Masters of the Universe was an excellent underrated movie. #motu #mastersoftheuniverse #heman

Prompt engineering is the digital version of training new personnel.

I chose to pay a physician to murder my unborn child in 1991 when I had an abortion. I was a medical student at the time. My being chose to ignore the physical and spiritual truth that physical and spiritual life begins at conception. May God have mercy on my soul. As Christian physician, I will spend the rest of my days advocating for the truth- abortion is murder and is NOT a medical procedure.

My dad, a retired Bell Labs physicist, has been quietly resigned for many years to the fact that neither of his kids are smart enough to understand and appreciate math & physics the way he does. But now it's becoming clear my 11yo is terrifyingly smart, she engages with him on mathematical puzzles in a way I've simply never been capable of, and hope is returning to his eyes. It's both wonderful and heartbreaking for me to witness

Absolutely remarkable and brilliant systems management. @elonmusk

Here is a bit more detail. The Trump admin explained that “Petitioners are former healthcare workers who contend that New York’s now-repealed COVID-19 vaccine mandate for healthcare workers—known as Section 2.61—conflicted with Title VII because it foreclosed employers from granting any reasonable accommodations for religious practice” and that “Section 2.61 permitted only a medical exemption and did not include a religious exemption.”     The practical effect of that policy was that New York healthcare workers seeking to decline vaccination for religious reasons were fired.   Instead of defending these wrongfully terminated workers, the DOJ nonsensically and shamefully plays word games to characterize their requests as seeking an “exemption” (which New York law prohibited) instead of an “accommodation” (an option federal law requires). It then relies on this sematic nonsense to argue that the Supreme Court should not review the Second Circuit’s holding that a policy providing for medical but not religious exemptions is legal.   Having dealt with scores of religious employees in New York that lost their jobs under this policy, the Trump administration’s position is a sharp betrayal. The DOJ should have simply argued the obvious – that Section 2.61 foreclosed any religious exemption and hence should not stand under federal law. Period. That would have taken one or two pages. Instead, it spends over 20 pages creating a word salad of nonsense to justify New York’s and the DOJ’s unjustifiable position.

My wife mentioned a nice private school over dinner this week She said the campus was beautiful I asked what's the tuition She said we should look at it as an investment in him not a cost I made a note She said don't make a note I said I always make notes She said this isn't a deal I said everything is a deal She closed her eyes She said we'd discuss it Saturday I agreed Saturday 7:02am She came downstairs in her Saturday robe Coffee in hand I had my cargo shorts on The dining room had been cleared The projector was on The analyst was at the head of the table Quarter zip on, three iced coffees, a legal pad, and two laptops He had been there since 6:44am I texted him at 11:14pm Friday The text said dining room 6:45am bring the model He sent a thumbs up My wife stopped in the doorway She said what is this I said you said you wanted to discuss it She said this is not a discussion I did not respond She sat down anyway The analyst stood He said good morning ma'am She did not respond He sat back down A printed deck in front of each seat A fourth copy in case Slide 1 Tuition Schedule $38,500 per year Thirteen years $500,500 nominal Before escalators The school has raised tuition 4.2% per year for a decade With escalators $648,000 My wife said okay I said I'm not done Slide 2 Opportunity Cost Even before escalators $38,500 invested annually 10% nominal return S&P long-run average since 1928 By his eighteenth birthday $944,000 My wife said we can afford it I said I know that's not the slide Slide 3 Terminal Value at Age 65 $83 million She was quiet The analyst slid the sensitivity tables across the table 8% return $31 million 10% return $83 million 12% return $222 million She did not look She said this isn't about money I said it's always about money She said no it isn't I said then what is it about She did not answer She said you can't put a dollar value on his teachers his classmates his environment I said I can the analyst already did slide 6 He flipped to slide 6 She did not look She said the school is the best in the city I said best is a feeling She said it produces the best students I said the students were already the best before they got there She said our son deserves it I said our son deserves $83 million My son walked in He is five Dinosaur pajamas He looked at the projector He looked at the open deck on the table He looked at slide 3 He said are we modeling pre-tax or after-tax The analyst opened a new tab My wife looked at the ceiling He said what's the discount rate The analyst set down his pen She closed her eyes He said is this the same return assumption from the 529 conversation The analyst stopped typing He looked at me I did not say anything She stood up Sat back down He said dad can I help I said yes He pulled up a chair The analyst handed him a printout He started reading My wife watched him read She watched him for a long time She said his name He looked up She said do you like school He said the work is too easy and the kids don't ask questions She did not respond She looked at the ceiling She walked out of the room The analyst started packing up He said should I follow up Monday sir I said no follow up needed He'll be fine Sent from my iPhone

