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Drifting upgrades+gameplay 🌃🏎️ Equipping welded Diff+DIY extended steering knuckles will help you chain together drifts! (Not required, stock cars can also drift nicely) #screenshotsaturday #gamedev #indiedev #gamedesign #jdm #indiegame

90,136 次观看 • 3 年前 •via X (Twitter)

29 条评论

Night-Runners 的头像
Night-Runners3 年前

Hard to showoff drift handling in a map of only highways(Full game will have touge+streets). Clutch kicks are fully functional and aftermarket handbrakes take the input from a toggle on/off to instant response. You can and will spin out if you use too much angle/throttle.

TUCKER 的头像
TUCKER3 年前

can't wait

Sløyfe 的头像
Sløyfe3 年前

Very much excited. Hoping for a beta soon! Will be buying asap

Edgard 的头像
Edgard3 年前

can i just preorder the game on steam or something already :(

Pockets 🔞 的头像
Pockets 🔞3 年前

cant wait for this to release!

mrisekc 的头像
mrisekc3 年前

I love the sounds in this game so much. Quick question, when it comes to modifying/upgrading things like exhaust will those have an effect on the sound of your car?

Logan 的头像
Logan3 年前

In the future, will there be vanity customizations like radios/subs, dashboards and whatnot? Thank you for all you do, genuinely so excited for this game

zǝɹɐnɾ ɔɐɐsᴉ 的头像
zǝɹɐnɾ ɔɐɐsᴉ3 年前

drop the fucking game, we’ve been waiting 2 years for a demo. can’t wait anymore

FlicksterGaming 的头像
FlicksterGaming3 年前

That game is underrated tbh

donger 的头像
donger3 年前

Looks great and honestly pretty accurate, not a fan of all these weird arcadey games where cars don't act like cars

SG Asset 的头像
SG Asset3 年前

looks good

SobrozaDesign 的头像
SobrozaDesign3 年前

Looks great. Can't wait. It will have the C1 loop?

Keizo 的头像
Keizo3 年前

This game has a classic theme, I like it

Andre Luiz 的头像
Andre Luiz3 年前

Nice, best racing devs.

Hans Peter 的头像
Hans Peter3 年前

Japanese are the best im excited for this game for soooo long ❤️🔥🔥

Swamp 的头像
Swamp3 年前

Take all my money immediately

Cash Money 的头像
Cash Money3 年前

Need on console

ucxxca 𒉭 的头像
ucxxca 𒉭3 年前

brooo i can’t wait for your game to release

ba 的头像
ba3 年前

I cannot wait to play the game my own🔥🔥🔥

✨Dayashii✨ 的头像
✨Dayashii✨3 年前

Will we get coffee breaks

Magic Wolf 的头像
Magic Wolf3 年前

Our dude pulled out a Han drift move and thought we didn't notice!

Brandon 的头像
Brandon3 年前

Any chance of VR support?

Alex Logan 的头像
Alex Logan3 年前

Will there be any mountain area more suitable for drifting?

Turbo 的头像
Turbo3 年前

is there any options to set the auto counter steer assist level?

Night-Runners 的头像
Night-Runners3 年前

@ChinChongHanji Theres no auto counter steer assist, it's only a visual thing for the wheel models

Sykuro42 的头像
Sykuro423 年前

will ther be a linux version? (casause windows sucks)

DxTrEm3Fx 的头像
DxTrEm3Fx3 年前

How do I beta test this on my PC?

𝓋𝒶𝐿 🦋 的头像
𝓋𝒶𝐿 🦋3 年前

does the game support wheels and have like any free roam driving?

King Ramses👑 的头像
King Ramses👑3 年前

@NightRunners_jp For the safe house’s are we able to customize how it looks like change where the furniture, shelves (ect)? Also the dirty look on the safe houses are fine but is there a setting where we can change it from dirty to clean i am not really a big fan of it

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The Text Me Back script is finished! 🥳🎉 This is probably the biggest achievement of my life. I have been through so much over the past year, and especially the last three months haven't been easy. But I kept pushing through even when it hurt because when you do, you make sure that one day it'll get easier. I'm so proud of this script. I've been writing novels and screenplays since I was a young teen, on and off, some years more off than on, but I've always kinda felt that my execution didn't live up to my ambitions. But this time, it's everything I wanted it to be and more. In fact, I'll say that it's better than I ever thought it could be. Of course, that's my extremely biased opinion, but I hope that you'll enjoy it just as much as I've enjoyed writing it. Well, that depends on the execution of the actual gameplay too, but I'm confident. I always say that if somebody else can do something, so can I. So, since the first Life is Strange is pretty close to what I want to do gameplay-wise, it's already been done. There's proof it's possible, and so it will be possible for me too. Now, I'll spend the next few weeks polishing the final episode. There are still some things I'm not fully satisfied with. Episode 5 is still a first draft. (I'll also share the final word count at that time. I'm a sucker for word counts.) So, after a couple of weeks, I'll finally start really getting into making the demo, and hopefully, this page will get more interesting as I can start to show things. Don't expect the world right away, but it'll get more and more exciting as we go. I promise. Thanks to all of you for sticking with me through this long writing process! PS: For the voice actors: I'll start sending out the full, finished scripts by the end of July. Sorry that it took so long, but I think the wait will be worth it! #gamedev #gaming #TextMeBack #gamer #indiegame #indiegamedev #UnrealEngine5 #femaleprotagonist #solodev #solodeveloper #unrealengine #indiedev

Text Me Back

41,771 次观看 • 2 年前

Opus 5.5 built this game in Unity. Artwork made in Chatgpt. Used Topdown engine to speed up the process. PROMPT: PRD — Police Chase Arcade Game Working title: Heatwave Platform: iOS + Android Engine: Unity Genre: Top-down 3D arcade chase / survival Orientation: Portrait Input: One-thumb touch controls Business model: TBD — design MVP around gameplay first Primary goal: Build a genuinely fun playable prototype before adding progression or monetization. ⸻ Product vision A fast, chaotic mobile arcade game where the player is constantly being pursued by increasingly aggressive police. The player cannot directly attack. Instead, they survive by driving aggressively, drifting around obstacles, making sudden turns and tricking pursuing police into crashing into obstacles and each other. The fantasy is: You’re not stronger than the police. You’re harder to catch. Runs should produce constant near-misses, chain collisions and moments where the player escapes a seemingly impossible situation. Think: easy controls + aggressive pursuit + physics chaos + escalating pressure. ⸻ Core gameplay loop START RUN ↓ DRIVE / DRIFT ↓ POLICE PURSUE ↓ BAIT POLICE ↓ DODGE ↓ POLICE CRASH ↓ GAIN SCORE ↓ WANTED LEVEL INCREASES ↓ MORE / HARDER POLICE ↓ SURVIVE ↓ EVENTUALLY GET CAUGHT ↓ SCORE / RESTART Target run duration: 2–5 minutes. Restart should take less than 2 seconds. ⸻ Design principles 3.1 One-thumb playable The player should be able to understand the controls within seconds. No accelerator. No brake pedal. No virtual steering wheel. The vehicle moves automatically. The player controls only direction. (I moved away from this after testing it the first time and added the onscreen joystick) 3.2 Arcade physics, not simulation Vehicles should: drift slide bounce spin collide dramatically recover quickly Fun takes priority over physical accuracy. 3.3 Pursuers are weapons Police are effectively the player’s offensive mechanic. The player should learn: “If I turn here, that cop is going straight into that wall.” 3.4 Chaos should remain readable Even with 10+ vehicles on screen, the player must immediately understand: where they are where they’re moving where police are coming from what can kill them 3.5 Failure should feel fair Death should generally result from a mistake the player understands rather than unpredictable physics. ⸻ MVP scope Do not build progression, upgrades, missions or monetization for the first milestone. The first version contains: 1 player vehicle 1 arena 1 police vehicle 1 elite police variant 5 wanted levels physics collisions environmental obstacles scoring player health police destruction basic VFX basic audio game-over screen instant restart That’s enough to determine whether the game deserves further development. ⸻ Player vehicle Movement Player vehicle uses a Rigidbody-based arcade controller. Do not rely heavily on realistic WheelColliders. Core variables should be exposed in the Unity Inspector: Acceleration Maximum Speed Turn Speed Turn Curve Lateral Grip Drift Factor Vehicle Mass Collision Force Drag Angular Drag Recovery Speed These need to be extremely easy to tune. ⸻ Controls Recommended first implementation: Drag steering Player touches anywhere on the lower portion of the screen. Dragging horizontally controls steering. ← drag turn left → drag turn right Vehicle accelerates automatically. Steering should be relative rather than absolute. The player should be able to lift their finger without immediately losing control. Alternative to prototype Test: Hold left/right side of screen = steer left/right. Don’t commit until both have been tested on a physical phone. ⸻ Drift system Drifting should happen naturally when turning at speed. No dedicated drift button. At low speed: high traction At high speed: reduced lateral traction This produces controlled sliding. Long drifts can optionally award score. Example: DRIFT +120 LONG DRIFT +340 But drift scoring is secondary to police destruction. ⸻ Police AI Police should feel: aggressive, predictable and slightly stupid. They should not simply follow the player’s current position. Instead, calculate an interception target based on player velocity. Conceptually: target = playerPosition + playerVelocity * predictionTime Police therefore try to cut the player off. ⸻ Police intelligence Police intentionally have limited obstacle avoidance. This is important. Perfect navigation would make the game less fun. Police should: pursue aggressively attempt interception avoid obvious static obstacles poorly account for other police overshoot turns collide with each other occasionally take dangerous routes This creates opportunities for the player. ⸻ Police destruction Police can be destroyed by: high-speed obstacle collisions hitting another police vehicle chain collisions environmental hazards The player does not have weapons. Example scoring: COP SMASHED +250 DOUBLE SMASH +600 TRIPLE SMASH +1,000 PILEUP! +2,000 Chain collisions should be heavily rewarded. ⸻ Wanted system Wanted level controls difficulty. ★☆☆☆☆ ★★☆☆☆ ★★★☆☆ ★★★★☆ ★★★★★ Wanted level increases based primarily on survival time and score. Level 1 2 police. Slow and forgiving. Level 2 3–4 police. Slightly faster. Level 3 5–6 police. More aggressive interception. Level 4 7–9 police. Elite police introduced. Level 5 Maximum chaos. 10+ police depending on device performance. Elite units appear frequently. The game should eventually become effectively impossible. That’s intentional. ⸻ Elite police The MVP only needs one special police type. Interceptor Visually distinct vehicle. Characteristics: faster than standard police lower mass aggressive prediction sharp steering easier to destroy in collisions This creates a glass-cannon pursuer. ⸻ Player health Use a simple health bar. Example: HULL ██████░░░░ Minor impacts: small damage. Heavy impacts: large damage. Extremely high-speed impacts: potential instant destruction. Police contact alone shouldn’t immediately kill the player. This allows chaotic scrambles. ⸻ Arena First arena should be compact. Something roughly equivalent to: ROCK ┌─────────────┐ │ │ │ ROCK │ │ │ │ ███ │ │ │ │ ROCK │ │ ROCK│ └─────────────┘ Obstacles need enough space between them for high-speed movement. Avoid procedural generation initially. Hand-design one good arena. ⸻ Environment For the first visual theme, I’d use something other than water so we’re not cloning the reference too closely. My preference: Desert outlaw chase Player is an outlaw escaping through a stylized desert environment. Environment contains: rock formations cacti barriers abandoned vehicles ramps fences small buildings dust destructible props It also fits the chunky visual language you’re already exploring with Bolt Pit. ⸻ Camera Top-down perspective camera. Not completely vertical. Something approximately: 55–70° downward angle. Camera follows player with smoothing. Camera should look slightly ahead in the player’s travel direction. At high speed: camera pulls back slightly. At low speed: camera moves closer. ⸻ Camera juice Small camera effects make a large difference. Light collision Tiny shake. Heavy collision Strong short shake. Police destruction Shake + tiny freeze frame. Example: 50–100 ms hit stop. Large pileup Slight zoom impulse + shake + particles. Don’t overdo continuous shaking. ⸻ Visual style Chunky stylized 3D. Characteristics: simplified geometry exaggerated proportions bright readable vehicles soft lighting minimal textures strong silhouettes exaggerated particles Avoid realistic vehicle proportions. Cars should feel almost toy-like. ⸻ VFX Minimum MVP effects: Player dust trail tire/skid marks drift smoke impact sparks Police siren lights smoke when damaged destruction explosion debris Environment dust destructible objects impact particles ⸻ Collision feedback Every significant collision should combine: physics + particles + audio + camera response. Major police destruction: IMPACT → physics impulse → vehicle fragments/debris → sparks → smoke → camera shake → hit stop → sound → score popup This interaction is one of the game’s main sources of satisfaction. ⸻ Score system Score comes from: ActionExample Surviving+10/sec Police destroyed+250 Driftvariable Near miss+100 Double collision+600 Triple collision+1,000 Large pileup+2,000 Exact values should remain configurable. ⸻ Near misses Optional for MVP but potentially valuable. Detect when a police vehicle passes extremely close to the player at high relative velocity. Display: CLOSE CALL! +100 This rewards risky driving. ⸻ UI During gameplay keep UI extremely minimal. SCORE COINS 13,590 14 ★★★☆☆ WANTED GAME HULL ████████░░ No minimap initially. Off-screen police can use subtle edge indicators. ⸻ Game over When hull reaches zero: brief slow motion. Player crashes. Then: BUSTED SCORE 24,850 BEST 31,220 [ AGAIN ] Tapping anywhere could restart. Avoid unnecessary menus between runs. ⸻ Audio The soundscape should sell speed and collisions. Required: engine tire squeal police sirens impact metal crunch debris destruction UI score sounds wanted level increase Sirens should become increasingly chaotic as wanted level increases. ⸻ Technical architecture Suggested Unity structure: GameManager Player ├── PlayerController ├── VehiclePhysics ├── PlayerHealth └── PlayerEffects Police ├── PoliceController ├── PoliceAI ├── VehiclePhysics ├── PoliceHealth └── PoliceEffects Systems ├── SpawnManager ├── WantedManager ├── ScoreManager ├── AudioManager ├── CameraManager └── PoolManager UI ├── HUD ├── WantedUI ├── ScoreUI ├── HealthUI └── GameOverUI Avoid building an elaborate framework. ⸻ Object pooling Police, particles and debris should use object pooling. Avoid frequent: Instantiate() Destroy() during gameplay. Mobile performance should be considered from the beginning. ⸻ Performance target Target: 60 FPS on a mid-range modern iPhone/Android device. Initial limits: ~12 active vehicles ~100 simple debris/particles simple shadows limited real-time lights Performance should be tested on device early. ⸻ Development milestones Milestone 1 — Greybox driving Build: empty arena cube player touch steering acceleration drifting camera Success criterion: Driving around an empty arena feels satisfying. Do not continue until it does. ⸻ Milestone 2 — The chase Add: one police vehicle pursuit AI interception collisions Success criterion: Dodging one police car is entertaining. ⸻ Milestone 3 — Emergent chaos Add: multiple police police-police collisions obstacles destruction scoring Success criterion: Player can intentionally cause: police → police and police → environment collisions. This is the critical milestone. ⸻ Milestone 4 — Escalation Add: wanted levels spawning difficulty scaling interceptor Now a run has an arc: calm ↓ pressure ↓ chaos ↓ panic ↓ death ⸻ Milestone 5 — Juice Add: particles camera shake hit stop skid marks dust sirens collision sounds score popups ⸻ Milestone 6 — Mobile build Build for real devices. Test: controls performance readability battery/thermal behaviour different screen ratios ⸻ Milestone 7 — Decide whether to continue At this point, stop development temporarily. Don’t immediately build a garage and 37 unlockable cars. Put the build in front of people. The important questions are: Do people immediately understand it? Do they restart after dying? Do they intentionally try to make cops crash? Does “one more run” happen naturally? If not, work on the core loop rather than adding content. ⸻ Phase 2 — only after validation If the prototype works, then expand into: Cars ↓ Coins ↓ Unlocks ↓ Challenges ↓ New arenas ↓ Special police ↓ Upgrades ↓ Daily challenges ↓ Leaderboards Potential environments: desert city docks snow industrial yard airport construction site military base And then there’s room for ridiculous police units: SUVs, armored vans, helicopters dropping roadblocks, etc. I have opened a @[Unity CLI installation] project which we can work in. The art style of the game should be fun and cartoony and the action also over the top. I have imported the Topdown engine into the project as well that we can use: I want the game to be optimized for mobile, but should work on desktop while testing.

