Dylan Hirsch-Shell 🧢🔰🗳️

California's jungle primary leads to massive vote splitting between ideologically similar candidates. We could fix this bug with one simple tweak: allow voters to choose all the candidates they approve of. See reply for a link to the fix: a three-word change to the Elections Code

Lol, X's automated moderation system is comically bad. It rejected my reports of actual violent speech from an antisemitic account and then flagged my own post complaining about its failure as violent speech!! 🙄🤦‍♂️

FUN FACT: Under Joe Biden, the United States had the lowest inflation rate post-COVID-19 pandemic of any G7 country. Based on today’s projections, Donald Trump will have the highest.

the corruption is staggering

@PebMet1 @Malusi_Reloaded @elonmusk *Rocket* reusability. The shuttle's boosters were discarded, not reusable. And the shuttle wasn't *rapidly* reusable. The shortest turnaround time for the same shuttle to relaunch was 55 days. #page=6.00" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/…

@Malusi_Reloaded @elonmusk Only people who believe SpaceX was the beginning of the Space Program think people are still talking about reusability as a theory. 1981, STS-1 and STS-2 showing Columbia being reused which was almost 45 years ago. 25 years before the 20 you mentioned.

34th launch & landing of the same rocket

Mercury beats the moon! See Sec. 20 of [1]: "Our moon seems like a reasonable starting point for colonizing the rest of the solar system. It has no oxygen atmosphere to corrode metal-based life. Electromagnetic coilguns or maglev trains could economically transport (with relatively low escape velocity 2.4 km/s) lots of material into space, to construct huge space-based factories and other things (while current inefficient Earth-based rockets waste 99% of their energy on lifting fuel through the atmosphere). The planet Mercury (escape velocity 4.5 km/s) seems even more promising though: it has no atmosphere either, but (unlike our moon) lots of heavy metals for building machinery and infrastructure, and an enormous density of solar power next door. Although Mercury experiences significant temperature variations, it should be easy to cool or heat places as desired using mirrors. (Even without such tricks, there is an elliptical ring around each pole where the underground temperature is a pleasant 25°C [BAL22].) Electromagnetic mass drivers will shoot more and more material from Mercury into space, where it will be assembled into many products including robot factories and solar-powered spacecraft. The latter may include huge, rotating, hollow cylinders containing human-friendly worlds with artificial gravity—a concept that is ancient in science fiction [CLA73]. This stuff will be sent to convenient locations across the solar system via solar sails, or faster means when necessary. Much of the machinery near Mercury's orbit around the Sun will initially use solar energy for computation, construction, and mobility. This will cause thermal energy to radiate into space, making the Sun appear slightly redder to outside observers over time. However, the infrastructure near the sun (mirrors, lasers, etc) will also focus energy directly on distant robot colonies (e.g., in the freezing Kuiper Belt). Consequently, less and less of the sun's light will be wasted into interstellar space. Mercury seems ready to be dismantled and transformed into the next industrial center of the solar system!" [1] J.S. Annotated History of Modern AI and Deep Learning. Technical Report IDSIA-22-22, IDSIA, Switzerland, 2022 (updated 2025). Preprint arXiv:2212.11279

Claude solved it in an hour. Couldn’t tell you why it works. Couldn’t generalize to the next case. Knuth’s note is the cleanest field observation of the Shannon/Kolmogorov boundary I’ve seen. Detail by detail. @vishalmisra/knuth-just-showed-us-where-to-put-the-human-013c0330ef0a" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">medium.com/@vishalmisra/k…

Talking about tracing things back

The FTC just settled with OkCupid and Match Group for secretly handing nearly 3 million users' dating profile photos and location data to Clarifai, a company that builds facial recognition software(!!!). The penalty? A promise not to do it again.

Effectively all growth in corn production over the last 20 years is for ethanol. ~20 million acres of conservation land, grassland, and soybean rotation was turned into corn monoculture that effectively strip mines the topsoil. Meanwhile it’s the most fertilizer dependent crop with only a 40% uptake rate. So ~1.7 million tons of nitrogen runoff flows into the Mississippi basin annually while also polluting their own water supplies. This runoff ends up expanding the Gulf deadzone, which is also where 40% of domestic seafood comes from. It’s hard to find a worse way to create fuel, with a wicked level of waste and downstream consequences.

