@OpticalArgos
Account based inAustralia
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Joined September 2019
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Optical Argos retweeted
This pisses me off. My fellow journalists were targeted by russians in Kyiv on September 8, yet I cannot properly share photos or videos of them covered in blood because of social media restrictions.
As if war is supposed to look pretty or Instagram-glamorous.
War is a tragedy, and we cannot stay silent about it.
A russian drone struck the office of the We Are Ukraine TV channel during a live broadcast. At least 5 journalists were injured, and the newsroom was destroyed while people were inside.
russia is an enemy of humanity. The world must not turn a blind eye. Please share this video. Don’t be silent about it.
P.S. Thank you Marichka Hlyten (@marichkahlyten), for filming and editing this video!
Optical Argos retweeted
I'm in San Francisco this week. So is the Deputy Prime Minister, but we’re here for very different reasons.
He's meeting with Anthropic and OpenAI, working on Australia’s data centre pipeline.
I'm here as the co-founder of @_Firmable and a Partner at @GlitchCapital, meeting with Australian founders who moved here this year. The CGT changes came up in almost every conversation as part of the reason they left Australia to build their business in the US.
What a mess.
The AFR published two opinion pieces todaythat demonstrate this shambles.
In the first, Treasurer Jim Chalmers set out how Australia can benefit from AI if we get it right. And that’s a big if. The headline number he was spruiking was $150 billion of data centre investment by 2030.
Jim, data centres are the bottom of the stack. Concrete, power and imported GPUs. Enormous capex, very few jobs, and negligible compounding growth for our country. If that's only our AI strategy, we’re in trouble, as we're importing expensive chips, hosting someone else's product, and then buying the intelligence built on top of it at full retail.
The bigger opportunity is in using and complementing the frontier models. Products built on top of frontier models that solve real business problems. That's where jobs are created and where the productivity Chalmers is chasing actually comes from. I’m seeing it at what we’re building at Firmable, the companies we invest in at Glitch and the founders I’m meeting in the Bay Area.
In the second op-ed, @Shaun_Cartoon laid out what Chalmers is actually doing to the people who build that layer. Effective rates for founder and employee equity are doubling to 47%, which is why founders are leaving.
Australia is courting the frontier labs on one hand, and taxing the hell out of the Australian founders and builders.
You can't be a value-add exporter of AI when the value-adders are in San Francisco.
If Australia is serious about backing innovation, restore the 50% CGT discount for all businesses. This alone will generate far greater productivity gains for our country than data centres will.
Optical Argos retweeted
A father breaks down in tears upon learning that his son was found dead beneath the rubble of a multi-story residential building destroyed by a russian strike in Kyiv.
Optical Argos retweeted
The Russian Armed Forces 3rd Army channel deleted its own post bragging about a drone strike on a cyclist near Kramatorsk. They pulled it down only after the story blew up online.
Optical Argos retweeted
🇺🇦 Fedorov is being pushed into the wrong things, — Zelensky.
“I offered him 4 different formats of working in a team for our state. Usually I don’t meet with people 4 times to offer them a job, because I think it’s unconstructive. In this case, I did it, given our good and long-standing relationship. Mykhailo refused all 4 offers. Well, that’s his choice.”
Optical Argos retweeted
KASPAROV: I think, turning point for changing Russian imperial consciousness would be Ukrainian flag in Sevastopol.
Because, after all, we're not fighting solely against Putin as source of evil. Putin relies on Russian imperial consciousness.
This imperial virus sits very deep, even among well-educated and intelligent Russians who read books and speak foreign languages.
Russian war against Ukraine has shown how strong this virus is. This does not apply only to people from the remote Russian provinces.
This war also enjoys support in Moscow and St. Petersburg. There is no real opposition to this war.
My opposition colleagues often say, "You know, there are about 4,000 political prisoners in Russia."
I say "In Germany there were 800,000 anti-fascists in camps." There's no genuine resistance to war in Russia.
Many people left Russia. Putin relies on historical myth of Russian Empire, which has taken deep root in public consciousness.
This historical myth can only be gotten rid of when it becomes obvious that the "empire is dead."
You asked how Russia can lose this war? This will not be 1945. Please don't think of 1945, but rather of 1918.
Russia is not able to continue the war, resources are being exhausted, not just economic, but psychological ones.
Russia can no longer fight its war without North Korea, Zelensky says.
He warned that Pyongyang is gaining real battlefield experience in Ukraine — experience that could later threaten Japan, South Korea and the Philippines.
kyivpost.com/post/82102
Optical Argos retweeted
"Amnesty has moved so far away from their original mission... They are now acting like the types of authoritarian regimes that they have always sought to expose.” -- @iseult, granddaughter of Amnesty founder.
thetimes.com/uk/scotland/art…
Optical Argos retweeted
THIS IS IMPORTANT.
Two days ago posted about why I am souring on patents because I believe it puts a roadmap out there for competitors and that AI will just work around them.
@Molson_Hart objected and said AI cannot work around a patent. It’s too visual. AI is just a word guesser. It can’t engineer.
