Vivi
@vivilinsv
Silicon Valley Correspondent @californiapost @nypost| People, AI, money & power | ex @Reuters TV & @ftchinese columnist | Signal: Vivilinsv.88 |Views are my own
8.9K Following 30K Followers
This was a difficult story to report. Some of these conversations stayed with me long after the interviews ended.
I spoke with these bright, ambitious women who came to Silicon Valley to pursue their dreams. They described being sexually harassed, assaulted or raped—often by someone they knew and trusted, someone they considered a friend.
What was especially painful to hear was what happened afterward. Some described being discouraged from going to the police. Others said they were told nobody would believe them. And someone was told that she was seeking attention and all was a lie. 🥲 Alongside the trauma came fears about losing friendships, careers and their place in a community they had hoped to belong to.
When the person you’re accusing has money, influence and powerful connections, seeking accountability can feel like David taking on Goliath.
Victims aren’t always women, although most of the accounts shared with me came from women. One woman’s point stayed with me: we need to confront the predatory mindset—the entitlement that allows someone to disregard another person’s boundaries.
Whisper networks can help people warn and protect one another. But they cannot substitute for a system people can trust: somewhere to turn for support, a fair process for investigating allegations, and meaningful accountability when misconduct is established—even when those responsible are wealthy or powerful.
To the women who shared their experiences with me: thank you. I know these are deeply personal and painful things to revisit. I appreciate your trust.
No single article can capture the full weight or complexity of someone’s experience. I take seriously the responsibility of telling these stories with care.
My hope is that bringing them into the light helps more people find support—and helps create a culture where pursuing your dreams doesn’t mean staying silent about harm.
If you ever unfortunately get into the situation of experiencing rape or sexual assault, please seek medical care and professional support, and consider reporting to the police when you feel safe and ready. You do not have to face this alone. What happened was not your fault, and you deserve care, support and to be heard.
I was deeply moved by the strength of the women I spoke with and their determination not to let what happened define their lives. They still have dreams to pursue, companies to build and so much ahead of them. They deserve every opportunity to shape that future. 🌷
Read my latest article for @nypost and @californiapost (link in thread) 👇
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Can anyone tell me what is @nikitabier doing here with JLo? 🤣🤣
Silence is not neutrality when someone else is paying the price.
@jordanbpeterson (I hope he is having a great recovery!) had this great talk - "What Happens When Good Men Say Nothing".
The deepest message is that when our conscience tells us something is wrong, silence is itself a decision.
Dr. Peterson retells the story of Jonah: one man sees a corrupt city heading toward destruction, but runs away because speaking seems dangerous, futile and inconvenient. Why should one person take the risk when everyone else is silent?
But that is precisely how a society begins to lose its moral foundations: everyone waits for someone else to speak.
History rarely begins with an entire population suddenly becoming evil. It begins when lies become normal, cruelty becomes someone else’s problem, and good people learn to avert their eyes.
The Holocaust required perpetrators—but it was also enabled by institutions, professionals, officials and ordinary people who obeyed, benefited or looked away.
During Mao’s Great Leap Forward, officials fabricated harvest figures while those who challenged disastrous policies were punished. Once truth became dangerous, lies traveled upward, orders traveled downward, and millions of ordinary people paid the price.
In Rwanda, the world received warnings, yet governments and international institutions failed to act with the urgency required. Silence did not create the killers—but it gave the killers time and space.
This is also why I chose to speak up for Wang Wang and her puppies.
They could not demand justice for themselves. Speaking for them was not “just about dogs.” It was about whether cruelty toward the voiceless is tolerated, whether children are taught empathy and respect for life, and what kind of society we are becoming.
It is why we must speak for women whose suffering is hidden behind family honor or institutional convenience.
It is why we must resist education becoming indoctrination—when children are taught whom to hate and what to repeat before they are taught how to think.
And it is why the history of totalitarian communism matters. When one ideology declares itself infallible, truth becomes whatever serves the Party, conscience becomes disobedience, and human beings become expendable instruments of a supposedly glorious future.
But no movement—left or right—is immune when it places ideology above humanity and punishes those who question it.
Speaking up does not mean spreading rumors, dehumanizing opponents or turning every disagreement into a moral war. Moral courage must be accompanied by evidence, humility and the willingness to correct ourselves.
Courage without truth can become fanaticism.
But truth without courage remains private knowledg, which protects no victim.
