Davin Birdi

new life

[Davin Birdi @davinbirdi]

100

[Tim Urban @waitbutwhy]

The path of a maturing thinker. In order to get to Grown-Up Mountain and start real learning, you have to brave the cold winds of Insecure Canyon. If you're not willing to say "I don't know" for a while, you might spend your whole life on Child’s Hill.

[✝️🇺🇸Chet Ozmun🇨🇳☭ @OzmunC]

In Oppenheimer the plot focused on the physicists designing the bomb. BUT in this show about how China built its own nukes, an entire plotline honors the factory workers who built the uranium core with absolute precision. Chinese shows make proletarians into heroes while Hollywood only focuses on intellectuals.

[✝️🇺🇸Chet Ozmun🇨🇳☭ @OzmunC]

@mc_sein 🫡

https://t.co/tDqO2DQmib

[New Mentalities @NewMentalities]

The fool tries. That's the advantage.

[Ruthvik Dev @syntactic123]

gotta agree with Bloom's taxonomy here in that being unable to memorize and rapidly recall information, is prohibitive to more advanced forms of thinking e.g. evaluating complex problems, and synthesising seemingly unrelated concepts.

somewhat relatedly, this is also why people tend to get more creative and have interesting insights when they are both well read in terms of both breadth and depth.

[mate @_Mataghu]

The thing that pisses me off most about Matt Damon and Ben Affleck is that people don’t realise just how clever, curious, and thirsty for knowledge they actually are.

They’re genuinely really fucking smart.

[SunnyD 🇨🇦 @hashtagERTW]

@PhilosophyOfPhy “he rewrote the central ideas in his own language, reconstructed the mathematical derivations for himself, and searched for a physical explanation behind every equation.”

Very powerful method for gaining an understanding and insight.

[aether @bluewdrift]

major cheat code in life:
master the pause. before responding to that text. before accepting that meeting.before saying yes to that favor. the pause is where wisdom lives. most mistakes happen in the rush. most regrets from quick decisions. slow down to speed up. response time doesn’t equal response quality.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

In Germany, a talented 14-year-old earns his club money. In America, his parents pay the club $15,000 a year.

That single inversion explains why "we will not" is the most accurate line ever written about US soccer.

FIFA built a global system for this. Training compensation and solidarity payments send a cut of every transfer fee back to the clubs that developed the player, from age 12 onward. Develop one future pro and your academy gets paid for a decade. Barcelona's La Masia, Ajax, every Bundesliga academy runs on this logic. The kid is the asset.

US Soccer refuses to enforce those rules. When Seattle's Crossfire Premier claimed its $60,000 share of DeAndre Yedlin's transfer to Tottenham, it got nothing. Claims on the Dempsey and Bradley transfers died partly because the federation couldn't even produce the youth training records.

So American clubs earn zero dollars when a kid turns pro. They earn when a kid enrolls. Which makes the parent the customer, and the product is whatever keeps the parent writing checks: travel tournaments, hotel weekends, $500 showcase events, private training at $100 an hour. Elite pathways run $8,000 to $20,000 a year. A comparable academy spot in Italy costs about 120 euros.

Follow the incentive one level deeper and it gets darker. A club dependent on fees can't cut its weakest paying players, so rosters optimize for retention over development. The scouting pool shrinks to families who can afford the cliff, which appears around age 11, exactly when development matters most. The country runs a talent filter sorted by household income instead of ability.

Every four years someone proposes fixing this. The proposal always requires the people profiting from the $15,000 model to vote themselves out of business.

They will not.

[Seldon @seld_on]

What part of "houses are for living, not for speculation" do you people fail to understand

[outside five sigma @jwt0625]

chips get all the love but the interconnects across all levels from c2c to rack-to-rack are as important, and many chip makers are sleeping on it until very recently. Even most interconnects people just want it to be as transparent as possible, just send and receive the bits with lower error rates and lower energy per bit, wrong long-term direction imo. Interconnects are part of the living creature, so many things happening in your blood vessels in addition to just moving stuff, and your axons do much more than carrying spikes.

People do not appreciate interconnects, smaller volume, poor margin, messy ecosystem, manual process, it's been a spiral of grinding, and it is largely invisible. How often do you see people tearing down transceivers and die shot of DSP chips vs logic chips? How often do you see high res pictures of all the connector's gold fingers on the NVL72 cartridge? Because it sounds boring, it's just making contacts, shoving electrons and photons, what a simple problem.

But that is deceiving, and theres so much to it. You might want 576 to begin with, had to cut down to 288, then to 144, and finally to 72, and that barely worked first time. You are entering the domain of analog and mixed signaling, you are fighting copper real estate with power delivery, you are getting impedance mismatch and reflections and interference at every stupid interfaces, your optical components' and connectors' backreflection is making your laser mode hop.. And we are not even going into the thermal and strain-stress, the reliability of how many times you can actually mate your connector, the horrible jobs people are doing across the stack from science-project-originated photonic PDKs to hand cleaved laser dies to optical engines to rack manufacturing, on spec-ing out the requirements, the tolerances.. On top of all these, people thinking about where the bits should be going and people who know what the bits have to go thru are two totally different groups of people.

