nesung

@haugejostein China looks at the US as the US looks at Europe

I've now visited three provinces and two municipalities in China, and based on what I've seen, there's no clear gap in quality of life between the West and China. Some things are generally better in the West: air quality, real wages, work-life balance. Some things are generally better in China: infrastructure, urban modernity, safety. Overall, the gap that many Westerners assume exists has largely closed.

@Dad_2_The_Bone fresh baked vanilla pastry, sesame oil

What is your favorite smell? And you can’t say bacon, that’s too easy... Mine is gasoline. Weird. I know.

@bluewmist ice dispenser

What is something relatively cheap that improves your life by 100%?

when you look back from the future, hollywood's largest blunders will be 1. writer's strike that tanked production and killed off so many below the line jobs 2. opposing netflix taking over wb, letting it end up somewhere way way worse

this is like modern bureaucracy, tax laws, democracy, or any institution we have. keep amending with more and more stuff instead of a complete overhaul.

Sinatra in Paradise(Hulu) is super-EA-coded imo, and i don't know if the EA folks will take this as a jab or a compliment.

@keachhagey or just EAmaxxing

It’s never been entirely clear why Dario and the other Anthropic co-founders left OpenAI. I set out to find out.

@kylascan great read. younger gen in korea is resorting to exactly what you said, control over the one thing left they can control, their bodies. no sex, no babies, cause no money, but weights/running is their thing now. instant gratification sure, but at least they're more healthy.

We've built an entire economy around selling people the feeling of control through bets, hacks, subscriptions, and optimization. But the model only works if people stay desperate. The worse things get, the better the pitch works. New essay on control and agency, financial nihilism, belief markets, the manosphere, and spectacle during war.

@WSJ nearsightedness permeating the replies

Student visas for Africa’s best and brightest were canceled by the Trump administration, leaving empty seats and broken dreams. “A punch to the heart,” said one woman who lost her scholarship. on.wsj.com/3Pwmprd

@MattZeitlin much easier to get noticed when you're a writer/director. it's hard to debut solely as a director (unless you have a writer partnered with you). nolan, coogler, etc all came up as writer/director, so are sticking to it.

it's interesting how big name, oscar-nominated director types virtually always direct their own scripts (nolan, coogler, etc). there's real artistry in being a hired gun and bringing your own distinctive style to someone else's script, that's what auteur theory is really about

is AI just improv? "yes and"ing everything

@NextBestPicture 1. Parasite 2. Nomadland 3. Anora 4. OBAA 5. Green Book 6. EEAAO 7. Moonlight 8. Oppenheimer 9. CODA . . . 10. The Shape of Water

How would you rank the last ten #Oscar Best Picture winners? 2016: Moonlight 2017: The Shape Of Water 2018: Green Book 2019: Parasite 2020: Nomadland 2021: CODA 2022: Everything Everywhere All At Once 2023: Oppenheimer 2024: Anora 2025: One Battle After Another

@lhfang lol banger

No matter how many people are killed by Israel, how many hospitals it bombs, how many Palestinians live under racial apartheid, how many countries it invades — many U.S. pundits will claim it’s an island of western values simply bc they have a gay pride parade.

@Chris_arnade not that it's important, but in my neck of the woods it was always more coffee than tea (since the 90s). in the era you mentioned the preference did change from instant (da bang style, with sugar and non-dairy creamer) to espresso based, mostly americanos.

