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Startups & Products8/10

NSF America's Seed Fund Reopens With Up to $1.55M in Grants

NSF America's Seed Fund Reopens With Up to $1.55M in Grants

Ksenia Moskalenko reports that the NSF America's Seed Fund has reopened after reauthorization, offering non-dilutive funding up to $1.55M across three tracks. The post lists eligibility rules, a 3-page pitch step, and a November 4 full-proposal deadline.

Ksenia Moskalenko @kseniam0s · ·♥ liked
Original post · 1 min read
The US government will give your startup up to $1.55M and take 0% equity.

@NSF's America's Seed Fund is open again after Congress reauthorized it in April.

Three tracks:
- Phase I: up to $305K to prove the idea
- Phase II: up to $1.25M to build it
- Fast-Track: up to $1.55M, both phases in one go

Who can apply:
- US-based startups with 500 or fewer employees
- 51%+ owned by US citizens or permanent residents
- Not majority owned by VCs
- All the work done in the US

How it works:
- Send a 3-page Project Pitch first
- NSF invites the best ones to submit a full proposal
- Next full proposal deadline: Nov 4

Phase I funding rates have run about 10 to 20%. It's work, but nobody takes your cap table.

Application link 👉 seedfund.nsf.gov

Bookmark and tag a tech founder who needs this.
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AI

Models, labs, research and the AI industryAll 161 →
AI9/10

OpenAI Introduces Dots, Always-On Agents Powered by GPT-6 Astra

OpenAI Introduces Dots, Always-On Agents Powered by GPT-6 Astra▶

OpenAI announces dots, a product powered by GPT-6 Astra that provides always-on agents designed to handle a wide range of tasks. The post is a short announcement with an accompanying video.

OpenAI @OpenAI · ·♥ liked
Original post · 1 min read
Introducing dots, powered by GPT-6 Astra.

Remarkably capable, always-on agents built to handle everything.
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AI7/10

Deedy Says OpenAI Math Results Mark Major Leap Toward AGI

Deedy highlights a claimed OpenAI mathematics release, conditional on verification, and argues that LLMs have made major progress on several Millennium Prize problems, concluding that AI has largely reached human-level cognitive ability.

Deedy @deedydas · ·♥ liked
Original post · 2 min read
OpenAI’s math release is, in the words of Opus, “the single most consequential mathematical release ever” *

LLMs have how made substantial progress on 4 of 7 Millenium Prize problems: Navier-Stokes (claimed), Riemann, Hodge and Birch-Swinnerton-Dyer. Poincaré was solved in 2003. The two left are P v NP and Yang Mills.
*conditional on verification

On average, each OpenAI result used only 3hrs of thinking compute on their new unreleased models.

Two years ago, models said 9.11 > 9.9. Today, we have results that the smartest human minds have not been able to achieve in their entire lives. It is clear that data, compute and algorithms scale. Every model generation (3mos) has made substantial intelligence progress.

It also becomes incredibly hard to not believe that all knowledge work will change monumentally over time. The things AI can not do in the foreseeable future are very likely context-bound (don’t have access to the right information) than intelligence bound. Some might argue they are also creativity-bound or judgement-bound (what should I work on), although it can be argued that future generations could solve for this (given, say, the advancement in research taste for models over time).

AGI is defined as surpassing human capabilities on virtually all cognitive tasks. By most interpretations of that definition, we are there. The domains humans are still better than AI, such as, robotics / physical world control (data-bound?), natural science research (data-bound), some creative domains like writing, movies, music (creativity-bound), super long tasks (context-bound), choosing problems to solve (creativity-bound) and maybe human relationships management (meat-proxy bound?).
In many ways, we have achieved AGI.
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AI8/10

Tavus Unveils Griffin, Claims First Video Turing Test Pass

Tavus Unveils Griffin, Claims First Video Turing Test Pass▶

Tavus introduces Griffin, which it says is the first model to pass the video Turing test, with 48% of live conversers thinking it was human. The company says it ranks first on NVIDIA's full-duplex AI video benchmark.