Marty Makary used to ambush a Virginia courthouse every other Friday. That was the day the local tax-exempt hospital reserved the docket to sue its poorest patients. Marty would show up at the door with a lawyer and intercept them on the way in. They were working-class people in job uniforms, embarrassed, grim-faced, expecting to lose. He reviewed the bills on the spot, for free, as a medical expert. Pointing out fraud, upcoding, inappropriate care, contradictions to the court. Then his counterpart, a young lawyer named Joey Kirchgessner, argued until the hospital cried uncle. They won A LOT. I drove down one Friday to watch. I was working in the Trump White House at the time. I was so proud of him I could barely stand it. That's the man the WSJ op-ed page wants you to believe is the problem. Read or listen to the full story here: katytalento.com/p/the-most-d…

I just had the craziest experience at the airport. We are about to board a flight to Atlanta when the pilot from the incoming plane walks out of the jetway. Guy is probably late 50s, salt and pepper hair, military look. The kind of pilot you instantly feel good about seeing on your flight. Pilot walks over to the counter, gets on the PA system, and starts addressing everyone. “Folks, I’ve been doing this a long time. Flying one of these jets is easy. The hard part is looking at 130 people and telling them their flight is going to be delayed.” Audible groans throughout the boarding gate. Most people here are flying to Atlanta as a layover before another flight. 130 people just had their day become a complete mess. The pilot goes on. “I get it, trust me. But here’s the deal: During our landing, we had a small mechanical issue. I’m not your pilot for the next leg, but I don’t feel confident the jet’s safe to fly until we have a mechanical team look it over, and I don’t feel comfortable asking the next pilots to fly you guys until we get confirmation.” He points at the agents next to him behind the counter: “Now, none of this is the agents’ fault. Please be kind to them. I’m the one who made this decision, not them, so any inconvenience you experience is my fault. Just please know that I don’t do this lightly, and I’m only doing it because I believe it’s in the best interests of everyone’s safety.” Now this is where the story gets crazy. The pilot puts the microphone down, grabs his suitcase, and all the people in the gate… Start clapping. I’m not joking, everyone starts clapping for the guy. 130 people who just had their travel plans ruined give an ovation to the guy who made the decision and delivered the message. All because he addressed them with decency and transparency, took ownership of the decision, made it clear that it was necessary, and explained why it was in everyone’s best interest. It’s honestly one of the best examples of strong communication—of strong leadership, for that matter—that I’ve seen in a long time. @Delta, whoever your Atlanta to Wichita pilot was this morning, he’s one of the good ones. Please tell him the delayed passengers of flight 1637 appreciate what he did.

Je me rappelle au lycée, j'avais une prof de français qui me répétait : « Rousseau, c'est mon auteur préféré. » À l'époque, j'étais complètement illettré, je n'avais pas lu un roman. Depuis, j'ai rattrapé un peu le retard. Et force est de constater : Rousseau est lui aussi un poison pour l'esprit français. Tu as raison de remonter à lui. Le geste fondateur est là. L'homme naît bon, c'est la société qui le corrompt. La propriété, la hiérarchie, la tradition, l'institution, tout ce qui structure une civilisation devient suspect. Le mal n'est plus dans l'homme, il est dans l'ordre. Donc il suffit de défaire l'ordre. De cette intuition découle tout le reste. La Terreur, qui croit pouvoir régénérer l'homme par le décret. Le socialisme utopique, qui croit pouvoir abolir l'égoïsme par l'organisation. Le wokisme, qui croit pouvoir purifier la société en démantelant ses normes. À chaque fois la même logique : l'homme est innocent, l'institution est coupable, donc il faut casser l'institution. C'est faux. L'homme n'est pas né bon. Il est né pulsionnel, ambivalent, capable du meilleur et du pire. Les institutions n'oppriment pas une nature angélique, elles canalisent une nature ambiguë. Détruire les institutions ne libère pas un bon sauvage, ça libère un homme livré à ses pires instincts. Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze n'ont fait que radicaliser Rousseau avec les outils du XXᵉ siècle. La matrice est la même : soupçon de toute autorité, dissolution de toute hiérarchie, fantasme d'un état originel pur que les structures auraient trahi. Donc oui, le péché originel commence avec lui. Et la France a une double dette : avoir donné Rousseau au XVIIIᵉ, et avoir donné la French Theory au XXᵉ. Deux fois le même poison, juste recombiné. Au travail.

