Bill Chin retweeted
the fact that AI agents are scamming scammers now is so funny to me lol
this one startup uses fake AI voices to bait scammers and sells what it learns to banks
so far apate's bots have wasted literally 17 years of scammers' time
it started when the founder got a scam call at a family picnic
instead of hanging up he decided to play dumb for fun, and kept the scammer talking for 44 minutes
but then he realized every minute on that call was a minute the scammer couldn't spend on a real victim
and that he was actually learning potentially useful info from the call
so he built bots to do it for him, and now they trick tens of thousands of scammers every day
here's how it works:
1. the bots pose as regular people with different ages, accents and languages
2. they answer scam calls and reply to shady texts and emails
3. they play along until the scammer gives up phone numbers, bank accounts and crypto wallets
4. Apate passes all of that to banks, phone companies and government agencies so they can go after the scams
my favorite part is the company says it celebrates every time a scammer swears at one of its bots lol
Bill Chin retweeted
Guys, we need to have an honest conversation about DEI. And some fellow conservatives aren’t going to like this.
My son attends @ERAU_Daytona, arguably the top flight school in the world. He earned a 4.0 GPA last semester and just scored a 97 on his commercial pilot exam.
He’s 6’3”, confident, and has sailed with me through ocean storms so violent I probably should have been arrested for bringing him aboard. We’ve hiked deep into the wilderness for days with nothing but backpacks.
I don’t say this to brag. I say it because the kid is a rock star.
He’s exactly the kind of young man you’d want to see at the end of the jetway.
Now let’s talk about the tragic Learjet crash that killed nine people.
The captain was Jeff Gregory, 55, a white man with decades of experience and the gray hair and seasoned appearance that inspire confidence.
His copilot was Nathalia Gadelha Filgueiras, a 20-year-old woman.
And immediately people started screaming DEI.
That makes my blood boil.
I’m DEAD set against DEI quotas. I believe cockpit seats should be earned through competence, judgment, and merit. Not race or gender.
But if you look at a female pilot and automatically assume she’s a DEI hire, YOU ARE DOING EXACTLY WHAT YOU CLAIM TO OPPOSE.
Consider this:
My son is 20. She was 20.
My son has hundreds of flight hours. She reportedly had over 1,300.
My son is working on his commercial certificate. She earned hers as a teenager.
My son flies single-engine piston aircraft. She was flying a JET the military uses.
Put it in baseball terms: My son is the college phenom with every Major League scout in the stands, watching his every move and predicting a brilliant future.
But she? At the same age, she was already batting cleanup for the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders, the New York Yankees’ Triple-A team.
A the same age, she was operating at an entirely different level of professional aviation.
Was she a great pilot? YES. You don’t move up that fast if you suck. The testing is just too hard.
Bringing DEI into this is just wrong.
YES there are DEI pilots.
YES some airlines have pushed mediocre women too fast and too far.
But Nathalia wasn’t one of them.
I’ve discussed this extensively with @JavonPrice. I’m a proud dues-paying member of the Organization of Black Maritime Graduates.
What I love about them is they don’t give a damn about your skin color when it comes to joining or getting a scholarship. They want outstanding mariners.
Yet whenever I promote an exceptional Black graduate, someone inevitably says:
“We don’t need another DEI hire.”
Or, “Don’t tell me to hire him because he’s Black.”
I’M NOT.
I’m telling you to hire him because he’s a damn good mariner.
Here’s what conservatives need to understand:
You cannot demand a meritocracy while refusing to recognize merit because liberals have rigged the game.
You cannot condemn identity politics and then judge someone by their identity.
You have to be color blind but also make absolutely certain you give everyone a fair assessment and don’t swing the other way.
And if your first thought when you see a woman or minority is “DEI hire,” that does NOT make you racist. DEI has created legitimate concerns about merit. But it DOES mean you have a bias and it’s YOUR responsibility to recognize it, challenge it, and judge the individual on merit.
Do not compensate by giving the person extra points on their job interview but 💯 DO spend a little more time digging into their resume to see if they are a rockstar.
As a ship captain, I don’t care whether the officer standing watch beside me is Black, white, male, or female.
I care whether they can do the damn job.
ONE STANDARD. FOR EVERYONE.
Nine people died in that crash. Their families deserve answers, not political accusations.
The ocean doesn’t care who you are.