Tavus @tavus · ·♥ liked · 🔖 bookmarked
Original post · 1 min read
Introducing Griffin, the first model to pass the video Turing test.

48% of people who talked to it live thought it was a real human. Previous systems have had a pass rate <3%. It is #1 on NVIDIA's benchmark for full-duplex AI video.

It’s the first Human Interaction Model (HIM).
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AI9/10

AMD Acquires World Labs, Founded by Fei-Fei Li, for $8.2 Billion

A breakdown of AMD's roughly $8.2 billion acquisition of World Labs describes its founders' and investors' returns and recounts Fei-Fei Li's history, including creating ImageNet, which she released free in 2009 and which helped spark the deep learning boom. Li becomes AMD's Chief Scientist.

Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta · ·♥ liked
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AI6/10

Ben Affleck Describes Machine Learning Background and Visits to Google, OpenAI

In a quoted interview, Ben Affleck says he writes Python, understands convolutional neural networks and has worked with GPUs, and that he has visited Google and OpenAI to see their video models. The post also quotes Andy Bechtolsheim saying AI has raised optics demand roughly tenfold, with much more growth ahead.

Fireside Alpha @firesidealpha · ·♥ liked · 🔖 bookmarked
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Agents & Dev Tools

Coding agents, developer tools, workflows, open sourceAll 283 →
Agents & Dev Tools7/10

Nat Eliason Details Fourteen Ways His Bot Setup Automates Work

Nat Eliason lists fourteen functions of his bot setup, including a chief-of-staff agent that drafts emails, specialist agents per work lane, and cloud coding agents that open pull requests from Linear issues. He notes GrokBot as a substantial improvement over his previous OpenClaw setup.

Nat Eliason @nateliason · ·♥ liked
Original post · 2 min read
Things my @bot setup does that still blow my mind:

1. A Chief of Staff who opens the day pulling open loops from email & tasks and suggesting things it can knock out before 7am.

2. After every meeting, decisions get folded into Notion, Linear, and Todoist — not left rotting in Granola

3. Every email starts as a draft. The CoS bot scans my email every ~2hr and drafts replies to nearly everything — including checking my cal for availability and finding requested attachments / links

4. A specialist for each lane: curriculum, engineering, coaching, hiring, content, ops, and one for every single piece of software

5. Routines that keep running while I’m offline (e.g. monitoring Sentry errors in our apps and proactively fixing things)

6. Group rooms where 2–4 bots share one project thread instead of me copy-pasting context

7. Cloud coding agents that pick up Linear issues and open PRs after running the list of open work by me EoD — then squash-merge to main when it’s done

8. Meeting prep briefs pulled from Granola + Notion before I walk in

9. A growing shareable knowledge base in Notion + a GitHub repo that we update daily based on what happens at school

10. Student progress look-up across Expertise, Followers, and CoFounder without inventing numbers — chat anytime to see where a student is on their business work

11. Mentor Mind that coaches me on how to hold the bar without inventing doctrine

12. Todoist as a central task list where it logs things it’s blocked on for me, or from meetings / emails — and I can paste links into chat to direct it how to solve them

13. Engineering work is automatically tracked in Linear so my and the product teams’ bots don’t collide with each other

14. Presentations spun up in Gamma / Claude Design without me opening a slide tool

15. Plaud / live capture → notes the bots can actually act on

Probably more but these were the immediate ones we thought of.
Nat Eliason @nateliason
GrokBot feels like absolute magic at this point, a meaningful leg up on my previous OpenClaw etc. setups.

And with how easy it is to setup, there's really no excuse now.
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Agents & Dev Tools7/10

Open-Source Tool Rea Uses Agents to Reverse Engineer Binaries

GitHub - morluto/rea: Reverse engineer anything with agents, from app behavior down to native binaries.