In my original post so someone asked grok to work around an existing patent and it did, but Molson is the type of guy that requires overwhelming evidence. He is also very savvy on patents.
@danyay stepped in at 4:30AM after a bunch of beers and took on the challenge. He used a frontier model and a bunch of sub-agents to examine the patent, design alternatives, create CAD models, test the CAD models, render them, and refine the final product.
He met the challenge. And the parameters around this task were very challenging.
AI can work around a patent. AI can design visual parts. AI can engineer.
I felt like I was competent with AI but @danyay taught me a lot! There are some things I am eager to try in TotalShield. He absolutely crushed it.
And remember, this is as bad as AI is ever going to be. It’s only going to get more capable.
I bet $1000 that @danyay wouldn't be able to use AI to make a discs that could connect as well or better than our patented Brain Flakes without infringing.
He won the bet.
PS I bought some very nice crystals from his business crystalclearmemories.com and gave them as gifts.
Optical Argos retweeted
Okay, I’ll take a hack at Deans argument without his conflict of interest.
What China is doing in AI is called dumping. They do it in literally every industry they enter. The goal is to kill all local competition by subsidizing their own industry so they can produce at a loss, then once all competitors are dead, they can charge profitable prices and control the market.
In steel and automobiles this is just bad. In AI it’s potentially fatal to our country.
Unfortunately, dumping is the a very common argument for rent seeking domestic firms who want protection, and Dean’s position here seems to be a Jones Act of sorts for AI. This has famously not saved our shipbuilding industry and I suspect it won’t save our AI labs.
Stopping open weights it’s virtually impossible. So our only other option is governments taking stakes in labs and subsidizing our own industry.
If you scream and yell about either Jones Acting AI or subsidizing GPUs then you should also explain how we will escape the dumping trap china is trying to push on us to destroy our labs and leave themselves with the only functioning AI industry in the world.
Some observations on Kimi:
1. It's a very good model! I don't think its performance can be explained away by distillation or anything like that. In agentic coding sessions, it seems pretty much on par with the best public models of Q1 2026. In my fairly limited use, it also seemed very token hungry. It's not obvious to me that this model is actually that cheap to run.
2. I am personally surprised the Chinese state continues to allow the open sourcing of models this good, given potential risks. To be clear, I *myself* might be fine with models presenting this level of marginal risk being open weight, but I am surprised that China is fine with it. I suspect the reason they are is 75% explained by strategic blindness/lack of AGI-pilledness (the CCP is very Yann Lecun-y in its views of AI). The other 25% or so is their lack of compute for customer inference (making China's open-weight strategy an unintended byproduct of US export controls) and the normal Chinese strategy of aggressive exports. For the companies, as opposed to the government, the decision to open source is partially ideological and partially because they are behind, and they know that very few people would pay for sub-frontier models from China.
3. Open-weight models are inherently decelerationist, and I'm continually surprised to see the so-called "accelerationists" so excited about open-weight models. I suspect the reason they are is that they know open-weight models are effectively ungovernable, and they simply like the overall cloak of ungovernability open-weight models create over the whole of AI. It's not a bad strategy; it reminds me of James Scott's recounting of the hill people in "the art of not being governed." Still, in the end, open-weight models deter further AI capex.
4. One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes: rather than a market product, AI is a "public good" which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of "digital public infrastructure." This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape, but I've never met an open-weight models advocate who doesn't ultimately concede this is where things end. You'd be surprised how many 'accelerationists' lobbied me, while I was in government, to support an eleven or twelve-figure federally funded data center so that startups could train models at a subsidy and then give them away for free. There was no other way for AI to progress, they said. Perhaps this is the logical end state of things. Nonetheless, I find myself surprised to see supposed accelerationists excited about such an outcome. I think many of them just don't know what they're doing. Many accelerationists do not view the creation and serving of frontier models as a legitimate business.
5. I would guess that the Trump Administration will at some point realize that their best strategy here would be to create large amounts of regulatory risk around the use of open-weight Chinese models. You don't need to "ban open source" (one of the dumber motifs of AI policy discussion). You just need to direct every agency to issue soft law that creates FUD. "A Federal Reserve Advisory Bulletin found that there may be backdoors in Chinese AI models." It needn't be that well justified. You just create enough regulatory risk that every regulated enterprise backs off. You probably don't want to create so much regulatory risk that you scare off the hyperscalers from serving Chinese models; this will just drive startups to sketchier providers. There's a happy middle ground here. I'd assume they will do some version of this.
6. It's probably true that open-weight models of this capability make the world a bit more dangerous, but not so much more that you'll really notice. At some point the models will be capable enough that you will notice. "A nonliving, invisible, dangerous, and infinitely self-replicating agent escaped from a Chinese lab," you say? Color me shocked.
This seems extensive. Enough to end OpenAI as a company?
The 10 craziest parts of the ChatGPT lawsuit.