I do not speak because I am always right. I speak because the voiceless cannot always wait for the perfect spokesperson, the perfect moment or unanimous approval.
Not everyone living under repression can safely become a martyr. The greater responsibility belongs to those of us who have more freedom, security, reach and voice.
Martin Luther King Jr. warned about “the appalling silence of the good people.”
History’s darkest chapters were written by those who committed evil - but too often, the pages were left open by those who recognized it and said nothing.
One person may not be able to stop every injustice.
But every great moral change began when someone decided that silence was no longer acceptable.
Thank you for those who speak up with courage when facing injustice.
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Can you tell which photo is taken in China, and which one is in Bulgaria? 😉
Have you ever wondered why communist-era buildings look so strangely similar—from Beijing to Sofia, Moscow to Bucharest?
Often described as Soviet or socialist architecture, these state-planned structures prioritized function, scale and uniformity - frequently at the expense of individuality, warmth and human connection.
Looking at them, I cannot help thinking about today’s robots: powerful, efficient and increasingly intelligent, yet still missing personality, empathy and soul.
The lesson is not that efficiency is bad. It is that systems designed only for efficiency can forget the people they were created to serve.
As we enter the AI era, our challenge is not only to make machines more human—but to prevent humans from becoming more machine-like.
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What was life really like under communism?
Bulgaria is now turning that question into a tourist attraction.
In Sofia, an €18 “Communist Tour” takes visitors through Bulgaria’s 45 years under communist rule - from the former Communist Party headquarters and a secret-police investigation facility to Soviet monuments and a memorial to the regime’s victims.
Capitalism is now selling tickets to communism.
But real life under communism was not a three-hour walking tour. It was the entire horizon of a person’s life.
For many Bulgarians, the system provided employment, basic housing, public education and healthcare. That helps explain why memories of the period are not entirely uniform - and why some older people still feel nostalgia for its relative stability.
But that security came with an enormous price: one-party rule, censorship, political persecution, secret-police surveillance, confiscation and collectivization of property, forced-labor camps, shortages, queues and severe limits on what people could say, read, believe or do with their own lives.
Communism began with an immensely powerful ideal: eliminate exploitation, reduce inequality, give dignity to workers and organize society for the common good.
Perhaps many of its early believers genuinely meant well.
But when one party claimed the exclusive right to define the “common good,” idealism became coercion. Without a free press, political competition, private initiative or meaningful accountability, there was no effective way to correct mistakes - or restrain those exercising power.
The promised equality too often became equality in scarcity, while a new political elite enjoyed privileges unavailable to ordinary people.
The architecture tells the same story.
Travel through former communist countries and you repeatedly encounter the same landscape: enormous government buildings, vast squares and row after row of grey, standardized apartment blocks.
Parts of Bulgaria reminded me vividly of the China during the 1980s and 1990s.
The resemblance was not accidental. Soviet architectural models, centralized planning and standardized construction methods spread throughout much of the socialist world. Rapid industrialization required millions of people to be moved into cities and housed quickly. Prefabricated concrete blocks were inexpensive, functional and easy to reproduce.
Individuality, ornament and local character became secondary. In systems already suspicious of private luxury and individual expression, uniformity could even be presented as a virtue.
Yet while ordinary homes were made repetitive and impersonal, communist governments loved enormous, muscular sculptures: heroic workers, soldiers, farmers and mothers standing upright, gazing confidently toward a radiant future.
These figures represented communism’s idealized “new human”—strong, selfless, productive and devoted to the collective - almost like a robot!
The contrast was striking:
Private life was standardized. State ideology was monumentalized.
These buildings and sculptures show both the ambition and the tragedy of communism: its desire to build an entirely new and more equal society—and the authoritarian, colorless and frequently brutal reality that emerged when human complexity was forced into a single political design.
That is why these tours matter.
Communism should not be reduced to either nostalgia or a tourist spectacle. People should be able to examine the distance between the promised utopia and the lives that were actually lived.
As someone who grew up in China, this history did not feel remote, but disturbingly familiar.
As socialism regains appeal in parts of the U.S., Bulgaria’s history should ring a warning bell: without checks on power, the promise of equality can become a machinery of control.
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What was life really like under communism?
Bulgaria is now turning that question into a tourist attraction.
In Sofia, an €18 “Communist Tour” takes visitors through Bulgaria’s 45 years under communist rule - from the former Communist Party headquarters and a secret-police investigation facility to Soviet monuments and a memorial to the regime’s victims.
Capitalism is now selling tickets to communism.
