Uber 4.95⭐ Private account of @becker_rad. Opinions and Tweets are my own. Topics/Interests: 👨⚕️👨🔬| 🧮🖥️📈 | 🏋️♂️🏃♂️🏂 | 🥩🌶️🍺🫕
New York
Joined January 2010
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Anton Becker retweeted
Also it works as an MCP connector so you can find, book and review hotels via your favorite AI agent
hotelist.com/mcp
🏩 Hotelist is now my most popular site with 700,000+ visitors per month
So I added user profiles today invite-only and invited @marckohlbrugge @jelmerdeboer @theannalux and they get 3 invites too so let's see who joins
Users can review and rate hotels, upvote/downvote other user's reviews and get karma from all of that
The idea is actually by Marc that you probably trust your friends' and their friends reviews better than random Google Maps reviews (which are also often fake)
So this is a natural social way to get rid of fake reviews, because you're probably far away from a fake reviewer and you trust your friends' reviews
Anton Becker retweeted
I think he's right
With regulatory capture we will speedrun to a new feudalist time
Regulatory capture is where you pass regulation, or create government agencies to "protect the people" but in the end it helps protect companies because you stop new companies from being able to enter the market, because the cost of following regulation is too much compete for a startup
Neo feudalism will mean AI companies at the top and the rest of us as serfs paying them to use AI for literally everything
Next in regulatory capture will be banning open source and/or Chinese models, mark my words
That's a very dangerous thing because then there will never be new AI frontier companies being able to compete again and with exponential self improving AI that means essentially no competitors in any industry ever again as they will slowly suck up money in all industries
Safety concerns of AI are scary but the neo feudalism of AI with regulatory capture is a way more scary for me
Get ready for all of the investors in frontier model companies to suddenly flip to regulatory capture mode today
Their investments in frontier model companies are currently at risk/capped because the biggest buyers of tokens are embracing open-source models: vertical AI companies, the government and enterprises
That’s all this is about: stopping open source — which I’ve been saying on the pod for two years
If you want safety, you want disclosure — and open source is the ultimate disclosure process
Anton Becker retweeted
I implemented my own virtualization software with a built-in ultra low latency remote desktop mode, and I'm pretty excited about it!
So, here's a rambling not-pre-planned single take where I demonstrate it and talk about the other things it can do (first ever long-form content)
Anton Becker retweeted
Tesla is officially beginning its first FSD (Supervised) ride-alongs in Switzerland. Rides start this Thursday.
"Be among the first to experience FSD (Supervised) from the passenger seat. Our team will show how FSD (Supervised) works in real road conditions. See how it handles live traffic and supports the most stressful parts of driving, helping make the roads safer for you and others."
Sign up: tesla.com/de_ch/events/fsd-s…
Anton Becker retweeted
A) We don’t know how he died. It could have been PE after a long flight
B) There’s a 90% chance that Mr Graham had coronary calcium based on age
C) There’s exactly zero evidence that intervention on coronary disease absent acute symptoms prevents MI or death.
D) Mr Gerstner understands business and I laud him for invest America, but he and many of his colleagues fundamentally misunderstand heart disease
A tragic reminder - get your CAC scan - the mammogram for the heart. Cardiac arrest / heart disease is the #1 killer & largely preventable. $150 & 15 mins to save your life. In honor of Sen. Graham we should immediately cover w insurance & launch a natl ad campaign. 🤍 @DrOz
Anton Becker retweeted
As someone who lives in Portugal which already stops every single package you get from outside EU with no exceptions for a decade or more:
I can tell you how this will go
From now on if you receive a package from outside EU, it'll first go missing for weeks and nobody will know where it is, then you'll receive an email from your country's customs agency
They'll make you login to some extremely unusable and outdated web portal which breaks half the time and where you have to classify your shipment in one of 10,000 confusing category codes
Depending on the category code you'll pay a different tax rate, sometimes it's 5% sometimes it's 60%
Then you have to pay the customs duty in some archaic way that will also be broken half the time
And then you'll finally receive your package from outside EU after months
Experiencing this for a few times you'll realize you will never ever try to order or receive anything from outside EU ever because the ordeal is too painful and expensive
I get asked a lot here by people from US to test out new products (like the guy who made the Minimal Phone) and it's just literally impossible for me to receive it even for testing. I tried to classify it as samples for testing but you need to go through a bureaucratic process of insane lengths to get that through so I just gave up
Realistically all this does is make Europeans live even more in the stone ages, as now they can't use modern AI, nor get modern products from outside EU because it'll be too much hassle to order
From today, customs duties apply to e-commerce parcels worth up to €150 entering the EU.
