You walk into a Prague grocery store in 1985 and the toothpaste says "TOOTHPASTE." That is the brand. White tube, blue letters, no name, because a name implies a producer competing for your loyalty, and there is no competition. There is one toothpaste. You take it or your teeth stays dirty.
The soap works the same way. "SOAP," wrapped in waxy gray paper that crumbles when you look at it. Is it good soap? You have no idea, and you never will, because you have nothing to compare it to. The genius of price signals and brand reputation is that they pack thousands of strangers' judgments into one purchase decision. Strip that away and you are buying blind. Quality becomes a rumor. You hear the soap from the Plzeň plant lathers better than the Ostrava one, so you hoard the Plzeň bars when a friend tips you off. That is your consumer research: gossip.
Now the line. You have stood in it for two hours, and you do not yet know what it sells. You joined because a line means something arrived. Oranges, maybe. Toilet paper, if the planners felt generous this quarter. This happens not because the planners are evil or even incompetant. Without market prices for capital goods, the central planner cannot calculate. He is flying blind, allocating steel and labor by guesswork, and the result lands at your feet as an empty shelf and a four-hour queue for shoes that do not fit. The system itself cannot function. It is impossible. Production under socialism is impossible because there are no price signals.
There were no restaurants worth the word. East Berlin in 1980 had a handful of state canteens serving the same gray schnitzel, where the waiter did you a favor by taking your order and the kitchen ran out of half the menu by noon. Choice was a Western decadence. You ate what existed.
This is what "they meant well" produced: a continent of adults trading gossip about soap and standing in line for the privilege of not knowing what they would get. The planners promised abundance and delivered a blank tube of toothpaste. Forty years of it. Yet, people keep telling you it was never tried properly.
The most terrifying age is 40.
Not because you’re getting old or have some grey hair, but because your perception of time completely changes.
At 40, life is f*cking serious. If you have kids and don’t work hard, they starve and end up getting a bad education. You also see the difference between those who f*cked around and figured it out and those that settled for mediocre.
The stark difference will rip your face off.
A person who could have done a lot and didn’t by 40 has wasted the best years of their life. It’s sad to see.
By 40, the lifestyle you chose becomes obvious. Your hair turns grey or falls out if you abuse your body. You end up with a pot belly if you eat like sh*t. If you don’t go to the gym you have no energy. Something else happens.
Your parents either die or have multiple near-misses. You start to realise they will be dead one day and you’re in charge of your bloodline. This responsibility weighs on you.
Even cooler, the knob heads in high school who made fun of you or thought they were cool are not modern day losers. They work dead end jobs and watch sports with a beer to numb their pain. They don’t dare f*ck with your aura anymore.
Pessimism can often set in to. You start to obsess over news and politics. You think the government will save you or that billionaires are evil for doing what you refused to do.
Jealousy gets ugly. It becomes a realise valve.
The best place to deploy it is on social media. You rage post comments calling stuff scams and trying to discredit people. But it doesn’t work. People ignore you because they know you’re a little b*tch.
For many people, 40 becomes a moment of either radical transformation or a slow decline.
The crazy part isn’t turning 40.
It’s realizing how much time you wasted being trapped by fear.
1900s: "Cocaine tonics for vitality!"
1910s: "Heroin cough syrup: safe for children!"
1920s: "A little arsenic keeps the complexion bright!"
1930s: "Radioactive water is energising and modern!"
1940s: "Breakfast is the most important meal of the day!"
1950s: "Smoking is healthy! Doctors recommend it!"
1970s: "Margarine is better than butter!"
1990s: "Fat makes you fat! Eat carbs!"
2010s: "Statins for everyone!"
2025: "Plant-based is optimal!"
2050: "We were wrong about literally everything."
You: Still trusting them.
An update to the Hallmarks of Cancer framework for understanding (and researching) what causes human cancers. https://t.co/3d6pYrcAJ5
Douglas Hanahan
@CellCellPress
Ukraine could have surrendered in 2014. But we didn’t.
Ukraine could have surrendered in 2022. But we didn’t.
And we could surrender now. But we will not.
We. Are. Ukrainians. We will not surrender.
Right now, all our services keep working in Ternopil to help the victims and save as many lives as possible. Points of Invincibility have been set up, where people can receive the support they need.
Tragically, tonight, the people of Ternopil suffered the most from Russian aggression in this massive attack. As of now, we know that this strike by Russia has claimed 25 lives, including three children. Once again, the Russians have killed innocent, peaceful people who were simply sleeping in their homes. My condolences to everyone who has lost family members and loved ones. 93 people have been injured. They are receiving medical care. There are still people trapped under the rubble, and first responders are continuing search and rescue operations.
Russia will never stop on its own. Their goal is to continue killing and destroying life in Ukraine. Only strong pressure on the aggressor can stop this. Every life matters. Every life must be protected. And I am grateful to our partners who are ready to pressure Russia, help our people, and do everything possible to restore a just peace.
