A masterclass in strategic manipulation. Trump can now blame any Ukrainian strike on Russian oil refineries, whose purpose is to cripple Russia’s war machine, for rising diesel prices in the US. Not that he hasn’t already done so, but until now, he had no real basis for that claim. Putin just secured protection for his refineries. Meanwhile, Russia itself is rationing diesel. There is no sensible reason to sell diesel to the US when you don’t have enough to meet your own domestic needs, unless the political benefits outweigh the economic logic. When a former KGB agent meets a real estate tycoon who has spent his entire life claiming to be richer than he actually is, this is what you get.

When I grasped the philosophy of photonics a few years ago, it really captured my interest. Though from an investment standpoint, I was about 2-3 years too early: For decades, "digital" has been the ultimate benchmark for progress. Yet, as we strive to map our reality with ever-increasing precision, we encounter a fundamental paradox: our world does not operate in 0s and 1s. Nature consists of continuous waves, fluid transitions, and infinite nuances. While classical electronics must laboriously translate reality into binary code, photonics speaks the native language of the universe. Every time a digital sensor captures an image or records a sound, an abstraction occurs. Information is chopped up (quantized) to make it digestible for a computer. In this process, context and energy are inevitably lost. Photonics offers a paradigm shift: Light is an electromagnetic wave, just like the analog reality it represents. In traditional IT, analog signals (light, sound, pressure) must be converted into digital data (ADC), processed, and often converted back for output (DAC). This translation costs time and massive amounts of power. The Photonic Advantage: Optical systems can process analog signals "at the speed of light" without conversion. A photonic filter doesn't "calculate" in the traditional sense, it allows light to flow through a specific structure, and the result emerges instantly. By skipping the translation, it achieves unparalleled efficiency. The digital world is limited by its bit-depth and sampling rates. An analog light signal, however, carries theoretically infinite information within its amplitude, phase, and polarization. The Photonic Advantage: In sensing technology, such as spectroscopy or advanced medical imaging, photonics allows for precision far beyond what a standard digital chip can capture. We don't just measure if light is present; we analyze the exact vibration of the light, which interacts directly with the molecular properties of matter. The human brain does not function like a binary processor. It is analog and massively parallel. It is incredibly efficient because it doesn't require billions of rigid switching operations for simple recognition tasks. The Photonic Advantage: Cutting-edge photonic computers aim to mimic this analog, brain-like operation. Light beams can overlap and weight one another simultaneously, much like neurons in a biological brain. This makes photonics the ideal candidate for AI applications that need to recognize patterns rather than just crunch numbers. The Philosophical Edge: Harmony over Fragmentation Digital electronics forces a fragmentation of the world in order to understand it. Photonics, by contrast, harnesses the wave-like properties of nature itself. Digital says: "I will divide the rainbow into 256 distinct steps." Photonics says: "I will use the entire continuous spectrum of the rainbow at once." Conclusion: We live in an analog world. The superiority of photonics lies in the fact that it does not fight or laboriously translate this analogy, it embraces it. By using light as the primary carrier of information, we work in harmony with the physical laws of our environment. Photonics is more than just a technical tool; it is the bridge that reconnects our artificial intelligence with the fluid, continuous reality of nature. Optical interconnects for AI data centers are just the next logical evolution.