That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin
SF
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I’m willing to bet my entire net worth on neither the median nor the average American reading 11 books a year.
The average American reads about 11 books a year. Here are eight published in 2025 that you could add to your list econ.st/4bExiya
Community note
46% of Americans said they read no books that year; 54% said they did, and *among the readers*, 11 was the average number of books read. So this headline is pretty off.
nitter.app/_thomas_sherre
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Me whenever anything relating to this podcast touches my TL.
aella is such a perfect guest for whatever
it actually feels like watching an alien first encounter. their priors are so different that communication becomes almost impossible
the contrast she has with the turbonormies in the room, the autistic micromovements, the candor
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got a friend with absolutely no technical background wanting some kind of "intro to the world" book.
basics like how a fridge works, what a generator is etc
I really don't know what to recommend here, feynman probably too theoretical, other things too obvious.
bill bryson maybe?
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Why do we put gifted people on the same conformist path as all others, just much faster?
You're so beyond your peers. You could spend your entire youth building things you enjoy, tinkering and exploring.
But instead you intern at shopify?
Instead you close jira tickets?
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this does NOT end well.
Your github has no contributions.
You didn't win an olympiad.
Your social circle is your local town.
Your life's EV calculation is so bad HS math must've been a challenge.
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Survivorship bias?
I‘d rather say it‘s a cause/effect thing.
Like, the guy that has the money time and willingness to pick up a hobby like that is almost by definition just someone that has his life in order.
Which tends to be attractive.
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Now I’m curious, has there ever been a world important city that we completely destroyed? Only Troy??? The romans salted the soils at carthage, yet there it stands…
Nations are temporary but cities last. There was a New York City before the United States. There will be a NYC after the US.
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The problem with "founder as a carreer" is its total risklessness. You're trading in a little TC for immediate prestige. An easy choice is no choice at all.
It's a highly performative "grind culture" which just produces vaporware.
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College isn’t some happy place to read and hang out and experience abstract personal growth. It’s supposed to be a full time job…
Put 40h a week into your material and see where it gets you.
Start taking your existence seriously. this is embarrassing.
With 3 other courses you end up having around 600 pages of reading to get through a week, plus weekly submissions and essays. You end up not even trying to read the material because there's no way to get through it. You end up just relying on summaries and external resources
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I think that before you try meditating you should attempt to go on like a 30min walk through a vaguely pleasant area without your phone. Best case? It works and you're still a normal person. Worst case? You still went outside.
but idk, might be a wholly naive take here.
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isn‘t dish soap for handwashing. and yk, that‘s why the dishwasher has a little place where you put the pod???
how has this apparently happened to MULTIPLE people.
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isn't the first graph basically total BS when we consider the development of social technology plus the fact that the roman empire in ~400AD was in a decrepit state?
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What is the oldest still very commonly cooked dish?
Some german sausage derivatives are a few hundred years old, but nothing from antiquity?
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again proving that I would literally 0 every single stat to maxx charisma. it’s unbelievably good.
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Every single member of that Jodlerclub is a millionaire. It's a truly incredible country.
But being honest, it's kinda boring if you're young. Great place to raise a family though.
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switzerland doesn't have much space *at all*, and it has some veeery child/marriage unfriendly policies.
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never know what to make of realizations like this.
bla bla don't cry cuz it's over be happy cuz it happened. but yeah. it could've also happened a little longer yk.
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never underestimate how good some people are at their jobs.
it’s entirely alien. their expertise is so far from the median that you can’t begin to comprehend what’s going on, might as well be a different species.
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Nobody in my university class knows the Illiad. You cannot make references anymore. "Apple of discord" or "Golden fleece" as figures of speech are out of reach for 99.9% of zoomers.
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All upper class hobbies are this way. If you fly or boat or breed horses, you‘ll obviously meet some right leaning people, but *never* in a MAGA way, that‘d just be unseemly. And they tend not to be trad either
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This is why I will end up with someone from this site and not some girl from Zurich. Half the people here are just this. I don't care about your chalet in Gstaad, please be able to hold a conversation.
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this one image has me saved hours and boosted my career.
You cannot imagine what actually looking at this image for 1min will do for you.
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There's a vim clutch fyi.
Puts you into insert mode when you press down, leaves insert mode when you lift it.