A trending-repository post highlights rea, a GitHub project that uses agents to reverse engineer applications, from observed app behavior down to native binaries. It gained 2,963 stars in the past 24 hours.

Trending GitHub Repositories @trending_repos · ·♥ liked
Original post · 1 min read
Trending repository of the day 📈

rea

Reverse engineer anything with agents, from app behavior down to native binaries.

Last 24h: 2,963 ⭐
Total: 6,869 ⭐️
github.com/morluto/rea
github.comGitHub - morluto/rea: Reverse engineer anything with agents, from app behavior down to native binaries.Reverse engineer anything with agents, from app behavior down to native binaries. - morluto/rea
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Agents & Dev Tools7/10

DHH Predicts Software Development Boom as Coding Agents Take Over

Over my dead pencil

DHH argues in an essay that falling development costs will spark a bloom in software creation and that coding agents now make hand-writing most code obsolete. He urges programmers to stop relying on pencils and start building.

DHH @dhh · ·♥ liked
Original post · 1 min read
"We're about to see an absolute bloom in software development as the price of development plummets and everyone realizes how much automation we still have left to do in this world... Don't go down with the pencils. There's so much to build. We need you." world.hey.com/dhh/over-my-dead-pencil-fb0f3647
world.hey.comOver my dead pencilTwo weeks ago at Rails World, I told my fellow programmers that it's time to put down the pencils. We're not going to write the vast majority of code by hand an
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Startups & Products

Launches, founders, growth and building companiesAll 134 →
Startups & Products8/10

Qatar Offers Up to $5.5 Million to Lure Startups to Doha

Qatar Offers Up to $5.5 Million to Lure Startups to Doha

Aakash Gupta analyzes the Startup Qatar Investment Program, backed by Qatar Development Bank, which offers equity checks up to $5.5M with mandatory relocation, comparing it to Singapore's 1960s incentive playbook and noting retention as the open challenge. He quotes Suraj Sharma's summary of the two tracks and perks.

Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta · ·♥ liked
Original post · 2 min read
Qatar's entire startup ecosystem raised $11M in venture capital in 2023. This new program writes single checks of $5.5M. One company can now land half the country's annual VC flow just by agreeing to move to Doha.

Here's the mechanism underneath it. Cities with real startup density charge you to be there. San Francisco collects it in rent, New York collects it in salaries, and founders pay gladly because the customers, talent, and capital are all within a mile. Cities without that density have to run the trade in reverse. They pay you.

So the $5.5M is Doha putting a price on the network effects it doesn't have yet.

The regional race explains the urgency. Saudi Arabia pulled in $1.4B of venture funding in 2023, 52% of all MENA. The UAE led the region in deal count. Qatar took 6% of deals. In a three-country contest for Gulf tech, third place pays cash.

The structure shows how targeted this is. It's equity, drawn from a $100M fund managed by Qatar Development Bank, disbursed on milestones, and relocation is mandatory. A $100M fund writing checks up to $5.5M caps out around 18 companies at the top track. They're running an auction for a few dozen anchor startups, and the visas and subsidized housing exist to tip founders who are already indifferent between Gulf cities.

This playbook has worked before. Singapore's Economic Development Board spent the late 1960s paying companies to show up, and Texas Instruments went from decision to production in Singapore in about 50 days in 1968. GDP per capita there was around $500 at the time. Today it's roughly $90,000.

The unsolved part is retention. Checks get companies to land. Density is what makes them stay, and density only arrives after enough checks pile up in the same place at the same time. Singapore cleared that threshold. Qatar is betting $100M it can too.
Suraj Sharma @suraj_sharma14
Up to $5.5M to move your startup to Qatar.

Just an MVP gets you in the door.

The Startup Qatar Investment Program (backed by QDB) funds tech startups to launch or expand in Qatar.

