Jesse

The iconic Seinfeld bassline was created with mouth noises and played on a synth. 🤯 Yada, yada, yada, that’s how Jonathan Wolff did it! (📹 via @seinfeldmusicguy)

🚨 THIS IS INSANE. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick's sons could be making 3 to 5x returns on every dollar they spent buying tariff refund rights. Cantor Fitzgerald, now run by Lutnick's sons Brandon and Kyle, was buying tariff refund claims from companies at 20 to 30 cents on the dollar. The firm told clients it had "capacity to trade up to several hundred million" in these claims. They confirmed at least one $10 million trade was already executed as of July 2025. They said they expected that number to "balloon in the coming weeks." That was 9 months ago. Today those claims are worth 100 cents on the dollar. The refund portal is live, $166 billion in refunds are being processed. If Cantor bought $100 million in refund rights at 25 cents on the dollar, they spent $25 million. They now collect $100 million from the government. That is a $75 million profit. A 300% return. If they scaled to "several hundred million" as they told clients they could, the profits run into the hundreds of millions. Howard Lutnick was the architect of the tariff policy. He pushed Trump to impose them. He fought against officials who wanted to limit them. Then he left Cantor Fitzgerald to his sons and transferred his equity into a trust benefiting them. Tax free under government ethics rules. He received $360 million from the buyout. His sons positioned the firm to profit from the exact policy their father built. Their father publicly championed tariffs he knew could be struck down while his sons were buying refund claims betting they would be.

The psychedelic executive order requires government to "initiate and complete review of any product containing a Schedule I substance that has successfully completed Phase 3 clinical trials ... so that rescheduling ... may proceed as quickly as practicable". My 2018 peer-reviewed analysis did EXACTLY this for psilocybin. The data suggested that upon approval psilocybin should be moved to schedule 4 (if it is to remain in the controlled substances act). I'm hoping this will help the government's own assessment and prep for rescheduling. @joerogan @calleymeans @SecKennedy @DrMakaryFDA @NIHDirector_Jay

having the pope on twitter rules. it must feel so hood to wake up every day and log on thinking “hehehe today i will post the most morally good thing i can think of and everybody will listen. because i’m the pope.” god bless

@shaggysurvives showed this pic to julie the other day, said "look it's anya taylor-joy being born from a rock" - she made a slight frown and we moved on

this doesnt remind me of anything or represent anything

One of the greatest commentaies ever. 🤣

Only one chance in this lifetime… Like watching sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos, I couldn’t resist a cell phone video of Earthset. You can hear the shutter on the Nikon as @Astro_Christina is hammering away on 3-shot brackets and capturing those exceptional Earthset photos through the 400mm lens. @AstroVicGlover was in window 3 watching with @Astro_Jeremy next to him. I could barely see the Moon through the docking hatch window but the iPhone was the perfect size to catch the view…this is uncropped, uncut with 8x zoom which is quite comparable to the view of the human eye. Enjoy.

I'm always accused of being too negative, so I'll say: it's great (almost unbelievable) that the end of federal prohibition on psychedelic drugs was just declared at the White House. In a GOP administration, no less. We'll have to see about implementation, but still, great stuff

@hikari_no_yume @shaggysurvives nice, beat me to it

@shaggysurvives yeah they make it real hard to see the chemtrails

man i hate these ugly phone lines blocking the sky

funnily enough the deeper you go into mathematics the more suspicious negative numbers seem. it becomes increasingly meaningful that there's no such thing as, like, -1 apples, as they say. addition is very straightforward but subtraction is surprisingly often bizarre black magic i can't think of a really simple example but here's a calculus example. so the taylor series of e^x goes e^x = 1 + x + x^2/2! + x^3/3! + ... and so forth. when x is positive this is all fine and dandy, each of these individual terms is an increasing function and you add them up and you get a really quickly increasing function, an exponential curve when x is negative something really strange happens. e^x decreases as you get negative, e^{-10} is really small, e^{-100} is tiny. but the individual terms of the taylor series are getting much larger! the taylor series expansion e^{-100} = 1 - 100 + 100^2/2! - 100^3/3! +-... results in a number whose decimal expansion starts with 44 zeroes, it is absolutely tiny. and yet the largest term in the taylor series expansion (it's a nice exercise to figure out what term this is and why, take a few seconds to try before reading on) is 100^100 / 100! which is a 1 followed by 42 digits it's almost a googol times bigger than the final result! which means this whole taylor series expansion involves a really insane amount of very precise cancellation, even though if you didn't know this was the taylor series expansion of e^x you'd have no way of knowing this a priori and it wouldn't be remotely obvious staring at the series from first principles