But real life under communism was not a three-hour walking tour. It was the entire horizon of a person’s life.
For many Bulgarians, the system provided employment, basic housing, public education and healthcare. That helps explain why memories of the period are not entirely uniform - and why some older people still feel nostalgia for its relative stability.
But that security came with an enormous price: one-party rule, censorship, political persecution, secret-police surveillance, confiscation and collectivization of property, forced-labor camps, shortages, queues and severe limits on what people could say, read, believe or do with their own lives.
Communism began with an immensely powerful ideal: eliminate exploitation, reduce inequality, give dignity to workers and organize society for the common good.
Perhaps many of its early believers genuinely meant well.
But when one party claimed the exclusive right to define the “common good,” idealism became coercion. Without a free press, political competition, private initiative or meaningful accountability, there was no effective way to correct mistakes - or restrain those exercising power.
The promised equality too often became equality in scarcity, while a new political elite enjoyed privileges unavailable to ordinary people.
The architecture tells the same story.
Travel through former communist countries and you repeatedly encounter the same landscape: enormous government buildings, vast squares and row after row of grey, standardized apartment blocks.
Parts of Bulgaria reminded me vividly of the China during the 1980s and 1990s.
The resemblance was not accidental. Soviet architectural models, centralized planning and standardized construction methods spread throughout much of the socialist world. Rapid industrialization required millions of people to be moved into cities and housed quickly. Prefabricated concrete blocks were inexpensive, functional and easy to reproduce.
Individuality, ornament and local character became secondary. In systems already suspicious of private luxury and individual expression, uniformity could even be presented as a virtue.
Yet while ordinary homes were made repetitive and impersonal, communist governments loved enormous, muscular sculptures: heroic workers, soldiers, farmers and mothers standing upright, gazing confidently toward a radiant future.
These figures represented communism’s idealized “new human”—strong, selfless, productive and devoted to the collective - almost like a robot!
The contrast was striking:
Private life was standardized. State ideology was monumentalized.
These buildings and sculptures show both the ambition and the tragedy of communism: its desire to build an entirely new and more equal society—and the authoritarian, colorless and frequently brutal reality that emerged when human complexity was forced into a single political design.
That is why these tours matter.
Communism should not be reduced to either nostalgia or a tourist spectacle. People should be able to examine the distance between the promised utopia and the lives that were actually lived.
As someone who grew up in China, this history did not feel remote, but disturbingly familiar.
As socialism regains appeal in parts of the U.S., Bulgaria’s history should ring a warning bell: without checks on power, the promise of equality can become a machinery of control.
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The Bessent–Warren fight is getting epic - and personal! 🤣
But underneath the insults is actually a useful lesson in how governments intervene in foreign-exchange markets.
And on one narrow but important point, @SecScottBessent appears to be right.
@SenWarren questioned Treasury's intervention to support the Japanese yen by arguing that American taxpayers could ultimately bear the cost if Japan were unable to “repay” Treasury.
The problem: Japan apparently has nothing to repay.
According to Bessent, Treasury did not lend Japan money. The Exchange Stabilization Fund exchanged foreign-currency assets it already owned for yen — reportedly selling euros and buying yen.
That's an FX purchase.
No loan was created. Japan didn't borrow the money. There is no Japanese principal waiting to be repaid.
This distinction matters because there are at least three very different financial instruments getting mixed together in this political debate:
FX purchase: Treasury sells one currency and buys another. It now owns a different reserve asset and bears FX valuation risk.
Currency swap: Two monetary authorities exchange currencies with an agreement to reverse the transaction later.
Loan: A borrower receives money and owes principal, usually plus interest.
Argentina was different. The U.S. established a $20 billion swap line with Argentina's central bank in 2025, and Treasury records show Argentina drew $2.5 billion through an actual swap transaction.
So Warren is absolutely entitled to question whether Treasury should intervene, how much risk taxpayers are taking, whether the intervention worked, why the amount remains undisclosed, and whether the ESF is being used too aggressively.
Those are legitimate oversight questions.
But “What happens if Japan can't repay us?” appears to misunderstand the transaction itself.
And Bessent's broader argument is worth understanding too.
Japan is one of the world's largest holders of U.S. Treasuries. A disorderly yen collapse can trigger carry-trade unwinds, portfolio shifts and forced selling across global markets — potentially pushing up U.S. Treasury yields and ultimately borrowing costs for Americans.
So the real debate isn't simply: “Why are American taxpayers bailing out Japan?”
