Co-founder and Co-CEO of @resonant_energy | distance over speed | (i/dec)

Joined January 2011
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Pinned Tweet
15 Oct 2020
Say what you will about Late Capital, at least itโ€™s given us rustic urban chic
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Ben Underwood retweeted
could a country in severe decline do THIS?
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Ben Underwood retweeted
As evidenced by the unbridled promotion and implementation of technology at the expense of human dignity, we are truly experiencing an eclipse of the sense of what it means to be human. It is imperative to recover an understanding of the true meaning and grandeur of humanity as intended by God. It is in this sense that the challenge we currently face is not technological, but anthropological, and it is my hope that the Encyclical Letter to be published within a few days will contribute to answering this challenge.
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Theyโ€™re calling it โ€œstrollingโ€
walking around outside is like scrolling with your body
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Ben Underwood retweeted
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This may explain why @pmarcaโ€™s head just keeps getting bigger and bigger: Information goes in, but has no way to get out.
Great men of history had little to no introspection. The personality that builds empires is not the same personality that sits around quietly questioning itself. @pmarca and I discuss what we both noticed but no one talks about: David: You don't have any levels of introspection? Marc: Yes, zero. As little as possible. David: Why? Marc: Move forward. Go! I found people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past. It's a real problem and it's a problem at work and it's a problem at home. David: So I've read 400 biographies of historyโ€™s greatest entrepreneurs and someone asked me what the most surprising thing Iโ€™ve learned from this was [and I answered] they have little or zero introspection. Sam Walton didn't wake up thinking about his internal self. He just woke up and was like: I like building Walmart. I'm going to keep building Walmart. I'm going to make more Walmarts. And he just kept doing it over and over again. Marc: If you go back 400 years ago it never would've occurred to anybody to be introspective. All of the modern conceptions around introspection and therapy, and all the things that kind of result from that are, a kind of a manufacture of the 1910s, 1920s. Great men of history didn't sit around doing this stuff. The individual runs and does all these things and builds things and builds empires and builds companies and builds technology. And then this kind of this kind of guilt based whammy kind of showed up from Europe. A lot of it from Vienna in 1910, 1920s, Freud and all that entire movement. And kind of turned all that inward and basically said, okay, now we need to basically second guess the individual. We need to criticize the individual. The individual needs to self criticize. The individual needs to feel guilt, needs to look backwards, needs to dwell in the past. It never resonated with me.
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Mass-produced LLM text is not a harmless drafting assistant. It is flattening the topography of the internet. It is smoothing every idiosyncrasy into median tone. It is converting lived experience into statistically probable phrasing.
[[Topic of discussion]] is not [[analogy]]. [[Dramatic fact given own line]]. [[Dramatic fact given own line]]. [[Dramatic fact given own line]]. [[Dramatic summary sentence.]] [[Topic of discussion]] is [[different analogy]]. [[Implications delivered with certainty]].
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The web is losing its dialects. Mass-produced LLM text is a beige fog rolling over a once-fractured vista. If we do not resist its homogenizing drift, the future of online discourse will not be noisy or chaotic or dangerousโ€”it will be uniformly, impeccably, forgettably the same.
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Can someone else confirm this for me, or am I finally losing it: Instagram automatically turns up the brightness of your phone screen when you scroll over an ad?
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Ben Underwood retweeted
Imagine you own a paid-off heavy-duty pickup truck that gets 12 MPG. You decide to buy an e-bike for your daily commute. The critic: "That's wasteful! Now you have to maintain two vehicles instead of one." Reality: you keep the truck for heavy lifting (reliability), but use the bike for 90% of trips (cheap energy). Even with "two systems," your total costs drop because you stop burning ~$100/week in gas.
โ€œWeโ€™re running a two system grid: one to harvest cheap variable energy and another to guarantee reliability. Two systems cost more than one.โ€
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23 Nov 2025
Which begs the question: How much higher would our bills be today if we had not avoided grid infrastructure upgrades by making EE and DER investments ten or twenty years ago?
23 Nov 2025
Replying to @xiaowang1984
Of course the real world is more complicated in that if you spend in efficiency you also can defer future upgrades. The fairy may not be able to do much about costs already incurred but it can definitely reduce future investment
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19 Sep 2025
Autocorrect, but it takes 1 GW of power
17 Sep 2025
Colossus II, the worldโ€™s first Gigawatt AI training cluster
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17 Sep 2025
I invite you to pause and notice how ugly the interface of this and virtually every other website has become
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17 Sep 2025
8 hours a day of looking at this stuff really weighs on the prefrontal cortex... the enshitification is real! @doctorow
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Ben Underwood retweeted
interesting...
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Not the hero we need, but maybe the hero we deserve: "Garbarino fell asleep during the House vote but said he would have supported the bill despite being disappointed with its details." eenews.net/articles/senate-rโ€ฆ

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22 Apr 2025
A defining feature of many conservativesโ€™ psychology is a stunted imagination: they canโ€™t imagine that a better world is possible. Itโ€™s interesting to watch the contortions they come up with to justify the world they can directly observe.
I would argue that the deepest problem with โ€œredlining as a form of invidious discriminationโ€ is that it was just actuaries trying to accurately calculate risk. To do otherwise would have constituted a subsidy for risky neighborhoods.
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Ben Underwood retweeted
The amount of BTM solar in New England is crazy
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Ben Underwood retweeted
29 Mar 2025
someone said their dad started believing in climate change because insurance companies started accounting for it and i still think about that
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25 Mar 2025
Hedging my bets by giving my son a name with universal appeal: Moshe Kohen
nameberry (baby name website) charted the reddest vs bluest baby names (meaning: highest disparity in red states vs blue states) and it extremely interesting data:
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