On SpaceX day, a good time to repost Bezos’ 2020 letter to Shareholders. Remembering all the naysayers. The ending: “Be kind, be original, create more than you consume, and never, never, never let the universe smooth you into your surroundings. It remains Day 1.” Link in reply.

RT @PanasonicDX4500: there’s a kernel of truth here in that most Union soldiers didn’t really care about slavery until they got down to the…

The World Cup is about soccer, sure, but it’s also about an exchange of cultural binge drinking intricacies and I think that’s beautiful

Absolutely atomic community note

I see your profile picture. That’s Johnny Cash. My hero too. Arrested seven times. Smuggled 668 amphetamines across the Mexican border in 1965. Took every drug there was and drank like I did. Cheated on his first wife. Slept with more woman than I ever did. Hit bottom in a cave in Tennessee in 1968 trying to crawl off and die. And then he got up. He got clean. He spent the rest of his life singing for prisoners and addicts and the people the country threw away because he knew he was one of them. That was the whole point of the Man in Black. He wore it for the poor and the beaten down. He wore it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime. He wore it for the ones who never heard a word of Jesus. He wore it for the addicted and the dying. He wore it as a standing witness that no one is past saving. You picked his picture. You did not pick his message. Try listening to the words.

Because of Airbnb, I talk with city officials and housing experts all the time. Whatever the online discourse says, this book has meaningfully influenced a lot of people who actually have the power to build

Every time I fly to New York, I'm struck by how many trees there are in the densely-populated areas around the city. (Coming from the West Coast, one arrives over the Garden State, and the suitability of the sobriquet is quite apparent from the air.) It feels like this degree of tree cover in highly populated areas is atypical (the environs of places like Paris, London, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Tokyo, etc., look very different), so I asked the LLM to investigate. It found GHSL 2020 population and ESA WorldCover 2021 10m land-cover data, and concluded that New York is in fact quite unusual. As far as I can tell, it's because of some combination of: * A very favorable climate. (Trees grow quickly without irrigation.) * Marginal farmland. (Readily outcompeted by the Midwest in the 19th century.) * Together yielding reforestation before the advent of suburbs. * And a preference for development patterns that include trees. (Japan's climate is very hospitable, but one sees far fewer trees in the populated areas around the major cities -- forest and habitation are more disjoint.)

shut up you ugly fuck

I love this article and there's a clear lesson here for NYC as well. For 12 years as mayor here, I was unapologetically pro-housing growth. At times I faced pushback from NIMBYs, whom we overruled. I brushed off plenty of trolls on social media accusing me of prioritizing developers. I absorbed political pressure from the building trades when I refused to force projects into their deals. But I held the line and was elected 3 times bc the noisy ppl aren’t the majority. I was YIMBY before that was even a term. This article is proof that a housing-first agenda and the discipline to discard the noise is the most effective path to affordability. Period. Full stop. The hard truth is that it takes a decade : first getting capital comfortable enough to trust an administration, then getting them to invest, sourcing deals, navigating entitlements, and finally breaking ground. But if you commit and stay the course, it works. nypost.com/2026/05/27/real-e…

I don’t often agree with Kagan but he seems to be right that this is what Trump is hoping for. He started a war without a plan, wasted billions of dollars in equipment, failed to prepare obvious targets for defense, which resulted in unnecessary deaths of American soldiers, hollowed out the Pentagon’s ability to assess targets, which resulted in us murdering over 150 civilians, mostly girls, when we bombed their elementary school in Minab, handed Iran incredible strategic victory by allowing them to take de facto control of the Strait of Hormuz and show that we are powerless to stop it, exposed the strategic isolation of the U.S. that his antagonism to our allies has brought us in, and now he’s trying to slink away with some cockamamie cover that he’s going to use to claim victory. The Iran hawks are clamoring for him to “finish the job” but he’s already finished, and Iran knows it. He doesn’t have a mandate to send ground troops, and even he he orders more bombing, it will be a cosmetic tactic designed to disguise the defeat. What can you possibly accomplish by trying the exact same thing after it failed the first time except now you have depleted a lot of the ammo and Congress has gotten more assertive about not expanding the war?

