3x candidate for NYC Public Advocate. Boards @sarapisorg, @sahanafoss. Lead @wegovnyc. Advising green/distributed energy startups. Integrity over Ideology.

NYC
Joined February 2009
Devin Balkind retweeted
There’s zero chance he’s gonna win in Idaho as an independent but Todd Achilles might win best campaign ad of the year with this
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Devin Balkind retweeted
I feel like society collectively forgets how crazy it is that the most powerful military in the world is led by a former Fox News weekend host with no significant management experience who never held a high-ranking military command
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Devin Balkind retweeted
Me explaining AI to friends
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Devin Balkind retweeted
If you tried to build this in SF, they’d call it a genocide.
The Torch will be higher than the Chrysler Building, and the entire top is an amusement park ride The stupidest tower in all of NYC. I’m so excited
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This is what success looks like.
toronto city council just approved this 11 story building in parkdale with an entire tibetan monastery on top of 80 apartment units
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Devin Balkind retweeted
Everyone who cares about climate should understand this. Texas, with no pro-climate policies, has blown passed California in clean energy. In large part because Texas has less red tape and makes it easier to build.
Texas just passed California in utility-scale solar. And it's not close in wind or energy storage.
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Devin Balkind retweeted
Really starting to feel like Donald Trump isn't taking being the first recipient of the FIFA Peace Prize all that seriously.
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Devin Balkind retweeted
worth considering
It’s going unnoticed because so much other news is happening, but the war drums are beating again in D.C. The warmongers worry this is their last chance to get the white whale they’ve been chasing for thirty years, an all-out regime change war against Iran. A new Middle East war would be a catastrophic mistake. Our military stockpiles are depleted from three years of backing Ukraine. Our effort to reshore manufacturing has only just begun and will take years to bear fruit. War would worsen our already immense deficit and national debt. Iran is larger than Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan combined. A war would not be easy and could easily become a calamity. Thanks to President Trump’s restraint during his first term, America has a golden opportunity to pull away from Middle East quagmires for good. We shouldn’t throw that opportunity away so that sone D.C. has-beens can feel tough by sending young Americans to die yet again.
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Devin Balkind retweeted
Blue cities are out of control, promising more, spending more, delivering less and pushing off fiscal problems to some future day. Democrats in city halls should stop governing as if the goal is to announce new entitlements, and instead make government work. My take:
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Bad Bunny Super Bowl halftime opening dubbed to English
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Devin Balkind retweeted
Should have named his book "nuanced takes about the future with some caveats"
Fukuyama didn't say it was the end of history. In "The End of History and the Last Man" the part no one reads is about "The Last Man". Go read the last chapter of the book, here is the important part summarised:
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Devin Balkind retweeted
When Democrats are in power, libertarians get called right-wingers. When Republicans are in power, libertarians get called liberals. We're the ones consistently calling out authoritarianism. They're the ones with blinders on half the time, when their side has control.
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Devin Balkind retweeted
Impeach and remove Kristi Noem. Congress must not fund DHS. No more money without disciplined leadership and massive reforms—real training, body cameras, no masks—and clear rules for how federal agent misconduct will be investigated, prosecuted, and punished.
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This sentiment will define the midterms.
nyc subway goes america first
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Unpopular opinion: Existing tools have become obsolete circa 2022-2023. Language models are more than generating code or enabling automation. If you are not curating or building new tooling, you are going in the wrong direction.
I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue. There's a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering. Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession. Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind.
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Devin Balkind retweeted
Rand Paul on mid-decade redistricting: "I think it's gonna lead to more civic tension and possibly more violence in our country. Think about it: if 35% of Texas is solidly Democrat and they have 0 representation, how does that make Democrats feel? I think it makes them feel like they're not represented."
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Devin Balkind retweeted
An excellent demonstration of why we shouldn’t give one man the power to impose tariffs whenever he wants.
Is the new 10% tariff on imports from Canada related to the fentanyl emergency or the reciprocal trade emergency or are hurt feelings also now a national emergency?
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Devin Balkind retweeted
it literally started with Trump trying (and failing) to kill congestion pricing
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This project is good, the experimentation is deeply American, and I hope to visit it!
1/ 🇺🇸 Today, @CAForever submitted detailed plans for the next great American city, an hour north of Silicon Valley, including: Solano Foundry, America’s largest manufacturing park, Solano Shipyard, our largest shipyard, and walkable neighborhoods for 400,000 Californians.
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