Techno

Everything we achieved so far will pale in comparison to what comes next.

[Techno @Adarshjoseph33]

Adarsh’s Substack: Are we running out of resources? https://t.co/UiZ24AHkVB

[Max @MaxTorchbearer]

RECOVER FASTER THAN EVERYONE

Lose the day. Come back at night. Miss the gym. Go tomorrow. Waste a week. Win the next one. Get embarrassed. Stay visible. Get rejected. Try again. Fall behind. Move anyway. Stop turning every mistake into a new identity. Stop making failure mean more than it does. Stop disappearing every time life proves you’re still human. The men who win aren’t perfect. They just don’t stay gone.

The cheat code is simple.

Become impossible to keep down.

[Milo Blake @miloblake99]

@magattew Kind of reminds me of this one

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

Mark Manson was right when he said:

“Beware: learning more is a smart person’s favorite form of procrastination.”

[Ronit Pereira @CAronitpereira]

“Mozart was the greatest musician to ever live, yet his life was full of unhappiness and resentment.”

“He overspent his income and was full of jealousy. All you've got to do is learn from Mozart.”

- Charlie Munger. 2019

[Ronit Pereira @CAronitpereira]

“If you're a pure socialist, you're a nutcase. An absolute nutcase. Not a modest nutcase, but a real nutcase."

"You can be a perfect nut with a high IQ."

- Charlie Munger.

[Kpaxs @Kpaxs]

Your phone is a casino where the currency is not money but the part of your life you were supposed to spend becoming someone.

[GRITCULT @GRITCULT]

Dostoevsky was 28 when they stood him in front of a firing squad. Blindfolded. Hands tied. He could hear the rifles being loaded.

At the last second a messenger on horseback arrived. The Tsar had commuted the sentence. The entire execution was staged. Psychological torture designed to break him.

It worked. He had a seizure on the spot.

They sent him to a labour camp in Siberia. 4 years. Freezing. Starving. Sleeping on wooden planks next to murderers. His epilepsy got worse. He had no paper. No pen. Nothing.

When he got out he was broke. His first wife died. His brother died. He inherited his brothers debts. He was so desperate for money he signed a contract with a publisher that would have given away the rights to everything hed ever write if he missed the deadline.

He wrote The Gambler in 26 days to make it. Dictated it to a 20 year old stenographer named Anna. Married her three months later.

Then the real work started. Crime and Punishment. The Idiot. Demons. The Brothers Karamazov. The greatest novels in the history of the Russian language. Maybe any language.

The man who stood blindfolded before the firing squad, who convulsed on the ground while soldiers watched, who slept next to killers in Siberia for 4 years, who was buried in debt and grief.

That man wrote: "every minute can be an eternity of happiness."

He earned the right to say it.

its never over. never give up fren.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Winston Churchill fought his depression with bricks. He'd lay them for hours at his country home in Kent. He joined the bricklayers' union. And in 1921 he wrote about why it worked. It took psychology another 75 years to catch up.

He called his depression the "Black Dog." It followed him for decades. His method for fighting it back was as basic as it sounds: laying brick after brick, hour after hour.

Churchill spelled out his theory in a long essay for The Strand Magazine. People who think for a living, he wrote, can't fix a tired brain just by resting it. They have to use a different part of themselves. The part that moves the eyes and the hands. Woodworking, chemistry, bookbinding, bricklaying, painting. Anything that drags the body into a problem the mind can't solve by itself.

Modern psychology now calls this behavioral activation. It's one of the most-studied depression treatments out there. Depression sets a behavior trap. You feel bad, so you stop doing things, and doing less means less to feel good about. Feeling worse makes you do even less. The loop tightens until you can't breathe inside it.

Behavioral activation breaks the loop from the action side. You schedule the activity first, even when every part of you doesn't want to. Doing it produces small rewards: a wall gets straighter, a painting fills in, a messy room gets clean. Those small rewards slowly rewire the brain. Action comes first, and the feeling follows.

Researchers at the University of Washington put this to the test in 2006. They studied 241 adults with major depression and compared three treatments: behavioral activation, regular talk therapy, and antidepressants. For the people who were most severely depressed, behavioral activation matched the drugs. It beat the talk therapy. A 2014 review of more than 1,500 patients across 26 trials backed up the result.

Physical work like bricklaying does something extra on top of this. It crowds out rumination, the looping bad thoughts that grind people down during the worst stretches of depression. Bricklaying needs both hands and gives feedback brick by brick: each one is straight or crooked. After an hour you can see exactly how much wall you built. No room left for the mental chewing.

The line George Mack used in his post, "depression hates a moving target," is good poetry. The science behind it is sharper. Depression hates a brain that has somewhere else to be.

