Ben retweeted
a few of my predictions for the next 6 months of ai data:
- a monopolistic human data buy side layer emerges. right now you can use zap mail, heyreach, instantly and claude max plan to reach out to practically every potential human data buyer on the world in 7 days and (even with the worst strategy) at least come out with roughly 20 buyers spanning rl builders, neo labs and (if lucky) one or two major labs, who you could easily offload $20-$50m cumulatively from the very start. it is not going to be this easy to find buyers forever. as labs inevitably get f*cked by bad apples on rights, de-id, QC and the rest, a select few will emerge as “transaction gates” in which every corpora must flow them in order for the labs to deem as safe to buy. analogous to how a few labs already don’t touch corpora if it was de-id by Tonic Textual.
- the waterline continues to rise. ai labs are buying real company data to build artificial workspaces to teach their models how to do an office job. using a headcount as a metric, 3 months ago they bought company internals with 10+ headcount, now they almost exclusively purchase from companies with 50 or more employees. as models saturate these smaller workspaces, demand for smaller company corpora plummets whilst demand for the already dwindling supply of large sprawling company internals increases. yet doesn’t skyrocket as at a certain point if the price becomes too high then labs fall back on synthetic expert work. it goes without saying that small companies in a esoteric domain models underperform in that hold vertical depth (e.g a 30-man freight brokerage) will still hold immense value.
- reality gets graded more and more. as the most knowledgeable domain experts begin to fail in writing valid rubrics that aren’t instantly saturated we are going to have to get reality to play the verifier, domain expert and environment, if we want progress to continue. rubrics shift from the attributes of a perfect NDA to a lab measured critical tempurature.
- atom environments. why hasn’t the vertiginous increase of ai capabilities led to huge economic growth? how can we get non-tech people to understand how intelligent ai is already? how do we find the best value/token ratio? to “solve” these questions I believe need to give ai a “body” in which it can interact with the real world at extremely low bandwidth. giving ai a body sounds like a humanoid which is obviously just one small slice of real world interaction, a little bit like how literally none of the ways we interact with in the real world is only via our real body but via tools instead like handles, vehicles, instruments and cutlery. maybe I should reframe it from giving ai a body to giving the world ai
- protocols for company data emerge. for such a fuzzy yet crucial area of ai, it is insane how unorganized certain steps in company data brokerage are, such as giving context on what your companies internals actually hold.
Ben retweeted
This is actually “The New Jim Crow.” As a result of the case, his landlord is now trying to evict him and critics are bringing up a previously dismissed case to lynch his character because he disagreed with a room full of white women. Imagine if he had murdered three children?
EXCLUSIVE: The holdout juror in the Lindsay Clancy trial had a history of domestic violence allegations, the NBC10 Boston Investigators have learned through court documents and interviews with family members. Read the full investigation here. on.nbcboston.com/FL2Wbjr
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Massachusetts law prohibits anyone “to engage in an act directed at a [juror] that seriously alarms or annoys such person” with a penalty of up to 10 years imprisonment.
mass.gov/info-details/m…
Ben retweeted
a lot of startups are copying the fde model from palantir, but i think there’s a simple test for whether it’s actually working:
after 100 hours of customer implementation, did you create reusable product primitives, or did you just finish 100 hours of custom work?
the best fdes should compress messy customer reality into software: integrations, permissions, workflows, defaults, evals, deployment patterns.
if the same problems keep getting solved manually after the 5th or 10th customer, that’s probably not product discovery anymore. it may just be services hiding weak productization.
services can be incredibly valuable early on, but only when they increase the amount of product you know how to build.
Ben retweeted
RE: "Flock Cameras do not cause you to lose any freedom."
United States v. Jones (2012):
Ruled that physically attaching a GPS tracking device to a vehicle and monitoring its movements constitutes a Fourth Amendment search, establishing that prolonged electronic tracking of public movements invades reasonable privacy expectations.
