Theron James

"a man who can feed people well can be trusted with most things" - unknown

@bryan_johnson Also would suggest: Saline nasal rinse / mouth taping for mouth breathers. Sleep quality intervention with meaningful effect size that almost no one does.

Underrated on this list: #26 (hearing) is chronically ignored and irreversible. Most people won’t take it seriously until it’s too late. #38 (body as clock) is doing more work than it gets credit for. Circadian consistency probably amplifies most of the other items on this list. #41 (do less) is the most important meta-point and it’s buried at the end.

This is it. Everything learned spending millions on longevity. From: Your Immortal Unc and Auntie. To: Our Immortal nieces and nephews. 0. Sleep is the world's most powerful drug. 1. Be in your bed for 8 hours 2. Same bedtime every night, any time before midnight 3. Don’t eat right before bed 4. Calm foods for dinner 5. No screens 1 hour before bed 6. Avoid added sugar (be aware it’s in everything) 7. Avoid all things in an American convenience store 8. Avoid fried foods 9. Shoes off at the door 10. Eat whole foods, particularly veggies fruits nuts legumes berries 11. Walk a little after meals or air squats 12. Get your heart rate high routinely 13. Lift heavy things 14. Stretch daily 15. Water pik, floss, brush, tongue scrape, morning and night 16. Make an effort to drink water 17. Get sunlight when you wake up (UV is low) 18. Protect skin in midday sun 19. Stand up straight 20. See at least one friend once a week 21. Avoid plastic where you can (in all things) 22. Circulate air in rooms 23. When stressed, breathe, learn to calm your body 24. Go to the dentist 25. Avoid sitting for long times 26. Protect your hearing, the world is too loud 27. Alcohol is bad for you 28. Finish coffee before noon 29. Avoid bright lights after sunset 30. If obese, look into a GLP 31. Sleep in a cold room 32. Texting while driving is dangerous 33. Turn off all notifications 34. Limit social media use 35. Don’t smoke anything 36. If you struggle to sleep, read a physical book before bed 37. 1 hour before bed have a calm wind down routine: bath, read, light walk, listen to music 38. The body is a clock and loves routine. Have a daily morning and evening schedule. 39. Avoid long distance travel where you can 40. Baby steps first: incorporate new things slowly 41. Do less… most things don’t work. Bonus points if you get your blood checked. Start here, it will change your life.

Poverty is solved by prosperity, not poverty alleviation. Then the question is: who creates prosperity? Entrepreneurs. What do entrepreneurs need to create prosperity? A business-friendly environment that lets them start, build, and scale without being strangled by the state.

The current system is bad in many ways but it's clear. You go to school, you get a job, you get promoted, you retire. The replacement won't have that legibility for a while, possibly a generation, and the discomfort of operating without a script is real. But scripts for life are themselves historically unusual. Most humans across most of history made it up as they went using the cultural materials available to them, and the ones who did it well are who we remember.

Both sides are arguing over proxies without defining the construct. Ferguson points to violence, pregnancy, substance use down. Haidt points to anxiety, depression up. Both are real. Neither is "healthy child development" — that's a multi-dimensional thing nobody in this debate has operationalized. Until someone specifies what a flourishing 14-year-old actually looks like across attention, agency, relationships, resilience, and skill — not just absence of pathology or compliance with institutions — every iteration of this argument is just trading measurable indicators and calling it evidence. The productive question isn't ban-or-don't-ban. It's prior: what are we even optimizing for?

I'm told kids today are messed up from social media. But some researchers say, chill out! Kids are doing fine. "They're less violent, drink less, & stay in school longer," says @cjferguson1111. "We look for bad news & attribute it to social media. We don't attribute good news.”

Worth noticing what's smuggled in here: the claim that diluting Democratic votes = diluting minority votes. That equation only holds if you treat racial minorities as a permanent partisan bloc, which is precisely the categorical thinking civil rights law was supposed to end. Black voters were heavily Republican in 1956. Hispanic voting has shifted significantly in recent cycles. The 1965 VRA guaranteed access to the ballot. Somewhere along the way, "voting rights" came to mean a guaranteed representational outcome for a group. Those are very different things, and the slide between them deserves more scrutiny than reverence.

Today’s Supreme Court decision effectively guts a key pillar of the Voting Rights Act, freeing state legislatures to gerrymander legislative districts to systematically dilute and weaken the voting power of racial minorities - so long as they do it under the guise of “partisanship” rather than explicit “racial bias.” And it serves as just one more example of how a majority of the current Court seems intent on abandoning its vital role in ensuring equal participation in our democracy and protecting the rights of minority groups against majority overreach. The good news is that such setbacks can be overcome. But that will only happen if citizens across the country who cherish our democratic ideals continue to mobilize and vote in record numbers - not just in the upcoming midterms or in high profile races, but in every election and every level.

"Governments tend to respond with incentives — baby bonuses, tax credits, parental leave. These aren’t wrong. They’re just aimed at the wrong level. You can’t fix a load-bearing failure with a subsidy."

@CopyRebeldia No.

