Willy Chu

There's a physicist at Stanford named Safi Bahcall who modeled this exact principle and the math is wild. He calls it "phase transitions in human networks." When you're stationary, your probability of a lucky event is limited to your existing surface area: the people you already know, the places you already go, the ideas you've already been exposed to. Your opportunity window is fixed. When you move, your collision rate with new nodes in a network increases nonlinearly. Double your movement (new conversations, new cities, new projects) and your probability of a serendipitous encounter doesn't double. It roughly quadruples. Because each new node connects you to their entire network, not just to them. Richard Wiseman ran a 10-year study at the University of Hertfordshire tracking self-described "lucky" and "unlucky" people. The single biggest differentiator wasn't IQ, education, or family money. Lucky people scored significantly higher on one trait: openness to experience. They talked to strangers more, varied their routines more, and said yes to invitations at nearly twice the rate. The "unlucky" group followed the same routes, ate at the same restaurants, and talked to the same 5 people. Their networks were closed loops. No new inputs, no new collisions. Luck isn't random. Luck is surface area. And surface area is a function of movement. The lobster emoji is doing more work than most people realize. Lobsters grow by shedding their shell when it gets too tight. The growth requires a period of total vulnerability. No protection, no armor, soft body exposed to the ocean. That's the cost of movement nobody posts about. You have to be uncomfortable first. The new shell only hardens after you've already moved.

Claude can now build interactive charts and diagrams, directly in the chat. Available today in beta on all plans, including free. Try it out: claude.ai

lol

This strange square 👇 is undoubtedly the most extraordinary work of literature in human history. Yet, unfortunately, barely anyone in the West has ever heard of it. There was this woman poet in 4th century China called Su Hui (蘇蕙), a child genius who had reportedly mastered Chinese characters by age 3. At 21 years old, heartbroken by her husband who left her for another woman, she decided to encode her feelings in a structure so intricate, so beautiful, so intellectually staggering that it still baffles scholars to this day. Came to be known as the Xuanji Tu (璇璣圖) - the "Star Gauge" or "Map of the Armillary Sphere" - it's a 29 by 29 grid of 841 characters that can produce over 4,000 different poems. Read it forward. Read it backward. Read it horizontally, vertically, diagonally. Read it spiraling outward from the center. Read it in circles around the outer edge. Each path through the grid produces a different poem - all of them coherent, all of them beautiful, all of them rhyming, all of them expressing variations on the same themes of longing, betrayal, regret, and undying love. The outer ring of 112 characters forms a single circular poem - believed to be both the first and longest of its kind ever written. The interior grid produces 2,848 different four-line poems of seven characters each. In addition, there are hundreds of other smaller and longer poems, depending on the reading method. At the center a single character she left implied but unwritten: 心 (xin) - "heart." Later copyists would add it explicitly, but in Su Hui's original the meaning was even more beautiful: 4,000 poems, all orbiting the space where her heart used to be. Take for instance the outer red grid of the Star Gauge. Starting from the top right corner and reading down, you get this seven-character quatrain: 仁智懷德聖虞唐， 貞志篤終誓穹蒼， 欽所感想妄淫荒， 心憂增慕懷慘傷。 In pinyin, it is: Rén zhì huái dé shèng yú táng, zhēnzhì dǔ zhōng shì qióng cāng, qīn suǒ gǎnxiǎng wàng yín huāng, xīn yōu zēng mù huái cǎn shāng. Notice how it rhymes? táng / cāng / huāng / shāng The rough translation in English is: "The benevolent and wise cherish virtue, like the sage-kings Yao and Shun, With steadfast will I swear to the heavens above, What I revere and feel - how could it be wanton or dissolute? My heart's sorrow grows, longing brings only grief." Now read it from the bottom to the top and you get this entirely different seven-character quatrain: 傷慘懷慕增憂心， 荒淫妄想感所欽， 蒼穹誓終篤志貞， 唐虞聖德懷智仁。 The pinyin: Shāng cǎn huái mù zēng yōu xīn, huāngyín wàngxiǎng gǎn suǒ qīn, cāngqióng shì zhōng dǔzhì zhēn, táng yúshèngdé huái zhì rén. It rhymes too: xīn and qīn, zhēn and rén And the meaning is just as beautiful and coherent: "Grief and sorrow, longing fills my worried heart, Wanton and dissolute fantasies - is that what you revere? I swear to the heavens my constancy is true, May we embody the sage-kings' virtue, wisdom, and benevolence." That's just 2 poems out of the over 4,000 you can construct from the Xuanji Tu! At the very center of the grid, the 8 red characters wrapped around the central heart, she "signed" her poem with a hidden message: 詩圖璇玑，始平蘇氏。 "The poem-picture of the Armillary Sphere, by Su of Shiping." Or reversed: 蘇氏詩圖，璇玑始平。 "Su's poem-picture - the Armillary Sphere begins in peace." Many scholars, and even emperors, throughout Chinese history have been completely obsessed by Su Hui's puzzle. For instance, in the Ming dynasty, a scholar named Kang Wanmin (康萬民) devoted his entire life to the poems (kangshiw.com/contents/461/2…), ending up documenting twelve different reading methods - forward, backward, diagonal, radiating, corner-to-corner, spiraling - and extracting 4,206 poems. His book on the subject ("Reading Methods for the Xuanji Tu Poems", 璇璣圖詩讀法) runs to hundreds of pages. Empress Wu Zetian herself, the legendary woman emperor of the Tang dynasty, wrote a preface to the Xuanji Tu around 692 CE (baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%BB%87…). Incredibly, there's even far more complexity to the Xuanji Tu than just the poems: - The name 璇玑 (Xuanji) - Armillary Sphere - is astronomical in meaning and the way the poems can be read mirrors the way celestial bodies orbit around a fixed center. It's a model of the heavens. - Her original work, with the characters woven on silk brocade, was in five colors (red, black, blue/green, purple, and yellow) which correspond to the Five Elements (五行) - the foundational Chinese philosophical system that explains how the universe operates. So it's also a model of the entire cosmic order according to ancient Chinese philosophy. - It's also of course deeply mathematical with this 29 x 29 perfect square grid, with sub-squares, lines and rectangles, and a structure which allows for symmetrical reading patterns in all directions - Last but not least, the content of the poems themselves contain multiple registers. On top of expressing her personal grief and longing for her husband, it's also filled with accusations against the concubine (Zhao Yangtai) he left her for, reflections on politics (with many references to sage-kings) and philosophical reflections. So the Star Gauge is simultaneously: - A love letter (expressing personal longing) - A legal brief (arguing her case against her rival) - A cosmological model (structured like the heavens) - A Five Element diagram (encoding the fundamental structure of the world according to ancient Chinese philosophy) - A mathematical construction with perfect symmetry and precision And yet, for all this complexity, we should not forget this was all ultimately in service of the simplest human message imaginable: a 21-year-old woman asking the love of her life "come back to me". Her husband did, eventually. According to what empress Wu Zetian herself wrote in her preface to the Xuanji Tu, when he received Su's brocade he was so "moved by its supreme beauty" that he sent away his concubine and returned to his wife. As the story goes, they lived together until old age. The heart at the center was filled after all.

