乁⁠(⁠ ⁠⁰͡⁠ ⁠Ĺ̯⁠ ⁠⁰͡⁠ ⁠)⁠ ⁠ㄏ

Procrastinating, mostly.

[乁⁠(⁠ ⁠⁰͡⁠ ⁠Ĺ̯⁠ ⁠⁰͡⁠ ⁠)⁠ ⁠ㄏ @devindamm]

@the_blind_thing

[Charly Wargnier @DataChaz]

life before this tweet:

[. @playboicurrryy]

how it feels when someone shows you a video thats not funny and over 2 minutes long

[𝐎𝐩𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐭𝐑𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐢𝐞 @opolot_ronnie]

He was trolled, bullied, and called names on the internet for losing weight, when in fact, he was dying.🥹

[Ben Basche @basche42]

He’s going to Settings > WiFi after the phone has been pretending not to be connected

Connect to the WiFi now

[Ihtesham Ali @ihteshamali]

An MIT professor taught the same math course for 62 years, and the day he retired, students from every country on earth showed up online to watch him give his final lecture.

I opened the playlist at 2am and ended up watching three of them back to back.

His name is Gilbert Strang. The course is MIT 18.06 Linear Algebra.

Every machine learning engineer, every data scientist, every quant, every self-taught programmer who actually understands how AI works learned the math from this one man. Most of them never set foot on MIT's campus. They just opened a free playlist on YouTube and let him teach.

Here's the story almost nobody tells you.

Strang joined the MIT math faculty in 1962. He retired in 2023. That is 61 years of standing at the same chalkboard teaching the same subject to 18-year-olds.

The interesting part is what he did when MIT launched OpenCourseWare in 2002. Most professors were skeptical. They worried that putting their lectures online would make their classrooms irrelevant. Strang did not hesitate. He said his life's mission was to open mathematics to students everywhere. He filmed every lecture and gave it away.

The decision quietly changed how the world learns math.

For decades linear algebra was taught the wrong way. Professors started with abstract vector spaces and proofs about field axioms. Students drowned in the abstraction. Most never recovered. They walked out believing they were bad at math when they had simply been taught in an order that nobody's brain is built to absorb.

Strang inverted the entire curriculum.

He started with matrix multiplication. Something you can write down on paper. Something you can compute by hand. Something you can see. Then he showed his students that everything else in linear algebra eigenvectors, singular value decomposition, orthogonality, the four fundamental subspaces was just a different lens for understanding what the matrix was actually doing under the hood.

His rule was strict. If a student could not explain a concept using a concrete 3 by 3 example, that student did not actually understand the concept yet. The abstraction was supposed to come last, not first. The intuition was the foundation. The proofs were just confirmation that the intuition was correct.

The second thing Strang changed was the classroom itself. He said please and thank you to his students. Every single lecture. He paused mid-derivation to ask "am I OK?" to check if anyone was lost. He never used the word "obviously" or "trivially" because he knew exactly what those words do to a student who is one step behind. He treated 19-year-olds learning math for the first time the way he treated his own colleagues. With patience. With respect. With the assumption that they belonged in the room.

For 62 years.

The result is something that has never happened in the history of education. A single math professor became the default teacher of his subject for the entire planet.

Universities in India, China, Brazil, Nigeria, every country with a computer science department, started telling their own students to just watch Strang's lectures. The University of Illinois revised its linear algebra course to do almost no in-person lecturing. The reason was honest. The professor said they could not compete with the videos.

His final lecture was in May 2023.

The auditorium was packed with students who had never met him before. He walked to the chalkboard, taught for an hour, and at the end the entire room stood and applauded. He looked confused for a moment, like he genuinely did not understand why they were cheering. Then he smiled and waved them off and walked out.

His written comment under the YouTube video of that final lecture was four sentences long. He said teaching had been a wonderful life. He said he was grateful to everyone who saw the importance of linear algebra. He said the movement of teaching it well would continue because it was right.