30 million Europeans work in retail; it's our our largest private-sector employer.
And the surge in low-value online imports has put our retailers at an unfair disadvantage.
Too many of these products also fail to meet EU safety standards, putting consumers at risk.
Today's change is about restoring fairness for European businesses and better protecting our consumers.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Ursula von der Leyen said in an official statement on February 11, 2025:
"Tariffs are taxes - bad for business, worse for consumers."
ec.europa.eu/commission/pre…
x.com/vonderleyen/st…
Anton Becker retweeted
Windows is honestly annoying to use, every time I open my PC to play Flight Simulator 2024 I get some dumb popus like this, either about selling me OneDrive to backup my drive or now upgrading to paid Microsoft 365 (I don't even use office apps on this PC, it's for gaming!)
And it's not just one button to skip or decline, it's multiple, plus the dark pattern of this [ Upgrade ] CTA which looks like [ Continue ] so I almost did upgrade accidentally
Considering I already paid $130 for Windows 11 Pro just to use it, it's crazy to keep getting upsold inside your OS
MacOS never does this and also I never had to pay for MacOS
Anton Becker retweeted
My 2025 Tesla Y is a great car
I never had a car before so don't trust me but I did ride a lot of Teslas before in Uber, specifically Tesla 3 and I didn't like it cause it felt cheap and shaky and I'd get car sick (I never get car sick)
Not the 2025 Tesla Y, even as a passenger I don't get car sick, it feels smooth, it doesn't feel cheap
Most of all my friends with petrol cars spend a lot of time in garages, meanwhile we've never
Only when it delivered, it showed an error that the cameras did not calibrate, we brought it to the garage and a cable was loose during production and they fixed it and since then it just works
I like driving it because I know the safety score is good so if something happens there's good odds we survive it as it's built well
Only thing I don't like is that sometimes it does automatic phantom breaking on the highway in Portugal, that's extremely dangerous because if someone is behind you, they might hit you, I think it's because in EU we still run on the old software and not FSD yet (except NL recently), also you do need to clean the cameras regularly but also there's lots of construction dust near us so that doesn't help
So yeah I like it a lot, it's a car that's not annoying, never breaks, doesn't need maintenance
For the first time ever, an imported vehicle became the best-selling car in South Korea and it’s the Tesla Model Y
Not just the best-selling EV
The best-selling vehicle overall
Historic moment in Hyundai and Kia’s home market 🇰🇷
May sales:
• Tesla Model Y: 8,762
• Kia Sorento: 7,836
• Hyundai Grandeur: 5,183
Tesla as a brand sold 10,866 cars in Korea last month, more than BMW and Mercedes-Benz combined
Even crazier: roughly one in three imported cars sold in Korea this year has been a Tesla
Tesla has now been the No. 1 import brand in Korea for four straight months
No imported model had ever done this before
A Tesla did
Anton Becker retweeted
my gut reaction to ai in math is i'm excited about getting access to an infinitely patient teacher that's near expert in every area of math.
this is possibly the best time in history to be doing math as a hobby.
Anton Becker retweeted
Introducing Meditations in Color.
I built it as the color archive and drawing studio I always wanted: a way to experiment with palettes from artworks I love, distill their colors, follow an artist’s chromatic journey, and find inspiration.
A meditation, in color.
@MeditateColor
Sony executives should read the Western tale of "the emperor's new clothes"
The new AI Camera Assistant* with Xperia Intelligence brings stories to life. Using subject, scene and weather, it suggests expressive options with adjustments of colour, exposure, bokeh, and lens for breathtaking photos*.
sony.co.jp/en/xperia-1m8/s/
#SonyXperia #Xperia1VIII
I feel the same about German car companies, unfortunately
Japan's biggest problem is they suck at software, have always sucked at software and will keep sucking at software
Now that the most important thing is AI, which Taiwan builds the chips for with memory from Korea, they completely missed the boat on the hardware part (which they used to be still good at)
And because they can't do software, they're going to alienate the last of their customers with AI features that suck because they can't do software
Could do Hetzner for backups as well. -1
Wavespeed for GPU (Photo AI + Interior AI)
Cloudflare for R2 storage and domain renewal
xAI for LLM AI API for all my sites
Backblaze for backups
Hetzner for VPS
Scrapingbee for scraping (mostly for Hotelist)
Google Cloud (also for Hotelist)
NameCheap (for like 4 domains left that I can't transfer into CF)
Anton Becker retweeted
Wir (pokefy.de) verkaufen gerne in Europa. Und hören trotzdem damit auf.
