Founder & chief cat-herder @emotif_us - experience-centric brand design company. Techno-optimist; photographer; PG Tips aficionado.
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Joined January 2009
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The toilet paper is an excellent touch, showing serious tradecraft.
What could be more inconspicuous than a wad of toilet paper attached to the back of a TV.
My complements to his training team and handlers.
BREAKING: A Saudi national/OpenAI employee has been arrested by the FBI after he was allegedly caught placing an eavesdropping/audio recording device inside of OpenAI’s executive conference room in San Francisco, CA. Feds say Abdulrahman Alfozan made his first appearance in federal court today. OpenAI says they immediately contacted the FBI after they discovered the device & are grateful the feds made a quick arrest. Alfozan was caught on CCTV cameras at OpenAI.
From the complaint:
“Alfozan had been employed as an engineer by the company identified as “Company 1” since July 2025. On or about Sept. 30, Company 1 personnel discovered a surreptitious audio recording device (Recording Device 1) inserted into a USB port on the back of a television in an executive conference room inside one of Company 1’s buildings in San Francisco. Company 1 determined that the device, which had been concealed in toilet paper, was installed on or about Sept. 28, and that its contents were encrypted.”
Simon Pearce retweeted
I absolutely support the sentence of death, but live-streaming executions is what jihadists do. America is better than that.
Simon Pearce retweeted
Most websites were built around one assumption: A human will visit and click the buttons.
That assumption is starting to change.
Google is testing a proposed web standard called WebMCP.
The basic idea is simple. Instead of an AI agent looking at your webpage and trying to guess what every button does, the website can tell the agent directly which actions are available.
For example:
• Book A Meeting
• Search Inventory
• Filter Products
• Complete A Form
• Request Support
That creates a practical question for every business with a website:
If your next customer sends an AI agent instead of visiting personally, what should that agent be able to do?
Try this exercise.
Write down the five most important actions customers take on your website.
Then ask: Could a machine discover and complete each one reliably?
We spent twenty years making websites easier for humans.
The next web may require making them easier for humans and their agents.
Source: Chrome Developers, 2026
Let them eat Fake
New essay about reality v simulation in modern fiction.
substack.com/@theliminallens…
NPD is to humans what persistent hallucination is to a model: internal coherence preserved at the cost of the thing the system was originally for.
open.substack.com/pub/thelim…
Japsper Griifin would be proud, even if @caro_pearce would be mortified.
It’s not every day that one gets to listen to a former British Prime Minister recite from memory the opening passages of The Iliad in Ancient Greek, with no notes, in response to a random question from an undergraduate—and all while wearing what appear to be Thomas The Tank Engine socks. But today was one such day.
My thanks to my good friend Brad LaMorgese for the opportunity to see the colorful and comic Boris Johnson speak tonight at the University of Dallas.
Simon Pearce retweeted
Iran conflict officially on hold until Monday because the EU leadership does not work on weekends
Succinct and accurate. I've been studying "off ramps" from this, and I don't see any really appealing ones yet. We're into civilizational harm-reduction at this point.
All empires since the Dutch have used capitalism to create a virtuous cycle that leads to an empire’s demise.What happens when an empire can no longer borrow the money necessary to repay its debts? History shows us that having too much debt during an economic downturn leads to a classic, self-reinforcing cycle where:
1) The empire can no longer borrow the money to repay its debts
2) It prints a lot of new money, which devalues the currency and raises inflation
3) Living standards decline, leading to the rise of political extremism
4) Turbulent economic conditions undermine productivity and there is conflict about how to divide the shrinking resources
5) Populist leaders emerge pledging to take control and bring about order
Ultimately, this failure to control the anarchy is when democracy is most at risk.
#principles #raydalio #history #debt
This confuses collapse narratives with monetary reality. Bitcoin has been empirically shown to behave as a high-beta speculative asset. It tracks liquidity, risk-on cycles, and the most volatile segments of the legacy financial system it claims to replace. It does not decouple under stress; it amplifies.
Money is not code.
Money is a shared system of claims on the future.
It reflects trust, obligation, and confidence within a community.
So the real question is: what community does Bitcoin represent?
It is not a productive polity.
It funds no public goods.
It imposes no reciprocal obligations on its holders.
It is a ledger without a commons.
With extreme concentration of ownership, the implied future is not liberation but digital feudalism: a tiny rent-extracting class holding claims on everyone else’s future without responsibility for maintaining the underlying society.
States are not being replaced by networks. When order fractures, people turn to institutions that can coordinate force, enforce contracts, provision energy, and absorb shocks. Blockchains do none of these things.
The fantasy here is not that code replaces institutions.
It’s that accountability can be escaped.
That isn’t a future. It’s an abdication.
theliminallens.substack.com/…
I have never been more bullish on crypto.
Because the rules-based order is collapsing and the code-based order is rising. So the short term price doesn’t matter.
As international law breaks down, we will need not just onchain currencies, but onchain companies. As the post-war order breaks down, we’ll similarly need the post-internet order. States will fail, and the network will take their place.
We need internet capitalism, we need internet democracy, and we need internet privacy. So we need cryptocurrency.
I don’t know if it will go all the way to 0 due to residual emotional factors but I directionally agree. It’s a derivative, not a hedge, and it’s only even a derivative in the vaguest sense as it has no structural relationship to the underlying assets that it “kind of” tracks. It will be interesting if the panic starts with institutional investors wanting to get out before the ship sinks. My guess is they move first and then panic spreads to retail side.
Concur with @michaeljburry . Our BTC price target is 0.0. That's not just for shock factor. It's where the math takes us. It's not worked as a dollar hedge, rather it's just a speculative instrument correlated to the Nasdaq. It's not gaining any traction as medium of exchange. No serious central bank will ever own something where Michael Saylor controls the float. The miners (who are the network) are bleeding cash. It's horribly inefficient as a transaction processor and wastes tremendous amounts of energy. Nothing "green" about this "coin". We think it's a zero.
ibtimes.co.uk/michael-burry-…
Simon Pearce retweeted
Concur with @michaeljburry . Our BTC price target is 0.0. That's not just for shock factor. It's where the math takes us. It's not worked as a dollar hedge, rather it's just a speculative instrument correlated to the Nasdaq. It's not gaining any traction as medium of exchange. No serious central bank will ever own something where Michael Saylor controls the float. The miners (who are the network) are bleeding cash. It's horribly inefficient as a transaction processor and wastes tremendous amounts of energy. Nothing "green" about this "coin". We think it's a zero.
ibtimes.co.uk/michael-burry-…
Our next essay drops this Thursday at 6 AM ET / NOON CET
open.substack.com/pub/thelim…
Simon Pearce retweeted
Most people don’t understand the power of compounding. And they definitely don’t understand the power of insider information. teapaw.org/MichaelAArouet/status/…
The next edition in our "democracy's edge" series will be published early tomorrow. open.substack.com/pub/thelim…