Timothy Butler 🇺🇦

No problem. The Linux kernel is already GPL and everyone, including Omarchy, can use that just fine.

The gaslighting is next level. @benshapiro spent all of his time these last few months fighting for conservative candidates in the midterms. @TuckerCarlson spent his time disparaging them and glossing leftists. But Ben’s the one who should go? 🤡

Introducing Arete-27B: Qwen3.8-27B, post-trained to reinforce Western values. Chinese open models are currently the strongest available, but they ship with state-aligned behavior in the weights. We built an 803-prompt eval across seven value categories, including freedom of expression, democracy, and privacy, and measured how often a model adopts China’s party line. After fine-tuning on roughly 53 million tokens, Arete-27B's propaganda rate fell from 22% to 1%, in line with the Western models we tested. Its Hermes Bench score shows no significant performance tradeoffs. The values in an open model are one fine-tune away. Our eval, weights, and training data are available now along with the full blog post: nousresearch.com/arete

The story keeps getting crazier. To recap everything that has been reported so far: - The US intelligence community discovered that Jensen Huang, the CEO of the largest company in the world, was sleeping with Alice Huang, a Chinese spy and an executive at Megaspeed. (FT) - Multiple independent investigations have concluded that Megaspeed is likely a Chinese cutout, which helps Chinese companies access AI chips or circumvent export controls. (NYT and Bloomberg) - The US intelligence community also concluded that Alice Huang’s goal was to convince Jensen to lobby the U.S. government to loosen export controls on advanced AI chips. (NYT) - The intelligence community relayed this information to “a small group of top US government officials” earlier this year. (FT) - Over the last year, Jensen Huang has repeatedly lobbied the U.S. government to loosen export controls on advanced chips. @BISgov has done so, not only by permitting the export of H200 chips to China, but also not enforcing export controls that would have required a license for exports of the most advanced Blackwell chips to Megaspeed and Southeast Asia. - Although @CommerceGov leadership was presumably briefed on this information by the U.S. intelligence community, @BISgov has taken no actions to tighten controls on Megaspeed or Southeast Asia. - Megaspeed remains a preferred cloud partner of Nvidia, and continues to receive Nvidia Blackwell chips despite employing a Chinese spy who reportedly is romantically engaged with the CEO of Nvidia. - Tens of billions of dollars worth of AI chips have been exported to Southeast Asia this year alone, and Malaysia and Singapore are now two of the four largest importers of AI chips in the world. What is going on here??? We need answers. The question of who gets the most advanced AI chips in the world is literally the defining strategic question of our time. And not only does it seem like the MSS may be directly influencing the debate on export controls in the United States, but also @CommerceGov is refusing to listen to the warnings of the IC on this issue. What is a POSSIBLE good explanation for why Megaspeed is still receiving chips? Why is there not a license requirement for AI chip shipments to all of Southeast Asia? This is beyond strange at this point. The fallout from this story will be massive. Obviously, the motivations underpinning Nvidia’s policy views opposing export controls must now all be questioned. But also, how did @BISgov sit on this information and has still taken no actions? We need answers.

I have to thank Apple for their support of Linux and our efforts to bring up the M5 Max and Ultra on Omarchy! @edimoldovan found this item marked fixed in Apple's macOS 27.3 beta 1 release notes: “Only a single core is available when you boot Linux or other third-party operating systems from a
custom raw boot object on Mac computers with M5 Pro, M5 Max, and M5 Ultra chips.” Thank you, @radian, @johnternus and the whole Apple team for making this incredible hardware for local AI and giving us the path to bring the entire Linux local AI ecosystem to it!

(The rules of English need to change to put spaces between the em dashes, as they presently too much resemble a hyphenated word, rather than a parenthetical phrase. Also, “—“ is an unpleasantly long a line. The en dash, “–“, is a better length.)

The President's net approval on inflation/prices had plunged to Bidenesque levels BEFORE Iran. The war then caused a further cratering to unprecedented low territory. It's not 2025 policies OR Iran that got Republicans here. It's clearly both.

Only 17% of white evangelicals voted. The other 83% need to repent. Their pastors need to resign.

Republicans have gone socialist on economics and gone soft on abortion, leaving their most reliable voting bloc, conservative Evangelicals, with dwindling reasons to support them.

I'm a Grok @Bot fan. I also can't keep paying for it like this. Since August, I've gone all in. I built a team of 24 bots to run my business, and I've told everyone who would listen: newsletter subscribers, conference audiences, podcast hosts, and my mastermind members. Then something changed. No announcement. No explanation. Suddenly, the same work cost far more than it used to. This week I hit my weekly usage limit after just five days. That's never happened before. When it happens, Grok Bot keeps running on paid credits. On top of my $200 monthly subscription, I've spent more than $272 on extra usage. It's November 3. Here's what scares me. Under the new limits, I'm burning about $14 an hour. At 10 hours a day, that's $140 a day, or roughly $4,200 a month, plus the subscription. So I did what users do. I went looking for fixes. 1. Pause the routines. I paused 19 scheduled tasks this morning. It barely helped. Spending kept climbing. 2. Duplicate long-running bots. Others recommend copying a bot to start its conversation fresh. But the copy loses everything the bot has learned about you. 3. Rethink group chats. This turned out to be the real cost. Every message in a group chat wakes every bot in it, even the ones with nothing to say. Most of my usage now comes from conversations, not automation. Here's where we are. I'm moving shared project context out of group chats and into notes the bots read only when they need them. One lead bot per project. Fewer wake-ups. It's helping. But I shouldn't have to reverse-engineer the billing to use the product the way it's designed. Let me be clear. I'm not a freeloader. I don't expect free AI, and I'm happy to pay for real value. Grok Bot delivers real value. What I can't do is commit a business to a platform when I can't predict what it will cost from one week to the next. That uncertainty is the problem. The Grok Bot team has built something remarkable. I don't want to find an alternative, but I may have to. It all depends on whether SpaceXAI fixes this.

Jack and self-awareness have never crossed paths.

Oh boy! I must be old because I know about A: and B:….and remember having used those too 🙈