We must stop thinking as slaves. We must think as free men. - Javier Milei | Confessional Presbyterian, Bitcoin, Software Engineer, mentor, libertarian.
Joined October 2023
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Westminster Penguin ₿ retweeted
France's biggest mobile network went down nationwide for nearly 10 hours, and the next day the No. 1 social app in the French App Store was one that doesn't need a network at all. Jack Dorsey's Bitchat passed Telegram and Signal after Orange's nationwide outage, Frandroid and iGeneration reported.
Frandroid tied the surge to the outage and to protesters who fear social media gets cut at the next march. Both come down to reaching people when the usual service is gone. Bitchat hops messages phone to phone over Bluetooth, with no internet, no phone number and no account.
Money has the same weak point. A card or bank app that needs a working tower fails the same afternoon the texts do. A Bitcoin transaction can be signed offline and broadcast later, once a connection is back.
Westminster Penguin ₿ retweeted
Correct.
Using Starlink, a civilian commercial service, for offensive drone strikes to kill people has never been allowed, nor should it be.
Starshield, a different system, is controlled by the US government. What they decide to do is up to them.
Ukraine military violated Starlink terms of service and used it for offensive drone strikes to kill people. That loophole was closed last week.
Starlink remains critical to the defense of Ukraine, as it is the only system that cannot be jammed or blown up, at least for now. Were Starlink to be turned off, the Ukrainian front line would collapse immediately. This is NOT a threat, it is simply a statement of fact.
Starlink was also crucial to preventing Russia from overrunning Ukraine in the early days of the war, as all other means of communication were destroyed or jammed by Russia.
SpaceX has done more to defend Ukraine than any private company on Earth BY FAR.
That said, I have nothing but UTTER CONTEMPT for the virtue-signaling evil warmongers who push for endless slaughter and offer no realistic solution to the conflict. May you burn in hell.
End of story.
Westminster Penguin ₿ retweeted
We run 11 storage sites in low income areas. Some things I've learned:
Being poor is traumatic. Customers who miss payments are stressed all the time and are really anxious trying to pay their bills.
Being poor is expensive. Customers will pay late every single month and willingly pay fees. They think, the bill is due on the first, but I get paid on the 15th so the fee is unavoidable.
Paying early / on time is a foreign concept. If they get paid on the 15th, prepaying next month's bill when they have money seems crazy.
They know how to play financial defense. They lock their debit cards and unlock only when they make a payment. They chargeback valid charges when they really need money and then apologize and makeup the payment.
They rely on friends and family "run this $45 on my son's card, let me see if my brother has some money on his card" etc.
You can only fall for a sob story so many times. Customers will say their son's very last toys are in the unit, we will tell them they can grab them today. Then well...they can't come for a couple days, then a week, then their brother is out of town who was going to help them...
The only way to deal with low income customers is to have strict SOPs and never make exceptions. Every time we've made an exception for someone it's gone poorly.
You become both frustrated by the self defeating activities of some of these customers and saddened by the difficulty going on in their lives.
We totally love our customers and are always trying to help them where we can, but if you're the type of person who is used to only dealing with white collar labor / high income friends, you will have some adjusting to do to make your business work in these areas.
Westminster Penguin ₿ retweeted
1. NSA bulk phone metadata collection on Americans. Denied by DNI Clapper March 2013 ("not wittingly"). Confirmed by Snowden documents June 2013; later ruled unlawful.
2. Hunter Biden laptop authenticity. Labeled Russian disinfo by 51 former intel officials Oct 2020. Authenticated by FBI (2019 possession), media forensics 2022, court testimony 2024.
3. ATF Operation Fast and Furious gunwalking. Denied by DOJ Feb 2011 letter. Letter withdrawn as inaccurate Dec 2011; IG report confirmed.
4. COVID-19 lab-leak possibility. Widely dismissed as conspiracy theory in 2020. FBI (moderate confidence 2021), DOE (low 2023), CIA (low 2025) assessed as likely.
5. Pentagon UAP investigation programs. Long publicly minimized. Existence of AATIP confirmed Dec 2017; videos authenticated.
