To fully grasp the current situation in San Francisco, where venture capitalists are trying to take control of City Hall, you must listen to Balaji Srinivasan. Before you do, steel yourself for what's to come: A normal person could easily mistake his rambling train wrecks of thought for a crackpot's ravings, but influential Silicon Valley billionaires regard him as a genius.

“Balaji has the highest rate of output per minute of good new ideas of anybody I've ever met,” wrote Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the V.C. firm Andreessen-Horowitz, in a blurb for Balaji's 2022 book, The Network State: How to Start a New Country. The book outlines a plan for tech plutocrats to exit democracy and establish new sovereign territories. I mentioned Balaji's ideas in two previous stories about Network State–related efforts in California—a proposed tech colony called California Forever and the tech-funded campaign to capture San Francisco's government.

Balaji, a 43-year-old Long Island native who goes by his first name, has a solid Valley pedigree: He earned multiple degrees from Stanford University, founded multiple startups, became a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz and then served as chief technology officer at Coinbase. He is also the leader of a cultish and increasingly strident neo-reactionary tech political movement that sees American democracy as an enemy. In 2013, a New York Times story headlined “Silicon Valley Roused by Secession Call” described a speech in which he “told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations': outdated and obsolescent.”

“The speech won roars from the audience at Y Combinator, a leading start-up incubator,” reported the Times. Balaji paints a bleak picture of a dystopian future in a U.S. in chaos and decline, but his prophecies sometimes fall short. Last year, he lost $1 million in a public bet after wrongly predicting a massive surge in the price of Bitcoin.

Still, his appetite for autocracy is bottomless. Last October, Balaji hosted the first-ever Network State Conference. Garry Tan—the current Y Combinator CEO who's attempting to spearhead a political takeover of San Francisco—participated in an interview with Balaji and cast the effort as part of the Network State movement. Tan, who made headlines in January after tweeting “die slow motherlovers” at local progressive politicians, frames his campaign as an experiment in “moderate” politics. But in a podcast interview one month before the conference, Balaji laid out a more disturbing and extreme vision.

“What I'm really calling for is something like tech Zionism,” he said, after comparing his movement to those started by the biblical Abraham, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism), Theodor Herzl (“spiritual father” of the state of Israel), and Lee Kuan Yew (former authoritarian ruler of Singapore). Balaji then revealed his shocking ideas for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray t-shirts. “And if you see another Gray on the street … you do the nod,” he said, during a four-hour talk on the Moment of Zen podcast. “You're a fellow Gray.”

The Grays' shirts would feature “Bitcoin or Elon or other kinds of logos … Y Combinator is a good one for the city of San Francisco in particular.” Grays would also receive special ID cards providing access to exclusive, Gray-controlled sectors of the city. In addition, the Grays would make an alliance with the police department, funding weekly “policeman's banquets” to win them over.

“Grays should embrace the police, okay? All-in on the police,” said Srinivasan. “What does that mean? That's, as I said, banquets. That means every policeman's son, daughter, wife, cousin, you know, sibling, whatever, should get a job at a tech company in security.”

In exchange for extra food and jobs, cops would pledge loyalty to the Grays. Srinivasan recommends asking officers a series of questions to ascertain their political leanings. For example: “Did you want to take the sign off of Elon's building?”

This refers to the August 2023 incident in which Elon Musk illegally installed a large flashing X logo atop Twitter headquarters, in violation of building safety codes. City inspectors forced him to remove it. This was the second time Musk had run afoul of the city in his desire to refurbish his headquarters: In July, police briefly halted his attempt to pry the “Twitter” signage from the building's exterior. But in Balaji's dystopia, he implies that officers loyal to the Grays would let Musk do as he pleases (democratically inclined officers, he suggests, can be paid to retire).

Simply put, there is a ton of fascist-chic cosplay involved. Once an officer joins the Grays, they get a special uniform designed by their tech overlords. The Grays will also donate heavily to police charities and “merge the Gray and police social networks.” Then, in a show of force, they'll march through the city together.

!clinklickers MOAR WORDS...

