USA. A Mexican restaurant. We had not yet ordered anything, and the food was already arriving. Chips. Salsa. Unrequested. Free. I stopped the waiter. "We have not earned these." "They just come with the table, man." They come with the TABLE. In my land, hospitality is a debt. Every gift creates an obligation, weighed carefully, returned in the proper season with interest of feeling. Here, the gift arrives before you have even proven you can pay for dinner. This is not an appetizer. This is a declaration: we trust you. Eat. I ate with the gravity the moment deserved. And then — I must report this calmly — the basket emptied, and a new one appeared. "Did we…?" "Refill," the waiter said. "It's bottomless." Bottomless. They have wells of salsa. The supply lines of this nation are beyond anything my ancestors imagined. My friend warned me. "Don't fill up on chips, dude." Too late. I had accepted three baskets. Honor demanded each one be finished — an unfinished gift is an insult. By the time my actual food arrived, I was a ruined man. I was not hungry. I was not comfortable. I had been defeated by a courtesy. Generosity that arrives before the request cannot be repaid. It can only be survived. I know the rule now. I have made my peace with the basket. One basket. Two at the most. Who am I deceiving. There is no number of baskets I would refuse. The trust of a nation is in that salsa, and I intend to honor all of it.

Let @HunterBiden cook 🔥….just not crack

Put $5k in a Major Multipliers machine in the last hour and this is the result...

Two Uber drivers, the doorman at Wynn, and a guy from Texas agree with @joshd on Oyster Bar. At 1 AM, Tex and I were at Palace Station’s Ultimate Hold ‘Em table for almost two hours while his wife waited in line and he complained about not being able to open carry in the casino.

5000 YouTube subscribers in a year. I am proud of that, but more proud my daily videos now get on average 5k viewers each.

Today Instagram had this massive exploit where hackers were just stealing rare handles left and right. Hundreds of accounts gone. People losing handles they’ve owned since 2010, some worth hundreds of thousands. I own a few rare ones so I was actually stressed watching this happen in real time, which I haven’t been in years. Obama White House account got hit. These aren’t some random new accounts, these are verified, locked down accounts and they still got compromised. The thing is the exploit is so simple it’s almost funny. Attacker goes to Forgot Password, says their account is hacked, turns on a VPN to match the target’s location (which now you can find on the about section of the page). Instagram’s AI support flow asks them to verify with a selfie. They grab a photo from the target’s profile, run it through an AI video generator to make an animation of the person’s face moving around, upload that to Meta’s AI as proof. And Meta’s AI just accepts it because it can’t tell the difference between a real selfie and an AI-generated video of someone’s face . Once verified they change the email to theirs. Password reset link goes to their email. They own it now. 2FA gets bypassed somehow in the process but honestly I don’t know exactly how, just that it did. Point is even locked down accounts went down. Then you try to recover your account and you’re talking to a chatbot that has zero ability to help. You can’t escalate to a human. You’re just stuck. Your asset is gone and there’s no one to call. The whole thing just highlighted how stupid it is to automate account security without any human in the loop. One AI fooling another AI while there’s literally no person anywhere to catch it. Meta took hours to even acknowledge it while accounts were getting stolen every minute. Now thankfully it’s patched but I don’t think it will be the last one. Stay safe!

Unpopular opinion: Smug people who like to say "The lottery is a tax on people who can't do math" are wrong, they don't get it, at all. People don't buy a lottery ticket because they think it's a good investment, or because they are too stupid to do the math. They buy it for psychological, social, and entertainment reasons. The lottery ticket is the cost of buying into the social conversation at the lunch time table at your daily work grind as you discuss with your colleagues what you are going to say to your boss when you win it this week. The lottery ticket is the weekly mental and social sugar hit just like your daily coffee is, or your daily wine, or your daily beer, or your daily durry. Which incidentally aren't great investments either, and could likewise be (unfairly) considered a tax on the weak willed. The lottery ticket is the price to be able to have some fun and dream a little. Sure, it's not the only way you can do that, but it is certainly a legit way. So, food for thought as you go with your work collogue to the coffee shop, or to the courtyard to smoke your durry tomorrow. BTW, no, I don't play the lottery, but I understand people. And thinking people can't do the math, that ain't it, Chief.

.@airfrance @KLM my partner was charged €500 fee at CDG this week for "not flying" the first leg of his multi-city ticket. The catch: he demonstrably DID fly it--sitting right next to me, with photos to prove it. Your agents refused to believe him and denied his refund claim.🧵

Started at the bottom (Hilo), now we are here (Kīlauea). 🤔😀🫡

When I talk to police officers privately, they almost always say the same thing: "you have no idea what's going on out there in the real world". To which I reply: I think the opposite is true. *You* have no idea what's going on out there, because you have self-selected into a