Two tracks:
START: up to $1.1M if you have a proof of concept or MVP
GROW: up to $5.5M if you're already established and expanding

What else you get:
- Entrepreneur visa + flexible work visa
- Registration and license fees waived
- Subsidized housing
- Subsidized co-working space
- Access to R&D and innovation grants
- Mentoring, training + help hiring talent and interns
- Your product showcased at exhibitions
…
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Startups & Products7/10

Qatar Startup Program Offers Up to $5.5M to Tech Firms Relocating

Qatar Startup Program Offers Up to $5.5M to Tech Firms Relocating

Suraj Sharma shares details of the Startup Qatar Investment Program, backed by QDB, offering up to $1.1M to early-stage startups and up to $5.5M to established firms expanding to Qatar, along with visas, fee waivers and subsidized housing and co-working space. Eligible sectors include AI, fintech and climate tech.

Suraj Sharma @suraj_sharma14 · ·♥ liked · 🔖 bookmarked
Original post · 1 min read
Up to $5.5M to move your startup to Qatar.

Just an MVP gets you in the door.

The Startup Qatar Investment Program (backed by QDB) funds tech startups to launch or expand in Qatar.

Two tracks:
START: up to $1.1M if you have a proof of concept or MVP
GROW: up to $5.5M if you're already established and expanding

What else you get:
- Entrepreneur visa + flexible work visa
- Registration and license fees waived
- Subsidized housing
- Subsidized co-working space
- Access to R&D and innovation grants
- Mentoring, training + help hiring talent and interns
- Your product showcased at exhibitions

Sectors they want:
- AI & ML, B2B SaaS, FinTech, HealthTech, Cybersecurity, Climate Tech, Robotics + more
- Not on the list? It's open to any innovative startup

Apply link below 👇
startupqatar.qa/en/investment-program

Bookmark this + tag a founder looking for a new market.
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Startups & Products6/10

Adrià Martinez Explains How to Apply to Anthropic's Startup Program

Adrià Martinez Explains How to Apply to Anthropic's Startup Program

Adrià Martinez describes the Claude Startups program, which offers a year of Claude Team, API credits, priority rate limits and tool discounts, and gives step-by-step application tips such as using a company email.

Adrià Martinez @adriamatz · ·♥ liked
Original post · 1 min read
It took me 5 minutes to get into the Claude Startups program

And you don't need VC funding anymore

What you get:

- A year of Claude Team
- API credits
- Priority rate limits
- Deals on the tools a startup runs on

How to apply:

- Create a Claude Console account (the API one, not the app)
- Use a company email, not Gmail
- Go to claude.com/programs/startups
- Fill in the form with what you're building on Claude

Easiest trade I've made all year
Claude @claudeai
The Claude Startups program is expanding to more founders.

Members can get a year of Claude Team, API credits, special offers on the tools a startup runs on, and office hours with Anthropic’s Applied AI team.
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Business & Markets

Big tech, the economy, investing and tradingAll 145 →
Business & Markets7/10

Huawei and Qualcomm Sign Broad Patent License, Cross-Licensing Deal

Huawei and Qualcomm announced a multi-year patent license agreement with cross licenses covering 5G, compute, AI and networking, plus Qualcomm's purchase of certain Huawei U.S. patents. Arnaud Bertrand calls it a notable outcome given U.S. efforts to cut Huawei out of those fields.

Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand · ·♥ liked
Original post · 1 min read
This is genuinely incredible: Huawei survived the most aggressive assault against a single company in modern history and is coming out the other side with the U.S. licensing its technology.

And ironically in the exact domains - 5G, AI, compute, networking - that the U.S. tried to cut Huawei out of.
Huawei @Huawei
Huawei and Qualcomm have announced a multi-year, broad patent license agreement that includes cross licenses to the companies' patent portfolios across a range of fields, including 5G, compute, AI, and networking, together with Qualcomm's purchase of certain Huawei U.S. patents.
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Business & Markets8/10

Larry Ellison Signs $40.4 Billion Guarantee for Warner Bros. Deal

Aakash Gupta reports that Larry Ellison signed a $40.4 billion personal guarantee to back the Ellison family's roughly $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery after Paramount's purchase, outbidding Netflix. The combined company, to be called Skydance, would include major studios, news networks and a 15% stake in TikTok's US entity.

Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta · ·♥ liked
Original post · 1 min read
A dad just signed a $40.4 billion personal guarantee so his son could buy Hollywood.

In 14 months, the Ellison family bought Paramount for $8 billion, then won a bidding war against Netflix for Warner Bros. Discovery at roughly $111 billion. Warner Bros, Paramount, CBS, HBO, CNN, DC, Nickelodeon, and TNT Sports now sit under one roof. Next week the combined company takes the name Skydance.

Netflix should have won. Warner's board had already signed an $83 billion deal with them and rejected the Ellisons twice, because the money sat in a revocable family trust the board called "illusory."

So Larry Ellison, 82 years old, answered with an irrevocable personal guarantee of $40.4 billion. One signature.

For scale, Larry has sold about $4.7 billion of Oracle stock this entire century. The guarantee was almost 9x everything he's cashed out in 25 years, backed by his 1.16 billion Oracle shares.

The merged streamer launches with around 207 million subscribers and $70 billion in projected annual revenue. And through Oracle, the family also holds 15% of TikTok's US entity.

Harry Potter, Top Gun, Batman, SpongeBob, Game of Thrones, CNN, CBS News, and a piece of TikTok's algorithm, all of it now answers to one family.
Valuetainment @valuetainment
JUST IN: HBO Max and Paramount+ are merging into a single streaming service.
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Business & Markets7/10

Valon Raises $150M Series D at $2.3B Valuation for Mortgage Software

Valon Raises $150M Series D at $2.3B Valuation for Mortgage Software▶

a16z reports that Valon raised a $150 million Series D at a $2.3 billion valuation after signing over $200 million in software deals, and describes how it became a regulated servicer before selling its platform to the industry.

a16z @a16z · ·♥ liked
Original post · 1 min read
.@Valon just raised a $150M Series D at a $2.3B valuation. Within six months of selling software, they signed over $200M in deals.

(And they're hiring!)

How the seven-year-old company got there:

- Mortgage is $13 trillion of consumer debt running on a system built before the internet, and no servicer will trust a new platform. So Valon became one.

- Co-founder Andrew Wang read every federal and state regulation, 18 hours a day for six months, and turned it into code.

- They ran their own servicer on the software until it hit 3x the industry's efficiency, sold that servicer to a larger mortgage company, and now sell the software to everyone else. One of the biggest servicers in the US is moving 4 million loans onto it, nearly 10% of the market.

Valon is hiring deployment strategists in NY and SF. Read more about their open roles: a16zjobs.substack.com/p/valon-just-raised-150m…

@xlindadu @wangandrewd
a16z @a16z
a16z's Angela Strange sits down with @Valon's Andrew Wang and Linda Du to unpack what it takes to rebuild the infrastructure underneath a $13 trillion mortgage market that still relies heavily on systems designed before the internet.

Linda and Andrew explain why Valon chose the hardest path: becoming a regulated mortgage servicer, translating decades of federal and state regulation into software, and proving the platform on its own loans before selling it to the industry. That foundation made Valon roughly 3x as efficient as traditional servicing and created the system of record it is now usi…
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Science & Health

Research, medicine, energy and discoveryAll 46 →
Science & Health6/10

Phone-Free Trial Shows Gains in Attention and Depression Symptoms

Noah Smith shares a post by Brandon Luu, MD, reporting that two weeks without phone internet improved sustained attention by an effect size comparable to about ten years of aging and reduced depression symptoms more than the average antidepressant effect.

