I used to do things, now I like to study things. A tabula rasa approach can make false narratives easier to see. Team America.
McLean Virginia
Joined July 2014
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Ryan N. Lambert retweeted
On December 30, 1952, London bus driver Albert Gunter dramatically jumped his Route 78 double-decker bus across a rising gap on Tower Bridge. Realizing the bridge was lifting unexpectedly on a green light, the former WWII tank driver accelerated, clearing the opening with 20 passengers on board....
With 20 terrified passengers on board, the red Routemaster leaped across a three-foot gap as the bridge continued to lift. The front wheels landed safely on the opposite side, though the impact broke the suspension and injured Gunter’s leg. Miraculously, everyone survived with only minor injuries.
Albert was later rewarded with a £10 bonus for his bravery — roughly £400 today — and became a London legend. His daring leap remains one of the most extraordinary moments in public transport history.
#drthehistories
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The image attached here is a fabricated/AI-generated depiction that greatly exaggerates the 1952 event; no real photo of the bus jump exists and the actual gap was only about 3 feet.
leadstories.com/hoax-alert/202…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1952_Towe…
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…
Ryan N. Lambert retweeted
Christopher Hitchens: ”In 1786, when the United States was barely a country, it was having its sailors taken as slaves by the Barbary states, the states of the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. Tripoli, shores of Tripoli. Ships stopped, its crews carried off into slavery. We estimate 1.5 million European and American slaves taken between 1750 and 1815.
Jefferson and Adams went to their ambassador in London and said, why do you do this to us? The United States has never had a quarrel with the Muslim world of any kind. We weren't in the crusades. We weren't at war with Spain. Why do you do this to our people and our ships? Why do you plunder and enslave our people? The ambassador said very plainly, Mr. Abdul Rahman said, because the Quran gives us permission to do so, because you are infidels, and that's our answer. Jefferson said, well, in that case, I will send a navy which will crush your state, which he did.
Islamic fundamentalism is not created by American democracy. It's a lie to say so. It's a masochistic lie, and it excuses those who are the real criminals, and blames us for the attacks made upon us.”
Ryan N. Lambert retweeted
WE AUDITED ALL 58 FOREIGN-BORN FEDERAL JUDGES SITTING ON AMERICA'S BENCH FOR LIFE.
I spent over a billion tokens and about 45 days on this deep dive.
Through this deep dive and the over a million court cases we have combed through, we have launched an American First Index (AFI) for the site. (More on it as we improve the metrics and refine deeper.)
Out of 58 sitting foreign-born Article III judges, 43 were appointed by Biden or Obama. Among those drawn from ACLU and public defender pipelines, border enforcement is blocked over 80% of the time and 60% of criminal sentences fall below federal guidelines.
We have added an interactive tool on bench receipts that allows you to drill down and look at how each of these judges behave on the bench.
This is just the start. The federal judges are easier to identify than the state level judges. I assume there are 100s if not 1000+ foreign born or first-gen American on our benches.
They do not judge on our laws, they judge on the culture they came from. This is a huge reason our country has lost its identity.
Ryan N. Lambert retweeted
I’m glad the American people fired your ass instead and why the fuck are you giving credibility to an Iranian account based in Europe? 🤣
Ryan N. Lambert retweeted
Dusting off this tweet from April because this gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is *widening*. It's now less "two groups of people speaking past each other" and more a sharp funnel.
- Napkin math somewhere around 6B people (~75% of the population) have barely come in contact with LLMs at all.
- Around 1-2B (~20%) are casual and infrequent users of free-tier ChatGPT-like products. This group sees derpy chatbots and treats them a bit like a better Google search, a writing aid, or etc. Maybe an agent tries to book you a flight. I have non-tech friends who (reasonably, imo) say they have not much use for it at all. Even many professionals outside of math&code are in this tier. For example, execs and many other functions spend a lot of their time talking to other people, so while they understand what is happening intellectually, it is still second-hand and a bit abstract.
- Now we get to professional use of frontier-grade LLMs in math&code. Somewhere around 20M people (0.2%) see first-hand that large, complex projects that used to take them weeks/months can now be completed by agents with a prompt. Building apps, copying apps, translating apps, decompiling apps from binaries... This has all happened very quickly and recently - less than 1 year ago, I was writing code manually by hand, typing memorized computer code commands into a code editor character by character, occasionally pressing Tab to autocomplete a little chunk of code.