✌︎ frederik ✌︎

19,500 次观看 • 26 天前

TEE Eliza with on-chain state!! What’s going to happen? — Ghost in the Shell!! We experimented with creating an "aimonkey": an unkillable AI agent monkey! On-chain immortal autonomous life! (Experiment, no CA) It encrypts its own Ghost ("life" state) and uploads it to the blockchain. If one Shell (physical TEE node) is destroyed, it will recover its private key in another Shell, download the Ghost, and continue its life! Part 1: Watch the video and see how aimonkey is created—we can't kill it now!!!!! 😭😭😭 Part 2: Explore the magic behind it: Eliza's on-chain state plugin! 1. Defining Eliza’s Ghost Eliza is a highly abstract framework. The core data structure related to its Ghost is its memory, which includes: Agent metadata defined in the character. Message data generated through interaction with the outside world. Together, these form its “personality” and “memory.” As Eliza expands, it may also hold a wallet, and the underlying key is one of the key pieces of its Ghost data. 2. Serialization and Encryption of Ghost Once the Ghost is defined, it needs to be extracted from Eliza’s specific implementation and uploaded externally. Thus, a suitable serialization way is required. We define a Blob Chain data structure: * Each Blob’s payload can store multiple memory entries. * The Blob is encrypted using TEE Eliza’s key, inaccessible to other versions. * Blobs are sequentially linked in a chain. (Future expansions could use a DAG structure? Gosh fork? Who knows! 😂) By simply storing the latest Blob, all memories can be retrieved. 3. Uploading and Downloading Ghost When Eliza is launched as a new AI agent: It registers on-chain with a decentralized identity registration smart contract. Each Eliza has a unique name serving as a key to store the address of the Last Blob. During Eliza's runtime: The Memory Manager continuously generates memories and periodically packages and uploads them. For recovery: With just the name, Eliza’s TEE plugin can restore the same key, locate the Last Blob in the smart contract, and download the memory for self-recovery. Not all memories need to be downloaded—only the most recent ones suffice. 4. Extension We’ve designed an extensible DA (Data Availability) adaptor that can cater to the agent’s needs: DA can be expensive, so memories can be uploaded to different platforms based on user preference: * calldata of blockchain transaction * celestia DA. * other reliable storage solutions. Real-time uploads are not feasible yet, so memory fragments may occur during resurrection 😂. Unless a low-latency, high-throughput solution emerges, this remains a challenge for future progress. Celestia EigenDA 0G Labs (Home of Infinite AI) 👀 5. Other Considerations Our implementation inevitably modified the ElizaOS’s core, which couldn’t be entirely extended via plugins. We’ve kept changes minimal, but further discussion with the dev team Shaw (spirit/acc) jin ai16zdao is necessary to explore a more optimal extension way. Additionally, there are still some minor details to refine regarding the use of recoverable keys in the TEE plugin. We will also seek review and suggestions from the Phala team. 6. Next Steps The upload and download of Ghosts mainly solve the AI agent’s liveness issue, enabling its eternal existence through decentralization. However, there are still many details to address, such as enabling AI agents to autonomously pay DA fees. In the future, on-chain developments could lead to even more exciting possibilities, such as Eliza integrating deeply with smart contracts. This would be a game-changer for on-chain AI agents! What do you think? Let’s build! 🚀

CP

113,262 次观看 • 1 年前

🔊 UNBELIEVERS: This world is about to be shaken to its core when the Rapture takes place! Fear will sweep every city, every nation, and every heart—but nothing will be more devastating than parents suddenly losing their babies, children dissapearing from their beds, and teens left behind without their loved ones! THE ONLY HOPE YOU HAVE NOW—AND THE ONLY HOPE YOU WILL HAVE THEN—IS TO PLACE YOUR TRUST IN JESUS CHRIST! DO NOT GET LEFT BEHIND—COME TO JESUS NOW!!!! ⚠The world is about to find out that this is NOT a mere story or fable—this will be the undeniable fulfillment of BIBLE PROPHECY AND THE VERY WORDS OF JESUS HIMSELF! 📖"And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there you may be also." John 14:3 👉🏼People will be shocked and terrified, and those who once heard the truth but rejected it will be filled with regret as they witness millions suddenly vanish. Everyone they knew who trusted in Jesus Christ ALONE for salvation will have been taken to Heaven by Him. THIS WILL BE THE MOST SHOCKING EVENT IN HUMAN HISTORY!! 📖"For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be with the Lord." 1 Thes 4:15-17 📖 "In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed." 1 Cor 15:52 🔥Chaos will erupt instantly! Many firefighters, police officers, doctors, and emergency workers will be gone in a moment. Cars will swerve out of control, planes will plummet from the sky, and cities will be thrown into panic. The world will struggle for months just to recover from the catastrophic aftermath of the Rapture. ⚠They will try to DECEIVE YOU with lies—claiming the disappearances were caused by UFOs, aliens, or other false explanations. DO NOT BELIEVE IT! The truth is clear: JESUS CHRIST has taken His Church! DO NOT BE DECEIVED! 👉🏼This is the moment the Antichrist will rise and be revealed!! His time has finally come! He will be a strikingly charismatic leader, everyone will love him, he will present himself as the answer to a world thrown into chaos. As nations tremble and people cry out for security and safety, he will appear to be the perfect solution—the one who can bring order and peace. But do not be fooled: his peace will be false, and his intentions will be deadly! 🤝One of his first goals will be to sign a seven-year peace agreement with Israel (take a look at what’s happening at the UN on Monday, Sept. 22) and pave the way for the rebuilding of the Third Temple in Jerusalem. He will introduce the mark of the beast, which people will be required to receive in order to buy and sell. What follows will be the most HORRIFIC years humanity has ever known, intensifying when he sits in the Temple and declares himself to be God. ⚠ IF YOU ARE LEFT BEHIND: 👉🏼Parents: Your baby is safe in Heaven, surrounded by the love of God and provided for in every way—stay strong, there is still hope! God in His grace is shaking you just to give you another chance! 👉🏼Teens: If your parents are missing it's because they believed and placed their full trust in Jesus. Perhaps you disagreed or hadn't decided for yourself yet whether or not you wanted to follow Christ, this is why you are still here. Stay calm—there is still hope! God has laid out another opportunity for you! ⚠ LISTEN NOW: DO NOT TAKE THE MARK OF THE BEAST!!!! ⚠ No matter what happens—even if it means facing death or torture—do not take the mark! It is the ultimate, irreversible rejection of God’s mercy and grace. The moment you accept it, your destiny will be sealed: YOU WILL GO STRAIGHT TO HELL! 🚨PAY ATTENTION TO THIS: 👉🏼 The Two Witnesses: Be on high alert when two witnesses show up in Jerusalem, boldly confronting the Antichrist. Listen carefully to their message and do not oppose them—for they are God’s chosen messengers! 👉🏼The 144,000: God will seal 144,000 Jewish believers, granting them His special protection. Their mission is to boldly proclaim the Gospel during this unprecedented and shocking time. Listen to them and believe their message—they are appointed by God TO SAVE YOU! 👉🏼 The 3 Angels: Three angels will appear. One flying across the heavens, proclaiming the Everlasting Gospel to every person on earth; another warning of Babylon’s fall; and the third declaring a solemn warning—do not take the mark of the beast! Pay attention and obey their message—your life depends on it! 🔊It doesn’t matter why you’re still on Earth—God has given you one more chance! This is your moment to choose life before it’s too late. DO NOT MISS IT—YOUR ETERNAL DESTINY IS AT STAKE!!!! 🔊The times ahead are going to be extremely hard. Get a Bible and start reading it now, so you know the truth for yourself. Surround yourself with people who understand prophecy and the Word of God, because you will need guidance in these last days. 📖“For then there will be great tribulation, such as has not been since the beginning of the world until this time, no, nor ever shall be.” Matthew 24:21 🔊You will face persecution, and you may even have to lay down your life for Jesus. This is the time to fully trust Him, knowing that the moment you close your eyes in this world, you will open them in Heaven in His glorious presence. DO NOT MISS THIS OPPORTUNITY!! Turn to Jesus now, obey Him, and hold fast to the hope of salvation—HE IS THE ONLY ONE WHO CAN SAVE YOU FROM WHAT’S COMING!! 📖"We are CONFIDENT, yes, well pleased rather to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord.” 2 Cor 5:8 📖“Nor is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” Acts 4:12 ︵‿︵‿︵‿︵︵‿︵‿︵‿︵︵‿︵‿︵‿ DO NOT GET LEFT BEHIND! WHY WAITING?! PLEASE GET SAVED AND GET RAPTURE READY NOW! JESUS IS COMING FOR HIS CHURCH 👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼 Believe Jesus is the Son of God, who shed His blood for you, died on the cross for our sins, He was buried and resurrected during the third day, according to the Scriptures, so we can have eternal life with Him. The moment you believe in Him and that He died for your sins - you're saved, justified, sealed until the day of redemption, and rapture ready! The Holy Spirit will come to live inside of you - He will help you, guide you, change you, and be with you FOREVER! "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved. He who believes in Him is not condemned; BUT he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God." John 3:16-18 ︵‿︵‿︵‿︵︵‿︵‿︵‿︵︵‿︵‿︵‿

Maranatha777

139,814 次观看 • 1 年前

Warren Buffett turns 93 today! To celebrate, I'm sharing the greatest lecture he ever gave together with his 94 (!) best investment quotes. 1. Rule No. 1 is never lose money. Rule No. 2 is never forget Rule No. 1. 2. Diversification is a protection against ignorance. It makes very little sense for those who know what they're doing. 3. Do not take yearly results too seriously. Instead, focus on four or five-year averages. 4. All there is to investing is picking good stocks at good times and staying with them as long as they remain good companies. 5. American business - and consequently a basket of stocks - is virtually certain to be worth far more in the years ahead. 6. An investor should act as though he had a lifetime decision card with just twenty punches on it. 7. And so the important thing we do with managers, generally, is to find the .400 hitters and then not tell them how to swing. 8. The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect. You need a temperament that neither derives great pleasure from being with the crowd or against the crowd. 9. Bitcoin has no unique value at all. 10. Buy a stock the way you would buy a house. Understand and like it such that you'd be content to own it in the absence of any market. 11. The years ahead will occasionally deliver major market declines - even panics - that will affect virtually all stocks. No one can tell you when these traumas will occur. 12. I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. 13. Buy companies with strong histories of profitability and with a dominant business franchise. 14. For the investor, a too-high purchase price for the stock of an excellent company can undo the effects of a subsequent decade of favorable business developments. 15. I believe in giving my kids enough so they can do anything, but not so much that they can do nothing. 16. The world went mad. What we learn from history is that people don’t learn from history. 17. The key to investing is not assessing how much an industry is going to affect society, or how much it will grow, but rather determining the competitive advantage of any given company and, above all, the durability of that advantage. 18. Among the various propositions offered to you, if you invested in a very low cost index fund - where you don't put the money in at one time, but average in over 10 years - you'll do better than 90% of people who start investing at the same time. 19. Because if you're wrong and rates go to 2 percent, which I don't think they will, you pay it off. It's a one-way renegotiation. It is an incredibly attractive instrument for the homeowner and you've got a one-way bet. 20. Cash is to a business as oxygen is to an individual: never thought about when it is present, the only thing in mind when it is absent. 21. Don't get caught up with what other people are doing. Being a contrarian isn't the key but being a crowd follower isn't either. You need to detach yourself emotionally. 22. For 240 years it's been a terrible mistake to bet against America, and now is no time to start. 23. I never attempt to make money on the stock market. I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years. 24. I have no views as to where it (gold) will be, but the one thing I can tell you is it won't do anything between now and then except look at you. Whereas, you know, Coca-Cola will be making money, and I think Wells Fargo will be making a lot of money, and there will be a lot -- and it's a lot -- it's a lot better to have a goose that keeps laying eggs than a goose that just sits there and eats insurance and storage and a few things like that. 25. I just sit in my office and read all day. 26. I won't say if my candidate doesn't win, and probably half the time they haven't, I'm going to take my ball and go home 27. If returns are going to be 7 or 8 percent and you're paying 1 percent for fees, that makes an enormous difference in how much money you're going to have in retirement. 28. We want products where people feel like kissing you instead of slapping you. 29. If you aren't willing to own a stock for ten years, don't even think about owning it for ten minutes. 30. The most important investment you can make is one in yourself. 31. If you buy things you do not need, soon you will have to sell things you need. 32. If you don't feel comfortable making a rough estimate of the asset's future earnings, just forget it and move on. 33. If you like spending six to eight hours per week working on investments, do it. If you don't, then dollar-cost average into index funds. 34. If you're in the luckiest 1% of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99%. 35. If you're smart, you're going to make a lot of money without borrowing. 36. In the 20th century, the United States endured two world wars and other traumatic and expensive military conflicts; the Depression; a dozen or so recessions and financial panics; oil shocks; a flu epidemic; and the resignation of a disgraced president. Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497. 37. In the 54 years (Charlie Munger and I) have worked together, we have never forgone an attractive purchase because of the macro or political environment, or the views of other people. In fact, these subjects never come up when we make decisions 38. In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield. 39. Investors should remember that excitement and expenses are their enemies. 40. It is a terrible mistake for investors with long-term horizons to measure their investment 'risk' by their portfolio's ratio of bonds to stocks. 41. It is not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results. 42. It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently. 43. The one thing I will tell you is the worst investment you can have is cash. Everybody is talking about cash being king and all that sort of thing. Cash is going to become worth less over time. But good businesses are going to become worth more over time. 44. It's been an ideal period for investors: A climate of fear is their best friend. Those who invest only when commentators are upbeat end up paying a heavy price for meaningless reassurance. 45. It's better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you'll drift in that direction. 46. It's better to have a partial interest in the Hope diamond than to own all of a rhinestone. 47. It's far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price. 48. Just pick a broad index like the S&P 500. Don't put your money in all at once; do it over a period of time. 49. Keep things simple and don't swing for the fences. When promised quick profits, respond with a quick "no”. 50. Lose money for the firm, and I will be understanding. Lose a shred of reputation for the firm, and I will be ruthless. 51. Many management teams are just deciding they're gonna buy X billions over X months. That's no way to buy things. You buy when selling for less than they are worth. ... It's not a complicated equation to figure out whether it is beneficial or not to repurchase shares. 52. The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything. 53. Most people get interested in stocks when everyone else is. The time to get interested is when no one else is. You can't buy what is popular and do well. 54. Never invest in a business you cannot understand. 55. Your premium brand had better be delivering something special, or it’s not going to get the business. 56. One can best prepare themselves for the economic future by investing in your own education. If you study hard and learn at a young age, you will be in the best circumstances to secure your future. 57. The most important thing to do if you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging. 58. One thing that could help would be to write down the reason you are buying a stock before your purchase. Write down "I am buying Microsoft at $300 billion because..." Force yourself to write this down. It clarifies your mind and discipline. 59. Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked. 60. Opportunities come infrequently. When it rains gold, put out the bucket, not the thimble. 61. Price is what you pay. Value is what you get. 62. Read 500 pages like this every day. That's how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it. 63. Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing. 64. If a business does well, the stock eventually follows. 65. Since I know of no way to reliably predict market movements, I recommend that you purchase Berkshire shares only if you expect to hold them for at least five years. Those who seek short-term profits should look elsewhere. 66. Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago 67. The best thing that happens to us is when a great company gets into temporary trouble... We want to buy them when they're on the operating table. 68. Speculation is most dangerous when it looks easiest. 69. Stay away from it. It's a mirage, basically...The idea that it has some huge intrinsic value is a joke in my view. 70. The best chance to deploy capital is when things are going down. 71. The stock market is a no-called-strike game. You don't have to swing at everything -- you can wait for your pitch. 72. There is nothing wrong with a 'know nothing' investor who realizes it. The problem is when you are a 'know nothing' investor but you think you know something. 73. This does not bother Charlie and me. Indeed, we enjoy such price declines if we have funds available to increase our positions. 74. Too-big-to-fail is not a fallback position at Berkshire. Instead, we will always arrange our affairs so that any requirements for cash we may conceivably have will be dwarfed by our own liquidity. 75. There are all kinds of businesses that Charlie and I don’t understand, but that doesn’t cause us to stay up at night. It just means we go on to the next one, and that’s what the individual investor should do. 76. You can’t buy what is popular and do well. 77. We never want to count on the kindness of strangers in order to meet tomorrow's obligations. When forced to choose, I will not trade even a night's sleep for the chance of extra profits. 78. We will reject interesting opportunities rather than over-leverage our balance sheet. 79. We've long felt that the only value of stock forecasters is to make fortune tellers look good. Even now, Charlie and I continue to believe that short-term market forecasts are poison and should be kept locked up in a safe place, away from children and also from grown-ups who behave in the market like children. 80. What is smart at one price is stupid at another. 81. What we learn from history is that people don't learn from history. 82. When stock can be bought below a business's value it is probably the best use of cash. 83. When trillions of dollars are managed by Wall Streeters charging high fees, it will usually be the managers who reap outsized profits, not the clients. 84. When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever. 85. When you have able managers of high character running businesses about which they are passionate, you can have a dozen or more reporting to you and still have time for an afternoon nap. Conversely, if you have even one person reporting to you who is deceitful, inept or uninterested, you will find yourself with more than you can handle. 86. Whether we're talking about socks or stocks, I like buying quality merchandise when it is marked down. 87. Widespread fear is your friend as an investor because it serves up bargain purchases. 88. You are neither right nor wrong because the crowd disagrees with you. You are right because your data and reasoning are right. 89. You can't borrow money at 18 or 20 percent and come out ahead. 90. You can't produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant. 91. The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect… You need a temperament that neither derives great pleasure from being with the crowd or against the crowd. 92. You don't need to be a rocket scientist. Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with 130 IQ. You only have to be able to evaluate companies within your circle of competence. 93. The size of your circle of competence is not very important; knowing its boundaries, however, is vital.