Well so much for that. Already lost. The system is utterly fucked and broken. @stripe 48-page evidence package. Easy to read, Table of contents, filled with visuals (a junior bank employee could easily understand everything). The customer used the product for 49 days, was logged in 13 hours before filing the chargeback, then canceled the subscription 5 hours after the dispute was already filed. *Technically they are still ACTIVE. Here's everything we submitted: PAYMENT INTEGRITY • AVS postal-code check: PASS • CVC check: PASS • Stripe Radar score: Normal (22 / low risk) • Auth success rate on customer email: 100% • Card brand, last-4, fingerprint, exp, billing ZIP all confirmed by issuer CUSTOMER USE POST-CHARGE • 35 distinct active days in 49 days • 393 authenticated session-refresh events • 17 long-form SEO articles generated • 18 AI images generated • 3 WordPress sites configured (admin credentials added) • 4 Google accounts authenticated via OAuth • Customer added their own paid OpenAI API key (BYOK) • 4 team members added TIMING • 49 days between charge and dispute • Logged into the dashboard 13 hours BEFORE filing the chargeback • Canceled the subscription 5 hours AFTER the dispute was filed INDEPENDENT IP CORROBORATION • Stripe captured IP at checkout: Manchester, UK • Microsoft Clarity captured 22 of 38 sessions over 60 days: also Manchester, UK • Two unrelated 3rd parties placing the same person in the same city across payment 60 days of authenticated use THE KICKER - THE CUSTOMER'S OWN PUBLIC WEBSITE CURRENTLY DEPENDS ON OUR PRIVATE CDN • Articles generated on his account are LIVE on his own public WordPress sites • Page source contains img tags pointing INSIDE our private R2 bucket • Last-Modified headers on those CDN files match the EXACT minute his account generated them • Currently fetched by every visitor to his website CRYPTOGRAPHIC IDENTITY CHAIN (Automattic / Gravatar) • Every WordPress author avatar = SHA-256(author email) • 3 of his sites, 3 perfect SHA-256 matches against the gmail addresses in our DB • Automattic has no relationship with us, the customer, or the bank • Effectively unforgeable email-to-WP-admin binding DOMAIN OWNERSHIP (third-party attestation) • Google Search Console verified ownership on 4 separate domains • Public WHOIS: 2 of his domains registered 9 SECONDS APART through the same registrar account • Both registered 5 MONTHS BEFORE he bought our subscription • Pre-existing content business, not a stolen-card test VISA CE 3.0 ELIGIBLE • Same payment credential had a $0.00 trial-start invoice marked "paid" 7 days before the disputed charge • Same customer, email, payment method, subscription • Exactly the prior-undisputed-transaction proof Visa CE 3.0 requires The chargeback dispute system is broken.

This is without a doubt the craziest thing I've ever hit!!!

Polymarket fixed ghost fills which is good. But the market is still getting farmed in one of the most obvious ways possible. Settlement manipulation on short-term markets (especially BTC 5min) is still wide open. If you’re actually trading these markets, you’ve seen it: - Traders build large positions - Then move BTC (usually via Binance) in the final seconds - Settlement follows that move - They cash out, liquidity providers get run over This isn’t edge-case behavior, it’s consistent and repeatable. And at this point, more money has been made by manipulators running this play than by actual traders providing real liquidity. They are extracting well above 50k a day in btc 5min alone. The result: - Liquidity disappears near settlement - Serious market makers turn off during these windows - Retail sees random last-second flips and loses trust - Market quality degrades Weekends and low-liquidity periods are especially bad, sometimes borderline untradeable. One important point here: Polymarket already uses Chainlink for settlement, which aggregates multiple price feeds. But in practice, that aggregation is still heavily dominated by Binance, and Binance leads most venues. If you can move Binance a few bips at the right moment, the rest follows. That’s exactly what’s being exploited. So while the oracle design sounds robust in theory, in reality it’s still very gameable in short time windows. To be clear: this is a hard problem. But it’s also a very visible one, and there’s been little real acknowledgment or discussion around it. There are ways to mitigate it: - Investigate and ban clearly linked manipulation clusters (many are trackable on-chain) - Work with active traders already monitoring this behavior - Adjust settlement (e.g. short time-weighted averages instead of single-tick pricing) - Reduce reliance on any single venue dominating price feeds On time-weighted averages specifically: Retail often pushes back on this, but I haven’t heard a strong argument for why a short averaging window (e.g. last 30–60s) would be worse than a system that can be flipped in the final seconds. Right now, the current design is clearly exploitable. None of these fixes are perfect, but doing nothing isn’t neutral, it actively pushes liquidity out. And that’s the real issue: You can’t build durable markets if the participants providing liquidity are structurally at a disadvantage. I’ve personally tracked multiple large clusters of accounts running this strategy, including linked funding, coordinated behavior, and PnL data. Happy to share data, examples, and work through potential solutions if the team is open to engaging on this. @devjoshstevens @mustafap0ly @kakujain @PolymarketDevs @Polymarket

True! youtube.com/watch?v=53eqjM-0…

"The problem with gambling is that it scales. It can take any amount of money from you." -- @RealW2Jesus Had never heard it put that way, but true.

Classy: @TheStreet provides attribution for original reporting. Unethical douchebaggery: @ReviewJournal credits The Street, rather than the original source. Related: The RJ is losing $10 million a year. Exclusive scoop: casino.org/vitalvegas/nellie…

1) Have faith in yourself, not in your bets. Every strong bettor I know holds themselves into a high regard yet constantly audits their positions and second-guesses themselves. Every bad bettor I know is deeply insecure yet refuses to change course once they're decided on a bet.

The number of fake, long form narrative stories on X has gotten out of hand. I am sure there is some formula that is used to crank them out via AI, but it is so obvious that I am amazed it still works.

The scope of the social casinos (play for fun, no cash out) is unreal. Also the states are coming for the predatory practices. In Washington state alone they have secured 500 Million in settlements. bloomberg.com/features/2026-…

Wrote about how prediction markets depend on user losses, and why Kalshi’s claim that their incentives are fundamentally different from casinos is a lie