Apple says:
1.) A former Apple engineer named Chang Liu quit Apple in January 2026 to join OpenAI, secretly kept his Apple-issued laptop instead of returning it, then discovered a bug that let him log back into Apple's private servers from his new desk at OpenAI.
He didn't report the bug. He didn't log off. He texted a friend still working at Apple: "LOL, I found out I can access the [server], so funny." Then he spent weeks downloading over 1,000 pages of Apple's confidential engineering files while actively building competing hardware for OpenAI.
2.) Apple is suing OpenAI's Chief Hardware Officer a man named Tang Yew Tan who spent 24 years at Apple as VP of Product Design for iPhone and Apple Watch before leaving to co-found OpenAI's hardware division.
Apple alleges that when Tan interviewed Apple employees for jobs at OpenAI, he told them to physically bring Apple hardware to the interview. Batteries. Circuit boards. Logic boards. Prototype parts. Actual physical components taken from Apple's facilities.
One candidate was so caught off guard he said he "didn't even know we could take those from the office."
3.) Apple's lawsuit reveals that OpenAI was circulating a confidential internal Apple document, one marked "Need to Know," intended only for Apple's own managers, among new OpenAI hires.
The document details Apple's security procedures for when an employee resigns.
OpenAI was sharing it with recruits before they even told Apple they were leaving, so they knew exactly what checks to expect and how to avoid them. OpenAI employees referred to it as "a checklist that Tang put together" even though it was clearly an Apple internal document.
4.) Apple's investigation found that OpenAI was actively coaching Apple employees on how to handle their exit from Apple.
The advice included: don't sign anything at your exit interview. And if Apple asks you to sign something, contact OpenAI immediately. OpenAI was running legal interference on Apple's own offboarding process in real time, from the inside.
5.) Tang Tan, the former Apple VP who is now OpenAI's Chief Hardware Officer, was reportedly warning Apple employees he was recruiting not to tell Apple they had accepted jobs at OpenAI.
The strategy: stay at Apple as long as possible, keep your badge and system access active, and keep gathering information.
Apple says it found a clear pattern of departing employees skipping exit interviews, ignoring security outreach, and taking steps to evade the procedures designed to protect Apple's confidential data.
6.) OpenAI's interview process for hardware candidates, many of them current Apple employees, required them to prepare a "Technical Deep Dive" presentation with slides about their work.
The instructions asked candidates to disclose which vendors Apple uses, how Apple selects hardware components, what software tools Apple uses for system integration, and how Apple manages its supplier relationships.
7.) Apple's lawsuit alleges that OpenAI interviewers, former Apple insiders who knew the company's internal language, were using Apple's secret project code names during job interviews to ask candidates about unreleased Apple products.
Apple documented at least one case where a candidate began screenshotting and downloading confidential Apple files in the hours before his OpenAI interview.
During the interview, Tang Tan asked him about the exact same project. Apple says this has become an established pattern.
8.) Apple alleges that OpenAI, through its hardware subsidiary io Products, approached one of Apple's trusted industrial design partners and had them perform Apple's proprietary metal-finishing technique the multi-step process Apple developed over years to produce the distinctive look and feel of its products.
OpenAI told the partner that Apple had given permission. Apple had given no such permission. The partner was bound by exclusivity agreements with Apple that explicitly prohibited doing this work for anyone else.
9.) The engineer who broke back into Apple's servers, Chang Liu wasn't acting alone. Apple's lawsuit alleges he was simultaneously coaching a current Apple employee named Alyssa Peng on how to copy files from Apple workstations without triggering the security team, directing her to specific confidential project folders, and using Apple's stolen data to help her prepare for her own OpenAI job interview.
To keep all of this hidden, Liu told Peng to stop communicating over Apple devices and switch to a separate private messaging app called LINE.
10.) Apple's lawsuit frames this not as the actions of a few rogue employees, but as a deliberate institutional strategy. OpenAI now employs over 400 former Apple engineers and executives.
Apple alleges that OpenAI built its entire hardware recruiting pipeline around extracting Apple's proprietary knowledge from manufacturing processes and supplier relationships to unreleased product designs and that as a result, OpenAI's nascent hardware business is, in Apple's words, "rotten to its core by its illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets."
Aust govt is going for broke with new tax regime but spending no money on getting soccer fans drilled on the words and tempo of Advance Australia Fair. Seeing some bad performances in the stands at World Cup😄
Digital Turbine $APPS Anyone have insight or speculation on what proportion of AGP revenue is coming from iOS versus Android?
Spotify is ripe for disruption. They do not have a strong moat in my opinion. I would leave them in a flash. Right now Apple and Amazon suck too and are no threat.
Crying is PM Albanese's tell and it means he's doing something his unconscious knows is a disaster. Reference his teary 'captain's call' to kick off the failed referendum in 2023. 👇
Heard today about small business in NSW that upgrades farm tilling equipment, applying tungsten to the tips. Theyve closed down. Tungsten too expensive for farmers to justify upgrade. Demand destruction.
Even if tungsten price retreated all the way back to last year this company would likely not come back immediately. Might take years of stable price to get confidence again in viable business conditions.