Rand

Becoming healthy, wealthy, well-dressed, and wise. Mechanical Engineer. Entrepreneur.

Ask me about chicken coops!

[Prep Propaganda 👔 @prep_propaganda]

Tweed season approaches

[Rand @BankofRand]

60% of people with depression will respond to physical exercise, 60% to talk therapy, and 60% to drugs. https://t.co/D4bnpA7yFG

[Rand @BankofRand]

Need a solid web stack without the enterprise price tag?
📧 Email: MXroute + open-source client
🌐 Hosting: GreenGeeks
🔗 Domains: Cloudflare
⚡ Quick app hosting: Netlify
🎨 Web design: WordPress + Bricks Builder
🛒 Ecom: SureCart
Or DM me if you want me to just build it for you

[Rand @BankofRand]

The fifth amendment is essentially dead.

When the police or three letter agency asks for your data the tech companies assume they are the good guys and hand it over.

I am trying to build tech that doesn’t spy on you.

I have some prototypes that might be ready to share soon 👀

[Rand @BankofRand]

Will AI, robotics and 3D printing finally make beauty accessible, or just accelerate cost over form?

[Homestead Brand @HomesteadBrand]

The U.S.A. doesn’t make these solid brass snaps anymore. Not a single one.

Just a few decades ago, USA manufacturers boasted that “9 times out of 10” they’d make the parts in New Britain, Connecticut.

Casting brass and finishing these snaps used to be a competency of American manufacturing. Now it’s gone.

We were able to get our hands on a few boxes of these NOS snaps from 1951 for a project launching soon. Keep an eye out!

[Rand @BankofRand]

When did being introverted become a virtue?

[Rand @BankofRand]

Ai has accelerated the trend of the digital age where intimate human interaction went from the default to optional.

It’s not that human interaction has more inherent friction, it’s just that it now has to be chosen.

[Tom Ruby @bgcts]

As AI becomes more ubiquitous, real genuine human interaction will command a premium effort and cost until a new equilibrium is reached.
In person concerts, perhaps unplugged in small venues. Smaller cruise ships. Parish picnics. And yes, the intimacy of a small group Cultural Debris Excursion where you get into a place a 50 person tour group can't. Cocktails made by your host, Alan, under 600 year frescoes. Seeing relics of San Siro and Catherine of Genoa behind the curtain in a sacristy that is closed to the public. Viewing the Alabaster plate on which John the Baptist's head was brought to King Herod. Gazing in awe at a ceiling that didn't have to be made at all, let alone in such detailed beauty. Enjoying a multi-course meal that a real person planned and real people made and after which you can thank them and ask about their lives.
AI can't give you those experiences. Your eyes can see them and your cameras can take them for you to relive them.
But the point here is that in the coming AI age, you'll find ways to keep your humanity at the fore. Going to see these things won't be Disneyland. It'll be real. And preserving them in an age of fakery will only grow in importance until we one day build them again.

[Tom Ruby @bgcts]

As AI becomes more ubiquitous, real genuine human interaction will command a premium effort and cost until a new equilibrium is reached.
In person concerts, perhaps unplugged in small venues. Smaller cruise ships. Parish picnics. And yes, the intimacy of a small group Cultural Debris Excursion where you get into a place a 50 person tour group can't. Cocktails made by your host, Alan, under 600 year frescoes. Seeing relics of San Siro and Catherine of Genoa behind the curtain in a sacristy that is closed to the public. Viewing the Alabaster plate on which John the Baptist's head was brought to King Herod. Gazing in awe at a ceiling that didn't have to be made at all, let alone in such detailed beauty. Enjoying a multi-course meal that a real person planned and real people made and after which you can thank them and ask about their lives.
AI can't give you those experiences. Your eyes can see them and your cameras can take them for you to relive them.
But the point here is that in the coming AI age, you'll find ways to keep your humanity at the fore. Going to see these things won't be Disneyland. It'll be real. And preserving them in an age of fakery will only grow in importance until we one day build them again.

[Rand @BankofRand]

There’s this idea that being under authority is so repressive or limiting, but if you are under good and Godly authority, how freeing!

[Fr. Joseph Krupp @Joeinblack]

“Father I keep confessing the same sins”

I promise you, God is not looking for originality from you here.

[Alan Cornett @alancornett]

BREAKING: The thing I put off doing was much easier than I imagined. Certainly I will learn from this and not do that again.

[Rand @BankofRand]

@bgcts Thank you!

[Rand @BankofRand]

Worth remembering that while Rome had a millennium of hegemony to develop and refine its theology, most of Eastern Christianity was holding on to the faith under occupation.

As far as I can tell that difference explains a lot of what still separates them.

[Rand @BankofRand]

A cloth hardcover with gold foil costs about £18 to make now.

We could put beautiful books in everyone's hands and we don't.

As far as I can tell that's expectations, not cost.

[Rand @BankofRand]

Public domain means the text is free. Making it beautiful is the whole cost, and as far as I can tell that's the part everyone skipped.

[Ole Lehmann @itsolelehmann]

i’m fully convinced AI + robotics will unleash the greatest aesthetic renaissance human civilization has ever seen

the cost of building beautiful things is about to collapse

we just need to care about beauty again.

[Rand @BankofRand]

Ironically it is the strip mine version of crop farming that puts carbon into the atmosphere and ruminate livestock that add it to the soil.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Before 1800, somewhere between thirty and sixty million bison moved across North America.

Add the elk. Add the deer and the pronghorn, tens of millions more. A whole continent carpeted in wild ruminants, every one of them belching methane into the same sky we are now told the cow is wrecking.

By the best estimates going, all those wild herds put out about as much methane as every cow, feedlot and dairy in America does today.

And here is the part the panic cannot survive. The land under them did not wear out. It became the richest farmland on earth. The deepest, blackest topsoil humans have ever dug was built up over thousands of years by exactly this: enormous herds grazing, trampling, dunging, moving on, and letting the grass come roaring back.

The herbivores did not wreck that country.

They are the reason it was worth ploughing at all.

Then we ploughed up what they built, and started blaming their replacements.

[Rand @BankofRand]

I’ve wanted to build tendon driven robots since childhood.

[Bernt Bornich @BerntBornich]

Introducing NEO’s 25 Degrees of Freedom, tendon-driven hands — nearing or surpassing human-level dexterity, strength, speed, and reliability.

For seventy years, robotics worked around the hand problem. The humanoid bet is the reverse: it lives or dies at the fingertips.

[Bernt Bornich @BerntBornich]

Introducing NEO’s 25 Degrees of Freedom, tendon-driven hands — nearing or surpassing human-level dexterity, strength, speed, and reliability.

For seventy years, robotics worked around the hand problem. The humanoid bet is the reverse: it lives or dies at the fingertips.

[Rand @BankofRand]

Keynes thought we’d work 20 hours a week by now.

We actually could start next month if we just:

① Cut taxes (shrink government)
② Use hard money (stop printing cash)
③ Spend less on cars, clothes & house sf (live like Europeans)

Why are we choosing to overwork?