Stefan King

Technologist. Location-independent expat. Pizza eater.

[A Gene Robinson @AlBuffalo2nite]

The reason this meme resonates with me is that it captures a common tactic in public democrat debate. Someone points to a broad trend and instead of discussing whether the trend is real, the conversation immediately shifts to an exception.

Mention fatherlessness and someone brings up a successful person raised without a father. Mention failing schools and someone points to a student who excelled. Mention crime and someone finds a neighborhood that remains safe. The exception is treated as though it disproves the pattern.

The problem is that exceptions do not erase trends. Nobody is claiming every circle is red.

They will call me a outlier... An exception.... an anomaly.

The point is that when most of the circles are red, focusing exclusively on the blue one prevents an honest discussion about what the overall picture actually shows. Serious analysis begins with patterns, not exceptions.

That is why so many conversations about public democrat policy go nowhere. Instead of asking why a problem exists, people spend all their energy trying to prove the problem doesn’t exist because they found a single exception.

Reality doesn’t work that way. If most of the circles are red, then the responsible thing to do is explain why.

#AStoneGroove #SilentMajoritySpeaks

[Joe Burnett, MSBA @IIICapital]

99% of the world’s capital is managed by people who never thought to study the origins and fundamentals of money itself.

That is the opportunity 🟠.

[Robin Hanson @robinhanson]

After decades of science fiction portraying AI as like human servants, logicians, or engineers, odd to see a world of AIs that are more like drama kids.

[Washingtons ghost @washghost1]

Cats are just cats no matter how big they get

[Cats with Aura 😺 @catwithaura]

A glove goes missing. Then another. You think the cat’s being weird again… until you realize....

[Stefan King @stefantking]

@stats_feed Coffee

[Ole Lehmann @itsolelehmann]

this is just the most ridiculous AI application i've ever seen lol

a Peter Thiel-backed startup that makes AI collars for cows is now worth $2 billion

and the more I read about it the cooler it gets. here's how it works:

every cow wears a solar-powered collar that talks to a network of radio towers and an app on the farmer's phone

instead of building physical fences, the farmer draws the fence on a map in the app, and the collar keeps each cow inside that invisible line using GPS

when a cow drifts toward the edge, the collar plays a sound to steer her, and a gentle vibration tells her which way to go.

it's like how a car beeps as you back up toward a wall

the cows learn the cues in a few days

so now a rancher can move an entire herd to fresh grass by sliding the fence on a map, without driving out to open a single gate

and that same collar is reading each cow's body the whole time.

it takes five readings per second on every animal, so the AI can catch a cow that's sick, injured, ready to breed, or about to give birth before a person would ever notice walking the field

so it's basically like WHOOP for cows too lol

and they gave the AI behind it the perfect name: the Cowgorithm

it's been trained on more than 7 billion hours of real cow behavior, which is why Halter calls the data its real asset and moat.

they know what a normal cow looks like better than anyone, so they can flag the odd one out instantly

it's already on more than 1M cattle across New Zealand, Australia, and a bunch of US states.

California even used it on public land to graze cattle in patterns that clear dry brush and slow down wildfires

costs about $5 to $8 per cow per month

a job that used to mean barbed wire, gates, and driving the fields all day is now mostly 1 person on their phone

[Freyy @Freyy_is]

having strong pattern recognition is a weird experience. you spend half your time being told you’re paranoid and the other half being asked how you knew.

[Stefan King @stefantking]

Yes. If people have consensual sex, they are equal by definition.

[critter @BecomingCritter]

"dating out of your league" isn't real. dating is a marketplace. it's called price discovery. your value is whatever clears the market

[Atlas Press @realAtlasPress]

Leonardo da Vinci's greatest paragraph

[Alexander @alexanderrX_]

forward deployed engineers were basically what every engineer was in the 90s and 2000s.

normal people who could code, speak to customers, understand the business and ship the thing.

we had to recoin the term because the average dev became a cave goblin who hates meetings, users and sunlight.

happy to see fdes making a comeback

[Adam Livingston @AdamBLiv]

Here’s the part that’ll keep you up.

Money isn’t a thing you HAVE. It’s a message. It’s information about how much energy and effort the world owes you. And these people have a printer that lets them forge the message.

They can write “you are owed nothing” onto your entire life’s work without touching your bank balance by a single dollar. The number stays the same. The MEANING gets robbed. You got mugged and the wallet is still in your pocket.

That’s why you can’t explain to people that you got robbed.

The evidence is invisible BY DESIGN.

[Jeremy Trimble @jeremytrimble]

You just won a 2-week, all-expenses-paid vacation. But there’s a catch: you have to stay within one region the whole time. What are you picking?

[🕊️ @lichthauch]

I wanted a thousand things in my life, and most of them i didn't get. and i looked at myself the way this post is asking me to, and thought i wasn't smart enough. but years passed, and i started seeing what each of those things would have done to me if i had gotten them, and every single one would have destroyed me - some fast and some slow. everything i didn't get turned out to be the smartest thing that happened to me, but it was not my smartness. it was something else deciding on my behalf, because i was not smart enough to decide for myself. sometimes not getting what you want is the only proof that something out there loves you more than you were ever capable of loving yourself

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

I ordered one pancake in America. The waitress wrote it down and said, "one short stack."

Short. I am a small and humble man. A short stack sounded perfect for me. I waited with a calm heart.

She returned carrying three pancakes, each the size of my face, stacked into a tower, with a block of butter on top sliding down the sides like slow lava.

This was the short one. I did not dare ask what the tall one looked like. Some knowledge a man is not ready for.

I ate for forty minutes. I was not full. I was afraid. The tower did not shrink. I am fairly sure it was growing back faster than I could eat it.

I had to surrender. I left half. In Japan, leaving food is a deep shame. So I leaned in close and apologized to the pancakes directly, in a low voice, one by one.

The waitress asked if I wanted a box. I did not know food could be taken into custody. I declined. I did not want it following me home.
In America, is the short stack truly the small one?
I need time to prepare my spirit before I ever face the tall one.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

The "Duck" in Avenida Place hotel, Barcelona, Spain.

[Francisco Ribeiro @fraveris]

Igor Dubovoy (Russian Artist, born 1972)
"On the Hill", 2021.
Oil on Canvas

[Wolf of X @WolfofX]

In 1988, Chinese mother Li Jingzhi's world was shattered when her 2-year-old son, Mao Yin, was abducted.

Refusing to give up hope, she quit her job and dedicated her life to finding him.

For the next 32 years, Li traveled across China following leads, searching tirelessly, and distributing more than 100,000 flyers with her son's photo in the hope that someone would recognize him.

During her decades-long search, Li's determination helped reunite 29 other missing children with their families, even though she was still searching for her own son.

Finally, in 2020, advances in police investigations, facial-recognition technology, and DNA testing led authorities to Mao Yin, who had been taken from his family and raised under a different name.

After 32 years apart, mother and son were reunited in an emotional meeting that moved millions around the world.

[Stefan King @stefantking]

That's a great movie overall.

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

cc @slatestarcodex

[Paco de la India @RunwithBitcoin]

"I was not reading it because I felt that I had to do it. I was like, this is like, I know that Paco has a bunch of really crazy stories, and so far every chapter has been fun, so I just want to read the next chapter. So, that is a page flipper." - @stefantking