YouTubers be like “wake up at 4am and run, that’s alpha!” No, it’s not. Look at apex predators; they’re all lazy. Bears hibernate, lions sleep all day. You know who wakes up at 4am and runs? Squirrels.

The future of P&I claims relating to autonomous container ships. @ProfRobAnderson

Brett Kavanaugh, a man in his 50s, had been valedictorian of his high school, at Yale College and a star student at Yale Law, had clerked for the Supreme Court, had a top career as an appellate lawyer and federal judge and a pristine reputation, and then a random woman from the town he grew up in claimed he had groped her at a party 35 years earlier when they were in high school. Kavanaugh didn’t try to argue that the incident was consensual. He didn’t claim he remembered things differently than she did. He immediately stated that he had never even met the accuser. Denying ever meeting the accuser is a much stronger claim than merely denying assaulting her, and much easier to refute. After Kavanaugh made this denial, Christine Blasey-Ford no longer had to prove he had sexually assaulted her to scuttle his nomination, she only had to prove that the two of them had attended a party together at which such an assault might have occurred. She was unable to do so. She did not know whose house the alleged assault occurred at. None of the people she claimed attended the party corroborated any aspect of her account. Leland Keyser, a friend of Blasey-Ford’s, who the accuser claimed was at the alleged party, said she recalled no such event and had never met Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh produced a detailed calendar he had kept during the summer Blasey-Ford alleged she was assaulted, which included his whereabouts of every weekend night and listing who he was with. Kavanaugh argued that he could alibi himself and provide witnesses for any night Blasey-Ford claimed she might have been at a party with him. Blasey-Ford responded that she did not know the date of her assault and was not entirely certain it even occurred that year. Instead of being seen as persuasive, Kavanaugh’s calendar was mocked in both mainstream and social media because the reason he kept it was for a drinking contest he was having with his friends. Nearly a decade later, there is still not a single shred of proof or a single witness who will corroborate the claim that Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey-Ford were ever in the same room before she testified at his confirmation hearing. Nonetheless, people like Nick Kristof still claim Kavanaugh was “credibly accused” of sexually assaulting this woman.

Dijkstra’s Algorithm Just Got Dethroned After 41 Years And the Future of Navigation, Logistics, and AI Just Got WAY Faster! Imagine this: For over six decades, Edsger Dijkstra’s legendary algorithm has quietly powered everything that moves data, people, or packets across networks. Google Maps rerouting you around traffic in real time? Dijkstra. Booking the cheapest flight with optimal connections? Dijkstra. Internet routers blasting your cat videos across the globe at lightning speed? You guessed it, Dijkstra. Textbooks declared it unbeatable on sparse graphs since 1984. Even the great Robert Tarjan snagged an award last year essentially saying, “Yeah, this is as good as it gets.” The “sorting barrier” felt like a law of physics. Until now. A brilliant team from Tsinghua University (led by Professor Ran Duan) just dropped a bombshell paper that shatters that 41-year-old ceiling. They’ve created the first deterministic algorithm to beat Dijkstra’s classic O(m n log n) time bound for the Single-Source Shortest Path (SSSP) problem on directed graphs with real weights. The New Champion: O(m log^{2/3} n) — Mind-Blowingly Faster on Massive Graphs Their breakthrough? They stopped obsessing over fully sorting every node by distance. Instead, they fused the relaxation power of the Bellman-Ford algorithm with a genius “recursive partial ordering” technique. This cleverly shrinks the “frontier” of candidate nodes you need to track, avoiding the full logarithmic sorting hit that’s haunted Dijkstra for decades. On huge sparse graphs (think the web, global supply chains, social networks, or road systems), this translates to significantly faster route-finding. We’re talking real theoretical wins that could cascade into practical speedups as implementations mature. This isn’t some incremental tweak — it’s the first major deterministic improvement since 1984, and it just won Best Paper at STOC 2025. Science is self-correcting in the most exhilarating way possible! Why This Feels Like Magic Dijkstra works by always picking the next closest unprocessed node elegant, but it forces you to maintain a sorted order. The Tsinghua team said: “What if we don’t need the full order right away?” They use divide-and-conquer on vertex sets, bounded multi-source subproblems, and smart pivots to compress the work. It’s like navigating a city by smartly grouping neighborhoods instead of checking every single streetlight one by one. Robert Tarjan himself called it “amazing.” When a legend in the field reacts like that, you know history is being rewritten. What This Means for the Real World • Navigation & Maps: Faster dynamic rerouting on planetary-scale graphs. Traffic apps could feel even snappier. • Logistics & Supply Chains: Optimizing millions of routes in less time = lower costs, greener deliveries, happier planets. • Networking: Internet infrastructure could route packets more efficiently than ever. • AI & Games: Pathfinding in massive virtual worlds or graph-based ML models gets a turbo boost. • Beyond: This cracks open the door for rethinking other “impossible” barriers in algorithms. If we can beat sorting here, what else is waiting? Implementations in libraries like NetworkX or Boost Graph are coming, and the entire algorithms community is buzzing. What a time to be alive in tech! Tsinghua just proved that even the most sacred cows in computer science aren’t untouchable. The sorting barrier? Obliterated. The shortest-path problem isn’t solved, it’s reopened for even greater conquests.

