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Seattle, WA
Joined March 2014
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Pavel Velkovsky retweeted
I am in @BostonGlobe this morning on why selling out is harder than ever: “Once upon a time, selling out was easy enough. In a pinch, come graduation, if you were an elite undergraduate drifter with no plan and no job, feeling the weight of parental disappointment, you could find refuge in consulting. McKinsey, Bain, and BCG wanted you. Sure, you’d sacrifice some of the glory of helping mankind, but noblesse oblige, the idea that wealth and prestige demand social responsibility, was unfashionable anyway. In return, these firms would make your choices for you and ensure your lifestyle was very, very comfortable…What has changed is that students who are starry-eyed are now coming to school starry-eyed about consulting.”
Pavel Velkovsky retweeted
I love super early European reactions to the reality of the New World from before they'd really had a chance to process the whole idea. That Albrecht Dürer journal entry where his mind is totally blown after seeing Aztec artifacts is one of my favorite historical snippets.
Pavel Velkovsky retweeted
There’s an incredible momentum on the video apps right now against the betta fish cup trade.
People across the country are posting bettas dying on shelves and confronting store managers.
60+ DVMs/PhDs published an open letter and 6K have signed the petition in one week. ⬇️
Pavel Velkovsky retweeted
Thank god we can find and intercept lost hikers as they mistakenly run away from rescue in dense forest!
Purdue University's IDEAS Lab built an autonomous drone that tracks runners through dense forests completely without GPS or cloud networks.
By running 3D LiDAR mapping and obstacle-avoidance AI entirely on-chip, it can weave under tree canopies and predict target movement through blind spots in real time.
Massive implications for next-gen search & rescue and edge AI.
Pavel Velkovsky retweeted
just went to the aquarium and saw an epaulette shark and my mom said “oh my god are those its eyes?!” duped, i fear, by quite literally one of the oldest tricks in the book
Pavel Velkovsky retweeted
The PBS documentary on Jonestown is genuinely amazing but there’s this great bit about Jim Jones’s career as a door to door pet monkey salesman where they talk to this woman and she’s like Oh yeah I remember Jim Jones. Bought a monkey from him. Anyways the monkey hanged itself.
Imagine learning basque just so that the waiters at Donostia's best restaurants will think you're cool.
Pavel Velkovsky retweeted
At a certain point, the only people likely to be learning a language are linguists. Even the ‘accessible’ Hittite textbook doesn’t really explain, e.g., the ablative, because who’s learning Hittite before Latin?
Pavel Velkovsky retweeted
In retrospect, losing the first round was the best thing that could have happened to Lula: it jolted his campaign, quieted the infighting and mobilized his supporters. Flávio Bolsonaro’s first-round win, by contrast, bred overconfidence in his camp.
Pavel Velkovsky retweeted
Related: I find the endless discourse about Bali being “ruined” rather amusing. It was a tourist hotspot by the 1980s and a haven for Western spiritual types long before Instagram. In 2002, Al-Qaeda targeted its tourist district precisely because it was full of Australians. This is hardly some recently discovered paradise.
Pavel Velkovsky retweeted
Backpackers were robbed, murdered and simply disappeared along the Hippie Trail. You could vanish somewhere in Afghanistan and your parents would never even know where to start looking.
Pavel Velkovsky retweeted
its unfortunate how often a building or landscape is marred by totally incongruous signage
for ex there are so many beautiful details and materials on this building in Liverpool, then there's artistically-insipid signage all around that breaks the spell
Pavel Velkovsky retweeted
Watching Brazil re-elect their elderly center-left incumbent President over a far right lunatic
Pavel Velkovsky retweeted
We have already seen a defection from the traditional WASP elite idea that it was an elite duty to hold the population to high educational standards, for the betterment of the entirety of society. This has led to stupidity. AI will make it worse.
I predict that High IQ well off functional people will form communities to protect themselves from sloppification, while everyone degenerates into this numb, sterile mass of jellyfishness. A Snow Crash-like scenario.
And the "well intentioned" will clap like seals, supporting the lowering of standards, much like what we've seen for the last decades, which will affect the masses and not already privileged the most.
Pavel Velkovsky retweeted
Gives you some insight into the types of people who bet on these markets and why they should NOT be cited by journalists. Polling in the closing weeks was a statistical dead heat, but polymarket had Bolsonaro at >80%? Never made sense.
