The ugly truth about France and some of the other European countries currently in turmoil - and which none of the politicians want to admit because it'd be political suicide - is that you can't solve the problem by going after immigrants (as the right asserts) or the rich (as the left asserts), but you could solve it by going after the old. One extraordinary statistic for you: people over 60 in France, a quarter of the population, own 60% of France's wealth, non-financial and financial (ofce.fr/pdf/revue/2025/3-192…). And here is another crazy statistic: that same quarter of the population, those above 60, receive nearly two-thirds of all social spending by the French government (previssima.fr/actualite/prot…) - which is famously among the highest in the world (France's government spending is an insane 57.3% of GDP). Last statistic: they make up about 40% of voters because they're a third of registered voters (insee.fr/fr/statistiques/266…), and they turn out far more than anyone else (franceinfo.fr/elections/sond…). Put our 3 statistics together and there's almost a bit of an apartheid situation here: the old own most of the country's wealth, collect most of the social spending and have the political power to keep it that way. Which makes them a de-facto rentier class, living off assets and transfers paid for by younger generations. And, of course, at the risk of stating a truism, the future is built by the young. Yet France keeps effectively taking money away from them to give it to those whose working lives are already behind them - and need the money far less since they already own the country's wealth. What about inheritance, I hear you ask? That's the funniest/saddest aspect: given that life expectancy has kept rising, the French now inherit a home at 54 on average. The most common case is someone in their 80s leaving it to heirs in their 50s, in effect the very old transferring wealth to the about-to-be old (insee.fr/fr/statistiques/fic…). You can add this to our earlier apartheid statement: on top of all the rest, even when the old finally let go of their wealth, it stays within their own "camp". That's my personal situation, incidentally: I'm 42, my father is 71 and he is starting to look at ways to pass things on to me and my siblings, when our professional lives are already well settled, so it'll arrive when it changes things the least, which is pretty much the French system in a nutshell. Now, I get that there'd be some unfairness in going after them: they paid into the system their entire working lives, playing by the rules of a social contract that told them if they paid up they'd collect at the end. Changing the rules now means breaking that promise, which is admittedly unfair. But there's no magic wealth tree in any society: you can only take it where it is. That's the way most major societal transformations end up happening. They're often triggered by a catastrophic event (the so-called "four horsemen": mass-mobilisation war, revolution, state collapse, plague) BUT what really drives change is a transfer: wealth gets pried from the privileged class who've been sitting on it and handed to those who'll build what comes next. So, in theory and in an ideal world, you can do without the catastrophic event and directly proceed with the transfer... The fact that in France, and elsewhere in Europe, it's the youth protesting is probably no coincidence - even though they don't frame it as a generational fight. And even though, cruel irony, the left politicians many of them march behind promise to bring the retirement age back to 60 (lcp.fr/actualites/legislativ…), which would make the situation even worse. Let's say they understand intuitively that the system is stacked against them, even if they haven't yet figured out how. And politicians are obviously doing what politicians do, meaning pandering to the people who actually vote, while pointing the young towards easier - and politically convenient - scapegoats. To be clear I'm not saying it's the only problem in France, VERY far from it. I'm also not saying that all old people in France live a lavish lifestyle at the expense of younger generations: there are also plenty of very poor retirees who, if anything, would deserve more. What I am saying is that it's probably the biggest elephant in the room: everyone can see it, nobody dares mention it - no politician, from any side, wants to run on cutting grandma's pension - and it makes every other problem harder to fix.

Foursquare raised $411 million in funding according to PitchBook data, but its equity holders saw no returns from its final acquisition. spr.ly/6019BHnV8z

it'd be interesting if si produced some sort of an economy where private corporations become the primary financiers of social welfare (aka universal high income) rather than governments. i know indirectly this is what happens through taxes but imagine it working directly in some fashion (likely through ownership, growth, & some form of liquidity). the reason why is because it's pretty clear now that si will create super power law outcomes for almost all of society. & more specifically current mechanics for income redistribution like income taxes will become way less effective over time too since the income gaps will continue to increase drastically (see sf & its housing market as an early example of this). basically some form universal equity ownership as an intermediate step before full automation occurs. fun to think about all of the implications of this.

