🇺🇸 🇺🇦 🇮🇱 VernAfterReading

Recovering Former Tech Bro | STEM, Space, Old Time Music | Dad |

[🇺🇸 🇺🇦 🇮🇱 VernAfterReading @vimrich]

In response to some worried about what happens when the protests wane. This is where I am.

[NASA Space Alerts @NASASpaceAlerts]

UPDATE: @NASA can confirm a fireball over New England at 2:06 p.m. EDT on Saturday, May 30, 2026. The meteor was about 5 feet (1.6 meters) in diameter with a mass of 5.6 metric tons and entered Earth’s atmosphere at roughly 42,000 mph.

The meteor traveled through the atmosphere from northwest to southeast for 26 miles before breaking up at an altitude of 31 miles and producing a meteorite fall into Cape Cod Bay.

Based on the latest data, the energy released at breakup is estimated to be equivalent to about 230 tons of TNT, which accounts for the sonic boom.

Have questions? Check out our fireball FAQs: https://t.co/HyyRIGmeoI

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Yann LeCun sat across from Lex Fridman and quietly proved that intelligence has nothing to do with thinking.

He did it with two sentences about a trophy.

“The trophy doesn’t fit in the suitcase because it’s too big.”

“The trophy doesn’t fit in the suitcase because it’s too small.”

Same words. One swap at the end.

In the first, “it” is the trophy.

In the second, “it” is the suitcase.

You solved both before you finished reading.

Nobody taught you that. There is no rule for it. No logic chain. No formula.

You knew because you’ve held things. Packed things. Felt the resistance of something too large for the space it was meant to fill.

LeCun calls this grounding.

“A big object doesn’t fit in a small object.”

The machine has read that line a billion times.

It has never once picked anything up.

It knows the word “big.” It has never been small enough to be lifted, or large enough to be the problem.

So when the sentence turns, it has nothing to turn on.

You didn’t solve that riddle by thinking.

You solved it by having lived.

Every object your hands ever closed around. Every door you misjudged. Every suitcase you overpacked and forced shut.

Decades of physics written into your nervous system so deep you can’t even find it.

That is what answered the question. Not your mind. Your life.

LeCun: “You have this knowledge of how the world works, of geometry, and things like that.”

Now point that at yourself.

Most of what you understand, you could never explain.

You cannot describe how you catch a ball. How you judge the weight of a bag before you lift it. How you know a staircase is wrong before your foot confirms it.

Your deepest intelligence has no language in it at all.

We spent centuries convinced that thinking was the highest act of the mind.

LeCun is pointing at something underneath it.

Something older. Something the body learned long before the mouth could speak.

Intelligence was never computation.

It was accumulation.

The slow, silent record of a life spent touching the world.

The machine holds every word ever written about it.

It has never once been in it.

We keep asking whether it thinks.

It cannot even tell us which “it” we mean.

[Faytuks Network @FaytuksNetwork]

Reports of an explosion heard around Boston are believed to be a significant bolide/meteor entering the atmosphere, a very large flash was detected by GOES-19 satellite that does not correlate with active thunderstorms.

[🇺🇸 🇺🇦 🇮🇱 VernAfterReading @vimrich]

@howie_hua A bit misleading. Repeatedly tossing coins for a three result sequence implies each set of three tosses is a separate event. You can repeat events - three new tosses - but you can't mix the result of a prior 3-toss event with the next 3-toss event.

[Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63]

As I’ve said since that first Trump term, we may never know why Trump is so loyal to Putin. Bribery? Blackmail? Affinity for dictators & oligarchs? KGB asset? All of the above? More important is stopping him, because if he were a Russian agent, what would he do differently?

[Michael Warburton @For_Film_Fans]

“The pellet with the poison's in the vessel with the pestle; the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true!.”

THE COURT JESTER (1955)

DANNY KAYE was genius-level talented. https://t.co/nJcmkr1nbA

[Acyn @Acyn]

Standing ovation for this line from King Charles: The U.S. Supreme court historical society has calculated that Magna Carta is cited in at least 160 supreme court cases since 1789, not least as the foundation of the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances.

[Hunter Kozak 🧦🇺🇦🏳️‍🌈 @HunterEKozak]

The correct answer

[🇺🇸 🇺🇦 🇮🇱 VernAfterReading @vimrich]

@panomics @howie_hua yes I saw it down thread - very nice. But what I'm getting at is, what if I don't have a chart? Is there any quick mental math way to estimate function values like this?

[Howie Hua @howie_hua]

The probability of finding a Pikachu in Viridian Forest is 5% so you just need 20 encounters to ensure finding a Pikachu, right? Math doesn't work out like that. Let's do the math to find the probability of encountering at least one Pikachu in 20 encounters.

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

In the 1920s, a Stanford psychologist tracked genius children for 50 years.

Malcolm Gladwell breaks down what he discovered:

Rich families → successful. Poor families → failures.

Not average. Failures. Genius-level IQs that produced nothing.

He spent 60 minutes at Microsoft explaining why we're wrong about success:

The psychologist was named Terman. He gave IQ tests to 250,000 California schoolchildren.

He identified the top 0.1%. Kids with IQs of 140 and above.

His hypothesis: these children would become the leaders of academia, industry, and politics.

He tracked them. And tracked them. For decades.

The results split into three groups.

The top 15% achieved real prominence. The middle group had average, moderately successful professional lives.

And the bottom group? By any measure, failures.

The difference wasn't personality. Wasn't habits. Wasn't work ethic.

It was simple: the successful geniuses came from wealthy households. The failures came from poor families.

Poverty is such a powerful constraint that it can reduce a one-in-a-billion brain to a lifetime of worse than mediocrity.

There's a concept called "capitalization rate."