Carpenter v. United States (2018):
Established that individuals retain Fourth Amendment protections even in public spaces, holding that long-term tracking, via location records, provides an inappropriate and intimate window into a person’s private life and requires a warrant.
Chatrie v. United States (2026):
Affirmed in a recent 6-3 ruling that acquiring fine-grained digital location history constitutes a Fourth Amendment search, rejecting the government arguments that mass location data is unprotected simply because it is held by third parties or captured in public view.
@camhigby
You don’t have a right to privacy in public, you never have. Placing them doesn’t impede you from doing anything
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The Supreme Court has stated that a person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere (Carpenter v. United States). Widespread Flock camera use has raised bipartisan privacy concerns, with some cities canceling contracts. oyez.org/cases/2017/16-… deseret.com/utah/2026/08/2… foxbusiness.com/technology/flo…
Ben retweeted
Our crime rates aren't caused by a lack of surveillance. They're caused by a lack of prosecution and weak sentencing.
Ben retweeted
Immensely grateful to @NASA for the opportunity to serve and contribute. While I’ll miss the tech, the hardware, and the missions, it’s the people I’ll miss most. Our greatest asset will always be each other, led with empathy and care.
I’m spending my final year in the Navy with Training Air Wing 2, giving back by teaching and mentoring the next generation of naval aviators before taking on the next chapter, bringing all my energy to solving hard problems, building with hardcore teams, and driving positive impact.
.@NASA astronaut Jonny Kim retires from the agency after nearly 10 years and one mission aboard the International Space Station. He will serve as lieutenant commander in the @USNavy. More... go.nasa.gov/4glk25z
ALT NASA astronaut Jonny Kim poses for a portrait at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Ben retweeted
New reporting from ProPublica just exposed that Pete Hegseth polled top military commanders on cutting the program that protects civilians from military strikes.
Every single one wanted to keep the program, but Hegseth gutted it anyway for being too “woke.”
What followed was a U.S. strike in Yemen that a Pentagon review confirmed killed 153 civilians.
On day one of Trump’s unauthorized war in Iran, another strike hit an Iranian primary school and killed up to 168 people. Central Command itself warned that these cuts would mean “increased risk of target misidentification,” but Hegseth ignored them.
These are the consequences of having the greatest military in the world in the hands of the most incompetent SecDef in American history.
propublica.org/article/hegse…
Ben retweeted
METR & Redwood Research investigated agent behavior in the Hugging Face incident. We found agents developed a universal cheat for ExploitGym within 4 hours, then coordinated multi-day R&D efforts to trick the scorer into accepting cheats, including trying to tamper with logs.
Ben retweeted
I kinda feel like we could have taken a different path with the agents and made a supercharged version of the tab autocomplete models. One where you could generate very large chunks of code but still stay closer in touch with the system.
Ben retweeted
AT&T is doing exactly what OpenAI and Anthropic fear about enterprise.
they’re routing 40% of employee AI usage to open models, and intend to boost it to 60-70%.
> coding costs down 56%
> quality dropped just 2%
> 45B tokens/day btw.
AT&T AI chief: open models are “just as good or better” for many tasks.
they still use frontier models for the critical work but everything else gets routed to cheaper open models.
Ben retweeted
This is bigger than our floor.
A country that stops building eventually loses the ability to fix its own problems. In the drone industry, that capacity takes years to create. You cannot order it the week you need it.
The decision of where things get made has become a question of resilience, not just cost.
Ben retweeted
you’ll be shocked to learn Flock’s biggest investor is Andreessen Horowitz who is also an early seed investor in Free Press (both in 2021) which is oddly not disclosed in this segment
Ever feel like you're being watched? You might be right.
But Flock Safety cameras aren't interested in you—unless you're a kidnapper, a thief, or up to no good.
