What comes next: The govt will rollout an emergency citizenship program for any foreign-born employee working in a lab contingent on them immediately moving to the U.S. Everyone will be heavily vetted via the same screening construct already utilized by the defense primes. Google will have to move the entirety of DeepMind to the U.S. and fire whoever refuses to relocate. People will gleefully assume Demis will just start his own UK lab instead before realizing the next step is the US is about to gut foreign “unmonitored” access to compute. You can pull a LeCun but you won’t have sufficient compute to do shit. Greencards will be given to family members too. Foreign govts will freak out when they realize what is happening. We are gatekeeping and hoarding intelligence preemptively. Why? Because by GPT 7 France will be like “oh you just destroyed our services sector we are going to tax the labs to pay for the necessary benefits to prevent riots” and it’s a lot easier to do that if labs have critical employees based in Paris. Ditto for every other foreign nation. Anyone acting like this is surprising is simply incapable of thinking four steps ahead. We are going to see industries nuked over night. There will be civil unrest. The only way to navigate that is to tax and gatekeep. The only way you can tax something is if it lives in your borders. We are repatriating exposure points preemptively. Compute gatekeeping comes next. 🫡

the dollar didn't win in Venezuela because they love the US it won because they trust phones more than banks and the people in power

Sanctions hurt people, not dictators. Right? Wrong! This book by @miguelsantos12 @JoseMoralesA and @zp2903 carefully looks at Venezuela and tells a much more interesting story: the sanctions forced the dictator to reduce their damaging command and control destructive measures. Read this 🧵!

RT @naval: Introducing USVC - a single basket of high-growth venture capital, for everyone. No accreditation required, SEC-registered, an…

This is awesome. A top tier VC fund anyone can invest in with as little as $500. Congrats @AngelList @naval @ankurnagpal

timeline cleanse: pediatrician with a young patient

In 1993, the New York Times published an article criticising Federico Fellini and some other foreign language films for being "hard work". MARTIN SCORSESE sent this incredible letter in response.

Of course that's your contention. You're a first-time SaaS bear. You just got finished listening to some podcast, Dario on Dwarkesh, probably. Now you think it’s the end of white collar work and seat-based pricing is screwed. You're gonna be convinced of that til tomorrow when you get to “Something Big is Happening”. Then you’ll install ClawdBot on a Mac Mini, vibe code a dashboard on top of a postgres database and say we’re all just a couple ralph loops away from building a Salesforce competitor. That’s gonna last until next week when you discover context graphs, and then you're gonna be talking about how the systems of record will be disintermediated by an agentic layer and reposting OAI marketing graphics. “Well, as a matter of fact, I won't, because ultimately the application layer is just ….” The application layer is just business logic on top a CRUD database. You got that from Satya’s appearance on the BG2 pod, December 2024, right? Yeah, I saw that too. Were you gonna plagiarize the whole thing for us? Do you have any thoughts of your own on this matter? Or...is that your thing? You get into the replies of anyone posting a SaaS ticker. You watch some podcast and then pawn it off as your own idea just to impress some VCs and embarrass some anon who’s long SaaS? See the sad thing about a guy like you is in a couple years you're gonna start doing some thinking on your own and you're gonna come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life. One: don't do that. And two: you dropped thirty grand on Mac Minis and LLM API calls to come to the same conclusion you could’ve got for free by following a handful of VC accounts.

Crazy opportunity to be at the center of AI investing

This is wild

👀

As a Venezuelan, these last few days have been a rollercoaster of happiness, frustration, and sadness. On the day I thought would be the most important for my life and my country, I find myself struggling to make people understand that our reality isn’t an internet slogan. It has left me completely broken to see that the fall of the criminal dictator who destroyed my family, my friends, and my country was not universally celebrated. What I found instead has left me with a profound sense of emptiness: What I have seen confirms something I have felt for a long time. Nuanced thought has practically vanished. There is no longer a common ground where we can reason with any depth. We are so consumed by radical narratives that we have reduced complex, painful realities into simplified versions that feel comfortable to us. Today, people react before they even try to understand. They take a stand based on their hatred of a figure or an ideology first, and only then do they look for a way to justify it. The question is no longer about what actually protects human life, but rather who is saying it and which side they belong to. Moral analysis has been replaced by political identity. Fewer and fewer people bother to learn from direct sources or real communities. Very few take the time to actually talk to those living the realities they criticize from afar. Instead, we consume fragments of information filtered by social media and algorithms designed to reinforce what we already believe, all seen through the lens of privilege. We have reached a point where trying to understand nuance feels dangerous. Defending something objectively good is seen as a betrayal if the person doing it is on the "wrong side." Many people now reject actions that relieve human suffering simply because acknowledging them would mean agreeing with someone they have decided to hate. Ideology has been placed above reality. We are reducing entire countries and cultures to Instagram posts and slogans shared without context. People are taking to the streets to defend realities they have never experienced and pains they have never had to carry, convinced that a narrative learned online is enough to speak for others. We have never been so technologically connected while being so humanly disconnected. Being right has become a priority over listening. What disappoints me most is seeing how human rights fall below personal or political interests. People aren't thinking from a place of reason or shared humanity; they are completely rooted in extremes. I only ask for a little respect and compassion for those of us who have suffered through 30 years of dictatorship. Please, listen to the voices that have been silenced for so long.

A Call for New Aesthetics: newaesthetics.art.

This image looks grim to us, but when Terence Cuneo painted it in 1947 it was a picture of progress. In fact it was commissioned by Ford, whose factory it portrays.

In case you missed it, @Function just announced a $298M Series B at a $2.5B valuation from Redpoint, a16z, Spacecadet, and many others. Huge congrats to @swerdlin, @drmarkhyman, @pranithapat, and the entire Function team for building what is quickly becoming the operating system for human health. I couldn’t be more proud or more grateful to be one of the earliest investors. The most rewarding part is having a front row seat to the impact Function is having on hundreds of thousands of people in the US, and soon, millions around the world. America spends ~2x more per capita on healthcare than Canada (my home country) and yet we have substantially worse outcomes and higher rates of disease. The biggest problem that plagues healthcare in America is that we’re far too reactive and not preventative enough. For most Americans, their first interaction with the healthcare system is a hospital visit, which is expensive and means the person waited far too long. By pushing healthcare from reactive to truly preventative, Function has a chance to rewrite how we care for people around the world, and, if they succeed, to become one of the most valuable companies on the planet 👨‍🚀

YC is the YC for crypto

Short term price moves do not measure long term progress. 2025 was a huge year for fundamental progress in crypto adoption and innovation. We're sharing 9 ideas we’re ready to back that could define crypto’s next big thing in 2026. They break down into 4 main themes: 👇

Shame on you, @Cartajuanero, for doing the Venezuelan regime’s bidding. Fortunately, human rights watchdogs such as the @HRF exist to unmask people like you who help keep these criminal structures in power. It’s unforgivable that reputable journalists such as @amanpour/@CNN give a platform to lies and misinformation.

Today, Valar Atomics became the first startup in history to split the atom. Announcing Project Nova, a series of zero power critical tests on Valar Atomics' Nova Core in collaboration with Los Alamos NCERC and NNSS. Nova went critical for the first time this morning at 11:45am.