pekac

[Erik Voorhees @ErikVoorhees]

What more can punish a man than to sit and groan as he contemplates what might have been?

- Rockefeller

[Taelin @VictorTaelin]

@VitalikButerin bro

[Paul Graham @paulg]

Trial lawyers are lobbying against self-driving cars because they're too safe. They need people to be killed and injured so that they have material for lawsuits.

[Peter Steinberger 🦞 @steipete]

Are we still talking loops or did we shift to graphs yet?

[www.sidin.co @sidin]

Annual reminder the Mbappe remains the only footballer named after two degrees you can get from Oxford.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

This is like someone who can bench press 30 pounds writing about what it takes to bench press 600.

[Velina Tchakarova @vtchakarova]

Brutal. Just brutal.

[pekac @pekac9]

@VictorTaelin Dih move tho

[pekac @pekac9]

@VictorTaelin Dont worry man, if they succeed - it will be A LOT of hard work that you didnt have to do and bend will be the best lang for it and humanity++.

If they dont, as its very hard to work on hard stuff without strong conviction, you will.

Winwin.

[Hedin (λ) 💙💛 @dallaylaen]

Combinatory logic.

[Taelin @VictorTaelin]

faster mobile version

Room → Macbook → Apple M4 → Atoms → Quarks

also deployed for you to play! (link below)

[Jrag.eth @Jrag0x]

Hey @grok

Please swap the hairstyles of these two individuals while leaving their facial features unaltered.

[LaurieWired @lauriewired]

i’m pretty convinced that LISP is the highest-IQ programming language

absolute S-tier reflection. if you use a derivative like 3-LISP I’d say you can even hit SS+ tier with it’s meta-circular interpreters.

my own runtime reflection lib for C++ probably brought the language from C-tier (c++26 static) to B-tier (runtime)…but it’s still a far cry away from how crazy LISP can get

[Hairspring Watches @hairspringwatch]

Finds. AP’s 25668BA is not the watch that revived the Swiss industry in the wake of quartz, it’s the reference that celebrated that success. Made in 205 examples across all metals, of which just 94 were cased in yellow gold, it is the skeleton which goes most unappreciated today. https://t.co/zKX9c8dlnq

[Handre @Handre]

Walter Duranty knew people were starving. He wrote that they weren't anyway.

From his comfortable Moscow apartment, the New York Times correspondent filed dispatch after dispatch in 1932 and 1933 assuring American readers that talk of famine in Ukraine was, in his words, "an exaggeration or malignant propaganda." Meanwhile, the Holodomor killed somewhere between 3.5 and 7 million people. Stalin requisitioned the grain, sealed the borders of starving villages, and let entire regions collapse into death and cannibalism. Duranty saw the reports. He had the sources. He chose Stalin.

Duranty privately told a British diplomat, Sir William Strang, in September 1933 that "as many as 10 million" had likely died. Then he went back to his typewriter and produced the line "there is no actual starvation." He calculated that access to the regime, the famous interviews, the prestige of being the man who explained the Soviet experiment to America, was worth more than the truth. The market he served rewarded him for it. The Pulitzer committee handed him their 1932 prize for correspondence. They have never revoked it.

This is what central planning always buys: not just the bodies in the field but the men with pens who explain why the bodies don't count. Every engineered scarcity needs its Duranty. Someone has to stand at the edge of the mass grave and assure the readers back home that the five-year plan is working, that the eggs are necessary for the omelette (his actual phrase). The state directs the grain. The court intellectual directs the narrative. Both jobs pay well.

Free market economists spent the entire 20th century explaining that you cannot run an economy by command without producing exactly this: shortage, terror, and a press corps competing to flatter the men who caused it.

The famine ended, and the Pulitzer sits on the wall at 620 Eighth Avenue to this day.

[Curiosity @CuriosityonX]

If Saturn were as close to Earth as the Moon, this is what it would look like:

[Alex Veremeyenko @alex_verem]

i'm obsessed with what's happening in AI reforestation right now

this Franco-Brazilian startup called MORFO took a patch of land in Brazil that was rock-hard and compacted from years of cattle farming. they replanted it using a single drone. months later the ground was covered in grass, bushes, and small trees. the land came back to life.

here's how the whole thing works.

1. drones scan the terrain with high-resolution cameras and sensors
2. AI analyzes the imagery alongside soil samples, moisture levels, slope, and surrounding vegetation
3. the system picks from a catalog of 300+ native species, deciding exactly which plants will thrive in which specific spot
4. the drone fires biodegradable seed pods packed with seeds, nutrients, and moisture at 180 capsules per minute
5. satellite and drone imagery monitors regrowth over time, with AI tracking vegetation cover and biodiversity
6. two people and one drone cover 50 hectares a day. a person planting by hand manages about one hectare.

and MORFO isn't alone. AirSeed in Australia drops 250,000 seed pods per day into bushfire-scarred koala habitat, replanting swamp mahogany that koalas depend on to survive. Flash Forest in Canada fires 50,000 pods daily into wildfire-destroyed boreal forest, planning the replanting alongside Cree Indigenous communities. re-green won Prince William's Earthshot Prize after planting 6 million seedlings across 30,000 hectares of Amazon and Atlantic Forest.

five companies across four continents built this same approach independently. nobody coordinated. the physics of the problem demanded it.

knowing which seeds belong in which soil used to require years of ecological fieldwork, manual planting crews, and budgets that made large-scale restoration nearly impossible. now two people with a drone and an AI model trained on local soil data can replant 50 hectares before lunch.

this is the AI work that'll still matter in 50 years.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

There are crocodiles in that water. Some of the last left anywhere in the Sahara, cut off in this canyon when the desert dried out around 5,000 years ago.

This is the Guelta d'Archei, a permanent pool deep in the Ennedi Plateau of northeastern Chad, fed by water that seeps up through the sandstone long after the rivers above it dried out. The dark color comes from centuries of dung, dropped by the camels that crowd in by the hundreds to drink. That waste feeds the algae, the algae feeds the fish, and the fish feed the crocodiles, which means the filthiest water in the desert is the one thing keeping life here alive.

These are West African crocodiles, smaller and shyer than the Nile crocodile. The desert ones stay small, while Nile crocodiles can reach 6 meters, about 20 feet. When the pool shrinks in a bad year, they crawl into caves and burrows and shut their bodies down for months, barely breathing, until rain refills the canyon. Then they climb back out.

Those crocodiles are leftovers from a different world. Six to seven thousand years ago this part of Africa was green, full of rivers and grassland. In the basin to the south sat Lake Mega-Chad, the largest freshwater lake on Earth at the time. It covered around 400,000 square kilometers, bigger than the Caspian Sea, the biggest lake on the planet today. Hippos and giraffes lived along its shore. The cliffs above this canyon still carry painted scenes from that greener time.

Rain stopped reaching the region. The monsoon that fed all of it collapsed about 5,000 years ago, and the land dried to desert in a few centuries, until the great lake was a sliver of what it had been.

The country in that post is named after it. "Chad" comes from an old local word that just means a large body of water. Those crocodiles are the last living piece of the world that name remembers.

[hersch @tittyrespecter]

i open this app like a divorced man opening the fridge

[fejau @fejau_inc]

im sorry what did you call them