Jonathan Stoop

Nobody wants to hear it, but the US youth soccer developmental system and the changes that were made a decade ago are working very well. It’s the first time in history where there are legitimately 10+ US prospects with world class potential rather than relying on one golden egg

DISTANCE COVERED - 2026 FIFA WORLD CUP: FULL TOURNAMENT UPDATE 48 teams and 104 matches analyzed: - All matches from the group stage through the final - Team distances standardized per 90 minutes to account for extra time - Adjustments for periods played following red cards QUESTION: Did total distance covered - walking, jogging, running and sprinting - have a meaningful association with tournament success at the 2026 FIFA World Cup? RESULT: No meaningful relationship.

The paradox of LLM-curated personal knowledge bases is that the personal knowledge worth capturing - intuition, pattern recognition, taste - lives below articulation and is not AI-readable. In order for knowledge to be personalized, it must be curated by you. Otherwise, it is simply a research wiki. Only you can fill that gap via writing. It cannot be outsourced. Writing is thinking. Automation cannot think you like unless it operates from a model of your knowledge architecture. Zettelkasten methodology is higher friction than instructing an agent to collect and curate knowledge but the resulting knowledge base is of much higher quality because it is modeled on your implicit knowledge made legible via writing. Essentially, writing down your thinking is building autonomous extensions of your intelligence. Agents aren’t just retrieving knowledge - they reason from a shaped perspective modeled on your idiosyncratic curation profile.

One pattern I find useful for working with LLMs is a nice long ramble session. Sometimes the LLM needs more bits to understand what you're trying to achieve, but you're too lazy to type them. In these cases I like to lean back, switch to /voice and just ramble for like 10 minutes, total mess, anything goes, full stream of consciousness. Sometimes I declare it up top, something like "switching to speech recognition sorry for any typos...". Sometimes I turn it into a small interview of a few turns. But I find that the LLMs are somehow very good at reconstructing long incoherent rambles and often their echo of your own tangle of thoughts comes out quite a bit cleaner than what you started with. The result is that you improve the mind meld and have to correct things less from that point on.

In case you're wondering why America will never be in the World Cup finals, it's because if a young athlete with the speed and agility of Lamine Yamal grew up in America, he'd be playing wide receiver at a college like LSU and then in the NFL like Ja'Marr Chase.

🇯🇵 J League to Europe confirmed transfers 26/27 (so far): 🇧🇪 Ryotaro Araki - Kashima → STVV 🇧🇪 Koki Ando - Mito → Antwerp 🇵🇹 Sota Matsunaga - Urawa → Oliveirense 🇩🇪 Ota Yamamoto - Reysol → RB Leipzig 🇪🇸 Ryunosuke Sato - FC Tokyo → Valencia 🇩🇪 Zento Uno - Shimizu → Gladbach 🇧🇪 Ken Masui - Nagoya → Kortrijk 🇪🇸 Kazunari Kita - Kyoto → Real Sociedad 🇩🇪 Takato Yamamoto - Gamba → Dortmund 🇧🇪 Nelson Ishiwatari - Cerezo → STVV 🇪🇸 Taisei Miyashiro - Vissel Kobe → Las Palmas 🇧🇪 Tsubasa Kasayanagi - V-Varen → Patro Eisden 🇩🇪 Taisei Abe - V-Varen → Holstein Kiel 🇫🇷 Sota Nakamura - Sanfrecce → Le Havre

Here's my suggestion for improving the offside rule: Widen the line used to draw offside to marginally increase the buffer for what counts as level with the last defender. This absorbs the toenail decisions with minimal disruption to general play.

So obviously baseball is a series of discrete, binary events. Soccer has much less of this But it got me curious, and maybe someone at an AI lab knows the answer, at the very deepest levels of the universe, are things more digital and binary, or is it more continuous flow?