Will

Alexa is actually usable now with Alexa+. You can redirect it, you can ask for specifics, etc. Probably should have switched my home automation over awhile ago, but TBH they kinda caught up.

Gritty has once again thrown a penguin off of the upper level

Just found out that on 9/11, when the United States shut its airspace, 38 planes got diverted to a tiny town in Atlantic Canada called Gander, Newfoundland. The town’s population at the time was around 10,000 people. Overnight, 6,700 strangers arrived. The population nearly doubled in a few hours. Apparently the town just opened up. Schools, churches, and community halls were turned into sleeping areas. Bus drivers who had been on strike came off the picket lines to shuttle passengers. Pharmacies filled prescriptions for free. The ice rink at the community centre became a giant fridge because there was so much donated food. People invited strangers into their homes for showers, meals, and a bed. The passengers were only there for four days. Twenty-five years later, many of them are still in touch with their Newfoundland hosts. One flight raised money for a scholarship fund for kids in Gander. It started at 15,000 US dollars and has since paid out over a million dollars to local students. A musical was made about it called Come From Away. It ran on Broadway for five years. When a reporter asked one of the Newfoundland women why they did it, she said, “You don’t turn your back on people in need.”

In The Office writers were told to make the craziest opening scene of the show for this episode so people wouldn’t change the channel right after Super Bowl. An initial wild idea was Jim losing Pam in a poker game, inspired by a French film. But instead they came up with fire drill episode. The cat gag was elaborate and expensive. They used two real identical cats (one thrown up, one dropped down) with trainers in the ceiling. $12,000 custom stuffed replica was made as backup. No animals were harmed; trainers limited takes to protect the cats’ careers Filming the fire drill took 1.5 days due to all the physical comedy and stunts. The cast’s genuine panic helped because the chaos was more intense than expected. It was the most-watched episode of the series

Tonight is the 251st anniversary of Paul Revere’s midnight ride. If he were to make the same journey from Boston to Lexington today, he could stop at 7 Dunkin locations. (via Reddit)

@useblacksmith 🍎

2-4x faster builds across the board, almost here

Elon Musk on why the smartest people drop out of college: "You don't need college to learn. Learn stuff. Everything is available basically for free. You can learn anything you want for free. It is not a question of learning." Musk explains what college actually provides: "There is a value that colleges have, which is seeing whether somebody can work hard at something, including a bunch of annoying homework assignments, and still do their homework, and kind of soldier through and get it done. That's the main value of college. And also, you probably want to hang around with a bunch of people your own age for a while instead of going right into the workforce. So I think colleges are basically for fun and to prove you can do your chores. But they're not for learning." On hiring at his companies: "There is a requirement of evidence of exceptional ability. I don't consider going to college evidence of exceptional ability. In fact, ideally you dropped out and did something. Obviously, Gates is a pretty smart guy, he dropped out. Jobs was pretty smart, he dropped out. Larry Ellison, smart guy, he dropped out. Obviously not needed." Musk shares how education should work: "Generally, you want education to be as close to a video game as possible. Like a good video game. You do not need to tell your kid to play video games; they will play video games on autopilot all day. If you can make it interactive and engaging, you can make education far more compelling and far easier to do." He challenges the current system: "You really want to disconnect the whole 'grade level' thing from the subjects. Allow people to progress at the fastest pace that they can, or are interested in, in each subject. It seems like a really obvious thing." Musk criticizes traditional teaching: "Most teaching today is a lot like vaudeville. Somebody's standing up there lecturing to you. They've done the same lecture several years in a row. They're not necessarily all that engaged. That lack of enthusiasm is conveyed to the students; they're not very excited about it. They don't know why they're there. 'Why are we learning this stuff?' We don't even know why. A lot of things people learn, probably there's no point in learning them, because they never use them in the future." On whether university is necessary: "A university education is often unnecessary. That's not to say it's unnecessary for all people. But I think you learn about as much, the vast majority of what you're going to learn there, in the first two years. And most of it is from your classmates. If the goal is to start a company, I would say no point in finishing college." Musk started his own school for his kids: "I created a little school. It's small, only 14 kids now, and it'll have 20 in September. It's called Ad Astra, which means 'to the stars.'" He explains what makes it different: "There aren't any grades. There's no grade one, grade two, grade three. Not making all the children go in the same grade at the same time, like an assembly line. People are not objects on an assembly line. That's a ridiculous notion. Some people love English or languages. Some people love math. Some people love music. Different abilities at different times. It makes more sense to cater the education to match their aptitudes and abilities." Musk shares a key principle: "It's important to teach problem-solving, or teach to the problem, not to the tools. Let's say you're trying to teach people about how engines work. A more traditional approach would be: 'We're going to teach you all about screwdrivers and wrenches. You're going to have a course on screwdrivers, a course on wrenches.' This is a very difficult way to do it." He offers a better approach: "A much better way would be: 'Here's the engine. Now let's take it apart. How are we going to take it apart? Oh, you need a screwdriver, that's what the screwdriver is for. You need a wrench, that's what the wrench is for.' And then a very important thing happens: the relevance of the tools becomes clear." The result: "It seems to be going pretty well. The kids really love going to school. I think that's a good sign. I hated going to school when I was a kid; it was torture. The fact that they actually think vacations are too long, they want to go back to school. Weird, I know." Musk reframes what education really is: "If you think about it, what is education? You're basically downloading data and algorithms into your brain. And it's actually amazingly bad in conventional education. It shouldn't be this huge chore. The more you can gamify the process of learning, the better."

