JM Cooper

"No billionaire has ethical wealth" is just the commie version of "The jocks must be dumb" It's comforting to pretend that people more successful than you must be secretly bad people

@xwanyex Pop-ups. They must have poured all those resources into pop-ups and splash screens.

I don’t have to be convinced that LLM’s make programmers more productive. But where’s all the stuff? We’ve now had months and months of 100x or 1000x programmet productivity improvements. Where’s all the stuff they’re building?

@CollinRugg Lived in WA my whole life. Every time seeing Rainier feels like the first time. It’s pretty stunning.

NEW: Seattle Storm WNBA player Natisha Hiedeman says she "didn't know what was going on" when she saw a mountain (Mount Rainier) from her balcony. Mount Rainier is 14,410 feet high and is visible from Seattle. "I was just sitting on my balcony and I sat on my balcony like mad times. I had never seen it, so I didn't know like what was going on." Hiedeman joined the team about a week ago but says she never realized there was a mountain despite spending "mad times" on her balcony. Lmao.

Caught shit for saying this last time, but the urge to characterize drug dealers as simply "wholesome smol beans who are just trying to survive under le late stage capitalism" needs to die. They do it because it's easy to exploit weak people, and the quoted tweet illustrates clearly how the drug users are also willing to abuse and exploit others in order to indulge their habits. If a man started a cult in order to exploit mentally vulnerable people for money and sex, lefties would understand it to be grotesque behavior. Yet, when the exploitation happens on a chemical level, it's a morally grey area? Letting this chain of abuse continue unabated is not compassion. It's societal suicide.

@anishmoonka Trees can see? 😳

A biologist once figured out part of this mystery by accident, during a nap. In 1982, Jack Putz lay down under a group of mangrove trees in Costa Rica, looked up, and watched the wind slam their top branches into each other over and over. Every gust snapped off leaves and twigs. So Putz had a theory. When two trees grow close together, they sway in storms and their branches beat each other up. Over years, that beating trims back the treetops where they meet. That wear and tear carves out the gap. A 2015 study backed him up. Researchers checked the branches along these gaps and found that at least half of them had been broken in just the previous six years. Trees are getting slapped around constantly up there. But the theory falls apart in some forests. Alan Rebertus, a scientist who studied a cloud forest where winds hit over 100 kilometers an hour, compared it to sheltered forests. He expected the windy ones to have bigger gaps. They didn't. The gaps looked the same. The Malaysian camphor tree doesn't show any sign of rubbing either. It grows as tall as a 25-story building, and researchers looked carefully where the branches stopped. They found nothing. Whatever was keeping those branches apart, it wasn't physical contact. So there's a second theory, and this one is the part I love. Trees might actually sense each other. Their leaves carry a protein called phytochrome that acts like a little light meter. It notices a kind of light called far-red, which healthy leaves bounce off instead of absorbing. So if a tree's growing tip is suddenly drowning in far-red light, it knows another tree's leaves are right there. The tip stops growing in that direction. The gap forms on its own. Plants even do this politely toward relatives. Next to kin, they back off. But put them next to a stranger and they grow right up in the neighbor's face. The honest answer to what we're looking at in the sky is: we don't fully know. Probably wind in some species, light sensing in others. Plenty of trees do both at the same time. A hundred years of science and nobody has cracked it.

@walterkirn Exactly

What I see here is a California power (fraud) structure that very much doesn't want to become the issue -- which it will if he runs.

People are doing Instagram wrong. Just popped open my feed and there was Ana Alfa Romeo restomod, big wave surfing video, recommendations for visiting Machu Picchu, futurism art, a Japanese listening bar, and a video onboard a sailing yacht. Curate your feed for beauty, curiosity, and whatever expands your mind. Your feed is simply a reflection of your attention.

Stanford paid 35,000 people to quit Facebook and Instagram for 6 weeks Depression dropped. Anxiety dropped. Happiness went up. Women under 25 on Instagram saw the biggest gains That was 6 weeks. I'm going a full year.

@Flaujae Listen, I’m not a basketball fan. But I will wrestle a running lawnmower for Flau’jae. Let’s go!

That fast break dunk gone feed families 😩

@MissileFur @OwenShroyer1776 But other than that…

The war appears to be winding down, which I obviously hope is true. But this war has been a disaster. It will have cost us about $60 billion, loss of life, plus economic & geopolitical damage that could be irreversible. Who benefitted? Think your life will be much different?

@ok6ixx I was in Florence feeling like I’d been there before. Got back and went to play Assassin’s Creed and was like ooooh that where I saw that street. Found where my AirBnB was in Rome in AC.

