C

[TUPACABRA @tupacabra]

The Neverending Story

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

It makes so much sense now.

[Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos]

Knowledge accelerationism

[Shaun Fosmark @Shaun_Fosmark]

Im not convinced people actually know what the P=NP problem is.

Lets break it down.

Before the 1960s, computers were getting faster every year, so engineers just assumed that if a problem was too hard for a computer to solve then, all had to do was just wait a few years for a faster computer, boom, problemo solved.

But then, they ran into a wall with a specific group of problems. No matter how powerful the computers got, they would freeze up, overheat, or take billions of years to solve them.

So these were super hard theoretical physics or black hole topography, right? Nope, they were everyday things like designing a high school schedule where a teacher is never in two places at the same time, or like, draw a trace on a circuit board that's as short as possible without overlapping other traces.

Heres the kicker, once the problem was solved, the computer could VERY quickly go back over and be like "Yup, no scheduling conflicts!". Once the problem was solved, verifying the solution was easy. It would be like you walking up to a lock someone left on a door and trying to figure out the code, and then someone else coming up behind you "Hey, the code is 26-42-36-10. Pop in the code and boom! Problem solved, solution verified.

Computer scientists grouped all of these problems into a category called "NP". Aww now if makes sense. And you know what ALLLLLLL of these problems have in common? They were exponential. Meaning if you only had 5 classes, your computer could solve thay in a MILISECOND. But if your schedule had like 100 classes, the possible combinations went insane like, more atoms than in the known universe numbers.

So by putting these problems into this "NP category", scientists were basically telling software developers "Stop wasting billions of dollars on trying to get your computers to solve these problems" and do something heuristic like, draw a line first, then verify it sux and iterate on it quickly until its good enough and move on.

So then they realized something terrifying. If you could figure out a trick to solving ANY of these problems, you could solve ALL of them, no matter what it was as long as it was an NP problem.

Ok so whats the big deal then!?! What do people mean why they say "If AI solves P=NP, thats the end game!". They are essentially saying that if its easy to verify a solution to a problem that was solved, then there must be a hidden trick to solve it as easily from scratch and if you could find that trick, all the hard problems could be solved instantly. Some of this is good like medicine or cosmology, some of it bad like cryptography which rides on assumptions that these problems are extremely difficult to solve from scratch.

Thats the entire breakdown on the P=NP or P≠NP debate you see floating around X these days.

Thanks for reading.

[signüll @signulll]

google wrote a paper, published it for anyone to consume, then watched all eight authors leave & two outside labs capture most of the frontier model equity.

the most valuable research paper in history was effectively a gift from google's balance sheet to its competitors.

re mark able.

[Science girl @sciencegirl]

The clearest explanation I’ve seen of the difference between prediction markets and sportsbooks.

Amazing how much of the media still fails to understand the basic mechanics.

[Undiscovered Compounders @UCompounders]

Half of micro caps would become small caps if their CEOs read this chart every day.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

On my way to the office this morning, I passed a group of young people protesting, a Palestinian flag draped over their shoulders.

And I asked myself a question I can't shake: why does this generation always fall into the same trap? No matter the history. No matter the context. Even the ones from wealthy families, who went to the best schools, who were dealt every good card. Always the same trap.

I don't think it's stupidity. I think it's a mechanism. And a mechanism can be taken apart, piece by piece.

A. The observation: everything the state touches becomes unaffordable.

Look at economist Mark Perry's famous chart, the one people call "the chart of the century." It tracks US prices since 2000.

At the top, what explodes: hospital services, college tuition, textbooks, childcare, housing. Increases of +100%, +150%, up to +250%, far above general inflation.

At the bottom, what collapses: TVs, software, phones, toys, clothing. A TV today costs a fraction of what it did in 2000, for an infinitely better product.

Look at what separates the two groups. It isn't technology. It isn't complexity. It's one variable: how much the state is involved.

At the top, sectors that are subsidized, regulated, shielded from competition, where the state funds demand and blocks supply. At the bottom, sectors where companies fight every single morning to serve you better and cheaper.

B. The mechanism: why it's systematic.

When the state subsidizes demand without freeing supply, prices rise. Every time. Guaranteed student loans, and universities raise tuition. Housing aid plus blocked building permits, and rents skyrocket. Administered healthcare, and bureaucracy eats the budget before it ever reaches the patient.

In France it's even more vicious, because the price doesn't disappear: it hides. You never see the hospital bill, you pay it through payroll contributions. You never see the cost of school, you pay it through taxes. Public spending at 57% of GDP, one of the heaviest tax burdens in the world, more than €3.4 trillion in debt. And the result? Overflowing ERs, falling PISA scores, young people who can't afford to live in the city where they work.

The market didn't fail in these sectors. It was never allowed in.

C. Suffering demands a culprit.

A 22-year-old lives all of this in their bones. They can't find a place to live. Their degree either buries them in debt or opens no doors. The future feels blocked. That suffering is real, and I don't deny it for a second.

But human beings can't stand suffering without a culprit. They need a face. A scapegoat.

And this is where everything is decided: who taught them how to read the world?

D. Whoever tells the story picks the villain.

Schools are public. Universities are public. Culture runs on grants. Film goes through funding committees. Public broadcasting shapes the narratives. The people handing down the interpretive framework are, overwhelmingly, paid by the very system that creates the problem.

Do you really think that system is going to name itself as the culprit?

No. It names the capitalist. The boss. The landlord. "The rich." The multinational. The commercial West. Same role, same casting, every time.

