Chloe✤

I am in charge of AI-driven training and organizational development for corporations.

[Chloe✤ @ChloeLaboratory]

Only you can change your life. No one can do it for you.

[Outlander Magazine @StreetFashion01]

The moving train window displays for Chanel at Bergdorf Goodman?? INSANE

[patrick. @imPatrickT]

the original iconic BACKROOMS photo was yellow because the camera incorrectly white balanced.

you can easily recreate the look by pushing your camera very warm to create a similar feel without editing.

this subway station in Toronto actually has white walls.

[patrick. @imPatrickT]

i cut together the best egg scenes in movies

[Robert Greene @RobertGreene]

Real pleasure comes from overcoming challenges, feeling confidence in your abilities, gaining fluency in skills, and experiencing the power this brings.

[Caleb @CalebSol]

Me holding to zero instead of panic selling for a loss

[Apple Music Classical @AppleClassical]

Passionate, heart-rending music from French violin master @RCapucon.

Here he performs Chausson's "Sicilienne" from Concert for Violin, Piano and String Quartet, with @QuatuorEbene and Nicholas Angelich:
https://t.co/pzXXUpCe0S

[Alex Kittoe @AlexKittoe]

A night in Milan 🎞️

[Michael Buda 📸 @MichaelBuda2]

Gm everyone

I definitely need to return to SF.

[Jim Beattie @JimBeattie18]

Thierry Lechanteur.

[tesas @mondaystufx]

The glitter makes the wedding shots look extra wow.

[Clara life @hidupsukaenak]

It’s amazing how an idea in your head can turn into a perfect piece of art.

[Ceomnsr @ceomnsr]

POV: How I feel going to work to fund my stock portfolio

[Millie Marconi @MillieMarconnni]

A British biologist looked at 200,000 years of human history and found that the entire reason humans broke out of poverty was not intelligence, not language, not even agriculture, but one mechanism so simple a 6-year-old could explain it.

His name is Matt Ridley.

He is a zoologist by training, an evolutionary biologist by career, and in 2010 he wrote a book called The Rational Optimist that quietly argued the most important fact about human progress had been hiding in plain sight for the entire history of economics.

Naval Ravikant has been telling people to read everything Ridley has ever written for the last 15 years. The reason is the argument inside this one book.

For 200,000 years, anatomically modern humans walked around with the same brain you have right now. Same skull size. Same neural architecture. Same raw capacity for language, planning, and abstract thought.

For roughly 190,000 of those years, almost nothing happened. Generation after generation lived and died inside the same Stone Age toolkit their great-great-grandparents had used. Then somewhere around 50,000 years ago, the line on the chart of human progress started to tick upward. Then it bent. Then it exploded.

The question Ridley spent years on was the only question that mattered. What changed.

It was not the brain. The brain had been the same for 190,000 years. It was not language, which had existed long before the takeoff. It was not even agriculture, which arrived only 10,000 years ago and was actually preceded by the upward bend, not the cause of it.

What changed was that humans started trading with strangers.

This sounds too small to be the answer. Ridley argues that it is the answer to almost everything. The moment one human exchanged a useful object with another human from a different group, something happened that no other species on earth had ever done.

Two ideas that had developed in isolation came into contact. The flint knapper learned what the spear maker had figured out. The fisherman from the coast learned what the hunter from the forest had figured out. The two pieces of knowledge fused into something neither side could have produced alone.

Ridley calls this ideas having sex. The phrase sounds frivolous and it is meant to. The point is that ideas, like genes, get better when they combine with other ideas from different lineages.

An idea sitting inside one head, no matter how brilliant the head, eventually hits a ceiling. The same idea exposed to ten thousand other ideas does something genes do under sexual reproduction. It mixes. It recombines. It produces offspring nobody planned.

The cleanest proof of this argument is the most uncomfortable case study in the book. Tasmania.

Around 10,000 years ago, rising sea levels cut Tasmania off from mainland Australia. A population of roughly 4,000 humans was now isolated on an island, with no possibility of contact with the rest of humanity. They had the same brains. The same language. The same starting toolkit as their cousins 150 kilometers north. The natural experiment was now running.

