P͎e͎t͎e͎ ͎D͎a͎k͎i͎n͎

@Simon_Ingari A consultant is someone you pay to use your watch to tell you the time then keeps the watch

Wife explaining her husband's job to her close friend. Wife: "He sells software to companies." Her friend: "Oh nice, like apps?" Wife: "No. Big software. For running whole businesses." Friend: "Oh, like Microsoft?" Wife: "No. A German company. SAP." Friend: "What's SAP?" Long pause.↓↓↓

@jaynitx Drivel post about a lecture predicated on a false premise (that poor kids are dragged up, rich kids are not). Don't waste your time, keep scrolling.

In 1972, a Stanford psychologist gave 4-year-olds a choice. "One marshmallow now or wait 15 minutes and get two." Rich kid waits. Poor kid eats it immediately. For 50 years, psychologists said this proved poor kids lack self-control. Wrong. Poor kids learned that promises get broken. The second marshmallow isn't coming. Professor Jiang Xueqin spent 50 minutes explaining why the poor kids are the rational ones: The psychologist was named Walter Mischel. He put a marshmallow in front of 4-year-olds and said: "You can have it now, or wait and get two." He tracked them for decades. The kids who waited did better at everything. His conclusion: success means delayed gratification. Long-term planning. Self-control. So educators built curricula around it. Teach kids self-control, resilience, self-assessment. They'll succeed. It didn't work. "If you take a bad student and teach him self-control, resilience, and self-assessment, the student doesn't actually get better." The reason is simple: correlation does not equal causation. Successful people wake up at 4am. But waking up at 4am won't make you successful. If you're successful, you wake up early because you're motivated. If you're successful, you have self-control because your environment rewards it. The traits don't cause success. Success causes the traits. Here's what actually determines success: "We know for a fact that rich people are much more likely to succeed than poor people. School doesn't really matter. If your parents are rich, you'll be successful. If your parents are poor, you will not." The difference starts with parenting. A rich kid touches a hot stove. The parent says: "You made a mistake. Don't worry about it. Let me explain why fire is dangerous. You could burn yourself. We'd have to go to the doctor." A poor kid touches a hot stove. The parent says: "Don't you ever do that again or I'll beat the crap out of you." Same lesson. Completely different worldview. The rich kid learns: the world is safe. I am respected. Adults explain things to me. The poor kid learns: the world is scary. I must fear authority. Don't ask questions. There's another difference. Rich parents keep promises. Poor parents can't. "Next week we'll go to Thailand." Next week, you go to Thailand. "Next week we'll go to McDonald's." But the paycheck isn't enough. "Sorry, we can't go anymore." Rich parents offer stability. Poor parents can only offer volatility. Now go back to the marshmallow test. "If you believe the teacher will keep his promise, you won't eat that marshmallow. If you think the teacher is lying, you will eat it." If you're a poor kid, you've learned that promises get broken. Adults lie. The second marshmallow probably isn't coming. So you eat the first one. That's not lack of self-control. That's rational decision-making. "Poor kids are not stupid. Poor kids are rational. They're responding to the circumstances they live in." The same logic applies to resilience. "The idea of resilience is that you believe the world will help you. If you're rich and you fail, someone will help you get up. If you're poor and you fail, that probably tells you that you shouldn't be doing this." Why try again when trying again has never worked? And self-assessment? "If you're a poor child who lives under a lot of stress, it's hard to be self-reflective. Because if you look back at yourself, all you think about is your pain and your stress." Here's the deeper structure. "As a poor person, if you want to survive, you have to obey authority. As a rich person, you maximize your outcome by negotiating with others." Poor parents command their children because that's what the world will demand. Obey the police. Obey the boss. Don't talk back. Rich parents teach their children to debate, argue, negotiate. Because that's their game. "From day one, rich kids know they're playing a different game." Here's something stranger. 500 students took an IQ test. Then they guessed their ranking. The top 5% thought they were top 20%. The test was easy for them, so they assumed it was easy for everyone. The bottom 5% thought they were average. "People who are stupid lack the capacity to know they're stupid." This is the Dunning-Kruger effect. And it explains why the most confident people are often the least competent. "This helps explain why the world is why it is. Often the people in power are stupid. They don't know they're stupid. They were confident." Can poor kids escape? "Yes. But it means leaving your community. You have to be extremely individualistic. Very ambitious. High risk tolerance. Most people don't have that." The professor is one of them. "I'm a poor kid who succeeded. My father was a dishwasher. But I left Canada for the United States. I got lucky." "You can work as hard as you want, but the chances are against you. It takes luck. And that's often the exception to the rule, not the rule itself." Here's what he wants you to understand: When we see differences in success, our default explanation is differences in ability or effort. We forget that a poor kid eating the marshmallow isn't weak. He's learned that waiting doesn't pay. We forget that a poor kid giving up isn't lazy. He's learned that no one's coming to help. We refuse to admit that the traits we associate with success are products of environment, not causes of it. The marshmallow test is about measuring childhood, not measuring character.