E. One lens, a thousand causes.

And this brings me back to that flag. A generation taught to read every situation through a single lens, oppressor on one side, rich, Western, capitalist, oppressed on the other, will apply that lens everywhere. To housing. To climate. To conflicts on the other side of the world. The cause changes, the lens stays. That's why the trap is always the same: it's not the cause that draws them in, it's the way of thinking that was installed in them.

F. The perfect inversion.

Here's the irony. Capitalism is the force that drove down the price of almost everything it touched. The state is the force that blew up the price of almost everything it captured. And young people blame the first for the crimes of the second.

It's like blaming the firefighter for the fire because you saw him at the scene.

G. The ballot box confirms it.

In the US, a few weeks out from the midterms, a large share of urban young voters is getting ready to vote Democrat for more state, more spending, more regulation. New York elected a self-described socialist mayor, carried by young voters, on promises of rent freezes and city-run grocery stores. Rent freezes, the policy that has made housing scarcer everywhere it's been tried. The cure that worsens the disease.

In France, it's the same play in two acts. Part of the youth votes for the radical left, which promises more state. Another part votes for the center, which promises to "manage" the state well, and has dug the debt deeper than ever. Two different ballots, one shared assumption: the problem is the market, the solution is the state.

H. The way out.

These young people aren't stupid. They're right to be angry. They're just aiming at the wrong target.

The day they understand that their rent, their tuition and their hospital are expensive precisely because the state runs them, their anger will change direction. They'll stop protesting against those who create. They'll start protesting against those who capture.

That day, the greatest intellectual scam of our time will be over.

[Lexer @LexerLux]

i HATE how an engineer invented the correct way to write recipes like 20 years ago and nobody else ever used it

[ol’ stocky ⛳️ @oldstocky]

Watched Barry Lyndon last night, every frame is like a painting

[Paul Brown @0xQuasark]

This is hands down the best explanation of meditation I've ever seen 🤯

[FischerKing @FischerKing64]

Interesting maps - and it explains why I could never live in Florida even though it is increasingly well governed.

[Hunter📈🌈📊 @StatisticUrban]

There was a semi-well known interview of the famed Argentine writer JL Borges where he explains this.

Borges: I have done most of my reading in English. I find English a far finer language than Spanish.

William F Buckley: Why?

Borges: Well, many reasons. Firstly, English is both a Germanic and a Latin language. Those two registers—for any idea you take, you have two words. Those words will not mean exactly the same. For example if I say “regal” that is not exactly the same thing as saying “kingly.” Or if I say “fraternal” that is not the same as saying “brotherly.” Or “dark” and “obscure.” Those words are different. It would make all the difference—speaking for example—the Holy Spirit, it would make all the difference in the world in a poem if I wrote about the Holy Spirit or I wrote the Holy Ghost, since “ghost” is a fine, dark Saxon word, but “spirit” is a light Latin word. Then there is another reason. The reason is that I think that, of all languages, English is the most physical of all languages.

WFB: The most what?

Borges: Physical. You can, for example, say “He loomed over.” You can’t very well say that in Spanish.

WFB: “Asomó?”*

Borges: Well, no, no, they’re not exactly the same. And then you have, in English, you can do almost anything with verbs and prepositions. For example, to “laugh off,” to “dream away.” Those things can’t be said in Spanish. To “live down” something, to “live up to” something—you can’t say those things in Spanish. They can’t be said. Or really in any Romance language.

[John Carter @martianwyrdlord]

Another angle to this is that dogs effectively stumbled onto what is for them the equivalent of artificial superintelligence 20,000 years ago. The Singularity already happened for dogs. They live in a world they cannot understand, surrounded by miraculous wonders they take entirely for granted, their every need seen to by entities whose thoughts they cannot begin to fathom.

The result is that there are about a billion dogs on the planet now. Most of them are pretty happy. Almost none of them need to work. It worked out pretty well for them.

[The Pale King @thepalehundreds]

Admiration

[Samuel Hughes @SCP_Hughes]

The elites of Victorian Britain got up late, drank ceaselessly, worked short hours, partied through the night, and knew nothing about science, technology or engineering. And yet, by their own lights, they were hugely effective.

https://t.co/TvbuWtaPRJ

The Victorians are often held up as a model against the supposedly soft, feckless, humanities-educated elites of today. But I argue that the genius of their system may have been its drastic weighting towards soft skills, team-building and intra-elite networking:

- A Victorian’s gentleman’s office hours typically began about 11am and finished about 5pm, including a multi-course lunch with wine.

- Upper-class Victorians drank ceaselessly. Conduct guides recommended four or five glasses of wine at dinner *for married women*. Port was often served in pints.

- Party culture was intense and nocturnal. Balls started at about 10pm, peaked after 1am, and continued till dawn. During the social season, bankers, judges and politicians might go to several balls per week.

- Elite Victorians learnt almost no STEM at school or university. At least half of class time was given over to ancient languages, often as much as 80 percent. One leading educationalist remarked that it was not worth teaching science to gentlemen because it does not involve ‘continued reasoning’.

- Sports and character formation were valued far above transmitting facts. A top headmaster described his school’s priorities as ‘First – character, second – physique, third – intelligence, fourth – manners, fifth – information’.

This cannot have made elite Victorians more productive individually, but maybe the dense social and emotional network it created helped them to work as a sort of extended team.

Perhaps we should think again about what makes groups of people effective.

[Soda @fredsoda]

🎯🎯🎯

astute observation

folks are not ready to have these conversations

people got really mad at me the other day for saying that having a degree from an “elite” school doesn’t make you “elite”

it’s merely a credential that makes you *eligible* for being a servant of capital lol (not capitalists, but CAPITAL itself)

it’s the lowest form of being “elite,” if even that lol