What happened next is something no economist or geneticist had ever predicted.

The mainland Australians kept inventing. Boomerangs. Spear-throwers. Fishing nets. Bone needles for sewing fitted clothes. Watercraft with paddles. Their technology compounded slowly across the centuries.

The Tasmanians went the other way. They did not just fail to invent the new tools their cousins were developing. They started losing the tools they already had. Fishing was abandoned within a few thousand years. Bone tools disappeared. Fitted clothing disappeared. They forgot how to make fire from scratch and started carrying lit firebrands from camp to camp instead, relighting their fires from a neighbor's whenever their own went out.

By the time European explorers arrived in the 17th century, the Tasmanians had the simplest toolkit of any human society ever recorded. Their material culture had gone backward for 8,000 years.

The archaeologist Rhys Jones called it a slow strangulation of the mind.

Joseph Henrich at Harvard later proved with formal mathematical models that there was nothing wrong with Tasmanian brains. There was something wrong with their network. A toolkit requires a critical mass of people exchanging skills to maintain itself.

The act of teaching a skill is imperfect. Every generation loses a small percentage of what the last generation knew. If your population is large enough and trading widely enough, those losses get caught and corrected by someone else who still remembers.

If your population shrinks below a certain threshold and stops mixing with outsiders, the small losses compound until entire technologies disappear.

This is the part that should haunt anyone reading this in 2026.

Intelligence is not a property of the individual brain. Intelligence is a property of the network the brain is connected to. A genius in isolation will produce less than a mediocre thinker inside a dense exchange of other mediocre thinkers.

The thing your ancestors needed in order to break out of 190,000 years of stagnation was not better brains. It was better connections between brains they already had.

The implication for any individual is direct and uncomfortable. If you are smart and isolated, you will be outproduced by people half as smart who are connected.

The most successful people in any field are almost never the smartest people in it. They are the ones positioned at the intersection of the most idea flows. They are reading more authors than their competitors. They are talking to more people from more disciplines. They are in the rooms where ideas from different lineages bump into each other.

Ridley ends the book on the line that sounds optimistic but is actually a warning its this "The future will be invented by people who connect ideas, not by people who guard them."

[charlize theron @charlize870]

The older I get, the more I value peace over noise, depth over appearances, and truth over approval.

[Charlize Theron Daily @dailytheron]

Charlize Theron attends ‘APEX’ premiere.

[Dave @dave_krugman]

WINDOWS // NYC

For the past five years, I've immersed myself in a photographic, typological study of the illuminated windows of New York City at night. On June 16th, we invite you to build a new world with us, a multilayered, interconnected city of light and shadow, powered by @TransientLabs Studio.

This has been my biggest undertaking to date, and is the extension of my lifelong interest in photographic patterns and generative photography. This interest was crystalized in 2021 with my project DRIVE and continued in 2022 with Drip Drop.

Over the years, I've learned so much about the conceptual world of typologies, about the intersection of photographic technologies and blockchain as immutable records of consensus and truth, and of course, about how the constant evolution of technology broadens the scope of what is possible for us artists- revealing new ways to create and connect with the people who seek to do the same.

The process of creating WINDOWS // NYC has been the best sort of challenge, and as always, the incredible minds at @TransientLabs have taken my ideas and built technological frameworks that have elevated this project beyond my wildest dreams. I cannot wait to show you more, but for now, drop a comment if you want to connect, hear what we've built, and for information on how to participate and get involved.

I love this world. I love looking at it in intricate detail and making photographs so that others can look at it that way too. And this pattern of windows and grids is one of my favorite ways to see.

Sign up at windows dot davekrugman dot com, or via link in the comments below!

[Randy Little @randytlittle]

Hard line secured.

Every window holds a story.
Some of them began with a phone call.

WINDOWS // NYC @dave_krugman

[Paul Seibert @BEH0LDINGEYE]

“Big Softee” has its first bid placed. A big shout to @justinaversano for kicking off the auction.

Have you seen the collection yet? Link ⬇️