This is why the anti-cheat arms race is getting so interesting. Riot is pushing Vanguard further into hardware-backed trust, attestation, VBS/HVCI, IOMMU and deeper platform security. At the same time, AI-assisted reverse engineering is making it much faster to tear apart the software sitting on top of those protections. @k0mkc is showing heavily devirtualized VGK internals and says he can now devirtualize the entire thing. On the EAC side, @in19h has published tooling that recovers large parts of a heavily virtualized Easy Anti-Cheat Linux sample into readable code and IDA artifacts: github.com/19h/eac-linux-dev… There is an important parallel here with EDR. An EDR is only as effective as the detection engineering, threat hunting and R&D behind it. Anti-cheat works the same way. You need researchers constantly following new techniques, detection engineers turning that research into useful telemetry and detections, and people actively hunting for behaviour that existing rules may miss. That means continuously keeping up with: - new cheat architectures - kernel abuse - BYOVD - hypervisors - DMA - firmware tricks - input manipulation - virtualization + obfuscation - new bypass techniques The game was already there. AI is speeding it up and lowering the barrier to reversing, classification, devirtualization and research. That forces both sides to iterate faster. A lot of respect to the Vanguard team as well. They have clearly been keeping up with some of the most cutting-edge work in Windows security, hardware-backed trust, kernel security and anti-cheat research, and their recent Vanguard On-Demand changes show how quickly the defensive side is evolving too. This is becoming a much faster research cycle on both sides. Where does the arms race go next? Huge credit to @k0mkc and @in19h for the research. #AntiCheat #ReverseEngineering #WindowsInternals

Tiger Woods Unimpressed With Roadster As He's Flipped Dozens Of Vehicles buff.ly/dUGarJ0

BREAKING: Elon Musk unveils flying Tesla Roadster at launch event.

A retired NASA engineer who had worked on the Space Shuttle program for 25 years was hired by SpaceX at age 62. He described the first week as the most disorienting experience of his professional life. At NASA, a design change required 3 meetings, 2 committees, a review board, and 6 to 18 months of documentation. At SpaceX, his new supervisor said "if it works, build it. If it doesn't, change it by Friday." He sat at his desk after the first day and called his wife. He told her he felt like a man who had been swimming with ankle weights for 25 years and someone just cut them off. He could move. He could decide. He could build something in the morning and test it in the afternoon. The constraint that he had accepted as the nature of aerospace engineering turned out to be the nature of bureaucracy. Within 6 months he had contributed to more design iterations than he had completed in his last 5 years at NASA. Not because he was working harder. Because the time between having an idea and testing the idea collapsed from months to hours. The same brain. The same knowledge. A different operating system. He described a specific moment where he proposed a modification to a Raptor engine component. At NASA, the proposal would have entered a queue. At SpaceX, the modification was machined by the end of the day and tested by the following morning. He watched his idea become a physical object in 18 hours. At NASA, 18 hours would not have been enough to schedule the first meeting to discuss whether to schedule a meeting. He told an interviewer: "I didn't get smarter when I went to SpaceX. I got faster. The intelligence was always there. The system was in the way." The difference between SpaceX and NASA is not talent. NASA has extraordinary talent. The difference is the time between a thought and a test. SpaceX compresses it. NASA elongates it. The same engineer produces 10x more at SpaceX than at NASA because the bottleneck was never the engineer. It was the meetings about the meetings about the work.

My son tried out for his high school basketball team three years in a row and got cut every time. He's a good kid, but he's five foot six and not very fast, and the third time it broke his heart. He'd practiced every single day that summer. He came home from the final cut list and went straight to his room. The next morning, the coach called our house and asked to talk to him. He said he had a problem.

The academics think the founder who raised at $2B valuation can pay but they can’t You are a founder who owns 50% of your company and you have 20x voting rights. You owe 5% on $10B in the asset seizure tax. You owe $500M of your paper $1B. Find me a way to get a loan for half your illiquid net worth. You cant. The asset seizure proponents are dishonest and also it’s not a 5% tax on startups. It’s a 50% tax in this simple case.

that's just my face

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

i recently met a wildly successful founder who had exited for an enormous amount of money & whom i admired cuz he’d dm’ed me saying he loved my writing. i never knew cuz he’d never liked, replied to, or interacted with a single post of mine. i had absolutely no idea he was even reading, & strangely never even followed. just goes to show you the feedback loops on x are incredibly lossy. you have no idea who’s consuming your thoughts, who you’re impacting, or who absolutely despises everything you say. your visible audience & your actual audience are two very very different things.