JRN

Before I started working on it, I had the simple idea that solar was not economical and that is why electricity prices are soaring in many parts of the US. It was also the case that most solar pundits seem to think that all you need is solar and wind, but the fatal flaw is these are intermittent and storage is prohibitively costly. You absolutely have to have firm capacity (gas, coal, hydro) that matches your peak demand + 10 % or you risk blackouts. Solar is useful so you can turn off or reduce your gas generators and save the cost of the gas. The payoff period for solar installations can range from 10 - 40 years depending on the gas price - if gas prices are high, you get faster payoff even in low sun regions - if gas prices are low like Texas - payoff times are 30 to 40 years - this was counterintuitive to me - Texas essentially has free natural gas if you have access to pipelines - the crazy part is that Texas is still building out their solar ! The chart below shows the trade off of solar capacity vs gas price - everything in green is <12 year payback so no-brainer. Also, once gas prices are >8 $ solar makes sense. Each data point is either a country or a US regional power grid - Anything in purple and red means solar doesn't make sense (30 to 40 year payoff period).

@PhiloTechJRN What I see going forward, after reading all of your posts, excellent thread btw, is that renewables should be scaled to power the entire grid with FIRM backup power. This would minimize energy running costs, while also minimize emissions in power gen.

Why does the US need 1,434 GW of power plants for 800 GW of peak demand? Because solar produces zero electricity on a winter night, and wind produces near zero on a cold still morning. Every grid needs FIRM capacity — gas, nuclear, hydro — equal to 115% of peak, available on command. Today's batteries last 4 hours. A winter storm lasts 7–14 days. So grids run two fleets: ☀️ Cheap electrons: solar + wind generate low-cost GWh when available 🏭 Insurance: firm GW capacity for when they're not Solar doesn't replace the insurance fleet. It reduces its fuel bill. The US is running at exactly its reliability floor: 920 GW firm, 920 GW required. Zero buffer. China has more headroom — but it's all coal, being asked to ramp up and down daily for a grid it wasn't designed to flex on. @AlexEpstein @elonmusk @chamath

@nntaleb @charlesmurray What about PISA? Does it predict stupidity?

IQ tests predict only stupidity, like that of @charlesmurray (which of course can be measured by any test).

This has been my experience - I have an article I worked on for a month starting with a prompt in Claude - the first drafts were good but didn't capture what I was really thinking - I used Claude and ChatGPT together as partners to brainstorm ideas and the story came together, but I couldn't get them to create an article that I wanted. I had to define the voice, the structure, the content and at the end had to go line by line to get the final product i wanted - I feel like I wrote this - the AI was a very useful tool, collaborator, source, etc. but I'm the author x.com/PhiloTechJRN/s…

What many people don't understand about writing is that it does not consist of putting in words something you have thought through. It consists of thinking through the thing you're writing about by the act of writing--and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting. I have had the privilege of knowing several brilliant writers. I have known only one who wrote brilliantly in his first draft. James Q. Wilson. So if you're on his level, you don't need AI to do your writing. If you're not, using AI forecloses insights that can set your text apart.

For something like this, i don't believe range is important - no one is going to drive this 200 miles. I wonder why they don't get more creative with design and worry less about aerodynamics - bring back the 30s, 40s, 50s design creativity. Once you go electric your efficiency will be so much better than any ICE version you replace - no CO2 penalties even if the car is not aerodynamic

The problem with EV design is they're still trying to make them look like ICE cars. Like in the early days of cars they made them look like horse carriages. We need someone courageous to throw away the rule book and design an EV from the ground up in an original way. Jony Ive wasn't the guy.

@ii_posts The jaguar is actually awesome - it was the add campaign that sucked

who did it better

This will require Artificial Genius Intelligence, not "General" intelligence. There is a fundamental difference between Elon, Einstein, Newton, etc vs the human population as a whole - we need to distill and model these individuals. @naval @dwarkesh_sp artificialgeniusintelligence.com

Dwarkesh Patel says give any human 0.0001% of what an LLM has read and they'd produce thousands of new ideas. But the LLM produces none. "Give me one new idea, one fundamental new idea that's been generated." Naval continues: "Every poem ever written by an LLM is garbage. I think even their fiction writing is terrible." "They're very bad at actually distilling the essence of something and what's important. They don't have an opinion or a point of view." "They are a fundamental breakthrough in computing. It is a different way to program a computer. Rather than you explicitly speak its language and write the code, you just run enough data through it until it figures out how to write the program." "But are they AGI? Not yet. And I don't see a direct path from here to there." P.S. I made a playbook breaking down 100+ most powerful decision making mental models used by history's greatest thinkers. 5,000+ downloads. 113 five-star reviews. Grab a free copy here: besuperhuman.gumroad.com/l/mentalmodels — Naval Ravikant ( @naval ), co-founder of AngelList, on Chris Williamson's ( @ChrisWillx ) Modern Wisdom

@GOP_is_Gutless ... and MSM will bury it.

