Manav

"Nobody exists on purpose. Nobody belongs anywhere. Everybody is going to die. Come watch TV" - Morty Smith

[Manav @_manavp]

@Elitecargasm Porsche all day

[The New Yorker @NewYorker]

How golden is silence, actually? The secret history of shutting up. https://t.co/0voUb0HXuU

[Manav @_manavp]

@BBCWorld Play Nightcall at his funeral

[Crypto Jargon @Crypto_Jargon]

THIS IS INSANE. 🤯

India gave GitHub THREE HOURS to delete BitChat.

By the time the deadline hit, the app was already back. On a network with no company to send the order to.

Here's what happened:

• India orders GitHub to remove BitChat, citing "unlawful communication"
• GitHub has 3 hours to comply or face legal action
• Within hours, a developer mirrors the entire codebase on Radicle
• Radicle has no central server. No company. No CEO to subpoena. No app store to pressure.
• The instructions go out: clone it, seed it, keep it alive
• Every person who seeds it becomes another copy the government can't touch

The part nobody's saying out loud: this is the exact scenario BitChat was built for.

It runs on pure Bluetooth. No internet. No SIM. No phone number. It was already unkillable at the app layer, that's why protesters in Nepal, Iran, and Madagascar used it to route around government shutdowns.

Now the SOURCE CODE is unkillable too.

India didn't delete BitChat. It just handed the entire internet a live demo of why decentralized infrastructure exists.

You can order a company to take something down. You can't order a network that isn't owned by anyone.

Command to mirror it yourself is already public. People are seeding it right now.

[jack @jack]

the government of india does not like technologies like bitchat and wants it taken down

[Manav @_manavp]

@michaeljburry UNAS slayer

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

This strange square 👇 is undoubtedly the most extraordinary work of literature in human history. Yet, unfortunately, barely anyone in the West has ever heard of it.

There was this woman poet in 4th century China called Su Hui (蘇蕙), a child genius who had reportedly mastered Chinese characters by age 3.

At 21 years old, heartbroken by her husband who left her for another woman, she decided to encode her feelings in a structure so intricate, so beautiful, so intellectually staggering that it still baffles scholars to this day.

Came to be known as the Xuanji Tu (璇璣圖) - the "Star Gauge" or "Map of the Armillary Sphere" - it's a 29 by 29 grid of 841 characters that can produce over 4,000 different poems.

Read it forward. Read it backward. Read it horizontally, vertically, diagonally. Read it spiraling outward from the center. Read it in circles around the outer edge. Each path through the grid produces a different poem - all of them coherent, all of them beautiful, all of them rhyming, all of them expressing variations on the same themes of longing, betrayal, regret, and undying love.

The outer ring of 112 characters forms a single circular poem - believed to be both the first and longest of its kind ever written. The interior grid produces 2,848 different four-line poems of seven characters each. In addition, there are hundreds of other smaller and longer poems, depending on the reading method.

At the center a single character she left implied but unwritten: 心 (xin) - "heart." Later copyists would add it explicitly, but in Su Hui's original the meaning was even more beautiful: 4,000 poems, all orbiting the space where her heart used to be.

Take for instance the outer red grid of the Star Gauge. Starting from the top right corner and reading down, you get this seven-character quatrain:
仁智懷德聖虞唐，
貞志篤終誓穹蒼，
欽所感想妄淫荒，
心憂增慕懷慘傷。

In pinyin, it is:
Rén zhì huái dé shèng yú táng,
zhēnzhì dǔ zhōng shì qióng cāng,
qīn suǒ gǎnxiǎng wàng yín huāng,
xīn yōu zēng mù huái cǎn shāng.

Notice how it rhymes? táng / cāng / huāng / shāng

The rough translation in English is: "The benevolent and wise cherish virtue, like the sage-kings Yao and Shun, With steadfast will I swear to the heavens above, What I revere and feel - how could it be wanton or dissolute? My heart's sorrow grows, longing brings only grief."

Now read it from the bottom to the top and you get this entirely different seven-character quatrain:
傷慘懷慕增憂心，
荒淫妄想感所欽，
蒼穹誓終篤志貞，
唐虞聖德懷智仁。

The pinyin:
Shāng cǎn huái mù zēng yōu xīn,
huāngyín wàngxiǎng gǎn suǒ qīn,
cāngqióng shì zhōng dǔzhì zhēn,
táng yúshèngdé huái zhì rén.

It rhymes too: xīn and qīn, zhēn and rén

And the meaning is just as beautiful and coherent: "Grief and sorrow, longing fills my worried heart, Wanton and dissolute fantasies - is that what you revere? I swear to the heavens my constancy is true, May we embody the sage-kings' virtue, wisdom, and benevolence."

