Product/UX design lead, Inventor, Artist, Heli Skier, Crepe Maker (not necessarily in order). My views are my own and not that of my employer.
San Francisco
Joined March 2009
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(((Daniel Schwartz))) 🇺🇸 retweeted
Golda Meir on 1948: "Ben-Gurion called me in and said: ‘I want you to go to Haifa at once and see to it that the Arabs who remain in Haifa are treated properly. I also want you to try to persuade those Arabs on the beach to come back. You must get it into their heads that they have nothing to fear.’
So I went immediately. I sat there on the beach and I BEGGED them to return to their homes. But they had only one answer. ‘We know that there is nothing to fear but we have to go. We’ll be back.’ I was quite sure that they went not because they were frightened of us but because they were terrified of being considered traitors to the Arab ‘cause’. "
Nakba 1948 disinformation simply doesn't check out with the truth.
How Hamas brutally treats its own people…
Not a week passes without Hamas abducting Palestinian civilians in Gaza and subjecting them to torture, beatings, deprivation, intimidation, isolation, and threats of execution. Many cases never surface because families stay silent, hoping to appease the group and protect their sons and daughters. Yesterday, Hamas kidnapped Ahmed Hilles, a well‑known young Gazan committed to a future beyond the group’s terroristic rule. He has been the subject of incitement by vicious arms of Hamas, including the Belgium-stationed counterintelligence social media-based network called “To catch a spy,” run by the fraudulent Hamas double agent who received political asylum in Belgium, Mohammed Othman.
Last week Hamas abducted Eyad (Abu Hammam) Jundeya, an anti‑Hamas Gazan who had criticized Hamas‑aligned merchants for gouging prices to cover the group’s taxes. He disappeared for more than a week and was released showing clear signs of torture, then warned never again to speak on social media about Hamas or anything happening in Gaza. Hamas’s internal security also went after a friend of mine, previously arrested and tortured, summoning him yet again and threatening that he is out of chances if he posts anything critical of the group or its rule.
I’ve spent days mapping where Hamas drags people for industrial‑scale interrogation, intimidation, torture, beatings, and execution threats. One site is steps from my childhood home in Gaza City, the el‑Yarmouk football stadium area in northern Rimal, between Sheikh Radwan and downtown. Hamas also uses abandoned or partially damaged houses and buildings across Gaza, including near Shujaiyya, Jabaliya, Sheikh Radwan, el‑Saha, Zeitoun, and Tal al‑Hawa.
Through direct and indirect channels, I asked people with close contact to the Israeli military whether they knew about the sites Hamas uses for internal security and counterintelligence operations against Gazans. I inquired specifically if the military was aware of where Hamas takes civilians to be interrogated, tortured, beaten, jailed, and threatened by its various security services. I received broadly consistent answers:
1. Yes, the Israeli military generally knows where Hamas operates, including sites in partially destroyed structures, makeshift centers, medical facilities, displacement areas, and private homes.
2. The military does not have standing orders to target all Hamas police or rank‑and‑file militants.
3. Current priorities focus on eliminating those involved in October 7 and senior figures in Hamas’s military leadership.
4. The IDF will strike Hamas targets of any level if they credibly appear, through intelligence or observation, to be preparing attacks against Israel or IDF forces inside Gaza.
5. Because the ceasefire restricts major offensive operations, the IDF prioritizes Hamas targets according to Israel’s national security interests, not what might be most helpful or necessary for Gaza’s civilian population.
If the Israeli military is understandably ill-positioned to counter Hamas’s internal terror apparatus against Palestinians in Gaza, then who is? Will it fall to the incoming NCAG-led Gaza police force and the International Stabilization Force under the Board of Peace? Could the UN do it? The Palestinian Authority? An armed uprising? A new regional or international coalition of the willing? And if the transitional process becomes excruciatingly slow and overly complex, will the international community tolerate a Jihadi‑fascist‑Islamist organization holding two million people hostage in 1/3rd of Gaza with no real horizon for Gazans to be freed from Hamas’s grip?
(((Daniel Schwartz))) 🇺🇸 retweeted
I know so many people who blindly hate Israel will call this couple’s existence “pinkwashing.”
I still think the love between two Ugandan women who found safety and acceptance in a new home is worth celebrating 🇮🇱🏳️🌈
(((Daniel Schwartz))) 🇺🇸 retweeted
Overnight, the Russians used 39 ballistic missiles and more than 120 attack drones and loitering munitions against our energy and critical infrastructure in Kyiv, the Kyiv region, and Kharkiv. A targeted Russian ballistic missile strike specifically against energy infrastructure – the very infrastructure covered by the ceasefire announced by the American President. The strike was entirely deliberate and demonstrative in its scale – Russia has never before shown such ostentatious disrespect toward the United States. Russia does not consider the American President’s statements strong. Unfortunately, at least 600,000 people are now without power. Outages could become even more widespread. Unfortunately, there is significant damage to facilities and equipment – at 26 facilities of our power system and four facilities in the oil and gas sector. I am grateful to the repair crews, all Ukrainian energy workers, and the personnel of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine for all their efforts to address the aftermath of this Russian strike. Tragically, there have been fatalities and injuries.
