Is it actually impossible for small accounts to make it on X? It's certainly possible, but a lot of things have to align for it to happen. The first thing is to have no flags on your account. The second thing is to make a post someone is interested in - not a rehash of something everybody's seen before. The third thing is to have someone in network that is a large reputable account that will reply, share, or quote your post. There is a long and winding cold start staircase that could get your post in people's feeds if you are a tiny account. But that's like buying a lottery ticket. So being mutuals with a large account - that has a good reputation and is trusted by its own network - to give your post a boost. It's worth a shot to try quote posting one of these larger accounts - if they are in network and you can add something concrete to what they said. That will pull in some of their followers, and also might prompt them to reply to you.

Tibet was hit by a magnitude 7.0 earthquake this morning, 10:33 AM ET. At least 16 people are dead and 32 injured, 11 seriously. It struck Baqen County in Nagqu, about 4,800 meters up and 390 km northeast of Lhasa. At least 339 homes collapsed, and power and phone service are down in the county seat. USGS puts the depth at 18 km. Aftershocks up to magnitude 5.2 followed.

Tom Skerritt has died at 93. He was Captain Dallas in Alien. Alien was my first date with my kids' mom in 1979. We were married 43 years before she passed. Every time I saw his face on screen after that, I thought of that night. Rest easy, Captain.

SpaceX $SPCX closed at $144.75 today, down 9.1%, as up to 1.31 billion insider shares became eligible to sell. That erased Wednesday's entire 7.8% post-earnings jump, and then some. 193.7 million shares traded. The IPO floor held. It's still 7% above the $135 offering price, and after hours it barely moved. Musk's own 6.4 billion shares stay locked until June 2027.

Vivek’s ad going after Amy Acton’s childhood didn't just draw pushback from Jon Husted, it just handed Acton $500,000 from Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker's wife. CBS News: 👉$16,615 straight to Acton's campaign 👉$483,385 to the Ohio Democratic Party In March 2020, JB Pritzker issued Illinois' stay-at-home order. 24 hours later, Acton locked down Ohio's schools, businesses, and election polls. Why give the 2020 lockdown architects a sympathy narrative two weeks before Nov. 3 when her actual record is sitting right there?

Tim Scott just claimed Abdul El-Sayed has "family members who helped resource Osama bin Laden." People are calling it a lie. Others are taking it as fact. Here is what the actual record shows. El-Sayed's mother worked for the Islamic American Relief Agency (IARA) from about 1999 to 2002. In 2004, the US Treasury designated the global IARA network for supporting bin Laden, and IARA-USA officers were convicted of sending money to Iraq in violation of sanctions. However, his mother was never charged with any crime. Separately, his half-sister has posted that their mother was a Muslim Brotherhood activist in the 1970s. While bin Laden and his mentor Abdullah Azzam came out of that same Brotherhood world in Jeddah, al-Qaeda later broke with the group entirely. Ayman al-Zawahiri even wrote a book condemning the Brotherhood. Are there fair questions about her past associations? Yes. Is there proof she personally funded bin Laden? No.

Handing an AI agent your bank password to handle financial drudge work isn't just a security headache, it's a liability trap. Under US banking rules (Reg E), if you hand over your login credentials, whatever that bot does generally counts as "authorized." If the AI hallucinates a transfer, fraud protection likely won't save you. Schwab is already blocking unauthorized bots dozens of times a week. Expect banks to lock this down fast: read-only APIs for bots, human verification for moving money.

"I've gotten too old to not be greedy." That is what 82-year-old Virginia Senate President Pro Tempore Louise Lucas allegedly said on a federal wiretap, calling an illegal pot operation her family's "last chance at generational wealth." Today, she was indicted by the DOJ alongside 6 others, including her two daughters and her grandson. Prosecutors say the top Virginia Democrat used her Senate power to shield and steer licenses to a Portsmouth cannabis shop she co-owns, moving over 100 kg of illegal marijuana since 2019. Yes, she also sponsored Virginia's 2021 marijuana legalization bill.

Atlanta influencer Shawty Dred (2M Instagram followers) has been indicted for stealing roughly $4 million in SNAP benefits. Prosecutors say Mercedes New used stolen identities to run 350+ fake food stamp accounts, then got his own business approved as a SNAP retailer to cash them out. Meanwhile, his Instagram was full of private jets, a Rolls-Royce, and stacks of cash. The USDA pulled his license in November. Two weeks later, police arrested him at a Walmart where he was still selling EBT cards. Indicted in federal court this month, he is one of 40+ defendants in a $42M SNAP fraud sweep announced by Vance's task force. The money was meant to feed low-income families.

