David's Den

@Simberg_Space Nice, I couldn't think of one.

@Thacyline Racquetball...

Soccer, tennis, lacross

@bungarsargon Seriously.

They've graduated from a strongly worded letter to a conference 😂

@peterrhague What is a space archeologist?

“Most of those profits will likely flow to private companies” is a thought terminating cliche here but literally just means “corporation tax will be less than 50%”

@Lgrng0 @ripblackmamba @laraseligman They are willing to make deals all the way to having nuclear weapons. That's why they have the enriched uranium. To make bombs. Not to make deals, not to prove how reasonable they are.

@ripblackmamba @laraseligman I am glad you are so willing to sacrifice 100s of American soldiers from behind your keyboard. Iran was willing to make a deal on their uranium enrichment, but instead of taking the deal, Trump decided to bomb them.

NEW; President Trump is weighing a military operation to extract nearly 1,000 pounds of uranium from Iran, according to U.S. officials, a complex and risky mission that would likely put American forces inside the country for days or longer. wsj.com/politics/natio…

@Chris_arnade Man, I would even go to MacDonalds if they served a teritama here.

Everyone talking about how great Japan is, without mentioning the food. Best cuisine in the world!

@deanwball Their pointing it out hasn't done much good then. Not even when the people in the labs are their friends who know just what they know. This indicates the equal spaciousness of both the dunking and the we-told-you-so's. Hard problems are not solved by pundit theater.

One of the several ironic things about this tweet is that a lot of “EA-adjacent” organizations would say, “yes, it IS clear that poor frontier lab cyber- and operational security are big problems, we have been saying this for years and we are so glad you recognize this!”

@Chris_arnade Great ad. Thanks for sharing.

When I was a kid, Japanese baseball was this weird quirk that only nerds were into — you had to work really hard at knowing who Sadaharu Oh was, and even then, nobody in the US cared. A cool geopolitical story about post-WWII reconciliation, but that was about it. It eventually graduated to being on the radar only because it is where washed-up players went — as the surprisingly good movie Mr. Baseball highlights. But still a joke. That changed with Ichiro, and of course now with Shohei, who has made MLB fun, relevant, and interesting again. Baseball is, certainly globally, as, if not more, Japan-coded than it is US-coded. It is Shohei's sport now more than Babe Ruth's. Never, not once, before 1995 could I ever imagine that Japan would basically save the "American Pastime" from decades of stat-induced irrelevance and boredom. But that is what it has done. Amazingly. Imagine telling that to someone in 1945

@orsonscottcard So fascinating. Thank you.

By mining my own psyche and memories of experiences and readings, I was able to write the novel with NO additional research and development. I wrote the early chapters in a week, getting Ender into Battle School. Then my publisher sent me on a brief signing tour for my novel Saints (published incompetently under a stupid title with an appallingly bad cover). This being before the invention of the laptop computer, I wrote nothing that week. But unconsciously, I was developing Ender's story like mad. I got home and immediately got back to work. I wrote the rest of the novel, including Ender's post-war transformation into the original Speaker for the Dead, in just under three weeks. I printed it out on my NEC Spinwriter and mailed it off to my then-editor at TOR, Harriet McDougal (married to the soon-to-be-famous Robert Jordan).  Tom Doherty, the best publisher possible, would do a superb job of marketing the book, and it got some attention. But I have never spent so little time planning and developing a book as I did with Ender's Game. I'm not sure my haste was the key to its success. Rather, by mining my own life, lifelong study, and easy imagination, things came together to make it the easiest writing job of my life, which could not be repeated.  I have put a lot more preparation into almost every other book I've written. That preparation was never wasted, but neither did it have the strong results of EG. Speaker for the Dead shocked me by winning the same awards — but it never matched Ender's Game’s sales and staying power, and it certainly did not reach the YA audience the way EG did. It wasn't supposed to. It was the grownup book. Ender's Game was, conceptually, an elaborate standalone prologue. I raced through EG to get to Speaker, not realizing at the time that I had struck oil along the way. 3/3

