Jerin Philip

[kache @yacineMTB]

The biggest Blackpill for academia for me was getting genuinely good at RL for robotics control policies. Just reading what is published. . 99.99999% of it is slop (RAPTOR is good though)

This is even worse for RL in general!

The way I do academia now is I have a list of people that I programmatically stalk (scrape) and have a local RSS feed of what they're doing. Lots of ETH Zurich people there. Some Berkeley people. But it's really really sparse. So much... Bullshit

[𝐵𝑎𝑏𝑦 𝐾 @misskerrington]

Btw in your 20’s and 30’s you’ll start rediscovering the niche interests and hobbies you had as a kid. It’s very important you revisit them. Your younger self was actually on to something

[signüll @signulll]

if posting can reprice you upward, it’s because the legacy pricing mechanism (titles, pedigree, the org chart) was always trash.. aka low bandwidth proxy stapled onto people because nobody could afford to evaluate them directly. “vp” is just a compressed claim that someone, somewhere, at some point, ran a process that concluded this person is serious. the signal is laundered through institutions because the institutions used to be the only legible referee.

x *collapses* the referee.

you get to watch someone think in public, at volume, longitudinally, w/ adversarial replies stress testing every take. that’s a much higher fidelity instrument than a title & the fact that it routinely surfaces people the org chart missed is just the efficient market read. the titles were underpricing them because again the pricing function was pure trash.

modern x platform is one of the most important revolutions for humanity to make progress & leave the nonsensical elements like this behind.

[One Happy Fellow @onehappyfellow]

aaaah, reading politics here is poisoning my brain. let me get everything out so I feel better:

- there's just one empirically validated way of getting masses out of poverty: economic growth

- nobody is owed "comfortable life" just by the virtue of their existence.

- the most reprehensible kind of person is one who could produce, create, improve but chooses to just consume or worse, destroy

- public spending is very rarely the answer. sometimes it works because it solves a coordination problem. that's useful.

- "fuck you, I owe you nothing" and "I want to spend my time and money helping people" are not incompatible. if you think they are: fuck you.

- everyone cannot enjoy above average standard of living. we can increase average standard of living.

- you can't save everyone. spending infinite resources to help every single person is short sighted. it you see it as cruel rather than a simple fact, well, I'm sorry

[trish @TrisH0x2A]

wise words from the best systems engineer I've worked with:

"two things that make code actually maintainable:

1. reduce the layers a reader has to trace
2. reduce the state a reader has to hold in their head"

applies to every codebase. always.

[Jerin Philip @jerinphilip_]

Welcome change.

[Nikita Bier @nikitabier]

All aggregators had their payouts reduced to 60% this cycle. We will add another 20% deduction in the next cycle.

It became abundantly clear: flooding the timeline with 100 stolen reposts and clickbait everyday crowded-out real creators and hurt new author growth.

The next step is to assign a permanent deduction to habitual bait posters who use “🚨BREAKING”on every post.

X will never infringe on speech or reach—but we will not compensate for manipulation of the program or our users.

[DHH @dhh]

We're far past the point where this "visibility" nonsense is offering any net value to anyone. Every performative post like these chip away at any goodwill saved from doing good work. Just ship code people like without the identity stickers! That's the best form of visibility.

[Lewis 🇺🇸 @ctjlewis]

It's happening.

[Merlin @TheWizardTower]

It's such a pernicious problem.

I had a friend a while back call me out on my rampant skepticism of the mainstream/legacy/establishment media. "If you don't believe anything people tell you, the only way you'll learn things is if you see it yourself."

I told him "You're right, but what am I supposed to do when what they're telling me is *obviously* wrong?"

I can't imagine what it's like in your shoes. I live here, I'm a native speaker, and have been immersed in the different political factions and history, and even I get confused and bewildered. Adding a language and cultural barrier on top of that sounds like a recipe for endless confusion.

We can't fix the incentives of the legacy media, but @elonmusk gave us something better -- organic, boots-on-the-ground information from ordinary users. We lost a centralized, professional auditing source for information that could be relied upon, but got a firehose of raw data as it happens.