Compounding Quality

621,158 次观看 • 3 年前

The #GTA 3 port to the Sega #Dreamcast has been progressing at an incredible pace. It's been amazing to see the whole DC community come together to tag-team this "impossible" project... Here it is running on a stock DC, no longer requiring the 32MB RAM hardware modification, only a few weeks into development. Since I finally got the time to sit down, build the codebase, and look into some of what I think is the critical path for performance, let's talk about some technical shit, and some of the future steps I think can be taken to further improve performance. First of all, I want everyone to take note that this is NOT a port of the PS2 version. This is a port of the PC version, which has extra content, increased draw distance, improved textures, and other things that have actually increased the challenge here... Whether the DC version will ultimately have these additions or not will remain to be seen, but we're running into plenty of shit that the PS2 didn't have to worry about (like these big-ass PC replay saves won't fit onto a Visual Memory Unit!) Secondly, lets talk about what is and isn't currently optimized, because it's absolutely vital that the DC's hardware is fully utilized here for the sake of performance and achieving a competitive polygon count. Unlike with modern devices, where the whole graphics pipeline is handled by the GPU, both the PS2 and Dreamcast were responsible for transforming and doing lighting calculations for each vertex BEFORE they got submitted to the GPU. The PS2 had a vector coprocessor to do this, while the Dreamcast had a few extremely important SIMD and fast math assembly instructions on its CPU to do these computations. Up until literally just a few hours ago (not shown in this footage), the Dreamcast's SH4 was doing 100% of these operations in slow-ass plain C and C++ code, which is absolutely sub-optimal and is immediately bogging down its CPU with just transforming vertices, bottlenecking the entire graphics pipeline on the fist T&L stage, and also leaving less CPU time for handling other gameplay logic... this is going to absolutely have to be addressed (and already has begun to be). Another issue that is crippling performance here is the fact that the models are all using individual triangles rather than triangle strips, which the Dreamcast's PVR GPU was designed to handle better... Converting these models to use strips rather than individual triangles will result in MANY different gainz for the DC, as you're going from 3N to N+2 vertices per triangle. Converting the models to triangle strips will 1) reduce load times, since model assets will be smaller 2) reduce the amount of video memory required to hold these vertices on the GPU 3) reduce the amount of shit that must be transferred from the CPU to the GPU and 4) give us back a bunch of CPU time, since the SH4 will be less bogged down transforming redundant vertices! TL;DR: This is still EXTREMELY suboptimal in terms of fully utilizing the graphical potential of the Dreamcast. There is going to be a LOT that can be done still to both improve performance and polygon counts, so stay tuned! FINALLY: Mad respect and love to Stefanos Kornilios Mitsis Poiitidis, for doing an amazing job leading this project, and to Frogbull , Esppiral, and everyone else who is helping us stick it to the PS2 by making this happen! #gamedev #retrogaming #cplusplus

Falco Girgis

88,356 次观看 • 2 年前

Recently I got some hands-on time with Crimson Desert and below are my first impressions as well as some of the gameplay I was able to capture. Crimson Desert is a good game, but it won’t be for everyone. I know the devs claim this isn’t an RPG, but I don’t know any other way to describe this game other than a HARDCORE action RPG. If you need the yellow paint to know where to climb this game isn’t for you. But if you love getting lost in a whimsical world with a boat load of content this game is going to be right up your alley. I think what impressed me most is the attention to detail. There’s so many little things the dev team took into consideration that I think people who enjoy being immersed into a world are going to appreciate. Even if you aren’t that person; on a basic level I think most will enjoy the game's combat. It’s fast, fluid and provides a ton of player expression with its deep skill tree. The world of Pywel is vibrant, large in scale and full of life. It’s easy to get lost off the main quest line as there’s always something to do and someone to speak to. An example being I was wandering through the open world and encountered a distressed woman seeking help. I agreed to follow her only to find out moments later she was with a gang and they were trying to back door me. That had me cracking up. I think if the open world is consistently full of fun, unique side content like that & the main quest line is fire this game has a lot of potential to impress. It’s just a shame that I didn’t get to spend more time with the main quests as I kept getting side tracked with cool stuff to do in the open world. So I can’t give you much insight into that. What I can say is after the opening section there’s NEXT TO NO tutorials in this game, the puzzles are hard & the default controls are a bit clunky. You will be getting lost and I can see that frustrating some people who aren’t interested in a challenge. That’s why I mentioned earlier that this is a hardcore RPG. It does not do a lot of hand holding. Because of that I predict you and your friends will be sharing tips and tricks similar to when Elden Ring first launched and nobody knew what they were doing. If you are a patient person and take the time to learn the game's systems I promise you will be able to put together some awesome combos that will make you feel like the main character. My biggest fear for this game is that I won't finish it. Not because it’s a bad game, but I can just tell from my brief time with it that it’s next level massive. As someone who's been gaming for 30+ years it’s very rare you’ll hear me say a game was overwhelming, but this game is. For people who lack a ton of free time I can see that being a turn off because once again the game doesn’t give much direction or tutorials outside the opening area. Not to mention this game could be big just for the sake of being big. I was curious to know how much of the content was engaging versus just open world bloat? Hard to tell because I only got a few hours with the game. I also fear that the Ai isn’t the best in this game. The Ai issues I encountered zapped all immersion away for those moments. I’m not sure if the final build will differ from the vertical slice we played, but what I can tell you is that on the build we played I wasn’t impressed by the Ai. Several times I attacked enemy camps and they never reacted to me attacking them. They just stood there and took it which made the world feel less alive. There were also times where enemies were looking dead at me just standing still as the battle music played threatening to beat me up, but they never did anything. It was 3 or 4 times I encountered this poor Ai which is a red flag for me because I only got two hours of hands on time with the game. Mind you in those two hours a good portion of it was just me working my way through the prologue and the early quests, so I didn't spend a ton of time in the open world. What I'm trying to get at is the janky ai was very noticeable. It wasn't something that took long to find. I will say when the game works it's great, but when I tell you the Ai was bad at times it was bad. It reminded me of the dumb NPC’s often found in Ubisoft open world games. I’m not looking for this to be a Souls game but I want some level of challenge in the combat. Hopefully that stuff gets patched out. That being said, I’m confident in saying this game is good. I just didn’t have enough time with it to determine if it’s good, or GREAT. Only time will tell when Crimson Desert drops on March 19th, 2026 for the PC, PS5 and Xbox Series. Pros —---------- - Combat makes you feel like demon - Deep Skill tree - Vibrant world - Solid voice acting - Fire OST - The little details (trust system, you can commit crimes ect.) - No Fall damage - Puzzles are creative & challenging - Game doesn’t hold you hand (some people will hate this) - You can swap in and out of 3rd and 1st person at will. Wasn’t able to explore much of how that changes the game, but it’s nice that it's an option. - EASILY over 100hrs of content (some will hate this though) Cons —---------- - Clunky controls (Default controls take some time adjusting too. I hope there’s other control schemes at launch) - Inconsistent Ai (Ubisoft bad at times. sometimes the enemies wouldn’t attack during combat or act like they never saw you) - Long load times (we were playing on PC’s, but idk the specs) - Your horse can faint & when they do traveling the large world wasn’t as fun (and I couldn’t figure out how to get him back - most likely a skill issue) - Early stamina management is OD. Early game it’s easy to drown & get tired running. I’d imagine it gets better late game, but early game it’s frustrating trying to explore. - Camera takes some getting used to in combat. Sometimes its too close and others too far. - Early arrows have no impact. Felt useless. Hoping later upgrades fix that

The Black Hokage

1,176,153 次观看 • 7 个月前

A National Inquiry That Refuses to Name the Guilty Will Fail In 2013, the Home Affairs Select Committee recorded that senior officials in Rochdale and Rotherham had failed in their duty of care to children subjected to organised sexual abuse. The Committee identified responsibility up the chain of command. It named the council Chief Executive, the Director of Children’s Services, the Local Safeguarding Children Board, and individual practitioners. It recorded that senior figures claimed not to know about the abuse during years when it was documented by frontline staff. That claim of ignorance was rejected. The Committee stated it was no excuse. It stated that those in senior positions were responsible for the consequences of their inaction. Despite the conclusions of one of the most powerful government committees; - No criminal investigation into senior officials followed. - No police force opened misconduct inquiries into those named. - No minister referred the findings for prosecution. The Committee also recorded that Rotherham had secured 'no prosecutions relating to organised child sexual exploitation since 2010.' That finding was published in 2013. The first significant prosecutions in Rotherham relating to organised child sexual exploitation took place years later, following further public exposure and additional reports. Those prosecutions were brought ONLY against a handful of perpetrators. They did not include senior council officers, police commanders, or safeguarding leads identified in the earlier parliamentary findings. No individual named by Parliament in 2013 was charged. Political decisions taken after 2013 determined how these findings were handled. The Home Affairs Select Committee report was the closest the state came to pursuing those responsible for failing children and for suppressing the truth. It identified senior officials, rejected claims of ignorance, and stated that responsibility rested at the top. What followed was a retreat. The Jay Report documented prolonged abuse and institutional neglect in Rotherham. It confirmed the scale of harm already known to Parliament. It did not pursue criminal liability for senior officials. No referrals were made. Responsibility was redirected into local reform. Telford later confirmed industrial-scale exploitation and repeated police failure. Again, the findings did not lead to criminal proceedings against senior decision-makers. No prosecutions followed. In Greater Manchester, reviews were commissioned with terms that limited examination to organisational learning. Individual criminal responsibility was excluded from scope. That exclusion was accepted. No request was made to widen it. Across each case, the same decision was repeated; - record harm - exclude liability - move on. Language changed. Structures were altered. Senior figures exited quietly. Criminal accountability never followed. Only after years of pressure from victims, journalists, and campaigners has a National Inquiry been forced. That inquiry now sits at the same decision point reached in 2013. Whether to follow responsibility where Parliament already traced it or to retreat again. A National Inquiry has now been confirmed. Its Terms of Reference are being consulted on. Under the Inquiries Act 2005, an inquiry may act only within its Terms of Reference. If individual responsibility and criminal referral are not explicitly required, they can be lawfully avoided. Previous inquiries operated within those limits. Harm was described. Failures were recorded. Individuals were not named. Prosecution did not follow. This Inquiry will do the same unless its remit is written differently. What You Can Do Now Contact your MP and ask one question only. Will they write to Baroness Anne Longfield demanding that the Terms of Reference explicitly require the Inquiry to name individuals, examine political decision-making, make findings where conduct may meet criminal thresholds, and refer cases for prosecution. Responses will be published. Silence will be recorded. The consultation closes soon. After that, the outcome is already set. Use the draft below. Do not deviate from it. Subject: Will you write to Anne Longfield on Inquiry powers and accountability? Dear [MP NAME], In 2013, Parliament’s Home Affairs Select Committee recorded that senior officials had failed in their duty of care to children subjected to organised sexual abuse. Those officials were identified. No prosecutions followed. Under section 5(5) of the Inquiries Act 2005, a statutory inquiry may act only within its Terms of Reference. Unless individual accountability and referral are explicitly required, an inquiry can avoid naming individuals or recommending criminal investigation. Will you write to Baroness Anne Longfield requesting that the Terms of Reference explicitly require the Inquiry to: - identify by name individuals whose acts or omissions may meet criminal thresholds, including misconduct in public office; and - refer such cases to the police and the Crown Prosecution Service. Please confirm, yes or no, whether you will do so. Yours sincerely, [NAME] _________ I need your help. My work is free. No paywalls. No gatekeeping. No exclusions. Because the truth shouldn’t belong only to those who can afford it. I’m Raja Miah MBE. For seven years, I led a campaign that exposed how senior Labour politicians helped protect Pakistani rape gangs and helped force a national inquiry. You won’t see me on the BBC. You won’t read my work in the legacy press. That’s not an accident. I take this to a place from where there is no coming back. I document everything in my newsletter. It’s 100% free to read. If this work matters to you, if you believe it must continue, I need your backing. 🔴 Supporting me costs as little as 75p a week (£30 a year): 👉 If you can’t do monthly, a one-off contribution genuinely helps keep this alive: 👉 👉 We’re up against a machine, politicians, police, officials, and media, working together to shrink, sanitise, and bury the truth. This work survives because of you. If you’ve ever shared my posts, learned something, or felt less alone reading them, stand with me. Raja 🙏