NEW: The man accused of throwing a Molotov cocktail at the home of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in San Francisco’s Russian Hill neighborhood is 20-year-old Alejandro Daniel Moreno-Gama. By @jesssmflores sfchronicle.com/crime/article/…

Violence is not the way. Do not do this. I'm glad Sam and his family weren't hurt.

@ChrisJBakke Try being a hardware startup. Then you get to add component shortages in 2020, inventory overhang in 2022, tariff chaos in 2024, and memory prices going through the roof in 2026.

Neuralink enables those who have lost the ability to speak to speak again

This attack on his family is horrifying and wrong on so many levels. Hope whoever did this is brought to justice.

a moving man will meet his luck 🥀

Why are you here? "We're going back to the fucking moon, that's why." The kids are ok.

Honestly this would be more impressive if the time delay was a result of technology not being good enough. We’ve had the tech, and the brains to build it. Politics always got in the way.

Hey, saw this making the rounds and wanted to clear things up from our side. @raycast wasn't involved in this. We didn't pay GitHub or have any ad arrangement with Copilot. What happened is that someone on the GitHub team included a tip mentioning Raycast in Copilot pull requests, purely because they use and like the product. These tips were originally meant to only show up in PRs created by Copilot to help developers get more out of the agent. A bug caused them to also appear in human-created PRs when someone mentioned Copilot and asked it to make changes, which understandably raised eyebrows. GitHub have already fixed this on their side and I believe there was no ill intent here, just an unfortunate confluence of events.

What I see in cybersecurity: AI has re-invigorated an industry that was largely stale for the past ten years. Complete new green field. Changes everything. New innovation happening everyday. Need to adapt or be left behind. This reminds me of the early 2000s, it’s exciting, addicting, and it’s going to be fun as hell.

Incredible that it was only 66 years from the first controlled, powered flight to landing on the Moon!

The data on neurodivergent workers is so lopsided it looks like a typo. JPMorgan Chase ran an Autism at Work program and found participants were 90% to 140% more productive than neurotypical employees. With fewer errors. UiPath partnered with AutonomyWorks on AI data labeling and reported neurodivergent associates were 150% more productive than non-neurodiverse talent. Hewlett-Packard integrated neurodivergent professionals into software testing teams and measured a 30% productivity gain. EY reported neurodiverse teams were 1.2 to 1.4x more productive and more accurate than comparable groups. At SAP, a single neurodivergent employee’s solution saved the company $40 million. Now zoom out. 15 to 20% of the global population is neurodivergent. One in five adults. Yet only 22% of autistic adults in the UK are employed. And 73% of neurodivergent people don’t disclose during hiring because they’re afraid of being discriminated against. That means the most productive talent pool in the workforce is also the most underemployed and the most hidden. Karp sees this and is building a pipeline to capture it. Palantir’s Neurodivergent Fellowship pays $110,000 to $200,000 a year. The job posting says outright that neurodivergent individuals will “disproportionately shape the future of America and the West.” A Gartner study projects that one in five Fortune 500 sales organizations will actively recruit neurodivergent talent by 2027. Palantir is two years ahead of that curve. The roster of neurodivergent founders reads like a hall of fame. Branson built Virgin with ADHD and dyslexia. Kamprad founded IKEA and invented the naming system because he couldn’t remember product codes. Musk disclosed Asperger’s on live television. Steve Jobs was dyslexic and dropped out. 40% of self-made millionaires in the UK are dyslexic. People with ADHD are estimated to be up to 500% more likely to become entrepreneurs. Karp himself is dyslexic. He built a $370 billion company. And he’s saying the system that filtered him out, the standardized tests, the credential pipelines, the interview formats designed for neurotypical candidates, is about to become even more obsolete as AI eats every routine cognitive task those systems were built to evaluate. The bet is simple: AI commoditizes average. The people who see patterns no one else sees, who obsess for 14 hours on a problem everyone else quit after 2, who build IKEA’s naming system because the “normal” approach didn’t work for their brain, those are the ones who can’t be replaced by a model. Karp is recruiting them while everyone else is still writing job descriptions that screen them out.

Announcing TERAFAB: the next step towards becoming a galactic civilization twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1…