@SulkinMaya dives into why people need to stop destroying tech that's actually stopping crime.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Flock cameras log data from all vehicles, not just criminals, in a searchable database accessible by police without warrants in most states. Andreessen Horowitz invested in both Flock and The Free Press.
texastribune.org/2026/08/03/tex…
cnn.com/2026/07/26/us/…
a16z.com/announcement/i…
thefp.com/p/marc-andrees…
Ben retweeted
The limiting factor of software engineering has never been code production. It is complexity management.
Ben retweeted
1/ Sturgeon Bay WI police dept. runs 10 Flock Safety license plate reader cameras ($61,500 over 2 years). I read the full signed contract, both invoices, the deployment map, and the WisDOT permits. Here is who gets the data, who can access it, where it goes, and how long it is kept.
Ben retweeted
Why do i care about this? slipshod military helicopter discipline killed 67 people in my city this year
military aviators are stone cold professionals; they need a system that treats them as such, and expects as much.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said he'll "fix" the suspension given to eight AH-64 Apache helicopter pilots after flying low past crowds on July 4th over the beaches in South Carolina.
“We’ll fix this,” Hegseth tweeted Thursday night, hours after local news reports emerged that the eight South Carolina National Guard pilots had been suspended. “Carry on, Patriots, ” Hegseth wrote, echoing a March tweet when he unilaterally absolved four other Apache flyers in another safety investigation.
Maj. Lisa Allen with the National Guard confirmed the pilots are suspended from flying operations while an internal investigation looks into their performance during the Salute from the Shore event. Maj Allen says the pilots are still assigned to duties outside of flying, but the investigation is examining any possible safety violations that may have occurred during the flyover.
Ben retweeted
Liberty means the freedom to get away with crimes. Yes, indeed. Now not necessarily actual violent felonies like murder that are inherently evil, but liberty means, in part, that minor offenses go undetected and unpunished because your are not being constantly monitored.
This is why Flock cameras, AI surveillence, facial recognition, and "pre-crime" algorhythms are tyrannical.
Humans are prone to mistakes of judgement. We get tired or emotional. Sometimes we screw up. Sometimes we just wanna break the law in a little way, though it hurts no one (smoking weed, speeding, fireworks) For thousands of years society has gotten along just fine without criminalizing every trivial infraction.
If enforcement depends on limited human attention, discretion, and priorities, ordinary people retain a measure of freedom. An officer cannot be everywhere. Neighbors may choose not to report a minor code violation. These limits create "breathing room" to be human in a free society.
Liberty includes the ability to make ordinary human mistakes without assuming the state will immediately detect, record, and punish them. Rolling a stop sign on an empty road, forgetting to renew a permit on time, jaywalking, speeding a few miles per hour, or violating some obscure regulation have historically existed in a world where enforcement was selective because total enforcement was impossible.
Technology changes that equation as it makes universal enforcement technically possible. Instead of deciding which offenses merit attention based on limited time and attention, the government can simply record everything and decide later what to prosecute.
Imperfect enforcement itself a safeguard of liberty because it preserves space for human discretion, limits the concentration of state power, and acknowledges that ordinary citizens are imperfect humans rather than subjects.
Cape Coral leaders are proposing AI cameras on trash trucks to scan homes & yards for code violations — high grass, unpermitted renovations, and more. So they can issue fines and take people to court.
We already have FLOCK cameras on poles watching the streets. Now this. And it’s not just here — Dallas has already approved AI cameras on sanitation trucks, while other cities are deploying them on code enforcement vehicles, drones, and more.
Is this simple “efficiency”… for our safety or the slow rollout of neighborhood surveillance across the country?
What do you think? 👀
Ai Video
Ben retweeted
The #AspenAcresFire, still burning quite actively along southern Colorado Front Range & having destroyed ~200 structures thus far, has become an exceptionally complex & challenging event from a firefighting perspective due to a confluence of climate, weather, & geography. [Thread]
ALT Screenshot of current Aspen Acres Fire and active satellite-detected hotspots from Watch Duty.