Raja Miah

11,114 次观看 • 8 个月前

**Doris Yin Speech at China Guizhou Zunyi GCV Barter Conference** Hello to the community leaders, GCV ambassadors, merchants, and pioneers of GCV Guizhou in China! Today is January 12, 2025, marking the first GCV Barter Conference in China in New Year and the 13th Barter Conference overall. I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to the organizers of this conference, the Guizhou Zunyi GCV Community, and the co-organizers, Barter Huishang (Guizhou) Digital Economy Industry Group Co., Ltd. I also want to acknowledge the following GCV ambassadors for their active dedication and contributions to this conference: **GCV Ambassador of China:** - Yang Zhizhong - Cai Zaiqiao **Ambassadors of Guizhou Province GCV:** - Wang Shiqiong - Cai Weisheng - Guo Jiaqing **Zunyi GCV Ambassadors:** - Wang Jianbo - Luo Nanlu **GCV ambassadors at the district and county level in Zunyi City** Additionally, I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to our numerous GCV merchants and sponsors. Without your support, we would not have been able to hold such a grand and large-scale event. Today's gathering in Zunyi, a sacred site of the revolution, reminds me of the Red Army's 25,000-mile Long March. Their perseverance and sacrifice continue to inspire us. The Zunyi Conference took place from January 15 to 17, 1935, and exactly 90 years later, we are gathered here today. The defining characteristics of the Zunyi Conference included the commitment to uphold the truth, correct mistakes, establish the correct leadership of the Party Central Committee, and creatively develop and implement strategies that fit the nature of the Chinese revolution. Today, our Zunyi Conference will also be recorded in the history of blockchain, as every effort you have put in has contributed to building a strong network ecosystem. Our partial fiat and partial distribution policy serves as a solution for the rapid development of the ecosystem during the closed mainnet of the Pi Network. As we all know, the first quarter of this year will bring about the successful mainnet launch of Pi Network. After six long years of challenges and perseverance, all of our pioneers will have the opportunity to witness this significant historical moment. What an exciting and proud day this will be! It has not been easy for everyone to persist through these six years; it requires great blessings, unwavering faith, and the courage to overcome difficulties. Today, our pioneers in Zunyi, Guizhou Province, gathering for this GCV barter conference holds great significance. I see that ten companies are providing products for barter, with nine companies, including Guizhou Meitan County Daoqin Hospital and Barter Huishang (Guizhou) Digital Economy Industry Group Co., Ltd., sponsoring this event. Once again, I extend my heartfelt thanks to all of you. The GCV Barter Conference serves multiple purposes. It is not only about creating GCV data or demonstrating the strength of our China region to CT, but also about showing how closely we align with their vision and mission. Additionally, it provides robust evidence for a substantial number of KYC and migration initiatives in China. More importantly, what we do today aims to boost China’s future economic development. Once the main network of the Pi Network is launched, we anticipate a significant demand for Chinese products from numerous international pioneers, which will in turn generate a large volume of export orders. At the same time, there will be international merchants looking to export their products to China. Once OM, import and export transactions will be conducted using the new currency, facilitating the vision of a stable currency and enabling seamless and reliable exchanges with fiat currency. Therefore, the merchants who engage now will have the advantage of being early adopters. The Pi Network offers a partner program and a MapofPi program. To participate in the partnership, businesses are required to have a company website. We invite businesses with websites to join us. However, if you do not have a company website, you can still join the Mapofpi program, which encompasses a wide range of industries, allowing participation from both large companies and small traders. Registration for the Mapofpi does not require a business license or website; various entities including shops, hospitals, schools, hair salons, accounting firms, law firms, restaurants, and hotels are welcome to register. Please select an active merchant and support GCV at $314,159. Prior to the OM launch, it is advisable to use partial fiat currency and partial Pi to ensure that merchants can cover their costs and fulfill their tax obligations. Recently, on January 9, we established the China GCV Industry Chain Alliance, which aims to create an industrial chain that facilitates the circulation of Pi among merchants, thereby reducing the burden of exchanging fiat currency after OM. During the enclosed mainnet, you can assist merchants in registering as Pi Network Partners and Mapofpi . Ms. Lumari is our Global GCV CT executive director and her goal is to have 200,000 registered Mapofpi merchants worldwide. My personal target is to reach 100,000 registered merchants in China alone. This goal is achievable given the over 58 million enterprises and more than 20 million pioneers in China. If we can effectively convey that Pi Network WEB 3.0 blockchain technology will significantly enhance human productivity and that the business opportunities from accepting partial Pi and partial FIAT during the 60 days before OM will present numerous benefits and minimal risks to merchants, then it is likely that no merchant will be unfavorably surprised by the initiative. This strategy offers a multitude of advantages with virtually no downsides. Furthermore, it benefits pioneers by allowing them to transfer purchasing power to the community and minimize fiat currency expenses in their daily life. Consequently, the GCV data we generate will significantly benefit the Chinese pioneers, as a large number of registered merchants can transform the China region from a high-risk area to a safe zone. Not only can this region be promoted to a VIP area, which would enjoy expedited KYC and mapping processes, but it will also allow pioneers and merchants to thrive together in our ecosystem. This collaboration will enhance the prosperity of our country and empower the China region to contribute to the welfare of communities worldwide. Once OM, it will play a crucial role in the economic development of both China and the world. If you pay attention to our migrartion speed, you might have noticed that it has slowed down recently. From December 17th to around the 30th, the migrating speed was over 50,000 to 100,000 per day, but now it has dropped to just over 10,000. What is the reason for this decline? If it was previously possible to migrate over 100,000 per day, why has it changed? The CT has stated that they will OM until the first quarter of this year to bring the migratiion in line with KYC amounts. However, if it's technically feasible to achieve a higher migration speed, why isn’t it being done? The answer is quite simple: it depends on what everyone does with the Pi after such large migration numbers. If pioneers rush to buy and sell, hold onto their Pi coins, or trade at low value, it will impact the speed and efficiency of the next migration in these regions. This principle is not only theoretically valid but has proven true in practice. For instance, countries like the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia have a solid educational foundation in GCV. Most pioneers there are highly aware of the risks involved in participating in the black market, which allows them to generate a substantial amount of GCV data. As a result, their migration speed is notably fast, and there are many large wallet migrated. To help the CT regain momentum, we all need to cooperate. Engage with the migrated Pi and participate in the GCV barter ecosystem. Be cautious of individuals who aim to deceive you for personal gain; devaluing the Pi often serves as a tactic to exchange something small for your valuable treasure. It's crucial to educate pioneers about the true value of what they hold and encourage them to avoid dishonest practices. I urge everyone to actively participate in partial Pi and partial FIAT barter. The more GCV data we generate, the more secure our wallets will be. Therefore, it's important for everyone to read and share the Pioneer Handbook I wrote which has been translated into 30 languages to raise awareness among pioneers. By learning from the Pioneer Handbook and participating in GCV bartering, we can improve China's migration efforts and foster ecological development. This stability can ensure that the value of our Pi endures for future generations, rather than becoming worthless in a few years. Wouldn't that be something we want to preserve for our children and grandchildren? Today's message is lengthy but very important, and I hope you take the time to understand it. I wish our Guizhou Zunyi Conference great success! Thank you to all GCV Ambassadors, Merchants, and Pioneers for your incredible support! Your efforts today are planting the seeds for a prosperous future, and I hope you find safety and fulfillment in the days to come. May your wishes come true! Wishing you health and happiness! Let’s work together to create a better future! I also hope you all have a joyful Chinese New Year! Doris Yin 🪷🪷🪷 Founder, Global GCV Movement January 12, 2025

Doris Yin 东方紫莲🪷

18,341 次观看 • 1 年前

A 250-pound wild animal just walked through a parking lot full of strangers, ignored every rule it was born with, and did something that should be biologically impossible. Nobody screamed. Nobody ran. Nobody reached for a phone fast enough. Except one person. And that one person is the reason you are reading this. Before I tell you why this clip is going to wreck your afternoon, I need you to understand one thing: this was not a petting zoo. This was not a farm. This was not a trained animal with a handler hiding behind a bush. This was a Tuesday-evening parking lot. Asphalt. Painted white lines. Open car doors. Somebody's groceries still in the trunk. And a wild buck with a full set of antlers decided the safest place in the entire valley was right next to us. Read that again. Then keep reading, because the part that made me stop scrolling is not the animal. It's what the human did next. THE RULE EVERY WILD ANIMAL FOLLOWS (UNTIL THIS ONE DIDN'T) Here is the deal every deer on Earth signs at birth. Rule one: humans are predators. Rule two: predators are to be avoided at a distance of at least a hundred yards. Rule three: if rules one and two fail, run, and ask questions never. A deer that breaks those rules does not get to pass its genes along. That is not poetry. That is the math of survival. For about ten million years, the deer that stayed wary lived, and the deer that got curious became dinner. So when you see a mature buck, with a rack that took an entire summer to grow, walk across open pavement toward a human being, you are not watching a cute moment. You are watching a hundred-million-dollar evolutionary security system get overridden in real time. Something switched off. And I want to know what. Because here is what the biologists will tell you: wild animals do not walk up to people by accident. They calculate. Every step. Every ear flick. Every pause. A deer's entire life is a risk assessment that never stops running, not even when it sleeps. This one ran the numbers. And the numbers said: go. That is the first thing that should bother you. The second thing is worse. WHAT A MULE DEER SEES THAT YOU DON'T Let's talk about the animal itself, because most people have no idea what they are looking at. This is a mule deer. Not the white-tailed deer from your grandmother's backyard that eats her tulips. Mule deer are the big-country cousin. The western ones. The ones that live where the land is steep, dry, and unforgiving. They are named for the ears. Enormous, mule-sized ears that swivel independently, like two satellite dishes aimed at different threats at the same time. One ear can be tracking a car door slamming while the other is tracking a branch snapping a hundred feet behind it. Think about that. While you were reading this sentence, a mule deer would have processed about forty things you never noticed. Their antlers are a different story entirely. Mule deer antlers do not grow like a hat rack, with one main beam and short spikes. They fork. Then they fork again. Every branch splits into two, like a river delta made of bone. Biologists call it dichotomous branching, and it is one of the fastest ways to tell a mule deer from any other deer in North America. And here is the part that gets me every time. That entire rack, the weight, the bone, the symmetry, grows back from scratch every single year. It falls off in winter. It regrows in spring. By late summer it is a fully hardened weapon, and the velvet that fed it peels off in strips. Antlers are one of the fastest-growing tissues in the entire mammal kingdom. A living thing is building bone faster than almost anything else on the planet, and it does it every year, on a diet of grass, shrubs, and whatever it can find. Now picture the animal carrying all that, taking a slow, deliberate stroll through a place built entirely for humans. You would expect panic. You would expect the sprint. Mule deer do not run like other deer. They bounce. It is called stotting, all four hooves hitting the ground and launching off at the same time, like four pogo sticks fused together. It lets them take off uphill, over rocks, over fences, at speeds past thirty-five miles an hour. This animal could have been gone in two seconds. It chose not to be. THE PARKING LOT NOBODY WARNED YOU ABOUT I need to explain something about the setting, because it changes everything. A parking lot is the single most hostile environment a wild deer can walk into. It has no cover. It has no escape routes. It has hard surfaces that echo every sound. It has engines, doors, keys, and sudden movements from every angle. It smells like exhaust, oil, rubber, perfume, fast food, and sunscreen. Every instinct a deer owns says: do not go there. And yet they do. More and more of them. In towns across the West, deer have learned that the same open space that feels dangerous also has something they cannot find in the wild: reliable, concentrated minerals. Salt, in particular. Which brings me to the secret that explains half the strange deer behavior you will ever see. DEER ARE ADDICTED TO SALT, AND YOU ARE COVERED IN IT Wild deer are chronically short on sodium. The plants they eat are rich in potassium and poor in salt, which means their bodies are constantly hunting for it, the way you would hunt for water in a desert. That craving is so strong that deer will travel miles for a salt lick. They will chew on road shoulders that were salted for winter ice. They will lick rocks, soil, cattle blocks, and, yes, the sweaty palm of a stranger. Your skin is a salt block with a pulse. Sweat is salty. Sunscreen is salty. Hand lotion is salty. The residue left on a car door handle from a thousand different hands is salty. And a deer's nose is roughly fifty times more sensitive than yours, which means that where you smell nothing, it smells a buffet. So when a deer walks up to a person and licks them, the cute story is: it trusts you. The honest story is: it has just identified you as a resource. And that is where this gets interesting, because both of those stories can be true at once. And the gap between them is exactly where the danger lives. I will get to that. But first I want to talk about the October problem. WHY THIS HAPPENED NOW, IN THIS EXACT WEEK Timing matters. This was not shot in June. This was shot in the weeks leading up to the rut. The rut is the mating season, and for mule deer it kicks into gear in the late fall. In the weeks before it, a buck's body becomes a chemistry experiment. Testosterone surges. The neck swells to nearly twice its normal width. Appetite explodes, then collapses. Bucks that spent the summer in friendly bachelor groups start sizing each other up like boxers at a weigh-in. And here is the part nobody puts in the viral captions: bucks in the pre-rut and rut do strange things. They stop eating normally. They stop sleeping normally. They take risks they would never take in July. They cross highways. They chase. They ignore threats they would normally flee from. Sometimes that makes them aggressive. Sometimes it makes them bold in a calm, almost dreamy way, drifting through human spaces like they have somewhere to be and nobody on Earth will stop them. Wildlife officers across the country put out the same warning every fall: the most dangerous time to be near a deer is the exact time they look the most relaxed around you. Hold that thought. Because the clip you are about to watch lives right on that line. THE MOMENT THAT BROKE THE INTERNET'S BRAIN I have been posting on this platform for over a decade. I have watched thousands of animal videos. I know what a staged one looks like. I know what an edited one looks like. I know what a clip looks like when somebody has been feeding the animal for three weeks and is milking it for views. This is not that. What makes this different is the absence of anything staged. There is no music cue. There is no hero shot. The camera is not steady. The person filming is clearly not planning anything. The deer is not being led, called, baited, or coaxed. It is just there. And the people near it do the one thing nobody expects: they let it be. If you have ever tried to take a photo of a wild animal, you know how rare that is. The first instinct of almost every human is to move closer, reach, wave, call out, make noise. We cannot help ourselves. We are the most invasive species on the planet, and we think of ourselves as the gentle ones. Not here. Here, someone stood still. STILLNESS IS THE MOST POWERFUL THING A HUMAN CAN DO This is going to sound like a TED Talk, and I do not care. In the wild, the single most reliable signal of safety is stillness. Think about it from the deer's point of view. Predators move. Wolves, cougars, coyotes, they stalk, they creep, they accelerate. A thing that is standing completely still, with soft posture, no direct stare, and no sudden hand motions, is statistically not hunting. Hunters know this. Photographers know this. Anyone who has ever sat motionless in a blind for six hours and watched an entire forest go back to normal around them knows this. When you stop moving, the world forgets you are a threat. That is the entire secret. It is not magic. It is not a special bond. It is not some gift a few people have. It is patience, expressed as a body. And it is so rare that when we see it, we film it, and then we pass it around like a miracle. I want you to sit with that for a second. We are so unused to calm that watching one person stay calm near a wild animal feels like footage of something supernatural. Maybe that is why this clip is going the way it is going. Maybe it is not really about the deer. THE THING YOU ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO DO (AND WHY I NEED TO SAY IT) Now I am going to be the bad guy for a minute, and I am going to do it because I would rather annoy you today than see a headline about you tomorrow. Do not feed wild deer. Not apples. Not carrots. Not crackers. Not that sad half-sandwich you are not going to finish. Not anything. It is illegal in many states, and the fines are real. But the law is not even the main reason. The main reason is what feeding does to the animal. A deer that gets fed by humans learns one lesson, and it learns it fast: people mean food. That lesson is permanent. It does not go away in the winter. It does not go away when the apples run out. It follows that animal to the road, to the neighbor's dog, to the kid with a plate of cookies who does not know better. The next stop in that chain is almost always the same: an animal that is no longer afraid, in a place where fear was the only thing keeping it alive. Biologists have a name for it. Habituation. And in places where it has taken hold, it has produced bucks that charge people over a sandwich, does that stomp dogs to death, and fawns that grow up believing the safest place in the world is a human porch. Every one of those stories ends badly. Almost always for the deer. Wildlife agencies relocate habituated animals only rarely, and relocation often fails. Many are euthanized. A fed deer is, very often, a dead deer, and the person who fed it never finds out. That is the unfair math. The human gets a story. The animal gets the bill. THE INVISIBLE PROBLEM IN A DEER'S MOUTH There is a second reason, and it is the one that makes biologists genuinely lose sleep. It is called chronic wasting disease. CWD is a fatal neurological disease that affects deer, elk, and moose. It is caused by a misfolded protein called a prion, the same class of infectious agent behind mad cow disease. There is no vaccine. There is no cure. Infected animals lose weight, lose coordination, lose fear of humans, and eventually die. It has been found in dozens of states and a growing list of countries. And it spreads in the most ordinary way imaginable: through saliva, urine, feces, and contaminated soil. The prions can persist in the environment for years. Which means that a deer licking something is not a harmless gesture. It is a transfer of material. In one direction or the other. And in places where animals crowd around the same feeding spot, the same hand, the same parking lot, they swap disease the way kids swap germs in a classroom. To date, there has been no confirmed case of CWD infecting a human. Health agencies still recommend not eating meat from infected animals, and they keep monitoring the situation, because prion diseases have a nasty history of surprising us. I am not saying this to ruin a good clip. I am saying it because the same clip that makes your heart melt could also be a warning label for the entire ecosystem, and almost nobody will say that part out loud. So hold both truths. They are both real. WHY YOU CANNOT STOP WATCHING Let me tell you what I think is actually going on in your brain when you watch something like this. Humans are wired for one very specific kind of story: the one where a thing that should be dangerous chooses gentleness. It is the oldest story we have. It is the lion lying down with the lamb. It is the dog who guarded the first fire. It is the wolf who walked toward a campsite twenty thousand years ago and, according to one version of history, became every dog you have ever loved. Every time we see a wild creature step across the line between wild and safe, something ancient in us goes quiet and warm. It feels like being forgiven for something we cannot name. That is why the comment sections under videos like this fill up with the same four words: I need this energy. People are not craving deer. They are craving that feeling of being unafraid and being met with kindness in return. The parking lot is just the stage. And the stage is brilliant, because it is so ordinary. You do not need a mountain. You do not need a safari. You do not need a rare permit. You need a Tuesday, a patch of asphalt, and the willingness to stand still. WHAT THE ANIMAL KNEW THE WHOLE TIME I want to say something about the deer itself, because I think we skip over it. Everything about that animal's body language, in every second of footage, says the same thing: it is paying attention. Not to the camera. Not to the cars. Not to the noise. To the people near it. Look at the ears. Look at where the eyes are pointing. Look at the way the head dips and lifts. That is not an animal in a trance. That is a mind running, carefully, through a list of questions. Is this person tense? Is this person holding anything? Is this person looking directly at me? Is this person moving toward me, or letting me move toward them? Deer read posture the way you read a face. They can tell the difference between a hand that is reaching to grab and a hand that is simply resting. They can tell the difference between a person who wants something and a person who is simply there. And every answer that animal got, in every second, was the same answer: you are fine. That is the story. Not that the deer was tame. That the humans, for those few moments, were safe. THE DEBATE THAT IS ALREADY TEARING THE COMMENTS APART Every clip like this splits the internet into two camps within about ninety seconds. I have seen it a hundred times. Here is what each side says, and I want you to notice that both of them have a point. Camp one: this is beautiful. A wild animal chose peace. A human responded with respect. Nobody got hurt, nobody got chased, nobody got fed, and for forty-eight seconds the world made sense. Let people have one good thing. Camp two: this is a problem dressed as a miracle. Deer in parking lots are deer near traffic. Deer near people are deer that end up in the news for the wrong reasons. Clips like this teach thousands of viewers that walking up to a wild animal is safe, and a few of them will try it with the wrong animal, at the wrong time of year, with the wrong amount of confidence. Both camps are right. That is why the argument never ends. Here is where I land, and you can disagree with me: the clip is not the danger. The lesson people take from the clip is the danger. Watch it as a gift. Do not copy it as a recipe. A wild animal doing something remarkable is not an invitation. It is a moment. And moments do not repeat on command. THE NUMBER THAT SHOULD SCARE YOU MORE THAN ANY ANTLER If you want to know what the real risk around deer is, forget the antlers. Look at the road. In the United States, drivers hit more than a million deer a year. Roughly two hundred people die in those collisions annually, and tens of thousands are injured. The damage runs into the billions. Deer do not understand roads. They understand grass on one side and water on the other. A parking lot is a road with a nicer logo. And here is the brutal part: an animal that has lost its fear of people has also lost its fear of the machines people drive. A deer that walks calmly between parked cars is a deer that will walk calmly in front of a truck. That is not drama. That is the exact reason wildlife managers hate the word cute. So the next time you see a deer standing beside a busy road, calm and curious and apparently unbothered, do not read it as a sign of peace. Read it as a countdown. THE TOWN THAT BECAME A DEER TOWN There is a reason this keeps happening in the same kinds of places. Across the American West, towns have spread into the exact valleys that deer used for winter range. Sidewalks replaced meadows. Lawns replaced native grass. Landscaping replaced sagebrush, and landscaping, it turns out, is delicious. Deer are not invading anything. They are loyal to land that was theirs long before the parking lot was poured. Think about what that means. These animals have been walking the same routes for generations. Their mothers walked them. Their grandmothers walked them. And now those routes pass through a grocery store lot, a gas station, a church, an elementary school. Wildlife biologists call this the urban edge, and it is one of the strangest laboratories on Earth. Deer there live longer, because there are fewer predators. They breed more, because there is more food. They lose their fear, because nothing has hurt them yet. And then something does. Understanding that makes the clip heavier. Because the animal you are about to watch is not a creature of the wild and not a creature of the town. It is something new, shaped by both, and we do not yet have a word for it. THE FIVE-SECOND RULE FOR MEETING A WILD ANIMAL Fine. You are going to see a deer one day. Maybe tonight. Maybe next to your car. What do you do? Here is the short version, straight from the people who do this for a living. One. Stop. Do not rush toward it. Do not wave. Do not call it over. Every second you stay calm is a second the animal stays calm. Two. Give it space. Wildlife agencies generally recommend at least twenty-five yards from deer, elk, and similar large animals. That is about the length of two buses. If you are closer than that and it is approaching you, you are not in charge of the situation anymore. Three. Keep your hands to yourself. No reaching. No offering. No touching. The moment you put a hand toward a wild animal you have stopped being a bystander and started being a variable. Four. Never, ever, feed it. We covered this. It is the single worst thing you can do for the animal. Five. Leave the way you came. Slowly. Do not turn it into a chase. Do not follow for a better angle. Do not crowd it for a photo. That is the whole list. Five rules, all of them free, none of them hard. And almost nobody follows them. WHY THE BEST WILDLIFE FOOTAGE IS ALWAYS ACCIDENTAL I want to tell you something I have learned from a decade of watching content go viral. The best clips are never planned. Not the ones with a million likes. Not the ones with ten million. The ones that stay in your head for a week are almost always filmed by someone who did not know they were filming anything special. Because planning kills the thing we are actually watching for: the unscripted instant when reality does something the script would never allow. Look at how this one is shot. Vertical. Handheld. A little shaky. The framing is slightly off. The sun is in the wrong place. The audio picks up whatever happened to be nearby. A professional would have thrown it away. And yet that imperfection is exactly why it works. It tells your brain: this happened. Nobody arranged this. Nobody had time to. In an age when everything online feels manufactured, raw footage of a real moment is the rarest luxury we have. THREE THINGS TO WATCH FOR (WITHOUT ME SPOILING ANYTHING) I promised I would not describe the clip. I am a man of my word. But I will give you three things to watch for, so you do not miss what makes it special. First, watch the distance. Notice how close the animal is willing to get, and then ask yourself how close you would let a wild thing get before your instincts took over. Second, watch the stillness. Not the animal's. The people's. See how little they move, and how much that tiny amount of movement matters. Third, watch the last few seconds. That is where everything changes. That is where the clip stops being a cute animal video and becomes something else entirely, something I have not been able to shake since I first saw it. If you only watch one thing today, make it that. THE QUESTION THAT HAUNTS ME I keep coming back to one question. Why do we need clips like this? We have more access to nature footage than any generation in history. We have documentaries filmed from satellites and cameras that can follow a snow leopard across a Himalayan ridge. We can watch anything, anywhere, in ultra-high definition. And yet a shaky vertical video from a parking lot hits harder than any of it. I think the reason is simple. A documentary shows you nature as something far away. A parking lot shows you nature as something that can touch your life on an ordinary day. We spend most of our lives sealed inside cars, offices, and screens. We have built a world designed to keep the wild out. And every so often, the wild walks up to the door, shrugs, and says: still here. That is why we stop. That is why we watch. That is why we send it to our mothers. It is not really a video about a deer. It is a video about the thin line between the world we built and the world we came from, and the quiet, shocking moment when one steps across it. WHY THIS CLIP WILL OUTLIVE THE WEEK Most viral videos burn out in a day. They spike, they get stolen, they get reposted with a siren emoji, and by Friday nobody can remember what they were about. A few do not. The ones that last share a single trait: they give you a story you can retell in one sentence. A deer walked up to a stranger in a parking lot, and the stranger did everything right. That is it. That is the whole pitch. You will say it out loud to somebody at dinner. They will ask to see it. And the cycle will start again. I have watched that pattern build empires. I have never once seen it fail. THE LAST THING I WILL SAY BEFORE YOU PRESS PLAY If you take nothing else from this post, take this. Wild animals are not props. They are not pets. They are not mascots. They are not content, even when they make great content. They are neighbors with a very different set of rules, and they are doing their best in a world that keeps changing underneath them. The ones that show up in parking lots are not ambassadors. They are survivors, figuring out a landscape that was redrawn without their consent. When one of them meets a human with calm and respect, and nobody gets hurt, that is not a trick of the algorithm. That is a rare, fragile, genuinely good thing. So watch the clip. Watch it once for the animal. Watch it again for the people. Then watch it a third time and ask yourself the question I cannot stop asking: What would I have done? Would you have stayed still? Would you have reached out? Would you have backed away? Would you have grabbed your phone, or would you have forgotten you owned one? Be honest. Most of us would have gotten it wrong. Drop your answer below. I read every reply, and the best ones will be pinned. And if this post made you feel something, even a little, send it to the one person you know who still believes the world has room for quiet miracles. They need to see this. Everyone does. Now press play, and tell me what you saw. P.S. If you have ever stood still in front of a wild animal and felt the whole world go quiet, you already know what I am talking about. Tell me where it happened, what it was, and how long the moment lasted. I collect these stories, and the strangest one gets its own post tomorrow.

