gala.namann

from this world but not of it | passionately optimistic and perpetually paranoid

[Aravind Srinivas @AravSrinivas]

At its peak, Sun Microsystems was valued at 205B (394B if inflation adjusted). Sold software in enterprise servers. Got disrupted by Linux, x86, and commodity hardware. Ended up selling to Oracle for 7.4B, losing 96% of its value.

Open source models running on local hardware can have a similar impact given what’s going on.

[Daksh Gupta @dakshgup]

parampara, prathishta, anushasan

pre-training, alignment, post-training

[Mind and Glory 🎖 @mindandglory]

Cold showers. Early mornings. Heavy weights. Difficult books. None of it is glamorous. All of it is compounding.

[Millie Marconi @MillieMarconnni]

A British biologist looked at 200,000 years of human history and found that the entire reason humans broke out of poverty was not intelligence, not language, not even agriculture, but one mechanism so simple a 6-year-old could explain it.

His name is Matt Ridley.

He is a zoologist by training, an evolutionary biologist by career, and in 2010 he wrote a book called The Rational Optimist that quietly argued the most important fact about human progress had been hiding in plain sight for the entire history of economics.

Naval Ravikant has been telling people to read everything Ridley has ever written for the last 15 years. The reason is the argument inside this one book.

For 200,000 years, anatomically modern humans walked around with the same brain you have right now. Same skull size. Same neural architecture. Same raw capacity for language, planning, and abstract thought.

For roughly 190,000 of those years, almost nothing happened. Generation after generation lived and died inside the same Stone Age toolkit their great-great-grandparents had used. Then somewhere around 50,000 years ago, the line on the chart of human progress started to tick upward. Then it bent. Then it exploded.

The question Ridley spent years on was the only question that mattered. What changed.

It was not the brain. The brain had been the same for 190,000 years. It was not language, which had existed long before the takeoff. It was not even agriculture, which arrived only 10,000 years ago and was actually preceded by the upward bend, not the cause of it.

What changed was that humans started trading with strangers.

This sounds too small to be the answer. Ridley argues that it is the answer to almost everything. The moment one human exchanged a useful object with another human from a different group, something happened that no other species on earth had ever done.

Two ideas that had developed in isolation came into contact. The flint knapper learned what the spear maker had figured out. The fisherman from the coast learned what the hunter from the forest had figured out. The two pieces of knowledge fused into something neither side could have produced alone.

Ridley calls this ideas having sex. The phrase sounds frivolous and it is meant to. The point is that ideas, like genes, get better when they combine with other ideas from different lineages.

An idea sitting inside one head, no matter how brilliant the head, eventually hits a ceiling. The same idea exposed to ten thousand other ideas does something genes do under sexual reproduction. It mixes. It recombines. It produces offspring nobody planned.

The cleanest proof of this argument is the most uncomfortable case study in the book. Tasmania.

Around 10,000 years ago, rising sea levels cut Tasmania off from mainland Australia. A population of roughly 4,000 humans was now isolated on an island, with no possibility of contact with the rest of humanity. They had the same brains. The same language. The same starting toolkit as their cousins 150 kilometers north. The natural experiment was now running.

What happened next is something no economist or geneticist had ever predicted.

The mainland Australians kept inventing. Boomerangs. Spear-throwers. Fishing nets. Bone needles for sewing fitted clothes. Watercraft with paddles. Their technology compounded slowly across the centuries.

The Tasmanians went the other way. They did not just fail to invent the new tools their cousins were developing. They started losing the tools they already had. Fishing was abandoned within a few thousand years. Bone tools disappeared. Fitted clothing disappeared. They forgot how to make fire from scratch and started carrying lit firebrands from camp to camp instead, relighting their fires from a neighbor's whenever their own went out.

By the time European explorers arrived in the 17th century, the Tasmanians had the simplest toolkit of any human society ever recorded. Their material culture had gone backward for 8,000 years.

The archaeologist Rhys Jones called it a slow strangulation of the mind.

Joseph Henrich at Harvard later proved with formal mathematical models that there was nothing wrong with Tasmanian brains. There was something wrong with their network. A toolkit requires a critical mass of people exchanging skills to maintain itself.

The act of teaching a skill is imperfect. Every generation loses a small percentage of what the last generation knew. If your population is large enough and trading widely enough, those losses get caught and corrected by someone else who still remembers.

If your population shrinks below a certain threshold and stops mixing with outsiders, the small losses compound until entire technologies disappear.

This is the part that should haunt anyone reading this in 2026.

Intelligence is not a property of the individual brain. Intelligence is a property of the network the brain is connected to. A genius in isolation will produce less than a mediocre thinker inside a dense exchange of other mediocre thinkers.

The thing your ancestors needed in order to break out of 190,000 years of stagnation was not better brains. It was better connections between brains they already had.

