Robert Lersch

@Chris_arnade I am 69 and I endorse this view. What boomers are pissed about is the world is about to pass them by. And they don't understand how math in the form of AI and crypto is take a wrecking ball to their world.

I've written for the last decade about the educational divide in the US, but culturally there is now a large divide between generations — specifically those over sixty versus basically everyone else. The sixty-plus cohort (Boomers which I'm at the very tail end of) have a lot more certainty that they've discovered the Truth — or the high point, and often end point, of many things. From music (rock will always be here), to fashion (why would anyone wear anything but blue jeans), to politics (liberal democracy with emancipation from all forms of obligation as a human Telos). Younger people are much more uncertain and relativistic. They don't accept the claim that it's been solved, and the Boomers' rigidity and religious-like certainty seems to them either laughably naive or arrogantly condescending. The Boomers see everyone else as having fallen away from the path to historical perfection they paved, and are uniformly angry about that. What most of the Boomers miss is that the younger generation is living in the world they built — of hyper-individuality, of smashing of prior norms, and of moral relativism. This post-truth, post-gatekeeping, hyper-partisan world is an endpoint of their worldview, and yet they are angry about it.

@Jason I appreciate the summary as I wouldn't watch the show. Time saver!

tucker on trump x.com/Jason/status/2…

@danfaggella Watch the film '1900' for a depiction of farm workers hating on farm machinery

did this same thing happen when tractors arrived on farms - or when mainframes arrived in the corporate world? like - is this kind of crab-in-bucket phenomenon exist with all tech waves or only with the soft everyone-gets-a-trophy coddled american youths?

@_WinstonS_ @fortelabs Once I realized how easy it was to have Perplexity ( or Grok or name your favorite AI) coach me through working on the command line, these file conversion issues become trivial.

@fortelabs Oh no, some of those things are JSON files! How would we ever convert those to another format? It’s impossible. Won’t somebody think of the children?

I want to debunk the claim that I see a lot around here that Obsidian is "just plain text markdown files" which means "you can take them anywhere and open them with any app" That simply isn't true Yes, maybe the raw text of the notes is markdown, but many other parts cannot be moved elsewhere and opened by other apps: 1. The .obsidian/ directory contains your JSON config with plugins, settings, hotkeys, workspace state, link format, attachment paths – those can't be moved elsewhere 2. Plugin state files – Readwise's path-to-ID map, Templater's settings, Tasks plugin's database, Excalidraw's drawing data – even if plugins can be recreated, these settings cannot 3. .canvas files – JSON, not markdown. They reference notes by path and won't survive a move 4. .base files – JSON-based database/views over your notes. Same path-fragility 5. .excalidraw.md files – markdown wrapper around an Excalidraw JSON blob. Looks like markdown, isn't really 6. The link graph itself – backlinks, graph view, "linked mentions" – all computed from filenames and link references. They survive because the references are in the markdown, but they require Obsidian (or an Obsidian-aware tool) to materialize 7. Plugin-managed folders – Readwise output, Web Clipper output, Daily Notes location, Templates folder. Each is a folder whose contents are owned by an external system tracked in plugin state 8. Sync state – Obsidian Sync, iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive each maintain their own state about what's where and what's been resolved. Move operations interfere with this state 9. Embedded query results – Dataview queries, Tasks queries, Bases queries. The query is in the markdown; the result is computed live and never persisted So technically you CAN move your files elsewhere, but you'd destroy most of what makes them valuable – the graph, the plugin state, the canvases, the embedded queries, the sync state, and any structural intent encoded in folder placement Which means you're just as locked in to Obsidian as any other "proprietary" app, it's just a hidden lock-in that's obscured by inaccurate marketing Saying "Obsidian is just markdown files" is like saying "your house is just bricks" The bricks are real and moveable – but the architecture, plumbing, and wiring aren't bricks, and those are most of what makes the house function

@mattyglesias The tech innovations revealed flaws in institutions that people were unaware of in the past. Hence populists are angry about the flaws. It seems a bit of a stretch to claim that flaws inherent in the old institutions were CAUSED by the tech innovations.

This is pretty well-studied and the rise of the internet has a clear causal impact on the rise of populist parties.

@HamptonPrezcott I knew a guy who was a CFO at company with a big merger business. The M&A work goes lightning fast and older guys could not really cope physically. The big deals would be worked out in a couple days.

A relic of a bygone era. Re-read Den of Thieves recently, and what struck me is that most of the guys running the merger departments at these major investment banks were in their late 30s/early 40s. People that age today are generally stalling out at the VP level.

@EdMorrissey Winchester '73 is really good.

Not sure about underrated, but Hang Em High doesn't get mentioned often enough as one of the best. Silverado may be one of the most fun (and well structured). There Was a Crooked Man is amazing.

@StefanFSchubert Over time this is true, but in life (as in poker) truth-seeking is a compounding behavior. In a single case, you can be right and still lose or be wrong and still win. If most winners over a multi-year time frames use a truth-seeking AI...this will move the needle.

I think AI will make it harder to maintain widespread belief in false but politically convenient views, because: 1) People will increasingly use AI as an arbiter, and refer to it in debates 2) AI will be more truth-seeking and unbiased than human experts

@nic_carter If one is curious, it is a damn good teacher. So can add expertise to your stack. I wish I had it when I was in highschool.