We ask America and EVERYONE in the world who does not turn a blind eye to reality to respond – and to respond forcefully. Russia has squandered the opportunity for de-escalation and has clearly chosen to continue its insane war of annihilation. We ask President Trump to impose STRONG sanctions on Russia, especially since the Lindsey Graham bill, which was recently passed and signed into law, authorizes and regulates such measures. The American President has all the effective and necessary tools to bring peace closer through strength, justice, and pressure on the aggressor. We ask for additional packages of Patriot missile interceptors for Ukraine. It is entirely fair for us to tell the United States, Europe, and all our partners that no country in the world should be left alone to face such a deranged and pro-war actor as Russia. I am grateful to everyone who helps Ukraine! Peace can only come through strength, and we ask America to remember this principle of Reagan’s. Glory to Ukraine!
When you see an inverted red triangle 🔻 in someone’s profile or post, this is the also kind of acts they stand for and support: Qassam Brigades (Hamas’s military wing) to mark Israelis and Israeli targets. Horrific barbarism dressed as “resistance.” On this horrific day, it wasn’t just Hamas…
On this day—October 12, 2000
The Ramallah lynching.
Two Israeli reservists took a wrong turn. Yossi Avrahami, a 38-year-old toy salesman, and Vadim Nurzhitz, a 33-year-old truck driver, were heading to their unit near Beit El in a civilian Ford Escort. They took a wrong turn and ended up in Palestinian Authority-controlled Ramallah.
PA police stopped them, but instead of turning them around, the officers took them to the police station in el-Bireh. Rumors spread that Israelis were being held there, and more than 1,000 Palestinians descended on the station and began calling for their execution.
They stormed the station, found the two Israelis and began beating, stabbing, and mutilating them. Aziz Salha later described entering the room: “We were in a craze to see blood … I saw an Israeli soldier sprawled on the floor … a knife lodged in his back … I removed the knife and stabbed him … I put my hand over his mouth … to strangle him.”
He then walked to the window, hands and shirt soaked in blood, and waved at the baying crowd below. An Italian television crew captured it, and broadcast the images to the world. One of the bodies was thrown from that same window, and the mob immediately started stomping on and beating him. The other man was shot and set on fire. Once they were unrecognizable as humans, the crowd dragged their bodies through the streets to Al-Manara Square for an impromptu celebration.
British photographer Mark Seager arrived in time to see a body being hauled by the feet, lower half on fire, head “a pulp, like a red jelly.” He reached for his camera, but the mob stormed him with punches. They smashed his equipment and shouted, “no picture.” He later wrote: “It was the most horrible thing that I have ever seen and I have reported from Congo, Kosovo, many bad places … There was such hatred … It was murder of the most barbaric kind. When I think about it, I see that man’s head, all smashed. I know that I’ll have nightmares for the rest of my life.”
A Palestinian police officer, Raed Sheikh, later admitted he took an iron pipe into the room and struck one of the still-living Israelis across the body and head. “The soldier began making a grunting noise.”
This was not “resistance.” It was a deliberate, ecstatic, public slaughter of two Israeli men who had taken a wrong turn, carried out in broad daylight by a Palestinian mob.
The image of Salha’s bloody hands became a defining photograph. Salha was later arrested, convicted of murder, sentenced to life, released in the 2011 Gilad Shalit deal, and finally killed in an Israeli strike in Gaza in 2024.
Decades later, Hollywood celebrities and other professional virtue-signalers put on red hand pins. They call it a “ceasefire” symbol. To anyone who lived through October 2000 or who otherwise knows anything about the history of the conflict, those pins are not ambiguous. They are a stylized recreation of the exact gesture a murderer used to show a cheering crowd the blood of the Jews he had just helped butcher. The useful idiots who wear them either do not know, or they do know and have decided the image is aesthetic. Either way, it is a disgrace.
(((Daniel Schwartz))) 🇺🇸 retweeted
“Never Heard of It.”
In 1967, a young tie salesman walked into Bloomingdale’s. His résumé was a brief stint on the floor at Brooks Brothers. Bloomingdale’s was the most prestigious retailer in the country.
The men’s buyer had a “million-dollar pencil,” meaning his signature was worth millions to a fashion house. The young man wanted that pencil. He asked the buyer to carry a new line of ties, exclusively.
