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I’m surprised that the classification markings, all of which include “TK, were merely struck through instead of blacked out. But I guess the cat’s been out of the bag on the meaning of TALENT KEYHOLE for quite a while.


API limitations? Why not have the script run for a few days collecting images and then crank through all of them in an hour?


great idea, actually, I just didn't think of it!


I’ve been close to some people who tried to make a living as a professional athlete. This is a really special way to help passionate, hard-working people live out their dreams and potential.


How would you distinguish this from the case where they turned the 'magnify dissent' filter down from 200%?


Reminds me of the saying "Pessimists are often right. Optimists are often rich."


As a pessimist who's often right, and not rich, this resonates.

But how can this be true? Surely you get rich by being right?


Pessimists think nothing is worth doing, and are frequently right. But they will never catch the occasional thing that is worth doing. Some of the optimists will.


But optimism favors action, while pessimism favors inaction. And action vastly (and compoundingly) increases the amount of opportunities for being right.


Pessimists are just as often wrong too! Clearly the person you're replying to is an "optimist". :)

To be clear, I don't think there's a strong correlation between being rich and being a pessimist/optimist.

And to your original point, being right cannot possibly be biased towards optimism or pessimism. Any apparent correlation is more of a reflection on what everyone else thinks... and they are wrong! Cheers to being right!


Agreed, optimism/pessimism is just about our disposition to the world as we perceive it (ie. glass half full or half empty). It is orthogonal to understanding and prediction. A perfect Buddhist is neither an optimist or pessimist but can still be better or worse at predicting the future.

I do think pessimists, especially of the depressive variety generally do not get rich. The reason is that getting rich is hard, everyone nominally wants it, so it’s highly competitive and there are no easy paths. To find a path generally you have to take an action that almost by definition is low probability of success. You don’t have to be a beaming cheerleader to make this happen, but being an eyore is most likely disqualifying.


I remember reading that slightly depressed people tend to have a more accurate world view.

Perhaps there is something to the saying ignorance is bliss.


I might be misunderstanding, but I wouldn't call "un-depressed" people ignorant.

I also think depressed people would regress to the average if they weren't depressed. It's not a sustainable way to think harder and open your eyes to the world around you.


Yes I remember reading that too and it resonated. As a slightly depressed person I can't believe the delusionally positive spin people seem to put on everything and nonetheless this seems to be a winning strategy for them. I never could explain that.

Starting with an accurate world model, no matter how dispiriting, seems to be a prerequisite for knowing the most effective action to take.


The photo of the balloon here really helps put the story into perspective.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190408181736/https://www.museu...


> “Are we here in the West??” Only this one question is asked by Peter Strelzyk and Günter Wetzel when they were in the early morning of the 16th.

The "Handmaid's Tale" TV series has a great variation on that moment, which chokes me up every single time.

(spoilers in video title) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oKZgXvpm0c


[flagged]


They want to undo the protestant reformation?


They are just a bit confused about which Martin Luther they hate.


So turn back the clock to when Hildegard von Bingen was only one of many extremely powerful and influential abbesses that were polymaths and prolific artists and writers and educators of women in Europe?

I’ve never understood this mentality that people who read and watched handmaids tale, caused some done kind of weird obsession built on a literal fiction story, a made up story… especially since the reality is not only the polar opposite, but in no place on the planet have things ever been better for any people relative to all other places of their time than in the very European societies and cultures that you types are so suicidally fixated on being destructive of.

The irony of the handmaids tale types from my experience is that they/you are, in their/your suicidally manic self-harming obsession, advocates for the spread of Islam in the very western countries that have provided all of humanity all of its freedoms and comforts, which would ironically will lead to an actual handmaids tale type scenario you constantly warn of.

Have you ever heard of what the Ottoman Empire did? It makes the handmaids tale sound like a wholesome family dynamic.


> Have you ever heard of what the Ottoman Empire did?

Pertaining specifically to women? No, actually. Any chance you'd elaborate for the curious?


Not what he means but the ottomans and women have an interesting history…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultanate_of_Women


> So turn back the clock to when Hildegard von Bingen was only one of many extremely powerful and influential abbesses that were polymaths and prolific artists and writers and educators of women in Europe?

Who were the other female composers of her generation?


It is a bit disingenuous to jump from

> polymaths and prolific artists and writers and educators

to composers. Even the male composers of whom we know the names are few and sparsely attributed. Just look at the Notre Dame school and how little we know except two names with no attached biography and some beautiful music. And even only that by 'lucky accident' since a single, anonymous student wrote them down.

You'll definitely find abbesses like Herrad von Landsberg who did write and educate in her generation.


It's like, a metaphor man. A work of fiction. Not to be taken literally, yet conveys themes and ideas which can become a short hand for conveying these ideas. Tons of folks read Atlas Shrugged and thought "hey this is how the world actually is" too. Or worse, The Fountainhead. Shudder.