having said that, the position that AI can never be conscious or even intelligent even in principle has never made any sense to me. to me the basic idea is pretty simple and boils down to 1. humans are conscious and intelligent 2. humans are ultimately very complex machines made out of cells 3. the specific material composition of humans does not fundamentally matter, it’s hardware and not software 4. so conscious intelligent entities made of other things might also exist this line of reasoning also implies that brain uploading is possible in principle (some people seem to not think so?), that aliens with completely different biology from earth life might still exist and be conscious and intelligent, etc there are some people who seem to viscerally disbelieve this, to the extent that it feels so blatantly obvious as to not require a counterargument, and i just don’t get this. i saw a tweet about this but couldn’t find it again to QT - the phrase i’ve heard is something like “this is like expecting a picture of a waterfall to be wet” no it isn’t? when you have a video call with someone do you think “well this isn’t really a conversation, this is merely light and sound coming from my device that is simulating a conversation”? more to the point, how do you know there’s a real physical person on the other end and not an extremely accurate simulation or brain upload? (pretend either that the tech has improved or that i’m talking about a text conversation if it helps) afaict, people who viscerally disagree with this do not believe 2 on a gut level - that is, even if they’d phrase this differently, i think they believe humans have souls and machines are a fundamentally simpler and different type of thing that cannot have souls even in principle. and i don’t agree with this either! i think you can give a basically materialist account of what it means to have a soul (too much to get into here) and on that account there’s no reason in principle a sufficiently complex machine can’t have one. but also i’m not sure if this is the real crux either, idk. would be curious to hear people’s thoughts

土嚢キャッチボールに勤しむおじさんたち＠中国の公園

Thomas Massie just declared: “This government is under siege.” And he exposed Susie Wiles and Pam Bondi for taking “millions of dollars from Bayer.” “All three branches of this government are under siege by lobbyists and lawyers from a German company named Bayer.” “They spent over $9 million lobbying … so that they don’t have to be liable for any damages their herbicide Roundup causes.” “The Constitution guarantees people a trial if they’ve been harmed.” “Why are we contemplating going against the Constitution?” “The Attorney General has opined favorably for this German company in front of the Supreme Court about getting rid of any liability that they should have for any damages.” “By the way, the President’s Chief of Staff and the President’s Attorney General worked for one of the biggest lobbying firms that’s received millions of dollars from Bayer.” “Maybe that’s why we’ve seen an executive order that says that the production of this chemical from this German company is a national defense priority.” “And we know why they’re doing that.” “It’s to keep them from having any liability.” “This is wrong.” “We shouldn’t succumb to the lobbyists, not in the executive branch, not in the judicial branch, and certainly not here in Congress.”

@cantoni that's great for real, god cares

I get a lot of satisfaction from minimizing pngs. Nobody who goes to the website or downloads the app particularly cares, but I'm saving them time and using less bandwidth. It feels nice.

Please, I'm begging you, try to critically examine the differences between these two pieces of writing. ChatGPT editing did not improve this. Every single change only served to weaken your claims significantly. Everything is now hedged into oblivion: no longer have you outlined a "problem," now it's merely a "flaw." "It is true" now demoted to "it appears to be the case." "Is" gets a "usually" tacked on. A thesis statement at the end of the first paragraph gets run over by noisy, out-of-context example-whittling. All for fear of being misconstrued. And at the end, the argument that gets spat out isn't even yours anymore! You argued that Graeber failed to create a true account of work because he did not understand Chesterton's Fence. ChatGPT is arguing is that it is possible some apparently bullshit jobs could be secretly load-bearing if you squint. These are two different statements. The second is weaker and less compelling. It says less. And it's fucking longer! Don't do this anymore! Stop doing this! It's worse!!!

i hate to say it but a 1% tax on property over $5m you don’t live in is hard to argue against for the average voter like, the solution is simply “actually live in NYC”, “what are you so broke you can’t afford 1%?”, and “well you could just leave NYC” all are ego hits none of these property owners don’t wanna take and have a hard time refuting love or hate him, he’s actually doing something vs most mayors and tells you in the slickest way possible

President Trump is sending more military power to the Middle East as Iran rejects our initial peace offers—setting the escalation trap. We can avoid that trap if we are wise enough not to believe our own hype. Bombing Iranian equipment and killing leaders may produce great hype reels, but if the GWOT taught us anything, it is that tactical success does not equal strategic victory. To avoid a major disaster, we must first define what is truly vital to our national interests and act accordingly—regardless of optics of the daily news cycle. We need the Strait of Hormuz open so oil can flow and stability can return to the energy markets and the Gulf region. These are realistic, achievable goals. They can be reached by significantly reducing our military footprint in the region and lifting sanctions on Iran. We can then tout Iran’s agreement not to build a nuclear weapon as a clear win for the media. The key to avoiding the escalation trap and a disastrous quagmire is restraining Israel by drastically limiting the military aid we provide. Israel cannot sustain this fight without us, and will do everything they can to keep us engaged. We must pursue our own objectives, not theirs. If we try to impose a maximalist outcome on Iran (zero enrichment, etc.) this war will undoubtedly escalate—costing American lives, billions more dollars, and ultimately eroding our global standing. We must learn from our past and recognize when it is time to cut our losses and walk away. In the end, working to restore order will strengthen America far more than any military action ever could.

holy shit this is fucking art

spring is for being exactly right here, in the portland neighbourhoods

Navy photographer was COOKIN!