Add some kind of transmisison, control the modes based on gear setting...
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fr... I mean, if you're very talented, just go to a great college. Make some friends, meet great people, try to do some classes and see.
Best case? You enjoy it and have a few great years.
Worst case? you drop out.
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The funniest thing about all this is the “height requirement” in Europe is 1m80. That’s just 5’11. Imagine the alpha in going to france.
Height is continuous. 6ft+ preference is discrete. Amazing RDD opportunity here for economists. My hypothesis is that 5’11” men are the most underpriced assets in the dating market
(I’m 5’11”)
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New blocklist just dropped
My 2024 TPOT awards:
Best overall shitposter:
@nikitabier
Best thought leader / culture shifter:
@beffjezos
Best follower growth:
@yacineMTB
Best Aura:
@1owroller
Best humor:
@growing_daniel
Best original meme creation:
@granawkins
Best troll:
@boneGPT
Most prolific:
@jaivinwylde
Best comeback:
@IterIntellectus
Most active reply guy:
@basedkuromiboi
Best grifter:
@7etsuo
Who did I miss?
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This does make it so that politics is a total non-issue in Switzerland though. Basically no one talks abt it, people just go and vote a few times a year.
Honestly, for a small and rich country like this one, it works incredibly well.
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lmao??? in that case go to TU Graz. they’re launching some of europes best rocketry stuff and like, at that point you’re doing more than just react slop…
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yoooo isn’t this the dude that invented the heart rate sensors for smart watches? total legend.
Why does UC Berkeley @UCBerkeley allow a professor to show up to teach dressed as furry? Extremely bizarre and inappropriate.
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Zero intellectual curiosity. No desire to hack on stuff.
Of course the EE wants to see every circuit! Because he actually CARES.
How do you think things get done…
Is the iPhone designing itself? Is the RF work just guessing? Does solar get cheaper through divine providence??
Yes ?
Have you worked with an electrical "engineer"? Those nerds want to open up every circuit and do no work. That's cool I guess, but things need to get done.
Don't get me started on civil "engineering".
Honestly other engineers besides coders, are very European coded.
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> Electrons
> Electronic Circuits
Already completed.
@melqtx
Don‘t embarass your future self like this.
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imo the main reason why ppl are often like: "why didn't XYZ cause a boost in growth" is that what it actually did was just birth the next S curve that gave us a few more years of 3.5% growth while the old stagnated.
AI probably just what will enable another decade or two.
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huh.
isn't this like absolutely obvious to anyone who's done like 10s of debugging...
this is why like compile time debug flags are nice (for decently small projects)
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It’s great for prototyping and if you’re a broke college student
But honestly metal 3d printing is really incredible.
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Paying 40$/a for private library access has been the play of the decade and it's not even close.
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your ancestors left this behind in bavaria and now you're building b2bsaas in the sauna.
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Pretty great. Father was 46, surprisingly present in my life despite his stressful career, lots of guidance in decisions now that i’m older. Strong desire to involve me in family matters. It sometimes feels like I was raised in a different generation from my peers, in a good way.
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Yes. The proper induction into the student body only happens after a bunch of difficult first year exams. Weeds out a good 50%. In my school only 30% of math newgrads actually pass.
MIT Failure rate used to be 80%...
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This new "Musk way" of "weightlifter hard executors" won't produce much. Those who update in response to it wouldn't have made it anyway. Those who go their own way would have done so anyway.
Overheard in Silicon Valley: "The transition from the Jobs Way to the Musk Way in US startup culture is fascinating to watch. The founders are switching from artistic UI hippies to weightlifter hard executors."
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It echoes the old Nerd/Jock divide but the lines are now blurred; Anime is mainstream, Zuck is ripped.
Interestingly nothing here bears the illegibility of elitism anymore. If this is all kayfabe, where's the real fight.
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Idk abt a soulmate but Father went to drill for oil in the jungle and didn’t see a single woman for 6y after ending it with his college gf.
My grandfather did end up marrying his hs sweetheart in his 60s after his first wife passed, so maybe it does stay forever….
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Thank you very much! There are some really great ones there!
Technology connections is absolutely great, there's so much wisdom hidden in tech we use so often during the day, we forget the marvel of engineering they really are!