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion · ·♥ liked
Original post · 1 min read
Putting down your phone is more effective than antidepressants
Brandon Luu, MD @BrandonLuuMD
After blocking phone internet for 2 weeks:

1) Sustained attention improved by an effect size comparable to ~10 years of aging

2) Depression symptoms improved more than the average antidepressant effect
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Science & Health6/10

Randomized Trial Finds Plain Water Gargling Cuts Respiratory Infections

Randomized Trial Finds Plain Water Gargling Cuts Respiratory Infections

Brandon Luu, MD, highlights a randomized trial in which gargling with plain water three times daily reduced upper respiratory infections by about 36%. He describes it as one of the cheapest cold-prevention interventions.

Brandon Luu, MD @BrandonLuuMD · ·♥ liked
Original post · 1 min read
One of the cheapest cold-prevention interventions I’ve seen:

Gargling with plain water 3x/day reduced upper respiratory infections by ~36% in a randomized trial.
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Science & Health7/10

Anduril and Palmer Luckey Win Wildfire XPRIZE for Rapid Fire Detection

Palmer Luckey says Anduril won the Wildfire XPRIZE for detecting and suppressing a wildfire within 10 minutes of ignition. He argues that even small gains could save the U.S. roughly $500 billion a year lost to wildfires.

Palmer Luckey @PalmerLuckey · ·♥ liked
Original post · 1 min read
Thanks, Peter! This is the beginning of the end for destructive wildfires. In a country that loses ~$500B every year to wildfires, even tiny gains make for huge savings, to say nothing of the incalculable value of lives and homes.
Peter H. Diamandis, MD @PeterDiamandis
Congrats to @PalmerLuckey and Anduril for winning the Wildfire XPRIZE - for detecting and suppressing a wildfire within 10 minutes of ignition!
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World & Politics

Geopolitics, policy and current affairsAll 66 →
World & Politics7/10

Trump Administration Declines International Election Monitors for Midterms

A post warns of election interference after the administration reportedly refused OSCE observers for the first time in over two decades, a choice that aligns the U.S. with Russia and Belarus. The Justice Department is reportedly preparing to send its own poll monitors.

Patrick S. Tomlinson @stealthygeek · ·♥ liked
Original post · 1 min read
He's going to steal the election. Be ready.
Molly Ploofkins @Mollyploofkins
Trump administration refuses international election monitors for first time in over 2 decades.

The decision not to invite observers from the OSCE puts the U.S. alongside Russia and Belarus, while the Justice Department prepares to deploy its own poll monitors.
ms.now/news/trump-midterms-osce-election-obser…
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World & Politics6/10

Ransomware Gang Leaks Data of 3,615 Trump Mobile Customers

Ransomware Gang Leaks Data of 3,615 Trump Mobile Customers

International Cyber Digest reports that ransomware group BYOD leaked personal data of 3,615 Trump Mobile customers, including names, addresses and order details, and claims continued access to the company's backend. Straight Arrow News reported that people in the data confirmed its accuracy.

International Cyber Digest @IntCyberDigest · ·♥ liked
Original post · 1 min read
‼️ BREAKING: Trump Mobile customers have had their personal data leaked by ransomware gang BYOD. The dump covers 3,615 people and includes names, emails, phone numbers, home addresses and order details.

The gang says the company answered news of the breach with "We have no team to handle this."

The leak includes the Trump Organization's own CIO, who oversees its information security.

People listed in the data confirmed their details are accurate and BYOD claims it still has access to Trump Mobile's backend, Straight Arrow News reports.
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World & Politics7/10

Aakash Gupta Compares Purdue Pharma's Liability Record to AI Regulation

Aakash Gupta argues that Purdue Pharma's guilty pleas and fines failed to deter fraud, as the Sackler family extracted $10.7 billion and the conspiracy continued. He uses this to argue against relying on lawsuits to govern AI, responding to Bill Gates's remarks on AI safety.

Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta · ·♥ liked · 🔖 bookmarked
Original post · 2 min read
In 2007, Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty to lying about OxyContin's addiction risk. The fine was $635 million. Over the next decade, the family that owned Purdue pulled $10.7 billion out of the company.