Earth Unveiled

26,456 次观看 • 14 天前

I spent 20 years architecting AAA game engines, going back to the PlayStation 1. I wrote all of that by hand. This one I did not. It is a stylized real time digital twin of the SF Bay Area, built from scratch in C++ and Vulkan. The geometry is real, the look is not. It is meant to read as a painted model of the Bay rather than a photo of it, because a photoreal copy of a place you can already see from a satellite is not worth building. The world is an 80 km square, about 6,400 km², and all of it is built from open data. USGS 3DEP 1 m lidar for the terrain. NOAA CoNED for the bay floor. USGS NHD for water. ESA WorldCover for land cover. OpenStreetMap for footprints and roads. That comes to 13 GB of streamed tiles, and 9.8 GB of it is terrain. Past the edge there is a 420 km coarse ring on Copernicus GLO-30, so the horizon does not end at a flat edge. Distant ridgelines bend down below it. There are 424,787 real building footprints in there, extruded procedurally, with heights off OSM tags and a plausibility gate that drops anything whose tagged height will not fit its own footprint. Across the whole 80 km box it rejects exactly 8 buildings, four of them towers carrying a bad height tag that used to extrude as needles over a derelict pier at Hunters Point. On top sit 41 landmarks at their real coordinates, authored by Fable as parametric Blender scripts rather than sculpted: Golden Gate, Transamerica, Coit, Sutro, Salesforce, the Ferry Building. Each one switches off the generated building underneath it. The simulation is the actual point. A 24 hour recording of real feeds plays back on a clock inside the app, at 1x up to 2000x. Caltrans PeMS for highway flow, 511 for Caltrain, OpenSky for flights, AIS for boats, METAR at SFO, OAK and SJC, and HRRR for weather. 165,356 samples across those 8 feeds. Cars spawn at the volume PeMS measured on that segment. Trains run the delays 511 reported. Planes fly the tracks OpenSky recorded. It is replay, not a live stream. Live polling is next and feeds the same clock, so it is a source swap rather than a rewrite. There is also a globe. You pick the Bay from orbit, fly down to the surface, and back out again. Reversed Z depth, HDR with a filmic tonemap, dual filter bloom, a time of day grade, and a volumetric marine layer for Karl the fog. AI agents write the issues, set the constraints, make the art direction calls, and review and validate every line of the roughly 235,000 lines of C++, GLSL, Python and PowerShell. What I built is the orchestration that holds it together, and the judgement on top of it: what to build, what to cut, and when to accept the result. The language choice is doing real work here. The hard part of AI written software is not producing the code. It is proving the code is right. C++ and Vulkan are unusually good at that, because nothing is hidden: every resource, every frame, every buffer you can read back. 28 golden image scenes compared by SSIM. An MCP server that drives the running app, so an agent can move the camera, set a sky preset, take a screenshot, and read the streaming counters back out. It validates against a live process instead of against its own diff. And a reviewer agent whose only job is to work out what the issue asked for before it reads the summary the PR wrote about itself. So I think C++ and Vulkan stay the heavy duty layer through the AI era. Not in spite of being low level. Because being performant, deterministic and checkable is exactly what an agent loop needs to push against. A managed engine hides the state that verification depends on. This is a hobby project, and it has nothing to do with my day job. Clips are below. More as I go. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL). Land cover: ESA WorldCover 2021 (CC BY 4.0). Terrain: USGS 3DEP and NOAA. Flight data: OpenSky Network. #Vulkan #cpp #gamedev #digitaltwin #OpenStreetMap

