batwaith

2025.05.-USCPA勉強中 Studying for the CPA

[batwaith @batwaith3]

All great events hang by a single thread. The clever man takes advantage of everything, neglects nothing that may give him some added opportunity; the less clever man, by neglecting one thing, sometimes misses everything. -N.B.

[Bob Golen @BobGolen]

Arriving at a job interview at IKEA

"Come in. Make a seat."

[batwaith @batwaith3]

@wholemars @XMoney Desperately waiting for mine. Do you need to have +?

[Barbarian Herodotus @BBHerodotus]

Napoleon on his early years in the regiment:

“Do you know how I managed? By never entering a café or going into society; by eating dry bread, and brushing my own clothes so that they might last the longer. I lived like a bear, in a little room, with books for my only friends... These were the joys and debaucheries of my youth”

[ThinkingWest @thinkingwest]

“I love the name of honor more than I fear death.”

― Julius Cesar

[Francesco @xvifrancesco]

My type of women

[PANTALON ROUGE @l10475_louis]

French Artillery Uniforms Illustrations by Maurice Toussaint, 1910s
🧵1/2

[Ryan Leachman @RG_Leachman]

I asked Claude to build my daughter an app that plugs into our piano, can read live key strokes, can show her sheet notes and key view and ends with a Guitar Hero style game. All while giving progressively harder songs. Today she’s using It and crushing It.

[Daily Roman Updates @UpdatingOnRome]

Napoleon’s escape from Elba, but it’s Pokemon.

[Daily Roman Updates @UpdatingOnRome]

Don’t let it happen

[Timon Wong @t31kx]

Claude Code: "You've hit your limit · resets 7pm"

Me from 5-6.59pm

[𝙎𝙝𝙪𝙧𝙞 @moka_shuri_1008]

250624 공개 팬 사인회 pre

MOKA 🩵

#MOKA #모카 #ILLIT #아일릿

[Art Encyclopedia @artenpedia]

Raoul Dufy, The Opera, Paris, c.1930

[Impressions @impression_ists]

Édouard Cortes, Pont Neuf

[Sgt Sref @sergeantsref]

--sref 3904232334

[Christian Keil @pronounced_kyle]

Just finished Gen. Leslie Groves’ book on the Manhattan Project.

Incredible read!

It’s an inside look at the most complex & ambitious engineering project in history, and explains exactly how they did it.