Why a new line? He didn’t have an old one.
Selling ties isn’t anyone’s idea of a top-ten career, but he wasn’t choosy. He had talked a tie company called Beau Brummell into hiring him as a designer, and he worked out of a single drawer in the Empire State Building, delivering ties himself. The problem was that his ties were wider than anything on the market. The solution, as it would happen again and again, he knew what customers wanted before they did. He explained that to the buyer. Young men of the hippie era were looking for jobs. Or dates. Older guys wore golf pants and leisure suits.
The buyer asked for his brand. He told him a story instead: photographs of 1930s polo players, with horses, brass and leather, and let’s not forget the riding crops. Young men wanted to dress like Cary Grant, but that look had gone out with homburgs and trilbys. He knew it because he’d been chasing it since he was a teenager in the Bronx, studying Fred Astaire and Cary Grant. He would make them look like aristocrats.
“So what’s it called," they buyer asked impatiently?
“Polo.”
“Never heard of it,” the buyer said.
“Just wait.”
Bloomingdale’s asked him to make his ties narrower and drop his label. He took his ties and left. Months later, they came back on his terms.
One more thing. He was born Ralph Lifshitz, in the Bronx, the son of immigrant parents. At sixteen, tired of being teased at school, he and his brother Jerry changed their name to Lauren. Their brother Lenny kept Lifshitz.
Four takeaways
1) Sell what you can be, not what you are.
2) Name the future, not the past.
3) Know when to leave the table.
4) Expect a few dents along the way.
Coda
In 1971, with Norman Hilton’s backing, he launched his own company and opened the first freestanding store by an American designer, on Rodeo Drive.
In 1977, Woody Allen dressed the cast of Annie Hall in Ralph Lauren clothing.
Robert Benchley said there are two kinds of people: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don’t. I divide it into the ones Steve Jobs saluted in Apple's 1997 “Think Different” campaign: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers… Because they change things.”
(((Daniel Schwartz))) 🇺🇸 retweeted
The Free Palestine activists in Jordan are advocating for a boycott of Andrea Bocelli, an Italian Opera Singer.
His crimes? Bocelli has reached out to not one, but two released hostages after they were released from captivity and performed for them.
Yaffa Adar, who was 85 years old when she was kidnapped, would hum Bocelli's songs while she was a hostage to stay strong. Bocelli sent her a letter and invited her to one of his concerts.
Segev Kalfon, who was held for over 700 days in Gaza, was also reached out to by Bocelli, who invited Kalfon into his home and performed a private concert for him.
These acts of extreme kindness are, of course, unacceptable to those who would do anything to convince the world that Israelis are not human and thus undeserving of any human consideration.
(((Daniel Schwartz))) 🇺🇸 retweeted
The guy who invented Amazon Prime disappeared for six years. He came back this week with $250 million and a factory that turns lines of code into tiny working machines. Type different code, a different machine comes out the other end.
That sounds fake. Here's why it took six years.
A chip fab is the most precise factory humans have ever built, and it makes exactly one kind of thing. Flat silicon that processes information. The moment you want moving parts, multiple materials, or real 3D structure, you leave the fab for a world where getting one new device into production takes years and tens of millions of dollars. Engineers call it one product, one process. It's the reason micro-machines never got their Moore's Law.
Holden's Matter Compiler kills the per-product process entirely. Features down to a few microns, no new tooling, and the system measures and corrects every step while it builds, then feeds what it learned into the next design.
His first product is the tell on how sharp the strategy is.
PrimeSwitch is a 150-amp relay for 800-volt power in AI data centers. It opens in roughly 50 microseconds, about 1,000x faster than a normal contactor. So the first thing to come out of a universal factory is aimed at the one market where demand is basically infinite and a faster switch means less fried hardware.
Neal Stephenson wrote the Matter Compiler as fiction in 1995. Holden just shipped the first real product out of one, and it's a light switch for AI data centers.
After six years in stealth, Atomic Machines is out. Our mission: on-demand, universal command of matter. First beachhead: the Matter Compiler, an AI-native manufacturing system that builds working micro-machines from code alone. No per-product tooling. No process development. Different code, different machine.
(((Daniel Schwartz))) 🇺🇸 retweeted
Apparently they had cast the wrong guy for the role of Will Hunting.
Ben Affleck reveals he writes Python, understands convolutional neural networks, worked extensively with GPUs, and used his celebrity status to get private looks at Google and OpenAI’s video models
“I’ve always been kind of into computers since I was young. Then, when film started to move from analog film to digital, I became more interested in that aspect of it. The visual-effects workflow for many years has included machine learning, so I can write pretty shitty Python scripts and stuff like that.