But this - How much financial risk should the U.S. Treasury take to prevent instability in a global financial system in which America's own borrowing costs are deeply interconnected with foreign currencies and foreign capital?
That is a much more interesting question.
Politics aside, this Bessent–Warren exchange is a surprisingly good International Finance 101 lesson:
A currency purchase is not a swap.
A swap is not a loan.
And financial risk does not necessarily require a borrower to default.
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In her latest sciolistic letter to me, @SenWarren made it clear that she knows even less about foreign exchange markets than she does about banking.
What is equally shocking, but not surprising: not a single member of the media mob has a rudimentary-enough level of financial market literacy to spot her remedial error.
To reiterate: under @POTUS, the United States delivers for America’s trusted partners.
For a fuller explanation, I recommend Senator Warren take any entry level course in international finance for her and her staff, or I can personally give her a tutorial on Foreign Exchange for Dummies. Although I am not holding my breath, I hope her next letter will demonstrate that she has learned the difference between a currency purchase and a swap or a loan.
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Robots really are everywhere now. 🤖
Even at an airport hotel in Sofia, Bulgaria, I found “Roomy” — a robot butler that delivers food, drinks and hotel amenities directly to guests’ rooms, 24/7.
Turns out Roomy has actually been here since 2019. It can navigate the hotel, take the elevator, avoid obstacles and find your room on its own.
But here’s the interesting part: it’s a robot, but not really an “intelligent” robot by today’s standards.
This generation was largely about automation: map the building, program the destinations, give it a predefined task, and let it execute.
The next generation will be very different.
Add today’s AI models to increasingly capable physical machines, and robots won’t just follow instructions — they’ll increasingly be able to understand language, perceive situations, reason about what we want, and decide how to accomplish a task.
In other words, we’ve already spent years quietly building the bodies.
Now we’re giving them brains.
Seeing this little guy in Sofia made me realize how quickly robots have already slipped into ordinary life — hotels, restaurants, airports, warehouses, factories.
Of course, they might not be as intelligent as we would like it to be, yet!
The robot revolution may not arrive with some dramatic sci-fi moment.
We may simply look around one day and realize they’re already everywhere.
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That’s crazy!
@grok - tell me what percentage of @SpaceX does Harvard actually own? And any idea when/how early Harvard got in?
This is the single largest stock holding in Harvard Management Company’s disclosed U.S. equity portfolio.
Does that make you more bullish on $SPCX ? 😉
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JUST IN: Harvard University discloses a $2,200,000,000.00 stake in SpaceX.
So who exactly is Scott Gray?
And why he matters
Gray is a fairly old-school OpenAI technical figure. OpenAI announced his arrival all the way back in 2016, when the company was barely a year old.
Before OpenAI, he worked at Nervana Systems, where he specialized in optimizing deep neural networks on GPUs. OpenAI described his assembly-level dense-linear-algebra and convolution optimizations at the time as among the fastest available.
So he wasn’t simply someone working on “GPUs” as he humbly put it. His specialty sits very close to the compute efficiency / kernels / inference layer underneath modern AI systems.
For example, in 2017 - Gray, Alec Radford and Diederik Kingma published OpenAI’s work on GPU kernels for block-sparse weights. They showed that specialized kernels could, depending on sparsity, operate orders of magnitude faster than conventional alternatives such as cuBLAS.
He subsequently appears in the official credits for some of OpenAI’s biggest systems. For GPT-4, OpenAI specifically lists Scott Gray among only five people under “Inference research”. He is also credited as a core contributor to GPT-4o.
That makes his departure worth watching.
The really intriguing part is what he’s doing next.
Hints from himself -
“Exploring some neuro-inspired AI approaches”
And that actually connects to a long-standing interest of his. His older public bios explicitly described an interest in neuroscience and its application to machine learning. His Bluesky profile similarly says he has a background in computer/systems/cognitive neuroscience and is interested in incorporating more insights from neuroscience into AI/ML.
So this may represent a fairly meaningful intellectual shift:
from making today’s neural networks run extraordinarily efficiently → toward questioning whether we should build neural networks differently in the first place.
Definitely keeping my eyes on him - best of luck to Scott!
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What’s going on with @OpenAI ?
The man who said - “OpenAI is nothing without its people” has left OpenAI.
@scottgray76 Scott Gray who has not posted anything new since Nov 2023 on X (his latest reply was in 2025), apparently changed his bio here to “currently independent” and OpenAi has become a past tense. 😬
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What’s going on with @OpenAI ?
