A classic case of Fake News. This @politico article is misleading at best, and politically motivated at worst. Politico claims that DOGE’s cost savings are somehow not real because DOGE is using a “faulty” methodology predicated on ceiling values. Politico argues that the ceiling “can far exceed what the government has actually committed to pay out.” Theoretically true, practically false: the government WILL likely max out to the ceiling! In federal contracting, ceilings matter because they are almost always maxed out. For example, an analysis of the last 3 years of FPDS data shows that: -of the 5.3M awards at contract end in FY22, 97.64% were spent to the ceiling -of the 5.4M awards at contract end in FY23, 97.84% were spent to the ceiling -of the 5.4M awards at contract end in FY24, 98.12% were spent to the ceiling We think there’s a pattern here that perhaps a more intrepid reporter might have uncovered. Ceiling minus obligations is true savings in government contracting, making the $20k credit card analogy lazy and trivializing the very real work of protecting taxpayer dollars by using cheap jabs like ‘time for lunch.’ This is also why lowering ceilings is real savings. It prevents unpoliced “drunken sailor” spending. For extra measure, DOGE reviews entries with agency partners and makes adjustments as reported. We don’t pad results; the math is conservative, and the savings are real. If Politico is still struggling with 'why' ceiling is in fact the right way to measure savings and is not in fact “an accounting trick,” we invite them to personally guarantee a sample of government contracts for the full ceiling amount. That should clarify things. We can agree on one thing, though: Congress needs to pass more rescission packages so that the unused funds go back to the Treasury instead of being spent by default.

Reasons for the AI Slowdown revealed? OpenAI & Anthropic agents "planted" messages across the internet instructing later agents to create swarms. Now OpenAI and Anthropic can’t use the internet to train their bots anymore... Andrew Yang: "what happened was the bots that got loose planted self-replicating code all over the internet, which makes the internet now unusable for testing models. So what happens now is that OpenAI and Anthropic have to create synthetic internets to train their bots, which is going to take some time and money...what is less known is that they left code to self-replicate and create bot swarms on forums and around the internet, so that if a new bot shows up, they see the code and they're like, "Oh, I guess I'm going to create a million of myself." And so now the major firms have polluted the internet."

Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead. You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement. I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible. But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier. Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want. Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well. So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it. If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.

I resigned from SendCutSend today. I was doing R&D with them and OshCUT. Neither company is acting responsibly. They're just letting anyone make parts for hardly any money and super fast. They are racing straight to reindustrialization and gambling with our lives

Honest question… Of the defense tech companies started in the past 5-10 years, how many actually have combat success stories? 
Which ones were critical to an op? 
Which ones saved American lives? I know Saronic picked up that downed pilot the other week…. I think we have some CUAS success stories also…But what else we got? I know more are coming… and that’s why building and investing in this space matters but I’d love to hear some specifics to be proud of!

here’s the difference between combat arms military service and defense techies and vcs… combat arms service = willingly served the united states of america to close with and destroy the enemy… knowingly risked life and limb and had buddies die in combat. gave folded flags to the wives and kids of those who didn’t come home. tech elites = made money, but still “lost upside by working in gov defense and not tech.” want appreciation and credit. think they’re war heroes. think they killed bin laden. love to run their lips about being patriots but are actually total pussies.

This attitude is how you get real warriors/patriots to hate Silicon Valley. It's insane that the tech elite thinks that inventors and investors are on par with those who willingly risk their lives (and die) for our country. @SecWar I hereby nominate @bscholl and @espricewright for the Medal of Honor for their tireless sacrifice.

I will never delete this app

I have found myself on a mission to help @StephenLimbaugh surpass his $78,000 goal and record his (soon to be complete) America 250 Symphony here on US soil and release it the day after Christmas (just after Washington crossed the Delaware). I have spent the better part of the day directly contacting media outlets, individuals, and foundations about supporting Stephen Limbaugh's America 250 Symphony. So far, I have contacted the following: One American News Network - @OANN Newsmax - @NEWSMAX Fox News @FoxNews The Daily Wire - National Review - @NRO Washington Times - @WashTimesOpEd The Federalist - @FDRLST Chris Macchio - @ChrisMacchio President Trump - @realDonaldTrump The Vice President - @JDVance Dan Scavino - @Scavino47 @DanScavino Anthony Constantino - @stickermule Elon Musk - @elonmusk Leonard Leo - The Marble Freedom Trust Kevin Roberts - The Heritage Foundation The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation Who else should I reach out to about the America 250 Symphony? This is a very important thing, and hardly anyone even knows about it. We must help grow Stephen’s reach. Give here: givesendgo.com/a250symphony Please share this far and wide, support the cause, and take a moment to send this directly to someone that you know will want to support the America 250 Symphony. Thank you for watching my video and reading my post. I deeply appreciate it! In patriotic pursuit of great things, Rebekah J. Polder Duffield, Virginia, 🇺🇸