On Fox & Friends, Zelenskyy said "Yes" when asked if he would freeze the war where it stands, leaving Ukraine with over 75% of its territory and Russia holding roughly 19%. His condition is firm security guarantees from the US and Europe. Even though that hands Putin all the territory he currently holds, Moscow is still saying no. Lavrov argues a ceasefire would just give Ukraine time to rearm. Instead, Russia is demanding more than the current front line. They want Ukraine to surrender all of Donetsk, including Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, cities Russia doesn't even control. After a 3-hour meeting between Witkoff and Putin on Wednesday, technical talks are set for around Nov 10. Trump reportedly wants a deal signed at the G20 at Doral (Dec 14-15), though Putin hasn't said if he will attend.

Quick version for normal X users: X just made a small change that should help you see more posts from people you actually follow. When X builds your "For You" feed, it pulls posts from different places: accounts you follow, popular posts, and suggestions. Sometimes there are too many to sort through, so it has to throw some out. It used to toss whatever was last in line, which could push out posts from people you follow. Now it trims a little from each place evenly. The other change: if a video reacts to a graphic or adult post, the reaction gets blurred too. You don't need to do anything differently. Just keep liking, replying and following the accounts you want to see more of.

I back Vivek, but going after Amy Acton’s childhood was an unforced error. Sen. Jon Husted said he wouldn't have run the ad with her estranged mother, while Vance told Republicans to "stop whining." Husted is right. Why make it personal when her 2020 record as Ohio's Health Director speaks for itself? She shut down every polling place the night before the March 17 primary, signed the stay-at-home order days later, and resigned in June. 12 days left. Run on that.

SpaceX closed up 7.79% today at $159.31 after a Q3 beat. Revenue hit $14.6B, up 161%, and its AI unit went from $813M to $7.56B. That AI growth is the case for a Tesla merger. Tesla roughly doubled capex last quarter and is building 400 MW of AI training compute plus a chip plant with SpaceX. One side has the spending, the other has the revenue. Musk calls a merger "a good idea" but not a certainty. Tesla reported tonight and slid about 3% after hours.

Stella Parton, Dolly's sister, says she had to correct her vote 3 times at Nashville's Hermitage Library because it "kept defaulting to Marsha Blackburn." Two Williamson County voters told WSMV the same thing. Tennessee's Secretary of State has 1 formal complaint out of about 400,000 early ballots. Every voter who reported it caught it before casting. Donna and I already voted early on similar machines. No problems. Check your selection screen, the review screen and the paper record before you hit cast. Early voting runs through Oct 29. @timburchett is on top of it.

Trump says his political operation has spent more than $300 million on the midterms and will top $400 million. FEC filings back it up: MAGA Inc. spent $300.5 million through Oct 14 with $164 million cash left, while the RNC spent $160 million and the NRCC $122 million. Meanwhile, Elon Musk is pouring cash into Texas for Ken Paxton, and Michael Bloomberg is dropping $80 million for Democrats. Late TV buyers are paying up to 5x normal ad rates right now, even though data shows TV barely moves the needle and door-knocking shifts a race about a point. How much of that $400 million is buying shoe leather versus overpriced TV time?

Who makes the morning coffee at your house?

Steve Witkoff called Putin a humanitarian today. Stephen Hubbard, a 74-year-old retired Michigan teacher held by Russia since 2022, is going home. Trump says there was no swap. He also says the talks would have halted if he hadn't waived new Russia sanctions last week. You can argue about the price and the flattery. An American is coming home. That's what matters today.

Kalshi and Polymarket give Democrats 91 to 92% odds for the House in the midterms. Nate Silver, a Polymarket adviser, has them up 9.7 on the generic ballot. The polls and the bettors agree. Both have been wrong before: the final generic ballot average overstated Democrats by 3.9 points in 2020 and 3.0 in 2024. The House looks solid. The Senate, at 64 to 66%, is not.

Elissa Slotkin says Trump's pushback proves she "touched a nerve" on corruption. Her new defense: "If you break the law, you should be held accountable." Nobody disagrees with that. It's just not what she said in Chicago on Oct 13. Back then, she said she wanted new graduates looking at a Trump administration job to think they were "buying myself a ton of problems," and called it "deterrence." Warning lawbreakers is fine. Trying to scare 22-year-olds away from public service is something else entirely. Why change the story now?

I support Vivek Ramaswamy. I'm also not okay with this. His campaign confirmed the Donna Arthur ad is theirs and is putting $4M behind it. X's own Community Note on her video says she lost custody after years of documented issues, and Acton's brother confirms Amy's account. Beat Acton on her record.

Elon says X's new retrieval model is "trained to surface posts people read all the way through." Last night's code drop adds the plumbing for that, though right now it is switched off. The new commit adds a slot to send custom weights during retrieval, the step that picks which posts even get considered for your feed. Right now that slot is empty by default, so nothing gets sent. Nothing in this drop touches the reading-time weight either. It hasn't moved since Oct 13. If retrieval is already favoring long reads, that change lives inside the trained model, which isn't public. The open code shows a door being built, not one being opened. If retrieval is already favoring long reads, that change lives inside the trained model, which isn't public. The open code shows a door being built, not one being opened. Full algo explainer (updated daily): xitter.cf/d2fl/status/2088069901…