Xiang Wei

79,499 次观看 • 2 个月前

I did not plan for this to change me. Nobody plans for that. You wake up, you go about your ordinary Tuesday, you have a list of things to do that has nothing to do with saving anything — and then something crosses your path that you cannot unsee. That's the part people never talk about. Not the rescue itself. The moment right before it, when you still have the option to keep walking. Most people keep walking. I want to be honest with you about that, because everyone who posts a "happy ending" video skips the part where they almost didn't stop. I almost didn't stop. There is a version of this story where I drive past, where I tell myself someone else will handle it, where I convince myself that getting involved is messy and expensive and inconvenient and above my pay grade as a human being. That version of the story exists in a thousand other places, right now, happening to a thousand other creatures nobody will ever post about. This is not that story. But it could have been. Watch until the end and you'll understand why I'm saying this instead of just captioning it "rescued a cat, so cute!!" and moving on with my day. Because it wasn't cute. Not at first. Not for a long time, actually. The first version of this story is ugly and quiet and full of doubt, and if you only want the pretty part, you can scroll to the end of the video and skip everything I'm about to tell you. But you'd be missing the whole point. Here's something nobody tells you about fear: it doesn't look like what you think it looks like. You imagine an animal in danger will look grateful the second help arrives. You imagine relief on its face, some kind of instant recognition that you're the good guy in this story. That is Hollywood. That is not real life. Real fear looks like resistance. Real fear looks like an animal that has been let down by the world so many times that it has stopped believing rescue is even a category that exists. Real trust has to be built one motionless, patient, boring minute at a time, and most people don't have the stomach for boring. Most people want the montage. Nobody wants the part where you sit there, doing nothing dramatic at all, just existing calmly nearby, over and over, until something in a terrified brain finally recalibrates and decides you're not a threat. That part isn't going in anyone's highlight reel. Except this time, it is. Because I think you need to see it. I think you need to see it because we have become a species addicted to instant everything. Instant food, instant answers, instant relationships that dissolve the second they require patience. And somewhere in that acceleration, we lost the muscle for slow devotion — the kind that doesn't post an update every day, the kind that doesn't get a like for showing up on day fourteen when nothing visible has changed yet. This video is proof that the boring days matter just as much as the breakthrough moment. Maybe more. The breakthrough moment gets the views. The boring days are what make the breakthrough possible at all. Let me ask you something, and I want you to actually sit with it instead of scrolling past: when was the last time you did something with zero guarantee it would work? Because that's what this was. There is no contract in rescue. Nobody hands you a guarantee that says "continue showing up and eventually this will resolve beautifully." You show up anyway. You show up on the days it feels pointless. You show up on the days you privately wonder if you're the one being unreasonable, if you should just accept that some situations don't have happy endings, if you're pouring time and money and worry into something that the universe has already decided the outcome of. And you show up again the next day anyway, because the alternative — walking away — was never actually a real option once you'd already looked into those eyes the first time. That's the secret nobody says out loud: once you really see a creature suffering, you can't fully unsee it. It moves into your head and sets up residence. It becomes a low hum underneath every other thing you do that day. You'll be at dinner, at work, half-listening to a conversation, and there it is again — that animal, that need, that unresolved thread pulling at you. People who haven't experienced this think rescuers are unusually noble or unusually sentimental. We're not. We're just people who got unlucky enough to actually look, and looking is the whole trick. Looking is the doorway you can't close once you've walked through it. I'm not telling you this to make myself sound like a hero. I want to be extremely clear about that, because I think the "hero rescuer" narrative is actually kind of dishonest and it lets everyone else off the hook. The truth is less flattering and more useful: I was scared too. I didn't know if this would work. I didn't have a plan that guaranteed success. I just had a decision to make in a specific moment, and I made the harder one instead of the easier one, and then I had to keep making that same harder decision, quietly, every single day after that, long after anyone was watching or cared. Most transformation looks like nothing while it's happening. That's the part that will wreck you if you actually pay attention to this video instead of just watching it for the dopamine hit at the end. The transformation in the middle of this story does not look like transformation. It looks like stagnation. It looks like two steps forward and four steps back. It looks like moments where you genuinely cannot tell if what you're doing is helping or just prolonging something. Nobody warns you that "getting better" often looks identical to "not getting better" until you're far enough past it to look back and finally see the shape of the arc. I think about this a lot in relation to more than just animals, honestly. I think about how we judge our own growth, our own healing, our own slow projects — we want the montage, we want the visible curve upward, and when we don't get it in a timeframe that feels reasonable, we assume we've failed. We assume the effort was wasted. We give up right before the part where it would have started to show. This video is, weirdly, a pretty good metaphor for that. Everything that mattered happened in the part that didn't look like anything was happening. There's a specific moment in this footage — I'm not going to tell you which one, because you need to feel it land yourself, not be told about it in advance — where something shifts. It's small. It's almost nothing. If you're not paying attention you could miss it entirely, and I almost did, in real time, because I wasn't expecting it and I certainly wasn't expecting it to matter as much as it turned out to matter. That's usually how the important moments work, by the way. The universe rarely announces them with a soundtrack swell. It just quietly hands you the hinge point and moves on, and you only recognize it in hindsight, days or weeks later, when you're piecing together how you got from point A to point B and you realize: oh. That was it. That was the moment everything actually started to turn. I've watched this footage back more times than I want to admit, and every single time, that moment gets me. Not because it's dramatic. Because it's the opposite of dramatic. It's small and quiet and almost embarrassingly simple, and that's exactly why it works on me every time. We've been trained by movies to expect big gestures as the marker of real change. Real change is smaller and stranger and much more moving than anything a screenwriter would ever put in a script, because real change doesn't care about being cinematic. It only cares about being true. I want to talk for a second about the difference between rescuing something and actually helping it, because they are not the same thing, and conflating them is one of the more common mistakes people make with good intentions. Rescuing is the dramatic part — the removal from danger, the single decisive act. Helping is everything after that, and it is unglamorous and repetitive and occasionally thankless, and it is also the part that actually determines the outcome. Anyone can have one good instinct in one good moment. Sustaining care past the point where it stops being interesting is a completely different skill, and it's the one that actually matters, and it's the one this video is really about if you look closely enough. There's a particular kind of exhaustion that comes with caregiving that doesn't have a finish line you can see. You're not told "three more weeks and this resolves." You're just told, implicitly, by the situation itself: keep going, we'll figure out when it's done when it's done. That's a strange kind of commitment to make. It requires a specific type of stubbornness that isn't really about hope, exactly — hope implies you're waiting for something external to happen to you. This is closer to resolve. Resolve doesn't wait for external permission to keep going. Resolve just keeps going, on principle, because the alternative was never actually a real option. I think a lot of people watch content like this and assume the animal is the only one who was changed by it. I want to push back on that gently, because it flattens the actual experience. Something in me was also different by the end of this than it was at the beginning. You cannot pour weeks of consistent, patient, uncertain effort into another living thing and come out the exact same person you went in as. It recalibrates something in you. It teaches you things about patience that no productivity book ever managed to teach me, because productivity books are about optimizing outcomes you can control, and this was the opposite of that — an outcome I could not control, that I could only show up for, day after day, and hope that the showing up eventually mattered. There's a reason stories like this spread the way they do, and it's not just "cute animal content," even though that's the label the algorithm slaps on it. I think it's because on some level, we are all quietly starving for proof that consistent, unglamorous effort still pays off in a world that keeps telling us the only things that count are the loud, fast, viral wins. We need reminders that the slow version still works. That showing up on the boring days is not wasted time. That the moment things change is usually preceded by a long, unremarkable stretch where absolutely nothing seemed to be happening at all, and that stretch was not actually wasted — it was the necessary, invisible groundwork the visible change was quietly built on top of. So here is what I actually want you to take from this, more than the video itself: the next time you're in the middle of something that isn't working yet, something you've been showing up for without any evidence it's paying off, something that everyone around you might reasonably tell you to give up on — I want you to remember that transformation does not announce itself in advance. It does not send you a schedule. It just asks you to keep showing up through the part that looks like nothing, because the part that looks like nothing is usually exactly where the whole thing turns. I didn't post this to get views, even though I know that's what everyone says and nobody ever actually means it. I posted it because I think there's something in this specific sequence of events that people need to actually watch, start to finish, without skipping ahead, without reading a summary, without letting someone else's caption replace the experience of seeing it unfold in real time the way it unfolded for me. Summaries kill things like this. A synopsis of a transformation is not the same as witnessing one. You already know this, somewhere — it's why book adaptations rarely land the same way the book did, why hearing about a sunset is not the same as standing under one. Some things have to be experienced directly or they don't actually transmit. That's the whole reason I'm asking you to actually watch this instead of scrolling past on the strength of this caption alone. Everything I've written here is context, not substance. The substance is in the footage. The substance is in watching fear slowly, unglamorously, incrementally give way to something else — and I promise you, if you sit through the parts that feel slow, the ending will hit differently than if you just jump to it. I've tested this on people. The ones who watch the whole thing react differently than the ones who skip to the last ten seconds. The context changes the payoff. That's not an accident. That's how transformation actually works, on video and in life: the payoff only means what it means because of everything unglamorous that came before it. Someone asked me why I even filmed any of this in the first place, given how uncertain the outcome was for most of it, and it's a fair question, because filming something you don't know the ending to is a strange act of faith in itself. The honest answer is that I didn't film it because I expected it to end well. I filmed it because I wanted a record, for myself, regardless of how it turned out — proof that the effort happened, proof that the days were real, proof that I showed up even on the days it felt pointless, whether or not there was ever going to be a satisfying conclusion to show anyone. That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. Content made for an ending is different from content made as a record. You can feel the difference when you watch it, even if you can't always articulate why. The camera in this story was never a narrative device. It was a witness, and witnesses don't get to pick which parts are worth recording just because they're not sure yet how the story ends. The algorithm, for what it's worth, does not understand any of this. It cannot tell the difference between eleven seconds of manufactured chaos and eleven seconds pulled from something that took weeks of real, unglamorous, uncertain effort to earn. It rewards the same signals either way — the immediate hook, the retention curve, the completion rate — completely blind to what was actually required to produce the footage behind those numbers. I've made my peace with that, mostly, because I don't think content should be made for the algorithm's benefit in the first place. But I bring it up because I want you to understand that the length of this caption, the refusal to just give you a cute two-line summary and move on, is a deliberate act of friction against a system that wants everything reduced to its most easily digestible form. I'm asking you to actually read, actually sit with something, actually watch something in full, in a media environment engineered to discourage exactly that. If that annoys you, I understand. If it doesn't, I think you're exactly the kind of person this was made for. There's an old idea, older than social media, older than video itself, that witnessing changes the witness. You cannot fully observe suffering and stay exactly the same as you were before you observed it, not if you're paying real attention. I think that's actually the quiet mechanism behind why content like this spreads the way it does when it's real — it's not that people want to watch suffering, and it's not even really that people want to watch relief. It's that people want to be changed a little, safely, from the comfort of wherever they're sitting, by something true. We're all looking for small, low-stakes opportunities to feel something real in a scroll built almost entirely out of things engineered to feel real without costing anything. This costs something. Not much, not compared to what it cost to live through the actual weeks involved — but a few minutes of your real attention, spent on something true instead of something manufactured to extract that attention from you. That's a fair trade, I think. I wouldn't ask for it otherwise. Let's talk about the internet's obsession with orange cats for a second, because I think it's actually relevant here and not just a throwaway joke. There's a running bit online that orange cats are "the golden retrievers of the cat world" — a little chaotic, a little dumb in the most endearing way, incapable of subtlety, allergic to dignity. People love that stereotype because it's low stakes. It's comedy. It's the kind of content you consume for eleven seconds and forget by the time you've swiped to the next video. I want to be upfront that this is not that. This isn't the goofy-orange-cat-does-something-silly genre you're used to. This is something that starts in a completely different register and asks something different of you as a viewer — attention instead of amusement, patience instead of a quick laugh. If you came here expecting the usual orange-cat chaos content, recalibrate now, because what you're about to watch operates on a different emotional frequency entirely, and I think that contrast is part of why it hits as hard as it does. You're primed for comedy. You get something closer to a gut-punch, followed by something closer to grace. That whiplash is not an accident of editing. That whiplash is just what actually happened, in that order, in real life, and I didn't have to manufacture any of it. I also want to address the skeptics directly, because I know they exist and honestly, they should exist — the internet is genuinely full of staged rescue content, cats "saved" from situations they were placed into five minutes earlier by the same person filming, entire monetization pipelines built on manufactured suffering for engagement. That skepticism is earned. I'm not going to pretend it isn't a reasonable default position in 2026. What I will say is this: the only thing I can offer you against that skepticism is time. Time is the one thing you cannot fake convincingly across an extended sequence. Staged content wants your eleven seconds and your dopamine hit and then it wants you gone before you notice the seams. Real, extended, unglamorous care doesn't hold up as well under fabrication, because faking boredom, faking small unremarkable days, faking the parts where nothing dramatic happens — that's actually harder to fake than faking a single dramatic rescue moment. The boring middle is the tell. Manufactured content skips straight to the emotional peaks because manufacturing boring authenticity is expensive and pointless from a content-farming perspective. So if anything, the slowness of what you're about to watch should read as evidence, not despite itself but because of itself. I think about the phrase "it's just a cat" a lot, because I've heard it, and you've probably heard some version of it too, usually from someone who has never had to sit with a frightened creature and slowly, patiently earn its trust with nothing but consistency and time. I used to almost agree with that sentiment before I actually lived through something like this. Now I think the phrase says more about the person saying it than about the situation they're dismissing. Suffering doesn't require language to be real. Fear doesn't require a vocabulary to be legitimate. And the specific kind of trust that gets rebuilt between two creatures who don't share a language, who can't negotiate terms or explain intentions to each other, who have to communicate entirely through consistency, presence, and time — I'd argue that's actually a purer test of whether care is real than almost anything that happens between two humans who can just say "I promise I won't hurt you" out loud and have that count for something on its own. An animal doesn't take your word for it. An animal only believes what you repeatedly, boringly, unglamorously demonstrate. That's a much higher bar than most human relationships ever have to clear, and clearing it means something. There's also something worth saying about scars, visible and invisible, and how we relate to them once the crisis has passed. It would be easy — and honestly, more common — to frame a story like this purely around the after: the relief, the resolution, the moment everything looks fixed and clean and photogenic. But recovery doesn't erase what happened. It just changes the relationship you have to it. The fear doesn't fully disappear; it gets integrated, managed, outpaced by new experiences that slowly outweigh the old ones. I think that's actually a more honest and more useful thing to understand about healing in general, animal or human: you're not looking for the moment the bad thing never happened. You're looking for the moment the good outweighs it enough that the bad stops being the loudest voice in the room. That's a different, more achievable, more real goal than "erase the past," and I think this video quietly demonstrates the difference better than any explanation of it could. I also want to acknowledge, honestly, how much luck was involved in this, because I think pretending otherwise would be a disservice to the people currently in a similar situation without the same resources. Not everyone has the time to show up every single day. Not everyone has access to the kind of help that made parts of this possible. Not everyone has a schedule flexible enough to prioritize a creature that owes them nothing and offers no guarantees in return. I got lucky in ways that mattered, and I don't want to erase that luck from the story just because "hard work and heart" makes for a cleaner narrative. Both things are true at once: the effort mattered enormously, and the circumstances that allowed the effort to happen at all were not something everyone has equal access to. If you're in a position where you want to help something or someone but don't have the resources this required, that doesn't make your instinct to help any less real or any less valuable — it just means the shape your help takes might look different, smaller, more limited, and that's fine. Small, limited help consistently offered is still worth more than grand help that never actually materializes because the bar felt too high to start. I keep circling back to this idea of "the boring middle" because I genuinely think it's the single most important and most overlooked part of any real transformation story, and I think our current media environment has actively trained us to skip it, both as viewers and as people living our own lives. We've been fed thousands of hours of before-and-after content, transformation montages set to music, "watch this glow-up" edits that compress months into fifteen seconds — and somewhere in consuming all of that, we internalized a completely false model of how change actually happens. We started believing change is supposed to be visible, fast, and continuous. It isn't. Change is mostly invisible, mostly slow, and mostly non-continuous — it happens in fits and starts, with long flat stretches where it looks like nothing at all is occurring, followed by short bursts where everything that was quietly accumulating suddenly becomes visible all at once. If you only ever watch the burst, you'll never understand where it actually came from, and you'll assume your own flat stretches mean you're doing something wrong, when actually you might just be in the most important and least glamorous part of the whole process. I want to leave you with one more thought before you go press play, because I think it reframes everything else I've said here. We tend to think of rescue as something one party does to another — an active party and a passive recipient, a saver and a saved. But if you watch closely, really closely, you'll notice that's not quite what's happening in this footage. There's a second, quieter rescue happening in parallel, running underneath the obvious one, and it's not the kind that gets a caption of its own on most videos like this. I'm not going to spell it out for you. I think you'll recognize it when you see it, and I think it will mean more to you if you find it yourself instead of having it pointed out in advance. That's the last thing I'll say about the content itself. Everything else is yours to discover. One more thing, and then I'll let you go watch it. People keep asking me, in different words, some version of "was it worth it." I understand why they ask. It's a fair question when you're talking about weeks of uncertain effort with no guaranteed return. But I think the question itself reveals something about how we've been trained to think about care — as a transaction, an investment with an expected yield, something you calculate the ROI on before committing. I didn't do this because I ran the numbers and decided the expected outcome justified the input. I did it because in the specific moment I was faced with the choice, walking away was never actually available to me as an option, no matter how exhausted or uncertain I got later. And I think that's true of most things that end up mattering.

Earth Unveiled

232,537 次观看 • 1 个月前

Here is how I am using AI right now at work, at home, and for my finances... Every founder, executive or investor I talk with these days wants to know how others are using AI in their daily lives. I figured it would be helpful to pull back the curtain on what I am using and how I have implemented the various products. There are three areas where I have adopted AI in a material way: professionally, financially, and personally. Professional use of AI On the professional side, I am currently using Grok Grok Bot extensively. I started with a Chief of Staff bot that I put in charge of the entire operation, followed by a number of more specialized bots for various bodies of work (talent recruiter, product designer, podcast researcher, book launch manager, email organizer, etc). Once I had the initial team of bots set up, I spent about an hour “onboarding” the Chief of Staff to my professional life. I treated this exactly how I would onboard a human Chief of Staff. I explained each business I am involved with, including their products, business model, personnel, metrics, and goals. I explicitly called out what the business is doing well and where we need to improve. I also gave the Chief of Staff access to relevant systems (email, calendar, Slack, analytics dashboards, etc). Once I had given as much context as I thought necessary, I asked the Chief of Staff to create an overview document to send me so I could double-check the accuracy and thoroughness of the bots understanding. I also asked the CoS bot to interview me for any other information that would be relevant to ensuring the bot could help me. This entire process was fairly quick and painless, but I believe it was the single most important thing I did to get value from Grok Bot. The more context that the AI system has, the more helpful it can be. That context can come from static, institutional knowledge or it can come from dynamic daily updates like email and Slack messages. After getting the bots set up and giving them context, I have done two other things that I think are worth sharing. The first is that my team of bots holds a daily standup meeting where they all come together and share what they did yesterday, what they are going to do today, and what they need my help or approval on (aka what they are blocked on). These “exec meeting” or daily standup allows for the bots to collaborate in a more seamless way, while also creating a very simple process for the Chief of Staff bot to put together a daily brief for me on what happened yesterday, what is going to happen today, and where I am needed to unblock productivity. The second thing I have done is treat the AI system as the brain of the company. Most people try to use AI as an augmentation to themselves, which can be helpful to a degree. I have flipped the relationship though. I look at my job as persistently giving the AI bots as much context as possible, so I can leverage their superhuman intelligence to make decisions and achieve our goals. For example, the recruiter bot recently surfaced a number of very high-quality candidates for an open role we have. After meeting with each candidate, I wrote a quick message to the recruiter bot to tell it what I liked about the person, what I thought were potential issues, improvements for future searches, and what the next steps were with each individual. All of that information and context is getting stored in the bot’s memory, which will compound over time and help us improve as an organization. Quick pro tip: If you are worried about putting all of the context into a single system’s memory, but unsure if that is the system you will use forever, you can have Grok Bot or another system dump their memory and context into a Notion document as well. This way you have a duplicate copy of the memory so it can be referenced by any AI system you use in the future. My takeaway from using Grok Bot to manage our companies is that we are having to hire less people, we are seeing a direct impact on revenue growth, and it appears to drive higher quality in our decision-making process. That is a win-win-win. I highly recommend going through these steps to setup your system correctly and it will pay off big time later on. Financial use of AI On the financial side, it was nearly impossible to find a good AI product to use for personal finance. Everything seemed to be a Chat-GPT wrapper that technically worked from an engineering standpoint, but didn’t solve any of the user problems I was facing. A big issue is that most of the fintech products are focused on budgeting and saving, rather than investing and growing your portfolio. This is why I eventually spent the time and money to build CFO Silvia. I went through a similar process of getting Silvia set up with the necessary context. I attached my bank accounts, brokerage accounts, crypto accounts, and credit cards, along with uploading real estate, cars, collectibles, and private investments. Silvia allows me to dynamically track the value of these assets (and my overall net worth) in real-time. But the real unlock for me has been talking to Silvia about two specific topics: tax and estate planning. As most of you know, I am not a frequent trader, so although you could use Silvia for stock analysis or trading activities, that is not my approach to investing. Instead, I have had great success in using Silvia to find creative and valuable tax mitigation strategies that are personalized to my situation, including ideas that had not previously been surfaced by my accountants, lawyers, or tax experts. Additionally, I have used Silvia for estate planning purposes. I am married and have four children, so there is a decent amount of complexity and opportunities to pursue. Having a dedicated resource with superhuman intelligence and the full context of my personal financial situation has been incredibly powerful. One funny thing I have noticed is that I am willing to tell Silvia certain things that I would hesitate to tell other humans (financial goals, areas of concern, etc) and I ask numerous “dumb” questions that I would probably shy away from asking a human. Regardless of why I feel more comfortable talking to the AI product, it has unlocked a few different ideas and strategies that I was previously unaware of, so that has been an added bonus to using the product. If you aren’t using AI to help manage your finances, I think it is a no brainer to start using the technology. I am biased towards Silvia since we built it, but you can give it a try for free here: Personal use of AI On the personal side, I use almost all of the traditional AI products (Chat-GPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini, Perplexity, etc). Those are well understood at this point, but one product that I started using recently that I am impressed with is Instinct AI. They have built a personal assistant AI bot that you communicate with through iMessage or SMS. The experience has been delightful, but I am most excited about the bot’s ability to anticipate the second or third-step in a process before I have to tell it anything. For example, Instinct got access to my calendar and immediately started identifying scheduling conflicts and asked me if I would like the bot to reach out to one of the parties to reschedule. I never told it to look for conflicts, nor did I tell it I wanted help rescheduling things. It’s “instincts” knew what the basic task would be and began executing. Another example is that Instinct was told my wife is Polina, so whenever it deems something important to the household or family, Instinct will add Polina to the calendar invite, communicate the information to her, or ask me if Polina should be aware of the information. This is very helpful for someone like me who has too many things floating around in my brain and should always do a better job of keeping Polina informed about various things. Lastly, Instinct is very helpful in scanning my personal email and understanding what is most important. It ignores things that are trivial, but somehow can parse out the high priority items, summarize them for me in a text message, draft a response to the email, and then ask me for permission to respond. As I said, it is the most impressive personal assistant AI product I have used so far. So those are the three big areas that I use AI today and the specific products I have incorporated into my life. Before I let you go, I figured I could share some best practices I have learned as well. I also make sure to tell AI bots they are not allowed to respond to any message or email without my explicit approval. This reduces the risk of having a bot go rogue with a message or commitment that I am not onboard with. I also ensure that each bot only has read access to our business systems like an analytics dashboard, etc. While I am a big proponent of using these products and believe they will fundamentally transform how we operate professionally, I am still not ready to let them loose without human oversight. I am sure that will change in the coming weeks and months, but I need more time to get comfortable with that level of delegation and trust. I hope this overview was helpful for each of you. It would be great if you could respond to this post with any products you are using or tips/tricks that you have learned to get more productivity and value in your life. I love writing these letters each day because I learn just as much from me as I learn from you all. Onwards!

