Maksim Stepanenko

@nabeelqu you might find this interesting re: powerful myth and tolkien scholars-stage.org/on-the-tolkien…

Notable that the two most powerful original myths of the last 100 years -- Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter -- were both written by devout Christians.

2025 in books. The Death of Ivan Ilyich stuck with me the most this year. Maybe the best Tolstoy work, though I also do love War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Trilogy by Jon Fosse is great, made me want to re-read his Septology. His prose has a very cozy and meditative quality for me. Russian poetry is unmatched, if you can read it in the original. The language just offers much more to play with than English.

@nabeelqu Great essay! The long, multi-clause sentences was one of my favorite parts of reading Proust. Very similar feeling to holding a codebase in your memory while coding.

Ok, wrote a new essay, on the experience of reading Proust: nabeelqu.co/on-reading-pro…

Thomas Mann on social media.

Great opportunity for educators who dream of building their own schools.

@kevinakwok thought of you when i saw this

Really enjoying a talk and wondering if there were any signs I would

@alive_eth Good post! The framing is very similar to Iain McGilchrist’s left brain vs right brain amazon.com/Master-His-Emi…

There are two modes of thinking: Open and Closed. Most founders get stuck in closed mode. The great ones master both. But there's good news: It's possible to learn Open Mode.

@gauravahuja @MichaelDell love the design! congrats 🙌

Today we begin the first 100 Year Conversation with @MichaelDell. A project to capture timeless wisdom from leaders who have built institutions that endure. At the heart of the work is one question: How do you build something that lasts 100 years? Few founders have endured through four eras of technology: PC, Internet, Mobile/Cloud, and now AI. Michael Dell is one of them ↓

Seems like @OpenAI shipped some version of this. Excited to try out Pulse.

I recently learned that the novelist, Cormac McCarthy, spent several years at the Santa Fe Institute helping scientists write papers. His advice was condensed into a brief Nature column. The first three points, and some of the final points, are really good. (h/t @eryney_ok)

@simonsarris @sdw Here are a few more not as well-known microroasters that have excellent coffee: - hydrangea.coffee - lucienne.coffee - thoughtfulcoffee.co

Time to drink as Sebastiaan @sdw does out west (thank you)

@mirceap @BrainCo_AI @ClemensMewald @d_ashton_ @revant_kapoor @moh congrats!

Excited to announce @BrainCo_AI coming out of stealth! Honored to co-found this with the best team I’ve ever worked with, including @ClemensMewald @d_ashton_ @revant_kapoor @moh and many other talented folks. AGI may get the headlines, but deploying AI across healthcare, energy, retail & governmental services is what changes lives.

team is growing 🌳 very proud of the folks we have assembled at @operatordotxyz so far. yi is a beast!

@jorilallo yeah but do you have your own browser?

I think we’re grown up now, time to get the big players in with extended teams

I wanted to read Henry Kissinger’s 400 page undergraduate thesis (it has an incredible first page), but really didn’t feel like dealing with a scanned PDF that’s annoying to read on a phone without constantly zooming and panning. So I decided to convert it to a nice markdown format using OCR and LLMs. Then I thought it would be nice to fix the footnotes and get rid of the page breaks and to fix the line breaks and other things like that. I was already working on some other coding projects, so I had the idea of loading up the draft markdown file in Claude Code and having it work on fixing these issues using a swarm of 20 sub-agents, which worked well. Then I thought it would be cool to link to the full sources for all the many references on sites like the Internet Archive or Project Gutenberg, so I had another swarm of sub-agents do a ton of searches to track the links down and insert them into the footnotes and bibliography. Then I figured that I might as well run it through my mind-map generator and summarization code to see what it comes up with, so I tried that. But now I had a few files to present, so needed some kind of index page. So I asked Codex with GPT-5 to whip up a slick looking web page to present the stuff nicely, which it did a yeoman’s job with. Note that I was already working with these tools in a bunch of other sessions on other projects, so my work here was occasionally giving some instructions to the coding agents and letting them crank away. I really didn’t spend much active time on this! Anyway, the net result is clearly the premier way in the world today to consume Henry Kissinger’s undergraduate thesis electronically. I’ll post the link in the next tweet to avoid getting punished by the algorithm. As for the thesis itself, it’s wild how erudite he was as a young man, and also what a great writer he was. And even more impressive considering that English was his second language. The thesis is basically him trying to come to grips with, and to mentally organize in an internally consistent way, a vast swath of Western thought. From what I’ve read so far, I think he did a pretty good job. Incidentally, his thesis is the reason Harvard changes the rules to limit the undergrad honors thesis to a maximum of 35,000 words. Good thing they didn’t apply this silly limit to Henry!

Wonderful profile of Cormac McCarthy through his personal library. Didn't know he was such a big fan of Wittgenstein and so into menswear. True polymath.

@m_atoms nice! congrats on the launch, looks great

@mksm I have good news!

this is so great! hope it keeps expanding to more cities, and beyond