>A day of the life of a DEI program manager

>11:00 am - Wake up. Early birds are racist.

>11:30 am - Attend a sync up meeting. Standup is not inclusive. Everyone needs to come up with 5 words to remove from our dictionary.

>12:00 pm - Have lunch at a black-female-owned Chinese restaurant. Scold the owner for cultural appropriation.

>1:00 pm - Meet with one of my program sponsors. Discuss what protest we need to fund next.

>2:00 pm - Check internal Slack messages and mark those who used non inclusive language

>3:00 pm - Have s*x with a queer peer

>4:00 pm - Go back home. Work is racist

>10:00 pm - Attack random people online

https://fortune.com/2024/04/18/mercedes-self-driving-autonomous-cars-california-nevada-level-3-drive-pilot/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40126958

There is a large amount of creators on the platform that live off their content and eCommerce enabled through the platform. So it disappearing overnight would severely impact people who have a majority of their livelihood through the app.

Won't someone think of the poor zoomer influencers?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40127055

Banning TikTok will cause an entire generation of Americans to lose all trust in their institutions. Whatever vanishingly small influence China may or may not have through TikTok---still completely unproven innuendo---pales compared to the absolute public relations coup that would win were it banned. If you think cynicism is bad now, there will be zero trust in the democratic process and the rules-based order were this to happen.

Fellas is democracy gonna die because nurses can't twerk on TikTok anymore?

Microsoft just open-sourced DOS 4 https://t.co/iOeLUVfVok (as well a release of beta binaries, disk images, and PDFs from @rozzie's archives!) (but who did the PR?!) pic.twitter.com/g3VyOCsT40

— Scott Hanselman 🌮 (@shanselman) April 25, 2024

In order to download the full text of private newsletters you need to provide the cookie name and value of your session. The cookie name is either substack.sid or connect.sid, based on your cookie. To get the cookie value you can use the developer tools of your browser. Once you have the cookie name and value, you can pass them to the downloader using the --cookie_name and --cookie_val flags.

TSMC Takes on Arizona needs to be a documentary

"U.S. engineers told Rest of World that some Taiwanese male engineers had calendars with bikini models on their desks and occasionally shared sexual memes in group chats.

A female American colleague, according to an American… pic.twitter.com/Vf2yceE4sO

— Jordan Schneider (@jordanschnyc) April 23, 2024

Full story.

https://restofworld.org/2024/tsmc-arizona-expansion/

Pikesville principal Eric Eiswert was caught on tape going on a racist rant.

People called for his life to be destroyed.

Turns out, the entire recording was fake and generated (using AI) by Dazhon Darien, the school's former athletic director. pic.twitter.com/Qw6J1LPnxD

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) April 25, 2024

Intermittent fasting, aka time-restricted eating, can help people lose weight—but the reason why may not be complicated hypotheses about changes from fasting metabolism or diurnal circadian rhythms. It may just be because restricting eating time means people eat fewer calories overall.

No shit Sherlock. As always the article is boring and I won't post any of it here. Let's go -hunting in the top comments.

I think people find the "calories in vs calories out" rhetoric reductive is because it implies a simplicity that doesn't fit many people's lived experiences. Not everyone will absorb the same amount of calories after eating the same sandwich, or store the same quantity of calories in adipose, and not everyone will expend the same amount of calories when they jog for a particular distance of length of time. A person's microbiota influences caloric absorption. Hormones, epigenetics and genetics also play a role in metabolism. At rest, not all bodies use energy at the same rate. If we deprive the body of calories, not all bodies scale back the same expenditures at the same rate to conserve energy. So yes, calories in vs calories out is true, but not all true statements are helpful statements.

Yes, and what this study proves is that while it's always as simple as “fewer calories means less weight”, how the “fewer calories” happens isn't always “just eat less”.

Often the “eat less move more” is used incorrectly because of course it's technically true but most people when discussing diet are trying to talk about a method to eat less, move more.

It's always frustrating when talking about a technique of how to do X, only to have a bunch of people yelling “just do X!”.

Just eat less.