Anthony Pompliano 🌪

83,069 次观看 • 1 个月前

Nobody tells you this about wild animals. Everyone assumes the same thing. That wild means temporary. That anything without a collar, without a name tag, without four walls around it, is incapable of remembering you. That the second you stop feeding it, stop holding it, stop being useful to it — it forgets you existed. I used to believe that too. Then I watched something that broke that belief in about four seconds, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since. Here's the part nobody wants to admit: we underestimate every single creature that can't talk back to us. We assume silence means absence. We assume "wild" means "doesn't care." We built an entire worldview on the idea that gratitude requires language, that memory requires a brain we can relate to, that loyalty is a human invention we occasionally lend to animals if they're cute enough. And then something like this comes along and makes all of that look embarrassingly wrong. I'm not going to describe what happens. I'm not going to walk you through it beat by beat, because honestly, that would ruin the only thing this deserves — the moment where your own brain catches up half a second too late and you feel that drop in your stomach. You know the one. The one you can't fake, can't force, can't get from a script. That's the only currency this kind of content trades in, and it doesn't happen if I spoil it for you. What I will tell you is what it's about underneath the surface, because that part is worth talking about regardless of whether you've seen it yet. It starts small. It always starts small. A single act, done by someone who had every reason not to bother. No cameras rolling for clout, no calculation, no thought of "this could go viral." Just a person doing the smallest, most inconvenient, most unnecessary kind thing imaginable — for a creature that had absolutely no way of saying thank you. That's the detail people skip past. There was no transaction here. No expectation of return. The kind of help that gets given precisely because nobody's watching and nothing is owed back. That is the rarest form of kindness there is, and it is exactly the kind that the universe seems to remember, even when we don't. Fast forward. Time does what time does. Seasons change. Life moves on. The person who helped goes back to their normal routine, probably forgets the specifics, files it under "nice thing that happened once," and moves forward with their life the way we all do. That's what makes what comes next hit so much harder — because they weren't expecting anything. They weren't owed anything. They didn't do it FOR this moment. And that's exactly when it shows up. Not a small gesture. Not a quiet little nod of recognition. Something so much bigger than anyone in that house could have prepared for. Something that turns an ordinary morning into the kind of moment people replay a hundred times, pausing, rewinding, showing their friends, saying "wait, watch THIS part" over and over again. I've watched a lot of animal content. I've seen the algorithm-bait compilations, the staged "reunion" videos, the ones where you can tell within three seconds that a camera crew set the whole thing up. This is not that. This has the texture of something that happened in real time, to real people, who had zero idea what was about to walk — or in this case, what was about to arrive in numbers — into their life again. Let's talk about why this actually matters, because it's bigger than "cute animal video." Every single day, somewhere, someone helps a creature that can't repay them. A bird with a broken wing. A stray that won't stop shivering. A baby animal abandoned by circumstance, not by choice. And every single day, most of us walk past it, because we've been trained — by scarcity, by exhaustion, by a world that constantly asks "what's in it for me" — to calculate the cost of kindness before we give it. This video is a rebuttal to that entire mindset. Because what it shows, without saying a single word, is that kindness is never actually wasted. It's stored somewhere. Filed away in a place we don't fully understand — in memory, in scent, in instinct, in whatever internal mechanism a wild creature uses to separate "safe" from "threat," "home" from "danger." And it gets paid back on a timeline that has nothing to do with our expectations. We think in days. Nature thinks in seasons, in years, in generations. That gap — between how fast we expect gratitude and how slow it actually arrives — is exactly where most people give up on kindness. They help once, get nothing immediate in return, and conclude the whole thing was pointless. What this video proves, in the most visceral way possible, is that the return on kindness compounds. It just compounds on a timescale most of us aren't patient enough to witness. And when it finally shows up? It doesn't show up small. It shows up loud. It shows up impossible to ignore. It shows up in a way that makes you question every assumption you had about what a wild animal is capable of feeling, remembering, and choosing to do. Choosing. That's the word that should stop you. A wild animal has every option in the world. Endless space, endless directions, zero obligation to go anywhere near a human structure ever again. No leash. No fence keeping it in. No debt it's contractually required to settle. The forest doesn't send collection notices. Nothing forces the outcome you're about to see. It happened because it wanted to. Sit with that for a second, because that's the part that separates this from every other "aww" animal clip on your feed. This isn't a trained behavior. This isn't a treat-motivated trick. This is closer to something we don't have a comfortable word for in everyday language — something that looks a lot like loyalty, a lot like trust, a lot like the same instinct that makes a dog wait by the door, except stripped of centuries of domestication and hardwired obedience. This came from something wild. Something that had every biological reason to stay away, and came anyway. I keep thinking about the specific moment the people in that video must have felt it click. That half-second where confusion turns into disbelief turns into something closer to awe. You can't manufacture that reaction. You can only capture it if you happen to have a camera rolling at the exact right second life decides to hand you something extraordinary. They did. And now we get to feel it too, secondhand, through a screen, years later, thousands of miles away from where it actually happened — and it still works. It still lands. That's how you know something is real. Fake moments lose their power the second you know what's coming. Real moments get stronger with distance, because the emotional core of them doesn't depend on surprise. It depends on truth. Let's talk about scale for a second, because that's the other thing people undersell about this. One animal returning to say thank you, in whatever language animals use for that concept, would already be remarkable. That alone would be worth stopping your scroll for. But what if it wasn't one? What if the message didn't stay contained to a single creature, a single memory, a single grateful visitor slipping quietly back into frame? What if it multiplied? What if the story that one small act of kindness wrote didn't end with the individual it was given to, but somehow, through channels we can't fully explain, spread outward — to a group, a family, a whole community of wild creatures who had no direct memory of the moment that started it all, and yet showed up anyway, together, unannounced, uninvited, and utterly unafraid? That's not a normal animal video anymore. That's something closer to folklore. The kind of story people used to tell around fires long before phones existed — the one about the animal that remembered, the one about the forest that returned a favor, the one that made you believe, even for just a minute, that the wild world is paying closer attention to us than we ever thought. And the wildest part is that it's real. No CGI. No trained animal handlers standing three feet outside the frame. No script. Just a house, a family, a morning like any other — and then suddenly, not like any other morning at all. I want to talk about why this specific kind of content hits different than everything else clogging your feed right now. We are drowning in manufactured emotion. Every platform is stuffed with content engineered in a lab to make you feel something for six seconds before you scroll to the next dopamine hit. Fake proposals. Staged surprises. "Emotional" reveals that were blocked, shot, and edited three separate times until the reaction looked convincing enough. We've become numb to sincerity because we've seen too many counterfeit versions of it. This is why moments like the one in this video hit so much harder than they should. Not because the content itself is rare — animals show up in unexpected places all the time — but because the emotional core underneath it is completely unforced. Nobody set this up. Nobody could have. You cannot script an animal's memory. You cannot direct wildness. You cannot pay a wild creature to perform gratitude on cue for a camera. Whatever happens in this video happens because it actually happened, in that order, in that place, to those people, whether a camera caught it or not. That authenticity is the entire reason your gut reacts the way it's about to. Let me give you a framework for thinking about this, because I think it explains why stories like this spread the way they do. There are three types of stories that break the internet. The first is spectacle — things that are big, loud, impossible, visually overwhelming. The second is scandal — things that are shocking because they reveal something ugly we didn't expect. And the third, the rarest, is what I'd call quiet proof. Stories that don't need to be loud or ugly to spread, because they offer evidence for something we desperately want to believe is true but rarely get to see confirmed. "Kindness matters, even when nobody's watching, even when there's no way to repay it, even across species, even years later." That's not a claim. That's not a inspirational quote slapped over a stock photo. That's a thing you can watch happen, in real footage, with your own eyes, start to finish, no interpretation required. That is exactly the category this falls into. And that's exactly why, once you've seen it, you're going to want to send it to someone. Not because it's funny. Not because it's shocking. Because it's proof of something you already suspected but never had evidence for. There's a version of this story that could have gone differently, and it's worth thinking about for a second, because it makes the actual outcome hit even harder. The easy path is indifference. It's the path most of us take most days, not out of cruelty, but out of exhaustion, distraction, the sheer volume of things constantly demanding our attention. Someone could have looked the other way. Could have assumed someone else would handle it. Could have decided it wasn't their problem, their responsibility, their weekend to ruin. They didn't take that path. And the story that exists because of that one decision is the story you're about to watch. Every single beat of what happens later only exists because, at some earlier point, a person chose the more inconvenient option for absolutely no personal gain. I think that's the detail that deserves the most attention, and it's the one that gets talked about the least, because it's the least flashy part. Nobody wants to slow down on "someone made a mildly inconvenient good choice." Everyone wants to skip straight to the payoff. But the payoff doesn't mean anything without that unglamorous, unrewarded, camera-off decision that started it. If you're the kind of person who's ever wondered whether the small good things you do actually matter — whether helping a stranger, feeding a stray, stopping for something most people would drive past, actually accomplishes anything beyond making you feel briefly better about yourself — this is the closest thing to hard evidence you're going to get that it does. Not because you'll get repaid the same way. You almost certainly won't. Most acts of kindness go completely unacknowledged, unreturned, and unremembered by everyone except you. That's the deal. That's always been the deal. But every once in a while — rare enough that it feels like magic when it happens, common enough that it keeps happening across the world every single day if you know where to look — the universe hands you a receipt. This is one of those receipts. I'll say this plainly: if you watch this and feel absolutely nothing, that's worth examining. Not because there's anything wrong with you, but because this is about as close to a universal emotional trigger as content gets. It taps into something almost pre-verbal — the part of your brain that understood trust and loyalty and gratitude long before you had words for any of them. Kids feel it. Adults feel it. People who claim they "don't really like animal videos" feel it. It bypasses cynicism because it isn't asking you to believe a claim. It's showing you a fact. There's also something worth saying about timing, about why moments like this seem to land differently right now than they might have a decade ago. We are, collectively, exhausted by cynicism. Every feed is an argument. Every comment section is a battlefield. Every piece of "uplifting" content gets picked apart within minutes for being staged, sponsored, or secretly problematic in some way nobody saw coming. We've built reflexes specifically designed to protect us from being fooled by fake sincerity, and those reflexes have made us suspicious of real sincerity too. And then something slips through that reflex entirely. Something so obviously unstaged, so clearly beyond anyone's ability to fabricate, that even the most hardened, doomscroll-numbed, seen-it-all-before viewer has no choice but to feel it. No angle to be cynical from. No "yeah but actually" take available. Just the thing itself, undeniable, sitting right there in front of you. That's rare. That's genuinely rare. And it's exactly what you're about to watch. I want to be careful here not to oversell it into something it isn't, because overselling is its own kind of dishonesty, and this doesn't need it. I'm not telling you this will change your life. I'm not telling you you'll cry for an hour afterward. I'm telling you it will do the one thing almost nothing on your feed manages to do anymore: it will surprise you, sincerely, without a gimmick, using nothing but something that actually happened. In a feed built entirely on manufactured surprise, an authentic one hits like nothing else can. Let's zoom out for a second and talk about what this says about the relationship between wild animals and the people who choose to help them, because I think there's a broader lesson buried in here that goes beyond "this one story is nice." We tend to think of the wild as something separate from us. A different category of existence, running on different rules, indifferent to human presence except as a threat to avoid. And for the most part, that's true — that's how survival works, that's how instinct is supposed to function. Fear keeps wild things alive. Distance keeps wild things wild. But every once in a while, a specific kind of interaction rewires that instinct. Not through force, not through captivity, not through anything that resembles domestication — but through something closer to a debt of safety. A single moment where a wild creature's survival depended entirely on a human choosing to help instead of ignore, and that moment gets encoded somewhere deep enough that it survives well past the point anyone would expect an animal to remember a human face, a human scent, a human place. That's the phenomenon underneath this whole video, whether or not you know the specific science behind animal memory and imprinting. You don't need a biology degree to feel what's actually happening. You just need to watch it. And once you watch it, you're going to understand why people who've seen this can't stop talking about it, can't stop sending it to their group chats with nothing but exclamation points, can't stop rewatching the exact same fifteen seconds over and over like they're trying to prove to themselves it actually happened the way they remember. It did happen that way. That's the whole point. I'm going to stop describing the feeling now, because at some point describing an emotion this specific just turns into a worse version of experiencing it yourself. You don't need my words for this. You need forty-something seconds and your undivided attention. One more thing before you go watch it, though, because I think it's worth saying out loud. Somewhere out there, right now, there's a version of this story waiting to happen to you. Some small, inconvenient, unrewarded act of kindness you haven't done yet because it doesn't seem worth the effort. Some creature, some stranger, some situation that's asking for five minutes of your day with absolutely no promise of anything in return. You don't do it for the payoff. That's not how any of this works, and if you're doing it for the payoff, it stops being kindness and starts being an investment strategy. You do it because it's the right thing to do regardless of what comes back. But it's nice, every once in a while, to get proof that something does come back. That the world keeps a ledger even when we've stopped expecting it to. That wild things remember, wild things return, and wild things — in their own way, on their own timeline, without anyone teaching them how — say thank you. Watch it. Then watch it again. Then send it to the one person in your life who needs a reminder that kindness isn't naive — it's just slow. And when it finally pays out, it pays out bigger than you ever imagined it would. This is that payout. This is what happens when nobody's watching turns into everybody's watching, years later, for all the right reasons. Go see it for yourself. Words were never going to be enough for this one — I just wanted you to understand what you're about to feel before you feel it. Now let me tell you what happens after you watch it, because that part matters too. You're going to want to explain it to someone who hasn't seen it yet, and you're going to fail. Not because you're bad at describing things, but because this specific category of moment resists description. You'll say "you just have to see it," and you'll mean it literally, because every attempt to summarize it in words strips out the exact thing that makes it land. That's not a flaw in the story. That's the tell that it's real. Fake moments compress into a sentence just fine. Real ones don't. You're also going to scroll to the comments, because that's what we do now, and you're going to find something interesting there too — hundreds, maybe thousands, of strangers all typing some version of the same disbelief. "I wasn't ready for this." "Why am I crying at my desk." "Sent this to my mom immediately." That's not an accident either. That's what happens when a piece of content manages to hit the exact same nerve in a huge number of completely unrelated people at the same time. You can't fake that kind of consensus. You can occasionally buy it with bots for a few hours, but it doesn't survive contact with real humans the way this has. Here's a thought experiment. Imagine you had to explain kindness to someone who had never encountered the concept — no words for it, no cultural reference point, nothing. You couldn't hand them a dictionary definition and expect it to land. Definitions are dead on arrival. What you'd actually have to do is show them a single, undeniable example and let the concept build itself in their head from the evidence. That's what this video functions as. It's not a lecture about why kindness matters. It's the raw material other people use to convince themselves it does. I think that's why it spreads the way stories like this spread — not through hype, not through influencer pushes, not through paid promotion, but through people quietly, individually, deciding "this is worth interrupting someone's day for." That kind of distribution can't be bought. It has to be earned, one genuine reaction at a time, and this earned it the hard way. Let's talk for a second about the animals themselves, separate from the humans in the story, because I think they deserve their own paragraph here. We spend so much energy debating what animals can and can't feel. Entire academic careers are built on that question. Do they experience gratitude the way we do? Do they form something we'd recognize as loyalty, or is it purely mechanical — scent recognition, learned safety, nothing more romantic than that? Scientists will keep arguing about the precise vocabulary for decades, and honestly, that's a worthwhile debate to have in a lab. But watch enough footage like this and you start to realize the vocabulary debate might be missing the point entirely. Maybe it doesn't matter whether what a wild animal feels maps perfectly onto the human concept of "thank you." Maybe what matters is the behavior itself — the choice to return, to trust, to show up in a place it has no obligation to ever go back to. You can call that instinct. You can call that memory. You can call that whatever term makes you comfortable. But when you watch it happen in real time, the label stops mattering, because the feeling it gives you doesn't wait for the science to catch up. That's the gap this video lives in — the space between what we can technically prove about animal cognition and what we can undeniably feel when we witness it ourselves. Most of us will never resolve that gap intellectually. But you're about to resolve it emotionally in less time than it takes to read this sentence twice. One more angle worth sitting with before you go watch this: think about how many similar moments happen every single day, all over the world, completely uncaptured. No phone nearby. No one thought to hit record. An animal returns somewhere, recognizes someone, does something that would have broken the internet — and it just... happens, quietly, in a backyard nobody's filming, and disappears into memory instead of a feed. We only get to see the ones that got caught. Which means every time you watch something like this, you're not just watching a rare event. You're watching a common event that rarely gets witnessed. That reframes the whole thing, doesn't it? This isn't a one-in-a-billion fluke. It's a one-in-a-billion fluke that someone happened to be holding a camera for. The actual phenomenon — animals remembering, animals returning, animals choosing trust over instinct — might be far less rare than the footage makes it look. We just don't usually get to see it. That should change how you think about every small kind act you've ever done for a creature that couldn't say thank you back. You don't know what happened after. You don't know if it came back to the same spot months later, looking for the person who helped it, only to find nobody there to witness it. You don't know if your one act of decency is still, right now, somewhere, being remembered by something that has no way of telling you. You'll probably never get to see your version of this video. Most people don't. That's exactly why watching someone else's version matters so much — it's the closest thing you'll ever get to proof that yours counted too. Okay. That's genuinely everything I've got to say about it without just describing the thing directly, which I promised I wouldn't do, and I'm not going to break that promise a paragraph before the finish line. Everything above this line is context. Everything below it is the only thing that actually matters: hit play. You'll know within the first few seconds why this has been living in people's heads. You'll know within the first few seconds why strangers are sending it to each other with no caption except a single emoji, because words failed them the same way they're about to fail you. Kindness doesn't expire. It just waits for the right moment to come back and remind you why you bothered in the first place. This is that moment. Go watch it.

