Really clever targeting of a niche. I’d be interested to hear if they find success!

I wonder, if I was surrounded by wealth in the same way, if I would schedule talks on my wacky ideas. The blind encouragement of insurmountable wealth must be intoxicating.

I’ve had similar thoughts. As much as I’ve tried, I can’t fully imagine the unlimited wealth these people have and what it does to your brain.

It’s all deeply weird, and films like the Mountainhead increasingly seem like they might be more accurate than not.

There’s just clearly some limit around accumulated wealth where it detaches people further and further from reality.

Well it is their reality. It's more like most people live in a different, crueller reality than them.

I think I’d pay people to tell me my ideas were whacky and not to share them.

I wonder how often someone in his orbit tells him he is wrong?

Shit, I post my idiot ideas to HN and people tell me my ideas are wacky and I'm a dumbass. For free!

I suppose the kind of character traits that enable becoming super-rich probably also lend themselves to giving such talks.

Most sane people would stop working by the time they become rich, not super rich. To become a billionaire, your brain must be wired differently, and perhaps with unwavering conviction that you are right, righter than anyone else and the world owes you its attention.

My pet theory is that billionaire weirdness and AI psychosis have the same root cause: talk too much to sychophants and the human mind starts to go off the rails.

Without a reality check, the natural feedback loop that tells us we're wrong sometimes, the human mind starts to diverge into madness.

TED is a venue for middlebrow ideas by middlebrows for other middlebrows.

Same with symposia and fora with “distinguished guests” like the Dalai Lama, or Kissinger or one of the Clintons or many other officials.

They do a circuit, often have someone prepare note for them where they rarely challenge prevailing thought among the attendees and come out of it with a lot of money.

There will be some nuggets once in a while but there is rarely any groundbreaking insight like when physicists and mathematicians in the XXth century brought new ideas, challenged old ideas and often suffered indignity for some time before they were vindicated.

One might say that Elon's acquisition of Twitter is the ultimate manifestation of this.

You don't think he was aware of the potential to leverage Twitter to elect a friendly president and alleviate his severe regulatory challenges? That part was just a happy accident?

I do, but think that that's orthogonal from the constant positive affirmations to all of his random thoughts. That's a sensation bought.

We all know why he did it: because people wrote on and listened to twitter a lot, and he didn't like what they said. He wanted to control the conversation that was unfavourable to him.

He wanted to control the conversation by... buying twitter and removing nearly all existing controls of conversation?

How quickly we forget how censored twitter was before he bought it

You forgot the bit where he changed the algo to get his posts artificially boosted

Of course a conversation about Peter Thiel and the Vatican has someone finding a way to mention Elon

Are these lectures available for anyone to look over or is it only for paying customers? I feel like if it was public it probably has the same weight as the Left Behind books did in the early 2000s.

Making friends as an adult, especially starting from zero, is a universal struggle, so try to avoid any negative self-talk or other things that may compound your loneliness. The usual advice works, but like all advice it only works when we’re ready for it to work. I wish I could offer more than platitudes, but you sound like you have a decent self-support system already, and maybe are just temporarily lacking in confidence.

They’re all dead, Dave! What a great franchise.

Peterson isn't, is he?

Surprised not to see “breakfast pasta” aka Carbonara. Wheat in the noodles, egg and cheese sauce.

Or pasta as a cereal, in a bowl with milk.

Could you do this with erlang’s term to binary functionality?

I use Tidewave as my coding agent and it’s able to execute code in the runtime. I believe it’s using Code.eval_string/3, but you should be able to check the implementation. It’s the project_eval tool.

In my experience it’s a huge leap in terms of the agent being able to test and debug functionality. It’ll often write small code snippets to test that individual functions work as expected.

It’s not really covered, but p2p technology combined with every phone in the world (and a little wishful thinking) could make for some neat applications.

I like the little spot colors it put on the ground

I'd bet that shape would look like a tube with a cap on.