En el año 1200, en algún taller de Irán, un artesano construyó una caja que nadie podría abrir sin la combinación exacta. Y diseñó esa combinación con tantas variables que probarlas todas habría llevado más tiempo del que cualquier ladrón podría dedicarle.
La caja selyúcida del año 1200-1201 es uno de los ejemplos más sofisticados de mecánica de seguridad medieval que se conoce. Fabricada en latón fundido y martillado, con incrustaciones de plata y cobre formando patrones geométricos y caligrafía árabe, incorpora un sistema de cerradura de combinación con discos rotatorios que generan aproximadamente cuatro mil millones de combinaciones posibles.
Para ponerlo en perspectiva: un ladrón que probara una combinación por segundo, sin descanso, tardaría más de 126 años en agotarlas todas.
Los Selyúcidas gobernaron un imperio que se extendía desde Anatolia hasta Asia Central entre los siglos XI y XIII. Durante ese período, el mundo islámico atravesaba lo que los historiadores llaman la Edad de Oro de la ciencia árabe: álgebra, óptica, astronomía, medicina y mecánica avanzaban a un ritmo que Europa tardaría siglos en alcanzar. La sofisticación de esta caja no es una excepción. Es un ejemplo más de una tradición técnica que consideraba la belleza y la función como inseparables.
La cerradura de combinación de cuatro dígitos que usamos hoy en candados y maletines sigue el mismo principio que este artesano dominaba hace 825 años.
La caja se conserva en el Museo Benaki de Atenas.
When our generation was in college, one of the most popular sportsperson - Steffi Graf !
Today is birthday of Stefanie Maria "Steffi" Graf (14th June 1969).
She was ranked world No. 1 for a record 377 weeks. She is the only tennis player, male or female, to have won each Grand Slam tournament at least four times.
Je vais partir du principe que tu es de bonne foi, parce que ton raisonnement est intuitif et que 90% des gens le partagent. Mais il repose sur trois erreurs factuelles, et ça vaut le coup de les regarder calmement.
Erreur 1 : la fortune d'Elon n'est pas un tas d'argent. C'est de la propriété d'usines, de fusées et de satellites. "Prendre la moitié de sa tune", concrètement, ça veut dire forcer la vente de la moitié de SpaceX et Tesla. L'argent ne sort pas d'un coffre, il sort des entreprises elles-mêmes, qui passent sous contrôle de fonds étrangers ou d'États. Tu ne redistribues pas du cash, tu démantèles un outil de production. C'est la différence entre récolter des pommes et découper le pommier.
Erreur 2 : "ça résout énormément de problèmes dans le monde". Cette expérience a déjà été tentée, en vrai. En 2021, le directeur du Programme Alimentaire Mondial de l'ONU a affirmé que 6 milliards de Musk pouvaient "résoudre la faim dans le monde". Réponse d'Elon : décrivez-moi exactement comment, comptabilité publique à l'appui, et je vends mes actions Tesla immédiatement. Le PAM a publié son plan. Verdict : ce n'était pas "résoudre la faim", c'était nourrir 42 millions de personnes pendant un an. Un an. Puis il faut re-payer, pour toujours. Le PAM avait d'ailleurs levé 8,4 milliards l'année précédente, et la faim était toujours là. Les ONG traitent les symptômes en boucle, jamais les causes, parce que leur financement dépend de l'existence du problème.
Erreur 3, la plus importante : tu cherches ce qui sort vraiment les gens de la pauvreté. Bonne nouvelle, on a la réponse, et elle est massive. En 1990, 36% de l'humanité vivait dans l'extrême pauvreté. Aujourd'hui, moins de 9%. Plus d'un milliard de personnes sorties de la misère en 30 ans. Par quoi ? Pas par la charité ni par l'aide internationale (plus de 1 000 milliards versés à l'Afrique en 60 ans pour un résultat à peu près nul). Par l'ouverture des marchés, l'industrialisation, le commerce. La Chine seule a sorti 800 millions de personnes de la pauvreté en abandonnant le collectivisme, pas en taxant ses entrepreneurs.
Donc fais le calcul complet. Option A : tu confisques 500 milliards, tu finances quelques années de programmes, l'argent est consommé, et tu as détruit la machine qui produisait les fusées, les voitures électriques et l'internet des zones rurales. Option B : tu laisses le meilleur allocateur de capital de sa génération réinvestir 100% de sa fortune dans des industries qui baissent les coûts pour tout le monde et emploient des centaines de milliers de personnes. L'option A soulage ta morale pendant 18 mois. L'option B sort des populations entières de la pauvreté pour toujours.
La pauvreté ne se redistribue pas. Elle se résout par la création. C'est contre-intuitif, c'est frustrant, mais c'est ce que disent 200 ans de données.
Those who have not seen this Video, Must See till the End. She is *Roxana Küwen*, a German Circus Artist, graduated at Fontys Academy for Circus & Performance Art, Tilburg, Netherlands. Watch her Foot & Hand Movements With Five Balls, As If She has FOUR Hands !! Absolutely Amazing Control ...!!! ❤️
The human species has essentially been transformed into a giant profit-generating machine for corporations.
Under capitalism, humanity exists to serve the interests of the corporation. We are all livestock; beasts of burden used to carry margin expansion forward from quarterly statement to quarterly statement. Enjoyment of life has no value other than the extent to which it can be used to increase the net worth of the shareholders.