That's just 2 poems out of the over 4,000 you can construct from the Xuanji Tu!

At the very center of the grid, the 8 red characters wrapped around the central heart, she "signed" her poem with a hidden message:

詩圖璇��，始平蘇氏。 "The poem-picture of the Armillary Sphere, by Su of Shiping."

Or reversed:
蘇氏詩圖，璇玑始平。 "Su's poem-picture - the Armillary Sphere begins in peace."

Many scholars, and even emperors, throughout Chinese history have been completely obsessed by Su Hui's puzzle.

For instance, in the Ming dynasty, a scholar named Kang Wanmin (康萬民) devoted his entire life to the poems (https://t.co/4exP9zpqbc), ending up documenting twelve different reading methods - forward, backward, diagonal, radiating, corner-to-corner, spiraling - and extracting 4,206 poems. His book on the subject ("Reading Methods for the Xuanji Tu Poems", 璇璣圖詩讀法) runs to hundreds of pages.

Empress Wu Zetian herself, the legendary woman emperor of the Tang dynasty, wrote a preface to the Xuanji Tu around 692 CE (https://t.co/yW7aR73MPc).

Incredibly, there's even far more complexity to the Xuanji Tu than just the poems:

- The name 璇玑 (Xuanji) - Armillary Sphere - is astronomical in meaning and the way the poems can be read mirrors the way celestial bodies orbit around a fixed center. It's a model of the heavens.

- Her original work, with the characters woven on silk brocade, was in five colors (red, black, blue/green, purple, and yellow) which correspond to the Five Elements (五行) - the foundational Chinese philosophical system that explains how the universe operates. So it's also a model of the entire cosmic order according to ancient Chinese philosophy.

- It's also of course deeply mathematical with this 29 x 29 perfect square grid, with sub-squares, lines and rectangles, and a structure which allows for symmetrical reading patterns in all directions

- Last but not least, the content of the poems themselves contain multiple registers. On top of expressing her personal grief and longing for her husband, it's also filled with accusations against the concubine (Zhao Yangtai) he left her for, reflections on politics (with many references to sage-kings) and philosophical reflections.

So the Star Gauge is simultaneously:
- A love letter (expressing personal longing)
- A legal brief (arguing her case against her rival)
- A cosmological model (structured like the heavens)
- A Five Element diagram (encoding the fundamental structure of the world according to ancient Chinese philosophy)
- A mathematical construction with perfect symmetry and precision

And yet, for all this complexity, we should not forget this was all ultimately in service of the simplest human message imaginable: a 21-year-old woman asking the love of her life "come back to me".

Her husband did, eventually. According to what empress Wu Zetian herself wrote in her preface to the Xuanji Tu, when he received Su's brocade he was so "moved by its supreme beauty" that he sent away his concubine and returned to his wife. As the story goes, they lived together until old age.

The heart at the center was filled after all.

[Manav @_manavp]

@chiragbarjatya https://t.co/RoffgfVAIt

[The Cultural Tutor @culturaltutor]

I’ve made a short film.

Look at the things around you: doors, bins, staircases, furniture, railings, doorhandles, windows.

Do you like how they look, or not?

Modern design has become boring, but it doesn’t have to be this way.

The word ���beautiful” is overused. We don’t need “beautiful” lamps, bus stops, and water fountains – we just need lamps, bus stops, and water fountains that are interesting, that actually mean something.

Or, at the very least, not boring.

Because the aesthetics of architecture and urban design aren’t just a bonus; they totally change how we think, feel, and behave.

Boring environments make us more stressed and less productive; they erode our sense of community; they make us sadder, less trusting, and lonelier.

A boring world is one where we spend even more time online and where our addictions are even harder to battle.

The Problem

There is global, widespread dissatisfaction with how the world looks. In this film, and the series it will lead to, we want to investigate that feeling and give it a voice.

The point isn’t that we should return to the past or get rid of modernism. It’s about learning from the past in order to improve the present, and about giving the public what they very clearly want, which isn’t the eradication of modernism but the co-existence of modernism AND traditionalism.

Just look where tourists go, where they take their photos, and that tells you everything you need to know about what most people find interesting or beautiful.

And look at where people go on holiday. It’s always to cities filled with old architecture and design, with churches and mosques and palaces, with charming little alleyways and stone staircases and wrought-iron railings.

Of the world’s fifty most visited buildings, only four were made in the 20th century, and they’re all museums or memorials.

There’s a reason why posts about this go viral online all the time. Regardless of why the change happened, it is clearly the case that we no longer make things how we used to.

