FreeThinker, tinkerer, Ikigai-seeker, Shoshin-learner, a Soft Engi (neer), and a curious soul.
Joined March 2007
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Saturday was a blast. I enjoyed nature at High Point State Park in the day and then Central Park for the #WeBelongHere festival from dusk onwards #StephanBodzin #BenBohmer
MΞτ∆₱$¥¢HΞ retweeted
Jersey City raised the municipal tax levy 15%, cut Via service, and cut park maintenance.
Now the city council wants to spend $1.2 million to buy a vacant lot at 128 Glenwood — to lease it to a nonprofit for $1 a year as a community garden.
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MΞτ∆₱$¥¢HΞ retweeted
While this tax hike get approved so did all salary increases ; instagram.com/p/DbowvObHJwt/… #jerseycity recall
TAX HIKE: Jersey City lawmakers approved a 15% property tax increase amid a budget crisis. City officials say $120 million in state aid and $58 million in spending cuts helped keep the increase down.
#News12 #NewJersey #TaxHike #JerseyCity
tinyurl.com/3nuzpjwk
You need to be creative so that data centers will give back to the city via some programs.
Raising property taxes on residents instead of working with data centers shows lacks creativity on the new administration.
This new #JerseyCity Mayor Solomon is not good at all.
Those irrelevant and utterly wasteful daily standup meetings is what I do not miss from my previous job.
Elon Musk sent every Tesla employee a memo that took authority away from their managers and handed it to them.
He never asks for more hours. Every rule moves a decision closer to the person doing the work.
Musk: “Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time.”
Companies have a role for everyone who creates process and no role for anyone who removes it. Meetings and approval chains survive because removing them was never anyone’s job.
Musk: “Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren’t adding value.”
Attendance has always been treated as proof of commitment. He made it worthless, and contribution became the only thing that counts in the room.
Musk: “It is not rude to leave, it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time.”
Ordinary manners protect whoever called the meeting. He moved that protection to everyone else sitting quietly with real work waiting on them.
Musk: “Don’t use acronyms or nonsense words for objects, software, or processes at Tesla. Anything that requires an explanation inhibits communication.”
Internal vocabulary converts knowledge into status and charges every newcomer a fee to participate.
A company that speaks plainly can absorb talent at full speed.
Musk: “Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done, not through the chain of command.”
Most good ideas die in transit, three levels below anyone with the power to act on them.
Musk: “Any manager who attempts to enforce chain of command communication will soon find themselves working elsewhere.”
The only threat in the entire memo. A manager who insists on being routed through is buying his own relevance with everyone else’s time. Musk put a price on it.
Musk: “Always pick common sense as your guide. If following a company rule is obviously ridiculous in a particular situation, the rule should change.”
Following a bad rule normally shields you. Exercising judgment exposes you.
He flipped which one carries the risk, and every rule now has to earn its place against the person applying it.
Every institution drifts toward protecting its own comfort. The ones that keep building are held together by people who rewrite the rules back down to something a single person can act on.
Nothing on that list requires a budget, a headcount, or a title.
You can run the entire memo from wherever you are sitting right now. Most people never test it and never learn it was permitted the whole time.
You aim at where [success] will be, and you commit to that arc before you leave, because there is no correcting it once you are on it.
Elon Musk just told millions of Starlink customers that they have been quietly funding humanity’s road to Mars.
Musk: “if you look on your Starlink Wi-Fi router, you will see this image.”
The image is the transfer orbit to Mars. Earth on one side, Mars on the other, and the exact arc a ship has to fly between them.
The map to another planet is printed on the router in your living room, because the two things are the same project.
Musk: “you can’t just go straight to Mars, you have to create this elliptical orbit with Earth at one point and Mars at the other side at the far end of the ellipse and then time the where you are in that ellipse to intersect with Mars.”
You cannot aim at where Mars is. You aim at where it will be, and you commit to that arc before you leave, because there is no correcting it once you are on it.
The destination is not there when you depart. You are flying at a version of it that does not exist yet.
Earth and Mars only line up for this roughly every twenty-six months. The universe hands out departure times and does not take requests.
Musk: “the actual distance traveled on the arc is close to it like a thousand times further than the Moon.”
A thousand times further than the farthest point any human being has ever traveled.
The distance was never the hard part. Hohmann worked out this exact transfer in 1925. The math has been sitting finished for a century.
What nobody could solve was money. Every previous attempt at deep space ran on government appropriations, which means it ran on election cycles.
Programs that outlast a presidency are rare. Programs that outlast a generation barely exist.
Musk: “Starlink internet is what’s being used to pay for humanity getting to Mars.”
A rural household finally getting connected. A boat in the middle of the Pacific. A village nobody ever ran a line to. Every one of them is a payment toward a launch.
Musk: “I’d just like to thank everyone out there who has bought Starlink because you are helping secure the future of civilization and helping make life multiplanetary.”
That is not marketing language. That is accounting.
The financing is the real breakthrough. Building something people want this month to pay for something that pays off after everyone alive is dead.
Every monument in human history was built with money taken from people who were never asked. Tithes, taxes, tribute, conscription. The pyramids and the cathedrals and the moon landing were all funded by force.
This is the first project at that scale that runs on people choosing it, which makes every dish on every roof a vote rather than a levy.
Nobody had to be chosen for this. A working connection in a place the old providers gave up on puts you on the ledger.
Every generation inherits one project large enough to be remembered by. Almost nobody alive for those ever got close enough to touch theirs.
Civilizations do not get to choose whether they become permanent. They find out afterward.
Every one before this looked up at the sky and wanted it.
This is the first one writing the check.
"Everything has some consciousness, and we tap into that. It is about energy at its most basic level."
- Dr. Robert Moog -
(As seen on a Moog Mavis box)
In Project Hail Mary, there's a scene in which the Protagonist Ryland Grace asks "Who am I ?"
It reminds of the song "God I'm Just Grateful" (by Elevation Worship) which was inspired by
Psalm 8:4, "What is man that you are mindful of him".
Graph Engineeeeeeering
Lance Martin (Anthropic engineer) spent two hours on agent graphs. The diagram is finished in the first fifteen minutes.
2 hours. Free. Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair.
State, nodes, the three feedback loops. That part is quick, and it is the part people screenshot.
Evaluation shows up at 23:06 and keeps coming back, until the closing section is literally building eval datasets for the graph.
That ratio is the lesson. Drawing a graph is an afternoon. Proving it holds on inputs you did not choose is the job.
A graph without an eval set is a diagram with opinions.
Full workshop below.
Which node in your graph has never met an input you did not write yourself?
Technical knowledge is within reach on demand. Almost anyone can do any app now using AI.
What you need now are ideas, grit, and connections to survive and thrive.
It won't be long til robots flash the middle finger at humans—and actually mean it!
Robotics company 1X has unveiled a breakthrough hand for its NEO humanoid: 25 degrees of freedom, driven by tendons instead of gears, with skin that can actually feel. Running at gear ratios as low as 5:1, every joint doubles as a force sensor — so NEO can pick up single screws and coins, spin in a light bulb, pour tea, zip a jacket, and catch a slipping cup before it falls. IP68 waterproof and food-safe, the hands can even wash themselves, and 1X says it can build 10,000 of them this year.
#1X #NEO #HumanoidRobot #RoboticHand
I visited Minehaha Falls in Minnesota. I loved that I was able to dip my feet downstream.
I propose adding an exclamation❗to its name to make it Minehaha!
I am at AWS Summit NYC and I just learned about AWS DevOps & Transform and Kiro Autonomous mode.
Are we close to that day when our dev team employees could be agents running on AWS?
Got laid off last week. Never thought I really needed a break. A long one, for that matter.
Good decision by my previous employer.
MΞτ∆₱$¥¢HΞ retweeted
The moment you stop thinking of "government" as some abstract entity and start naming actual individuals, everything changes. Janet Yellen personally signed off on policies that destroyed your purchasing power. Jerome Powell individually chose to print trillions while small businesses died under lockdowns. Anthony Fauci made specific decisions that shuttered schools and churches. These are human beings who made choices and should face consequences for them.
The mystical thinking around government serves those in power perfectly. When you blame "the system" or "institutional failures," you let the decision-makers slip away into comfortable anonymity. Nancy Pelosi didn't accidentally become worth $120 million on a government salary. She made deliberate stock trades using information unavailable to you. When inflation hit 9.1% in June 2022, specific people at the Federal Reserve chose to expand the money supply by $4.9 trillion between 2020 and 2022.
Every regulation that destroys your business came from a specific bureaucrat's desk. Every tax that impoverishes your family got signed by an actual person. Every war that kills thousands started with individual politicians voting "yes." Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan deliberately kept interest rates artificially low for years, creating the bubble that exploded in 2008.
