YES. YES. I HAVE BEEN SAYING THIS. I started a spreadsheet in 2019 tracking every category where America is number one globally and people keep asking me to stop bringing it to Thanksgiving.
We lead the PLANET in medical debt. Not the developed world. The PLANET. There are countries where "medical bankruptcy" doesn't translate because the CONCEPT doesn't exist in their language. We invented it. We EXPORTED it as a field of academic study. German researchers fly here to observe it happening in real time. They take NOTES. We are a living laboratory and the experiment is "what if you made people choose between insulin and rent." We chose. Exposed. This is the thing we're best at.
We lead in incarceration. More humans in cages than China. China has 1.4 billion people and an authoritarian government and we STILL have more prisoners. We beat AUTHORITARIANS at their own game using FREEDOM. We did it with both parties cooperating across NINE administrations. Name ONE other bipartisan project that lasted fifty years. You can't. This is our moon landing. We just don't film it.
We lead in insulin pricing. $300 for a vial that costs $30 in Canada. Canada is VISIBLE FROM DETROIT. You can see Canada from a Walgreens parking lot where someone is deciding between half-doses. The same molecule. The same manufacturer. The border adds $270 of LEADERSHIP. That's what leading looks like. It looks like a 900% markup on not dying.
We lead in mass shootings. Not per capita. Not adjusted. RAW TOTAL. We have so many that researchers had to invent subcategories. School. Workplace. Concert. Grocery store. We have a TAXONOMY. Other countries have incidents. We have a CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM with peer-reviewed SORTING CRITERIA. That's infrastructure. That's RIGOR.
We lead in healthcare spending AND in maternal mortality among rich nations. Simultaneously. We spend $4.3 trillion a year and mothers die at rates that would concern a developing nation. We spent MORE money to get WORSE outcomes so consistently that it can't be incompetence. Incompetence wouldn't be this RELIABLE. This takes PLANNING. This is an ACHIEVEMENT of systems working exactly as designed across multiple industries cooperating to extract value from the specific biological event of someone trying not to die.
We lead in per-capita spending on our military while our veterans sleep in tents. We allocated $886 billion to defense and our soldiers come home to a VA waitlist so long that some of them die on it. We spent the money. We just didn't spend it on THEM. The money went somewhere. It led the way. Just not toward the people who fought.
I printed this tweet on a 24x36 poster. It's in my living room. My wife moved out last month but she didn't take the poster so I think she agrees.
@upsivale Les he llamado más de 4 veces para desbloquear mi tarjeta. He esperado 20 min en cada llamada y nadie atiende. Les mandé correo y me responden que debi llamar.
Que procede?
Sean serios por favor
We’ve identified industrial-scale distillation attacks on our models by DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax.
These labs created over 24,000 fraudulent accounts and generated over 16 million exchanges with Claude, extracting its capabilities to train and improve their own models.
"i hope this email finds you well"
- boring
- not this again
- blehhhhhhhhhhh
"i hope this email finds you before i do"
- commanding
- gets s**t done
- i wouldn't mess with them
@stephen_wolfram We can automate the proving of theorems, or the discovery of conjectures, or even the invention of new axiom systems, but we can't automate *mathematics*. Because "mathematics" is the name we give to the *human* cultural story, not to the formal methods themselves. (14/15)
I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue. There's a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering. Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession. Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind.
Lord Kelvin famously believed that atoms were "knots in the aether".
And he was onto something: perhaps not atoms per se, but knots can indeed tell us something quite deep about the nature of the universe, and the relationship between classical and quantum field theories. (1/16)
Here we go again. We have beaten this to death about 20 times already, but let me try a different approach this time. It will require you to think a bit. Ok, ok, come back. No thinking will be necessary, I'll explain.
So Americans are freaking out CCP is controlling their kids through TikTok, right? If it wasn't just a general paranoia about everything Chinese it would actually be understandable. Nobody (looking at you Europe) wants some foreigners running their most popular media, both having and controlling information, right?
Right? That's exactly how the Chinese felt about 15 years ago, but in reverse, about US social media and other internet companies.
However, unlike the US today, the Chinese government did not confiscate or steal foreign companies, instead they said "let's make rules for everyone operating on the internet, foreign and domestic" to regulate this, so they can't do the manipulation. And they did. One of the rules, for example, is that for the Chinese service you have to keep servers inside China, not abroad.
Of course, why would anyone put their servers in China when it's the internet stupid. You can just put them anywhere in the world. Haha. Ha. H....
That's why the Chinese government put up the Great Firewall (considered crazy and technically impossible at the time) and started blocking popular sites that did NOT want to put their servers in China and operate under other rules to prevent manipulation of China's media space. Nobody was banned. Everyone is welcome. You just have to operate by the rules, which are the same for everyone, foreign and domestic.
VPN's are not illegal. No foreign company could operate in China without their corporate VPNs. As for public VPNs, companies selling them have to get a license in China to sell in China, which, as you might guess none tried to do.
But Chinese citizens can purchase them online with a credit card. And many do. It just turns out that not many (several million at most, which is a small number for China) really want to pay $10-$20 / month for it simply because there isn't that much worth it for them on the global internet (not everything is blocked).
Are you paying $7 for Twitter? Some of you are. Would you pay $10 per month to access China's Global Times or China Daily? Obviously not. So why do you think someone Chinese would pay $10 / month to read New York Times and access X? When they have the same service in China?
Because "truth" and "freedom". Well, maybe that's your answer and your illusion that Chinese would pay anything for your truth and freedom. Most won't even pay $10 / month.
BTW, think about how brilliant that is, especially now as Europe and the US grapple with the same issue of supposed foreign disinformation. All the Chinese government did was put a premium on "foreign influence", ie you can read it, but you have to pay for it, and not even a fortune. And problem gone. It's brilliant, not to mention the side effect of allowing local internet companies to flourish.
Instead, Western government are choosing outright bans ("democracy shields") and theft, while telling China they want fair economic competition.
I'm sorry but anyone can manage. Of course not everyone is a great manager, but anyone can become "a" manager. Not everyone can become a scientist. Being a scientist is binary. You are either a scientist or you aren't.
To qualify as Science a piece of research must be correct and reproducible.
To be correct and reproducible, it must be described in sufficient details in a publication.
To be 'published' (to receive a seal of approval) the publication must be checked for correctness by reviewers.
To be reproduced, the publication must be widely available to the community and sufficiently interesting.
If you do research and don't publish, it's not Science.
Without peer review and reproducibility, chances are your methodology was flawed and you fooled yourself into thinking you did something great.
No one will ever hear about your work.
No one will pick it up and build on top of it.
No one will build new technology and products with it.
Your work will have been in vain.
You'll die bitter and forgotten.
If you never published your research but somehow developed it into a product, you might die rich.
But you'll still be a bit bitter and largely forgotten.
Astrophysicist and Nobel laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar used to travel 80 kilometers every week from the Yerkes Observatory to the University of Chicago, where he taught a course attended by only two students. When asked why he spent his time this way, the professor replied that they were very good students.
In 1957, Lee Tsung-Dao and Yang Chen-Ning were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. The course taught by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar became the only course in history where all its attendees received a Nobel Prize.
pésimo tiempo de respuesta @VivaAerobus. 2 horas para iniciar conversación, 20 minutos entre cada mensaje subsecuente. dónde tienen su call center, en marte? 👎 y mientras, el vuelo en cuestión sube al doble de precio 😡
Just noticed that the Centenary of Quantum Mechanics is not that far away - July 29, 1925 was the date of Heisenberg's paper (Schroedinger was a little later, IIRC)