Westminster Penguin ₿ retweeted
AI really is not that useful. Like all it's good at is a few work applications.
It's only really good at excel, spreadsheets, coding, design, animation, engineering, robotics, math, science, law, contract review, medical development, marketing, note-taking, taxes, accounting, shopping, financial preperation, inventory, reconciliation, etc.
So I don't get the big deal with AI, it's only good at that type of stuff.
For the average folk that just wants to go home and sit on the TV, what do they even need AI for.
Westminster Penguin ₿ retweeted
Two facts to brighten your morning:
Murder rates in the US are at record lows.
Civilian firearms ownership is at a record high.
Gun owners know why this is. If you have trouble understanding it, some of your premises need a rethink.
Westminster Penguin ₿ retweeted
Most potential upside ranking:
1. Tesla
2. Nvidia
3. Meta
4. Alphabet
5. Amazon
6. Microsoft
7. Apple
Tesla tops for pure upside via robotaxi, Optimus robotics and energy scaling—multi-trillion optionality if executed, with highest risk. Nvidia follows on sustained AI compute demand and 70%+ growth runway. Meta’s AI agents and ad leverage offer strong asymmetry. Others deliver more measured cloud/ecosystem gains.
Westminster Penguin ₿ retweeted
So basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and Archive.org went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.
Westminster Penguin ₿ retweeted
Websites use digital certificates to prove they're real (like a lock icon). Those certs are signed by a company called a Certificate Authority using a secret number called a private key.
A proper 384-bit private key is a gigantic random number, roughly 116 digits long. Impossible to guess.
This Indian CA (eMudhra) accidentally used tiny numbers instead. One was literally just 4.
Anyone could try 1, then 2, then 3... and find it in a split second. With the key they could forge fake certificates for any website. Browsers blocked them fast once discovered.
Westminster Penguin ₿ retweeted
I've been telling people about bitcoin privately and publicly for 8+ years.
It's been a constant reminder of how difficult it is to actually help most people. Ultimately, because pride causes them to immediately reject things that don't already align with their worldview and assumptions.
Fiat inflation is not going to stop... The current system requires it.
Eventually, a single bitcoin will be worth millions of dollars and people will still be calling it a 'scam' because of ego.
Westminster Penguin ₿ retweeted
Per latest Census data (July 2024–July 2025), the biggest net domestic outflows are from California (-229k), New York (-138k), Illinois (-40k), New Jersey (-37k), and Massachusetts (-33k)—all states that voted Democratic in 2024.
The largest net inflows are to North Carolina (+84k), Texas (+67k), South Carolina (+67k), Tennessee (+42k), and Arizona (+31k)—all states that voted Republican in 2024.
Overall, people are leaving blue states for red ones.
Westminster Penguin ₿ retweeted
ARKK UPDATES THEIR 2031 $TSLA TESLA VALUATION MODEL, SEES BASE CASE OF $4400/SHARE, A 12X FROM TODAY’S PRICES
- Robotaxis are expected to drive 80% of Tesla’s enterprise value by 2031, making autonomous transportation the overwhelming driver of ARK’s valuation. ARK projects 8.1 million robotaxis generating $753 billion in annual ride-hailing revenue, supported by operating costs potentially 40% below Waymo’s and a massive expansion of the ride-hailing market through lower prices.
- Optimus humanoid robots are emerging as Tesla’s second major growth engine, with ARK forecasting approximately 1 million externally sold robots and $212 billion in annual revenue by 2031. ARK estimates a $26 trillion addressable market for humanoid robotics and expects Tesla to invest approximately $225 billion cumulatively in AI infrastructure by 2031 to support its ambitions.
In the base case, Tesla would be worth $18T within the next 4 years.
Westminster Penguin ₿ retweeted
This is what was just burned down.
The barbarians don’t care about your culture or your history
Westminster Penguin ₿ retweeted
I was contacted by a North Korean. He wanted me to be the front for multiple jobs for some percentage of the pay. He claimed to be from Singapore, IIRC saying new laws made it difficult for them to work American jobs.
I asked him to say Kim Jung Un is a fat dictator. He acted confused at first. When I repeated it he ended the call.