That was it. No book promotion. No farewell speech. No legacy management.

The man whose teaching is the foundation of modern AI just thanked the audience and went home.

20 million views. Zero ego. The entire engine of the AI revolution sits on top of math that millions of people learned for free from one quiet professor in Cambridge.

The course is still on MIT OpenCourseWare. Every lecture, every problem set, every exam, every solution. Free.

The most important math course of the 21st century is sitting one click away from you. Most people will never open it.

[A.Y.O @YusufAsunmogejo]

Sometimes we just need to think deeper than we do. Did you know that this simple quadratic curve with its tangent is the core logic behind the Newton-Raphson method that we use to solve complex non-linear problems today?

The truth is: If you never struggled with this green graph paper, you would not know how to spot when a simulation is lying to you.

As a Master's student, I took a course on the Rheology of materials. This curve is part of the constitutive model we use to determine what type of property a material has.

Why does your toothpaste stay on the brush instead of running off like water? It is because of yield stress. The slope of these curves is what engineers study to make sure your paste only flows when you apply force to the tube.

This knowledge is a means to an end. You might not see the importance now, but if you study deeper and go higher in the STEM fields they are built for, you will see it.

[David Willis @ThePrimalDino]

Project Hail Mary and Artemis II happening at the same time was quite possibly one of the greatest cultural events to happen in recent memory.

[kira 👾 @kirawontmiss]

😭😭😭😭

[Joe Mitoshi 👨🏻‍🚀 @CryptoSays]

What a sight!!! 😍

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

You make a cancer-fighting chemical in your brain every night. It kills tumor cells and fixes broken DNA while you sleep. Only works in the dark. The hormone is called melatonin, and when you flip on the lights at 2 AM, your brain stops making it.

Melatonin is the sleep hormone. But it moonlights as your body’s overnight cancer patrol. It chokes off the blood supply to tumors and wakes up your natural killer cells (the white blood cells that hunt down cancer). Melatonin also flips on genes that order damaged cells to stop dividing. Researchers at Tulane ran an experiment where they exposed rats to dim light at night. Not bright light. Dim. The tumors lost their natural growth rhythms and grew nonstop.

The WHO classified night shift work as “probably carcinogenic” in 2007. Reviewed everything again in 2019. Kept the classification. Same risk category as UV radiation.

Your body’s internal clock controls more than when you sleep. It schedules DNA repair. There’s a repair protein called XPA that rises and falls on a 24-hour cycle, timed by your clock genes. When scientists knocked those genes out in mice, DNA repair went haywire and tumors grew faster. The same clock decides when damaged cells kill themselves off before they turn cancerous. Wreck the clock, you lose all of that.

Denmark started paying workers’ comp for this. In 2008, the Danish government said: if you worked night shifts at least once a week for 20+ years and got breast cancer, that’s an occupational disease. Between 2007 and 2011, 110 women got compensated. One was a flight attendant who did 30 years of overnight flights for SAS airlines. No other country has followed.

1 in 5 workers worldwide works night shifts. In the US, that’s around 15 million people, mostly in healthcare, factories, and trucking. The exposure tilts hard toward people who can least afford it: 20% of workers without a high school diploma pull non-daytime shifts vs. under 2% of college grads.

I’ll be straight with you, the science isn’t totally settled. A big 2020 analysis pooling 57 studies and 8.5 million people found no clear overall link between night shifts and cancer. But a 2024 study tracking how risk changes with time on the job told a different story: 9% higher breast cancer risk after 20 years of night work. 13% higher after 30. The lab evidence in animals is clear cut. The human data is messier, the way it always is when you’re studying something millions of people do in a thousand different ways.

[Sly 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @Thespeculator21]

A brave man running naked covers his crotch. A wise man covers his face.

[Celestara @celestaracosmos]

What a privilege to be able to see, hear, breathe, walk & talk.

[𝕛𝕒𝕟𝕖𝕒 @heyyitsjanea]

whoever wrote this headline needs to never write again