My full (unedited) notes:
‣ they melted down $154 billion of silver from the Treasury to make magnets, basically they ran out of copper nationally and needed another conductor... so they raided the Treasury lol
‣ Groves thought a lot about how his actions, words, etc. would affect morale. He insisted on being made General before the project so people wouldn’t think of him as a “promoted Colonel.”
‣ major theme: operating under extreme uncertainty/ambiguity; they didn’t know if the bomb was even possible for effectively the whole duration of the project: “Of theory there was a great deal, of proven knowledge not much.”
‣ people normally follow instructions more intelligently when they are general vs. spelled out in extreme detail.
‣ contractors were generally willing to deliver their goods to the Project with handshake agreements on price… oh how different the DoD is today
‣ the raw material from the Belgian Congo mine was 65% (!!!) uranium oxide, compare to 0.2% from Colorado. The bomb might have been delayed by years without that single mine
‣ he was diligent about making sure everyone knew their interim goals, even though very few could know the overall goal / details of the project — but also “nothing would be more fatal to success than to try to arrive at a perfect plan before taking any important step”
‣ du Pont was the big contractor for the plutonium plant, and they really didn’t want to do it, but did because their government asked for help. God Bless America.
‣ he says one of the hardest things he had to do was “sit back and appear calm and confident while all his hopes can easily be destroyed in a moment by some unexpected event over which he has no direct control.”
‣ they often thought about longevity, even in the early days, e.g. inviting the youngest member of a committee to attend a test, because he could be around to talk about it the longest
‣ ‼️du Pont was offered a standard cost-plus contract, but turned it down and demanded zero profit and no patent rights. wow
‣ lmfao they had to have a $1 fee in the end, and billed for it all at once because obviously, but then that failed a government audit because they still had work to do when they billed for the dollar
‣ someone told him he should buy a house near the Capitol because “you and I are going to live out our lives before Congressional committees” lol
‣ their estimates for how much uranium they needed for a bomb had error bars of 100x. Made it really hard to scope the massive factories to enrich it
‣ enrichment started 10 months after the first plant began construction (!)
‣ Groves estimates that a single “hoorah” speech improved productivity at a plant by over 10%, even though he still couldn’t tell them what the point of their work was
‣ the Treasury silver story mention above is insane. They basically ran out of copper, so they loaned 47,000 tons of silver and eventually recovered 99.965% of it back to the Treasury
‣ they had to invent a new welding technique to make the Oak Ridge gaseous diffusion plant, and trained hundreds of top national welders on it
‣ before 1942, the UK and US efforts on the bomb were basically equal, but then we went into crazy industry acceleration mode and they basically did nothing. I think Churchill knew this the whole time though, he apparently checked in on the project all the time
‣ in one of the important first meetings between the UK and the US to decide how much to share, FDR said he wanted “complete and free” interchange of technical info but his cable message saying so was too garbled as to be useless, so they basically said the opposite to the UK lol
‣ people working for the Manhattan project did not get any higher pay than normal govt. workers
‣ apparently the people at Los Alamos had nothing better to do than to get their wives pregnant lol, they said “the number and spacing of babies… surpassed all existing medical records”
‣ appropriating funds to secure the Belgian mine referenced above were really hard, and their way around it was to wire Gen Groves $37.5M (equivalent of $750M today) to his personal account lol. You’d go to jail for that today…
‣ one of their important operating principles was to always send someone to talk through things in person, whenever possible. Helped them keep good relationships and be productive with every other org, even rival intelligence organizations who hated each others guts (G-2 and OSS) would work through their team no problem
‣ incredible story of a mission to sabotage the German heavy water plant, basically cross-country commandos did a crazy clandestine bombing operation and it worked: “damage was not extensive except at the place where the attempt was made and there the devastation was total”
‣ their counter-intelligence stuff is super interesting, e.g. the codes and code names and plans for sharing fake info and press relations
‣ the secret agent they sent into Germany to try to learn of German progress towards the bomb was the former catcher of a MLB team lol
‣ the French were huge assholes, and after some details leaked to them, they threatened to go to Russia if we wouldn’t read them in further
‣ it seemed to Groves that the German scientists basically didn’t give a shit about the war and were not bought in, while the US was in a war for survival — which explains why we made way way more progress. In 1945, the entire German effort on the bomb was <30 people, meanwhile we’re deploying 0.4% of GDP haha — also the Germans (e.g. Heisenberg) thought it was impossible
‣ late in the game, in March 1945, there was a strong push to redesign the Fat Man bomb to be something more reliable and better, but Groves vetoed that idea and thank goodness he did
‣ Admiral Leahy thought the bomb project was a wild goose chase, prevailing wisdom at the time was that “no weapon developed during a war had ever been decisive in that war” — risk of overfitting on the past
‣ Groves goes into significant detail on the contingencies they planned for, which was basically everything — he says they took “extreme care… to lessen the chances of failure”
‣ they often had to reject the “human tendency to take care of first things first, rather than to prepare for an uncertainty far in the future”
‣ people were hype in the leadup to the Trinity test, which Groves hated, because that was the most important time for people to be calm; basically he just talked down Oppenheimer every few minutes
‣ Fermi measured the kilotonnage of the first test accurately by dropping paper scraps, and measuring how far away they landed — brilliant
‣ they eventually captured the German nuclear scientists, and after the war there was an awkward thing where they had to rebuild the German nuclear research labs so that they wouldn’t be tempted to defect to lucrative offers from Russia
‣ overall they spent about $2.2 billion, $44 billion today
‣ “the commander must always make his intentions unmistakably clear to his subordinates”
‣ when recruiting someone to replace technical managers, he said they just optimized for brains, because the scientists couldn’t stand working for someone dumber than them
‣ in the end he says there were five secrets: 1) clearly defined, unmistakeable, specific objective; 2) each part of the project had a specific task; 3) authority was always delegated with responsibility; 4) the project was temporary, so there was no reason for people to jockey politically for empires; 5) America was 100% behind them and the war effort more generally

[The Golden Age @thegoldenaged]

Hayao Miyazaki talking about the future of Studio Ghibli

[CG @cgtwts]

average claude code experience

[Leaders 𝕏 Junction @LeadersJunction]

Pavel Durov (Telegram CEO) explains why he never had depression