Sometimes, books which claim to be real like “night” by Elie Wiesel are full of bullshit/lies/fraud too!

His book sowed the seeds for holocaust denialism in GenZ.


It's laughable to paint Islam as the enemy of Western liberty when it is masked agents of a Christian nationalist regime who are terrorizing the streets of my city and cities across the US.


> a thousand years...

less than a hundred?


So native American tribes and no white people? That would make a change.


The text in the link is nice to read. I did a Google Translate on it which you can read here: https://pastebin.com/SdkKQkC6


>Ballonfahrt in die Freiheit

Gotta love the way German sounds to English ears. Always good for a chuckle.

This guy is a hacker hero - do the engineering needed, get the proof of concept built, move fast, break things, start over and go big, then scores a victory over the commies and saves his family.


You can only move so 'fast and break things', when failure can land you and your family in jail or get you killed.

That being said, the timeline is remarkably short for such a hardware project.


They originally wanted to make a helicopter. (Not kidding)


More like a ultra-light plane / helicopter hybrid or so, isn't it?


Sounds like an autogyro, indeed one of the lightest and cheapest ways to build a plane. They are basically planes with a free-spinning helicopter rotor for lift.


The private mechanics and electrical hacking culture that is the base for German engineering . Tûftler in jedem Schuppen..


I enjoyed learning about the town of Bad Kissingen


As a German, that name makes me think of pillows (Kissen).


Completely agree - although the shine has rather worn off the ‘move fast and break things’ approach.


SpaceX is doing fine woth that approach?


Great example.

But when Musk took that approach to DOGE, chaos.

And some of the approach hasn’t always gone well at Tesla either.

https://www.irishtimes.com/world/us/2025/06/01/elon-musk-wan...

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/12/24/elon-musk-...


Rapid prototyping works well in engineering, because you can test for faults quickly.

But transferring engineering practices into politics - which is not really new, "social engineering" has emerged again and again since the Enlightement Era - is usually a disaster.

In social contexts, people often cannot agree on what even constitutes a "fault" and how to measure outcomes. Individuals will adjust their behavior (unlike, say, a valve in a rocket engine, which can't consciously decide to sabotage the flight) and the systems tend to have long feedback loops.


This is a great example, an object lesson in something that is deeply misunderstood.

Running a company and running a government are fundamentally disparate things to the point of one set of skills being antithetical to the other, even though there is overlap in orthogonal skillsets

A company operates to extract value from employees (labor,automation,process, knowledge ) and concentrate and deliver that value to a minority set of individuals. Debts are costs to be paid. Cash surplus is power to act.

A government operates to -deliver- value to its constituents through redistribution of resources towards goals that are inherently cost centres. Debts are confidence in future economic growth and are not really ever paid in any real sense of the term, the monopoly game set doesn’t get richer or poorer when you move money around or print more bills. It only gets richer or poorer when you add or take away players, burn or draw in more properties or utilities, or melt or 3d print more houses and hotels. Cash surplus is useless and counterproductive.

The idea that business leaders will be effective political leaders is catastrophic. There is no more hopeless place to live than a country operated as an efficient and well planned business. At least in the chaos of Mogadishu or Haiti you can find the fetid seeds of opportunity to make something worthwhile, chaos creates pockets of opportunity and ad-hoc fiefdoms. Chaos is a ladder. A well oiled machine is a stifling factory farm, but for people.

Obviously you don’t want Mogadishu or Bechtel as your governance model, but the sweet spot is closer to Mogadishu, at least insofar as mandatory structures determining your life trajectory goes. Mogadishu is closer to a democracy than Bechtel. At least in Mogadishu it’s not a centralised power that threatens your life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, just your neighbours. It’s at least conceptually transcendable.


I keep on thinking it was a lot smaller! Wow!


Yes, https://www.projectceti.org/ is working on whale translation!


Nice that the back button works.


The app reopens to where I am reading when I open it, unless I've manually quit the app. If I quit the app, the it still frequently opens to where I was last time, although there may be some reset period after which it opens the 'your library' page. In that case, an icon representing the book I'm currently reading is visible in the bottom left, and I can open it with one tap.


Wonderful and reminiscent of the Vesuvius Prize [0], of course. Broadly, makes me wonder if there are other categories of 'lost' information that will emerge in the years ahead as imaging tools and AI analysis improve.

[0] https://scrollprize.org/


I am on the Vesuvius Challenge team. We came across this press release back in July and were quite impressed! It's great to see other groups using non destructive means to read ancient documents.


It makes me wonder how much information we lost because we thought that retrieval methods were as good as they were ever going to get, and we destroyed the material trying to read it.


Tangential but even stuff like this bothers me in that regard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pf1GvrUqeIA


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