Jonny

"everyone wants to live like Americans" @okaythenme is right, and that's the problem. The developing world wants to live how they think Americans live. How Hollywood used to sell it. Because the hardware is easily understood (while the human software isn't), countries are copying the car-centric, deconstructed, inhuman consumer cities that treat nature, beauty, and social connection as optional or inefficient. In the limit, it paves the path to hell. Americans already pay the ultimate price, mentally and physically. Dubai is a bit different but it manifests spiritually. SE Asia is showing it in physical health, though their family/collectivist values keep them saner. SEA's notion of progress looks like an early arc of US consumerism. One that China emulated and now builds regionally but with less taste, more haste, and a fuck more LEDs. My hope is that because SEA countries are building (while the US cannot), they may yet create beautiful, biophilic, circadian-friendly, human-scale places as new tech (energy, AVs, EVs, drones) allows them, and as some US states and hopefully China start to course correct.

@kjut4q @NousResearch sweet, setting mine up rn

I setup Hermes this week. A lot of you said you want to try it out, I'm documenting the whole journey, week by week, what it learns, what it builds for itself, what this agent actually becomes after a month of real use @NousResearch

LLMs will always sound like millennials because no subsequent generation will be literate enough to produce much training text

@MarioNawfal Summoning @zaidkdahhaj

🇨🇳 This might be the most futuristic thing you’ll see today: Artificial skylights that use LED panels + nanotechnology to create hyper-realistic blue skies and sunlight in completely windowless rooms. You can even switch from bright midday sun to warm sunset glow with a remote. We’re now simulating the sky indoors because real windows are apparently too much to ask for in dense cities. This is either peak innovation…or lowkey dystopian. You decide.

@zaidkdahhaj The truth about the sun and light is unfortunately too complex for our now illiterate society. Everything must be said in binary form. Or, we just fix the culture and environment to make it default. Circadian rhythm status-signaling. Biophilic design. Next-gen incandescents.

I do not advocate for sunburns, in the same way that I do not advocate for rupturing an ACL I can’t fucking stand when people assume I advocate for burning and unlimited sun exposure in all circumstances Chimpanzee level thinking

The year is 1950. Your doctor lights a cigarette and tells you smoking is fine. He read it in a study. He is telling the truth about having read it. He does not know, or is not saying, that the study was funded by the tobacco industry. The year is 1958. Your doctor tells you to eat less fat. The evidence is contested. The contestation is not in the public messaging. The food industry has been helpful in clarifying which findings deserve attention. Some researchers who published contradictory data have been quietly defunded. Ancel Keys is on the cover of Time magazine. The year is 1962. Your doctor prescribes thalidomide to your pregnant wife for morning sickness. It has been approved. The FDA gave it the green light in Europe. Twelve thousand children will be born with severe limb malformations before anyone in an official capacity acknowledges the problem. The families are told the drug was safe. The drug was approved. Both of these things remain true. The year is 1972. Your doctor prescribes Valium. Britain is in the grip of a benzodiazepine wave that will last two decades. The dependency risk is known internally. It is not shared. Your doctor is not lying to you. He was not told either. The year is 1999. Your doctor prescribes Vioxx for your arthritis. It is newer than ibuprofen, well-tolerated, and Merck has a study showing it works. Merck also has internal data suggesting it roughly doubles the risk of heart attack. This data will not reach your doctor for four more years. Fifty thousand people are estimated to have died in the interim. Merck eventually settles for 4.85 billion dollars. No criminal charges are brought. The year is 2002. Your doctor prescribes OxyContin. Purdue Pharma trained its sales representatives to tell doctors the addiction risk was less than one percent. That figure came from a letter, not a study. The letter was about patients with terminal cancer on short-term doses in hospital settings. Your doctor is a GP with a patient who has a bad back. Nobody draws a distinction. Nobody is required to. The year is 2008. Your doctor checks your cholesterol. Your LDL is elevated. You are prescribed a statin. Nobody mentions that the number needed to treat for primary prevention is approximately 250. Nobody mentions that the muscle deterioration you'll notice over the next two years is listed as a rare side effect rather than a documented pattern affecting a meaningful percentage of patients. The trial that informed the prescription was funded by the manufacturer. Now it is today. Your doctor has new guidelines. New studies. New consensus. He is confident. He has always been confident. The confidence has never been the problem. The confidence is, in fact, precisely the problem.

@BrianTycangco “Bahala na” mentality refuses to look up at any horizon

Oil shocks alone rarely cause recessions — they act as amplifiers of existing vulnerabilities. And the Philippines is choc-full of vulnerabilities. Be prepared.

A collection of Parisian doors.

an absolute gigabanger from substack

not having a tattoo is the new having a tattoo

>lose hair trading >take Finasteride from Hims >lose ability to get erections >take viagra from Hims unreal business model tbh

Isolation is the price of truth.

you just woke up in 2046 - bryan johnson is sec of health - peptides are a routine part of breakfast - psilocybin is prescribed like ibuprofen - testosterone levels are up 200% - aging is a billing error your doctor can fix - metabolism runs on a subscription model - life expectancy is 150 - average IQ 140 - you pick your biological age at 35 and stay there - vibes are permanently turned up we're getting there sooner than you know, just don't quit yet

@m_goes_distance Conservative but ok 🔥

@bryan_johnson @gregmushen need your take, my man

10 squats beats a 30 min walk. For blood sugar control after a meal, doing 10 squats every 45 minutes outperforms a dedicated 30 min walk by 14%. The mechanism: your quadriceps and glutes are the largest glucose sponge in your body. Activating them repeatedly clears more glucose than one sustained effort. The 30 min walk isn't wrong, it's just not as effective.

Hey so if we banned plastic clothes we would inadvertently kickstart an agricultural renaissance with hundreds of billions of dollars invested into farming and textile mills to replace polyester

Sevilla looks like it was built for people who know how to live

Vietnam again. Brick is not a primitive material, it’s a climate solution. The Bat Trang House wraps a 740m² family home in a porous ceramic facade inspired by the pottery village it sits in. Trees grow through the center. The courtyard pulls air through every floor. Heat and light filtered naturally through jali screens. Working with your climate instead of fighting it. The material existed. The knowledge existed. The decision was all that was missing. More images from this project are in the comments🧵 📍 Bat Trang House, Hanoi, Vietnam 🏛 VTN Architects 📷 Hiroyuki Oki

everything you call reality is basically just the front end

There’s something about a soulless job that makes you crave mindless entertainment, and that’s the combination that slowly kills you

starting a consumer company is basically opting into pain as a lifestyle. you need this weird, almost contradictory stack which is taste + timing, future intuition + present execution, & culture fluency + product rigor. most ppl have like… one of these. maybe two if they’re lucky. oh the worst thing is that there’s no clean feedback loop. ain’t no tidy dashboards telling you you’re right. it’s mostly vibes, weak signals, & ridiculously delayed validation if it comes at all (kinda like being in a toxic situationship). you’re effectively betting on something that doesn’t fully exist yet, using instincts you can’t quite articulate, in a market that will happily ignore you until it suddenly doesn’t. this is one of the most asymmetric games you can play but also one of the least coherent while you’re in it. i think of it as playing a video game in hall of fame difficulty with no tutorial & half the UI missing.