Addendum: How I did it -- once. My only start-quick novel was Ender's Game. I had had some traction with the novelet “Ender's Game,” and I had already committed to its main character as the protagonist of Speaker for the Dead. I needed a novel version of Ender's Game to properly set up Speaker, so readers of the EG novel would be prepared to pick up the story 3,000 years later. (Time dilation in lightspeed flight allowed frequent travelers to live through millennia.) I already knew, from expanding Mikal's Songbird into the novel Songmaster, that you don't novelize a short story by tacking twenty chapters onto the end. If the short story works, you start way earlier, developing characters and situations leading up to the same climax and resolution that worked so well in the short form. (If they did not work well, why are you novelizing it in the first place?) So to set up the story of EG, which began when Ender was given command of his own “army” in the orbiting Battle School, I went back to when he was chosen, and chose, to be taken out of his childhood home at around the age of six. Rigorous testing had led to Ender Wiggin being one of the most promising young recruits (draftees) to be trained to fight the invading hive queens. To show Ender's childhood family, I handled it quickly by putting Ender in my own family, back when there were only three of us kids. In my family, my sister was eldest, and a four-year gap between me and my older brother made us anything but close. So Ender grew up with a hostile older brother and a protective and kindly older sister — both of whom had come close to being drafted themselves. Every vile thing Peter did to Ender, my own brother had done to me. Every in-joke between Ender and Valentine was based on real memories shared with my sister. In this tiny cell, the parents seemed as distant as prison guards, quite unlike my own parents, who were in the main much more nurturing and involved. 1/3 🧵 ➡️

@ElliottBlackwe3 @ParsifalBooks Almost frighteningly good selection. Nice props. And somebody really knows their Dante. Old-time bookseller here, I'm impressed. Please congratulate the buyer for me.

Love supporting small independent bookshops. @ParsifalBooks

@ptpark @WallStreetApes Wtg doing your own research. Respect. Everyone should do this too.

I actually purchased some chocolate bars and warmed them up to see what happens. The Hershey bar, purchased this morning from the Dalhousie station store in Calgary, Alberta didn’t seem to exhibit any rubberiness when heated by my fireplace. I couldn’t reproduce the rubber effect in the video, but maybe it only does that over a small temperature range. Rubbery or not, I prefer dark chocolate. I tasted the Hershey bar and it was edible, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

American shows that Hersheys Chocolate Bars have changed textures “Guys, I don't think chocolate's supposed to look like this. Why is it so like elasticy? — It's like slime — this is fake” Hersheys has made major changes to their formula, including changing replacing cocoa butter with cheaper vegetable oils like palm oil, shea oil and sunflower oil

@StefanFSchubert It's curious. I am surprised we are not more interested in extreme chess capability. Does AI just go off past the human horizon, out of sight, out of mind? What it's like to be an ant beside a human. Fermi paradox solution: why bother visiting ants?

Chess is a really atypical profession. When we watch chess, we don't just care about the objective quality of the moves: we care about them having been decided by a human. By contrast, when we hire a doctor or an accountant we typically just care about the output.

@Thinkwert Um, you can see them?

I had a buddy in college (prone to tall tales) who told me that there were secret sensors embedded in the pavement and if you didn’t pull your car up far enough the light wouldn’t turn green. He was right?? All these years I thought it was just a fantastic tale he told me.

@katieporterca Buying votes, I see. What a useless person.

0% state income tax for California families making under $100,000. That’s thousands of dollars back in your pocket where it belongs. As Governor, I’ll work the issue at both ends—lowering taxes for those who are struggling and raising them on the biggest corporations that can afford to pay.

@AndrewCurran_ A weird cross between the original Star Wars movie poster and the old Soviet propoganda posters extolling workers on their tractors driving into the future! This stuff is silly.

Main character energy.

New Time cover.

@Jordan_W_Taylor Just fascinating. Great article. Thanks especially for the technical details.

@razibkhan Thanks for sharing, I didn't know a perfect score was so rare then. My best friend in high school got a perfect score, back in '74, so that was more special than I knew.

@Chris_arnade @NateSilver538 @mattyglesias Rand in Santa Monica combines a distinctive architectural appearance with functionality. Probably as good esthetically as you going to get.

@NateSilver538 @mattyglesias the industry did evolve from literal labs that needed to be clean, functional, and often secure (military stuff). Not aesthetically complex -- The look is consequently very fitting

@dickclucas It's bad. He can stay stupid longer than California can stay solvent.

I used to think this too but the reality is California would not rationally lower taxes in other areas with the windfall in property taxes. So the net result is they would just light more taxpayer money on fire.

@VerminusM Lol!

In honor of Purim, Trump should make Tucker drive Bibi across Washington while crying, "This is what is done for the man whom the president wishes to reward."