Chinese He-Man has better production value than the Hollywood film: 😂

Fable isn't the first. In 1999 the department of defense blocked exports of the PowerMac G4 for crossing the 1 gigaflop threshold. Steve Jobs turned it into an ad.

In 1963, New York City committed what one critic called an act of vandalism against its own soul. It tore down the most beautiful building it had ever built, and it has regretted it every day since. The building was Pennsylvania Station, and for half a century it was one of the great rooms of the world... It opened in 1910, designed by the architects McKim, Mead & White, and it covered eight acres in the heart of Manhattan. Its main waiting room was modeled on the Baths of Caracalla in ancient Rome, with ceilings that rose 150 feet into the air. Sunlight poured down through vast steel-and-glass canopies onto the concourse below. To step off a train and walk up into that light was, for millions of arriving travelers, the moment New York announced itself. A historian, Vincent Scully, famously wrote that, through it, one entered the city like a god. One scuttles in now like a rat... Because in 1963, the railroad, losing money and sitting on immensely valuable land, sold the air rights above the station. The great building was condemned. Wave by wave, the pink granite columns were pulled down and dumped in a New Jersey swamp, and a low, windowless complex of Madison Square Garden and an office tower was built on top of the surviving tracks. There was no law to stop it. At the time, nothing in New York protected a historic building from destruction, however beloved. Leading architects stood outside in protest as the demolition began. It made no difference... But something came out of the loss. The destruction of Penn Station horrified the public so deeply that it gave birth to the modern preservation movement in America. New York passed its landmarks law in 1965, and that law would later save Grand Central Terminal from the very same fate. In a way, Penn Station became more powerful in death than it had ever been in life. It’s really true that we never truly know what we have until we lose it... the columns of Penn Station could not be saved. But every landmark that still stands in New York today stands partly because of what their loss awakened in the people who watched them fall. Ada Louise Huxtable, the first architecture critic of The New York Times, wrote of the demolition in 1963: "The tragedy is that our own times not only could not produce such a building, but cannot even maintain it." I started this newsletter because the people who came before us left us something extraordinary, and almost no one is teaching us how to see it anymore. Every week I try to. If that is something you would like to be part of, you can join here: James-lucas.com/welcome I write about beauty in all its forms. If you'd like to support the work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible.

I just spent months handwriting a 200 page guide on the entirety of ML foundations and math from scratch. The guide features: - Neural Nets (Backprop, Adam, SGD, Batch Norm) - ML Algorithms (SVM, Grad Boosting, K-means, PCA) - Hardware (Tensor Cores, Systolic Arrays, CUDA) - Transformers (Multi-Head Attn, KV Cache, LoRA) - Vision (ViT, Convolutions, MAE, IoU, NMS, VLM) - Agents (OpenClaw, ReAct, Memory, Orchestration) Everything I wish I had years ago, for free.

Today I learned that when Richard Feynman couldn't take any calculus courses in high school, he decided to teach himself calculus and made his own calculus book from his notes.

On this date in 1984, Russian computer programmer Alexey Pajitnov created and released the very first version of Tetris. BITE-SIZED FACT | The original, stripped-down edition was developed on a Soviet Elektronika 60 computer. Because of the computer's limited memory, the original build only had 10 levels & lacked the scoring and color we know today.

The Matrix (1999) art by Krzysztof Domaradzki.

Dirac couldn't get hired as an electrical engineer. A 19-year-old with a Bristol degree in 1921, during a post-war depression that had no use for him. So he stayed at Bristol and studied math for free because there was nothing else to do. Two years later he got a fellowship to Cambridge. His advisor, Ralph Fowler, handed him proofs of an unpublished Heisenberg paper in August 1925. Dirac read it and realized the math resembled Poisson brackets from classical mechanics. Within months he had built an entirely new mathematical framework for quantum theory. He published 11 papers before submitting his thesis. Eleven. Most PhD students struggle to publish one. Dirac had a body of work that constituted an entire theoretical foundation, and he still needed to package it into a dissertation to satisfy the degree requirements. The thesis title tells you everything about the confidence level. When you title your PhD "Quantum Mechanics" at age 23, you are either delusional or correct. Dirac was correct. It was the first PhD thesis ever written on the subject. Two years after that he wrote the Dirac equation, unifying special relativity with quantum mechanics and predicting antimatter before anyone had observed it. By 1932 he held the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics at Cambridge. The same chair Isaac Newton held. He was 30. Nobel Prize at 31. The youngest physics laureate at the time. The entire arc from unemployable engineer to owning Newton's chair took 11 years. The field he named his thesis after is now the operating system of modern physics.

Dude, I retired like ten years ago. Since then, I've written and published two books, a metric crapton of software, learned 3D graphics and embedded systems, built a YouTube channel with a million subscribers, restored two cars, sent three kids off to college, learned to drive a race car, and now I'm a public speaker for fun. I don't have a garden. No chill needed.

Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneamise, 1987 This hand drawn movie was directed by Hiroyuki Yamaga and produced by the studio Gainax. A science fiction film set in an alternate world where a nation attempts to launch the first human into space. The story follows Shirotsugh Lhadatt, an unmotivated pilot who ends up becoming the candidate for a historic mission, facing political pressure, personal doubts of his dream of reaching space.

Moebius concept art for Alien, 1979.

Earlier this month I volunteered at Stanford’s Future of Math symposium, and ever since, I've been puzzling through what it now means to pursue mathematics as a student in the age of AI. I wrote an essay to make sense of it all: apoorvapanidapu.substack.com…

Sun SPARCstation Voyagerかっこいいよなあ！ こういうかっこいいコンピュータを使いこなすつもりで社会人になったはずだったんだが… ※写真は拾い