That’s why everyone’s so unhappy. We’re not living with purpose. We’re not working together to build a better world and a better future, we’re just pulling levers to turn gears to make the arrow line go up on the graph in the conference room. It’s a hollow, pointless way for people to live.
It makes our whole culture vapid and soulless.
Music is made to be as profitable as possible, which means giving it the broadest possible appeal using formulaic song structure calculated to cause a chemical response in the largest number of human brains.
Movies are designed to draw the largest possible box office revenue at the lowest possible risk to studios and investors, often by just rehashing a movie that’s already proven successful in the past or by slapping together a story about an IP with pre-existing mass appeal.
Food is made to be fast and addictive rather than nourishing.
Healthy human connection has been commodified as social media intertwines with friendships and dating apps insert themselves into the development of romantic relationships.
Human sexuality is being warped and twisted as internet porn normalizes violence and degradation for the maximum number of clicks.
Attention and engagement have been monetized, creating an information ecosystem dominated by conflict and gossip designed to appeal to our baser instincts.
Advertisement is injected into every possible corner of our waking sensory experience, with any available space where the eye might rest or the ear might listen being flooded with psychological manipulation compelling us to consume. They’ll start running commercials in our dreams the instant they have the technology to do so.
You spend eight hours at the office working to generate corporate profits, then you come home and consume products to profit other corporations. You need your beer and snacks to unwind, your streaming services and social media to distract your mind from the stress of it all, your online clothing purchase to try to feel good about yourself, and your prescription drugs to get to sleep at night. People live their entire lives like this.
And that’s those of us who are lucky enough to be living in the global north. In the global south you get wage slavery and exploitation with far more toil, far less relaxation time, and no cheap products made by impoverished workers on other continents with which to comfort yourself.
All of humanity has been roped into this mess. And for what? To make the numbers in some bank accounts increase. To get some green arrows pointing upward on the stock exchange. To enable a few billionaires to buy islands and elections.
All while destroying the biosphere we all depend on for survival.
This, we are told, is the best possible system we could possibly be living under.
I personally do not believe this is true. I personally believe we can have better. Those who benefit from this current arrangement are going to assure us it’s impossible and do everything they can to stop us from changing it, but we do have the means to reclaim the wealth, dignity and happiness that they have stolen from us.
They built this whole machine on our backs. All we need to do is stand up.
1990, Ayrton Senna au volant de sa McLaren MP4-5B équipée du v10 Honda atmosphérique de 690ch culminant à 13,500tr/min 🏎️ 🔥
Équipée d’une boîte manuelle transversale à 6 rapports, le pilote change les vitesses via un levier mécanique à sa droite dans le cockpit 🕹️
Il mare l'abbiamo avuto anche a noi a Milano
Tutto cosparso del suo bel ondeggìo che esso c'ha dentro
Esso andava da Porta Lodovica fino in via Farini
Via Torino tutto uno scoglio
C'è ancora il pesce adesso in via Spadari
Poi sono arrivati i tedeschi, hanno spaccato su tutto...
Ciao Martina. Questo accade perché il nostro corpo non percepisce solo il numero sul termometro, conta anche da dove arriviamo. In autunno 15°C arrivano spesso dopo settimane di progressivo raffreddamento, con sole più basso, giornate più corte, suolo più freddo e meno radiazione. In estate, invece, 15°C dopo un temporale arrivano spesso dopo ore o giorni caldi, i muri, il suolo ed il corpo hanno ancora memoria termica, l’aria può essere più umida, la radiazione solare resta forte e il contrasto viene percepito come sollievo, non come freddo vero.
You have noticed it. ChatGPT feels dumber than it used to. Your prompts that worked six months ago produce worse results now. The writing sounds flatter. The ideas sound safer. The internet itself feels like it is shrinking. Every article reads the same. Every email sounds the same. Every answer sounds like it was written by the same voice.
You thought it was you. It is not you.
Researchers at Oxford and Cambridge published a paper in Nature proving what is happening. They call it Model Collapse.
Here is the mechanism in one sentence. AI trained on AI-generated data gets dumber every generation until it forgets what real human data looked like.
The internet is filling with AI-generated content. Blog posts. Articles. Reviews. Comments. Social media. AI companies scrape the internet to train the next generation of models. Which means the next generation of AI is being trained on the output of the current generation.
Each cycle loses information. Not randomly. It loses the rarest, most unusual, most creative parts first. The researchers call these the "tails of the distribution." The weird ideas. The unexpected perspectives. The things that made the internet feel human. Those disappear first.
What remains is the average. The safe. The expected. The bland.
Then the next generation trains on that. And loses more. And the next generation trains on that. And loses more. The researchers proved this is not a slow decline. Major degradation happens within just a few iterations. Even when some of the original human data is preserved.
They tested it on large language models. On image generators. On statistical models. The pattern was the same every time. The output converges toward a narrow, flattened version of reality that looks nothing like the original data.
The lead researcher put it plainly. "Large language models are like fire. A useful tool. But one that pollutes the environment."
The pollution is invisible. You cannot see which sentence on the internet was written by a human and which was written by AI. Neither can the AI that is about to train on it. And once the tails are gone, they do not come back. The damage is irreversible.
This is not a prediction anymore. It is a diagnosis.
The internet you grew up on was built by humans writing things no algorithm would have written. Strange, personal, imperfect, alive. That internet is being diluted. One generation of AI at a time. And the models trained on what remains are learning a smaller and smaller version of the world.
Model Collapse is not a technical problem. It is a cultural one. The thing that made the internet worth reading is the thing that disappears first.