WLOGQED retweeted
That feeling when you post about Alberta independence and the Americans show up to fight the liberals in the comments with you.
WLOGQED retweeted
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The original post from Mr. Beast doesn’t mention a boy in a basement. This joke post may be interpreted as fact. Additionally, this post is a recycled joke used to farm engagement.
Original post: x.com/mrbeast/status…
WLOGQED retweeted
Eight people sealed themselves in a glass dome to prove humanity could feed itself on plants, and spent two years starving in front of the world's press.
Biosphere 2 cost a hundred and fifty million dollars. Three acres of Arizona desert under sealed glass, eight crew, door shut on 26 September 1991, nothing in or out for two years. The farm inside was worked intensively and by any agronomic measure it was superb, out-producing the most efficient smallholder farming on earth by a wide margin.
It produced 83 per cent of what they needed.
Which left Roy Walford, the crew doctor, in a sealed box with seven hungry colleagues and his own life's work. Walford was a UCLA pathologist who had spent thirty years arguing that severe calorie restriction extends lifespan. He had doubled it in mice. And here was reality handing him his own hypothesis with the door welded shut.
So he called it a health programme.
The menu became vegetables, half a glass of goat's milk a day, and meat or fish about once a week. The men lost close to a fifth of their body weight, the women about a tenth. And the markers Walford cared about behaved impeccably: blood pressure, glucose, cholesterol and triglycerides all down at least twenty per cent, into ranges any doctor would frame. He published it in PNAS in 1992.
The bloodwork was magnificent. The people were falling apart.
Jane Poynter wrote the book afterwards. Fatigue, depression, mental fog, and a preoccupation with food that ate the entire interior life of the crew. They stole from each other. They split into two factions that stopped speaking. The ecological research the building had been constructed for was largely abandoned by people who no longer had the headroom for anything past the next meal. The ants and cockroaches, by contrast, were thriving.
The air was leaving too. Oxygen started at 20.9 per cent and kept dropping and nobody knew where it was going. Columbia eventually worked it out: the concrete was quietly eating it. So oxygen had to be pumped in from outside, which is an interesting result for a sealed world.
Walford's verdict on the mutiny is the whole thing in one sentence. He said afterwards that any other physician aboard would have panicked and declared they were starving, but that he knew they were on a programme of health enhancement.
He knew. Seven other people, visibly wasting, were simply mistaken.
He came out in 1993, developed ALS, blamed the conditions inside, and died in 2004 aged 79 after years on 1,600 calories a day in pursuit of a longer life. The mice got double. He did not make it to average for an American professor.
Every argument you have heard this decade was already in that building. Grow it locally. Take the animals out. Eat less. Watch the numbers improve.
Eight of the most motivated humans alive, handed three acres of the best-managed farmland on the planet and no meat, could not feed themselves.
The press reported the fighting as a personality clash.
WLOGQED retweeted
Throw a shirt like that to any other athlete on the planet and he’ll shove it right back in your face.
Meanwhile Messi just picks up the shirt with a smile, signs it and hands it over 😂
WLOGQED retweeted
>Be a bunch of billionaires
>Invest in a Muslim third world country to create a "new silicon valley"
>Muslims immediately start accusing the skilled workers of being Jews
>The Islamic government gets involved to investigate you for potential Jews
>You're now kicking and screaming about the Muslim government probing your investment for.....Jews
>Repeatedly have to assure the Muslim government you aren't hiding Jews in the attic
>Completely humiliated
>Still believe this is the new silicon valley
>Lol. Lmao even.
Should the global tech community continue investing in Malaysia?
Given recent events, I raise this question respectfully for the consideration of Prime Minister Yang Amat Berhormat Dato’ Seri Anwar bin Ibrahim (@anwaribrahim), for the people of Malaysia, and for our friends in the Malaysian tech community. The answer will be of interest to anyone in global tech that’s considering building, investing, or expanding in Malaysia, including executives at Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft, founders of tech unicorns like Coinbase and Solana, and investors at the world’s largest venture capital funds like a16z and Polychain.
