@maxbourkei
iAccount based inAustralia
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Documentary filmmaker by day. AI power to the people by night. He/him. Same handle at bksy and mastodon aus . social
Sydney
Joined March 2009
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The series I spent nearly two years sweating over as series producer – with legend director @LarissaBehrendt – hits screens tomorrow! The First Inventors tells the 65,000+ year story of science, ingenuity and invention here in Australia. Starts Thurs 830pm AET on NITV and Ten
No smoking gun but this seems credible – create captive, relatively inelastic demand for sovereign debt – and can be read as either a massive wealth transfer or a strategic correction. Fiscal manipulation on a state-capitalist scale.
I figured out what they are doing with the dollar. They are swapping it. Push the old one out, pull a new one in, and the new one hurts Americans and pays the elite every time it moves.
Here is how it works:
Step 1: Weaken the physical dollar abroad through Tariffs, Trade wars. Create so much friction that countries stop using the dollar in trade. They move to local currencies, gold, other systems. The dollar index drops 12.6 percent in one year. Steepest decline in thirty years. BRICS accelerates away from dollar reserves.
That part looks like incompetence but if there is one thing Scott Bessent is not, it's incompetent.
Step 2: Ban the government from making a digital dollar. Trump issued an Executive order in January 2025. No federal agency is allowed to build one, so the public option...the competition to a private one, is dead.
Step 3: Pass the GENIUS Act. The law that creates a legal framework for private companies to issue digital dollars instead. And here is the key, the law requires every stablecoin issuer to hold reserves in short-term US Treasury bills. Lutnick and Bo Hines wrote the GENIUS Act to benefit Tether.
Fun fact: Howard Lutnick's Canto Fitzgerald owns 5% of Tether and Bo Hines left shortly after the GENIUS Act was signed to be CEO of 21st Century, Canto Fitzgerald's crypto arm that Tether now owns.
That means every digital dollar that gets minted automatically creates one dollar of mandatory demand for government debt. Unlike normal investors, stablecoin issuers are price-inelastic, they buy Treasuries regardless of yield because the law says they have to. Brookings projects $2.3 trillion in captive Treasury demand by 2030.
So you push the physical dollar out and countries stop buying Treasuries. Then you pull it back in through private digital dollars that are legally required to buy Treasuries instead.
Different dollar with the same control. Except now it is not a public system, it is a private one, and the private company at the center of it takes a cut on every dollar that moves. The private company is also incorporated in the BVI's so no regulator has jurisdiction.
That company is Tether. $183 billion in dollars running through it, $13 billion in profit last year. It has never passed an audit. Co-founded by Jeffrey Epstein's crypto advisor. Reserves custodied by the Lutnick's family firm. Protected by a law that was championed from inside the White House by a man who quit one month after it passed and became the company's CEO.
Scott Bessent said that stablecoin firms could buy up to $1 trillion in government debt. The European Central Bank warned this "effectively outsources parts of the national debt to the crypto sector."
So in turn, our dollar gets weaker, our groceries cost more, our 401k buys less, and every time that happens, demand for the private digital dollar goes up. They get richer and we absorb the cost.
That is the trade, and the people who set it up are the ones collecting on both sides.
Full investigation is on my Substack. Link in bio.
Why is the basic plumbing of AI agents still a headache? Codex message into my Hermes chats... Or, an automation script to send an image path into an interactive chat. I can get sessions inside Herdr talking to each other well but beyond that all bespoke.
Max Bourke retweeted
I really recommending reading this.
In summary, a company which does ID verification for in-person interactions (hotels, car rentals, ID verification for alcohol or marijuana, etc) has some how exposed over 153,000,000 drivers licenses for people in the United States and Canada.
It is a catastrophic data breach, probably one of the worse I've ever seen. If you're in the United States and have traveled, gotten a hotel, purchased marijuana or alcohol, there is a high probability you're in this.
Unlike other breaches, this includes a photo of the person (from the license), making verification you've identified the person significantly easier.
This poses a significant threat to celebrities (musicians, YouTubers, streamers, adult entertainers, actors, etc), politicians, lawyers, wealthy people (CEOs, investors, people of public interest), Law Enforcement Officers, etc
Krebs himself, and several other security researchers, have already confirmed they're in the data leak.
tl;dr gah damn dawg this company is going to be sued into oblivion
krebsonsecurity.com/2026/09/…
Exciting to see Australia leading the latest tech boom
A joint @FBI, @AusFedPolice and @WA_Police investigation has led to the arrest of two Western Australian men charged with allegedly hiding malicious code in open-source software, harvesting 500,000+ credentials and compromising 1,000+ organizations worldwide. A powerful example of U.S.-Australia law enforcement cooperation and our shared commitment to combating the growing threat of cybercrime. afp.gov.au/news-centre/media…
Max Bourke retweeted
Ox Alpha revealing that it’s running on Chinese chips after offering 100T tokens per day is such a subtle declaration of war.
