Martin Littlecott

Coder (Python, Powershell & JavaScript), Scientist (esp. Geophysics, & Astronomy), love Harley's, Matchless & BSA's, all types of music...🌋🌍🖥️

[Ivan Velichko @iximiuz]

iximiuz Labs has definitely become way better, thanks to agents. Test coverage 10x'ed, lots of bugs fixed, and playground performance has improved. All was definitely doable before agents, but I've never had enough resources as a solo founder. But now I do.

[Aviation Archive - Tim Farmer @aviationarchive]

On March 17, 1952, HMS Glory set a record that still stands as one of the most intense days of carrier operations in British naval history — 106 sorties in a single day during the Korean War.

She flew Sea Fury and Firefly strike missions for UN forces in some of the most demanding conditions.
Would you have wanted to fly off her deck that day?
Rare restored & colorized footage below 👇

[Calum E. Douglas FRAeS @CalumDouglas1]

Today I have been a very serious professional historian and have definetly NOT been sitting in mk1 Spitfire and also definetly did not say such remarks as:

“Roger gold leader angels 15, sighted tally ho over!”

Also not followed by

“Neeeowwwww…. Ratatatatatatatatatat!”

[21st Century @21stCenturyTime]

@YearsProgress And the 21st Century is 25.45% complete.

[Years Progress @YearsProgress]

2026 is 45% complete.

[Prof. Abel Méndez 🔭 🔬 @ProfAbelMendez]

Statistically, decades of observations of the universe might include every kind of detectable phenomenon. Yet everything we’ve detected so far appears natural, and nothing is clearly the product of an extraterrestrial civilization. Figure that out. 🤔 #UFOs #UPAs #DisclosureDay

[Ron Eisele @ron_eisele]

13 June 1911. Birth of John Wescott Myers (d. 31 January 2008). American WWII test pilot with Lockheed Corporation and Northrop Aircraft. He helped develop the P-61 fighter. He had logged over 70,000 hours and kept flying until he was 93.

[Ron Eisele @ron_eisele]

13 June 1909. Alliott Verdon-Roe first flew his Roe 1 Triplane at the Lea Marshes in Walthamstow, becoming the first British man to fly an all-British aeroplane in the process. There is now a blue plaque on the railway viaduct at Lea Marshes commemorating the achievement.

[Hush-Kit Aviation News, History & Satire @Hush_Kit]

10 Steel Marvels of Aviation
(Yes, they made steel aeroplanes) https://t.co/sadXUr8gwX

[Khairallah AL-Awady @eng_khairallah1]

Anthropic engineer:

"You're not supposed to prompt Claude. You're supposed to build a system that prompts itself."

this is one of the best workflows I've seen in a long time

in this video she breaks down exactly how most people are using Claude:

- the 24% you lose to CLAUDE.md before typing a word
- the plugins that 95% of users have never installed
- the workflows that run without you typing a single prompt
- why typing one prompt and closing the tab is leaving 90% on the table

if you've been using Claude for months and still start every session from scratch, you have at least 28 untouched features. probably 30

instead of another show tonight, watch this

make sure to bookmark it before it gets lost in your feed

full guide in the article below

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

This metal joining trick works without welding, and most people have never seen it.

[Amazing Maps @amazingmap]

How East Germany depicted West Berlin in 1988

[Skilled Coder @theskilledcoder]

Linux Command : Users, Groups & sudo

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Russian psychologist spent 10 years proving that the act of talking to yourself out loud is one of the most powerful cognitive tools the human brain has, and almost nobody outside his field has read the work.

His name was Lev Vygotsky.

He worked in Moscow in the 1920s and died of tuberculosis in 1934 at the age of 37. He had no laboratory, no funding, almost no English readers, and a body of work that the Soviet government suppressed for two decades after he died.

He produced the foundational theory of how human cognition actually develops, and the central piece of that theory was a behavior almost every adult is faintly embarrassed about.

Vygotsky noticed that young children talk to themselves constantly. They narrate their own actions, they argue with imaginary opponents, they instruct themselves through tasks out loud.

The dominant theory at the time, from the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, said this was a sign of cognitive immaturity that children would eventually grow out of as they learned to think properly.

Vygotsky said the exact opposite.

He argued that this self-directed speech was the most important cognitive event in the entire developmental window, because it was the moment a child first started to use language as a tool to control their own mind. The child was not failing to think. The child was learning how to think by externalizing the process and listening to themselves do it.

He predicted that as children matured, this out-loud self-talk would not disappear. It would go underground. It would become silent inner speech, which is the running monologue every adult has inside their own head for the rest of their life.

The voice you hear when you read this sentence is the direct descendant of a four-year-old narrating their own block tower.

For 50 years almost nobody outside Russia had access to his work, and the few researchers who did pick it up could not get funding to test it. Then in the early 2000s the experiments finally started to pile up, and what they found was that Vygotsky had been right about something even more important than he knew.

The first major study came from Gary Lupyan at the University of Wisconsin and Daniel Swingley at the University of Pennsylvania in 2012. They ran a simple visual search experiment. Participants were shown 20 images at once and asked to find a specific object, like a banana or a chair. In one condition they searched silently. In the other condition they were told to say the name of the object out loud to themselves while looking for it.

