Red

My father learned rocket chemistry on a subsistence farm using stump remover and sugar. No kits. No experts. Just trial, error, and the stubborn belief that if it's broken, you fix it with what you have. He went on to have his name engraved on hardware that flew in orbit. Then he spent decades in our garage with a green chalkboard and his slide rule, trying to make sure I understood concepts like orbital decay, thrust, specific impulse, the rocket equation, and more, because he was convinced we were forgetting how to go to the moon. He was right. And we're doing it again. unmitigatedrisk.com/?p=1227

This was a really fun little test of color vision and also a really well designed test. What's My JND? 0.0099 Can you beat it? keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd/?…

Don’t stop at fast food Let’s get Adobe CEO to try canceling an Adobe subscription

@politicalmath This week’s parsha!

"visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation of them that hate me"

Apple is the only company with a great proposal here: let parents, who buy the devices used by kids, set up kids accounts and decide what they're allowed to do, then pass those decisions to apps through parental controls -- without demanding anyone's identity papers.

Quarterbacks are judged on what they do in the biggest games, and there’s no bigger game than the Super Bowl. So @theStevenRuiz ranked all the 50 Super Bowl QB performances of the 21st century, from worst to … guess who. theringer.com/2026/02/03/nfl…

WHAT IS THIS SORCERY?!

@varadmehta All of them.

Went to ShopRite after the movie to get the eggs that are on sale that were sold out yesterday. Much less hectic than yesterday. But over the public address they were announcing that the store would be closed on Sunday. I wonder how many schools around here will be closed Monday.

Russia supplied the hardware. China published the playbook. Iran just proved it works. Starlink: 80% packet loss. Expert monitoring Iranian internet for 20 years: “I have never seen such a thing in my life.” The “LEO satellites are unjammable” consensus? Dead. Wall Street modeled Starlink as immune because satellites hop frequencies and move constantly. SpaceX patched SOFTWARE against Russian jamming in Ukraine. This is HARDWARE. Murmansk-BN. Krasukha-4. Delivered via IL-76 transports. 5,000 kilometer jamming range. Two months ago, Chinese researchers published exactly how to black out Starlink over Taiwan: 935 coordinated ground-based jammers blanketing Ku-band frequencies. Tehran was the field test. 40,000 terminals. Near-total degradation. Regime now executing anyone caught with a dish as “enemies of God.” This is not about Iranian protests. This is the authoritarian electronic warfare axis proving concept for Taiwan. The $280 billion satellite communications market is repricing a risk that consensus said didn’t exist. Defense stocks are about to enter a new cycle. And somewhere in Beijing, someone is taking very detailed notes on what worked.

Inside each city are two wolves, Philly edition:

@MorlockP Oooh, which vacuum sealer do you recommend?

8/ Yep. I have a commercial grade deli slicer, two commercial grade vacuum sealers, Speed Queen washer / dryer, restaurant style 10-burner 2-oven stove, Powermatic tablesaw and wood lathe, Bridgeport milling machine, etc. Those options exist, 99.9% of ppl don't want them.

Once again: "planned obsolescence" is an engineering tool to keep costs affordable. Consumers would rather buy a 60 year stream of appliance utility in 15 year chunks than pay up front, with costly current dollars, for the whole thing, especially since fashions and needs change

I’ve been thinking about this exact point lately. I’m not sure it 100% discounts the possibility of an AI bubble, but it is a significant difference.

@JHWeissmann I saw that post too this morning. I think we’ve definitely seen a huge democratization of traditional BBQ with pellet smokers. Definitely way more people who care about the year-round cost of brisket now than 5-10 years ago.

@captgouda24 @scottlincicome Neat. I downloaded the paper to read after work.

@redroark @scottlincicome The argument would be that, regardless of changes in practices, the firm-level reduced-form evidence suggests that less creative patents do have an effect.

Total factor productivity growth is slowing down, but we have more patents than ever. What gives? Aakash Kalyani argues that if you look at the actual text of the patents, they’re getting less creative — a change likely caused by falling population growth. 1/

Vibe coding is the future 🤣

Maybe in 2031 when the patent expires 🤣

@ChrisCroy @moultano Flowers for Algernon

@moultano I wonder if there are any dim protagonists in children's fiction. Not "silly misunderstandings", but kind of stupid and struggling with school.

A priori it's odd that so many main characters in children's fiction are too smart for the rest of their class. One would think that would be a narrow audience, except that those are the kids reading books.

Missed a real opportunity by not opening both this Thursday, in time for the season opener!