Also "most people when discussing diet are trying to talk about a method to eat less, move more" is bullshit. Most people when discussing diets are looking for some magical food that will cause them to lose weight. No one on a diet discusses how they should move more.

As the arrticle says, this does seem obvious (esp since Ive tried it myself) but as a (non-nutrition) scientist it would have been exciting had they found something unexpected. Sigh. But good work regardless.

BTW while calories in/calories out is absolutely true it's not automatically obvious how many calories you get from eating X. The rating on the box comes from burning food in a calorimeter! Meanwhile your body can extract calories more easily from a small piece of doughnut than from a large, fibrous chunk of broccoli, even if they have the same number of calories on the label. To say otherwise is like saying, “well all chemistry is quantum mechanics” — completely true, but mainly in-useful.

Thanks for that, scientist.

I do time-restricted eating, but that's because I have acid reflux. Don't want tp be slamming a double cheeseburger, fries, and a coke 1/2 hour before bed.

Acid reflux is the only thing stopping this guy from slamming a double cheeseburger, fries, and a coke 1/2 hour before bed. I wonder why he has acid reflux?

So very much this. The whole “CICO”/“it's just physics!” crowd is infuriating.

Like, yes, of course the key to losing weight is to consume less than you burn. But that is by itself not a sufficiently useful strategy for addressing a population-wide obesity crisis.

Preaching sexual abstinence doesn't solve unwanted pregnancy, and preaching food abstinence doesn't solve obesity. You want people to overcome their most basic biological drives, they need more than a Nike slogan.

"Noo we have to account for the fact that everyone is incredibly dumb"

I tried the whole "eat a big breakfast so you won't need such a big lunch" thing. Doesn't work for me. I just wind up with three big meals a day instead of two, if I do that.

https://old.reddit.com/r/balatro/comments/1bt7agy/exploit_balatros_source_code_is_exposed_easy_to/?sort=controversial

hello~ idk if this has been discussed in the community yet, but there's a really easy exploit to cheat in balatro --- you can right-click the .exe file, go to "Open Archive", and modify the source code directly. i made a video so you can see how it works:

i'm bringing it up because if the editor is smart, there's no way to tell if a game has been modified or not --- you can, for example, increase the droprate of powerful jokers or legendaries and cheat in a speedrun category

i've sent a message in the speedrunning groomercord that they should probably modify the rules so that runners have to verify their game files on Steam before they submit a run. and more generally, i think ppl should be aware that this exists so they can call out suspect videos and runs

i almost didn't want to publicize this because the more well-known this gets, the easier it will be for ppl to cheat in speedruns and tournaments and stuff, but at the end of the day i think it's better if more ppl know and can establish rules to stop it when it matters

Huge news for anyone working in tech in the US.

Noncompetes are now banned: not just in California (like before), but nationwide. Very, very relevant for anyone at Amazon (which is the Big Tech that has enforced noncompetes even for low-level engineering positions). pic.twitter.com/H8F4UVxhwS

— Gergely Orosz (@GergelyOrosz) April 23, 2024

^ Yeah this thing

Truely unsurprising.

{Its basically just a VNC connection to an android VM with Playwright automation scripts for the 5 services it does. Oh and that VM connection is also how you put in your logins to those services, probably scraping your password}

Don't ever use Reddit again. pic.twitter.com/ynSlWFt844

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) April 23, 2024

The Department of "Justice" has once again criminalized the developers of an app that restores financial privacy. The way to fix this it to make money private by default. Privacy must never be "exceptional," or they will make it criminal.

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) April 24, 2024

Australia’s censorship industrial complex:

“The problem that you’ve got here with this eSafety Commissioner, she’s an activist.

She will continue to expand her role to police the internet, to censor debate in a way that’s consistent with her own ideological views.

You have… pic.twitter.com/GZosiBHAcb

— Ana Mostarac (@anammostarac) April 20, 2024

Which company looks like X at 10pm on a Saturday night? #Xdeveloperchallenge pic.twitter.com/BWUmCiCkqS

— John Ji (@johnji_) April 21, 2024

cracker foids: ❌

American Citizens: ❌

non-autists: ❌

they/thems: ❌

Elon won