João Apel

Penguin clears

Nobody remembers who actually trained Chinese math olympiad champions. The edtech myth has it wrong. If you’re serious about building deep technical talent, one Soviet textbook outperformed every modern edtech platform combined. Most teachers reach for Khan Academy.

This is basically what philosophers and anthropologists mean when they say that the 'individual' is a relatively modern construct, and that many other cultures conceive of people in a more porous, contingent, interwoven fashion. Weird as it sounds, it's just observably true.

Remind myself of the role reversal often.

Winston Churchill fought his depression with bricks. He'd lay them for hours at his country home in Kent. He joined the bricklayers' union. And in 1921 he wrote about why it worked. It took psychology another 75 years to catch up. He called his depression the "Black Dog." It followed him for decades. His method for fighting it back was as basic as it sounds: laying brick after brick, hour after hour. Churchill spelled out his theory in a long essay for The Strand Magazine. People who think for a living, he wrote, can't fix a tired brain just by resting it. They have to use a different part of themselves. The part that moves the eyes and the hands. Woodworking, chemistry, bookbinding, bricklaying, painting. Anything that drags the body into a problem the mind can't solve by itself. Modern psychology now calls this behavioral activation. It's one of the most-studied depression treatments out there. Depression sets a behavior trap. You feel bad, so you stop doing things, and doing less means less to feel good about. Feeling worse makes you do even less. The loop tightens until you can't breathe inside it. Behavioral activation breaks the loop from the action side. You schedule the activity first, even when every part of you doesn't want to. Doing it produces small rewards: a wall gets straighter, a painting fills in, a messy room gets clean. Those small rewards slowly rewire the brain. Action comes first, and the feeling follows. Researchers at the University of Washington put this to the test in 2006. They studied 241 adults with major depression and compared three treatments: behavioral activation, regular talk therapy, and antidepressants. For the people who were most severely depressed, behavioral activation matched the drugs. It beat the talk therapy. A 2014 review of more than 1,500 patients across 26 trials backed up the result. Physical work like bricklaying does something extra on top of this. It crowds out rumination, the looping bad thoughts that grind people down during the worst stretches of depression. Bricklaying needs both hands and gives feedback brick by brick: each one is straight or crooked. After an hour you can see exactly how much wall you built. No room left for the mental chewing. The line George Mack used in his post, "depression hates a moving target," is good poetry. The science behind it is sharper. Depression hates a brain that has somewhere else to be.

can’t stop thinking about this

The entire RAG industry is about to get cooked. Researchers have built a new RAG approach that: - does not need a vector DB. - does not embed data. - involves no chunking. - performs no similarity search. It's called PageIndex. Instead of chunking your docs and stuffing them into pinecone, it builds a tree index and lets the LLM reason through it like a human reading a book. hit 98.7% on financebench. beats every vector RAG on the leaderboard. no embeddings. no chunking. no vector DB. 100% open source.

Biology is 10+ orders of magnitude more sophisticated than transistor based computers… which includes all of AI today.

i need to read this everyday

someone wrote a 680 page interactive book on cs algorithms

Parenti talks about this in his famous “yellow” lecture. Denial of education and literacy is denial of a full existence, of dignity and opportunity, of one’s very humanity. The less you know about the world, and the less you can learn on your own, the easier you are to control.

“We need to create sober, patient people, who do not despair in the face of the worst horror and who do not get excited about every little thing. Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” - Antonio Gramsci

Paul Horn recorded “Inside the Great Pyramid” inside the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid of Giza in 1976, using the chamber’s natural reverb as the main effect. A highly recommended listen.

@kyleichan If I knew and wrote about it 15+ years ago, what's our govt's excuse for doing nothing in that time? x.com/ideafaktory/st…

Fascinating footage released by the IRGC of a class at the org's staff college in the 90s, where future IRGC leader Hossein Salami teaches a course on asymmetric warfare, teaching officers how to drag out a war with the US by driving up economic costs and political turmoil.

Undercity by Japanese artist Tomoaki Okada.

Xi really said

On this day, 59 years ago, Glauber Rocha's "Terra em Transe" (1967) was released in Brazil.

Literature is humanity’s longest conversation with itself about what it means to be alive. It has been going on for thousands of years. You are not late, you are not unqualified, you are not too much or too little or too broken. Pull up a chair. This conversation was always about you.