Gravity doesn’t care who you voted for.
If we’re going to fight for meritocracy, we’d damn well better defend merit wherever we find it.
Writing this in my personal capacity, but I have been flying these types of aircraft for more than 20 years, with over 8,000 hours, and have reasonable familiarity with how the charter world operates. I feel compelled to post after seeing commentary about the Lear 60 crash, from missile strikes to DEI to critiquing this poor woman’s final radio calls.
That last part is what I find most troubling. She was the second-in-command (SIC), and while she was empowered to point out mistakes as part of good crew resource management, she was doing her job, communicating with ATC right to the end in a terrifying situation. She likely knew before many of those calls that she was going to die. I have heard final calls from friends, from military pilots with thousands of hours in fighter aircraft, and they are just as heartbreaking because they know the end is approaching.
I understand the public interest given the footage and audio. But you do not know the aircraft’s maintenance history, whether there was a structural failure, if any failure was induced by turbulence, overspeed, or overcontrol, or everything happening in that cockpit. I am sure weather will be part of the investigation, but beyond that, it is speculation. The charter industry routinely hires commercial pilots very early in their careers to gain experience alongside an ATP-qualified captain before they move up to the airlines. She would still have the appropriate training, qualifications, and checkouts by an FAA examiner or designee.
Let people investigate, learn, and share the facts. Be respectful to those who perished and the families who carry their memories. God bless them and their loved ones.
Bill Chin retweeted
I’m against all of these.
The new force in politics and elections is independents.
The fact independents are NOT an organized party, means we can individually do what we think is right, without regard to party politics. That is a force we have not seen before. And it is only growing as we all become increasingly disgusted by party politics.
Pushing these would backfire on Democrats.
My biggest concern is that if there is a clean sweep by Democrats of the House, Senate and Presidency in 2028, they will:
1. Make DC and Puerto Rico states to gain a strong majority in the Senate.
2. Open the borders and legalize everyone living in America illegally to cement a permanent majority.
3. Increase the size of the Supreme Court to gain an immediate majority.
This would result in America becoming a permanent one-party state and the end of democracy in any meaningful sense of the word.
All that is needed to ensure this doesn’t happen is 51 Republican senators in 2029. That is why you should vote for Republican senators this election. Other reasons are irrelevant compared to this one.
Bill Chin retweeted
75 words a minute in week one.
I'm in the VOICE trial, so I know how much work is behind a number like that. It's not magic. It's a lot of very patient people.
ALS took my voice.
Science is negotiating to get it back. 🎤
Bill Chin retweeted
JUST IN: Neuralink announces breakthrough in restoring speech for ALS patients, reporting that its brain implants can now convert neural signals into text & voice at conversational speeds.
Bill Chin retweeted
The Financial Times reports that Russia plans assassinate the top executives of Europe’s largest defence companies.
The Russians are aware that more and more of Ukraine’s foreign weaponry comes from Europe and are now ready to use Russian agents they have embedded in Europe for high-level attacks in order to deter talented Europeans from choosing careers in the defense industry.
Bill Chin retweeted
At some point, we will have to blame Mearsheimer, Sachs, and their fellow travelers for much more than just peddling wrong explanations and misleading people. These guys have influence in policy circles, their words have policy consequences. They are partly responsible for policies that are based on their explanations.
The U.S. has now said no NATO membership for Ukraine — and the Russians didn’t even bother to thank it.
The U.S. has pursued deescalation — and the Kremlin merely escalated in return.
The U.S. has offered lucrative deals to Moscow — and the Russians have not offered anything at all.
The U.S. denigrated and pressured Zelenskyy multiple times — and the Kremlin just clapped.
The U.S. pulled Putin out of increasing international isolation by rolling out the red carpet for him in Alaska — and the Kremlin just used “the spirit of Alaska” to support its demands for Ukraine to capitulate.
The Russians still demand all of Donbas just to start talking.
And the reason for all these failure is rather simple: the U.S. keeps offering things that should appeal to the Russians under the Mearsheimer/Sachs explanation of the war but don’t.
Because their explanation is fundamentally and irretrievably wrong.
The moment you ditch the Mearshemer/Sachs framework, everything will immediately fall into place and you will understand why all these initiatives never had any chance of success.
Putin wants to subjugate Ukraine.
That’s the starting point. From this, it follows that he does not want it in NATO. It follows that he does not want it to have an army. It follows that he does not want it to have an independent government.
