lol

Chandrasekhar died exactly 31 years ago today. At 19, on the boat from India to Cambridge in 1930, he worked out that a white dwarf above ~1.4 solar masses could not remain stable. Eddington publicly rejected the result. 53 years later, Chandrasekhar won the Nobel Prize for his work on stellar evolution.

In 1948, a 32-year-old at Bell Labs published a paper nobody fully understood. Engineers found it too mathematical. Mathematicians found it too engineering-focused. One prominent mathematician reviewed it negatively. That paper - "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", became the founding document of the digital age. The man was Claude Shannon. Father of Information Theory. At 21, he wrote the most important master's thesis of the 20th century. Working at MIT on an early mechanical computer, Shannon noticed its relay switches had exactly two states - open or closed. He had just taken a philosophy course introducing Boolean algebra, which also operated on two values: true and false. Nobody had ever connected these two things. His 1937 thesis proved that Boolean algebra and electrical circuits are mathematically identical, and that any logical operation could be built from simple switches. Howard Gardner called it "possibly the most important, and also the most famous, master's thesis of the century." Every digital computer ever built traces back to this insight. At 29, he proved that perfect encryption exists. During WWII, Shannon worked on classified cryptography at Bell Labs. His work contributed to SIGSALY, the secure voice system used for confidential communications between Roosevelt and Churchill. In a classified 1945 memorandum, he mathematically proved the one-time pad provides perfect secrecy, unbreakable not just computationally, but provably, permanently, against an adversary with infinite power. When declassified in 1949, it transformed cryptography from an art into a science. It laid the foundations for DES, AES, and every modern encryption standard. At 32, he defined what information is. His 1948 paper introduced one equation: H = −Σ p(x) log p(x) Shannon entropy. The average uncertainty in a probability distribution. The minimum bits required to encode a message. Three things followed: > He defined the bit - the fundamental unit of all information. His colleague John Tukey coined the name. > He proved the channel capacity theorem, every communication channel has a maximum rate of reliable transmission. You can approach it. You can never exceed it. > He unified telegraph, telephone, and radio into a single mathematical framework for the first time. Robert Lucky of Bell Labs called it the greatest work "in the annals of technological thought." Where his equation lives in AI today: Cross-entropy loss - the function training every classifier and language model, is derived directly from H. Decision tree splits use information gain, which is H applied to data. Perplexity, the standard LLM evaluation metric, is an exponentiation of cross-entropy. Every time a neural network trains, Shannon's formula runs inside it. He also built the first AI learning device. In 1950, Shannon built Theseus, a mechanical mouse that navigated a maze through trial and error, learned the correct path, and repeated it perfectly. Mazin Gilbert of Bell Labs said: "Theseus inspired the whole field of AI." That same year he published the first paper on programming a computer to play chess. He co-organized the 1956 Dartmouth Workshop, the founding event of AI as a field. The man: He rode a unicycle through Bell Labs hallways while juggling. He built a flame-throwing trumpet, a rocket-powered Frisbee, and Styrofoam shoes to walk on the lake behind his house. He called his home Entropy House. When asked what motivated him: "I was motivated by curiosity. Never by the desire for financial gain. I just wondered how things were put together." In 1985, he appeared unexpectedly at a conference in Brighton. The crowd mobbed him for autographs. Persuaded to speak at the banquet, he talked briefly, then pulled three balls from his pockets and juggled instead. One engineer said: "It was as if Newton had showed up at a physics conference." He died in 2001 after a decade with Alzheimer's, the cruel irony of information slowly leaving the mind of the man who defined what information was. Claude, the AI model, is named after Claude Shannon, the mathematician who laid the foundation for the digital world we rely on today.

Grok 4.6 just took #1 on CursorBench. Not only the highest score. It did it at a fraction of the cost of the models sitting right behind it. That combination is the real signal. Top-tier results are one thing. Top-tier results that stay cheap enough to run for long agentic coding sessions are something else. I see this as the practical edge that matters for real work. Benchmarks are useful. Sustained performance at low cost is what actually gets used.

It’s that easy to use Grok @Bot

Grok Bot can recreate any viral video from the link 🤯 How it works: I send @bot a link to an AI clip. It watches the video and writes a prompt to recreate it (with any changes I want). Then it uses @imagine to generate the new video! I tried it on the subway trend 👇

If you're a man who is dating and considering taking a woman seriously, find out how she acted during Covid and get her opinion on the Lindsay Clancy case first. Jusy trying to save you some pain :)

I’ll give you the big picture: America has been living under two constitutions since 1964. The Civil Rights Act began as a ban on segregation. Then Griggs made unequal group outcomes illegal, Bakke locked race preferences into college admissions under the diversity banner, and Title VII and the EEOC grew into a permanent legal apparatus that can override private contracts, hiring decisions, and free association whenever the numbers look uneven. Christopher Caldwell’s point in The Age of Entitlement is that one constitution protects individual liberty, while the other enforces group equality. So, at which group’s expense, specifically, has this “equality” been happening in schools, universities, corporations, and government?

The Bataclan attackers who murdered 130 people in Paris were already known threats, but the European authorities still let them operate freely. Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the ringleader, had a conviction in absentia and an international arrest warrant yet moved between Syria, Greece, and Western Europe for months without being stopped. Samy Amimour was under formal judicial supervision after trying to join jihadists in Yemen, slipped it, traveled to Syria, returned to France, and helped carry out the massacre. Two more attackers entered through the Greek island of Leros on fake Syrian passports, riding the same migrant routes used by hundreds of thousands of real asylum seekers. France’s own Fiche S terrorism watchlist flagged thousands of people as security risks, including several connected to the attackers, but the designation carried no legal force so they remained free. The parliamentary inquiry later confirmed every name was already known. What was missing was the will to act before the massacre began.