The participants who spoke the target name out loud found the object significantly faster, with higher accuracy, than the participants who searched in silence. The effect was strongest when the spoken word matched a familiar object the brain already had a strong category for.

Saying the word out loud literally tuned the visual system to detect that thing better. The researchers called it the label feedback effect, and the implication was that the act of vocalizing a goal physically changes how the brain processes the world while pursuing it.

The second major study came out of the University of Michigan and Michigan State in 2017. The lead researchers were Ethan Kross and Jason Moser, and they used both EEG and fMRI to record what happens inside the brain when people talk to themselves while emotionally upset.

They asked participants to recall painful autobiographical memories and reflect on them in two different ways. Some used the first person, saying things like "why am I feeling this way." Others used the third person, referring to themselves by their own name, saying things like "why is John feeling this way."

The brain scans showed that the simple act of switching from first person to third person, even silently, decreased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for rumination and self-referential pain. Within a single second of using their own name instead of the word I, participants showed measurably lower emotional reactivity. The shift required no extra cognitive effort. It cost the brain nothing. And it worked.

Kross described the mechanism in his interviews. Talking to yourself by name creates a small amount of psychological distance from your own experience. Your brain processes the situation more like a problem belonging to someone else, which means it can analyze it instead of drowning in it.

What Vygotsky had intuited in 1934 turned out to be even more powerful than the developmental theory he built it into. The voice you use to talk to yourself is not background noise. It is one of the most precise cognitive tools the brain has, and you can change how it works just by changing the pronoun you use.

People who talk through problems out loud are not anxious or unstable. They are running an externalized version of a process the rest of us are running silently and worse. The kindergartener narrating their block tower, the surgeon muttering through a procedure, the engineer pacing a hallway describing a bug to nobody, the athlete repeating a cue to themselves before a free throw, they are all using the same ancient mechanism that builds and steers human thought.

You can run the experiment yourself the next time you are stuck on something hard. Stop trying to solve it silently in your head. Say it out loud. Describe what you are seeing. Walk yourself through the steps as if you were explaining it to a colleague who is not in the room.

And when something genuinely upsets you, switch to your own name. Ask why this person is feeling this way, instead of why I am feeling this way.

The voice you have been told to keep quiet your entire life is one of the oldest pieces of cognitive technology you own.

Most people are still embarrassed to use it.

[J&L Historical @Jason_R_Burt]

Trained as a 60mm mortarman, Sledge joined K Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines.

In September 1944, he landed on Peleliu — his first combat — facing hellish heat, coral craters, and fanatical Japanese resistance in one of WWII’s most savage battles.

[J&L Historical @Jason_R_Burt]

Born November 4, 1923, in Mobile, Alabama, Eugene Bondurant Sledge came from a comfortable family.

He initially enrolled in officer training but deliberately flunked to enlist as a private in the Marines in 1943.

[J&L Historical @Jason_R_Burt]

In HBO’s The Pacific, Eugene “Sledgehammer” Sledge is the young Marine whose wide-eyed innocence turns to horror amid the brutal fighting on Peleliu and Okinawa.

🧵But the real story behind this quiet Alabamian is one of survival, trauma, and profound reflection.

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

Falcon 9 lands on the A Shortfall of Gravitas droneship, completing the first 35th launch and landing of a booster

[Francisco Cunha @OnDisasters]

On This Day: The fall of the Valkyrie

June 9 1966: The 2nd prototype of the North American XB-70 Valkyrie [62-02070] collides with an F-104 Starfighter over California (US).

Of the three aboard both planes, only the XB-70´s pilot survives, with his co-pilot and the fighter pilot perishing. Incident occurred during a photoshoot while in close formation.

Enquiry stated the F-104´s pilot was in a position where he was unable to safely distance from XB-70 (more details from the ASN Entry below)

The XB-70 was a Mach 3 bomber developed in the 50s. Developments in missile technology made the concept obsolete, leading to its cancellation in 1961. At the time of the crash, the two prototypes that had been built were being used for research.

Video is from an excerpt by YouTuber Mike Bell – Video´s name is “Wake Vortex and the XB-70 crash”

More info on the report here

“ On 8 June 1966, XB-70A No. 2 was in close formation with four other aircraft (an F-4 Phantom, an F-5, a T-38 Talon, and an F-104 Starfighter) for a photoshoot at the behest of General Electric, manufacturer of the engines of all five aircraft.
The USAF summary report of the accident investigation stated that, given the position of the F-104 relative to the XB-70, the F-104 pilot would not have been able to see the XB-70's wing, except by uncomfortably looking back over his left shoulder.

The report said that Walker, piloting the F-104, likely maintained his position by looking at the fuselage of the XB-70, forward of his position.

The F-104 was estimated to be 70 ft (21 m) to the side of, and 10 ft (3 m) below, the fuselage of the XB-70. The report concluded that from that position, without appropriate sight cues, Walker was unable to properly perceive his motion relative to the Valkyrie, leading to his aircraft drifting into contact with the XB-70's wing”

[Endurance22 @Endurance_22]

🌊 This #WorldOceanDay, we're celebrating the oceans that preserve both life and history.

For more than a century, the icy waters of the Weddell Sea protected Shackleton's Endurance, discovered by @FMHTrust in 2022 nearly 3,000m beneath the surface.

https://t.co/Tnjgc5LmrC