The implication for any individual is direct and uncomfortable. If you are smart and isolated, you will be outproduced by people half as smart who are connected.

The most successful people in any field are almost never the smartest people in it. They are the ones positioned at the intersection of the most idea flows. They are reading more authors than their competitors. They are talking to more people from more disciplines. They are in the rooms where ideas from different lineages bump into each other.

Ridley ends the book on the line that sounds optimistic but is actually a warning its this "The future will be invented by people who connect ideas, not by people who guard them."

[Logan Kilpatrick @OfficialLoganK]

we are cooking the worlds best vibe coding app on Android and iOS, it’s going to be so cool :)

[Justin Skycak @justinskycak]

The cost of avoiding structure is that every day has to be renegotiated from scratch.

[signüll @signulll]

it genuinely feels like modern life has become a bandwidth trap.

the amount available to perceive, read, respond to, maintain, understand, optimize, archive, remember, compare, desire, fear, & keep up with is just grotesquely higher than what a human day can metabolize.

even worse the world now presents itself as if it is all equally adjacent to you. every article, every take, every message, every possibility, every person, every catastrophe, & every opportunity. your brain interprets this as “maybe i should be engaging with all of it.”

but you can’t. nobody can. not even the freaks. the good news is that ai is the best mechanic to parse signal from the noise, & that’s what we are building.

[Blake Burge @blakeaburge]

Major cheat code for life: Learn to delay your reaction. Anger, fear, and impulse will try to make you move fast. There's power in pausing. In the pause, you see clearly, you respond wisely, and you avoid decisions you’ll regret. Slow down to speed up.

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

When your working life rewards you, it’s easy to ratchet up the complexity: homes, cars, travel, possessions etc.

I have found that all that complexity comes at the sake of your most fleeting asset: your time. Instead of building things, all of a sudden you’re dealing with minutiae and logistics. Instead of talking mostly to engineers, you’re talking mostly to non-engineers. The building stops…the business of managing self inflicted complexity begins.

It’s worth noting that the best players in the game (Buffett, Elon) have kept their life extremely basic, almost monastic/nomadic, as success ratcheted them ever higher.

I think it’s the biggest secret hiding in plain sight:

When the world upgrades your status, downgrade your complexity.

[David Senra @FoundersPodcast]

Sage advice from the founder of Red Bull:

“I don't believe in 50 friends. I believe in a smaller number. Nor do I care about society events. It's the most senseless use of time. When I do go out, from time to time, it's just to convince myself again that I'm not missing a lot."

[Aravind Srinivas @AravSrinivas]

it was a good idea to give computers to humans. it’s a better idea to give computers to computers so that they can create the same outputs we do on a computer for our work. that’s the core idea of perplexity computer in a nutshell.

[Matt Walsh @MattWalshBlog]

Smart phones really just ruined everything. People don’t even know how to sit still and think anymore, let alone pick up a book and read. Everyone is constantly overstimulated, addicted to the passive consumption of random bits of content streamed into their eyeballs at light speed. Kids are raised this way from birth. It’s unhuman. Disastrous for the mind and soul.

[Greg Brockman @gdb]

how did we ever write all that code by hand

[DogeDesigner @cb_doge]

🚨 Elon Musk on 𝕏 Chat:

"We just rebuilt the entire messaging stack. It uses a sort of peer to peer based encryption system, similar to Bitcoin. I think it is a very strong encryption method. There are no hooks in the X system for advertising.

Apps like WhatsApp have advertising hooks. WhatsApp knows enough about what you are texting to decide which ads to show you. That is a massive security vulnerability, because if it has enough information to show you ads, it has a lot of information.

X Chat has no hooks for advertising."

[Lovable @Lovable]

Introducing Lovable Cloud & AI, a new chapter for vibe coding.

Anyone can now build apps with complex AI and backend functionality, just by prompting.

100k+ new ideas, tools, and sites are built on Lovable daily.

Today, we're redefining what's possible:

[Julian Schrittwieser @Mononofu]

As a researcher at a frontier lab I’m often surprised by how unaware of current AI progress public discussions are.

I wrote a post to summarize studies of recent progress, and what we should expect in the next 1-2 years:
https://t.co/B7438Z9lOF

[Gaurav @gauravisnotme]

Can I just say be mindful of the terms and conditions before you switch over?

This app doesn't provide end-to-end on-device encryption for messages. You need to enable "Secret Chat". Otherwise, your data is stored on their servers.

Screenshot from their website.

[Cinema Tweets @CinemaTweets1]

One of Cinema’s Greatest Actors Returns

[Steve Hou @stevehou]

NVidia invests 100B in OAI so it has the money to buy NVidia chips

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

The algorithm will be purely AI by November, with significant progress along the way.

We will open source the algorithm every two weeks or so.

By November or certainly December, you will be able to adjust your feed dynamically just by asking Grok.