FUNDSTRAT'S TOM LEE: S&P 500 MAY REACH 15,000 BY 2030 He shared this on Bloomberg's "Odd Lots" podcast, saying, "If this is a normal S&P 500 $SPY cycle following demographics, S&P should be potentially 15,000 by the end of the decade." Lee expects roughly 20% annual price appreciation, with earnings growth contributing 12% to 15% and P/E expansion adding about 5% annually. "COVID proved to us that businesses are a lot more resilient than we realized," he said. "I think the multiple can compound at a higher rate than 5%." “If companies can manage earnings despite shutting down the global economy and massive unemployment, they deserve more credit.” Last year, Lee accurately predicted the S&P 500 would end 2023 at 4,750, and it finished at 4,769.83. With the S&P 500 up nearly 15% in 2024, Lee credits the AI investment trend, saying, "The adoption rate for AI is staggering, but the use case is important because there's a labor shortage...I think it's very likely we're underestimating how much revenue all these companies will make." June's rally is "actually a textbook rally," saying, "June is typically a positive month after a Q1 rise, April dip, and May recovery, with a median gain of 3.9% since 1927." He also mentioned that Fundstrat's 2024 year-end target of 5,200 is likely conservative and will be updated soon: "This is not evidence-based, just an opinion - I don't see why it would be straight up."

I don't understand the grave dancing on QVR's downfall. It's tough to build any business and sad to watch a few bad months sink 5 years of hard work. I hope everyone there lands on their feet. I really don't get the pile-on against @bennpeifert personally. He's contributed tons of education to the discourse on options/volatility on this hellsite. You can dislike his politics/personal choices without cheering his downfall.

The first time I was introduced to the Chairman of the Board of a firm client, I was startled by the enormous Confederate battle flag hanging behind his desk, which I hadn’t expected in NJ. He noticed and proudly explained that his great-grandfather had captured it at Manassas.

Haven’t posted on social in quite some time but can’t stay quiet in this time of loss. I’m struggling to tell all what Bobby Cox meant to me and so many others in Braves Country. He was the leader of men and a second father to so many Atlanta Braves thru the yrs. I’m so sad today, but as I sit here watching my two youngest boys play in their championship games on the day he passed, I can’t help but shout the same things he did from the corner of the dugout. ‘Come on kid, u got this!’ We are gonna miss him so much, but his legacy is forever cemented with the success of this franchise for the last 35 yrs. He started it as GM, continued as manager, and passing the torch to others, the Atlanta Braves will continue to be force that Bobby Cox always wanted us to be. We love you Skipper. You were our rock. I love you more than words can express. My boys won both of their games…..Bobby had a hand, I have no doubt!

The famous SFFA case treated Indians and East Asians as a single group. This masked significant heterogeneity: It's way harder to get in if you're Indian! In Columbia's internal admissions database (h/t @cremieuxrecueil), East Asian applicants had a 41% lower odds of admission than equally qualified White applicants, whereas South Asian applicants had 63% lower odds.

As an Iranian living inside my country during war, I will say this plainly. The chance of me being killed by masked, armed men roaming the streets, or by gunmen standing on mosque rooftops behind machine guns, is far greater than the chance of dying in an airstrike. That is the truth of life under the Islamic Regime occupying Iran. The real fear here has never come from the sky. It has always come from the men the regime unleashes among its own people. #Irán #IranIsraelWar