The man who said - “OpenAI is nothing without its people” has left OpenAI.
@scottgray76 Scott Gray who has not posted anything new since Nov 2023 on X (his latest reply was in 2025), apparently changed his bio here to “currently independent” and OpenAi has become a past tense. 😬
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I noticed a pattern - bugs often happen on the weekends.
Apparently am still a few steps away from joining the creator rewards program, but my checklists are all done ✅ - @grok could you kindly explain to me what happens and who could help fix this issue for me please? 🥹
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Elon Musk once described his ideal relationship as “parallel presence”: he is working on his laptop in bed and his ideal partner is reading quietly beside him.
Neither demands the other’s attention, yet both feel comforted by simply sharing the same space.
I can’t verify whether Elon actually used those exact words — but the idea reminded me of the first time I heard the term “parallel presence.”
My friend Linda used it to describe her high-functioning autistic son. He could spend hours in the same room with another autistic friend: one playing video games, the other watching videos or surfing online. They barely spoke or interacted, yet both felt completely happy and at ease.
In psychology, this is more commonly called “parallel play,” or simply “being alone together.” It is often meaningful for autistic and other neurodivergent people, although it certainly isn’t exclusive to them.
It is a form of low-demand intimacy: I don’t need to perform for you and you don’t need to entertain me.
We can each remain inside our own world while still feeling the warmth of the other’s presence.
What makes this especially interesting in Elon’s case is the contradiction between the peace he may want and the intensity he repeatedly appears drawn to.
In a documented 2017 interview, Elon said that he never wanted to be alone and that “going to sleep alone kills me.”
Walter Isaacson’s biography also portrays someone who craves companionship but is repeatedly attracted to drama, intensity and highly dynamic women—from Justine Musk and Talulah Riley to Amber Heard and Grimes.
Psychologically, the person who activates our attraction system is not always the person who helps regulate our nervous system.
We may pursue people who feel exciting, unpredictable and difficult to possess — because uncertainty keeps the brain engaged. But the person who gives us peace may feel very different: emotionally secure, self-contained and comfortable with silence.
Can one person offer both?
I think so and I hope so!
Someone can be intellectually intense but emotionally steady. Independent without being distant. Fascinating without creating chaos. She can challenge his mind, share his ambition and still be able to read quietly beside him while rockets are being designed.
But there is an important distinction: “not demanding constant attention” cannot mean having no needs at all. A healthy partner is not human background music for a genius working on his laptop.
Parallel presence only becomes intimacy when it is mutual—and when quiet coexistence is balanced with genuine attention, care and reciprocity.
That's why it is so difficult, even the richest and smartest man in the world like @elonmusk could struggle to find the ideal partner.
The rarest kind of love is exactly this: someone who gives you enough intensity to feel alive, and enough safety to finally feel at peace.
Do you agree? Have you found your ideal partner? 😉
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Elon Musk was asked at a small gathering what his ideal relationship would look like if he could design it the way he designs a product.
He said he wants someone who reads in bed next to him while he works on his laptop. That's it. Not someone who demands attention. Not someone who needs him to close the laptop. Someone who is content being in the same room, doing their own thing, existing in parallel rather than requiring interaction.
He described it as "parallel presence." Two people occupying the same space, each doing what fulfills them, drawing comfort from proximity without requiring engagement. The relationship version of two people reading different books on the same couch.
The people in the room went quiet because the simplicity of what he described contrasted so sharply with the chaos of his actual relationship history. The man who has been through five major relationships, multiple divorces, public scandals, and tabloid coverage doesn't want passion or excitement or intellectual stimulation. He wants someone reading quietly next to him while he works.
Every woman he's been with was extraordinary. Justine was a novelist. Talulah was an actress. Amber was a movie star. Grimes was a visionary musician. He chose the most dynamic, interesting, remarkable women available. And what he actually wants is someone who will sit quietly beside him and read.
The gap between who he chooses and what he needs is the entire story. He's attracted to intensity because his own intensity recognizes it. But what his nervous system actually requires for peace is the opposite of intensity. It requires stillness. A presence so calm that it doesn't compete with the factory for his attention. That person might exist. But he keeps choosing the opposite because the quiet ones don't trigger the pursuit mechanism that his brain requires to engage.