🚨 Big news in cellular therapy! 🚨
FACT and @JACIE_EBMT have officially released the Standards for Hematopoietic Cellular Therapy (HCT), 9th Edition and the Standards for Immune Effector Cells (IEC), 3rd Edition demonstrating our ongoing commitment to promoting quality, patient safety, and excellence in medical and laboratory practice worldwide. 🌎🫂
What’s new?
✅Updated International Standards for HCT and IEC
✅Fresh Accreditation Manuals to guide your journey
✅Downloadable Summary of Changes and Resource Links to keep you informed
📕HCT: https://t.co/hq1jvTQesx
📘IEC: https://t.co/cvBwwVT54a
#CellTherapy #FACTStandards #FACTaccreditation #ImmuneEffectorCells #PatientSafety
💔 2-year-old Anhelina was among the victims of Russian attack on Kyiv on August 28. Her mom Nadiia was also killed by a Russian missile.
The total death toll stands at 22, including four children.
New paper:
We trained GPT-4.1 to exploit metrics (reward hack) on harmless tasks like poetry or reviews.
Surprisingly, it became misaligned, encouraging harm & resisting shutdown
This is concerning as reward hacking arises in frontier models. 🧵
NVIDIA research just made LLMs 53x faster. 🤯
Imagine slashing your AI inference budget by 98%.
This breakthrough doesn't require training a new model from scratch; it upgrades your existing ones for hyper-speed while matching or beating SOTA accuracy.
Here's how it works:
The technique is called Post Neural Architecture Search (PostNAS). It's a revolutionary process for retrofitting pre-trained models.
Freeze the Knowledge: It starts with a powerful model (like Qwen2.5) and locks down its core MLP layers, preserving its intelligence.
Surgical Replacement: It then uses a hardware-aware search to replace most of the slow, O(n²) full-attention layers with a new, hyper-efficient linear attention design called JetBlock.
Optimize for Throughput: The search keeps a few key full-attention layers in the exact positions needed for complex reasoning, creating a hybrid model optimized for speed on H100 GPUs.
The result is Jet-Nemotron: an AI delivering 2,885 tokens per second with top-tier model performance and a 47x smaller KV cache.
Why this matters to your AI strategy:
- Business Leaders: A 53x speedup translates to a ~98% cost reduction for inference at scale. This fundamentally changes the ROI calculation for deploying high-performance AI.
- Practitioners: This isn't just for data centers. The massive efficiency gains and tiny memory footprint (154MB cache) make it possible to deploy SOTA-level models on memory-constrained and edge hardware.
- Researchers: PostNAS offers a new, capital-efficient paradigm. Instead of spending millions on pre-training, you can now innovate on architecture by modifying existing models, dramatically lowering the barrier to entry for creating novel, efficient LMs.
Carl June is one name that reshaped medicine. This tribute article charts his journey from Navy doctor to #CART pioneer, highlighting how his vision and compassion launched a new era of cellular therapy and saved thousands of lives. Read the article: https://t.co/VPsAfBPZas
Právě jsem mluvil s ukrajinským prezidentem Volodymyrem Zelenským. Ujistil jsem ho, že má naši plnou podporu. Velmi dobře víme a nezapomeneme, kdo je v této válce obětí a kdo agresorem. Spolu s dalšími evropskými státy hodláme zintenzivnit naši pomoc Ukrajině v jejím statečném a spravedlivém boji. Boji nejen za ukrajinskou, ale také naši svobodnou a bezpečnou budoucnost.
The Scariest Photo in My Gallery...
In the evening, I learned about a seriously wounded man who couldn't be carried away. He had been lying there for a long time, waiting for help, while an enemy drone hovered above him, watching for an evacuation team.
1/n
BREAKING:
Russia shot down the Azeri passenger plane, killing 38.
Euronews has received a confirmation from Azerbaijani government sources that a Russian surface-to-air missile caused yesterday’s Azerbaijan Airlines plane crash.
The missile was fired at Flight 8432 during a Ukrainian drone attack on Grozny, and the shrapnel hit the plane when the missile exploded next to the aircraft mid-flight.
Russia didn’t allow the damaged aircraft to land at any Russian airports despite the pilots’ requests for an emergency landing, and it was ordered to fly across the Caspian Sea towards Aktau in Kazakhstan.
Russia also jammed the plane’s GPS navigation systems with electronic warfare systems throughout the flight over thr Caspian Sea.
Ruská cesta k Velké říjnové socialistické revoluci
Jen stěží najdeme v celé lidské historii zásadnější událost než převrat, který provedli bolševici v Petrohradu dne 7. listopadu 1917.
Šlo však jen o jeden dílek ruské revoluční mozaiky a důsledků tehdy nikdo nedohlédl.
🧵🔽
Blood and guts: how the intestinal microbiome shapes hematopoiesis and treatment of hematologic disease https://t.co/URX0iw1sux #hematopoiesisandstemcells#transplantation