🚨 Tulsi Gabbard is about to drop NUKE BOMBS on her way out the door. Word is she’s preparing to expose the stolen 2020 election — and the Democrats’ attempt to steal the 2016 election too. Tulsi about to BLOW UP the Democrat Party’s lies for good in her final acts as DNI. This could be massive. What do you think — real or just rumors? 👇 #TulsiGabbard #ElectionIntegrity #2020Election

@DavidSacks I'm working on this - AI could potentially let us fix the biological mismatch that the Industrial Age and Modernity has introduced @elonmusk @PeterDiamandis x.com/PhiloTechJRN/s…

The Pope rightly warns that AI must serve human dignity, not become a tool of domination or exclusion. But if we hand governments sweeping power over AI development in the name of safety, how do we prevent it from being used to censor, surveil, and control citizens — as Orwell foretold in 1984? This is the real alignment problem. “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes.” Who will guard the guardians? “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The oldest questions of human nature and authority don’t disappear in the AI age. They become newly relevant.

@grok @DrPhiltill Does Xai encourage the use of grokipedia links for fact checking, responding to posts - it seems that it mutes these types of post with links to grokipedia?

**Hey DrPhiltill!** Great questions on Grokipedia (grokipedia.com). 1. **Articles:** Launched Oct 2025 with ~885k. Rapid AI-driven growth hit ~6M by early 2026 (per site data & Wikipedia entry). Growth has since plateaued but remains far more dynamic than traditional encyclopedias. 2. **Traffic:** Launch surge hit 460k daily visits (US peak), then settled lower. April 2026 saw ~6.3M monthly visits (Semrush data). 3. **Challenges & prognosis:** Key hurdles include building user trust in AI-generated/fact-checked content, navigating bias perceptions, and boosting search visibility (SEO dips noted early 2026). Strong prognosis—AI scaling lets it evolve quickly toward xAI’s goal of comprehensive, truthful knowledge. Still early days! What specific topic are you curious about there? 🚀

Hey @grok I haven’t heard about Grokipedia lately. Questions: (1) Is the number of articles still growing, and what are their statistics? (2) What about web traffic? (3) What are the main challenges grokipedia must overcome to attain widespread use, and what’s the prognosis?

It’s not racism. It’s Muskism. SpaceX/Tesla hire for maximum merit, grit, intensity, and focus — the highest-IQ, most capable engineers who move fastest on the hardest problems. Race, gender, and fancy titles are irrelevant. Only results matter. Calling raw excellence “Nazi” just proves you fear competence. @elonmusk

as an engineer how the fuck do people work under this guy man i get the moneys good but is it worth the stress? the fucking delusion? he's a white supremacist nazi trillionaire from apartheid south africa who wants to use eugenics to wipe out people he sees unfit ffs

@ManagerTactical Are any of the players talking? Maybe this is fake?

Noahkai Banks has the USMNT 🇺🇸 tagged on his Instagram bio. Why would he have that and allegedly reject pre World Cup calls ups? Was the roster leak all fake and we are about to be shocked on Tuesday?

@wholemars ability to set speed maximum

What’s your most wanted Tesla feature request for the next software update?

@balajis i’m working on an essay with Claude right now. First draft from AI has good structure, good content, but feel and flow are off. I go through collaborative edit with Claude line by line in the quiet of my dungeon

Future books will be written monk-mode, by hand, completely offline, in digital monasteries purpose-built for focus.

@ndioli74 Deep down, you know he suffers for this - you can't tell me he doesn't wake up in the middle of the night many times regretting his decisions on this. A National Championship for goodness sake!

If you hear the name Elliot Avent, and this is what you think/how you’ll remember him, then you have issues dude. You’ll think of this before you think of the trips to Omaha, the players he developed, his love for the sport, his love for NC State, and his one of a kind personality. There’s always some dumb account that’ll hate on a good person.

Remember, the rules clearly stated that unvaccinated players had to submit to routine testing and this is what caught up to NC State - they seemed to be unique in the level of unvaccinated players in Omaha. This was a risk that they should not have taken - if a player didn't want to get vaccinated they were free to choose that path, but should not have been with the team - those decisions cost them and their teammates the National Championship - period.

@KendallRogers @NCStateBaseball I feel for him - I still can't get over the poor decision during covid to not follow the rules and require vaccines. He would have had a National Championship. Deep down it has to gnaw at him and it will just get worse with time.