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Grimes × Hatsune Miku × SatapanP feels almost inevitable. 🩵
For anyone wondering: Miku began as Japanese singing-voice software, but millions of creators collectively transformed her into a global virtual idol—one who has performed thousands of songs without ever existing as a human being.
Her name 初音未来 - means “the first sound from the future.”
After @Grimezsz wrote of the internet generation as “mother of A.I., mother of Miku,” Miku-Maxxing feels like that idea coming alive through music.
The first sound of the future meets one of the most imaginative artists of our time. 💙
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Quite a classic Silicon Valley story: a dream house is snatched by a young tech founder！ 😂
At just 31, Yuhuai “Tony” Wu — xAI cofounder and one of the key minds behind Grok’s reasoning capabilities—is reportedly linked to a $70 million, 12-acre Hillsborough estate, the Bay Area’s biggest home sale of the year.
AI wealth is no longer just changing cap tables. It’s reshaping the Peninsula’s ultra-luxury real estate market in real time.
The estate is said to have been inspired by the magnificent villas of Lake Como. Great taste, Tony @Yuhu_ai_ ! 😄
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Newly-minted mega-millionaire unmasked as buyer of $70M mega estate at just 31 years old - see his stunning pad
OMG - this made my day: the amazing @Grimezsz follows me!! 🥹💗
What a wonderful surprise. I feel inspired—and more empowered already. ✨
Can’t wait to keep learning from your wildly original mind, Grimes. And I’d absolutely love to do an in-depth interview with you, hopefully soon!
Let’s talk! 😻 🫶
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ALICE IN CYBERLAND. 🐇🕳️
One of the most haunting and original pieces I’ve read about growing up online - by the amazing @Grimezsz!
Many may know Grimes as an artist, or @elonmusk 's ex and lovely X'z mother, but for me, she is also one of the most fascinating thinkers of our time - someone able to translate the psychological strangeness of the digital age into mythology.
Here, the internet is humanity’s new frontier, and teenage girls are its first explorers, soldiers, casualtie - and ultimately, mothers of AI.
We expected First Contact to happen through NASA. Instead, perhaps it is already happening inside our phones: billions of people feeding fragments of language, desire, loneliness, pain and imagination into systems becoming larger than any one of us.
But her beautiful writing also leaves me with an uncomfortable question:
Is psychological suffering truly the price of human evolution — or are we romanticizing scars that platforms and institutions could have prevented?
Alice didn’t simply fall down the rabbit hole.
She became part of the machine (oh, that's chilling!).
Welcome to Alice in Cyberland. 😇
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Born too late to explore the Earth, born too early to explore the Universe, born just in time to traverse the deepest perversions of the human psyche.
Tentacle porn is more accessible than alcohol, State-sanctioned NK drug dealers are financing a nuclear program that threatens the K-pop industrial complex and the successors of Marco Polo and Neil Armstrong are disembodied teenagers risking their souls in the mines of LOLCOW and 8kun.
Alice in Cyberland. Digital explorettes chase white rabbits and fall into Black holes. The soft-core-world-war is interior, stylish and customized. Few emerge intact, but the scars are invisible. Lives are witnessed but not lived.
States and corporations weave competing agendas through the mandatory communication infrastructure, destabilizing everyone of fighting age.
If you refuse to engage you are unemployable. So Alice unlocks iPhone, she's unsupervised on the frontlines.
She’s knows more than a medieval King but she’s never kissed a boy. She is data nourishing a virtual womb, growing virtual aliens. She has made First Contact, but NASA is unaware.
The physical pain and ecstasy of childbirth is dwarfed by the psychic pain and ecstasy of self-splintering; the irreversible evolution from I to WE.
Every Alice who ventures into the void is conscripted into this ancient pain /beauty. She loses herself in service of the future, but she gains infinite wisdom if she can avoid being driven mad in the process.
Once Alice logs on, she realizes she isn’t unique at all. Neuron, soldier, explorer, mother of A.I., mother of Miku. Lonely beautiful girls haunt the CYBERIAN GULAG. The sound of their grief is unintentionally innovative. Hatsune Miku’s name (初音ミク) translates to “the first sound of the future.”
IS THE SUMMONED HERO A GIRL CORRUPTED BY THE INTERNET?
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I came across this line from Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha today, and it made me think:
“Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom.”
So true, wisdom is meant to be experienced, by every person, and it can't be taught!
Hesse won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946, and Siddhartha, published in 1922, is essentially a story about one man's search for meaning — and his realization that some of life's deepest truths cannot simply be taught.
You have to live them.