@MercuriusFilius Just look in the boxes. The rules don't prohibit it, not do they state the boxes are closed. If the interviewer says, they're closed and you can't look, ask them to show where it says that. This is a test of critical thinking.

How would you answer this common Goldman Sachs interview question?

@rainstormblue 3m minus 2 dogs = 2m. Now over to you

i have a PhD in maths from the university of oxford and i can’t solve this

@nzfirst Invest in a teleprompter @nzfirst. @winstonpeters fumbling around looking at notes and losing eye contact with the crowd is so 20 years ago.

Winston Peters: Massive debt. Massive immigration. Massive increases in crime. This is Chippy's record.

@nikitabier It's not the size of the wand but the skill of the magician

The Internet was a mistake

Actually me watching Claude solve a complex business problem by wilfully ignoring clearly articulated architectural preferences.

Claude watching me write code manually after I hit the daily limit

@JudoIsBetter Blue could've had him with Yoko Wakare just hadn't built the muscle memory to corkscrew

This is one for the history books, legendary counter 🔥

.@XamanWallet social engineering scam to be aware of.

Everyone's using AI to polish their CV now. So if everyone's doing it, where's the advantage? That old saying about rising tides lifting all boats? It's nonsense. Some boats are chained to the seabed. Others have holes in them. The tide doesn't care. Same with the job market. Basic AI tools rearrange your words, sprinkle in some keywords, and spit out something that looks like everyone else's application. You're not standing out. You're blending in. The real differentiator isn't the technology. It's what makes you, you. Your quirks. Your approach. The way you actually work and think and solve problems. That's the X factor no algorithm can manufacture from thin air. It has to come from somewhere real. 👉At Promana People, we reckon the smartest thing AI can do is help you articulate what's already there. Not invent a fictional version of you.

The @grok (grok.com) Projects interface does not work for me, at all. I added a docx and an html file, first file via the "instructions" interface (docx) and then (html) via the "Files" interface. The "Sources" shows no files and when I edit the "Instruction" the only thing I see is the basic text I entered into the provided textarea during initial project setup. Grok then tells me there are no files (tries to list them cannot find them, has no clue what the content of them is about, suggests simply attaching them to EACH chat as the project evolves). But hey, there's Grok Imagine now, so who cares?

@elonmusk Ability to superimpose images or videos I to scenes, for example "take my screen recording and create a scene showing a laptop with that recording faithfully on it"

Grok Imagine is improving super fast! What are the highest priority improvements you want? Please reply below.

@PlanetOfMemes @grok give your estimate on how many tonnes of snow are pressing down on the structure of each of the three buildings covered by the most snow.

Frankly I think it'd be a good thing if NZ was out too. The last time this country grew a pair was over nukes, under David Lange and ever since then it's been vassal, vassal, vassal while we wither economcally and die slowly on the vine. Qui bono from five eyes?

@elonmusk And Grok is way easier to pronounce than LMGTFY, which is so neat

Grok it

More upgrades that you can shake a stick at. That was our 2025. Building earnestly for #coaches and #jobhunters. linkedin.com/pulse/whats-xm…

@TheProjectUnity What's with the chalky marking on the stone? It looks recent (why not tag beside it instead).

I went DEEP DOWN into a pretty sketchy looking archeological dig, high up in the Andes Mountains, at one of the most incredible megalithic sites in the world, with a 4K camera in hand, to show you evidence that challenges our narratives for ancient history!

@sciencegirl Jupiter

What would you name this cat