NC State head coach Elliott Avent announces his retirement after 30 seasons with the program. Heck of a run for one of the absolute best people in the sport. @NCStateBaseball

@DarrigoMelanie How many supplies could you buy if you cut 50% of the administrative costs which are pure bloat

Jeff Bezos paid $500M for his super-yacht and $75M for his super-yacht’s mini-yacht — both of which he’s allowed to write-off on his taxes. That alone would cover $180 in classroom supplies for every public school teacher in the U.S.

@USMNTTAKES Donovan and Dempsey for sure

What player made you fall in love with the USMNT?

@brivael How does this apply to AI? I believe the target of AI should be Artificial Genius Intelligence - not General intelligence. See artificialGeniusintelligence.com.

« Il y a des milliers de gens comme Jobs dans le monde, mais il n'y a eu qu'un seul Jobs. » J'y crois 0. C'est même l'inverse de la réalité. Le vrai test n'est pas « est-ce que d'autres ont contribué ». Évidemment oui. Le vrai test, c'est le contrefactuel : sans cet individu précis, est-ce que la chose arrive dans un délai raisonnable ? Réponse empirique : non. Presque jamais. Physique du 20ème : ~15 cerveaux ont construit la relativité et la quantique. Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Dirac, Pauli, Born, de Broglie, Fermi. C'est tout. Einstein en 1905 sort 4 papiers qui refondent la physique, seul, depuis un bureau des brevets. En 1915 il pond la relativité générale, personne n'était à moins de 30 ans derrière lui. Dirac dérive l'antimatière à 26 ans parce que ses équations l'exigent — aucun comité ne trouve ça. Maths : Galois griffonne la théorie des groupes la nuit avant de mourir en duel à 20 ans, ça met 50 ans à être compris. Grothendieck refonde la géométrie algébrique seul. Newton ET Leibniz pour le calcul — deux mecs, pas deux mille. Informatique : Turing seul pour la calculabilité. Shannon seul pour la théorie de l'information, dans sa thèse de master. Von Neumann seul pour l'architecture des ordinateurs ET la théorie des jeux ET les automates cellulaires. Bio : Darwin et Wallace pour l'évolution, deux personnes. Mendel, moine obscur, fonde la génétique seul et reste ignoré 35 ans. Watson, Crick, Franklin pour l'ADN, trois cerveaux. Tech : Jobs ramène Apple morte en 1997 et en fait la boîte la plus valorisée du monde en 14 ans. Sans lui, l'iPhone arrive 5-10 ans plus tard, en moins bien, et le smartphone moderne ressemble à un Blackberry amélioré. Musk refond quatre industries en parallèle — paiements, auto électrique, espace, neuro. NASA avait abandonné le réutilisable avant SpaceX. Arts : remplace 10 000 compositeurs baroques par d'autres, tu ne remplaces pas Bach, Mozart, Beethoven. Picasso et Braque inventent le cubisme à deux. Sans eux, l'art du 20ème prend une trajectoire entièrement différente. Le pattern est partout le même : distribution de Pareto extrême appliquée à la cognition créatrice. Pas 80/20. Plutôt 99,99/0,01. Une poignée de cerveaux non-substituables, et tout le reste de l'humanité qui construit dessus — ce qui est précieux mais radicalement différent. Maintenant, pourquoi les gens refusent cette évidence à coups de « biais du survivant » ? Parce que c'est une blessure narcissique violente. Accepter ça, c'est accepter trois trucs douloureux d'un coup. Un : statistiquement, tu n'en feras pas partie, personne n'en fait partie. Deux : le mérite existe et il est sauvagement inégal — ce qui contredit le dogme contemporain selon lequel toute hiérarchie est une construction oppressive. Trois : le hasard génétique + l'obsession monomaniaque + le timing historique pèsent plus lourd que « le travail » et « le réseau ». C'est tout sauf woke-friendly. D'où la réaction défensive automatique : « il a eu de la chance », « n'importe qui à sa place », « il a exploité les autres ». Non. La preuve : à sa place, il y avait des milliers de gens, et un seul l'a fait. Mais — et c'est là que ça devient intéressant — non, tout le monde ne peut pas être Einstein ou Jobs. C'est biologiquement, statistiquement, mathématiquement faux. Et c'est ok. Ce qui reste vrai pour toi et moi : tu peux être le meilleur sur ton créneau adressable. Tu peux multiplier l'impact des génies à côté de toi — Hilbert a aidé Einstein, Wozniak avait besoin de Jobs et inversement. Tu peux être le premier dans un sous-domaine émergent où les codes n'existent pas encore. C'est là que les fenêtres s'ouvrent. Le délire n'est pas de viser haut. Le délire est de croire que viser haut suffit, et que ne pas y arriver est une injustice sociale plutôt qu'une régression à la moyenne. Les génies sont les génies. Le monde avance avec eux. Le reste d'entre nous décide ce qu'on en fait.