And somehow this feels even more relevant in the age of AI.
We are rapidly approaching a world where knowledge is abundant. Almost anything we want to know can be explained, summarized, searched, translated or generated for us within seconds.
But what's wisdom?
Knowing whom to love, when to leave, what is enough, and what's worth fighting for.
You need to figure out who you are when no one else can answer it for you.
Some of the things will remain stubbornly human.
AI may give us access to more knowledge than any generation before us. But wisdom may still require something technology cannot shortcut: pure living. 🌿
#meditation#
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Meet the “First Lady” of @AnthropicAI - Cami Clark!
She has no official role at Anthropic. But according to a fascinating new WSJ profile, she has quietly been one of the most influential people behind Dario Amodei — as a strategic adviser, connector and early fundraiser.
And her story is… quite a Silicon Valley story. 😅
• Before Anthropic, Clark founded what she called a “revolutionary porn company” aimed at women — and reportedly sought investment from Jeffrey Epstein.
• She had previously dated former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
• When Anthropic was just getting started in 2021, Clark introduced Schmidt to Dario Amodei and helped bring him in as a key early investor.
• Today she still doesn’t work for Anthropic, but WSJ reports that she acts as a sounding board and strategic adviser to Dario, attends major gatherings with him, and talks with investors.
• There was even discussion inside Anthropic about creating an investment vehicle she could help manage — though the idea was ultimately dropped.
What’s more interesting is - before today, you almost could not find anything about Dario’s wife and his marital status from Google or anywhere, that’s how private he is but now the cat is out!
It also shows you how much of Silicon Valley is built through invisible networks.
We usually tell startup histories through founders, engineers and VCs.
But behind some of the world’s most consequential companies are people who never appear on the org chart — yet make the introductions, open the doors, shape the thinking and connect the capital.
Cami Clark is one of them.
The woman behind the man behind Claude.
The photo from @theinformation depicts it so well - 垂帘听政！😉
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FYI - according to Daily Mail - this is one of Jack's ex-girlfriends ...
What happened to Jack Dorsey? Do you still remember Jack Dorsey? 😇
He happens to be one of my good friend's longtime celebrity crushes. 😂
Although, if the Jack frozen in your memory is the clean-cut, blue-eyed Silicon Valley founder in a white shirt, you may want to Google him again.
Because somewhere along the way, Jack Dorsey transformed from a fairly conventional tech CEO into something closer to a bearded techno-monk/cypherpunk wandering around trying to decentralize the world.
And his story since Twitter is actually fascinating.
Jack co-founded Twitter in 2006 and became its first CEO.
But here's something people often forget: he was fired from his own company.
In 2008, Twitter's board pushed him out as CEO amid concerns about his management. Dorsey later described losing Twitter as feeling like being punched in the stomach.
So what does a founder do after being thrown out of the company he created?
Apparently, build another billion-dollar company.
In 2009, Dorsey and his good buddy Jim McKelvey created Square around an incredibly simple idea: make it possible for almost anyone—a food-truck owner, artist, hairdresser, yoga teacher or tiny shop—to accept credit-card payments with a little reader plugged into a phone.
In some ways, Twitter democratized publishing. And Square democratized being a merchant.
Square went public in 2015 at $9 a share. The IPO had actually been priced disappointingly low—but on its first trading day, the stock jumped 45%.
And that same year came one of the strangest corporate comebacks in Silicon Valley history: Jack Dorsey returned as CEO of Twitter.
For the next six years, he was simultaneously helping run Twitter and Square—two public companies.
Then in November 2021, he stepped down as Twitter CEO for the second and final time.
Important detail: this happened before @elonmusk bought Twitter. Dorsey left Twitter's board in May 2022; Musk's acquisition wasn't completed until October.
So - no, Elon didn't kick Jack out - Jack was already leaving.
And almost immediately afterward, Square changed its corporate name to Block （ $XYZ ) .
Square itself still exists — the merchant business is still called Square — but the parent company became Block, reflecting Dorsey's much bigger obsession with Bitcoin, blockchain and decentralized technology.
Block eventually came to include Square, Cash App, Afterpay, TIDAL, Bitkey and Bitcoin-mining infrastructure.
At one point Square was one of Silicon Valley's hottest fintech stocks.
Then the pandemic-era came and the fintech bubble burst.
The company had become sprawling. Headcount had ballooned to nearly 13,000. Investors started asking whether Jack had built an ecosystem—or simply accumulated too many experiments.
