Resilientree

Pine to say things so original and genuine that people debate what exactly was said, but they will remember the feeling, of tingles up their back standing taller, like a pine. 🌲

We need an explicit “Opt In” for political text messages. If you get a text and you are not on the list, you collect $25 directly from the sender. This seems doable.

@ps_ilove_me I was in a chair all day — not normal. And I feel it.

🚨SHOCKING: Every additional hour you sit shrinks your brain by 2%. That's not per year. That's per hour, per day, measured in real time by UCLA researchers who scanned the brains of adults and found something that should empty every office building in America. For each extra hour of daily sitting, the medial temporal lobe becomes 2% thinner. This brain region forms new memories, navigates spatial relationships, and consolidates learning. People who sit 10 hours daily have medial temporal lobes that are 20% thinner than people who sit 5 hours. The difference mirrors the brain scans of Alzheimer's patients. We accidentally discovered the fastest way to induce cognitive decline: put humans in chairs. The UCLA findings demolished decades of assumptions about brain health. Exercise couldn't compensate. People who hit the gym religiously but spent their days sitting showed identical brain atrophy to completely sedentary individuals. The damage accumulated hour by hour, regardless of evening workouts or weekend activity bursts. Walking reverses the atrophy with shocking speed. A landmark study tracked sedentary adults who began walking 40 minutes three times per week. Within one year, their hippocampi grew by 2%. Not maintained. Grew. That's enough new brain tissue to reverse two years of normal aging. No pharmaceutical intervention has ever produced comparable neurogenesis in healthy adults. The speed defies medical convention. Memory improvements appeared within six weeks. Fresh blood vessels sprouted throughout brain tissue within months. BDNF levels, the brain's growth factor, increased by 300%. New neurons integrated into existing networks faster than researchers thought possible. Japanese longitudinal studies revealed the step threshold for cognitive protection. Adults walking fewer than 5,000 steps daily had brain volumes equivalent to people 7 years older. The difference wasn't subtle. Brain scans could predict walking habits with 85% accuracy based purely on tissue density. The evolutionary context makes perfect sense. Human brains developed while walking 12 miles daily across changing terrain. Every aspect of neural architecture optimized for that movement pattern. Blood flow dynamics, neurotransmitter synthesis, stress hormone regulation, sleep cycles. Our cognitive abilities calibrated to nomadic life. Modern environments eliminated the movement without eliminating the biological requirement. We kept brains designed for constant travel and trapped them at desks. The result is mass neurodegeneration that we normalized as "mental fatigue." Silicon Valley leadership caught on early. Steve Jobs conducted meetings while walking. Mark Zuckerberg installed treadmill desks. Jack Dorsey scheduled walking one on ones. They weren't promoting wellness. They were preventing brain shrinkage in real time. The pharmaceutical industry spent billions developing nootropics and cognitive enhancers. Walking outperforms every compound they've produced. It increases creative output by 60%. It improves working memory by 40%. It reduces inflammation by 50%. It grows new neurons without side effects. Office workers who transitioned to standing desks showed measurable cognitive improvements within weeks. Processing speed increased. Attention spans lengthened. Working memory capacity expanded. Simply removing the chair began reversing years of accumulated brain damage. The most powerful cognitive enhancement technology ever discovered costs nothing, requires no prescription, produces no side effects. It's the movement pattern your nervous system has craved for 200,000 years. Every step rebuilds neural architecture. Every hour sitting erases 2% of it.

@tyromper We have a massive “expectations” problem in this country.

Tonight I took all 3 of my kids (10,5,5) to the park & had them do obstacle courses & compete for the choice of where I took them to dinner. At dinner I got up to go get my son a couple napkins & as I walked by two sweet old ladies stopped me & said, WOW, YOU'RE A BRAVE DAD HERE ALL BY YOURSELF! I said, "Thanks, it's not a big deal they are great kids & it's fun hanging with them." They remarked that they were watching & my kids were WELL BEHAVED & said IT WAS IMPRESSIVE SEEING ME ALONE WITH ALL THREE. I'll be honest. It was kind of them to say that to me, but also CRAZY!!!! Why would I be incapable of watching & hanging with MY KIDS?!?! Are other dads unable to take their 3 kids a few hours by themself?!! If so, WHY????

I happened to catch the Spectrum 'local' news at a restaurant a few weeks ago. The first story was "What are citizens going to do with the crazy high gas prices?!". The second story was "Democrats working to flip state senate." A one-two setup of Despair and then Inevitability.

Hypnotist Derren Brown demonstrates ... Speaking to the subconscious mind, by slipping SUGGESTIONS into STORIES. (aka "embedded commands") Milton Erickson would nod in agreement. Watch, take notes, then forget we ever spoke.

Full image of poem:

Pine to Say, a poem Pine to speak without sanding the edges rough as bark, warm as resin at the lip of a crack crawling toward sunlight. Three people will quote you after. None will agree on the words. One will say it was about endurance. One will say rain, the sound rain makes on a car roof as you finally reach your hand across the center console. The third will say she felt something climb vertebra by vertebra, small and insistent, the way a thing with wings tests the branch before it flies. Nobody will get the sentences right. But they will all stand a little taller, as if the memory itself had rings, one circle pressed upon the last. They won't remember the words. They'll all recall how the room smelled like pine.