It should be pretty obvious at this point that AI is a "force multiplier" not a "labor substitute". It helps experts be better at things they are already good at. It doesn't let beginners match experts. If you can't write, anything you write with AI will be unmitigated slop. If you aren't a software engineer, anything you vibecode with AI will have security holes and won't be able to scale past a toy demo. If you blindly trust AI to deliver on a research task without knowing the subject matter, you won't be able to fact-check it. There's this weird misconception of AI as something that completely levels the playing field. I don't see it that way at all. There are mathematicians deriving novel lemmas with off-the-shelf models. Normal people can't do that. AI is a tool that makes experts better. It doesn't make everyone into an expert.

@christopherrufo I don't think Musk bought Twitter to shape public opinion. He bought it to feed edge data into xAI for training purposes. The long tail of data on here is far more important than who is on top of the engagement leaderboard

This is correct. Twitter's long-term value is the perception, and, ultimately, the reality, that this is the front page of the news writ large. It should be the place where writers, editors, producers, bookers, policymakers, and artists *have to be* to remain in the discourse. If it doesn't deliver on this at a high level, it will become another irrelevant Boomer slop-feeding machine like Facebook. Generates cash, yes, but doesn't shape elite thought, which is Twitter's most valuable function, and, presumably, why Elon bought it.

@Dispropoganda Interesting post. That said, I don't think the real value of X lies in who runs the most popular accounts. The value lies, in my opinion, in the speed at which topics are debated and corrected. The top players rarely address these issue. AI discussion is X only, for example.

These were the top 20 Twitter accounts with the most engagement in 2021. They were mostly either democrats, or celebrities pushing democrat talking points. Not a single conservative or Republican account among them.

@sflorimm @DarrenTheLi Black Forest in Germany.

@DarrenTheLi only Mistral is making waves. never heard about the other ones.

USA has ChatGPT USA has Grok USA has Claude USA has Gemini USA has Llama USA has Copilot China has DeepSeek China has Qwen China has Ernie China has GLM China has Kimi China has MiniMax Europe has?

@Dillon_Valdez That was kinda my thought.

Unprofitable Rivian is going to somehow scale R2 Rivian’s to be fully autonomous and be RoboTaxi’s like Tesla’s $30,000 Cybercab? Sure

@cremieuxrecueil I am sure one can nit-pick but this data is pretty compelling.

The Dark Ages are visible in basically every metric, no matter how absurd. Here, for example, is the absence of items in the Louvre for the Dark Ages:

@jvisserlabs Speaking of AI fears, payment for agents in BTC on the Lightning Network. lightning.engineering/posts/2026-02-…

As the AI fears continue to disrupt growth companies, I continue to highlight the areas of scarcity in the physical world. CVX vs CRM is now up 77% YTD! This week on my YouTube weekly I will bring up the rise of chemicals and how Polymers are the next stage of GLW optical fiber demand as an AI trade that is about to breakout. For more details after the video go to my site at ai.22vresearch.com

@christopherrufo That presumes NFL football remains the king of the hill as far as entertainment in the US. Movies and TV shows used to be a big deal in the US. Not anymore and celebrity culture is dying with it. Rather than fight move to the future.

The problem with the annual conservative outrage cycle over the Super Bowl halftime show is that it has no impact on the NFL and makes conservatives look weak and left behind. Kid Rock does not change this calculus—he reinforces it. The ghettoization of conservative culture.

@jvisserlabs Now OpenClaw. Jeez, this changes fast. But yout point is well taken.

4/What happened: → Claudebot (now Moltbot) went viral, an open-source agent that connects LLMs to your actual productivity stack → Kimmy K2.5 dropped a trillion-parameter open-source model that runs on consumer hardware → People are stacking Mac Studios and running inference locally for ~free

The Edge AI Bear Case is Playing Out in Real-Time 1/ If you're not on X and listening to podcasts, you're behind on the AI speed. Mainstream financial media is 6-12 months behind what's actually happening. Case in point: @GavinSBaker warned us about the "scariest bear case" for AI infrastructure less than 2 months ago. It's happening right now.

@JohnKasich Disgraceful comments.

What’s happening in Minnesota is waking up the whole country. People don’t see justice or fairness, and doubling down isn’t going to work. It’s tearing the country apart.

@Megatron_ron Cruz was wrong about tariffs.

BREAKING: 🇺🇸 Secret recordings obtained by Axios show Sen. Ted Cruz privately blasting Trump’s tariffs and JD Vance and says they are going to destroy the Republican Party Cruz warned donors the tariffs could tank the economy and cost Republicans control of Congress, He told Trump: “If people’s 401(k)s are down 30% and prices are up 10–20%, we’re going to face a bloodbath.” He says Trump responded: “F**k you, Ted.” Cruz also accused JD Vance of being controlled by Tucker Carlson: “Tucker created JD. JD is Tucker’s protégé, and they are one and the same.”

@TPPSkol I would say they are ok but not competitive with the best teams. They are what their record says.

What’s your grade after 4 seasons of the Kwesi Adolfo-Mensah/Kevin O’Connell regime. Are they on the right path? Is the roster in a good spot? Does the future look bright? What needs to happen in 2026 to get to the playoffs and actually contend? Is there a legitimate, viable path?