Augusto Mercandelli

@fasc1nate Timelapse of land occupied by Native Americans

@pmarca @beffjezos @bayeslord @PessimistsArc @threader compile @readwise save

Patron Saints of Techno-Optimism Read the work of these people, and you too will become a Techno-Optimist. @beffjezos @bayeslord @PessimistsArc Ada Lovelace Adam Smith Andy Warhol Bertrand Russell Brad DeLong Buckminster Fuller Calestous Juma Clayton Christensen Dambisa Moyo David Deutsch David Friedman David Ricardo Deirdre McCloskey Doug Engelbart Elting Morison Filippo Tommaso Marinetti Frederic Bastiat Frederick Jackson Turner Friedrich Hayek Friedrich Nietzsche George Gilder Isabel Paterson Israel Kirzner James Burnham James Carse Joel Mokyr Johan Norberg John Galt John Von Neumann Joseph Schumpeter Julian Simon Kevin Kelly Louis Rossetto Ludwig von Mises Marian Tupy Martin Gurri Matt Ridley Milton Friedman Neven Sesardic Nick Land Paul Collier Paul Johnson Paul Romer Ray Kurzweil Richard Feynman Rose Wilder Lane Stephen Wolfram Stewart Brand Thomas Sowell Vilfredo Pareto Virginia Postrel William Lewis William Nordhaus

THE TECHNO-OPTIMIST MANIFESTO part 1 “You live in a deranged age — more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.” — Walker Percy “Our species is 300,000 years old. For the first 290,000 years, we were foragers, subsisting in a way that’s still observable among the Bushmen of the Kalahari and the Sentinelese of the Andaman Islands. Even after Homo Sapiens embraced agriculture, progress was painfully slow. A person born in Sumer in 4,000BC would find the resources, work, and technology available in England at the time of the Norman Conquest or in the Aztec Empire at the time of Columbus quite familiar. Then, beginning in the 18th Century, many people’s standard of living skyrocketed. What brought about this dramatic improvement, and why?” — Marian Tupy “There’s a way to do it better. Find it.” — Thomas Edison Lies We are being lied to. We are told that technology takes our jobs, reduces our wages, increases inequality, threatens our health, ruins the environment, degrades our society, corrupts our children, impairs our humanity, threatens our future, and is ever on the verge of ruining everything. We are told to be angry, bitter, and resentful about technology. We are told to be pessimistic. The myth of Prometheus – in various updated forms like Frankenstein, Oppenheimer, and Terminator – haunts our nightmares. We are told to denounce our birthright – our intelligence, our control over nature, our ability to build a better world. We are told to be miserable about the future.

The town of Whittier, Alaska, is known for having nearly the entire population living in a single apartment building. The building is called Begich Towers, a 14-story apartment complex that houses about 90% of the town's residents (total: 272). This has earned Whittier the nickname of a "town under one roof". The building, originally constructed as an army barracks, now serves as a cozy condominium featuring a post office, general store, police station, laundromat, health clinic, mayor's office, and a heated indoor pool. Whittier, Alaska is accessible only by air or through a single-lane tunnel that stretches over two miles through neighboring Maynard Mountain. The town's weather conditions can be harsh during winter, making the Begich Towers a convenient and practical living solution for the residents. In addition to the Begich Towers, there is a second condo building in the town where the remaining residents live. The town's school and gym are located in a separate structure but are connected to the Begich Towers by a tunnel, allowing for easy access during the winter months.

A game for cats where they catch the mouse twitter.com/ZL8CbPjXWoddz8…

@fasc1nate Albert Einstein explaining E=mc2

What is the most romantic movie you've ever seen?

Jim Carrey in his sophomore year in high school in Burlington, Ontario, Canada, 1970s. During this time, Jim and his family were so poor that they were all living out of a van. After school, Jim and his brother would work 8-hour shifts as janitors and security guards at a tire factory. At age 16, Jim quit school and continued working at the factory while honing his craft as a comedian. In an interview with the Hamilton Spectator in 2007, Jim said, "If my career in show business hadn't panned out, I would probably be working today in Hamilton, Ontario, at the Dofasco steel mill." When he was young, he saw the steel mills on the other side of Burlington Bay and believed that's “where the great jobs were.” Regarding his father, Jim had this to say, “My father could have been a great comedian but he didn't believe that that was possible for him, and so he made a conservative choice. Instead, he got a safe job as an accountant, and when I was 12 years old, he was let go from that safe job, and our family had to do whatever we could to survive. I learned many great lessons from my father. Not the least of which was that: You can fail at what you don't want. So you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.”

Whether it's lighting up the Las Vegas skyline or blowing up social media with memes, the MSG Sphere in Las Vegas will be hard to miss.

Wordle 737 4/6 🟨🟨⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜🟩🟩 ⬜⬜🟩🟩🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

I completed all 39 C exercises from W3Schools. w3schools.com/C/exercise.php

Avoid using free charging stations in airports, hotels or shopping centers. Bad actors have figured out ways to use public USB ports to introduce malware and monitoring software onto devices. Carry your own charger and USB cord and use an electrical outlet instead.

@ScuderiaFerrari 🫴

Reply with a 🫴 and we'll give you a 🚗

Not to be a ~well, actually~ jerk, and I'm sure Bard will be impressive, but for the record: JWST did not take "the very first image of a planet outside our solar system". the first image was instead done by Chauvin et al. (2004) with the VLT/NACO using adaptive optics.

Saw this ad 😀

The Great Wave off Kanagawa, created by Hokusai in 1831, is one of the world's most famous paintings. But why are there more than 100 different versions of it in galleries all around the world? Because it isn't actually a painting...

I spent New Years building GPTZero — an app that can quickly and efficiently detect whether an essay is ChatGPT or human written

Sped up trip there & back again