We could just... stop. This is such a waste of resources, land, and nitrogen. Even if we still wanted to use this land for fuel, we should be planting perennial grasses that require no fertilizer or irrigation and can yield far higher dry biomass per acre for use in Fischer-Tropsch (biomass to liquids) or gasification plants.

BREAKING: Zelensky just landed in the UAE and signed a defence cooperation agreement with President MBZ. The deal on the table changes everything about this war. Ukraine is offering Gulf states 1,000 drone interceptors per day. Each Sting interceptor costs $2,100. Each Patriot missile it replaces costs $3.9 million. In exchange, Ukraine wants the Patriot missiles the Gulf states are burning through, because Kyiv cannot get enough of them to stop Russian missiles. Read that again. The country America refused to arm fast enough is now arming America’s allies with a weapon that costs 1,857 times less than the one America cannot produce fast enough. The National reported on March 27 that Zelensky told reporters: “We’d like to quietly receive the Patriot missiles we have a deficit of, and give them a corresponding number of interceptors.” AFP confirmed the UAE agreement on March 28. Eleven countries have formally requested Ukraine’s drone defence expertise per Zelensky’s own count. Over 200 Ukrainian military specialists are already deployed across the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Jordan. Here is the arithmetic that should terrify every Pentagon procurement officer on earth. The United States fired 943 Patriot interceptors in the first four days of the Iran war per a US Congressional study cited by the Jerusalem Post. That is eighteen months of Lockheed Martin’s annual production consumed in 96 hours. Each of those 943 shots cost $3.9 million. Total expenditure: $3.68 billion in four days on defensive interceptions alone. Iran produces 10,000 Shahed drones per month per Reuters. Each drone costs $20,000 to $50,000. The cost exchange ratio is 114 to 1 in Iran’s favour per Military Times. Ukraine’s Sting interceptor inverts this arithmetic entirely. At $2,100, the cost ratio flips from 114-to-1 against America to roughly 10-to-1 against Iran. Ukraine can supply 1,000 per day. That is 30,000 per month against Iran’s 10,000 Shaheds per month. For the first time in this war, the defender’s production rate exceeds the attacker’s production rate at a fraction of the cost. And the country that built this weapon is the same country that Trump publicly rejected. “No, they are not helping. We do not need their help. We know more about drones than anyone else” per Fox News. He doubled down: “The last person we need help from is Zelensky.” Meanwhile the Pentagon notified Congress of plans to redirect $750 million in Ukraine-bound Patriot missiles to Gulf states per House of Saud reporting. America is simultaneously refusing Ukraine’s cheap solution and cannibalising Ukraine’s expensive one. Zelensky framed this explicitly. He told The National: “No matter how many Patriots, THAADs, or other air-defence systems are in the Middle East, that alone is not enough for fully effective air defence.” He told the UK Parliament: “When it comes to shooting down massive Shahed attacks, only Ukrainian experience can really help with this today.” The Pentagon is spending $3.9 million per interception, raiding Swiss fighter jet accounts to cover shortfalls, and diverting Ukraine’s own Patriot supply to the Gulf. Zelensky is offering the same result for $2,100 and producing 1,000 units per day. The market has a word for this kind of disruption. The $2,100 drone is the most important weapon in this war. And the country that built it is the one America said it did not need. Full analysis - open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

What is happening….

Watching Fox News assure viewers the Iran war is going SUPER well and Trump is a total stud is like watching the same network assure viewers that Dominion Voting Systems rigged the 2020 election and Trump was the winner.

@AnnCoulter Fox News is now the fake news. Brainwashing boomers to support what we voted against.

Who Americans think is their biggest supplier of foreign oil vs the reality:

I’m a Republican. I supported Trump. I raised money for him, I voted for him. I donated $60,000 to his campaign. Trump lied. He rugpulled us all. I didn’t vote for Lindsey Graham / America Second policies. You can disagree with me if you want. It’s your right to be fooled. But if you say I have “TDS” or am a “liberal” you need a new argument. There are millions of conservatives and members of the now torched “broad coalition” just like me. The only ones left supporting him are MAGA always Trumpers who place the man above the policies and our country.