As context, I am the former CTO of Coinbase and former General Partner at a16z. In October 2024, I opened a startup society called Network School in Malaysia, because I felt I’d been invited in by the government’s pro-tech policies.
Specifically, the KL20 initiative set out Malaysia’s ambition of becoming a top 20 global tech hub. Their MDEC digital nomad visas and MM2H investor visas were created to facilitate an influx of global talent and capital. And the Johor-Singapore Special Economic Zone was announced to facilitate the flow of capital and talent between Malaysia and Singapore, where I live. When taken in combination with Malaysia’s datacenter buildout and its policy of welcoming visa-free visits for 98% of the world, it seemed like Malaysia might be a great place to build a global tech hub that was simultaneously inexpensive and easy to visit (especially for non-Westerners).
And that’s what we did, by creating Network School. It’s an international tech community with its first node in Forest City, Malaysia. We picked Forest City because it had millions of square feet of empty space, because it was one hour from Singapore’s capital markets, and because it was within the Johor-Singapore Special Economic Zone. Then, within 18 months, without a single penny of government money, we built Network School into a global attraction that brought thousands of engineers, investors, and builders from 70+ countries to learn technology, burn calories, earn online, and have fun, integrating with the local Malaysian economy along the way.
Indeed, in terms of quantifiable contribution to the Malaysian economy, we’ve already invested 100M+ MYR in our campus to make it startup-friendly. For perspective, that’s about 4% of the budget of Johor, the Malaysian state where Forest City is located. We employ dozens of Malaysians directly and indirectly at every level from executive to staff. We’ve backed Malaysian tech startups like Collektr, hosted events for local teams like Superteam Malaysia, and are major customers of many local businesses like barbers, laundromats, and restaurants. We’ve also revitalized the multibillion-dollar Forest City project, causing millions of MYR in real estate appreciation. And, as the video below describes, we were on the cusp of a 500M+ MYR expansion to grow our community, as well as a global merit scholarship with my friend Amjad Masad of Replit.
However, that emerging multi-billion dollar success story — which should rightfully have been hailed as a huge victory for the pro-tech policies of the Malaysian government — is at risk of being derailed by a fake story spread by an anonymous account named MP4P.
In short: on the day before the July 11 Johor elections, MP4P posted an Instagram post falsely accusing Network School of harboring illegal aliens. The sensational accusations caused a tizzy in Malaysia, until Malaysian authorities came to our campus on July 14 to investigate. (I should note that the officers were very polite and professional.) After checking hundreds of physical passports from 40 countries, including dual passport holders, the authorities confirmed to the press on July 15 that all travel documents were in order. During the process, we cooperated fully; in the thread below you can see a photo of the men, women, and children of Network School smiling and holding up their passports in the bright daylight. Our faces are shown and our names are known; we have nothing to hide.
With that said, the process is the punishment. What MP4P did is very similar to the American crime of “swatting”, because MP4P created a hoax report of a serious threat, thereby forcing the Malaysian police to take time away from protecting the Malaysian people towards investigating a nonexistent issue. Moreover, this anonymous MP4P account has also called for Malaysia to boycott Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft…a move that would cost ordinary Malaysians thousands of jobs…even while MP4P’s own Instagram collaborators promote their Apple and Google apps! I mean, we aren’t talking about a credible accuser, but just someone screaming inconsistently at the top of their lungs on social media for traffic, an all-too-common phenomenon these days.
Anyway, at this point, all further investment we were planning to make in Malaysia is on hold until we get sufficient assurance that such issues won’t recur. So are the investment plans of many of our friends, including the execs and investors at global tech firms that we brought to Forest City. Because to put it very plainly: we have invested 100M+ MYR in Malaysia, while creating jobs for dozens of Malaysians, and our faces and names are known. Our Malaysian executives and employees deserve the benefit of the doubt over anonymous internet trolls.
