1/ The one big thing nobody is talking about: Did Elon want to shut the government down because of his business deals with China? A thread... 🧵

DID YOU KNOW? The H-1B visa, the most common for working scientists, has been called a secret weapon because it allows universities and tech companies to hire top talent from around the world. Scientific research in the U.S. relies heavily of foreign-born scientists! They are

I continue to think this is one of the most important cartoons of recent years. Tom Fishburne

This is exactly the problem. You can't take the "move fast and break things" mentality of Silicon Valley into the federal government, a place where if you break things, people die, or have their rights violated, or can't access essential services.

NEW: A DOGE staffer appears to be posting DOGE work on his public GitHub, as of this week. The staffer, Jordan Wick, also created a repository for a Twitter DM-downloading tool just 3 days ago. He posted work on geospatial data in Jan—undersea cables, ports & “critical minerals.”

i think we will look back in 25 years and realize that we misallocated time, talent, and capital at an absurd magnitude we built unicorns solving lazy problems like food delivery all while since 2000, US steel production has dropped 34% (108M tons to 71M tons), we lost 5.8M

Should edgy heterodox centrists accept some of the blame for Trump? Slate Star Codex:

The tech broliarchy wants to end IP laws because they want their AI products to steal, distribute, and profit from other people’s work without having to pay for it. Ending IP laws legalizes theft.

Marina Hyde on good form. What’s more vacuous than an endless vacuum? It’s Lauren Sánchez and Katy Perry’s party in space theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

25% of community college applicants in California are now AI bots. Scammers enroll the bots in online courses long enough to get money from the Pell Grant system. Welcome to the future.

Trump is destroying America’s key economic edge - that the smartest people in the world want to come here to innovate and start businesses.

Rep Joe Morelle (D-NY): “Trump’s termination of Register of Copyrights, Shira Perlmutter, is a brazen, unprecedented power grab with no legal basis. It is surely no coincidence he acted less than a day after she refused to rubber-stamp Elon Musk’s efforts to mine troves of

This is really problematic. Not because the president can’t fire the Register (It’s a quirk of history USCO is housed in Library of Congress). It’s problematic because this seems to be a first step in the administration’s attempt to partially nationalize copyrights and then give

they're literally trying to sneak a clause in the 2025 budget reconciliation bill that PREVENTS THE REGULATION OF AI FOR 10 YEARS. why isn't EVERYONE sounding the alarm about this???

I double checked and Amjad Masad is correct: the WaPo article that Shaun Maguire refers to - and cropped the date of (!) - is more than one month old, is about a completely unrelated massacre in Gaza. So we effectively have a guy who is a partner at Sequoia Capital, one of the most

absolutely stunning: at the same time Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan pulled funding from a free school for local kids, they were running a private school for their own children out of their house

Due to historical advantages, the US hosts most of the whole world's technology industry. That is immensely beneficial to the US. If the US is not willing and able to accept talent from the whole world, you cannot expect that to continue.

“In the interview with The Times last week, Mr. Benioff said that he had not followed news of ICE raids, the government shutdown or the president’s attacks on the media.” How can you be a CEO of a big company and not read the news? nytimes.com/2025/10/16/us/…

How startups lose their edge newsletter.posthog.com/p/how-startups…