simple

Trying to get better, but who I am gets in the way.

[signüll @signulll]

@hughlaurie @jan_murray what an amazing response lol

[Ole Peters @ole_b_peters]

Takes the edge off, somehow: when Caesar’s armies invaded, this olive tree was but a 400-year-old sapling.

[Nolan McCarty @Nolan_Mc]

Measurement in the social sciences is really important!

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

In medieval times, within the arms race of ever more demonic torture devices, some sadistic genius came up with the idea of the Little Ease.

This was a prison cell built so small in every dimension that a grown man could not stand upright in it nor lie down at full length nor properly sit.

The pain is relentless and without relief and inflicted by one's own body. Prisoners were known to go insane within a few days. A stay at the Little Ease was considered even more cruel than the rack, the thumbscrew, and the other ghoulish machinery of the Tower of London.

A breeding pig will spend her whole life in a version of that box.

These are social, roaming creatures (more intelligent than dogs) who will never leave this corset of steel.

They have been selectively bred to be bigger than their frames can support. Yet we put them in cells so confined that they cannot comfortably sit, and their attempts to do so (for example, by sneaking their limbs into adjacent stalls) reliably lead to fractures and sprains.

They cannot sweat, yet have nothing to roll around in to cool themselves off. Except their own manure, which (contrary to the common misconception) they are so averse to (thanks to their strong sense of smell) that new sows will often suffer from constipation to avoid soiling the space from which they eat and sleep.

Here is how the writer Matthew Scully described what saw at one of Smithfield’s “gestation barn”:

> “Sores, tumors, ulcers, pus pockets, lesions, cysts, bruises, torn ears, swollen legs everywhere. Roaring, groaning, tail biting, fighting, and other “Vices,” as they’re called in the industry. Frenzied chewing on bars and chains, stereotypical “vacuum” chewing on nothing at all, stereotypical rooting and nest building with imaginary straw. And “social defeat,” lots of it, in every third or fourth stall some completely broken being you know is alive only because she blinks and stares up at you … creatures beyond the power of pity to help or indifference to make more miserable, dead to the world except as heaps of flesh into which the [insemination] rod may be stuck once more and more flesh reproduced.”

—

The Save Our Bacon Act is trying to unroll the few state protections we have against this barbaric cruelty - for example California’s Prop 12 - which banned the sale of pork from pigs kept in gestation crates.

It’s incredibly important we don’t end up with this sort of federal preemption.

SOB will not only kill the most important animal welfare related laws in the US of the past decade, but more importantly, it will also restrict ALL future legislative progress (aka how the animal welfare movement has gotten its biggest wins).

The Senate is currently deciding whether to add the SOB Act to the Farm Bill.

With relatively little money now, we can discourage the most pivotal senators in the Ag committee from backing this amendment.

Defeating this bill is even more important given the amount of philanthropic funding I expect to come online in the next year or two.

It will plausibly be over 10x more expensive to repeal SOB than to prevent it from passing in the first place.

All that money that could be spent transforming our society's relationship to mass animal suffering will instead have to be spent just getting us back to where we are right now.

That's why money spent now fighting this bill (and I mean right NOW) is so effective.

If you’re in a position to donate six figures, please DM me.

[Tim Urban @waitbutwhy]

V1 of my book > final draft of my book. Took about two years to make the messy engines and will be about two years to go from messy engines to fancy engines. Book is slated for September 2027 launch.

[BuccoCapital Bloke @buccocapital]

Levie’s Law of AI Psychosis:

The farther away you are from the actual work the more confident you are that humans are no longer needed

I like it

[joshua steinman (🇺🇸,🇺🇸) @JoshuaSteinman]

There are cathedrals everywhere for those with eyes to see

[maro @ProofofMaro]

A woman expresses love through service.

[Jeffrey Wooldridge @jmwooldridge]

It's not hard to construct a population that will generate this outcome. And I avoid car acceleration, boat navigation, and getting smacked in the face. 😬

[Paul Graham @paulg]

It's a rough combination when people are simultaneously overreaching and uninformed. They want the best of everything, but they don't know what the best is, so their demands are simultaneously strident and random, like a set of vectors with large magnitudes and random directions.

[keerthik śaśidharan @KS1729]

https://t.co/JyHa4WnQVp

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

This is the the quote I've been citing a lot recently.

[Pedro Domingos @pmddomingos]

This perfectly encapsulates the state of American academia. (Whether to laugh or cry is another question.)

[Fermat's Library @fermatslibrary]

English polymath Samuel Johnson on choosing what to read

[Quintin Pope @QuintinPope5]

As a percent of GDP, hyperscaling isn't that extreme. The railroads were goddamn crazy, though!

[Alec Stapp @AlecStapp]

Government regulation in France:

Above a certain size, building new homes requires a licensed architect.

Outcome:

[John D. Cook @JohnDCook]

OH: “I want to get it right more than I want to be right.”

[Mac @GoodPoliticGuy]

The US president is praising Allah and Iran is defending the Pope, welcome to 2026

[Chris Anderson @chr1sa]

@alexsaraki Great post on lessons learned from a year of unemployment

"#7 The terminal job in all professions is sales"

This is SO TRUE. The sooner leaders accept that sales is their job and stop turning their nose up at it, the better.

In startups, CEOs have to sell to potential customers and existing customers, to their investors, to their existing employees and potential employees, to their family and to their peers. Sometimes you're selling a product, sometimes an idea, sometimes yourself, sometimes your company.

We are all salespeople and we might as well accept it and get better at it.

[Gregor Schubert @gregorschub]

As a reference for my students and others, I have started writing up summaries of each week of my MBA course on "AI Agents for Managers" at UCLA. First week's notes on AI use cases are here - subscribe for future issues: https://t.co/aFGY73tE3S