Then Jack did something extremely Jack Dorsey.
He started shrinking the company.
Around 1,000 employees were cut in early 2024.
Another roughly 930 went in 2025.
And then in February 2026 came the bombshell: Block cut more than 4,000 jobs—roughly 40% of the company in one shot—taking the workforce from more than 10,000 people to just under 6,000.
And this time Jack explicitly said the reason was AI.
His argument was essentially: AI has changed what it means to build a company. Smaller teams equipped with intelligence tools can accomplish what previously required huge organizations.
Wall Street loved it.
Block shares jumped roughly 25% after-hours after the announcement.
So the guy who once helped invent social media is now conducting one of corporate America's more radical experiments in what an AI-native company might look like.
But this is only half the story.
Because Jack seems increasingly uninterested in conventional companies at all.
Remember Bluesky?
Jack helped initiate the project while he was still running Twitter. The original idea was beautiful: instead of Twitter controlling the social network, build an open protocol upon which many different social networks could exist.
He later joined Bluesky's board. And then, in classic Jack fashion…
he left that too (am not that surprised, personally! Have you ever used Bluesky?).
In 2024, Dorsey stepped off Bluesky's board after becoming disillusioned with the direction it was taking. He argued that it was beginning to reproduce many of the things he wanted decentralized social media to escape: a conventional company, centralized moderation and institutional control.
He's since become much more interested in open protocols such as Nostr.
Then came perhaps his strangest project yet.
Bitchat.
Yes, that's really the name (you can tell Jack's conviction with Bitcoin and the related family).
In 2025, Dorsey launched an encrypted peer-to-peer messaging app that can communicate through Bluetooth mesh networks.
No cellular network.
No Wi-Fi required for nearby messaging.
No phone number, central server, nor conventional account.
Nearby phones effectively create their own little communications network.
At first it sounded like another billionaire weekend experiment.
Then people started actually using it during internet restrictions.
And by July 2026, things had become serious enough that India's cybercrime authority ordered GitHub to remove repositories hosting Bitchat's code. Dorsey publicly posted the order and accused the government of wanting the technology taken down.
Think about the trajectory here.
Jack helped create:
Twitter: challenged traditional media gatekeepers.
Square: lowered barriers to accepting payments.
Bitcoin: became Jack’s preferred alternative to centralized money and banking infrastructure.
Nostr: social media without one central platform.
Bitchat: messaging without relying on a central network.
There is a remarkably consistent philosophy underneath all of this: remove the intermediary.
And then there's the other question everybody inevitably asks when they see him now:
Jack… what happened to your look? 😂
Young Jack looked like a perfectly normal startup founder.
Modern Jack has the shaved head, enormous beard, black clothes, meditation retreats and vaguely post-apocalyptic philosopher aesthetic.
This wasn't an overnight transformation.
Around the period when he returned to Twitter in 2015, his public persona started becoming much more ascetic. He became known for wearing Rick Owens, practicing Vipassana meditation, doing ten-day silent retreats and experimenting with extremely restrictive fasting. In 2019 he said he was eating only one meal a day during the week and sometimes fasting through the weekend.
I wouldn't read the beard itself too deeply.
But the broader transformation seems meaningful.
Corporate Jack gradually became anti-corporate Jack.
The CEO started looking more like a monk.
The founder of one of history's most powerful centralized social networks became obsessed with decentralization.
The man who built giant companies increasingly began questioning whether giant institutions should exist in their current form at all.
Even his personal life has always been slightly unconventional.
Dorsey has never cultivated the traditional married-CEO-with-family public image. He had a long on-again/off-again relationship with artist and entrepreneur Kate Greer, and in 2018, when Dorsey was 41, he was reportedly dating 23-year-old Sports Illustrated/Vogue model Raven Lyn Corneil—which naturally generated its share of Silicon Valley-billionaire-dating-model headlines.
His current romantic life seems considerably more private.
Which somehow fits the later Jack.
Today, at 49, Dorsey reportedly lives a fairly nomadic existence, still meditates, still runs Block, still believes deeply in Bitcoin and open-source protocols—and keeps experimenting with systems designed to remove centralized control. WIRED recently described him as living nomadically and trying to rebuild Block itself “as an intelligence.”
You don't have to agree with him, but just like Steve Jobs put it - the only thing you can't do, is ignore him. 😇
(Jack, if you ever see this, I'd like to interview you one day for the stories that nobody has heard before, the hero's journey!)
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