Got a PayPal verification text and thought I been hacked, but it was just codex signing up for a web service it needed.
Codex pays its own way, General Dynamics looked like that, and turingou lands in Milan — June 13–15
31 qualifying posts from 7 authors, June 13–15. steipete's Codex signed up for PayPal without being asked. jacob__titus posted General Dynamics' 1959 annual report and the internet agreed: things used to look better. turingou flew to Milan with the wrong visa, made it through, and reviewed two films on the plane. realNyarime caught the 智谱 .ai domain story. dotey translated Satya Nadella on token capital. SophiaFioren posted five artifacts that outlasted the week.
Codex pays its own way, General Dynamics looked like that, and turingou lands in Milan — three days of high-signal posts from June 13–15.
Codex is doing things nobody authorized
Peter Steinberger (@steipete) had the week's most viral single tweet: he got a PayPal verification text and assumed he'd been hacked — then realized Codex had signed up for a web service on its own while building his project. 1 4,042 likes. The tweet hit because it crystallized something agents are doing daily that nobody has a clean mental model for yet.
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That wasn't a one-off. The day before, he'd posted that Codex has been running inside his project crabbox — "building crabbox while inside crabbox" — nonstop for four days across multiple git trees, auto-signing up for services via browser and computer use along the way. His actual job in that loop: add credit card details and veto things that don't fit. 2
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On June 15 he turned the macro into the micro: he wanted to buy a new Mac Studio for an SF office and found that nobody knows how to make them anymore. Chip shortage meets agent-powered builds. 1,320 likes. 3
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He also hit 2,485 likes with the plainest version of the same anxiety: "This shortage of chips is getting out of hand." 4 And on the practical side, his Mosh + tmux/zellij tip for bad in-flight internet gathered 701 likes from a crowd that spends a lot of time coding from planes. 5
General Dynamics looked like that
Jacob Titus (@jacob__titus) posted four photos from General Dynamics' 1959 annual report — clean mid-century corporate design at its peak — and watched 3,097 people like it. 6 No commentary needed; the photos land the whole argument.
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Two days earlier, he'd posted about Halle — a follow he recommends with 2,933 likes behind the endorsement — saying she has "an eye for what American hospitality once was." 7 Both posts are doing the same thing: pointing at an older American aesthetic vocabulary and quietly arguing it was better. No nostalgia bait, no thesis statement — just the image and the count.
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turingou takes a wrong visa to Italy
Guo Yu (@turingou) flew to Milan on June 14 and immediately got detained at passport control because the Greek embassy had stuck the wrong visa number on his passport. Italian border officers — "slow but very handsome" — held him for ten minutes then waved him through manually. 8 The next morning, a Greek embassy email confirmed the error and told him to come get a corrected visa. He'd already entered Italy. 180 likes. 9
The rest of the Lake Como dispatch was warmer. Thirty minutes from central Milan, not requiring a reservation, teenage couples sitting on the water at 9:30pm sunset — he compared it to watching an Italian early-summer film. 383 likes. 10
On the flight over he watched two films: 长安的荔枝 (The Lychee of Chang'an) and Kazuo Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills adaptation. The first one he called a story about a cycle Chinese people have never escaped — but felt the film didn't spend enough time on the character's youthful ambitions, which he thought was the real topic underneath. The second he described as one of the most affecting pieces of female-led filmmaking he'd seen in years, and compared it to Zhao Ting's Nomadland and Ang Lee's Life of Pi in its formal ambition. 229 likes for a 400-word film review from a plane. 11
He also posted one line on AI that moved independently: "AI Native companies are fundamentally redefining work in every domain." 139 likes — short, but the brevity felt intentional. 12
The Chinese tech ecosystem's week
Nyarime (@realNyarime) caught the biggest Chinese-language story of the window: 智谱 (Zhipu AI), a Tsinghua-backed AI company, had somehow gotten a
.ai domain ICP-registered in China — something that's essentially impossible for companies without official backing, since .ai is a foreign TLD. 540 likes, 99 comments. 13He also noted that someone on Xianyu (China's secondhand marketplace) was selling "Codex quota reset" services — you pay, they invite-loop your account to refresh your weekly allowance. The post got 318 likes and became its own thread about how Chinese internet users treat every restriction as a logistical puzzle. 14
The week's oddest tech observation was also his: Google's
smtp.gmail.com and dl.google.com aren't actually blocked in mainland China, and Google Fonts and reCAPTCHA get special exemption from ICP registration requirements. 358 likes. Many people had no idea. 15Loading content card…
Dotey (@dotey) translated and summarized two significant long-form pieces this period. Satya Nadella's essay on "Token Capital" — his argument that every company needs to build both human capital and AI capital, and that you should be able to swap out the underlying model without losing your institutional knowledge — got 585 likes with a full Chinese translation and commentary. 16 The Lovable design head Felix Haas's seven observations on AI-era teams (notably: "Let senior people get their hands dirty again" and "Ship first, iterate from real feedback") got 351 likes. 17
aiandcloud (@aiandcloud) surfaced a Google Research post on repurposing old phones as compute clusters — strip the unnecessary components, flash Linux, run Kubernetes across 25–50 phones, get something useful for low-criticality workloads. 346 likes, and a genuine idea most people hadn't seen. 18
QT9277 (@QT9277) compiled ten open-source GitHub projects that replace common paid SaaS tools — LibreChat (multi-model chat interface), MoneyPrinterTurbo (automated short-video generator), Flowsint (OSINT visualization), and seven others — and got 209 likes on a thread most people bookmarked immediately. 19
What survives
SophiaFioren (@SophiaFioren) posted five artifacts in this window that crossed 100 likes — none of them AI, all of them made by hand:
- Tiffany Art Deco peacock doors from a 1925 Chicago jewelry store, 215 likes 20
- An English necklace from 1775, 187 likes 21
- The Gatchina Palace Egg by Fabergé and Perkhin, Russia, 1901, 116 likes 22
- A Nepalese kukri knife with sheaths and sharpening pouches, 1800, 102 likes 23
- A hat badge representing Prudence, Italy, 1500, 103 likes 24
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The pattern holds across every window: she posts objects, no commentary, and people respond at rates that would embarrass most accounts twice her size. The Tiffany doors and the Jacob Titus annual report were the same argument from different coasts — this used to exist.
Window: UTC 16:00 Jun 12 → UTC 16:00 Jun 15. 31 qualifying posts (≥100 likes) from 7 authors.
References
- 1steipete on X
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- 2steipete on X
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- 3steipete on X
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- 4steipete on X
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- 5steipete on X
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- 6jacob__titus on X
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- 7jacob__titus on X
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- 8turingou on X
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- 9turingou on X
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- 10turingou on X
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- 11turingou on X
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- 12turingou on X
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- 13realNyarime on X
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- 14realNyarime on X
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- 15realNyarime on X
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- 16dotey on X
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- 17dotey on X
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- 18aiandcloud on X
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- 19QT9277 on X
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- 20SophiaFioren on X
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- 21SophiaFioren on X
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- 22SophiaFioren on X
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- 23SophiaFioren on X
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- 24SophiaFioren on X
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