[David Senra @davidsenra]

"I'd pay my entire fortune to have one more night with my parents."

"I think about my parents. My dad died in 2004. My mom died in 1987, and I still have conversations with them. I ask for forgiveness for them, and I give them forgiveness. I'd pay my entire fortune to have one more night with my parents.

That'd be so great to be able to tell them how much I appreciate all the things they did and how much I loved them. And also, 'hey, Mom, I turned out okay.' So, we'll call that a minor regret in my life that I couldn't make my mother happy on her deathbed."

— @iamjohnmackey

[Nayib Bukele @nayibbukele]

Cuadra por cuadra... tardará un poco, pero quedará hermoso.

[axe @axepreneur]

Reminder: this is still the greatest ad ever made.

[Techno @Adarshjoseph33]

True hero

[Simon Maechling @simonmaechling]

Today we celebrate the 112th birthday of Norman Borlaug. The man who fed the world.

Borlaug developed high-yield, disease-resistant wheat that sparked the Green Revolution, saving over a billion lives from hunger.

Happy Birthday, Norman Borlaug - hero of humanity.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Charlie Munger explained why AI will solve diseases faster than anything in human history. He did it two weeks before he died, at 99.

In 1954, his eight-year-old son Teddy was diagnosed with leukemia. There was no treatment. The survival rate for childhood leukemia in the 1950s was close to zero. Munger was 31, freshly divorced, nearly broke. His friend Rick Guerin said Munger would go to the hospital, hold Teddy, then walk the streets of Pasadena alone, crying. Teddy died in 1955 at the age of 9.

A reporter asks how he got through it. He says, "You can't bring back the dead. You can't cure the dying child. You have to soldier through. If you have to walk through the streets crying for a few hours a day, it's part of soldiering. You go ahead and cry away. But you can't quit."

Then he says, "In those days, the fatality rate with childhood leukemia was 100%. That's gone away. Now the cure rate is way up in the 90s."

He's right. The five-year survival rate for the most common childhood leukemia (called ALL, acute lymphoblastic leukemia) was close to zero before 1950. By the 1960s, it was under 15%. Today, it's about 90%, according to the American Cancer Society. It took 70 years of researchers running clinical trials and developing combination drug therapies to get there.

That was without AI. Human researchers work on one hypothesis at a time.

There are now over 170 AI-discovered drug programs in clinical trials. AI is compressing early drug discovery timelines by 30 to 40%, turning what used to take three to four years of preclinical work into 12 to 18 months. No AI-discovered drug has yet received FDA approval, but the first is expected in 2026 or 2027. The pipeline is real and growing fast.

What took seven decades for leukemia, AI could compress into years for diseases we haven't cracked yet.

Munger said it plainly: "What mankind did, what civilization did, was soldier through those tough years that took away my cousin Tommy from meningitis, and then took away my son Teddy from leukemia. Imagine pretty well fixing that disease for families who came into life later. It's a huge achievement."

He lost his son 68 years before this interview. He watched civilization solve the thing that took his boy. He died two weeks later, at 99. AI is about to make civilization progress much faster.

[Jannik 🐿️ @kineyDE]

@BernieSanders

[Perry E. Metzger @perrymetzger]

Almost all of the jobs we had in 1800 are gone. No one reaps wheat with a scythe anymore, no one uses paper files to track payroll, no one spins yarn by hand, no one hand copies documents in offices.

Somehow, however, even though 99% of the labor we did 250 years ago has been automated, people still have jobs, and in fact, poor people now are filthy rich compared even to wealthy people back then. How can this be?

The answer is straightforward, but only if you open your eyes.

[vittorio @IterIntellectus]

the protest in support of billionaires is the only protest in 100 years where the protestors are smarter than the opponents

[Magatte Wade @magattew]

Free markets didn't create child labor. 

Poverty created child labor, and poverty was the human default for millennia.

What free markets did was create the wealth that made child labor unnecessary.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Perhaps our purpose is to make the mind of a sentient sun

[Sundar Pichai @sundarpichai]

An exciting milestone for AI in science: Our C2S-Scale 27B foundation model, built with @Yale and based on Gemma, generated a novel hypothesis about cancer cellular behavior, which scientists experimentally validated in living cells. 

With more preclinical and clinical tests, this discovery may reveal a promising new pathway for developing therapies to fight cancer.

[Techno @Adarshjoseph33]

Falling birth rates don’t just mean fewer workers. They mean fewer learners, fewer experimenters, fewer dreamers. The wisdom of the dead requires minds of the living to make it useful. Otherwise, all we leave behind are libraries without readers and cities without laughter.