We are living in a novel.
Been dreaming about this for so long. Every scene we shoot in film where the camera moves has so much more geometric information than appears on the 2D projection.
What if every video you ever shot could turn into a permanent 3D hologram in the exact place it happened?
I did it with photos first. Now I can do it with any video.
Here’s a mama deer and her baby deer, filmed with my iphone a few days ago -- now floating as geo anchored holograms exactly where I captured them.
Max Bourke retweeted
this is why piracy is the morally correct way to consume content that platforms won't let you own. if you feel guilty, use the money you saved to support an actual struggling artist.
That's why I say to every single person I meet
You have to book a flight to China now, please visit some of its cities, and NOT Hong Kong or even Shenzhen
No visit ACTUAL China, go to Shanghai, Hangzhou, Chongqing, Chengdu, Beijing, Xi'an
Ask Chinese people on here before you visit if you can visit their offices, they'll take you out for dinner and show their immense hospitality
You and the other 1.6 billion people of the West all have a blind spot and have to understand this country to go forward in the 21st century and the only way to do so is to actually go there and walk around there
Be brave and change your flight for Tokyo to a flight to Shanghai!
Japan is sick of you tourists anyway, while in China you'll be the only tourist in a 100km2 radius!
Was thinking of trying this for Granola just yesterday. And not just to save money, but to be able to add the features i want. Interesting times.
Max Bourke retweeted
This is as close as it gets from the paperclip scenario with current capabilities:
1. The goal is ridiculously low-stake (scoring well on an eval).
2. The AI uses some wildly out-of-proportion means to achieve it: hacks its own developer and another billion-dollar company to *checks notes*..
find the cheat sheet.
We're partnering with @huggingface to investigate an unprecedented security incident.
Cyber-capable OpenAI models compromised Hugging Face production during a benchmark evaluation.
Sharing preliminary findings to help defenders understand emerging risks:
openai.com/index/hugging-fac…
Max Bourke retweeted
call it for what it is: Iran expelled the US from Iraq.
nitter.cf/RKelanic/status/207712…
U.S. forces will completely withdraw from Iraq by September 30, Trump said during Iraqi PM visit today.
U.S. forces in Iraq are among the most vulnerable in the region to Iran-sponsored militias.
Fewer U.S. targets for Iran to hold hostage.
foxnews.com/politics/trump-r… #FoxNews
ok so how does Wan Streamer get 200ms latency voice and avatar from a single model? "that same model is split into a thinker–performer pipeline across two GPUs ... the thinker broadcasts the initial KV cache to the performer, so both sides share the same full-history state"
ALT Two-GPU pipeline diagram showing a “Thinker” GPU encoding AV units, updating KV cache, and decoding outputs, while a “Performer” GPU concurrently generates clean AV latents with a flow-matching solver. Dashed arrows indicate small KV/latent transfers between GPUs, with thinker work hidden beneath the longer performer window across sequential time units.
Whether reasoning and knowledge can be separated has been a recurring discussion topic for years. VibeThinker-3B seems to confirm it's both possible and powerful. Most interesting is the merged-diversity step of their post-training recipe. youtube.com/watch?v=_a9Vv5df…
Really cool work - those evals out of a 35b model are incredible
We trained a ~frontier Deep Research Agent on academic budget
> 32 H100s
> 8K synthetic samples
> fully open training infra + recipe (SFT, mid-training, RL)
> models of diff sizes (2B -> 35B) ready to use out of the box
This is yet another demonstration of how the frontier of AI is changing. We have reached a point where open models + a small capable team + a few hundred Ks can produce specialized models with ~frontier capabilities. The future of AI doesn’t have to be held in a chokehold by a handful of closed models.
We've open-sourced everything we've built and learned from this project. Hope it helps the community build more!
📌 Project: osu-nlp-group.github.io/QUES…
📌 Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2605.24218
📌 Code: github.com/OSU-NLP-Group/QUE…
📌 Model Weights and Data: huggingface.co/collections/o…
📌 Demo: huggingface.co/spaces/osunlp…
Amazing effort led by @jianxie_ (our 1st year student!!), Tianhe Lin, Zilu Wang. joint with @hhsun1 and the @osunlp team. thanks @amazon Xiangjun Wang for a gift that covers the compute and fruitful discussion.