Thank you Paul for reading my “The Pilot Light” poem on your Daily Reads show! It means a lot. It begins at minute 23.

@paulbullard Add in some skipping, one leg hops, side steps, and other variety to mix it up. Oh and you can practice in a pool if you really want to go easy on your knees.

Guys, go sprint! I endorse this 1000% Tips on starting for beginners: • Warm up to enable intensity Like Tyler said. Warm up movements. Go slow at first. Let your first sprint or 2 be mid speed, and work up to top speed. • Grass to enable longevity Surface hardness matters for joints—more over time. Avoid concrete. Asphalt is ok in limited amounts. Grass, dirt, or a rubber track is best. Make sure ground is flat with no holes if off-roading it. • Volume to enable consistency Keep the volume low and build up over time, within reason. Even if you’re warmed up, doing too many is a recipe for inflammation and injury. 3–4 total is a good starting point.

@Tesla_AI Nice! Mastering pothole avoidance will be huge. It’s made minor improvements and look forward to future success.

New release of FSD Supervised now starting to roll out This update brings 20% faster reaction time to further increase safety, among many other improvements Full release notes below Full Self-Driving (Supervised) v14.3 includes - Upgraded the Reinforcement Learning (RL) stage of training the FSD neural network, resulting in improvements in a wide variety of driving scenarios. - Upgraded the neural network vision encoder, improving understanding in rare and low-visibility scenarios, strengthening 3D geometry understanding, and expanding traffic sign understanding. - Rewrote the AI compiler and runtime from the ground up with MLIR, resulting in 20% faster reaction time and improving model iteration speed. - Mitigated unnecessary lane biasing and minor tailgating behaviors. - Increased decisiveness of parking spot selection and maneuvering. - Improved parking location pin prediction, now shown on a map with a (P) icon. - Enhanced response to emergency vehicles, school buses, right-of-way violators, and other rare vehicles. - Improved handling of small animals by focusing RL training on harder examples and adding rewards for better proactive safety. - Improved traffic light handling at complex intersections with compound lights, curved roads, and yellow light stopping – driven by training on hard RL examples sourced from the Tesla fleet. - Improved handling for rare and unusual objects extending, hanging, or leaning into the vehicle path by sourcing infrequent events from the fleet. - Improved handling of temporary system degradations by maintaining control and automatically recovering without driver intervention, reducing unnecessary disengagements. Upcoming Improvements - Expand reasoning to all behaviors beyond destination handling. - Add pothole avoidance. - Improve driver monitoring system sensitivity with better eye gaze tracking, eye wear handling, and higher accuracy in variable lighting conditions.

"The Pilot Light", a poem There is someone in my kitchen who looks like me but older, the way worry ages a face in places sleep can't reach. He's been here all night. He has a list. Item one: the sound your knee made on the stairs. Item two: whether the cold will break before April. Item three: the email you didn't send in March. Item four: whether the pilot light is out, which it isn't — he's checked — but the checking is the point, not the flame. I pour water into the kettle. He reads the next item aloud but I'm listening to the gas tick before it catches, that half-second where the burner is only a promise. He says: You're not taking this seriously. I say: I'm making coffee. He folds his list in half. Then again. Each fold makes it larger the way worry works, doubling against every crease until what he's holding is a blade, thin and thrumming, pointed at his own chest. He doesn't seem to notice. He never does. I take my coffee to the window. Outside, a bird I can't identify repeats one bar from a wire. Above, a hawk looms, making patient, indifferent circles. The bird sings anyway, the song is the one thing that the hawk can't take. I listen until the cup is empty. When I turn back to the table he's still sitting there, but smaller now, his chair too big for him, the blade in his hand dull as a crayon. He looks up. When did he last eat? I pour a second cup and step outside to birdsong.

@signulll Yes. And then you enter the last few decades where people can be offended at the mildest thing. It’s a minefield. And arguably a trick to get people quiet. So, the solution is authenticity. Saying what you think rings true, in your own words. Without worrying too much.

the reason why emotional intelligence is extremely rare is simply cuz it is expensive. actually modeling another person’s internal state in real time is computationally brutal.. it requires suppressing your own frame, running a parallel simulation, & updating continuously. the “inference costs” of eq in humans are likely much higher than the most expensive ai model in existence today.

The short version of this story: Reframe your Owws into Oooohs!

@themgmtconsult This is the way. Cursor is great.

I really don't know what all these guides out there say and/or try to sell, but folks it is incredibly easy. 1) Pay for a pro subscription to Cursor 2) Use the "Ask" mode to fire out your questions 3) When you got the answer you were looking for, switch to "Agent" mode and let it rip > Rinse and Repeat steps 2) and 3) until you have your MVP You never get nervous because you have an ELITE DEVELOPER at your beck and call (ie, Cursor Ask mode) 24/7 sitting right there beside you, and you know it will fix your issues and will tell you exactly what you want to learn. You don't need any guide!! You just need $25, a lot of time (be ready to iterate a bunch of times) and a good idea (hardest bit).