There are two paths forward. In the first case, if Malaysia still wants continued global tech investment, if it wants to be a top 20 tech hub, if it wants us to revitalize Forest City, then we request an audience with the Prime Minister’s office to discuss the terms of a memorandum of understanding between Network School and the Malaysian government, similar to the document recently signed between the Solana Foundation and the Kazakhstan government.
Specifics can of course be discussed, but we would publicly commit to abiding by all Malaysian laws (we already do) and respecting Malaysia’s sovereignty (never in question). In return, they’d get to know our friendly community, and realize that we actually chose Malaysia because we thought it was a great place to build a tech hub where engineers from the global South, investors from the West, and builders from Malaysia itself could meet new people, build cool things, and perhaps create millions of dollars in economic growth in the fullness of time.
That vision of peace and trade, internationalism and entrepreneurialism, is still on the table. We aren’t asking for any money — just a meeting, to help restore confidence in Malaysia as an investable jurisdiction. Alternatively, if you don’t want our investment, or those of our colleagues at billion dollar funds and trillion dollar companies, we will of course respect your wishes, and reallocate our capital to other countries instead.
Either way, we will remain friends and abide by your decision. Please let us know.
WLOGQED retweeted
When I first started at X, this is one of the things I did a deep dive on because I felt it was critical to the integrity of the experienced.
I tasked our Threat Disruption team to investigate a number of trends that seemed artificial.
The findings:
We could not find meaningful examples of foreign interference in US policy discussions, except people gaming rev share in developing countries. This is what motivated the release of the Country of Origin feature and significant changes to the rev share algorithm.
The most deranged & divisive replies generally were from residential IPs in the United States—with no signs of using a VPN.
Ultimately, X is a reflection of the internet. And that means you will see the full spectrum of human thought. And sometimes the most outrageous takes will catch fire.
Having said all of this, there can still be cases of narratives being boosted but the origin of the initial post is almost always domestic and we have hardened our systems in the last 3 months to prevent this.
WLOGQED retweeted
No Jews were involved in this but that will never stop genuine lunatics like these people.
WLOGQED retweeted
the director of the ATF is… good?
WLOGQED retweeted
“Even if America fails, the Internet will still be there. It reflects the best of American values. Let’s try that same country platform elsewhere. We can rebuild like after the fall of Rome.”
When Rome fell, half the empire died in war and famine and disease. I am not loyal to a set of values. I am loyal to the American people. You were born here. You were raised here. Educated here, made rich here. You should be loyal to the American people too. The PEOPLE. Not a set of values, not an economic system.
But you’re not. You fled the country and now go on podcasts talking about how tech people can ‘avoid the collapse of America.’ To you, my country and my people are just something for your class to exploit for wealth and then move on. If my people vanished from this earth, your only thought would be “How does this affect my ROI?”
If my people are suffering and dying in America, it is no solace to me that Balaji Srinivasan is ‘rebuilding the American country platform’ in some special economic zone in Kazakhstan. In fact it’s actually worse that you’re trying to wear my people’s traditions and values as a skinsuit while stabbing them in the back, telling your tech bros to abandon America like you did. In any other place in any other age, your actions would be called what they are: treason.
The funniest thing is you couldn’t even resist in that reply questioning ‘the degree to which your success’ is attributable to America. My people gave you everything, yet you have no gratitude. No loyalty.
Well fine then. Keep your pride, keep your selfishness, keep your riches. Keep spewing anti-American drivel to anyone who will listen. But I’m supposed to pretend you were ever an American like me? No. Enjoy Singapore.
WLOGQED retweeted
BREAKING: In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court rules that racial gerrymandering, which has been used to create majority black congressional districts for decades, is unconstitutional. Justice Samuel Alito wrote the opinion for the majority.
