For those who think “ Americans will get tired of winning “ worth reading this so-called MOU. Looks lopsided to me. US agreeing to release frozen accounts and also engage to provide reconstruction funds for Iran! That sounds like reparations. Maybe now someone should ask about American lives lost and the taxpayers financing a war with this kind of outcome?

Thank God the War is over. Now Gold can go back to being a Safe Haven asset.

The golden age before social media and the quest to bare all. When dignity mattered, when emotions were private and were not meant to be tweet worthy.

One more for Monica Bellucci, a stunning 61 year old.

Good clear explanation of the five tiers of AI. In the base you start with energy to power the computer , then chips followed by infrastructure (buildings that house data centers), then the fancy models and finally application layer that does the solving via interface. x.com/ihtesham2005/status/20…

Well said. Young Frenchman speaks out on how European leaders, en masse, have failed his generation with a series of “ do good” projects that have left Europe sitting uncomfortably between America and China

“Arc of the Universe bends toward justice”! Or maybe there is Karma for all the MAGA folks.

People using their mind can make a massive difference. It’s not just about spending but thinking smart. Here loneliness which can devastate older communities is addressed in a smart way by bringing in univ. students to live in the dorms for free in exchange for paying attention to older people.

Once again we’re reminded that we’re dealing with an administration that is more show and bluster than deep thinking. Here is an article which highlights the stupidity of this administration. In a nutshell, they export Nvidia chips, but won’t allow a Canadian citizen with a green card to access latest models. So it’s “do something” not think it through first.

Yes @mcuban you’re right that 60% of US adults own stock directly or indirectly but what you omit to mention is that the richest 1% of Americans own nearly 50% of the stock market while the bottom half of Americans own just 1%.

Treasure trove of Cultural Revolution pics! If era fascinates you, definitely check this out!

But the female mind has demonstrated a capacity for all the mental acquirements and achievements of men, and as generations ensue that capacity will be expanded; the average woman will be as well educated as the average man, and then better educated, for the dormant faculties of her brain will be stimulated to an activity that will be all the more intense and powerful because of centuries of repose. Woman will ignore precedent and startle civilization with their progress. -- Nikola Tesla, Colliers Mag (1926)