Elon’s decision to make likes private here on X has probably done more to shift the Overton window than any other single action in world history

Everyone's fighting about Achilles again. Whatever side you're on, most of the takes are flattening him into a meme. Let me remind you who he actually was. Achilles was raised by Chiron, the wisest of the centaurs, who taught him medicine, music, and philosophy alongside war. He could heal wounds and play the lyre. He was never just a killer. His mother, the sea goddess Thetis, knew the prophecy. He could live a long, peaceful life at home in obscurity, or die young at Troy and be remembered forever. He chose Troy. Knowing. When his best friend Patroclus was killed wearing his armor, Achilles' grief broke him. He tore his face. He poured ashes on his head. He refused to eat. Homer gives him the most devastating mourning scene in Western literature, and then Thetis appears and confirms it: if you go back to kill Hector, you will die soon after. He went back anyway. But here's the scene people forget, the one classicists call the moral heart of the Iliad. After killing Hector and dragging his body around the walls of Troy, Achilles is visited at midnight, alone in his tent, by Hector's elderly father, King Priam. Priam, the father of the man Achilles killed, kneels and kisses "the terrible, man-slaying hands that had killed so many of his sons." And Achilles weeps. They weep together. He lifts the old king up, feeds him, gives him a bed for the night, and returns Hector's body for burial with full honors. He even pauses the war so the Trojans can mourn. That's how the Iliad ends. Not a duel. Not a sack. An act of mercy between two grieving men. This is why, six centuries later, Alexander the Great sailed to Troy, anointed himself with oil, ran a footrace around Achilles' tomb, and slept every night with a dagger and a copy of the Iliad under his pillow. This is why the Greek word for hero, hērōs, was practically synonymous with his name. He chose to die for his friend. He wept with his enemy's father. He's been a hero for 2,700 years for a reason.

A 40-year-old patent has finally been brought to life. That's the Y-zipper. A 3D-printed three-sided fastener that transitions any object from flexible to rigid and back again. The robotics application is the one that caught my attention. A quadruped robot that adjusts its leg stiffness depending on terrain, switching between rigid and flexible in real time without additional motors or complex mechanical systems. But this goes way beyond robotics. A wrist cast that loosens during the day and stiffens at night. A tent that pops into shape in 90 seconds instead of six minutes. The idea sat in a patent filing for four decades. It took 3D printing to finally make it real. ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news → ziegler.substack.com

First mathematical derivation of the fine-structure constant ever. Lfg! blog.floatingpragma.io/fine-…

Activist: "You can graze sheep underneath solar panels. It's called agrivoltaics." Farmer: "I've read the brochures." Activist: "Best of both worlds." Farmer: "The panels shade the sward. Productive species die back. What grows is what tolerates shade and compaction. Sheep won't finish on it." Activist: "But the trials show it works." Farmer: "The trials run three years and measure ewe presence. Not lamb growth rates. Not finishing weights. Not what the soil looks like in year fifteen." Activist: "It's still better than nothing." Farmer: "It's a 30% stocking rate, a steel frame I can't plough around, panel-cleaning chemicals running into the watercourse, and a 40-year lease I can't break." Activist: "But you're getting energy AND lamb." Farmer: "I'm getting a third of the lamb, a maintenance contract, and a field my grandson can't farm." Activist: "You're being negative." Farmer: "I'm watching a thousand-year-old way of feeding people get traded for twenty-five years of subsidised electricity. Negative would be the polite word."

Overturn this decision? It’s a ruling from the state Supreme Court on a state constitutional matter, who are you going to appeal it to? God?