Kevin (linuxbox)

Software Developer, have a lovely wife, 7 children, 3 cats and a dog

[Farzad 🇺🇸 🇮🇷 @farzyness]

The thing the Moon is genuinely rich in is oxygen.

Lunar dirt - regolith - is something like 40 to 45 percent oxygen by mass. Almost half the ground is oxygen, locked up in rock.

And oxygen is the heavy majority of any rocket's propellant load - when you fuel a rocket, most of the weight you're loading is the oxidizer, the oxygen, not the actual fuel.

So if you can pull oxygen out of lunar dirt and fling it into orbit with a catapult, you've built a gas station in space.

Every spacecraft passing through stops getting refueled by stuff hauled up from Earth and starts getting topped off with lunar oxygen launched for the price of electricity using a mass driver.

$SPCX

[Kevin (linuxbox) @linuxbox]

@RandyWKirk1 Seems some good bosses and owners are around. Would you say a majority?

[Kevin (linuxbox) @linuxbox]

@pbeisel Throw a little AI at an android version, please.

Given a strong enough model, it may only need that prompt

[Kevin (linuxbox) @linuxbox]

@JCChristopher @wholemars Good point

[Kevin (linuxbox) @linuxbox]

@tunguz Why perform given SOTA perf?

[Kevin (linuxbox) @linuxbox]

@JoeJustice Moved by the movie

[Eric Jorgenson 📚 ☀️ @EricJorgenson]

Everyone can use @elonmusk's "Magic Wand Number" and "Idiot Index"

They're universal ideas, helpful in any industry.

[Naval @naval]

Full podcast episode with @rauchg, @maxhodak_, and @bscholl.

40 minutes of unreleased material.

The AI Industrial Revolution

Part 1: Waste Tokens, Save Time

0:00 Three Frontier Founders
1:27 AI Software Factories
4:15 Waste Tokens, Save Time
5:47 Models Instructing Humans
9:29 Is Pure Software Dead?
12:03 You Don't Get Stuck Anymore

Part 2: Vibe Coding Hardware

14:39 Vibe Coding a Turbine Blade
18:07 Open Source Compounds China's Advantage
20:15 You Always Want the Smartest Model
22:44 Software Still Needs Hands
24:43 Humans Are Becoming Verifiers

Part 3: The Regulatory Frontier

27:53 The Regulatory Red Queen Race
32:32 Why There's No Innovation in Healthcare
36:49 We Need a True 50-State Experiment
40:31 China's FDA Is Beating Ours
43:37 Healthcare Is a Communist Society Inside Capitalism
45:57 Sid's Story: N-of-1 Medicine

Part 4: The Autonomous Company

47:49 Autonomous Infrastructure
51:25 Your Job Is to Train the Agent
54:54 The Next Lord of the Rings
59:08 What's Your Definition of Art?
1:05:00 Can AI Have New Ideas?
1:07:03 A Large Number of Small Teams

[Farhan Thawar @fnthawar]

https://t.co/DmKluplBF4

[Kevin (linuxbox) @linuxbox]

@mekmiotek @LimitingThe With all that ocean, presumably you can see them coming

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Dans le manifeste "techno-optimiste" de Marc Andreessen, il y a une phrase qui m'a marqué :

"Our enemies are not bad people – but rather bad ideas."

Nos ennemis ne sont pas des mauvaises personnes. Ce sont des mauvaises idées.

Prenons Jancovici. L'homme est brillant, sincère, travailleur. Il ne se lève pas le matin en se disant qu'il va nuire à l'humanité. Mais l'idée qu'il porte la décroissance, le rationnement, la frugalité érigée en horizon civilisationnel est une idée profondément destructrice. Elle prend des esprits brillants et les transforme en commissaires politiques d'un futur appauvri.

Et le plus fascinant, c'est ce que cette idée fait aux gens qui l'adoptent.

Dans mon entourage, une grosse partie de mes amis est sur cette ligne décroissantiste, avec tout le package qui va avec. L'argent c'est mal mais ils en veulent. Il faut moins prendre l'avion mais ils rêvent de voyager partout. Il faut consommer moins mais ils ne renoncent à rien de ce qu'ils aiment vraiment.

Et tous ont un point commun : ils sont déprimés. L'un d'eux m'a même confié qu'il était sous antidépresseurs.