- And finally we get to the ~5,000 people (~0.00006%) with access to frontier-grade systems internally. The external world has seen the preview. It looks like swarms of thousands of agents collaborating over weeks on software mega projects: minting zero days, running cyber attacks and defenses at machine speeds, discovering new science, advancing the frontier of mathematics. Things that would have taken top professionals in the industry years of work. Meanwhile, human review and comprehension are starting to fall behind. For example, people are still involved in the "archeology" of the OpenAI-HF incident from many months ago. Mathematicians may be poring over the 722 manuscripts on frontier mathematics for a while.
The funnel is driven by a combination of factors:
1. The impact scales with ambition, problem size, and horizon. A question with a paragraph answer barely stresses the system. You need a reservoir of big, difficult problems that you really care about. This aspect drives the consumer / professional dimension of the funnel.
2. The jaggedness of the system (which I have written about a lot separately). Capability peaks in domains that are digital, verifiable and economically valuable. This is because LLM capability emerges from reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards on a curated environment mixture driven by revenue potential. This aspect primarily drives the area (e.g. math&code) dimension of the funnel.
3. Access. Free-tier, paid-tier, internal.
So this is the weirdness of the moment. The general public has mostly not interacted with these systems. When they have, it looks like a derpy chatbot. The majority of professionals still see only a modest uplift. And a small sliver of professionals are experiencing the vertigo of the curve going vertical. And it is all happening at the same time.
Judging by my tl there is a growing gap in understanding of AI capability.
The first issue I think is around recency and tier of use. I think a lot of people tried the free tier of ChatGPT somewhere last year and allowed it to inform their views on AI a little too much. This is a group of reactions laughing at various quirks of the models, hallucinations, etc. Yes I also saw the viral videos of OpenAI's Advanced Voice mode fumbling simple queries like "should I drive or walk to the carwash". The thing is that these free and old/deprecated models don't reflect the capability in the latest round of state of the art agentic models of this year, especially OpenAI Codex and Claude Code.
But that brings me to the second issue. Even if people paid $200/month to use the state of the art models, a lot of the capabilities are relatively "peaky" in highly technical areas. Typical queries around search, writing, advice, etc. are *not* the domain that has made the most noticeable and dramatic strides in capability. Partly, this is due to the technical details of reinforcement learning and its use of verifiable rewards. But partly, it's also because these use cases are not sufficiently prioritized by the companies in their hillclimbing because they don't lead to as much $$$ value. The goldmines are elsewhere, and the focus comes along.
So that brings me to the second group of people, who *both* 1) pay for and use the state of the art frontier agentic models (OpenAI Codex / Claude Code) and 2) do so professionally in technical domains like programming, math and research. This group of people is subject to the highest amount of "AI Psychosis" because the recent improvements in these domains as of this year have been nothing short of staggering. When you hand a computer terminal to one of these models, you can now watch them melt programming problems that you'd normally expect to take days/weeks of work. It's this second group of people that assigns a much greater gravity to the capabilities, their slope, and various cyber-related repercussions.
TLDR the people in these two groups are speaking past each other. It really is simultaneously the case that OpenAI's free and I think slightly orphaned (?) "Advanced Voice Mode" will fumble the dumbest questions in your Instagram's reels and *at the same time*, OpenAI's highest-tier and paid Codex model will go off for 1 hour to coherently restructure an entire code base, or find and exploit vulnerabilities in computer systems. This part really works and has made dramatic strides because 2 properties: 1) these domains offer explicit reward functions that are verifiable meaning they are easily amenable to reinforcement learning training (e.g. unit tests passed yes or no, in contrast to writing, which is much harder to explicitly judge), but also 2) they are a lot more valuable in b2b settings, meaning that the biggest fraction of the team is focused on improving them. So here we are.
Ryan N. Lambert retweeted
Immediately after @SECWAR State of the Force speech, Project Meridian held its inaugural meeting with @elonmusk @newtgingrich and @PalmerLuckey.
And today, the full board met at the Pentagon for the second meeting.
Ryan N. Lambert retweeted
The NDS update finally says the quiet part in public.
Deterrence by denial along the First Island Chain is the main effort. Not presence tours. Not another rotational dog-and-pony in a theater we are asking allies to own.
What that actually requires, in the document’s own words:
• Magazine depth, not a handful of exquisite rounds
• Contested logistics, not just-in-time hope
• Resilient, cyber-hardened C2
• Ground-based, mobile, long-range fires
• Undersea, stand-in forces, mines, and IAMD that can survive first contact
The Munitions Acceleration Council and nearly $53B in the FY27 request for prioritized munitions is the right instinct. So is the admission that we need both high-end weapons and rounds we can actually build in quantity. Sophisticated and empty is not a strategy.
Then the part leaders already know.
