kbc 🌎 retweeted
“All faiths do harm. We may define "faith" as a firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. Where there is evidence, no one speaks of "faith." We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence. And the substitution of emotion for evidence is apt to lead to strife, since different groups substitute different emotions.”
— Bertrand Russell
kbc 🌎 retweeted
Lorsqu'on a demandé à Tchekhov quelle était la nature des sociétés défaillantes, il a répondu :
"Dans les sociétés défaillantes, il y a mille sots pour chaque esprit éclairé, et mille paroles grossières pour chaque mot conscient. La majorité reste toujours ignorante, et l'homme raisonnable est constamment vaincu. Si vous voyez des sujets futiles dominer les discussions dans une société, et les sots occuper le devant de la scène, alors vous êtes en présence d'une société très défaillante.
Par exemple, les chansons et les paroles vides de sens trouvent des millions de gens pour danser et les répéter, et le chanteur devient célèbre, connu et aimé. Au point que les gens prennent son avis sur les questions de la société et de la vie.
Quant aux écrivains et aux auteurs, personne ne les connaît et personne ne leur accorde de valeur ou de poids. La plupart des gens aiment la futilité et l'anesthésie. Quelqu'un qui nous anesthésie pour nous éloigner de nos pensées, et quelqu'un qui nous fait rire avec des futilités, est meilleur que quelqu'un qui nous réveille à la réalité et nous fait mal en disant la vérité. C'est pourquoi la démocratie ne convient pas aux sociétés ignorantes, car c'est la majorité ignorante qui décidera de votre destin." Le monde littéraire.
Yep.
I spent years in C and C++ at Microsoft and Google and architected 100s of systems and reviewed 1000s. I smell bad code the way some people smell smoke.
1/ First week with Claude I thought I’d cheated the system — stuff shipped, checks went green, I went to bed early.
Then every bug fix started making two new ones. Work crawled.
2/ Checkout breaks billing. Billing nukes notifications. “Quick field tweak” blows up three modules.
I saw the same Spaghetti code lazy programmers have always written — Claude just writes it 200x faster.
3/ Anthropic trained a genius on a landfill of Stack Overflow and enterprise Java and called it helpful.
Reach through objects. Over-DRY. Speculative hooks. Inheritance trees. One file, five jobs. God functions.
4/ Fix has been here since 1994. Anyone recognize this?
5/ Steal — paste into `AGENTS.md`:
```
# Timeless constraints (not a checklist)
When two principles collide, pick the one that cuts future cost in THIS codebase.
HARD RULE: refactor to the principle FIRST, then change behavior.
1. Separation of Concerns — one kind of work per part (UI / domain / persistence / infra). Root principle.
2. Encapsulation / Information Hiding — small stable contract; hide internals.
3. High Cohesion + Loose Coupling — change-together lives together; independents talk narrow.
4. DRY — one authoritative representation of each piece of *knowledge* (not every similar line). Avoid over-DRY.
5. KISS — simplest design that works; complexity is the long-term tax.
6. Single Responsibility — one reason to change.
7. Depend on Abstractions — policy doesn’t depend on details; both depend on contracts.
8. YAGNI — no speculative features, frameworks, or “later” hooks.
9. Composition over Inheritance — assemble pieces; don’t grow fragile hierarchies.
10. Open/Closed (with discipline) — extend at stable boundaries; only where change showed up twice.
Honorable: Law of Demeter · fail fast / illegal states unrepresentable · optimize for deletion · Unix do-one-thing + compose.
Treat as constraints. Violate slogans when judgment says so.
```
kbc 🌎 retweeted
“You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing.”
-- Richard Feynman
kbc 🌎 retweeted
“Bear in mind that the wonderful things you learn in your schools are the work of many generations, produced by enthusiastic effort and infinite labor in every country of the world. All this is put into your hands as your inheritance in order that you may receive it, honor it, add to it, and one day faithfully hand it to your children. Thus do we mortals achieve immortality in the permanent things which we create in common.”
— Albert Einstein
kbc 🌎 retweeted
Trump described Canada as a far greater enemy of the USA than Putin’s Russia.
It is time to say this openly:
– The USA is currently ruled by a dictator who was most likely recruited back in the days of the USSR.
– As it turns out, the American system of checks and balances does not actually exist in reality.
– The trust between Europe and the USA—which had existed since at least 1945—has been buried; if not forever, then certainly for a very long time.
t.me/MirovichMedia/15344
kbc 🌎 retweeted
In 1939, a graduate student named George Dantzig arrived late to his statistics class at UC Berkeley. Two problems were already written on the blackboard when he walked in.
Assuming they were the night’s homework, he copied them down and went home to work through them. It took him several days longer than usual, and he apologized to his professor for the delay.
His professor, Jerzy Neyman — one of the most respected statisticians of his time — didn’t scold him. He was stunned into silence. The two problems Dantzig had casually solved as homework were actually famous unsolved theorems in statistics, ones that had stumped professional mathematicians for years.
One of Dantzig’s solutions was prepared for publication almost immediately. He later admitted that if he’d known those problems were supposed to be impossible, he probably never would have attempted them at all.
Sometimes the only thing standing between a person and the impossible is simply not being told it can’t be done.
- Everyday Magic
Where's the @FBI
The 11 disappearing scientists and their field of research:
1. Amy Eskridge - anti gravity propulsion and electrostatic propulsion systems
2. Michael Hicks - Earth space observation systems
3. Frank Maywald - planetary robotic systems
4. Anthony Chavez - research classified, clearance at Los Alamos National Lab
5. Monica Reza - orbital communication systems
6. Melissa Casias - research classified, high security clearance at Los Alamos National Lab
7. Steven Garcia - nuclear weapons engineer
8. Jason Thomas - chemical biology and experimental drug development
9. Nuno Loureiro - plasma physics and fusion science
10. Carl Grillmair - exoplanets, stellar streams and near earth objects
11. William McCasland - Director of Air Force Research Lab, hypersonics, directive energy systems, and advanced propulsion tech
kbc 🌎 retweeted
On the helicopter leaving the ship right now. This planet is impossibly beautiful from every altitude I’ve seen it…surface to 250,000 miles
kbc 🌎 retweeted
You won't hear a better 55-second description of MAGA and Trump than this: in terms of the perspective of any minimally honest MAGA supporter:
