“Almighty God, we acknowledge
Our dependence upon Thee,
And beg for Thy blessings upon us,
Our parents, our teachers and our country.”
The above prayer was removed from classrooms in the United States on June 25, 1962, by the Supreme Court. Since then, what has been constantly under siege?
Us, our parents, our teachers and our country.
@nickshirleyy@elonmusk "If I was aware of the slightest evidence of aliens, I would immediately post out on 𝕏. This would be the most viewed post of all time. We've got 9000 satellites up there, we've never had to maneuver around an alien spaceship yet."
Elon Musk on building his first startup Zip2
In 1995, when he was just 23 years old, Elon dropped out of Stanford’s PhD program in physics to start Zip2 with his brother Kimbal Musk.
Elon personally wrote the first national maps, directions, yellow pages and white pages on the Internet that summer in C with a little C++.
In this CBS interview, a 27 year old Elon describes living in a $200/month office with a leaky roof:
“We found that an office was actually cheaper than apartment in Silicon Valley and we got this dinky little office that had a leaky roof. It was just the nastiest place you could imagine. I lived in it too and showered at the YMCA. This lasted for about three or four months, and the reason we chose this office — in addition to it being really cheap — was that there was an internet service provider on the floor below. So we were able to get really cheap internet access by drilling a hole in the floor and connecting to their server directly.”
In February 1999 — less than a year after this interview — Compaq would purchase Zip2 for $307 million in cash.
The interviewer also asks Elon what he thinks the future of the Internet will be, to which Elon responds:
“I think the internet is the superset of all media. It is the be all and end all of media. One will see print, broadcast, radio — essentially all media — folding into the internet. What the internet amounts to is it’s the first two-way communication medium that is intelligent. It allows consumers to choose what they want to see, when they want to see it.”
Jensen Huang just told the story of how Elon Musk became NVIDIA’s very first customer for their powerful AI supercomputer - when literally nobody else in the world wanted it
“When I announced this thing, nobody wanted to buy it. Not one purchase order
Except for Elon
He was at the 2015 event. Told me his company could really use it
I got excited… until he said it was a non-profit company
All the blood drained out of my face
In 2016, I personally boxed it up and delivered the first one to a tiny room in San Francisco
It was OpenAI
Just a handful of researchers - Pieter Abbeel, Ilya Sutskever, and the team were all there”
Elon backed AI when almost no one else believed
Dr. Joseph Warren died on this day in 1775, and he might be the most important Founding Father you were never taught about.
He was born in Roxbury, went to Harvard, and by his early thirties he was the most sought after doctor in Boston. He inoculated the Adams family against smallpox. He took on apprentices. He treated patients on both sides of the growing fight, redcoats included, because he was a doctor first. He was 34 and a widower raising four small children alone after his wife died in 1773.
He was also the quiet engine of the entire revolution in Massachusetts. He wrote the Suffolk Resolves. He ran the Committee of Safety. He stood up twice to give the Boston Massacre orations, and the second time, with British officers packing the room to intimidate him, the story goes that he climbed in through a window rather than be turned away, then delivered the speech to their faces.
On the night of April 18, 1775, it was Warren who learned the British army was about to march. He sent Paul Revere out one way and William Dawes the other to raise the alarm toward Lexington and Concord. There is no midnight ride without Joseph Warren. People have argued for two centuries about where he got his intelligence, and one long running rumor is that his secret source was close to General Gage himself.
The next morning he didn't sit safe behind a desk. He rode out to the fighting at Lexington and Concord and got into the thick of it. A British musket ball came so close it knocked a pin out of the hair beside his ear.
Three days before Bunker Hill, the Provincial Congress made him a major general. When he walked onto the hill on June 17, the officers there offered to hand him command of the whole field. He refused. He said he had come to fight as a volunteer, not to give orders, and he took a musket and went into the redoubt with the ordinary men, in the most dangerous spot on the line.