But it is shifting, pluggable volumes shipped are doubling and tripling for scale-out, scale-up domain asks for much higher bw than scale-out, and interconnects are inevitable even if you cram as much compute and memory onto a single wafer. People will see it always has been interconnects, the chips people have already been doing it on the chips, that you can sort it out with your chip designers and foundries, and now you need to work with more people to sort it out from chips to boards/trays to racks to pods to data halls and data centers. These people speak very different languages and care about very different things, and it will take a lot of effort to pull order out of all the chaos.

At the end of the day, it is such a crazy problem to work on, such a beautiful thing to make, millions of amps of current flipping 1e20 of flops, sextillions of photons carrying thousands of terabits per second, a few tons of copper, tens of thousands of fibers totally few hundred kilometers, one scale-up domain. You absolutely need a group of people that appreciate the beauty and care about the craft behind the grinding to make it together.

[Vancouver Canucks @Canucks]

"Welcome to the Vancouver Canucks organization."

General Manager Ryan Johnson addresses the next generation of Canucks to open development camp.

#AllInMoments | @Rogers

[New Mentalities @NewMentalities]

NOBODY SWINGS AT THE PERSON GOING NOWHERE

[Rossst.03 @Rossst_03]

Stephen Boyd, Stanford EE professor:

"Wall Street pays quant researchers $400K–$750K a year to estimate a hidden state from noisy data. It's the same filter that landed Apollo on the moon, and it's the final lecture of a free Stanford course."

this free stanford lecture from 17 years ago holds the entire "kalman filter edge" the 2026 quant threads sell you. in his last ee263 lecture, boyd builds state estimation from scratch: you can't see the true state, only noisy measurements, so you blend what your model predicts with what you just observed, weighted by how much you trust each. that blend is the kalman gain. that's the whole thing.

it's the exact filter the thread codes up for a dynamic hedge ratio. swap "spacecraft position" for "the true relationship between two assets" and the equations are identical. rudolf kalman published it in 1960. boyd has taught it free since the 2000s.

so the math was never the moat. the hedge ratio that updates every tick, the uncertainty that calibrates your z-score, all of it is standard state estimation, public for over sixty years.

and here's the honest part the thread is actually good about. the filter is only optimal if your assumptions hold, linear dynamics, gaussian noise, a Q and R you set correctly. get the noise model wrong and it tracks confidently in the wrong direction. the lecture is free. the judgment in how fast you let the hedge ratio drift, that ratio of process to measurement noise tuned to the pair in front of you, is the part that actually takes skill.

[Bambulu @Bqmbulu]

Mad dog Mattis

[Electra @Electrarythm]

Tiger Woods, maybe the greatest golfer ever, learned to do this better than anyone. That focus is a big part of why he got so good, and he got it from his father, Earl Woods, a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel trained in psychological warfare.

Earl trained Tiger from the time he was a little kid to block out everything on the outside, and he did it on purpose, by turning himself into the worst distraction he possibly could.

He'd drop his entire golf bag right at the top of Tiger's backswing so the crash would break his concentration.

He'd jingle coins in his pocket the second Tiger was about to strike the ball.

He'd throw a bunch of golf balls down in front of Tiger's ball so he had to swing through a mess.

He'd plant doubt right before the swing too, saying stuff like "water on the right, out of bounds on the left," to force Tiger's brain to start second-guessing and calculating risk in the exact half-second he was supposed to be calm and focused.

And he'd even insult him, "you little piece of sh*t," "f**k off Tiger," all of it timed to land at the worst possible moment, just to force his mind to lock in and tune out everything around him.

Tiger confirmed all of this himself in a 2018 Slate interview.

The whole point was to build a mental wall so strong that nothing, literally nothing, could get inside his head. Total control of his own mind, no matter what was happening around him.

[outside five sigma @jwt0625]

this looks so damn fun and painful at the same time. The pictured chip above supports 192 channels.

average coupling efficiency about -8 dB.

- Jarczynski2006: [Integrated three-dimensional optical multilayer using free-space optics](https://t.co/uCIxVoxIEQ)

[Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos]

> at the chip store
> ask about their current process node
> "oh it's sub 1-nm"
> surprised, ask whether that means the transistor pitch is < 1nm
> they don't understand
> show them a diagram, explain what I mean
> "It's a good chip sir."
> buy chip, take it to lab.
> put it under microscope, look at transistors
> 90 nm wide. 16nm pitch.
>MFW 😑

[Startup Wisdom @StartupWisdom_]

Paul Graham: What you'll wish you'd known

[outside five sigma @jwt0625]

a single training cluster now needs more optics/photonics than the worldwide volume in 2008

(blue datapoints from MA Taubenblatt's 2011 Journal of Lightwave Technology)