lewis

James Clear: The ability to bounce back quickly is a key skill in life.

I’m in love with this sentence: “The longer you stay on the wrong train, the more expensive it is to get home.”

“Life is not just eating, drinking, television, and cinema. The human mind must be creative, must be active." - Lee Kaun Yew

"It takes character to sit with all that cash and to do nothing. I didn't get to the top where I am by going after mediocre opportunities." - Charlie Munger

Interestingly, those backups weren't just within European monasteries. Key Roman manuscripts only survived because the Eastern Roman Empire didn't collapse. The Byzantines and the later Islamic world thus enabled the Renaissance. In modern parlance, a decentralized backup preserved Euclid, Ptolemy, and Galen till they could be re-read and appreciated one thousand years later, by a group of Europeans ready to emerge from the Dark Ages. "...as the vast Roman Empire disintegrated, so did appreciation of these precious texts. Christianity cast a shadow over so-called pagan thought, books were burned, and the library of Alexandria, the greatest repository of classical knowledge, was destroyed. Yet some texts did survive, and The Map of Knowledge explores the role played by seven cities around the Mediterranean — rare centers of knowledge in a dark world, where scholars supported by enlightened heads of state collected, translated and shared manuscripts. In 8th century Baghdad, Arab discoveries augmented Greek learning. Exchange within the thriving Muslim world brought that knowledge to Cordoba, Spain. Toledo became a famous center of translation from Arabic into Latin, a portal through which Greek and Arab ideas reached Western Europe. Salerno, on the Italian coast, was the great center of medical studies, and Sicily, ancient colony of the Greeks, was one of the few places in the West to retain contact with Greek culture and language. Scholars in these cities helped classical ideas make their way to Venice in the 15th century, where printers thrived and the Renaissance took root. The Map of Knowledge follows three key texts—Euclid's Elements, Ptolemy's The Almagest, and Galen's writings on medicine—on a perilous journey driven by insatiable curiosity about the world." amazon.com/dp/0385541767

Western civilization has collapsed before. But a few scholars preserved the ideas that once made Rome great. They made a backup, and it did eventually come all the way back. It just took one thousand years.

Sneak peak of a small handful of the evidence from my forthcoming manuscript (summary coming to @palladiummag!) on how there's A LOT of quantitative evidence for the European Dark Ages. There are so many more graphs than these ^^

Yeah, GPT image 2 is *that* good. It’s just so freaking accurate. Image: a 20 person horde raid is fighting Sam Altman in 2004 world of Warcraft style. One shortted.

Playing Mario 64 reverses aging in the brain in trial. Yes: Elderly subjects playing the iconic platformer increased grey matter volume in the brain over 6 months. Those not playing LOST grey matter. Grey matter is the cell body-dense region of the brain. 🍄

It has been much better to own stocks than real estate over the last 50 years. (h/t @Barchart)

I have built a spreadsheet. It has 847 rows. Each row is a community bank in the United States with a market cap below $200 million, a price-to-tangible-book ratio under 0.85, a non-performing loan ratio below 0.4%, and a CEO who has been in the role for at least twelve years. I update it every Sunday from 6 AM to 11 AM while my family attends church without me. I have visited the headquarters of nineteen of these banks in person. I have eaten a complimentary lobby cookie at each one. The cookies are how you can tell. A bank with a good cookie is a bank that respects its depositors. A bank with a stale cookie is a bank that will be acquired within 36 months at a 40% premium. I am never wrong about the cookies. The cookies have never lied to me. The cookies are the only thing left that tells the truth.

Because we get asked a lot. The Technological Republic, in brief. 1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation. 2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible. 3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public. 4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software. 5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed. 6. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost. 7. If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm’s way. 8. Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive. 9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret. 10. The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed. 11. Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice. 12. The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin. 13. No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet. 14. American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war. 15. The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia. 16. We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . . Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn. 17. Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives. 18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within. 19. The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all. 20. The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim. 21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful. 22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what? Excerpts from the #1 New York Times Bestseller The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, by Alexander C. Karp & Nicholas W. Zamiska techrepublicbook.com

Apparently TWOW will be announced soon!

@bitcoinpanda69 Heck ya. I’m just about to hit 100 hours in. What chapter are you on? Haven’t been this hooked on a game in a long time (probably since hollow knight)

Finally decided to pick up Crimson Desert once I learned they have a primitive investment system for your money (always wondered why games didn't do that) It's a beautiful game aesthetically, and, I suspect that once I am past the trillion hour introduction, it might even become enjoyable

Action. Wonder. Adventure. Artemis II has got it all. Don't miss the moment. Our crewed Moon mission will launch as early as April 1. Learn how to watch: nasa.gov/ways-to-watch/

In 1980, Singapore Airlines faced a significant pilot strike. Here’s what Lee Kuan Yew had to say about it.