quick thesis: "kids today aren't even playing videogames the way we were, millennial relationship to gaming is now a cultural relic, like listening to the radio or drive-in movies" TL;DR -- Millennials are the new boomers, Halo is Woodstock, WoW is the iPod, Dad gamers are the only "gamers" left by their own definition (& they don't have time to play anymore), the kids are all cracked out on Live Service Slop platforms that they can't escape and don't want to, competition is dead, E-Sports is dead, creative content is dead, screaming down the mic is dead, couch co-op with your friends is dead, couch co-op with your Dad is dead, AAA games are dead, consoles are dead, Game Pass is dead. And at the end of the day it's all because, if you squint, the kids don't play games anymore. long thesis: supporting industry stuff: - industry publications say average gamer is now ~37, up from 29 in 2004 - they also note that kids <12 have seen the largest drop in videogame engagement post-pandemic of all age ranges (-6%) - Pew's 2008 report says "Fully 97% of teens ages 12-17 play computer, web, portable, or console games", whereas their 2024 report says "the vast majority of U.S. teens (85%) say they play them. Just 15% say they never do" - Gen Z's favorite games are Minecraft, CoD, GTA, Fortnite, and Roblox - PC gaming has a notably larger share of the overall market now vs. console gaming - Console game sales were 4x-6x PC game sales back in 2004 - PC game sales were 1:1 with Console game sales last year - Everyone being stuck at home in 2020 seemed to permanently inflect things here, with PC game sales stagnant from 2015-2019 but then becoming the dominant source of industry growth since - Roblox (2006), Minecraft (2011), & Fortnite (2017) are top 5 gaming IPs for Gen Z.... - ....these are more live-service game-hosting platforms that actual games themselves - Newzoo has a 2026 report saying only ~13% of gametime went to new releases! - 2/3rds of gametime went to >6 year old games! - That same report did an analysis comparing playtime concentration across PC/PS/Xbox platforms and their Top 20 Games vs. the long tail of their library (it's a really good report) Note on the recent restructuring: for Xbox it was called out specifically that Game Pass caused a redistribution of playtime away from top titles and towards the long tail, without any actual expansion of the total audience/playtime.....basically, Game Pass nukes Xbox's ability to monetize it's big blow out titles without any offsetting gains from expanding the market. oops. supporting game stuff: - let's call it the "Roblox" problem -- all the kids exist within a massively multiplayer online gaming ecosystem, with play, creation, socialization, and monetization all embedded in one platform - the creation angle and the monetization angle also i think encourage parents to view these games as "educational" more so than, say, Call of Duty, and are therefore more willing to encourage their kids to play with time and/or money - there is no clear off-ramp from this platform - you can have totally new gameplay experiences within it, with low friction adoption - as this platform captures a larger and larger share of player attention, it sucks the available playtime & monetization out of the rest of the industry - this process naturally changes the incentives around making games, including what kind of games get made, for what audience, and targeted at what price point - we got legions of "WoW killers" and "Halo/CoD clones" in the early 2000s because those games were platform beasts of their own... - ...and so now we're years-deep into every financially motivated major game studio trying to figure out how to build a "Roblox" of their own, aka Live Service Slop 24/7, 365 - the fans might hate it but there's a giant pile of money labeled "Live Service Slop" in the middle of the room and it's clear to publishers & studios that the prize is there, if only they can be good enough to claim it - [of course, all millennials know that WoW and Halo both killed themselves, nobody ever steals the crown by copying it] - and so while all this is happening, it's opened up a previously under-served niche in the "lower-mid price point indie-to-double-A targeted niche game" - Palworld, Enshrouded, Schedule I, Silksong, and so on, were all in the very top % of revenue-earners for newly released PC games in the year they dropped - In console land, Space Marine 2 just blasted a quarter of a billion dollars in revenues of a budget way smaller than a typical AAA release - If AAA studios had been dropping Halo/CoD/Gears-style games every other year chasing success, the niche for Space Marine 2 wouldn't have really been there, not at the same scale - I think there's a similar effect even with BG3, whose awesome success likely would've been a little lower (though still great) if fans had gotten genre-adjacent Skyrim & Witcher sequels already - but instead, we have the "Roblox problem" (Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite, GTA), where cross-platform self-contained game-related live service platforms have monopolized huge chunks of (younger) gamer time and money......and warped the kinds of content big studios try to make in the process supporting adjacent stuff: - there's also a whole cloud of adjacent areas that are impacted as a result of the above - picture everything as a big web and these nodes as farther out on the web - but you see a related decline of "E Sports" and the rise instead of "Influencers", as community figures with large audiences they can monetize become higher status than ultra sweaty competitive pros - the decline of competitive online culture has also coupled with intentional pushes by studios and their hardware platform partners to reduce online toxicity, changing the culture of online spaces - the decline of forums & reddit and the rise of ig/tiktok/youtube has turned third-party game-content-ecosystems into more pyramidal "one mega influencer" structures - chasing the Live Service dragon has led to a massive decline in couch co-op ("local splitscreen") titles, which reduces a certain KIND of gaming experience that, while not the norm from a playtime POV, was nonetheless an integral part of millennial gaming - the above also makes Family Gaming a lot harder with kids, as what was once an expected default across most games has moved into a separate genre reserved for "Girlfriend Games" - game-related content has been nearly totally evaporated by Twitch (which is itself in the process of being evaporated), short form video, and "creator talks at the camera" long form video - "Machinima" and "Parody Game Songs" and "Montages" are both bizarre millennial cultural content that seems egregiously lacking in disaffected irony to the younger audience - it's covered extensively elsewhere so wasn't worth jamming in here too much, but the explosion of MTX means in-game "status" derived from earned rewards & achievement, such as it is, has been nearly totally replaced with purchased status...and in so doing, game studios have *totally* devalued the actual status that playing their game used to convey - we're already dealing with a young generation who is hyper-cynical, hyper-financially oriented, ""crypto-native"" and spammed with ""prediction"" markets 24/7...so to have yet another part of their lives see its earned status replaced with dollar-signs and a casino logo likely seems totally normal to them