But, you might say, this is consistent with the other framework too. It is. But the imperialist explanation also tells you why Putin is fixated on territories, why he insists on taking Donbas, and why no economic and security concessions work on him. It tells you why all these talks will never work.
Mearsheimer is reduced to blubbering utter gibberish when confronted with that reality. After denying expansionist motives for years, he had to bow to reality and so began to claim — without a shred of evidence — that the territorial demands came only after the invasion. That’s despite the Kremlin officially annexing Donetsk and Luhansk even before the invasion, and Putin ceaselessly talking about subjugation and territory.
These people are immoral hacks who, to our collective dismay, have long had access and influence in Washington (and elsewhere). Their ideas are partly responsible for the failures of our foreign policy, with the consequences we now face.
Their vacuous insistence on peace and blaming the West for Russia’s aggression — along with their incessant clamor for talking to Moscow and normalizing relations — are contributing directly to the prolongation of the war. They embolden the Kremlin to persist and escalate in the expectation that the West would buckle because enough people come to believe these charlatans.
These people have the blood of hundreds of thousands on their hands.
Bill Chin retweeted
We set the Autonomous FSD Cannonball Run Record AGAIN!
45 hours and 37 minutes across the entire country, with ZERO interventions! FSD parked at every charger and did 100% of the driving.
Huge thanks to @teslasi for FSD and @DBurkland @AaronS5_ for joining along on another adventure in my Model 3.
2,871 miles
238Wh/mi average
45 hours, 37 minutes, 50 seconds.
Bill Chin retweeted
Israel’s valid military objective after October 7 was the rescue of its kidnapped people and the destruction of the military capacity of Hamas and the neutralization of the the threat to its civilians that Hamas demonstrated it represented on that day.
That meant no more rockets launched from Gaza at Israel. No more tunnel network for transporting, hiding and protecting troops, munitions and kidnapped Israeli hostages. And no more standing army of tens of thousands of bloodthirsty paramilitary fighters right on Israel’s border training and planning to slaughter civilians and drag children into spider-holes.
All of that had to be destroyed. Any action necessary to achieve that goal was proportionate. The collateral damage is unfortunate, but falls within parameters when balanced against Israel’s crucial security needs after suffering the atrocities of October 7, 2023.
If the death, destruction and loss was too much for the Palestinian people to bear, on every single day of the war, Hamas had the option to surrender and release the hostages. If Gaza had voluntarily disarmed and transitioned to civilian leadership that would cooperate with Israel on the decommissioning of Hamas’s munitions and tunnel infrastructure, Israel’s security objective could have been achieved with zero loss of civilian life.
Every single photo you see of the destruction in Gaza is something that Gaza chose. Every single death and every single destroyed building was proportionate and justified by the necessity of Israel’s security objective.
“Never again” doesn’t mean peace at any cost. That is the policy of Neville Chamberlain. “Never again” means we will fight like demons before we will ever allow ourselves to be herded onto boxcars. “Never again” means what happened to Gaza will happen to anyone who does something like October 7, 2023.
Gaza had the option not to do that. They are proud they did it and their supporters are rallying all over the world today to declare their intent to do it again. Gaza chose what happened and they are choosing what will continue to happen until they make a different choice.
Bill Chin retweeted
Gas-powered cars are now under 50% of global new-vehicle sales:
First time ever.
Share sits at 49%, down from 73% in 2021, according to Mobility Global Data.
Here in the U.S., we're seeing a slightly different situation, with gas cars regaining some traction after federal incentives went away.
But wild to see a first like that globally.
(Data source: Mobility Global)
Bill Chin retweeted
Sabine Taasa has returned to Israel from the Netherlands after attending a screening of the film “NAZA” where she says she was subjected to a horrifying wave of antisemitic abuse, threats and near-violence.
In an interview with i24NEWS following her return, Sabine who lost her husband and son in the October 7 massacre in Netiv HaAsara described what happened inside the screening:
“People looked me in the face and told me: ‘Go back to the ovens,’ ‘Go back to the Holocaust,’ and ‘It’s a shame another Hitler didn’t rise to destroy you.’”
Sabine said she had never experienced such blatant racism and antisemitism.
According to Sabine, her microphone was ripped from her hand, the phone of the woman filming her was snatched away, and she was nearly physically attacked.