4 factors to consider when making a career decision (none of which involve compensation):

Banger

Huntrix at Bad Bunny SNL sketch tonight

Love this whole thread. Poking fun to genuine wholesomeness 🇹🇼💙❤️

GOLDEN IS GOING UP, UP, UP, TO NO. 1 ON THE BILLBOARD HOT 100 HUNTR/X (EJAE, Audrey Nuna, and REI AMI) have officially sealed the honmoon.

In the coming years, humanoid robots will handle most physical tasks people do today

We do lol

Excited that Salesforce is acquiring @Informatica for ~$8B—uniting the #1 AI CRM with the #1 AI MDM & ETL to power Agentforce, Data Cloud, Tableau, MuleSoft & Customer 360. Together, CLAIRE and Einstein forge the ultimate AI-data platform: trusted, explainable & built to scale. See details here: investor.salesforce.com/news/news-deta…

Real-time speech translation directly in Google Meet matches your tone and pattern so you can have free-flowing conversations across languages Launching now for subscribers. ¡Es mágico!

"Software for people managing how agents work will look different from software that enables people to work."

This is what boba shops are for

Every investor listening to administration description of tariff policy.

Hello, iPad! Don't be scared, this isn't a stretched-out iPhone app 👻 To celebrate, we're giving away an 11-inch iPad Pro (M4)! Copilot Money for iPad is an extension of our powerful Mac app. It takes full advantage of the available screen size and the different ways you can interact with this device. Tracking your finances in one place has never been easier. 🎁 To enter the giveaway, simply repost this announcement and we'll pick a winner on Monday Nov 4th.

@alexsongis But what if you need to hit the restroom on your way out

For instance. Southwest lands in terminal 1 in Vegas. No tram. I’m in the second row, no checked bags. The right answer would have been call the Uber the minute plane hits the gate. but I waited too long to call and hence had to wait extra 3 mins for the Uber.

Two weeks we're never going to forget. The best Olympics performance for Stanford. EVER. #Paris2024 recap: tinyurl.com/3337tr5y #GoStanford

Exciting to see so many great names on this list!