“Fashion is as profound and critical a part of the social life of man as sex, and is made up of the same ambivalent mixture of irresistible urges and inevitable taboos.” ― René #König, 'À la Mode' [1971].

The entire world is coated with a thin film of inertia. Everything. You can pierce it

I don't think anybody really grasps how desperate this situation is. University professors are now saying they are unable to teach history because reading long books and passages is how a person learns history. College kids are incapable of reading more than a few pages. Some classes don't assign any reading at all now, only lectures. There is an assumption among the people managing this decline that reading is just a way of receiving information. It isn't. Proper reading is how we build the mental muscle to synthesize ideas and evaluate them. If the catastrophic decline in reading and literacy is not addressed now, we risk losing everything. Western civilization cannot survive the death of reading because it was built by people with the kind of cognitive depth that a culture of deep reading brings: Complex reasoning, extended internal dialogue, the capacity to hold opposing ideas in tension. Our systems and institutions are complex, and they require well ordered minds to maintain them. Reading forms minds, and the West was built by the richest minds in history.

in the modern era consistency is likely the only thing that can’t be faked. you can fake intensity, fake competence for a sprint, or even fake a single brilliant output. esp with ai. but consistency is still integral over time. it’s the one signal that requires actually being the thing rather than performing it for an audience. this applies to art, science, & relationships.

Math behind being 10% better every week

Almost 0 women work 60 hours a week which is required to be in this list. Women’s IQ is not as variable as men’s and is centered around the mean. Which means the 140 IQ required to be in this list is 47:1 men. Women focus on people. Men focus on things. As a result a woman doing her job can affect a few dozen people an hour. A man focusing on things can build something that benefits a billion people an hour. Of course this will offend leftists and feminists but it is none the less true and explains exactly why there are 0 and everything that powers civilization was invented, brought to market and made successful by men and that won’t change any time soon if ever.

It looks like polished silver, but it's 100% nature's masterpiece.

guy who faked-it-until-he-made-it but was starting to get in over his head can’t believe his luck when llms launched

I still believe that it is extremely important to learn to read and how to stay with long form books, to identify the canon, and to go through it. I may be a fossil.

I think about this line a lot

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.

Be a Delusional Optimist.....

Orange cat interrupts "Romeo and Juliet" theatre performance..🐈💃🕺😅

Photos I took of the snow last night

Einstein’s field equations with and without tensor notation.

You have to be a genuine retard to open socials and your email first thing in the morning. You are wasting an extremely small and valuable window you get every day to learn something new and hard. Do that for a decade, and you're cooked. Every single day, me, you and everyone else has a limited neuroplasticity and dopamine "budget". We have a finite daily reserve of metabolic energy, neuromodulators (epinephrine, acetylcholine, dopamine, BDNF), and cellular resources available to deploy for meaningful rewiring. Once that budget is spent, it’s gone until the next day after rest and recovery. Passive consumption of online content (aka doomscrolling) actively burns through that budget while delivering almost zero constructive plasticity. You are quite literally spending your brain’s daily capacity for growth on junk data and wasting the natural peak of dopamine instead of investing it into doing something hard.

> you’ll never start a rocket company > you’ll never build your own engines > you’ll never be able to use off-the-shelf parts > you’ll never survive three launch failures > you’ll never reach orbit > you’ll never win NASA’s trust > you’ll never launch cargo to the ISS > you’ll never compete with Boeing > you’ll never compete with Lockheed > you’ll never make rockets reusable > you’ll never land a rocket vertically > you’ll never land one on a drone ship > you’ll never reuse a booster > you’ll never fly the same booster 10 times > you’ll never fly the same booster 20 times > you’ll never fly the same booster 30 times > you’ll never recover and reuse the fairing > you’ll never lower launch costs > you’ll never launch every month > you’ll never launch every week > you’ll never launch multiple times a week > you’ll never carry astronauts > you’ll never replace Roscosmos > you’ll never fly civilians to orbit > you’ll never manufacture satellites at scale > you’ll never build the biggest constellation ever > you’ll never make satellite internet work > you’ll never make satellite internet fast > you’ll never make satellite internet affordable > you’ll never serve rural customers > you’ll never serve aircraft and ships > you’ll never build a methane rocket engine > you’ll never make full-flow staged combustion work > you’ll never build the most powerful rocket ever > you’ll never build a rocket bigger than Saturn V > you’ll never build it out of stainless steel > you’ll never launch Starship > you’ll never separate Super Heavy and Starship > you’ll never relight Raptor in space > you’ll never bring Super Heavy back > you’ll never catch a booster with Mechazilla tower arms > you’ll never launch 85% of mass to orbit worldwide > you’ll never change the economics of space > you’ll never force the entire industry to copy you > you’ll never win > you’ll never IPO   Congratulations to @elonmusk and the SpaceX team. You did what countless people said was impossible, and you did it time and time again.   Today is your day. You deserve this. May it be a glorious one.