steve not being there. Steve was obsessed about details. Modern Apple doesn't care about details at all Developers are just a tiny sliver of society but they are trend setting and if you lose them, there's a good chance the rest of people will move on to other platforms too Apple should be studying what's happening now because add this to also investing $0 into AI (which people call a "great move" as models go open, I'm really not sure about that) they might not have a moat left I know for sure if I switch from a MacBook Pro running MacOS to a Dell XPS with Linux that will be a gateway drug for me to also move my iPhone with iOS to some great hardware phone running a great custom minimal Android install And I never even considered switching before this year!

Today’s For You release is in the open-source repo. Notable updates: • How ranking weights actually work • A new filter required for Brazil’s 2026 election All the details:

⚡️ Seedance 2.5 on is now LIVE on Photo AI! - The most realistic video model out now - 95% cheaper than on any other platform - No waiting queues or fake "unlimited" promises - Authorized for real characters trained on Photo AI - Unrestricted (non-US) - Up to 30 seconds

I tred pumping this blog post into it Definitely lots of things to improve here but you can see the direction is going, we're getting pretty close to AI-gen'd YouTubers This took 5 minutes to generate!

I present you: iPhone 18 Pro Fold ❤️ Okay this one's pretty good, I uploaded a clip of my voice, and a few pics, and this came out, it's getting close to passable! Live on Photo AI now 😊

I'm spotting lots of very rich people on here, like $500M net worth to multi-billionaires, buying 𝕏 followers in the last ~6 months Like they had very very steady follower growths of maybe 5,000/mo to 10,000/mo new followers before that for yeaaaaaaarssss And then suddenly in the last few months they add like 500,000 followers to 1 million in a month, with barely any signs of engagement on their tweets at all, completely fake It seems like some startup tech PR manager is behind it and managing them secretly, interesting? I think it shows that with AGI coming, for rich people, the currency of having a big audience is becoming more important than the currency of money!