Andang🎗️

[Andang🎗️ @andangk]

It cannot be too often repeated that all real democracy is an attempt (like that of a jolly hostess) to bring the shy people out.

G. K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles (1909)

[Andang🎗️ @andangk]

@mikelsaham Emiten $DATA, Pak Mikel.

[Andang🎗️ @andangk]

So then, brethren, stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter.
2 Thessalonians 2:15

[Andang🎗️ @andangk]

@MisbahAliah19 Trims, Mas. Akan saya coba 🥐🥖☕️

[Andang🎗️ @andangk]

@serish Same hobby here

[Andang🎗️ @andangk]

@weinbergersa Congratulations. I am looking forward to ordering your new book.

[Andang🎗️ @andangk]

@weinbergersa When I studied in New Mexico I purchased a used NeXTstation Turbo Color. The computer is like a pizza box. Its body was made from magnesium. The mouse shape is like Darth Vader helmet.The laserjet printer and external CD-ROM drive have the same aesthetic.What a beautiful machine.

[Andang🎗️ @andangk]

@rickyho_1989 Onion peeling is Indonesia’s comparative advantage 🧅

[Barchart @Barchart]

Stock Market hits 2nd most expensive valuation in history, far surpassing the Crash of 1929 and only slightly behind the Dot Com Bubble 🚨 🚨

[Aeon Magazine @aeonmag]

During the Cold War, Oxford philosophers worked together to aid dissidents behind the Iron Curtain. I was one of them https://t.co/zw0WsMGiFQ

[Athenaeum Book Club @athenaeumbc]

These books will give you a better education than almost any school curriculum in the West today.

In our academic system, you can go from Pre-K to PhD without reading a word of Homer, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Augustine, Dante, or Milton.

We set up the Athenaeum Book Club to fight back. If schools and universities won't teach the Great Books, we must form our own reading circles. These are some of the texts we've read together, or will cover soon.

Join our reading group to study the great works in dialogue with others.

We are just starting The Brothers Karamazov.

If you've been on the fence about joining our group, now's the time. You do NOT want to miss this.

We're reading Brothers K. over the next 6 weeks. The next discussion is on August 18th.

Take out a paid subscription if you'd like to support us and join the discussions directly — it makes a huge difference to the time and resources we can dedicate.

You'll get:

- Live book club discussions (biweekly)
- Access to our incredible community chat
- Essays to guide you through the Great Books
- All past recordings, essays, and podcasts
- Ability to vote on what we read next

https://t.co/efQaicNvay

See you inside!

[Andang🎗️ @andangk]

The Techno-Optimist Manifesto https://t.co/zeBO24SQeo

[Palantir @PalantirTech]

Because we get asked a lot.

The Technological Republic, in brief.

1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.

2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible.

3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public.

4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.

6. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.

7. If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm’s way.

8. Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.

9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.

10. The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed.

11. Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.

12. The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.

13. No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet.

14. American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war.

15. The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia.

16. We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . . Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn.

17. Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives.

18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.

19. The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all.

20. The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.

21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.

22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

Excerpts from the #1 New York Times Bestseller The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, by Alexander C. Karp & Nicholas W. Zamiska

https://t.co/8igjazz1On

[Andang🎗️ @andangk]

#SundayYellow

[Andang🎗️ @andangk]

@wmarybeard The Night Manager!

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world."

My Take
This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.
ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation."

I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate.
"We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline.

Hedgie🤗

[Mawa Kresna @mawakresna]

Sebagai mantan loper Tribun Jogja, sungguh bangga.

[Rémi Kasprzyk @KasprzykRemi]

Cette photo mérite absolument tous les prix. Elle a même sa place au Louvre.

Elle relate précisément l’inertie de l’individu face à l’effondrement.

Regardez la composition. Un chef-d’œuvre involontaire.

Au premier plan, le sable doré, les tongs abandonnées, la glacière. Le décor ordinaire du bonheur estival. Deux personnages assis, de dos, comme dans un tableau de Caspar David Friedrich. Sauf que Friedrich peignait des hommes contemplant le sublime. Ici, ils contemplent la catastrophe. Et ils ne bougent pas.

Au centre, le parasol. Publicitaire, criard, dérisoire. Un pastis face à l’apocalypse. C’est presque trop parfait : la France qui prend l’apéro pendant que le monde brûle. Aucun scénariste n’aurait osé.

Et puis le ciel. Les deux tiers de l’image. Cette muraille de fumée qui avale la lumière, ce dégradé d’ocre et de noir digne d’un Turner. La nature qui reprend la palette des maîtres pour peindre notre propre fin.

La femme photographie l’incendie avec son téléphone. Mise en abyme totale : nous documentons notre disparition au lieu de l’empêcher.

Cette image dit tout. Le déni, le confort, l’habitude. Nous sommes tous sur cette plage. Nous voyons tous le nuage. Et nous restons assis, parce que l’eau est bonne et qu’on a posé nos congés.

Les historiens de l’art parleront un jour de cette photo comme on parle du Radeau de la Méduse.

Sauf que cette fois, le naufrage, c’est nous qui le regardons depuis la plage.
💔🌍

[Prof. Stefan Rahmstorf 🌏 🦣 @rahmstorf]

Holiday in the climate emergency.
No that’s not AI or edited, it is a photo I just took with my phone on Lacanau beach in France.
Ash is raining from the sky.
What future will this boy grow up in?
It is in our hands, but time is running out.

[Andang🎗️ @andangk]

@TSN_Sports @elerianm Cancel culture