Bill Gates got asked this week whether lawsuits and corporate self-interest are enough to keep AI safe. He pointed at opioids and called the idea insane. The record backs him up harder than most people realize.

Before the guilty plea, payouts to the Sacklers ran $1.3 billion over twelve years. After it, $10.7 billion in ten. A criminal conviction taught them to move money out of the company faster. OxyContin sales kept growing after the fine.

Here's the detail that should end the debate. When Purdue pleaded guilty a second time in 2020, it admitted the conspiracy to defraud regulators ran from May 2007 to March 2017. May 2007 is the same month as the first guilty plea. The fraud restarted before the ink dried.

The final ledger reads like satire. More than half a million Americans dead from opioid overdoses. Purdue in bankruptcy. The Sacklers settling for $6.5 billion paid out over 15 years, no admission of wrongdoing, nobody in prison.

Liability ran a 20-year live experiment as the safety system for a dangerous product. Every lawsuit happened. Deterrence never showed up, because fines land years after the damage, on whatever shell remains, while the profits moved out long before.

That's why the FDA reviews drugs before they ship, why planes get inspected before takeoff, why cars have to include seat belts.

Gates called AI "the most dangerous thing that humans have ever gone near." You can argue with him on that. But governing it with lawsuits was already tested once, and the people who ran that test kept most of the money.
Matt Reardon @Mjreard
Bill Gates not having it with the liability talk
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World & Politics7/10

Physician Argues Foreign Doctors Fill Gaps Created by U.S. Medical School Shortfall

Dr. Joseph Younis responds to claims of H-1B fraud among residency programs, arguing that international medical graduates fill primary care and rural positions because U.S. medical schools produce far fewer graduates than available residency slots. He contends the root problem lies in medical school admissions, not in the programs or the IMGs themselves.

Joseph Younis, MD @YounisJoseph · ·♥ liked
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Culture & Ideas

Careers, essays, history, media and lifeAll 129 →
Culture & Ideas7/10

FBI Arrests Fortnite Player Using Epic's Voice Chat Recording

Aakash Gupta reports that the FBI arrested Edward Frith after Epic Games reviewed a reported voice clip of his threat and sent it to authorities, and explains how Fortnite's rolling five-minute voice buffer and reporting system work.

Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta · ·♥ liked
Original post · 2 min read
The FBI just arrested a Fortnite player using a recording the game made of his own voice. He had no idea his headset was taping him. Almost nobody playing does.

Edward Frith, 29, had logged into his account over 1,700 times. In September he told another player that if the FBI showed up at his door he'd shoot them too. Someone in the lobby pressed the report button. Epic reviewed the clip, sent it to the FBI on September 20, and agents arrested him within days.

The design of the system is the clever part.

Recording every player would be a privacy disaster and a storage bill nobody wants. So Epic built voice reporting in 2023 to work like a flight recorder. The audio buffer lives on your own device, overwrites itself every five minutes, and never leaves your machine unless another player in the match reports it. The moment someone does, the clip gets packaged and sent to Epic's safety team with the speakers tagged.

He said it to one stranger in a lobby. That stranger had a button that turns the last five minutes into a federal exhibit.

I was a producer on Fortnite, and this is the part people outside the building never see. Threats of real-world violence got treated with the same urgency as a revenue outage. The game is full of kids, and Epic acts like it.

Fortnite is actually the conservative version of this. It still requires a human to press the button. Call of Duty has run AI moderation directly on live voice chat since 2023, no report needed. Every major platform with a microphone is converging on the same architecture.

The era where anything said into a gaming headset stayed in the lobby is ending one match at a time.
Dexerto @Dexerto
A Fortnite player who threatened to shoot the FBI in voice chat was arrested by the FBI

WagesOfNinja told another user "Let's see if the FBI is going to show up at my door because I'll shoot them motherf**kers too"
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Culture & Ideas7/10

Ohio's New Rome Dissolved Over Speeding Ticket Revenue

Aakash Gupta describes how New Rome, Ohio, and Macks Creek, Missouri, depended on speeding fines for most of their budgets, leading to dissolution in Ohio and bankruptcy in Missouri. Missouri subsequently capped ticket revenue at 20% of city budgets.

Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta · ·♥ liked
Original post · 2 min read
Ohio once dissolved an entire town because its main business was writing speeding tickets.

New Rome had 60 residents and a 14-officer police force. One cop for every four people in town. They collected around $400,000 a year in fines, 92% of the village budget, mostly by working a stretch of road where the speed limit dropped from 45 to 35.

A state audit then found the village was spending 82% of that budget on the police force. The town's only real industry was funding the thing that funded the town. In 2004 a judge ruled New Rome had effectively dissolved itself through corruption and erased it from the map. Its land got absorbed into the neighboring township.

Missouri ran the same experiment with Macks Creek, population 272, sitting on the highway to Lake of the Ozarks. The town wrote 2,900 tickets a year. Eight a day, almost all tourists who would never drive back to fight them. More than 75% of town revenue came from fines.

Then an officer there pulled over a state legislator. He went back to the capitol and passed a law capping how much of a city's budget can come from traffic tickets. Macks Creek lost its revenue stream, went bankrupt, laid off its entire police force, and disincorporated. The IRS seized the town's bank account.

Speed traps cluster wherever a highway full of out-of-towners meets a sudden limit drop in a state that lets the town keep the money. Missouri now caps ticket revenue at 20% of a city's budget. Ohio had to pass a law aimed at one specific village.

A speeding ticket heatmap doubles as a map of who's allowed to keep the fine money.
Terrible Maps @TerribleMaps
Where you’re most likely to get a speeding ticket in the U.S.
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Culture & Ideas6/10

Deedy Explains Shazam's Spectrogram Peak Hashing Method

Deedy Explains Shazam's Spectrogram Peak Hashing Method

Deedy outlines how Shazam extracts high-amplitude spectrogram peaks, hashes them with timestamp and track ID, and performs recognition via a hash table lookup. He notes that his college CS class built a version and recommends the original paper.

Deedy @deedydas · ·♥ liked
Original post · 1 min read
The serious answer to how Shazam worked is it took the peaks of a spectrogram of short clips of every song, find the peaks from the highest amplitude bits, hash it with the value being (time stamp, track id) and then the actual recognition is a hashtable lookup.

We did this for a college CS project. The original paper is fantastic:
Nathan Ruff @TheNathanRuff
Dude, how did Shazam work 15 years ago without AI!?
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Other3/10

Vijay Shekhar Sharma Shares Clip on British Slave Owner Payments and Indian Diaspora

Vijay Shekhar Sharma Shares Clip on British Slave Owner Payments and Indian Diaspora▶

Vijay Shekhar Sharma shares a video clip he calls fascinating, covering how Britain kept paying slave owners and how Indians came to be in Guyana, Jamaica and Mauritius. The post gives little detail beyond the clip itself.

Vijay Shekhar Sharma @vijayshekhar · ·♥ liked
Original post · 1 min read
You will find this clip super fascinating!
- how British kept paying slave owners till ….. and how come so many Indians in Guayana, Jamaica or Mauritius… and more
👑
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Other2/10

Maxx Promotes Making Money With AI Motion Control Content

MAX says a Kling motion control page on Instagram earned about $100 a day from a low-ticket guide sold on Whop, and cites a tutorial video reaching 75 million views in five days. The post urges readers to learn AI monetization now.

MAX @maxxmalist · ·♥ liked
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Other2/10

Savip Claims Grok Bot Trading Desk Turned $1,000 Into $86,695

Savip says a six-bot Grok trading desk named Megabrain (Jev) turned $1,000 into $86,695 over nine nights by buying a crypto token called Effective Accelerationism during panic sells. The post promotes a paid-looking setup guide and includes trade logs, though the returns are unverified.

savip. @savipww · ·♥ liked
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