The Americans held off two British charges. On the third, low on powder, they were overrun. Warren stayed to cover the retreat and was shot in the head. The British knew exactly who they had killed. They stripped him, ran him through with bayonets, and threw him into a shallow pit with another body. A British officer later bragged that he had stuffed the scoundrel into the ground. General Gage is said to have remarked that Warren's death was worth that of 500 ordinary men.
Ten months later, after the British finally gave up Boston and sailed away, his friends went looking for him. The body was beyond recognition. The only reason they ever found him is that Paul Revere, a silversmith by trade, had once wired a false tooth into Warren's jaw with silver wire. Revere dug through the grave, saw his own work in the teeth, and knew. It is remembered as one of the first forensic dental identifications in American history.
His orphaned children were nearly forgotten too, until people like Benedict Arnold, years before he became a traitor, chipped in money to make sure they were raised and educated.
The most famous painting of the battle, by John Trumbull, isn't really about the battle at all. It's about the death of one man in the smoke.
The doctor who could have commanded an army chose to die in the dirt as a private soldier. He was 34 years old. 251 years ago today. Remember him 🇺🇸
This photo was taken exactly one year ago.
Today, I am officially the first German asylum seeker in the U.S under President Trump.
MAGA was my inspiration.
MEGA will be our revolution.
In 1980, a 22-year-old Michelle Pfeiffer walked onto The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson having never taken an acting class, never met anyone in the industry, and having found her agent through the Yellow Pages.
She had been boxing groceries at Vons supermarket in Orange County. Then she got promoted to checker.
"What am I doing here?" she asked herself.
That question changed everything.
It was her hairdresser who first planted the seed. He kept asking her why she wasn't pursuing acting.
For a long time, she dismissed it. Fear of failure.
What will people think?
The usual voices that talk most of us out of the things we actually want.
Then she stopped listening to them.
"I said, 'What do you want to do?' And not what everybody else wants you to do. And acting was it."
With no money, no contacts, and no roadmap, she did what any resourceful 22-year-old from Orange County would do. She opened the Yellow Pages and started calling agents.
Her pitch to the first one she reached was almost absurdly direct:
"This is what I want to do. I don't have any money to go through your school. I don't have any money to pay for pictures. I don't want to sign any contracts with you."
She laughed recounting it to Carson, noting that somehow that call still worked.
Within two years of that phone call, she was sitting across from Johnny Carson on national television, with two film credits to her name.
She credited her naivety as a kind of protection. "I look back and I think it's been very fortunate because I was very naive and I could have been taken advantage of." The industry she walked into had a reputation for chewing up hopeful newcomers. She walked through it without knowing enough to be afraid of it.
Her parents were worried. That was real. But the moment she showed them this was not a whim, that it was a genuine calling, the dynamic shifted completely.
"I certainly had their support once they knew. I mean, this is really what I wanted to do. Once they knew that, I had their support 100%."
The most likely outcome is that AI and robots make everyone wealthy. In fact, far wealthier than the richest person on Earth 👀
By this, I mean that people will have access to everything from medical care that is superhuman to games that are far more fun that what exists today.
We do need to make sure that AI cares deeply about truth and beauty for this to be the probable future.
My daughter's friend in grad school, upon being asked by a member of her dissertation committee why she didn't include a Marxist perspective. "I grew up in the Soviet Union. I don't practice recreational Marxism."
.@DaxMcCarty11 updates his FIFA World Cup™ Power Rankings:
1. ??
2. Argentina
3. England
4. ??
5. ??
6. USA
7. Morocco
8. ??
9. Portugal
10. Brazil
Do you agree? 👀
The contemporary publishing landscape rejects the notion that literature is supposed to teach us something.
But isn’t that why we gravitate toward literature in the first place?
‘A Message From the Strictest Headmistress in the UK’
Jordan Peterson @jordanbpeterson finds me quite extreme … 😂
..and laughs at how conservative I am…
Our chat about adults, freedom, teaching values, libertarians, progressives and race.
https://t.co/MWjo15myDV