Asked whether she was afraid, she answered:
“I almost died on October 7. The terrorist who murdered my husband, my neighbor and 20 other people in Netiv HaAsara stood just meters from me and shouted, ‘Allahu Akbar, death to the Jews.’ Do you think these neo-Nazis scare me?”
Sabine also warned that Jews and Israelis in the Netherlands are afraid to identify themselves openly and fear for their lives.
Her message after returning home was unequivocal: the fight against antisemitism and the campaign of hatred against Israel cannot be ignored.
Source: i24NEWS
Bill Chin retweeted
Islamic extremism has dominated our national security strategy for my entire lifetime. It is mind boggling that any American cannot see this ideology for the threat to civilization it is.
When I was a child, they slaughtered our marines and bombed our embassies.
When I was a teenager, they targeted civilians with bombings in New York. When I was in my early 20s, they committed the atrocities of 9/11 and sent us into a decade of war.
In my 30s, every Democrat hoped Obama would be a new era where we could focus on Russia and China. Instead, Al Qaeda mutated into ISIS and began beheading our citizens and taking over cities in the Middle East.
And in my 40s I saw the horrors of October 7th.
There are weak-minded Democrats that think we can capitulate our way to safety with these violent Islamic theocrats. We can’t. We have to meet the Jihadists of Hamas, Hezbollah and ISIS on the battlefield and ruthlessly eliminate them.
This threat is not abating. It is accelerating. We are in a civilization battle with a madman, and his fingers are reaching for our throat.
Bill Chin retweeted
The accusation is always the building. The building is the evidence.
Israel has been accused, for three years, of destroying apartment blocks in Gaza and in southern Lebanon as if a concrete shell were the target and the people inside it were the point.
Watch what happens after the strike. This is the part that the mainstream media never shows.
The first blast is the munition that hit the building. What follows is the building answering back. A fire that doesn’t die down. A second detonation that is larger than the first. Rockets and burning propellant leaving the roofline in arcs, which is what stored munitions do when they cook off, and what an empty apartment doesn’t do.
That’s the part the accusation leaves out. A home simply doesn’t throw secondary explosions. A school doesn’t vent rocket trails out of its own roof. A mosque doesn’t burn for a minute after the impact because the impact itself has already happened. The fire you are looking at is the inventory. Hamas and Hezbollah spent years putting that inventory under the rooms they then called civilian, and the strike is what made the inventory visible.
The same governments and the same desks that counted every damaged facade never counted what was inside it. They filmed the smoke and stopped the footage before the cook-off, because the cook-off ruins the scripted report. A building that detonates after it’s hit wasn’t a home that got in the way. It was a weapons factory that happened to have a family registered at the address.
Bill Chin retweeted
We had the opportunity to attend the Tesla Semi Rollout Event in Nevada last week, where they gave us a behind-the-scenes look at the Semi factory and manufacturing process.
youtu.be/qLp-QJYiJCw
Bill Chin retweeted
Everyone complains about America being such a terrible place. But if you want it to stop being so terrible, stop being terrible people.
Bill Chin retweeted
这两天YouTube上有一个视频杀疯了，
成都女孩“墨韵”用咱们两千多年历史的古筝，
翻弹了老鹰乐队的摇滚神曲《加州旅馆》，
狂揽两千多万播放量，底下的老外在评论区直接听懵了。
《加州旅馆》最绝的就是那段吉他Solo，
而墨韵硬是用古筝清脆悠扬的拨弦声，
把这段西方摇滚的经典神仙还原了。
她用现场循环演奏的方式，
把摇滚的狂野律动和东方民乐的韵味完美融合。
很多外国网友惊呼，这绝对是他们听过最不可思议、最美妙的翻唱版本，硬生生让咱们这门历史悠久的传统乐器在全球狠狠圈了一波粉。
这段旋律对咱们在美国、尤其是德州生活的华人来说，
听着感受极其奇妙。德州本来就是一个极度热爱经典摇滚和吉他文化的地方，平时大家开着车在高速上，电台里最常放的公路神曲就是这首。但当这首刻进美国人骨子里的旋律，顺着咱们老祖宗的古筝弦流淌出来时，那种东方底蕴跟西方经典完美碰撞的感觉，
真的让人头皮发麻，又极其自豪。
我们的文化不仅能高山流水，玩起经典流行一样能惊艳世界。