It means that 'monitoring the situation' is now a meme, and it means that you have to take on the responsibility of auditing/evaluating/collating/interpreting the information as it comes in, which takes a lot of education in economics, psychology, sociology, geopolitics, and history. But it's the only way to get accurate information in the current ecosystem.

Not that this too can't be gamed -- one of the most revealing changes @nikitabier added was showing an account's country of origin, and if they use a VPN. So many accounts from India, Pakistan, or Southeast Asia posing as white christian male americans who voted for Trump three times but are absolutely horrified at the latest thing he did (because it hurt's China and Russia, and they want to demoralize Americans).

Anyway. tl;dr it's a hugely sticky messy problem.

[@levelsio @levelsio]

I asked AI:

Who benefits financially if Europe brings in low/no income low educated non-culturally aligned welfare seekers from the third world?

"There are identifiable financial beneficiaries, and this is well-documented in immigration economics literature. Here's who actually profits:

1. Employers in low-wage sectors
- Construction, agriculture, food processing, cleaning, logistics
- Labor supply increase suppresses wages, boosting margins
- Reduces pressure to automate or improve conditions

2. Landlords & property owners
- Housing demand spikes in urban areas → rent increases
- Existing homeowners see property value appreciation
- Slum landlords and housing associations benefit most directly

3. Migration industry
- Lawyers, NGOs, translators, integration consultants
- This is a multi-billion euro industry in Germany, Sweden, Netherlands alone
- NGOs often receive per-head government funding — direct financial incentive to maximize intake

4. Retail & consumer goods
- Raw volume of consumers increases
- Governments often provide vouchers/cash that flows directly into consumption

5. Governments (short-term optics)
- GDP headline number goes up with population growth
- Politicians can claim “growth” while GDP per capita may stagnate or fall

Who Bears the Costs
- Native low-skilled workers — direct wage competition, most economically vulnerable
- Taxpayers — welfare, housing, education, healthcare, judicial costs
- Public service users — longer queues, diluted services
- Lower-middle class neighborhoods — concentrated social externalities

It’s essentially a privatization of gains, socialization of costs structure

Employers and landlords capture upside; diffuse taxpayer population absorbs downside. This is why mainstream economists who focus on aggregate GDP often support high immigration while working-class populations in receiving areas oppose it: they’re experiencing completely different economic realities.

George Borjas (Harvard) vs. Card/Peri debate covers this empirically in depth if you want the academic trail.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​"

[DHH @dhh]

@awesomekling Bluesky has been an incredible gift to the internet. Nobel-prize worthy achievement to induce such a successful a self-quarantining scheme.

[@levelsio @levelsio]

You've built an insane asylum

And everyone here at X thanks you for it ❤️

[John Carter @martianwyrdlord]

This is why I don't really buy that the left will successfully topple the government in an orgy of violence. Their foot soldiers are largely composed of hysterical middle aged women, who can in fact be cowed by just telling them "no, we're not doing that anymore."

[Wall Street Mav @WallStreetMav]

I thought this was a joke, but the European Union actually really published this as their priorities.

Watching this woke virus bureaucracy destroy Europe is so sad.

[Graham Linehan @Glinner]

It's also why European governments are desperately trying to censor the internet.

[Jason Locasale @LocasaleLab]

Universities deliberately re-engineered PhD admissions to serve goals other than research excellence, under the banner of correcting social injustices.

Students were admitted with little preparation for scientific work because standards were redefined.

That shift traces back to mission creep. Universities now claim their purpose extends well beyond research and teaching to vague notions of community benefit.

But that’s what taxes and public institutions are for. Meanwhile, university C-suites have grown far more lavish than local city halls, as academic standards erode.

The result is a fundamental misrepresentation: calling social policy doctoral training, then acting surprised when the outcomes don’t resemble scholarship.

[Ryan Fleury @rfleury]

This is not a real company

[David Sacks @DavidSacks]

@elonmusk Total vindication.