People are rightly confused by the fact that old lamp posts (to take the example we focus on in the film) are usually so pretty, while modern ones are usually so boring.

Some people say this is just an example of survivorship bias… and they’re mostly correct. But that’s the whole point!

Saying old buildings are usually prettier than modern buildings is not to say that architecture used to be better, or that the past was better.

It is simply to say that certain kinds of buildings, because they have been preserved, are good examples of what people like most.

In which case... shouldn't we try to design at least some buildings in a way that we know people like?

A Unifying Cause

Everybody, from all sides of the political spectrum and all backgrounds, stands to benefit from a world that is designed more thoughtfully and imaginatively. The world could be such a colourful, meaningful, and thrilling place!

So this isn’t about left versus right or conservatism versus progressivism; it’s about making our world a more interesting and meaningful place to live in. This should be a unifying cause, because everybody loses out when our homes and cities are badly designed.

I want this film to unite people who think they’re on opposite sides, and to create a consensus that we need to change our approach to how we design our buildings and the objects – benches, bus stops, bins, lamp posts, aircon units – that fill our cities.

The Importance of Details

We are incredibly rich and have a sprawling choice of shows to stream, phones to buy, or shoes to wear… but everything feels more and more generic all the time.

If you want to understand a society, don’t listen to what it says about itself – look at what it creates. You can learn everything about the Victorians – the good and the bad – just by looking at their lamp posts.

And what do the ordinary details of the modern world say about us?

That we are technologically advanced, very efficient… and care more about making money, about making things as quickly and cheaply as possible, than making our world an enjoyable place to actually live in.

It’s important to learn about why and how things have changed, but that’s for another time. The first step is establishing that the public aren’t happy with modern architecture and design, and that something needs to be done.

But what we need isn’t a total revival of so-called ‘traditionalism’; the truth is that traditionalism and modernism can (and should) co-exist.

The trouble right now is that we only have one, and that people are tired of it.

The Power of Noticing

But this film (and the series it will, all being well, lead to) is about more than the specific argument it presents. Above all it’s about a way of seeing the world around us, a way of noticing and thinking.

“How you do anything is how you do everything.” That is probably true, and it also applies to whole societies, not just individuals; a single doorbell implies everything else about the whole socio-economic and political system that gave rise to its creation.

And, beyond being merely “useful”, the ability to notice details makes the world a richer place to live in, and life a richer thing to lead. This is what the film is about, more than anything: the power and joy of noticing.

A Bigger Project

This short film is just the beginning. We want to make a full series about the history of art and architecture, both for their own sake and also to see what we can learn about life in the twenty-first century and how to improve it. To keep updated you can join our email list over at our website, linked in the reply below.

Final Words

You can watch the film here on X, or over on YouTube, also linked in the reply below.

So… this is where the dream begins, the dream of a new series and the dream of a more charming, more interesting, more meaningful modern world.

Spread the word.

[Manav @_manavp]

@alifarhat79 2025:Lost everything to Tariff Tantrum

[Contrarian EPS @contrarianEPS]

most super investors in India are insiders. Likely side deals with promotors and pick up little >1% shareholding

If You're really were interested in the idea, you don't want market to jack up the prices. you would Buy < 1% stake from own account, family account, trust accounts

[signüll @signulll]

silence is basically a luxury good now. modern life is an endless stream of ambient noise—background music in cafes, notifications, HVAC hum, distant traffic, people talking, planes overhead. even in places where you’d expect quiet, like libraries or offices, there’s usually some kind of low-level noise pollution.

[nic carter @nic_carter]

Deepseek just accelerated AGI timelines by 5 years. So focus on the gym. Knowledge work is obsolete. Muscles are all that’s left

[Morgan Housel @morganhousel]

Minimum levels of stress:

As the world improves, our threshold for complaining drops. In the absence of big problems, people shift their worries to smaller ones. In the absence of small problems, they focus on petty or even imaginary ones.

https://t.co/nOa0l5iSb7

[Dhaval (Investment Books) @InvestmentBook1]

Doing Nothing

[Orange Book 🍊📖 @orangebook]

Many of the most interesting people are a bit shy and introverted, are already happy alone, dislike crowded places and shallow conversations, don't like to promote themselves to get attention, have a lot to share, but are also very selective about who they spend their time with.

[Manav @_manavp]

@FastestPitStop Just sack horner!

[ʎllǝuuop ʇuǝɹq @donnelly_brent]

RIP Byron Wein

https://t.co/fllpDAntIn.

[Paras Chopra @paraschopra]

Curious people are always traveling.

[soli @solisolsoli]

The general zapped an angel, 1970, by Karel Thole