Was kostet z. B. ein Paket nach Österreich? 14,50 € Porto.
Realität für uns als Gewerbetreibende: 135 € pro Paket bei gerade einmal zehn Sendungen pro Jahr nach Österreich 2025.
Dabei sind wir nur eine kleine GmbH aus Deutschland mit vereinzelten Kunden in Europa. Unser gesamtes jährliches Aufkommen für den EU-Export liegt bei etwa 100 Kilogramm Verpackung. Nicht Tonnen. Kilogramm.
Die Rechnung für Österreich allein: Wer als ausländisches Unternehmen nach Österreich verschickt, ist gesetzlich verpflichtet, die Entsorgung der Verpackung zu lizenzieren und dafür einen lokalen Beauftragten zu benennen, der die Einhaltung der Vorschriften garantiert und dafür haftet:
- Porto (10 Pakete à 14,50 €): 145 €
- Jahrespauschale Verpackungsbeauftragter: 450 €
- Notarkosten für die Vollmachtsbeglaubigung: 150 €
- Opportunitätskosten: 600 €
Und das ist nur Österreich. Frankreich verlangt z. B. ein eigenes Logo samt Anleitung auf jedem Versandkarton, sonst drohen empfindliche Bußgelder. Spanien, Italien, Polen: jeweils eigene Anforderungen, eigene Register. Ab Mitte 2026 kommen mit der EU-Verpackungsverordnung #PPWR weitere Pflichten hinzu.
Konzerne verteilen solche Fixkosten auf Millionen Sendungen. Für kleine Unternehmen und Selbständige wird daraus ein reales Exporthindernis. Das ist kein Versehen des Gesetzgebers, sondern ein struktureller Konzentrationsvorteil zugunsten großer Marktteilnehmer.
Dahinter steht ein System mit eigener Ökonomie: Wer Verpackungen in Verkehr bringt, muss deren spätere Entsorgung lizenzieren. Allein in Deutschland fließen dabei jährlich Milliardenbeträge an Lizenzentgelten an marktbeherrschende Entsorgungsunternehmen. Diese profitieren dabei mehrfach, über Lizenzgebühren beim Inverkehrbringen von Verpackungen über die Abholung und Verwertung der eingesammelten Rohstoffe. Komplexität ist dabei kein Fehler im System; sie ist Teil des Geschäftsmodells.
Besonders grotesk wird das im Vergleich mit Plattformversendern aus Fernost. Millionen Kleinsendungen fluten den europäischen Markt bei erkennbar geringerer Vollzugsintensität. Der europäische Mittelstand wird kontrolliert, weil er greifbar ist.
Der ursprüngliche Gedanke hinter der @EUCouncil war ein anderer: ein gemeinsamer Binnenmarkt, der Grenzen abbaut statt neue errichtet. Stattdessen: 27 nationale Compliance-Silos, die kleinen Unternehmen den Export systematisch verleiden.
Was sich ändern müsste:
1. Eine zentrale EU-Registrierung statt 27 nationaler Alleingänge
2. Eine De-minimis-Regelung für Kleinversender
3. Konsequenter Vollzug gegenüber Drittstaatsversendern statt Belastung des europäischen Mittelstands
Wir ziehen uns deshalb vorerst auf Deutschland und die Schweiz zurück, weil wir unsere Energie lieber in Produkte und Kunden investieren.
Die aktuelle EU-Bürokratiearchitektur erleben viele Unternehmen nur noch als Belastung.
Wir sind Unternehmer und keine Verpackungsjuristen, @vonderleyen , @DIHK_News, @MarkusFerber , @svenja_hahn , @nicolabeerfdp , @ANiebler
Gerne reposten - es betrifft den Mittelstand generell.