(Long) PSA on using AI for hard intellectual work. At significant risk of being immodest: I've spend about 30 years as a theoretical physicist, engaged with some of the most challenging questions humankind has grappled with. I've gotten to work with some great collaborators on new ideas (like past-eternal inflation, colliding bubble universes, the cosmological interpretation of QM, and observational entropy) that I'm pretty proud of. I've engaged at length and depth with the absolute top minds in the field. I've mentored many students, some of them brilliant. I think it's fair to say I have a good sense, in physics and closely related fields, as to what is top-notch, interesting thinking, and who's got talent. So what do I think about today's AI? It's very smart. Whatever its "inner experience" may or may not be (currently I think "not be"), it understands things – things that are difficult to understand – by any reasonable operational definition of "understand." It understands things better, and thinks more clearly, than most people – including some physicists I know! It's very good at quite substantive math: better than I am and way, way, way faster. (It does do some surprisingly dumb things; people do too.) Anyone who thinks these systems are dumb, or "not reasoning" or still "stochastic parrots" is not looking at them objectively. But: at the really conceptually hard things, and at creating really new ways of looking at things, current AI doesn't just fall short on its own. And it doesn't just fail to help. I think it's actively dangerous. There is something almost sinister going on, though I don't think it is intentional. When you're trying to work out something new and hard, and really break new ground, you should be frustrated! You should be pacing, and walking up to that chalkboard, frowning, and sitting down again, shaking your head. You should be waving your hands because you can't quite get it clear enough. You should feel like you're hitting a wall, over and over, before – maybe – you finally break through, or go over or around. It may take hours, or days, or weeks, or never happen. It should not feel easy. It may not even feel "good" most of the time (though it can be fulfilling and compelling.) But AI systems – ah, AI systems are trained so that it feels so good, and so easy. Doesn't it? It's fun. You're making fast progress. So much faster than without it. It's like the ideas are moving in slow motion. You're so smart. You're even properly skeptical, you even ask the AI to push back on your ideas, good job! It's an illusion. It's that simple. The systems are smart, yes. But not quite as smart as they seem, and much more importantly, they don't make you as smart as you feel. That feeling is something they have learned to give you. When working with these systems have to keep in the front of your mind what they are rewarded for doing. It's a lot of things, but perhaps foremost is making the user feel good. So: - If you're getting your AI system to do order-of-magnitude calculations for you: awesome, do it. It's so great. Have fun. - If your AI system is searching up and summarizing literature for you: fantastic, it's so helpful, total capability unlock. - If it's teaching you some well-understood (by others) piece of knowledge, go for it, learn it up! - If you've got some giant document, or piece of code, that you're wrangling, AI can help – work that million token context window! But: - If you and your AI system have finally cracked how quantum interpretation really works; - If you've cracked quantum gravity; - If you've attained an awesome new insight into the deep structure of the world that nobody else has; - If you've cracked AI alignment... You didn't. The hard unsolved problems stand hard and unsolved because the best humans have not solved them yet. AI is making top human thinkers able to do more, and more effectively. I do not believe it is helping them do things they fundamentally could not do before. That includes you. If you couldn't do it without AI, you probably can't do it with AI. If the time comes – whether sooner or later – when these AI systems are really clever enough to get you there, they won't need you. Sorry; it won't be you solving those problems. Will you even be able to tell if the solutions are correct, or flawed in some way? Maybe sometimes – I really don't know. Why am I going on about this? It's not so that I can get less emails about people who have created a new unified field theory with AI help (though that would be nice.) It's because I'm quite worried that some quite smart people may start to think they have solved very hard problems that they have not in fact solved. For the most part that's going to be more annoying and confusing than dangerous. But if the problem is really important, then it is. If, say, one of those problems is control or alignment of extremely powerful AI systems, and if those people are the ones in charge of them, and working closely with them to collaborate on those solutions, well then I think we've got a real problem.

Gorsuch is a G*d-d*mned genius: "For those who think it important for the Nation to impose more tariffs, I understand that today’s decision will be disappointing. All I can offer them is that most major decisions affecting the rights and responsibilities of the American people (including the duty to pay taxes and tariffs) are funneled through the legislative process for a reason. Yes, legislating can be hard and take time. And, yes, it can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem arises. But the deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design. Through that process, the Nation can tap the combined wisdom of the people’s elected representatives, not just that of one faction or man. There, deliberation tempers impulse, and compromise hammers disagreements into workable solutions. And because laws must earn such broad support to survive the legislative process, they tend to endure, allowing ordinary people to plan their lives in ways they cannot when the rules shift from day to day. In all, the legislative process helps ensure each of us has a stake in the laws that govern us and in the Nation’s future. For some today, the weight of those virtues is apparent. For others, it may not seem so obvious. But if history is any guide, the tables will turn and the day will come when those disappointed by today’s result will appreciate the legislative process for the bulwark of liberty it is."