kasra

there is a revolution taking place in biology before our eyes I spent the past month reading the papers & interviews of @drmichaellevin, and wrote a long-form essay explaining his work and why it's important bitsofwonder.co/p/a-revolution…

@vividvoid absolutely stoked for this

Friends, I'm opening a spiritual center in Boulder! It's called Nameless Mountain, and it's focused on spiritual maturity rather than enlightenment. We're trying to raise $50,000 to cover this year's expenses. Please help build this with us by donating or becoming a member: givebutter.com/nameless-mount…

there is not a company on earth I am rooting for more strongly than anthropic

@EmilMieilica :O hadn't made that connection before

Our intuitions are informed by industrial design which is in turn influenced by cartesianism

@ptr very well put

If you are a creative, diligent, organized software engineer and you are freaking out, take a breath. It is incredibly easy to make software now. So easy that you trivially run out of things you know you want to do. Companies that lack ambition or creativity will do what Square did and lay off staff. But if you are a source of ideas, or the kind of person who knows how to take something vague and play and prototype and specify until you have something interesting, or something shippable, you are worth more than ever before. Companies do NOT want efficiency. They want growth. They reach for efficiency to satisfy investors as growth slows. AI is an "emperor has no clothes" moment for leadership teams. A lot of companies turn out to not have that many ideas, and the sheer time it has taken to build roadmap has hidden their lack of creativity away. The tide is going out on those people. If your value is purely your labor, you're in trouble. There's no room left to earn a living grinding bug reports and feature requests that are well-defined and well-documented. If your value is creativity, clarity, empathy, curiosity, focus, thoroughness, etc. -- you are more valuable than ever. Every company and every leader is going to be clamoring for people like you to help them chart a path forward, because they are running out of ideas. Breathe, spend some time outdoors (it's 70+ in SF!), nurture your creativity, take some risks and put yourself out there with ideas and prototypes and things to try, and we will all get through this together. 💗

@connie_surf so siiick

2026 is for trying again!

@donkcrow v cool thanks for linking!

@kasratweets another local org that does similar things (posting for collab/more free school resources and opportunities reasons, not for competition reasons): bafs.noblogs.org

a few friends and I have been inspired by "self-organized" universities like fractal university in NYC, so we started our own version in SF: cool4school is launching tomorrow, with 20+ classes on topics including character design, the tree of life, board games, and much more

classes will run in the month of february, at a number of venues and community spaces, as well as various friends' living rooms and parks we're really excited for this pilot! you can create an account and sign up for classes tomorrow at cool4.school

WINTER 2026 COURSE CATALOG IS LIVE .... REGISTRATION SATURDAY 10AM JAN 31... FDOS FEB 1ST... cool4.school

@owl_posting @ruth_hook_ a glorious whiteboard session truly

yes! it has, unfortunately, only happened once and it is unlikely to ever occur again. it was a tpot house party that i attended in summer 2022 where i met @ruth_hook_ and @kasratweets for the first time, the latter of whom i drunkenly whiteboarded with for an hour over viruses

there is no greater joy than creating software for yourself and your friends :^) I love making side projects and wanted a lightweight way to share with each other join at inprogress.works - my work in progress app for works in progress!

@ParssaKyanzadeh @kasrak felt the same. insanely good

@kasrak honestly the best "rewind" i've received from any app to date pulling out direct quotes from past brain dumps was a nice touch

In 2025, I wrote 800k words in my notes (War & Peace is 500k words), so manually reviewing wasn't going to happen. But luckily computers understand language now! I spent the past week building this Lookback feature: it reads through all the notes & chats to pull out highlights & insights People use Lightpage in very different ways: as a journal, as a work scratchpad, as a learning notebook, etc. So instead of being prescriptive about the output, I gave the LLM general principles to follow and it turned out pretty well A few screenshots from my lookback:

@bluewmist @shime_sh copypasta

a mistake that cost me 5 years: thinking preparation was progress. reading every book. taking every course. planning every detail. meanwhile, someone dumber than me started badly and figured it out. preparation feels productive but it's often just fear dressed up as strategy. you learn to swim by getting in the water, not by studying water.

you're cool4.school

@YatimaOfKonishi @joshwhiton @ShiningScience check out @juliangough’s work on evolution at the cosmological scale

@joshwhiton @ShiningScience That makes little sense because you need evolutionary pressures in order to develop intelligence. Galaxies and stars are not evolving through natural selection and passing on of information similar to genes. At least not in any way I could possibly imagine.

🚨 This changes everything… The universe may be far more interconnected than previously imagined. Astronomers at the University of Hawaiʻi, analyzing motion data from over 56,000 galaxies, propose that the Milky Way might lie within a gravitational structure ten times the volume of the already immense Laniākea supercluster. This newly suggested region, anchored by the massive Shapley concentration, challenges current models of cosmic structure and extends the boundaries of our mapped universe. The discovery, published in Nature Astronomy, invites a rethinking of how galactic movements are influenced on a colossal scale. The researchers liken the cosmos to a system of rivers and basins, where galaxies flow along gravitational currents shaped by immense attractors. This analogy paints a picture of the universe as a dynamic and interconnected web, with invisible gravitational highways guiding galaxies over billions of light-years. The findings suggest that our current maps may capture just a fraction of a deeper cosmic architecture, hinting at the existence of even larger structures—and perhaps a more unified universe—than science has yet observed. R. Brent Tully et al., “Identification of a Possible Basin of Attraction Beyond Laniākea,” Nature Astronomy.

the extremity of this genre of predictions about the co-evolution of society and AI systems is irksome not only in its overbearing epistemic arrogance but also because it implies nihilism alas I am all too well-acquainted with nihilism, but when it rears its head, we ought to ask

@nopranablem for some reason, I initially read the last sentence as “without so much swaggle”

Why is ACT so based?

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is surprisingly based and underrated

yea, it’s one quote, but in general I do often see teachers describing meditation as transformative for their life, getting them through a dark period, making them happier/more capable, etc etc just because they don’t adopt your particular framing of “my life is 50x better” doesn’t mean that they’re intentionally underselling. there are nuances to the experience (e.g. more porousness/sensitivity) that others have pointed out, which make any “X% better/worse” framing overly reductive imo

@kasratweets @arram @AlexBravo I eventually told him that when I met him and he’s like hm ya I probably should have said that more loudly

I basically think all the dharma teachers are giving pretty good instruction but underselling how good the emptiness is by like 10x at least

@arram @nickcammarata @AlexBravo I'm not sure I buy that they are downplaying it – I remember that clip of Shinzen Young saying he would take one day of his current life over a lifetime of material success or something like that...where do they undersell?

@kasratweets @nickcammarata @AlexBravo I meant for what Nick is saying - that this is wrong or miscalibrated but teachers continue to follow the heuristic of downplaying.