Ce n'est pas un hasard. C'est mécanique.

Quand tu crois que ton désir de vivre, de créer, de t'élever est moralement suspect tu te détruis de l'intérieur. Tu passes ta vie à t'excuser d'exister. Tu vis dans la dissonance permanente entre ce que ton corps veut (plus, mieux, plus loin) et ce que ton idéologie t'ordonne (moins, sobre, immobile).

D'où ma théorie :

Quand on pense quelque chose de fondamentalement faux décroissance, communisme, extrémisme religieux (de tout ordre) ce n'est qu'une question de temps avant que ça devienne vraiment destructeur.

D'abord pour soi. Puis pour les autres.

Les mauvaises idées tuent. Lentement chez ceux qui y croient, brutalement chez ceux qui les subissent.

C'est pour ça que la bataille des idées n'est pas un luxe d'intellectuel. C'est la bataille la plus importante de notre époque.

[Kevin (linuxbox) @linuxbox]

@dont_diversify @XFreeze @elonmusk What if a projection of nature on the walls of the tunnel could be done?

[Rothmus 🏴 @Rothmus]

As a young socialist, Hayek read Ludwig von Mises’ 1920 paper “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth.”

Mises showed that socialist central planning isn’t merely inefficient, it’s impossible.

Without private property and genuine market prices, planners lack any rational way to allocate scarce resources or determine real costs and needs.

Even Oskar Lange, a leading socialist in the calculation debate, effectively conceded the point.
While he promoted “market socialism” with trial-and-error pricing by a central board, real-world socialist planners in Eastern Europe quietly relied on world capitalist market prices as a guide.

Without external free-market price signals, pure socialism would be economically blind and coordination would collapse.

Mises went further, arguing that interventionism, the “middle way” of government meddling, is inherently unstable.
Each intervention creates problems that invite more interventions, eventually leading to full socialization.
Price controls cause shortages, subsidies distort production, and the cycle continues until the economy is fully planned.

The lesson is clear.
Rational economics requires genuine market prices emerging from voluntary exchange and private property.
Half-measures don’t stabilize the system. They accelerate the drift into central planning.

The Austrian School understood this decades before the collapse of the Soviet bloc proved it in practice.

[elvis @omarsar0]

New research from Microsoft Research

I see a lot of AI engineers handwriting agent skill docs and hope they generalize.

Probably not optimal. This works show why.

It treats the skill doc as a trainable external state of a frozen agent instead.

It introduces SkillOpt, where an optimizer model makes validation-gated edits to the skill file. It adds, deletes, or replaces instructions, with a textual learning rate that controls how aggressively each round rewrites the doc. The agent itself never changes.

SkillOpt is best or tied on all 52 (model, benchmark, harness) cells.

On GPT-5.5 it adds 23.5 points in direct chat, 24.8 with Codex, and 19.1 with Claude Code over no skill. It beats human-written skills, TextGrad, GEPA, and EvoSkill, carries zero extra inference-time cost, and the learned skills transfer across models and harnesses.

Paper: https://t.co/mNgTmmT32U

Learn to build effective AI agents in our academy: https://t.co/1e8RZKs4uX

[Kevin (linuxbox) @linuxbox]

@JCChristopher @daltonbrewer We share a Tesla birthday. Fun

[Kyle Becker @kylenabecker]

Western Civilization didn't flourish because "white males" stopped other groups from succeeding.

The West thrived because of rational thought, individual rights, and free enterprise.

"White males" that invented the steam engine, electric generation, the combustion engine, flight, and space exploration did not do so because they "stole" the ideas of minorities.

These inventions helped lift mankind out of ignorance and hardship, improving the quality of life for all of humanity.

"White males" didn't oppress the entire world, they helped make it a better place.

"White males" didn't oppress everyone's rights, they invented the idea of rights and paid in blood to liberate tens of millions of people.

"White males" didn't invent slavery, they ended it.

"White males" didn't invent tyranny, they devised a form of government to end it.

Destroying Western Civilization isn't about empowering groups that were "oppressed." It is about tearing down civilization itself so that globalist parasites can rule over all of us.

[Kevin (linuxbox) @linuxbox]

@AlfieJCarter 31

[Kevin (linuxbox) @linuxbox]

@Real_Turley @pwvl A

[Uncle Bob Martin @unclebobmartin]

Yup.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.