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This is super cool.
For the past two years, some folks in Texas have been creating a new hardware city out in the middle of nowhere.
It's called Proto-Town, and it's both weird and wonderful. There are startups and people living in trailers right next to their machines.
They've never let the media visit. But we managed to get our cameras in there. Come see
m.youtube.com/watch?v=qIob2-…
Himanshu retweeted
I spend a lot of time, perhaps too much, thinking about the lost architecture of Britain.
Crystal Palace was the most tremendous loss of the modern era, yet it's rare to see any pictures of it. When built in 1851, it was the largest building in the world and three times the size of St Paul's Cathedral.
What's more, that immense ironwork and 293,000 glass panels went up in just 190 days for the World's Fair. Almost 1 million square feet of glass. An extraordinary feat.
It was razed in a fire in the 1930s and never rebuilt.
Himanshu retweeted
I recently spent some time with former colleagues from academia. All of them brilliant, peak human capital. Almost all of them fundamentally unable to plug into the economy, inoculated against productivity by a youth spent experimenting in laboratories instead of building wealth for society. Dealing with real people in the real world.
90% of them have left academia in the last 10-15 years, and 90% of those are functionally unemployed. Grad school does a lousy job of training scientists to be professors (since most of them don't get the good postdoc or tenure track position) and an even worse job of preparing people for real life.
We complain that our societal infrastructure is collapsing, our state capacity is low, our incumbent industries are faltering. Where are the next generation of leaders that can push us forward?
A huge fraction of them were conveyor-belted into academia by schooling systems that have no mechanism to channel ambition and 99+%ile competence, and our universities are mostly hedge funds with glorified psych wards/academic departments on the side, running an insane pyramid scheme that exists only to prove, over and over again, the Shirky Principle: Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
We literally poured trillions of dollars into state-funded research and effectively neutered our elite civilian technical leadership development programs.
I recently asked a few academic friends if they were finding AI useful in accelerating their programs of research. You know, to solve the Big Problem their entire field exists to solve?
Some were. But most were complaining about how it created pedagogical issues, explaining how their department decided to ban the use of AI, or how it took 18 months to approve an enterprise account, or how they tried Gemini 2 on a puzzle a year ago and it wasn't very helpful, or repeating nonsense about datacenters and water consumption, or supposed IP theft by model companies, as though that has any bearing on their ability to, eg, accelerate a cure for cancer.
Elon sometimes calls AI a supersonic tsunami - a huge wave you don't see coming. I see it coming. But even the people who you'd think have been waiting for this their entire careers are steadfastly looking in the other direction.
Himanshu retweeted
'Speed' derives from the Old English 'spēd,' which referred to good fortune/success.
This sense of 'speed' lives on in 'Godspeed':
"God spede you" = "God prosper you"
We hope this brings you up to speed.
Himanshu retweeted
Peter Thiel on why hard is better than easy or impossible:
"The overarching lesson you learned going through a business like PayPal, which had a lot of challenges but ended up succeeding, the high-level lesson was, you can build a great company, but it's hard. And I think the lesson you learn inside of most startups is very different. If you're at a startup that fails, you will learn the lesson: it's impossible to build a great company, you should try something less ambitious the next time around.
If you're at a startup where things work too easily, which I think was the way most people at Microsoft or Google would have experienced it, you learn the lesson that it's actually easy to build a great company. And hard is somehow better than easy or impossible, because if it's easy, you don't need to work hard. If it's impossible, there's no point in working hard. And so easy and impossible converge to not working hard. Hard tells you you should have to work hard."
Himanshu retweeted
It's worth watching very closely how all this goes down in the coming years.
Because what Elon is doing here is basically the other side of the coin that Mamdani is on. AI/Robotics are deeply wealth concentrating technologies. Inherently.
Either the wealthy decide for themselves how to redistribute the wealth (like Elon here), or the people will elect politicians that will tax that wealth away from the wealthy, and then the government will spend it how they see fit.
Himanshu retweeted
This is a VERY big deal.
As I said in July in the post linked below:
"There is no greater act of philanthropy in the US right now than:
• Max out Trump Accounts for kids (as many as you can)"
xitter.cf/stevenmarkryan/status/…
Himanshu retweeted
The UK is giving America a preview of what happens when a country stops expecting immigrants to assimilate — and starts accommodating them instead.
@Liv_Boeree on immigration problems in the UK and across Europe
Himanshu retweeted
Including kids, hence a true commitment to the West includes allowing kids authorship of their own lives now, not after some training or initiation period.
Himanshu retweeted
Why I play video games...
I am engaging in bottom-up, centrally unplanned, undirected problem solving, carried forward voluntarily for my own reason.
Himanshu retweeted
The West, or perhaps only the Anglosphere, is the historically unique idea that individuals exist not for the sake of their ruler, their class, their society, their ancestors, their gods, or any other such superstition, but for their own sake.