A college dropout who became Robert Greene's research assistant wrote a book in 2016 arguing that the single thing destroying most tech founders is not the market, not the competition, and not bad luck, but the same enemy Marcus Aurelius wrote about in his journal 1,800 years ago. The book is called Ego is the Enemy and its written by Ryan Holiday. He dropped out of UC Riverside at 19 to apprentice under Robert Greene, the author of The 48 Laws of Power. He spent years inside the rooms where Greene wrote, reading every old book Greene was citing, watching how a serious researcher actually worked. By his mid-20s, he was writing his own books. By 29, he had published the one that quietly became required reading inside Silicon Valley, the NFL, and the U.S. military. The book he wrote came out in 2016. It is built on a 2,000-year-old philosophy called Stoicism, written down by three men who could not have predicted how relevant they would still be in 2026. Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor. He kept a private journal he never intended to publish, writing to himself every night about how to stop being arrogant, how to stop being reactive, how to stop letting power destroy his judgment. Seneca was an advisor to emperors who ended up rich, famous, and eventually forced to kill himself when the politics turned against him. Epictetus was a Greek slave who became a philosopher and taught his students that almost everything that destroys a person comes from inside, not outside. The three of them, separated by centuries, all arrived at the same conclusion. The enemy is not the world. The enemy is the part of you that wants the world to confirm how important you are. Holiday took that conclusion and built a framework specifically for modern builders. Founders. Engineers. Writers. Athletes. Anyone trying to do good work in public. He says we are always in one of three stages. Aspire. Success. Failure. We cycle between them constantly. And the ego attacks us differently inside each one. Stage one is aspire. This is the stage where you are working on something nobody is paying attention to yet. The repo with 12 stars. The startup with no users. The newsletter with 30 subscribers. The book draft sitting on your laptop. The ego in this stage wants you to talk about the work instead of doing the work. It wants you to post about the launch instead of finishing the launch. It wants you to argue with people on X about your future plans instead of shipping the next commit. The reason this is so dangerous is that talking about your work produces a small dose of the same satisfaction that finishing your work produces. Your brain cannot quite tell them apart. So you tweet about the project, you feel a little hit of completion, and the actual work gets quietly pushed to tomorrow. Holiday's prescription is direct. Talk less. Do more. Confidence is silent. Ego is loud. Stage two is success. This is the stage where the work starts to land. The repo crosses 1,000 stars. The startup gets the seed round. The post goes viral. The founder finally gets the press coverage they have been chasing for years. The ego in this stage wants you to believe you have arrived. It wants you to stop learning, stop listening, stop questioning your own assumptions, because you have proof now that you were right all along. This is the stage Holiday spends the most time on, because this is the stage that destroys the most careers. The founders who survive Series A and die at Series C. The maintainers whose project explodes and then quietly rots because they stop responding to issues. The creators who get one viral hit and chase that exact format for the next five years until nobody is reading anymore. The line he uses is brutal. Success is intoxicating, yet to sustain it requires sobriety. You have to keep treating yourself like a beginner long after the world has decided you are an expert. Stage three is failure. This is the stage every founder and every open-source maintainer eventually lands in. The project no one used. The startup that ran out of money. The launch that fell flat. The github repo that nobody starred. The book that did not sell. The ego in this stage wants you to blame everyone except yourself. The market was wrong. The investors were stupid. The users did not get it. The competitor cheated. The timing was off. Holiday calls this the most dangerous response to failure, because it prevents the only thing that can actually pull you out of it, which is honest learning. The Stoic move in failure is to look at the loss with cold clarity, separate what was your fault from what was bad luck, fix what was your fault, and keep walking. Now here is the specific framework for tech founders and open-source builders. Holiday does not write it this way in the book, but it is the direct application of his three stages to the work most of you are doing. In the aspire stage of an open-source project or a startup, your enemy is the dopamine of attention. You will be tempted to share screenshots before the product works. You will be tempted to tweet your roadmap before you have shipped a single feature. You will be tempted to compare your star count to other repos every morning. The Stoic move is to detach your identity from the metrics. The work is the work. The stars are a byproduct. If you stop checking the stars, the work will not get worse. If you start checking the stars every hour, the work will absolutely get worse. The Romans had a phrase for this. Memento mori. Remember you will die. The point is that no amount of validation is going to follow you out of the room you eventually die in. The work might. The applause will not. In the success stage, your enemy is the belief that you have figured it out. If your project explodes, the danger is not that you will fail. The danger is that you will stop being a student. You will stop reading the issues. You will stop talking to your users. You will start giving talks at conferences about your "philosophy" instead of shipping the next version. The Stoic move is to behave exactly the same after the win as you did before it. Same hours. Same humility. Same willingness to be told you are wrong. Marcus Aurelius wrote to himself, while ruling the entire Roman Empire, that he was just one man among many men, one mortal among other mortals, and that he should never let the throne change how he treated the people who served him. He was emperor. He still wrote this down every night. That is the standard. In the failure stage, your enemy is the story you tell yourself about why it was not your fault. The startup that did not work. The launch that fell flat. The project that nobody starred. The instinct will be to blame the algorithm, the timing, the competitor, the funding climate, the platform, the audience. Some of those things will be partially true. The Stoic move is to ignore them anyway. The Stoics taught that you only have two things in your life that are fully under your control. Your judgments and your actions. Everything else, including how your work is received, is outside the wall. If you spend your time arguing with what is outside the wall, you are wasting the only resource you can actually use, which is the next decision you make. The deeper insight buried in all of this is the one most readers miss the first time through. Ego is not the same as ambition. Ego is not the same as confidence. Ego is the specific failure mode where your sense of who you are becomes attached to outcomes you do not control. The repo getting starred. The startup getting funded. The tweet going viral. The press calling. The job offer arriving. The moment your identity gets attached to any of these, you have handed the steering wheel of your life to a public that does not love you and that has the attention span of a goldfish. The Stoic move is to take the wheel back. Do the work because the work is worth doing. Ship the project because shipping is its own reward. Build the company because building is the only part you can actually control. The outcomes will be whatever they are. The applause will arrive or it will not. The press will cover you or it will move on. None of it is yours. The work is yours. Marcus Aurelius wrote it down in his journal almost 1,900 years ago, expecting nobody to read it. The reason every serious founder you admire is quietly reading Ryan Holiday is that the most important sentence in modern startup advice is still a Roman emperor's private note to himself in the year 170. The enemy is inside the gates. And most days, the enemy is wearing your own face.

I will take the TV. They can have my currency. So China’s record breaking massive trade surplus will be viewed by some as a show of economic prowess. But think about it. Other people around the world enjoy goods produced by the sweat of Chinese people. What does the Chinese nation receive in exchange? Script, currency basically modern day trinkets.

That’s ingenious!

Interesting conundrum. AI revolution is meant to augment the collective intelligence of the world, with models continuously updated by retraining. But there is a problem: newer training data is increasingly scraped from AI-generated content, making outputs progressively blander and less innovative. Thats the ‘model collapse’ argument made in this 2024 paper here. Hard to believe human knowledge itself is not still expanding, but the paper makes a legitimate point that as AI-generated content floods the internet, future models risk training on their own outputs rather than genuine human thought. Knowledge may still be growing, but we will increasingly have to filter through a rising tide of anodyne, algorithmically homogenised information to get to it.

Amazing story on the power of conviction. Paulo Coelho’s parents subjected him to electroconvulsive shock therapy to dissuade him from becoming a writer instead of their chosen profession, which was the law. He persevered, and despite less than helpful editors, he prevailed and has become one of the most red authors on the planet.

Ah ohhhh! Let the games begin

Why are we hosting a sport built on international participation and goodwill, only to treat visiting delegations in a manner that falls well below the basic standard of hospitality the role demands? Sportsmanship is not an aspiration at an event like this. It is the entry condition. The United States has not met it.

Against all odds the so called “Filles du ROI”, 800 young women sent by Louis XIV from France to New France between 1663 and 1673 to address a severe gender imbalance where men outnumbered women nearly 6 to 1 in the colony of about 2,500 people. Most were poor, orphaned, or from institutions like Paris’s Hôpital Général; they endured brutal 6-10 week Atlantic voyages with disease, poor food, and storms, arriving malnourished before facing quick arranged marriages and harsh wilderness life in Quebec But there you go despite these high risks, these women drove rapid population growth to over 10,000 by 1681, forming the ancestry for a majority of today’s French Canadians through large families and community building. Another reminder that we have it good!