Matthew Robbins

Today I learned the people who make pure silicon are basically the Samurai sword makers and master blacksmiths of our era and that even if China gets Taiwan they wont be able to make chips anywhere near as good as the US can because we have the purest quartz in the world.

Okay, ONE more

@BohuslavskaKate That is the hardest combat patch ever. What does it say??😂

Sir David Attenborough turned 100 today, which technically put him outside LEGO’s classic 4–99 age range. LEGO marked the occasion by making room for him. gearjunkie.com/outdoor/lego-c…

There have been only four Black congressmen elected to the U.S. House from Louisiana since Reconstruction. They’re all in this photo.

It’s time to seriously talk ticks here in the Ozarks. My buddy in Benton County who used to diagnose a couple cases of Alpha-Gal a month—now multiple per day. Everybody’s dog has ehrlichiosis, and highest ER visits ever for rocky mtn tick fever in Arkansas last year.

Just a redneck shit

Fifteen Maps that Changed How We See the Ocean Floor: libraryoflostmaps.com/2026/05/06/fif…

“At the morgue, the babies were brought in with their diapers and blankets and with their hospital ID bracelets still wrapped around their tiny ankles. The pathologists’ findings were like those you would typically see in ailing adults, not newborns.” propublica.org/article/more-p…

You buy a German anvil. It contains 83 moving parts and requires winding twice a day. It's forged from excellent steel, holds tolerances across all three striking faces to within three microns, includes a beautifully indexed horn-adjustment mechanism nobody asked for, and requires a proprietary 11-point spanner should you need to replace the rebound calibration bushing. It runs flawlessly for years, but one day it starts up in limp mode because the onboard anvil-management system detects that it's overdue for its 50,000-strike inspection. You search AliExpress for a Chinese anvil, and are presented with a multitude of offerings from such household-name brands as DUKXJYIBF, HDBTGMXI, AND UEJQIP. They're all priced to within a few pennies of each other, appear completely identical except for the nameplate, and obviously all came out of the same factory. You text your blacksmith friend to ask if they're legit. He tells you he got one like that from KIXJBU a few years ago, and that it's been great and a terrific deal. You thank him, but KIXJBU seems to have folded so you buy the one from UEJQIP. When it arrives, it feels suspiciously light. You scratch it and realize it's iron-plated aluminum. You buy an American anvil. It's five times the price of the competition, but it comes from a brand that your great-grandfather used to love. It comes boxed with a warranty registration postcard, twenty pages of safety instructions, assay certificate, and a regulatory slip which lists its FCC certification and ITAR registration. It looks just like your friend's KIXJBU. There's a "Made In China" sticker on the bottom. You buy a Russian anvil. It arrives coated in cosmoline, wrapped in newspaper from 1974, and weighing 40% more than advertised. The finish looks like it was machined with a shovel. The face is not flat, but somehow this does not matter. You drop it off a truck, accidentally leave it outside for six winters, and use it to straighten a bulldozer blade. It's fine. You buy a Swedish anvil. It comes flat-packed in a long cardboard box with cheerful Neo-Grotesk lettering and a line drawing of a smiling man assembling it with an Allen key. The instructions contain no words, only pictograms showing the anvil face, horn, waist, feet, and 112 identical-looking fasteners. Halfway through assembly, you discover that the pritchel hole was installed upside down, but only because you used peg B17 where you should have used peg B71. Once assembled, it is clean, stable, and works better than it has any right to. You immediately wonder whether you should have bought two. You buy a Japanese anvil. It arrives wrapped in rice paper inside a paulownia box, accompanied by a certificate bearing three generations of signatures and a photograph of the first production example being presented to the Emperor. The face has been hand-polished by a seventy-eight-year-old master whose family has made striking surfaces since the Muromachi period. You are given detailed instructions for oiling it with a cloth folded in a specific way. It is the most beautiful object you own. You never quite work up the nerve to strike it.

One guy. One Navy ship. One file. 1 trillion databases. He built it alone in 2000. And gave it away forever. 🤯 Meet D. Richard Hipp 🇺🇸 > American developer. Born 1961 in North Carolina. > In 2000, working as a contractor on a US Navy destroyer. > Got frustrated with bulky databases that needed servers and setup. > Built SQLite in his spare time ~ a single-file database engine. > No server. No installation. No configuration. Just one file. > 25 years later, every iPhone, Android, Mac, and Windows PC runs SQLite. > Powers Chrome, Firefox, Safari, WhatsApp, iMessage, Skype. > Runs inside Tesla cars and commercial airplanes. 🚀 > Over 1 trillion SQLite databases active worldwide today. > Put the entire codebase in the public domain. Zero royalties forever. > Trillion-dollar companies use his code. He's never charged a cent. > Still maintains it full-time with a tiny team of 3. > Pledged free support and updates until at least 2050. > No VC money. No acquisitions. No spotlight. Just code. Every app on your phone runs his invisible masterpiece. Most engineers build for fame. He built for forever. Database GOAT. 🐐

My contribution to the solar/farm discourse is that solar panels capture about 100x as much usable energy from the sun as corn grown for ethanol, if you include the energy cost of growing corn. Ethanol corn is 40% of all US corn and is literally just there to capture energy from the sun. We have a way of doing that much more efficiently now!

Gas prices as we drove up and down I-71 yesterday: Regular: $4.69 $4.89 $4.79 $4.95 $4.88 $4.68 $4.96 $4.99 $4.95 Diesel: $5.45 $6.29 $6.27 $5.89 $6.29 $6.09 $5.99 $6.28 $6.27 $5.99 Ohioans need relief, and that's why we're fighting to lower costs, tackle corruption and build a state where we can all thrive.

May the 4th be with you. And especially with Amy Poehler.

Ohioans: do not vote for ANY Republican in this state. EVERYTHING that is wrong with Ohio falls at the feet of Republicans because they have been in power forever in this state. They also refuse to honor the will of the voters.

on my trip to colombia's western andes we saw dozens of these cicadas (to the point that a recurring joke was to say "i have a gift" and then hand over a cicada) and it turns out it's an undescribed species

@HSRdirector My dad was a physician. He told all of his patients "Do not STEP onto a ladder after age 65." He had many, many stories of people who were set to enjoy a well earned retirement, slipped on a ladder, and were dead before their next birthday.

The NEW Amtrak Long distance order has been FOIA'd🧵

HOY EN UN NUEVO CAPÍTULO DE: “¿PORQUÉ LOS HOMBRES VIVEN MENOS QUE LAS MUJERES?” 2 hombres cumpliendo el sueño de los otros 4,000,000,000 de hombres que habitamos el mundo