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I love the fact that we've managed to flood a city in the desert and somehow this is a bad thing.
mfers don't realize that this is just the first attempt. In a few years we will green deserts at ludicrous rates.
The way forward is tech. End of story.
This is the most dogshit thing I've ever seen lmao
0 police, 0 firefighters, 0 taxis — just yoloing the sea with a rental car after flight getting delayed by 6 hours
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The number of cs grads has increased inversely prop to quality. There are people in my second year engineering courses that have trouble using a command line.
The best SWEs where never those who watched career vids but those who just had fun grokking hard concepts and liked work
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literally just write them as if you where DMing a mutual whose city you happen to be in.
(this is slightly a joke, but probably more effective than this ngl)
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I think I'm the only person I know that has *one* alarm. that I just change based on convenience. But that's also because I just wake up normally without one.
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If your office looks like how an overzealous teen would design a CSGO lan party I'm convinced that not a single second of work will ever be done there.
This is absolutely atrocious.
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ok seriously now, did many get that fried by this book?
Maybe I was simply far too old when I read it, but I really enjoyed it but found it to have much less of an effect on my worldview than say, most philosphy that I've read.
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Chatted someone up at a party. Typical small talk. I end up ranting a bit abt how much I love resource extraction. She mentions she works for a climate change NGO. Well I suppose that’s over before it began.
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I mean. It’s reasonable to assume that among laying off devs etc they just put less money into the team that does the wrapped algo?
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It seems very difficulty to reach over the human baselin. If AI improvements taper of in the next 3 years we will have succesfully commiditsed midwitism.
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My flatmate bought two 3m long American flags and a copy of the constitution. We live in switzerland…
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For 10k you can buy:
- CNC Mill
- 3D printer
- Pick and place machine
Your basic „home workshop hardware“ is changing significantly. You can actually homelab metalworking and scale up electronics.
Truly the era of abundance.
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If anything then the popularity of LLMs but also the creationg of the internet at large has shown how vanishingly few live players there are, and how difficult, if not impossible, it is to grow that number.
Turns out almost all of you would still be in the same place you are now with 1000 jr engineers at your disposal. A tragedy for the "idea guy" narrative
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This is a good point.
I still see a large possibility for an AI winter happening to some degree.
It took 4 years from transformers to today, I expect it to take similarly as long for the next developments.
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It‘s like they’ve never gone out in a european capital.
Waves of german nepobabies being bled dry by them in zurich nightclubs.
It‘s almost funny.
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by quick googling, plutarch's Moralia, sayings of spartan women: "Either this or upon this." basically, either dead or victorious.
but seriously, do you know ancient greek??
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There seems to have been a small period of time where the right was focused on showing ppl how much wealth capitalism brought and how becoming more modern and more industrial is a good thing for a nation.
Interesting to see this weird, almost hippie, trad angle come up.
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Yeah. I mean, that's not too bad is it? Your beliefs are pleasant, so are the people you surround yourself with. You're healthy and comfortable financially.
It's understandable to want that. It's also still achievable in individual cases.
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High acceptance rates and 70% first semester failure rate is kinda ideal. this is still present in switzerland f.ex. where you get a countrywide ban to study your subject if you fail twice.
also:
College isn’t some happy place to read and hang out and experience abstract personal growth. It’s supposed to be a full time job…
Put 40h a week into your material and see where it gets you.
Start taking your existence seriously. this is embarrassing.
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Mann's Magic mountain is probably the book that most talks about the entire Sanatorium stuff. It's superb, of course.
Tangentially, the concept of the "Kur" is still rather widespread in Germany. A longer, curative retreat that will reset you. Often in a monastery or so.
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I think the type of note is different. My latin is frankly quite rusty, but it's the occasional underline with lots of scribbling on the margins. Different from the "I'm being methodical" kinda performative approach of the original tweet.
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I'm going insane. This is literally how my entire uni experience works? You can choose to never do the learning assignments and only write the exams at the end. It's kinda funny though because neither the top or bottom quintile are ever in classes.
in college there should be two
types of assignments: in person exams and ungraded work. the former is for evaluation and the latter for learning. it’s strange these were ever combined
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Just to make this perfectly clear.
Never scream at your girlfriend.
It’s not an emotional outlet, it introduces a layer of aggression, or worse, fear, into what could simply have been a heated argument. This will chafe at your relationship and makes you a less loveable person.
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