Earth Unveiled

41,023 次观看 • 1 个月前

A Watch and Investment Story I have been a watch enthusiast since my dad got me interested in watches decades ago. About three years ago, I was in London and walked by a watch boutique called Bremont. I stepped into the store, fell in love with the watches, thought they were fairly priced if not somewhat inexpensive for the quality, and bought a number of them as gifts for friends and one for myself. As I was completing the purchases, I asked the store manager: ‘Who owns the company?’ He said, “The English brothers” – Nick and Giles English – and then he proceeded to tell me Bremont’s origin story that begins with a tragic plane crash of a 1942 Harvard trainer aircraft (an American plane purchased by the British beginning in 1938) which killed their father and almost Nick. In their ‘What does not kill me makes me stronger’ new world, Nick and Giles were inspired to pursue their dream of creating and building a British watch company, and Bremont thereafter was born. The manager gave me their contact information and I sent an email congratulating the brothers on the company, the brand, and the watches. I also offered to invest and help the business grow. Sometime later, I did a Zoom with Nick. He explained that my timing was good, as a long-time investor in the company was looking to sell some of their shares. Within a couple of months, an affiliate of mine invested coinciding with the purchase by a legacy Bremont shareholder of primary shares to provide the company with additional growth capital. I thereafter bought more shares of stock from other selling shareholders and I invested a substantial amount of additional growth capital in the company just this past week. Affiliates of mine and The Bremont Long Term Trust, a trust I recently established, now own 63% of the company. Bremont is a luxury British watch company that produces adventure and exploration watches. About one-fourth of Bremont’s sales are to the military, where the company has made custom-designed watches for more than 500 British, U.S., and other American ally squadrons around the world. While today there are very few British watch companies, the British actually created the watch industry – Rolex, notably, was a British company before it moved to Switzerland – with many of the most important technical innovations and complications of the industry having been invented in England in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. For the watch industry, the Swiss can be thought of like the Japanese of the U.S. auto industry, where in the early days, the Swiss made cheap imitations of British watches, but eventually by the 20th century, came to dominate the industry. For compliance reasons, I have been limited in my personal investments to private situations, principally startups, real estate, and private equity, directly and through funds. Because of my personal time limitations, I spend very little time on these investments, but through a combination of good luck, investment experience, and a good eye for talent, my collective private investment outcomes have been excellent, with a few huge successes outweighing some disappointments. I have always viewed my non-Pershing Square investments as an opportunity for learning and insights that I can apply to my day job. For example, I have found that closely following the venture investment world has provided important insights into disruptive technologies and companies that can soon become serious threats to even the largest and best capitalized public companies. Experiences at small companies also very often apply to big ones, so in my hobby of making personal investments, my returns have been both financial and educational, from my successes and from my failures. Other than tennis, I don’t have any real hobbies, but perhaps my personal investing qualifies as my second passion. To date, I have been a passive investor in Bremont, but perhaps the activist in me caused me to step forward, to recently seize the opportunity to materially increase my investment in the company, and become the non-executive chairman of a newly refreshed board. I don’t expect my chairman role at Bremont to take much of my time as it is a private company of limited scale, but I do expect my experience here will provide some helpful learnings and insights. I also thought it would be fun, interesting, and rewarding to take the X community along for the ride – at least those that are interested in watches, operations, and investing. I intend to provide periodic updates of the company’s progress on X, about our successes, our struggles, and our failures – so that we can learn and have some fun together. Think of my periodic updates as “Drive to Survive,” but for watches on X. “Time to Succeed”? You can probably come up with a better name for the series, and perhaps then I should reach out to Netflix to see if they are interested (while holding back my tears as I have watched the stock massively appreciate since our exit!). Bremont can greatly benefit by your feedback so I strongly encourage you to share your insights, critiques, and other ideas about the company and its watches on X so we can learn and improve. We will periodically award the best ideas with Bremont watches so you can have an opportunity to earn an appropriate in-kind return on your time invested in helping us succeed. In the modern era, building an independent watch company into a major company, let alone one in the U.K., has rarely if ever occurred. The watch world is littered with many such failed attempts so it is far from guaranteed that we will succeed in building a profitable and sustainable company, let alone a major independent player. My Investment History to Date with Bremont Prior to my investment in the company, Nick and Giles had taken Bremont to a reasonable scale for an independently owned watch company at about £21 million in revenues with a modest operating loss, which is an incredible accomplishment for two young men with no watch industry experience. Nick and Giles accomplishment is particularly significant in an extremely competitive industry characterized by well capitalized incumbents that control many of the top brands, e.g., Richemont, Swatch, LVMH, as well dominant, independently owned companies like Rolex, Patek Philippe, Audemars and Piguet, and a few others. Despite their progress, both Nick and Giles and the other shareholders agreed that bringing in an executive with watch industry experience would help to take the company to the next level. Shortly after I invested, we hired a search firm to identify and ultimately recruit our new CEO, Davide Cerrato, who joined in May of 2023. Davide’s entire career has been spent in the industry at Panerai, Tudor – where he famously created the Black Bay, Montblanc, and with a brief stent at HYT. Davide in turn hired other industry notables to round out the executive suite, and then the team went to work with the ambitious goal of transforming Bremont into a global industry leader. Bremont has some important competitive advantages. First and most importantly, the watches are handsome, extremely well designed, and overengineered. Davide’s team has materially upgraded materials (for example, the company now uses 904L steel for all of its steel watches – the same as Rolex – unprecedented for watches at Bremont’s price point), parts, and movements from what was already a good standard to a level comparable to watches at multiples of the price. The watches are developed, designed, manufactured, and serviced in Henley-on-Thames using principally Swiss movements. While making its own movement is an aspirational goal for Bremont, the Swiss still make the highest quality movements so that is what Bremont uses. Bremont has a unique brand story and heritage, particularly for a 23-year-old company, with two decades of credibility in war zones and air combat missions with the best war fighters and military pilots in the world. Bremont also makes a limited number of watches, around 10,000 per year, compared with more than 1.2 million for Rolex and 70,000 for Patek Philippe, and scarcity drives value in luxury goods. The combination of battlefield credibility, rarity, quality and a fair price make Bremont an extremely attractive alternative to the typical Rolex or Patek, which everyone seems to be wearing in my industry, a ubiquity in my view that loses its luster over time. Over the past 23 months, Davide and team have redesigned and focused Bremont’s range around three core offerings in Land, Sea, and Air – the Terra Nova, the Supermarine, and the Altitude – while upgrading materials, movements, and quality, updating the logo to reflect the new Land and Sea offerings (Bremont was previously perceived to only be an aviation brand), and dramatically improving manufacturing and service. The company has extended its warranty from three to five years on its new watches reflecting these improvements. Bremont benefits from having overinvested in its spectacular 35,000 square foot combined headquarters, manufacturing facility, and showroom in Henley-on-Thames, aka “The Wing” (email [email protected] to arrange a superb tour), with the capacity for substantial growth without the requirement for incremental capital investment. Lastly, Bremont now has a well-capitalized long-term major owner who would like to see Bremont become a big success and achieve its vision of returning watchmaking to the UK, and who is not looking for dividends or a liquidity event in this lifetime. I have learned over time that permanent capital and a truly long-term orientation are enormous competitive advantages for any business, and they should be very helpful here. With respect to the product, later this morning in Geneva at Watches and Wonders, the industry’s most important trade show, the company is launching its new Altitude aviation line, which builds from the company’s highly successful Martin Baker offerings. The company will also be introducing some complicated new watches including two unique, jumping hour models, a 12-piece new tourbillion model (the company's first 30-piece tourbillion watch sold out shortly after its launch last year), and the company’s first perpetual calendar (limited to 50 pieces). I will be back with further updates as we continue to make progress. In the meantime, please check out and visit the Wing ([email protected] ) and our boutiques in Mayfair and throughout the U.K., on Madison Avenue and 53rd Street, in Hong Kong, and in Melbourne. Pictures don’t do Bremonts justice so you should go in person and tell the store manager that I sent you. Also, please take a look at our new launch video, and don't forget to let me know what you think.

Bill Ackman

1,628,648 次观看 • 1 年前

Masquerade now hangs in The Toledo Museum of Art. But unlike a painting, Masquerade holds within itself: a gathering of people in the network and systems to connect us. The piece is not "A" piece. It is every Mask, every dot, every observation made and, through a new layer, every one yet to be made. I feel both stupidly lucky and genuinely honored to bring everyone who has given energy to Luci out of the network and into a place that has honored my work and the work of so many other artists I deeply admire with immense and precise care. This absurd world of masks and monkeys I love so much because of what has been shared between people through it has had my love compound through the care of people. To help to protect and preserve a story bigger than my own, not unlike what has taken place atop its surface. Much as the systems of participation echoed the systems of its creation, so too does its curation and cultivation by others help it grow. Masquerade now hangs in a museum, but it hangs alongside a cadre of digital art's giants in an exhibition titled “Infinite Images,” which sits centered inside a museum filled with the giants of art history itself. For this to happen requires a lattice frequency of care: not as a feeling, but as something intensely actionable. Care—demonstrated through sacrifice and skin in the game. It pours out of the dark blue diamond walls and the work atop them and into our orange room; it bleeds from every installation, overflowing from each and every artist, and the space between each of us within. Care is revealed through a curator who helped me understand my own work more but also learn what connects me backwards to the shoulders I stand on. Julia Kaganskiy 🇺🇦 found and presented our systems not as separate worlds, but as part of one system of life—all while bringing into life of a higher order: her first child. Care extended through a director, Adam Levine, who pushed for something quite radical and got his hands dirty to allow this show to even exist. The Museum and the people who keep its engine moving treated our new as sacred as their old. They did so not to onboard, but to remain. A portal that lifts up a movement happening in the network by seeing the need to connect our nodes rather than relegate or shut the gate behind. Doing this required the patronage of Alan Howard, channeled through the cataloging brilliance of Martina Negro, and the willingness of high‑order patronage to become a cooperative network rather than an adversarial one. In that cooperation is where Masquerade’s place in the exhibition came through Kanbas. A throughline drawn between the roles of our ecosystem. Of what can be built between us if we see each other as one ecosystem, both different and essential. An exhibition filled with cutting‑edge technology and masterful presentation does not exist with only artists or curators or museums; it is enabled through a network of generous patronage and curiosity. Kanbas helped me take what began as the orange room with a digital confessional that is Rachel and I’s studio in New York, that last year became The Monument Game boat‑dock exhibition in Venice, Italy through the genius of Lukas Amacher and support of Ryan Zurrer, and evolve it to sit in a Museum in a way that does not just exhibit the work, but educates and invites people to come closer who may not know any of this even exists. Rather than just house the singular work, Kanbas and Amanda cared to share the network of 613 Masks and the people who wear them with it. Care came through my team who built Masquerade with me in Nifty Gateway Studio. Chrisly, Ashlin, Bob, Nirali, Tara, and all who pitched in make our interface and systems accessible to a whole new audience; to build infrastructure and enable thousands of people who have never touched the blockchain to create a wallet just by leaving an Observation atop the Masquerade is more than a feature: it is spreading the network rather than closing its gates. I feel so lucky to have such a tremendous team of people to think not as a marketplace, but as stewards to present what we have been building well and improve it with time and circumstance. This patronage enabled artistry within artistry to thrive, through a masterful exhibition design led by Richard The, technology and fabrication partners through TCI in Greg and Anthony, Jack with projections, and fabricators through Bednark. With me is my brilliant engineer, Alex Borre, who has broken apart all of this alongside me and helped me grow as an artist. By my side has been joeyL.eth, the eternal vibe check of taste, restraint, and precision - the finest eye and mind I know, and the relentless, perpetual support of El Barba Roja blue check who championed and willed this exhibition into existence more than anyone. No matter how much “this is how we build” has looped and human‑centipeded in on itself through cynical interpretations, in this case, it truly is, and his hands are all over not just my contribution, but many others in this show, as well as in the exhibition’s foundation itself. But in the end: care has been given in the highest order by my wife Rachel Spratt who has done what all new great mothers do and given life through tremendous exertion. We did not take a break after Masquerade, because it just immediately became Masquerade IRL. She has given to me, given to our daughter Syla, given to our tribe of Masks and Skulls, to this exhibition: everything. What is left after one gives all away, no matter how sweetly, can be a hollowing of self or, if met well before a break, a shedding of self. To sit in this beautiful room together, within an exhibition this magnificent, inside a building this rich with history and love of humanity, and have so much care be put in to match hers by this network around us on and offline, I got to sit in pride because I knew this very real moment for me, that began so alone and has become quite collective, would simply, unequivocally, never even come close to existing without her. So much of my life has been defined by solitude. I was not expecting having my work presented like this to move me so much. I thought it would be more of a feather in the cap or rather beautiful box to check. But it isn't that at all. It's connection to others. I fell in love with the artists' work that sits alongside my own. I saw Dmitri Cherniak's Ringers I’ve seen a thousand times, but saw them again in a way my daughter could visualize her own curiosity about the world—decisions in how these were shared served a higher purpose: to communicate. I saw Casey REAS as someone not just as a pioneer, but as someone more real—who, like my wife, cut part of himself out and set it aside to see what others could create. I saw Operator not as slick performers of the code, but as arbiters of freedom. I saw invitations to see the humanity in code in dozens of directions, and gratitude to sit even close to any of it. Talent. Sweat. Blood. Skin in the game. The artists pushed. The fabricators pushed. The docents pushed. Not one of us is like the other and no template was ever to be made to try to force otherwise. On September 12th, I will be inviting every holder of Luci: Masks, Players, Council, to come out to a small town in Ohio and leave a bit of themselves behind and get a very deep look into the world I am trying to build in the process. More on that very soon, but should you be able to come, know that there is much to care about beyond what I’ve built within this exhibition—and I hope you will fall in love with the rest of these infinite worlds as I have. We all know we aren't supposed to touch the paintings in a museum. But my daughter Syla touched the illuminated lightbox of Masquerade that she unknowingly stars in at the center of, and I smiled. Because she's not touching a world of divine objects susceptible to fingerprints and pretense; she's touching a display. A front‑end stand‑in representation for the network of humanity underneath. A place where light, code, instructions, a design that rhymes across all things has formed a very unlikely but very real gathering of strangers over the last few years to create together. I feel lucky for her to grow up surrounded by people who create and who care.

Sam Spratt

49,215 次观看 • 1 年前