Writer-editor. Co-author of “Are We Ready for Mars?” https://xitter.cf/t.co/yzekgO4x4U. Previously @nautilusmag. Here to take everything seriously 100% of the time.
Berkeley, CA
Joined March 2011
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No one:
My 2yo on a walk: “I was born”
Me: “You were born. You exist now.”
2yo: “It’s amazing!”
Brian Gallagher retweeted
In ‘Middlemarch’, Tom McCarthy argues, George Eliot uses her ‘study of provincial life’ as a Trojan Horse to smuggle the continental philosophy of Spinoza and Hegel into the vicarages of middle England. youtube.com/watch?v=XD_Cww5Q… #Middelmarch #Spinoza #Hegel #literature #philosophy
Hume was well aware of the “my side” bias
Insightful passage from Hume. One reconstruction: Why assume the worst about people when designing political institutions, given that most people are pretty decent? Because everyday decency is partly rooted in reputational concerns, and the tribal or factional nature of politics inverts these incentives: people win approval from their own side for advancing its interests, not for impartial benevolence, which leads them to act in ways that are biased and immoral.
Brian Gallagher retweeted
I know Tesla fans won't read the article and claim that I don't understand the difference between the maps Tesla wants to create and Waymo's HD mapping that Elon has trashed.
Read the article. I understand, and you are the one missing the point.
At the end of the day, it comes down to understanding your environment, and Ashok's comments about Tesla creating its own maps were about FSD not being able to recognize things like speed signs.
Tesla has always used navigation maps, and building its own instead of licensing them isn’t a contradiction on its own.
But look at the problems Tesla is trying to fix. Speed limits, parking and routes are all about understanding the environment, and FSD still often fails at it, especially with speed limit signs.
A speed limit sign is about as simple as road information gets. If an end-to-end vision system can’t reliably read and apply it, and the fix is a better map, then vision alone isn’t doing the job Tesla said it would.
Tesla’s fleet is now a mapping fleet
That brings Tesla closer to Waymo than it would like to admit.
Waymo maps a city by driving its sensor-equipped vehicles through it before launching service, and keeps those maps updated as its fleet drives. Tesla is now describing the same idea: its cars collect what they see, and that data feeds a Tesla-built map that helps every car drive better. The main difference is that Waymo’s cars have lidar on top and can deliver HD maps.
At one point, $TSLA fans are going to have to admit that Tesla's approach to self-driving shares many of the same problems as Waymo.
Tesla now says it needs its own maps for FSD after years of dismissing maps electrek.co/2026/10/22/tesla… by @fredlambert
Brian Gallagher retweeted
The GRU hacked into Jared Kushner's iPhone. Dutch military intelligence (MIVD) then recruited a GRU spy who gave them access to the hacked phone. What MIVD discovered was that Kushner had access to two bank accounts --one Azerbaijani, the other Israeli --where Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Emirati ruler Mohammed bin Zayed deposited money. It sounds like a slightly far-fetched episode of "Slow Horses," but it's real. And it proves just how eye-poppingly corrupt this administration was and continues to be as its "special envoy" decides the fate of tens of millions in Europe in the Middle East. Simply incredible reporting by Matthew Cole, drawn from his new book on Kushner. vanityfair.com/story/jared-k…
lol this explains my seemingly capricious dishwasher
Dishwasher Manufacturers: If you rinse off your dishes in the sink before loading them into the dishwasher, they come out less clean!
This always gets me in trouble. I of course don’t rinse first, because it is a Dishwasher. Right?
Rinsing plates before loading the dishwasher feels diligent. Appliance makers say it is the very reason your dishes come out dirty.
Engineers at brands like Bosch and Whirlpool, alongside detergent makers like Cascade, have spent years advising consumers to stop pre-rinsing.
Contemporary dishwashers rely on internal turbidity sensors—optical eyes that gauge water clarity during the early wash cycle.
When pre-rinsed plates yield clean water, the machine misinterprets the load as lightly soiled, shortening cycle time and reducing water temperature.
Furthermore, the enzymes in modern powdered and gel detergents require food starches and proteins to latch onto; without debris to activate them, the surfactants simply wash down the drain, occasionally leaving alkaline film etched into glassware.
Oh there is more…
Cookware care harbors equally stubborn folklore. For decades, home cooks warned that a single drop of liquid soap would ruin a cast-iron skillet's seasoning. Lodge, which has made cast-iron cookware in Tennessee since 1896, explicitly debunks this in its care manuals.
The prohibition dates to the nineteenth century, when soaps were formulated with harsh lye (sodium hydroxide), a caustic alkali capable of stripping cured oil. Modern dish detergents contain mild surfactants that lift loose grease without breaking the polymerized oil cross-linked to the iron matrix.
A gentle wash with liquid soap leaves true seasoning intact.
A similar misconception surrounds kitchen waste disposers.
Generations of homeowners were told that tossing eggshells or ice down the drain sharpens the disposal blades.
InSinkErator, the inventor and largest maker of food waste disposers, notes that residential disposers do not contain blades at all. The central chamber houses blunt swiveling lugs on a spinning turntable.
These lugs do not slice; centrifugal force hurls food against a stationary outer ring of shredder teeth to pulverize it into a slurry. Eggshells cannot sharpen a blunt lug, and their fibrous membrane often snags in plumbing traps.
Even oven maintenance suffers from well-intended habits.
Appliance makers including GE and Frigidaire warn against lining the floor of an electric or gas oven with aluminum foil.
Modern ovens hide the heating element beneath an enamel floor. Foil traps and reflects radiant heat directly against the base, reaching temperatures high enough to melt the aluminum or permanently fuse it to the porcelain finish.
Never have I seen a more concerted campaign of gaslighting as people trying to make us doubt the evidence of our senses on this matter of utmost importance!
Listen to the experts—but if you hear something, say something!
The mother of a toddler found alive in an Arizona hospital morgue more than five hours after being pronounced dead tells NBC News she thought she heard him breathing as she hugged him goodbye, but instead of listening to her gut, she believed the doctor. nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ari…
Doing the Lord’s work out here
You're a large account. You need to be responsible. The rule book is public information.
official.nba.com/rule-no-4-d…
I didn’t want to believe it because Luka is my guy but reading this it immediately sounded like slop to me and sure enough
Luka Doncic places full-page ad in LA Times ahead of Lakers' season opener on Wednesday.
"Dear LA, tonight we start our run for a championship."
(via @DanWoikeSports)
Ah man, wish I was there for this one. Looking forward to watching. Biographically it’s right up my alley.
In this Interintellect SuperSalon, psychologist and author @drvantongeren joined our founder @TheAnnaGat for a conversation about the search for meaning and purpose after leaving religion.
They explored the psychological challenges of moving beyond traditional belief systems, how people navigated uncertainty in the absence of established religious frameworks, and what it took to rebuild a sense of meaning and fulfillment in an increasingly secular world.
One of the books I recommend to people who want to get into philosophy not merely intellectually and don’t want to dive into primary literature right away or on its own, is Martha Nussbaum’s THE THERAPY OF DESIRE. It makes the case that argumentation is a healthy way of life.