Innovative Dreams keeps human creativity at the center of the filmmaking process, while using performance capture, virtual production, and generative AI to get stories told that weren’t possible before. We seek to use technology to usher in a new era of filmmaking creativity.

@ick_real Elinor

I'm looking for a ridiculously old-fashioned girl's name for our new born . Think great-grandma name. Very old and rare. Any suggestions asap pls?

Philip Tetlock's results in the early 2000s were the most important in the history of political science: on average, subject-matter experts didn't beat random guessing—and did worse than simple heuristics. If this isn't part of your worldview, you're ngmi

@Flaujae @tbailey1976 The Payton fit was strong. Welcome to Seattle!

This was the most beautiful welcome ever thank you Seattle 💚⛈️

@minty_hawk 💯💯💯

A union using environmental review as a weapon against an employee-owned low-cost grocery store, to protect its own market position, while naming itself after "working families"...That's not advocacy. That's regulatory capture with better branding. Seattle deserves to know who's really blocking their grocery store. Remember that next time you hear progressives complain about store closures and food deserts. /20

Seattle's Hearing Examiner just blocked WinCo Foods from opening in the old Sam's Club at 13550 Aurora Ave N, a building that's been vacant since 2018. The SEPA appeal was filed by a group called "Lake Washington Working Families." Sounds like concerned neighbors, right? Let's talk about a pattern. /1

@feelsdesperate This is not pejorative, this is an honest assessment of how just how child-like the left’s thought processes have become. People like Klein are supposed to be the braking mechanism to stop a downward spiral.

If you’re a lib Hasan Piker IS THE ENEMY and not just because he’s a malevolent leftist who is ideologically corrosive. Even more important is that he’s stupid. On his best day he operates on the intellectual level of a mediocre undergrad. The precipitous drop off in human capital progressive technocracy is experiencing is catastrophic. Lib thought leaders, politicians, academics, experts, etc are all becoming stupider at an extraordinary rate and it’s undermining any credibility or plausibility that they can accomplish meaningful technocratic tasks. Libs’ biggest problem may not be ideological derangement. It may be that by becoming so much dumber they will irrevocably discredit what is fundamentally an elitist enterprise. It is probably more important for libs to gatekeep stupid people at this point than it is the malevolent lunatics. You couldn’t ask for a better example of this tendency than Ezra Klein (who is very smart even if he lacks basic character) bending the knee to a moron like Hasan.

@iycrtylph Same when I found out George RR Martin has never hatched a dragon. I also heard that the couple who wrote Curious George never owned a monkey. Pretty disappointing.

maybe this is idiosyncratic, but learning about Éric Rohmer's personal life—the fact that he was a devout Catholic, that he hid his filmmaking career from his mother, that he never cheated on his wife—really turned me off his films

Hopecore Is the Vibe Shift Hollywood Needs hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-f…

@HistoryWJacob Dark Knight and Drive, too. But you got it right.

I've been workshopping this idea. I would love to hear your thoughts: In my opinion, the two of the most definitive "Guy Movies" are Gladiator and Braveheart. Both feature a hero who dies for something he deeply believes in. And whose death ultimately helps destroy or transform the corrupt system he fought against. Wallace's sacrifice inspires Scottish freedom; Maximus restores honor to Rome. There are plenty of modern movies where the hero gets a complete victory and remains alive, but few seem to reach legendary status. Other movies with this Martyr Archetype are 300 and Saving Private Ryan. Is there something within us as men that powerfully responds to this kind of noble sacrifice and legacy? Or am I totally off base here?

We are at a point in history—not nearing it, but here—where everyone is going to have to decide if they are content to numb themselves with an endless stream of fentanyl-like digital slop or if they are going to fight for their humanity and touch grass and challenge themselves and create and contribute and love. Decades of research shows people are most fulfilled when they care deeply about meaningful projects. When they have mastery and mattering. When they do good work and love good people. Nobody feels or performs their best when they are mindlessly scrolling. The antidote to algorithmic mass distraction is deep focus and enduring effort on meaningful pursuits. Making music. Writing. Running. Gardening. Coaching. Dancing. Building tables. When you work with deep focus on an activity or craft—when you throw yourself into something you care about and give it your all—you experience of the opposite of existential longing. You experience presence, depth, and aliveness. Perhaps the greatest risk of the modern world is that we go wherever the current takes us, like automatons floating along a pixelated conveyor belt to nowhere. The only thing that separates us from this dystopia is ourselves. Our agency—our attention, our capacity to think, create, and love—must be fought for.