kala.the.wild ✨

[NYTPitchbot @DougJBalloon]

I’m Kid Rock.”
“I’m Naomi Wolf.”
“I’m Kanye West.”
“I’m Matt Taibbi.”
“I’m Catturd. Those stories, plus Rob Schneider, tonight on 60 Minutes.”

[Jamie Bonkiewicz @JamieBonkiewicz]

When I paid $200 for 3 bags of groceries today, I thought to myself, “I’m sure glad they’re having a UFC fight on the White House lawn”

[Brigid Laffan @BrigidLaffan]

This is a remarkable photograph-not a woman in sight. China & US -not a single woman in the room.

[Lessie 🪐 @YouAreMyBezoar]

Este sobretodo de Dior Resort 2027 tiene la sombra de una ventana en el paño. No está proyectada, está EN el material es un delirio

[R @shibadad8]

If the Democratic Party was anything close to Zohran, we would be in for generational change in this country.

[kala.the.wild ✨ @kala_large]

‘Dafuq outta here’

[Gabriele Corno @Gabriele_Corno]

Female octopuses have been seen throwing rocks and other objects at annoying males that refuse to leave them alone. Researchers observing them in the wild noticed the females aiming the objects to push the males away.
Scientists believe this surprising behavior shows just how intelligent, aware, and expressive octopuses really are.

[Micah Erfan @micah_erfan]

Incredible how every “pro-life” policy actually leads to a large amount of unnecessary death.

[daz @MetamateDaz]

Free Universal Healthcare is so complicated and expensive that only 32 of the 33 wealthiest countries in the world have figured it out.

[Patrick Heizer @PatrickHeizer]

Every Democrat since Carter has decreased the federal deficit.

Every Republican since Eisenhower has increased the federal deficit.

[MP Arizona☀️🏳️‍🌈💙🌵🐕🐕‍🦺🫂💦🏜🐟🌴🎙🌎🌻♍️🌊 @AzPetrich]

I just want to point out....

The amount of money the United States has spent on war in the last 67 days, is roughly the same cost that Bernie Sanders proposed for universal college. So the real question is never can we afford it, it's what we choose to prioritize.

[Dissproportionately @dissproportion]

I hate to be the one to tell you how wrong you are.

[Katherine Argent @effthealgorithm]

Search is full of ads and wrong answers. Every other email is an ad. Prime Video charges you and shows ads. Paramount? Ads. Peacock? YouTube? Hulu? Ads followed by more ads. Netflix full of ads. Meta and X, every other thing is an ad. Pinterest is nothing but ads. AI is in everything. AI finishes sentences incorrectly and won’t stop. AI reads your email and search history to target you with more ads. Every time you open an app or visit a site there’s an update making it worse. In a hurry? First, click here to agree to terms you don’t have time to read and must accept. You need an account to do that. Change your temporary password. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email and enter that code. Now use a passkey. Your password is too simple to remember. Change it. No, not like that. Now log on. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email for a code… Welcome back! We’ve updated our terms of service and privacy policy (you have none). Subscribe to the site. Subscribe to Netflix. Subscribe to toilet paper. Subscribe to these groceries. Pay a membership fee for the right to subscribe then tip your driver who delivers the subscriptions your membership lets you subscribe to. Time to work? We’ve got to update your laptop and will slow down everything you do until you agree to update. But first, click here to agree. Update installed — your laptop’s broken now. It doesn’t matter, since your boss just replaced you with AI. Go to your phone to complain on social media. Wait, your phone needs an update so we can add more AI. Click here. Oh sorry, your phone can’t handle this update. Now it’s useless. Go get the newest phone. Here’s a text from a friend, an email, a voice mail they left three days ago but you didn’t see until now because of sync problems with the cloud. It’s their GoFundMe. Their MLM. Their Patreon. Never mind, you didn’t respond to their text within 9 minutes and now you’re no longer friends. They blocked you. Make new friends. Download this app to find people in your area. In your neighborhood. On your street. Two doors down from you. Do you know this person yet, we think you’d get along. You need an account to use this app. That username is taken. Enter a password. Not that one, you used it on another site. You need to be connected to WiFi to download the app. Allow the app to connect to other devices on your network. Allow the app to access your contacts, know your precise location, store your credit card details. Oops, sorry, we got hacked now all that info is available on the web. There’s a class action suit. You can join. It’ll take a decade to get your $3.73 share of the ten billion settlement. We’ll send it via PayPal or deposit it to your bank, just tell us those details. Oh no, another hack. That info is circulating now, too. Here’s a spam call, a spam email, a spam text. Why are you angry? Why are you talking about getting rid of your phone? Why don’t you like AI, it lets us make all of this easier? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? This is progress. You’ll be left behind. Do you want to be left behind? Do you???

[Joseph Fasano @Joseph_Fasano_]

The best thing my students ever gave me. One semester I thought they were just *really* focused on taking notes. Turns out they were compiling a book of all the slightly unhinged things I'd said. It's 152 pages long.

[Joyce Carol Oates @JoyceCarolOates]

Hitler's Führerbunker began as a ballroom extension to a building called the Old Chancelley to which an air raid shelter was added, eventually transformed into a luxurious bunker 50 feet underground that could be hermetically sealed to protect the VIP occupants from chemical weapons.
T***p's fanatic emphasis on ballroom/bunker might indicate that he anticipates, or will precipitate, a nuclear exchange of some sort, from which he, his staff, & (probably) selected billionaire donors might be protected.
otherwise, it is hard to explain how important this ballroom has suddenly become.
#WhenIsABallroomNotABallroom?

[Tuki @TukiFromKL]

the CATO Institute.. a libertarian think tank funded by the Koch brothers.. just published a study showing immigrants paid more in taxes than they received in benefits every single year from 1994 to 2023..

not a left-wing university.. not a Democratic PAC.. the Koch brothers' own research institute..

they reduced the deficit by $14.5 trillion over 30 years.. they earn less per hour but work at higher rates.. which means higher per capita income.. which means higher taxes paid..

the country spent 30 years being told immigrants were draining the system.. turns out they were funding it.. and the people who told you that knew the numbers the whole time

[CALL TO ACTIVISM @CalltoActivism]

HOLY SHIT. This is EXACTLY how you cook a misogynist.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

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.

[LOTR Universe @Lordoftheringsu]

Did you know? There is a well known audio recording in which J.R.R. Tolkien personally narrates “The Ride of the Rohirrim.”

This recording was made in 1952 at a friend’s house using a then new technologya tape recorder. During a period when Tolkien had not yet found a publisher for The Lord of the Rings and had begun to lose confidence in himself as a writer. When Tolkien listened to the recording, he rediscovered the power of his own prose, which encouraged him to continue writing. 📚

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Lithuanian composer and conductor Mindaugas Piečaitis, directs his orchestra on the notes of Nora the cat playing the piano.

She earns a standing ovation.