On Thursday, I flipped over on my mountain bike. I ended up in the ER. I'm still pondering why I tried the jump, but that's another story. It's all good. No broken bones. Just a partial tear in my AC impacting my right shoulder. I should be in a sling for a couple weeks, and then rebuild that arm strength from there. Throughout this time I have remained CURIOUS, which @ScottAdamsSays recommends below. Here's what I mean: Ooooh, I get to go to the ER! I get to find out what that's like. I've heard stories and now I get to see for myself. Oh, I can walk right in and there is a team of medical professionals ready to take care of me? Glad I got injured in a nice city with a nice hospital. Ooooh, I get to go in the CT scan and image my body. I'll find out how sturdy my body really is. Great! No broken bones! So, I have some body strength - I wouldn't have found out this had I not tried that jump. Ooooh, I get to wear a sling. I'll have just one arm to operate. I've taken for granted what having two arms is like. I bet I can be just as productive with one - though I'll have to be creative. (Today I picked up sticks outside, something I almost never do with two arms) Ooooh, I get to research physical therapy. They say I should follow up with an orthopedic surgeon. You know what that person will say? 'Yeah, it might heal, but you should probably get surgery!' When your only tool is a hammer, everything you see is a nail. I'm going to research YouTube PT videos and find something that works for me. Ooooh, I get to be tough in front of my kids. I will aim to take no pity, but instead try to be stronger than I was before. I have so many things to be grateful for. I chose to do a completely unnecessary, but actually totally necessary, physical challenge. I will benefit from these adverse results.

words and drugs have the same mechanism of action -Fabrizio Benedetti From @drmichaellevin 's presentation: youtube.com/watch?v=L0D4Fd…

@robbskidmore I've heard the kids today think Nirvana is a clothing brand.

Nirvana’s music does not stand the test of time. But the Smashing Pumpkins does. So ultimately Billy Corgan won out against Kurt Cobain. Nirvana was hugely popular but I never listen to it anymore. I find Smashing Pumpkins more musical and listenable. Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness is a truly great album. Nirvana’s best was probably Unplugged. What say you @batcountry1980 ?

@BrianRoemmele Permissionless innovation is America's secret sauce. Any threat to this freedom is a threat to us all.

When I say garage builders are not waiting to ask permission or “go to market” to please the VC class, I am not theorizing. This farmer had a need to get to places at his farm to he built it in his garage. Like all inventions it don’t have to pass any test but his own.

@robbskidmore I found the lists! Thanks for curating these. Great road trip music.

@resilientree @BowTiedTrance I did a Spotify list for THE PURSUIT OF COOL years ago. Not sure if it’s still there. I’ve also come up with a discography of LIFE AND DEATH IN SUBURBIA. Forthcoming…

I was listening to and posting about @BowTiedTrance's great ideas earlier today. And then... ...on the way home from the gym, I had an urge to drive a different way. I went through a residential neighborhood that I'd never been through before. I discovered a great little park right on the river. Who knew? For the tunes, I put Gene Wilder's 'Pure Imagination' on repeat. I'd learned it on the piano, but never actually heard the song on its own. It's captivating. Then, I picked up the phone and called my uncle, all out of the blue. We had a great 30 minute phone call on a range of topics--both of us helping each other make sense of this strange world. There's no grand conclusion to this story - it's just doing things slightly out of the ordinary to create a much more memorable day. That's all it is.

Cleverness ends up being simplicity. 1. Discover a repeatable system that makes you feel good and productive. 2. Don’t overthink things. 3. Do what is good enough now. 4. Use the tools you know vs. endlessly learning the newest ones. When I coached youth basketball, the kids loved trying the hardest trick shots. But at that level all they needed to master was simple dribble, pass, and layups. We all chase the clever tricks. But beautiful simplicity often wins in the end.

The story behind the New York Times’ 1903 claim that human flight was between one and ten million years away is even worse than it looks. Once you understand the backstory, you realize that the New York Times story is not really about flight at all but about how elites and credentialed “experts” mistake their own failures for the boundaries of possibility. The New York Times did not dismiss the possibility of powered flight at random. There was a very specific reason behind it. At the time, America’s most prominent scientific authority, Smithsonian Secretary Samuel Langley, had been showered with large amounts of taxpayer funding to build an aircraft, the Langley Aerodrome. Despite all the money, institutional backing, and elite prestige, Langley and his team could not get it to fly, culminating in a series of very public failures, the last on December 8, 1903. So when the New York Times declared that flight was millions of years away, what it was really saying was that if the most credentialed and well-funded “experts” cannot do it, then it cannot be done. A mere nine days later, the elites’ proclamation of impossibility lay in ruins. Two totally unknown bicycle mechanics from Ohio achieved the first powered flight using improvised parts, a few hundred dollars of their own money, and sheer persistence. The story of flight is, at its core, a story of the triumph of American individualism over elite credentialism. The fact that it was the New York Times that inadvertently delivered the proof is the most fitting conclusion imaginable.