People are pointing out I’m in a McDonald’s — yes I’m trolling but also, McDonald’s (and Starbucks) where highly influential in changing Korean preference to coffee from tea, something that happened dramatically in very early 2000s The book Golden Arches East, talks about these changes across the region — for instance how McDonald’s opening in Hong Kong changed a lot of the local culture— especially towards sanitation & queuing — same here in Korea. The coffee cafe culture you see here now is very different from the prior tea houses (da bangs)

@VitalikButerin we have friends everywhere ethos

Over the past year, many people I talk to have expressed worry about two topics: * Various aspects of the way the world is going: government control and surveillance, wars, corporate power and surveillance, tech enshittification / corposlop, social media becoming a memetic warzone, AI and how it interplays with all of the above... * The brute reality that Ethereum seems to be absent from meaningfully improving the lives of people subject to these things, even on the dimensions we deeply care about (eg. freedom, privacy, security of digital life, community self-organization) It is easy to bond over the first, to commiserate over the fact that beauty and good in the world seems to be receding and darkness advancing, and uncaring powerful people in high places are making this happen. But ultimately, it is easy to acknowledge problems, the hard thing is actually shining a light forward, coming up with a concrete plan that makes the situation better. The second has been weighing heavily on my mind, and on the minds of many of our brightest and most idealistic Ethereans. I personally never felt any upset or fear when political memecoins went on Solana, or various zero-sum gambling applications go on whatever 250 millisecond block chain strikes their fancy. But it *does* weigh on me that, through all of the various low-grade online memetic wars, international overreaches of corporate and government power, and other issues of the last few years, Ethereum has been playing a very limited role in making people's lives better. What *are* the liberating technologies? Starlink is the most obvious one. Locally-running open-weights LLMs are another. Signal is a third. Community Notes is a fourth, tackling the problem from a different angle. One response is to say "stop dreaming big, we need to hunker down and accept that finance is our lane and laser-focus on that". But this is ultimately hollow. Financial freedom and security is critical. But it seems obvious that, while adding a perfectly free and open and sovereign and debasement-proof financial system would fix some things, but it would leave the bulk of our deep worries about the world unaddressed. It's okay for individuals to laser-focus on finance, but we need to be part of some greater whole that has things to say about the other problems too. At the same time, Ethereum cannot fix the world. Ethereum is the "wrong-shaped tool" for that: beyond a certain point, "fixing the world" implies a form of power projection that is more like a centralized political entity than like a decentralized technology community. So what can we do? I think that we in Ethereum should conceptualize ourselves as being part of an ecosystem building "sanctuary technologies": free open-source technologies that let people live, work, talk to each other, manage risk and build wealth, and collaborate on shared goals, in a way that optimizes for robustness to outside pressures. The goal is not to remake the world in Ethereum's image, where all finance is disintermediated, all governance happens through DAOs, and everyone gets a blockchain-based UBI delivered straight to their social-recovery wallet. The goal is the opposite: it's de-totalization. It's to reduce the stakes of the war in heaven by preventing the winner from having total victory (ie. total control over other human beings), and preventing the loser from suffering total defeat. To create digital islands of stability in a chaotic era. To enable interdependence that cannot be weaponized. Ethereum's role is to create "digital space" where different entities can cooperate and interact. Communications channels enable interaction, but communication channels are not "space": they do not let you create single unique objects that canonically represent some social arrangement that changes over time. Money is one important example. Multisigs that can change their members, showing persistence exceeding that of any one person or one public key, are another. Various market and governance structures are a third. There are more. I think now is the time to double down, with greater clarity. Do not try to be Apple or Google, seeing crypto as a tech sector that enables efficiency or shininess. Instead, build our part of the sanctuary tech ecosystem - the "shared digital space with no owner" that enables both open finance and much more. More actively build toward a full-stack ecosystem: both upward to the wallet and application layer (incl AI as interface) and downward to the OS, hardware, even physical/bio security levels. Ultimately, tech is worthless without users. But look for users, both individual and institutional, for whom sanctuary tech is exactly the thing they need. Optimize payments, defi, decentralized social, and other applications precisely for those users, and those goals, which centralized tech will not serve. We have many allies, including many outside of "crypto". It's time we work together with an open mind and move forward.

so many ret*arded people having over a million followers (even if they're bots) doesn't bode well for humanity

can never get used to the glaring lack of shame in american culture

@kaitlancollins first name for a last name guy should sit this one out

Whoa >

actually talking about Justin Herbert

so the gala is basically the nba dunk contest