Alguien acaba de pulverizar a toda la industria de assets 3D. Lo que en 2023 ocupaba a un artista 3D senior durante tres semanas, hoy lo haces tú solo en una tarde de sábado sin abrir Blender una sola vez. El stack completo: → Concept art generado en 30 segundos con nano banana o GPT image → Conversión imagen → malla 3D con Hunyuan3D, Tripo o Meshy → Limpieza de topología + auto-rigging en Meshy o Tripo → Animaciones instantáneas vía Mixamo Te dejo de prueba un capibara hecho íntegramente con este pipeline. Modelado, riggeado, animado. Game-ready para Unity o Unreal. Cero artistas contratados. Cero líneas de código. Una tarde. La barrera de entrada a la industria del videojuego acaba de caer al suelo.

The Village We Engineered Away open.substack.com/pub/theronjame…

@claudeai Claudedev

In Claude Code, the new /ultrareview command runs a dedicated review session that reads through your changes and flags what a careful reviewer would catch. We've also extended auto mode to Max users, so longer tasks run with fewer interruptions.

Introducing Claude Opus 4.7, our most capable Opus model yet. It handles long-running tasks with more rigor, follows instructions more precisely, and verifies its own outputs before reporting back. You can hand off your hardest work with less supervision.

@codewithimanshu from 8 months ago. Much has changed.

The Head of Claude Code at Anthropic hasn't written code by hand in months. In 2 days he shipped 49 full features. 100% written by AI. He just dropped a 30-minute talk on exactly how he does it. More valuable than any $500 vibe coding course. Bookmark it.

If virtues are discoveries about what reality rewards — not preferences we invented — then ASI should find them faster than we did. We're the ones clouded by tribalism and short time horizons. The uncomfortable possibility isn't that superintelligence ignores the load-bearing virtues. It's that it embodies them better than we do.

A must-watch clip. @KonstantinKisin asks, “How will AI destroy humanity?” AI safety expert Roman Yampolskiy explains why that’s the wrong question. We assume AI will think like us. It won’t. A superintelligence could act far outside human understanding, like humans compared to squirrels. It wouldn’t need to hate us. It could wipe us out simply by pursuing something else. And the uncomfortable truth? We’re not in full control. @romanyam explains that we don’t code these systems, we train them, then study what they become.

This validates what practitioners are converging on: specs are the durable artifact, not code. The open question is what happens when specs move from static docs to queryable architecture — strategy graphs agents can traverse and verify against via tool calls, not files they interpret. Wrote about this here: theronjames.substack.com/p/the-code-is-…

New course: Spec-Driven Development with Coding Agents, built in partnership with @jetbrains, and taught by @paulweveritt. Vibe coding is fast, but often produces code that doesn't match what you asked for. This short course teaches you spec-driven development: write a detailed spec defining what to build, and work with your coding agent to implement it. Many of the best developers already build this way. A spec lets you control large code changes with a few words, preserve context across agent sessions, and stay in control as your project grows in complexity. Skills you'll gain: - Write a detailed specification to define your mission, tech stack, and roadmap, giving your agent the context it needs from the start - Plan, implement, and validate features in iterative loops using a spec as your agent's guide - Apply the same repeatable workflow to both new and legacy codebases - Package your workflow into a portable agent skill that works across agents and IDEs Join and write specs that keep your coding agent on track! deeplearning.ai/short-courses/…

The $1.90/day line is a floor, not a measure of prosperity. Many people just above it are still very poor by any reasonable standard. Some researchers argue higher thresholds (~$7-10/day) tell a less optimistic story. That’s a legitimate methodological debate, but it doesn’t invalidate what this specific chart claims to show.

True

I think the human’s role is critical. The question is where in the stack that human discipline lives. If code is the artifact, then yes, humans in the loop on code quality. But if the durable artifact is the spec and verification layer and code is a compilation target agents regenerate, then the human discipline is in spec precision, not code cleanliness. The agent skill is in structuring code for agent consumption between regenerations. Wrote this up here: open.substack.com/pub/theronjame…

@CoachTheron I don’t think that’s an agent skill. I think it requires humans in the loop.

A brief intro to Clean Code Second Edition a.co/d/h81TOYL

Calling it "brain upload", even with the "lossy" qualifier, smuggles in an assumption that the thing that matters about a person is their information content. But what makes talking to someone meaningful is mutual awareness, shared context updating in real time, the fact that they're there. A fine-tuned model doesn't grieve, reconsider, or grow. It's a very good statue, not a mind.

Yes it's the tractable form of brain upload. There's a ton of scifi on brain uploads that requires way too exotic tech (scanning and simulating brains etc), when we're about to get a lossy and approximate version of that *a lot* sooner via LLM simulators. You can easily imagine a "brain upload" startup - you show up for a few days to carry out detailed video interviews, then they use all that data with an LLM finetuning process to "upload" you and give you an API endpoint of your simulation that you can talk to. Look at what's already possible with HeyGen as an example, but combine it with an LLM model that has deep knowledge and personality. Trippy and admittedly kind of dystopian but in principle quite possible around now.

As I build my own 2nd brain 🧠 on Obsidian using @karpathy ‘s wiki idea, it suddenly dawned on me - one day when we r gone, our kids could inherit an interactive map to your mind, passion, obsessions, work, fascinations… It’s kind of beautiful way to think abt your 2nd 🧠.

Agentic Flow open.substack.com/pub/theronjame…

User stories tell teams what to build. "Outcome Specs" tell teams what success looks like. The difference sounds small. It isn't. When code generation cost approaches zero, the bottleneck shifts from building to defining "correct." That's what Outcome Specs are for. Template + context kit dropping soon. 🧵