Everyone with a TV set had seen Hell, but no one knew if there was a Heaven. They only knew that there was a crack in the sky, and that Neil Armstrong had passed through it singing songs of praise for the Most High.
But no one had ever known if there was a Heaven, and that hadn’t stopped them from hoping.
For example, Richard Nixon. Richard Nixon knew he probably wasn’t going to get into Heaven the traditional way, so he’d pulled rank and got himself a ticket on a space capsule to enter it directly. Unfortunately for him, that space capsule had been Apollo 13, and he’d fallen back to Earth and his enraged constituents. But what if he’d had the right idea?
At age 35, business magnate Richard Branson was already head of Virgin Records, Virgin Communications, Virgin Games, and Virgin Atlantic Airways. What other people saw as the immutable will of God he saw as a business opportunity. So he teamed up with legendary aerospace engineer Burt Rutan to create a spacecraft capable of transporting a small number of lucky passengers up into the crack. And by lucky, he meant “very very rich”. If you can’t take it with you, you might as well give it to the people promising to ensure you an afterlife of eternal bliss.
Thus was born Celestial Virgin. Jesus had said it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter Heaven, but rocketry had thirty years of practice working with astonishingly small tolerances and rose to meet the challenge. Competitors sprung up – HeavenX, Blue Origen – but if you really wanted the best engineers in the world aiming you at that needle eye and guaranteeing you’d get through, you would petition Celestial Virgin, accept no substitutes.
Sure, there were people saying it was literally the most blasphemous thing possible – to sell the rich tickets to Heaven so that only the poor had to answer for their misdeeds. But there were always people saying that kind of stuff. Why, you could say it was wrong to have doctors, because then rich people had an advantage in surviving disease! You could say it was wrong to have bookstores, because then rich people had an advantage in learning about the world! Everyone important, ie rich, was happy to ignore these nattering nabobs of negativism, and when Celestial Virgin offered to buy the Kennedy Space Center from the cash-strapped Untied States government, President Reagan was quick to agree.

Unsong

Recently Hyperliquid spot whale was doing 3 things at a very large scale ($1.5B BTC sold today I believe):
1) deposit BTC, sell it
2) buy spot ETH, withdraw and stake
3) long ETH perps
Both BTC and ETH markets were not nearly liquid enough for that kind of orders so they both depegged for 1%+. Eventually, market adapted and slippages went lower and these huge TWAPs became the norm.
People (me included) thought he was irrationally rushing to get exposure but that’s only halfway true — it was actually just an intended way of using financial swap contracts to achieve desired position faster. He actually decreased his market impact using that uncertainty and this tweet implies that market figured it out and reacted to it — uncertain buy pressure suddenly collapsed into a concrete number but not the moment when whale stopped buying but the moment when he stopped hedging future purchases!
I wonder if it’s a correct interpretation of the market and not the random noise, would be lit if that’s the case.
https://x.com/mlmabc/status/1959734324082659423

digital diamond
right-click and it shines the same
lab-grown luster wins

Never thought about that before but the age of human poetry is dead — I could never know that a new piece of poetry is fully written by a person with 0% LLM help.

quality of demonflyingfoxs (author of harry potter balenciaga) videos as a benchmark of AI capabilities
https://youtu.be/sCfAk7E1E4g

1) What
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-search-of-ai-psychosis

пришла открытка из золотых нулевых