“With convolutional neural networks, which were the precursors to what the transformer can do, which is much more computation simultaneously, you would do things like look at what’s called a tensor. That’s the numerical translation of a visual image in numbers, like the batch number, the frame number and the red, green and blue values of each pixel in each frame. It’s just that simple. That numeric is called a tensor.
“You’d use a convolutional neural network to identify patterns that reveal what’s called edge detection or feature extraction, which is identifying patterns well enough to know, this is where the window ledge is, so we can more easily take the green-screen image out and replace it with something.
“That was familiar to me early on because, prior to Artists Equity, I had a small visual-effects company. I’ve worked with GPUs a lot too. The visual-effects guys said, ‘Hey, you should see. There are a couple: Google and this other company, OpenAI, are doing really interesting stuff with transformers in video.’
“I’ve learned that I can actually just call up and go, ‘Hey, it’s Ben Affleck. Can I come see what you’re doing?’ Sometimes people say yes, to my astonishment.”
(((Daniel Schwartz))) 🇺🇸 retweeted
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.
(((Daniel Schwartz))) 🇺🇸 retweeted
This is that phenomenal video I mentioned in replies last night, and it’s just an incredible lost film that was rediscovered and restored by luck.
It’s a film shot in 1913, recovered by Yaakov Gross, and it opens on a train crossing the countryside into Jerusalem. What it finds is a people the propaganda of the past three years has told us weren’t there. Shops, schools, signs in Hebrew, flags, prayers at the wall, and the towns already built along the coast. The propaganda was lies. The people were most certainly there.
Tel Aviv was four years old. Petah Tikva was decades old. The Technion was open. This is four years before Balfour, thirty-five years before 1948, a community large enough to have a documentary filmed about it at a time and place when cameras were still not too common.
The Declaration of Independence didn’t invent it. The boats didn’t invent it either. Neither did the state. The street was already there, bustling and thriving.
The Jews were always there. Many never left in the first place.
(((Daniel Schwartz))) 🇺🇸 retweeted
The media barely talks about it because there are no Jews or Europeans involved, but Ethiopia and Eritrea just severed ties as a result of renewed fighting in northern Ethiopia between government forces, the Tigray People's Liberation Front, and as other ethnic rebel groups. Ethiopia accuses Eritrea, Egypt and Sudan of supporting the rebels. The Egyptian military is on high alert. You wouldn't know about it based on the amount of reporting it receives, but this is possibly the bloodiest conflict on the planet right now (as many as 800,000 dead in two years according to some estimates) and it might get bigger and bloodier soon.
(((Daniel Schwartz))) 🇺🇸 retweeted
This is wild...
There’s a farmhouse on top of a building in the West Village in NYC, and it just listed for $10.5 million.
Porch. Garden beds. A vegetable patch. City skyline instead of a backyard.
The penthouse at 719 Greenwich Street.
(((Daniel Schwartz))) 🇺🇸 retweeted
A new Israeli documentary is setting the record straight.
NAZA: The Real Story offers a firsthand account from senior IDF commanders and intelligence officers who were directly involved in the fight against Hamas in Gaza.
Using combat footage, declassified materials, captured intelligence, and firsthand testimony, the documentary provides important context about how the war was fought and the challenges Israeli forces faced on the battlefield.
Watch NAZA: The Real Story with English subtitles: nazadocumentary.com
(((Daniel Schwartz))) 🇺🇸 retweeted
The most thorough response to the actual accusations in the NAZA documentary I've read. From an IDF officer, (name/rank/unit provided) in which we can validate he was a part of and observed the processes the documentary attempts to cover. yairmiron.com/media/yair-mir…
(((Daniel Schwartz))) 🇺🇸 retweeted
“I knew I couldn’t let the passengers die”
FlyDubai pilot Smit Machchhar has spoken from his hospital bed.
Speaking to the India 🇮🇳 PM, Smit recounted the moments of the attack, his fears of the plane going down, and knowing he had to make one last push to save the innocent people on the flight.
We all thank him for his bravery and wish him a speedy recovery!
(((Daniel Schwartz))) 🇺🇸 retweeted
Ben Affleck (Hollywood star & Artists Equity CEO) talks about how he fine-tunes open video models by unfreezing weights and trained only the last cinematic layer so a film crew can hit real production standards.
for context, Ben Affleck founded InterPositive in 2022, a 16-person AI shop for film post and Netflix bought it in March 2026 for $587 mn in cash.
He needed that model because public video models were trained on his peers' films, and he did not think that was a real business. So InterPositive raised money, shot its own dataset for 8 months on a controlled stage, and used it only as late-stage training.
Each new film then trains a private model on its own dailies, so the production keeps the footage and the learning. That is the product Netflix paid $587 million for.
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From "Bloomberg Live" YouTube channel, (link in comment)