The genius of the state lies in convincing you that it's bigger than the sum of its parts, that individual accountability dissolves into collective responsibility. This is pure mythology designed to protect the guilty. Track down names. Demand answers from specific people. Make them personally defend their choices instead of hiding behind institutional language and bureaucratic doublespeak.
You wouldn't accept "the corporation made me do it" from a CEO who defrauded investors, so why do you accept it from politicians who defraud entire nations?
MΞτ∆₱$¥¢HΞ retweeted
Je veux présenter mes excuses, au nom des Français, pour avoir enfanté la French Theory (qui a enfanté la pire des merdes idéologiques : le wokisme).
Nous avons donné au monde Descartes, Pascal, Tocqueville. Et puis, dans les ruines intellectuelles de l'après-68, nous avons donné Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. Trois hommes brillants qui ont fabriqué, dans l'élégance de notre langue, l'arme idéologique qui paralyse aujourd'hui l'Occident.
Il faut comprendre ce qu'ils ont fait. Foucault a enseigné que la vérité n'existe pas, qu'il n'y a que des rapports de pouvoir déguisés en savoir. Que la science, la raison, la justice, l'institution médicale, l'école, la prison, la sexualité, tout n'est qu'une mise en scène de la domination. Derrida a enseigné que les textes n'ont pas de sens stable, que tout signifiant glisse, que toute lecture est une trahison, que l'auteur est mort et que le lecteur règne. Deleuze a enseigné qu'il fallait préférer le rhizome à l'arbre, le nomade au sédentaire, le désir à la loi, le devenir à l'être, la différence à l'identité.
Pris isolément, ce sont des thèses discutables. Combinées, exportées, vulgarisées, elles forment un système. Et ce système est un poison.
Car voici ce qui s'est passé. Ces textes, illisibles en France, ont traversé l'Atlantique. Les départements de Yale, de Berkeley, de Columbia les ont absorbés dans les années 80. Ils y ont trouvé un terreau qui n'existait pas chez nous : le puritanisme américain, sa culpabilité raciale, son obsession identitaire. La French Theory s'est mariée à ce substrat, et l'enfant de ce mariage s'appelle le wokisme.
Judith Butler lit Foucault et invente le genre performatif. Edward Said lit Foucault et invente le post-colonialisme académique. Kimberlé Crenshaw hérite du cadre et invente l'intersectionnalité. À chaque étape, la matrice est française : il n'y a pas de vérité, il n'y a que du pouvoir, donc toute hiérarchie est suspecte, toute institution est oppressive, toute norme est violence, toute identité est construite donc négociable, toute majorité est coupable.
Voilà comment trois philosophes parisiens, qui n'ont probablement jamais imaginé leurs conséquences pratiques, ont fourni le logiciel d'exploitation à une génération entière d'activistes, de bureaucrates universitaires, de DRH, de journalistes, de législateurs. Voilà comment on a obtenu une civilisation qui ne sait plus dire si une femme est une femme, si sa propre histoire mérite d'être défendue, si le mérite existe, si la vérité se distingue de l'opinion.
C'est de la merde pour une raison simple, et il faut la dire calmement. Une civilisation se tient debout sur trois piliers : la croyance qu'il existe une vérité accessible à la raison, la croyance qu'il existe un bien distinct du mal, la croyance qu'il existe un héritage à transmettre. La French Theory a entrepris de dynamiter les trois. Pas par méchanceté. Par jeu intellectuel, par fascination du soupçon, par haine de la bourgeoisie qui les avait nourris. Mais le résultat est là. Une génération entière a appris à déconstruire et n'a jamais appris à construire. Une génération entière sait soupçonner et ne sait plus admirer. Une génération entière voit le pouvoir partout et la beauté nulle part.
Je m'excuse parce que nous, Français, avons une responsabilité particulière. C'est notre langue, nos universités, nos éditeurs, notre prestige qui ont donné à ce nihilisme son emballage chic. Sans la légitimité de la Sorbonne et de Vincennes, ces idées n'auraient jamais traversé l'océan. Nous avons exporté le doute comme d'autres exportent des armes.
Ce qui se construit maintenant, en silicon valley, dans les labos d'IA, dans les startups, dans les ateliers, dans tous les lieux où des gens fabriquent encore des choses au lieu de les déconstruire, c'est la réponse. Une civilisation se reconstruit par les bâtisseurs, pas par les commentateurs. Par ceux qui croient que la vérité existe et qu'elle vaut qu'on s'y consacre. Par ceux qui assument une hiérarchie du beau, du vrai, du bon, et qui n'ont pas honte de la transmettre.
Alors pardon. Et au travail.