It asks a simple question: what percentage of people who are capable of doing something actually end up doing that thing?

In inner city Memphis, only 1 in 6 kids with athletic scholarships actually go to college.

If our capitalization rate for sports in the inner city is 16%, imagine how low it must be for everything else.

Here's something stranger.

Gladwell read the birth dates of the 2007 Czech Junior Hockey Team:

January 3rd. January 3rd. January 12th. February 8th. February 10th. February 17th. February 20th. February 24th. March 5th. March 10th. March 26th...

11 of the 20 players were born in January, February, or March.

This isn't unique to the Czechs. Every elite hockey team in the world shows the same pattern. Every elite soccer team too.

Why?

The eligibility cutoff for youth leagues is January 1st.

When you're 10 years old, a kid born in January has 10 months of maturity on a kid born in October. That's 3 or 4 inches of height. The difference between clumsy and coordinated.

So we look at a group of 10 year olds, pick the "best" ones, give them special coaching, extra practice, more games.

We think we're identifying talent. We're just identifying the oldest.

Then we give the oldest more opportunities, and 10 years later they really are the best.

Self-fulfilling prophecy.

The capitalization rate for hockey talent born in the second half of the year? Close to zero.

We're leaving half of all potential hockey players on the table because of an arbitrary date on a calendar.

Kids born in the youngest cohort of their school class are 11% less likely to go to college.

11% of human potential squandered because we organize elementary school without reference to biological maturity.

Now here's the part about math.

Asian kids dramatically outperform Western kids in mathematics. The gap is enormous and consistent across decades of testing.

Some people say it's genetic. It's not.

It's attitudinal.

When Asian kids face a math problem, they believe effort will solve it.

When Western kids face a math problem, they believe the answer depends on innate ability they either have or don't.

Here's the proof.

The international math tests include a 120-question survey. It asks about study habits, parental support, attitudes.

It's so long most kids don't finish it.

A researcher named Erling Boe decided to rank countries by what percentage of survey questions their kids completed.

Then he compared it to the ranking of countries by math performance.

The correlation was 0.98.

In the history of social science, there has never been a correlation that high.

If you want to know how good a country is at math, you don't need to ask any math questions. Just make kids sit down and focus on a task for an extended period of time.

If they can do it, they're good at math.

Why do Asian cultures have this attitude?

Gladwell's theory: rice farming.

His European ancestors in medieval England worked about 1,000 hours a year. Dawn to noon, five days a week. Winters off. Lots of holidays.

A peasant in South China or Japan in the same period worked 3,000 hours a year.

Rice farming isn't just harder than wheat farming. It's a completely different relationship with work.

There's a Chinese proverb: "A man who works dawn to dusk 360 days a year will not go hungry."

His English ancestors would have said: "A man who works 175 days a year, dawn to 11, may or may not be hungry."

If your culture does that for a thousand years, it becomes part of your makeup.

When your kids sit down to face a calculus problem, that legacy of persistence translates perfectly.

Now consider distance running.

In Kenya, there are roughly a million schoolboys between 10 and 17 running 10 to 12 miles a day.

In the United States, that number is probably 5,000.

Our capitalization rate for distance running is less than 1%.

Kenya's is probably 95%.

The difference isn't genetic. The difference is what the culture values and where it spends its attention.

Here's the most fascinating finding.

30% of American entrepreneurs have been diagnosed with a profound learning disability.

Richard Branson is dyslexic. Charles Schwab is dyslexic. John Chambers can barely read his own email.

This isn't coincidence. Their entrepreneurialism is a direct function of their disability.

How do you succeed if you can't read or write from early childhood?

You learn to delegate. You become a great oral communicator. You become a problem solver because your entire life is one big problem. You learn to lead.

80% of dyslexic entrepreneurs were captain of a high school sports team. Versus 30% of non-dyslexic entrepreneurs.

By the time they enter the real world, they've spent their whole life practicing the four skills at the core of entrepreneurial success: delegation, oral communication, problem solving, and leadership.

Ask them what role dyslexia played in their success and they don't say it was an obstacle.

They say it's the reason they succeeded.

A disadvantage that became an advantage.

Here's what Gladwell wants you to understand:

When we see differences in success, our default explanation is differences in ability.

We forget how much poverty, stupidity, and attitude constrain what people can become.

We refuse to admit that our own arbitrary rules are leaving talent on the table.

We cling to naive beliefs that our meritocracies are fair.

The capitalization argument is liberating.

It says you don't look at a struggling group and conclude they're incapable. It says problems that look genetic or innate are often just failures of exploitation.

It says we can make a profound difference in how well people turn out.

If we choose to pay attention.

This 60 minute Microsoft talk will teach you more about success than every self-help book you've ever read combined.

Bookmark this & give it an hour today, no matter what.

[The Oxford Comma @RealOxfordComma]

That’s quite the girlfriend.

[Tom Nichols @RadioFreeTom]

Vance has now seized the top seat in the Death of Expertise Hall of Fame: He has lectured the pope—the pope, the leader of a billion and a half Catholics—about being too sloppy with theology.

The queen of all vices: Pride.

https://t.co/GotUfLX5Nv

[Barstool Sports @barstoolsports]

The Pirates broadcast did a Masters style intro to perfection

[Ron Filipkowski @RonFilipkowski]

Cook Political moved Trump from Lean Antichrist to Solid Antichrist.

[Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 @IAPonomarenko]

Hahahahahaha.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!

[Armchair Admiral 🇬🇧 @ArmchairAdml]

The main reason Britain is not speaking German is the RAF, Royal Navy and British Army.

The Army held off the Germans and made it out of Dunkirk, the Navy was far stronger than Germany’s, and the RAF won the Battle of Britain.

Wish we’d stop with this bullshit.

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

He is an abomination.