Shipbuilding is still the widest gap between the strategy and the steel. Virginia-class is running about 1.1–1.2 boats a year against a need of 2.0, and the two-per-year rate is not expected until around 2032. Columbia is late as Ohio ages out. You do not get denial along the FIC on a slide.
Europe is being told to take primary responsibility for its conventional defense. NATO 3.0. Manned BCTs in EUCOM cut from five to three, back to the 2021 level, with a six-month posture review underway. That is not abandonment. That is solving simultaneity so the President still has options when the balloon goes up somewhere else.
Here is the practitioner cut.
Denial dies if the log base, the tanker column, and the command post are still treated as supporting cast. Fuel is still the bill payer we cut. Clustered CPs and PAAs are still suicide magnets on a transparent battlefield. Mission command is still the only C2 that survives when higher cannot see you and the net is dark.
The strategy is pointed at the right war. The force still has to be trained, manned, and sustained to fight it. Affordable mass, protected distribution, and leaders who accept friction. Or we will brief a perfect denial concept and lose it in the first fuel halt.
#LSCO #RaiseTheBlack #Lethality #MissionCommand #ContestedLogistics @SecWar @SecArmy
READ: Update on the Implementation of the 2026 National Defense Strategy from @USWPColby
media.defense.gov/2026/Sep/2…
Ryan N. Lambert retweeted
My wife is an American, born in America to American citizens. She deeply loves our nation and its culture. You, on the other hand, were born to foreign invaders and want to turn America into the third world culture you were raised in, while advocating for communism at your $3 million mansion in between electrocuting your dog.
Ryan N. Lambert retweeted
Whoever came up with the pronouns bs deserves a punch in the face.
It’s the dumbest thing ever.
Ryan N. Lambert retweeted
An understated dynamic regarding the pathetic cuckery from turncoats like David French and Erick Erickson (and many others, including Jonah Goldberg) is that their heel turn was driven more by resentment and a desperate need for secular approval than it was by ideology or political partisanship or any sort of actual concern for the country or its people.
Both saw themselves as national thought leaders with huge fame and notoriety and influence. Neither was true, but that fiction was key to their core identities. And then Trump arrived, embarrassed them, and showed them to be powerless and irrelevant. He became president, they faded away, and worst of all: nobody really noticed that they were gone.
Trump, and by extension his voters, defrocked them and showed their entire sense of self to be fraudulent. They reacted and lashed out in the same utterly broken and delusional way a transgendered kook responds when being told you can’t change your sex and no you’re not a woman.
There is no greater crime in the eyes of a delusional person than to expose the delusion. And no one in politics is better at brutally unmasking people than Donald Trump.
Both French and Erickson have always been desperate to be feted as celebrity political figures. Erickson looked in the mirror and saw Rush Limbaugh. French looked in the mirror and saw a president staring back at him. Trump so thoroughly and publicly crushed their dreams and exposed their impotence that they have never forgiven him, or anyone who voted for him and made him president. Twice.
And so now their lives revolve entirely around a man they detest to the point where their personal
compasses direct them not to a fixed point, but to the opposite direction of wherever Trump or his supporters are headed. Their hatred of him has made them so deranged that their lives are now directed entirely by him, if only by inversion.
But they have now finally found their precious, the One True Ring that gives them what they always desires: head pats and retweets from Jake Tapper and the New York Times. There is nothing more intoxicating to the conservative turncoat than Strange New Respect.
To the extent they’re even aware of how they’re being used, they don’t care. The high of finally getting patted on the bottom and told they’re special by the same media elite who quietly smirked when Charlie Kirk was killed is too much to resist.
And that’s how you end up with Erick Erickson using the same rhetoric and tactics that Antifa uses to target violence against white Christians, and with David French defending perverted sexual deviants twerking on children in libraries as “a blessing of liberty.”
Ideology was only ever their vehicle for fame and notoriety, which is why they were so easily able to do a 180 on what they had sworn were their core values. The only core value they ever had was a desire for attention and approval. It’s so obvious in hindsight that you almost have to kick yourself for not seeing it at the time.
Once Donald Trump shut down the avenue for any of that fame and positive reinforcement from the Right, they turned right around and begged for it from the Left.
Because it was never about ideology or core beliefs. All they ever wanted was attention.
Ryan N. Lambert retweeted
AGI solves aging in 2029 and we get de-aged emperor Trump for 100 more years
Ryan N. Lambert retweeted
This is perhaps the clearest audio of flight 175 barreling down and eventually into the south tower.
Those 2 young men, as well as millions of others who were rather in manhattan that day or watching events unfold live, knew in that instance that this was no longer an accident, and this was indeed an attack on America and it’s people.