Himanshu retweeted
Why study the mind, especially the power of the human mind? What's the attraction?
It's a bit like an astrophysicist looking through a crappy telescope, then seeing some fuzzy blob that can be perfectly still, or eat a galaxy, or make a galaxy, or turn a galaxy into the shape of a dog. What the fuck is that blob? That's what a human mind is like: a very powerful and mysterious blob that seems capable of... anything?
Yes, I think I would like to study the Capable of Everything Blob.
Himanshu retweeted
Two years ago, I started the simple practice of playing classical music while we did school.
I expected my kids to learn better - because the studies show that - but I didn’t expect them to fall in love.
The most shocking moment for me came while listening to Franz Liszt while teaching them math. I wish I had this on tape….
8yo: Mama, I think this is Beethoven
Me: No, it’s Liszt
10yo: Mama, I really think it’s Beethoven
Me (after looking it up): Ok, you’re right! Apparently Liszt transcribed Beethoven’s symphonies into piano pieces.
You don’t need any fancy training to help your kids fall in love with classical music.
You just need to start playing it.
Need help? I wrote the full list of classical artists we used and how we started. I hope it brings more music into your your home.
clarified.life/p/curate-a-lo…
Himanshu retweeted
Bring back Geography!
Geography isn’t about maps.
It’s about people.
Who they are, how they live, and how their environment shapes their culture, art, and history.
Geography is the exploration of how deserts shape nomads, why the Renaissance blossomed in Italy instead of Iceland, and why the architecture of Japan reflects a reverence for nature born from living in the land of earthquakes and volcanoes.
Pairing geography with history further transforms it.
Children begin to grasp not just what happened but why it happened. They see why empires rise along rivers and why trade routes matter.
When kids understand geography, they don’t just see the lines on a map - they see lives, traditions, and innovations shaped by the land itself.
Geography is part of the Story of Humanity
It deserves a place in your child's education♥️clarified.life/p/why-bother-…
Himanshu retweeted
What happened to stablecoins will happen to tokenized equities -- blockchains are unapologetically superior to TradFi's rails.
Total supply of tokenized equities now represents over 1% of total stablecoin supplies
chart @arkinvest
Himanshu retweeted
If given the choice between large State with closed borders and generous handouts, or small state with open borders and no handouts, I'd choose the later every day.
Immigrants from anywhere, so long as they get no handouts and are not permitted to violate private property, are little threat to anyone. And the immigrant that violates property is no worse than the citizen who does the same.
In America, it's white citizens in DC who do the vast majority of the looting, and who cause the vast majority of harm to the country and its people.
Because the scale of the State is so large, it necessarily invites special interest groups of all manner to organize and struggle for benefits. The danger of these factions over time, which the Founders wrote about explicitly, grows in proportion to state size. Identity politics (just a more contemporary name for such factions), which is wholly disintegrating any national concept of the people of America, is less a consequence of immigrants than of the game theory of an ever-growing state that dishes out loot to whomever demands it.
Property prices in and around DC is a much more damning indictment of modern America than any perceived border issue. It is not the barbarians at the gates but the kleptocrats within which most endangers this country.
If you want to deport people, start with Nancy Pelosi.
I think libertarianism is a self-refuting concept. It presumes a high-trust, self-governing society, but its core tenets are used to dismantle the borders and cultural homogeneity required for that society to exist. You cant sustain a free society while systematically importing people who don't share your history, religion, or values.
Sure, you can argue about "true" libertarianism versus open-border variants, but at this point, the movement is so fragmented that nobody knows what it actually stands for. When your advocacy for liberty acts as a battering ram to erase the national identit you're just creating a vacuum of social trust that a massive, managerial bureaucracy is all too happy to fill.
Essentially libertarians are used as pawns. They're a neutralizing weapon for those that would actually gain power and use it.
I do see them as allies though with the ability to evolve in thought. I admire libertarians like Tom Woods and Jeremy Kauffman.
Himanshu retweeted
notice how they always have to stay in control
god forbid you fucking just airdrop 5% on the public, no, they have to be able to monetize their own stock while determining how to spend it on things deemed by them as "benefits"
We’re committing a portion of Anthropic’s shares to the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, a new wholly owned entity dedicated entirely to the public benefit.
It will start off with 5% of our shares. For every 50% increase in the company’s value over a set baseline, we can contribute up to an extra 2%, subject to our board’s discretion.
In total, this means that roughly 20% of Anthropic’s shares are committed to the public good. Our co-founders have already pledged to donate 80% of their equity, and around half our employees are donating a portion of their equity as part of a donation matching program we’ve run since our founding.
In the post below, we share more details about our new fund.
anthropic.com/news/public-be…
