levy

on september 9, we all sat there and watched apple explain how the slightly faster version of the phone they sold us last year was somehow a turning point in human history.

everyone who walked on stage called it incredible, magical, and the most powerful iphone ever made. honestly, the real revolution will be the day an apple executive gets up there and says, “yeah, guys, this one is basically the same as the last one.”

the big difference this year was the foldable iphone.

samsung has been making foldable phones for years, but the second apple opened and closed one on stage, foldable technology was officially invented. naturally, the hinge was not just a hinge. thousands of engineers probably spent years perfecting it, and i was fully expecting it to have some name like ultra fusion hinge.

open it and it is an ipad.

close it and it is an iphone.

check the price and it becomes an economic reality that folds you instead.

the iphone 18 pro and pro max showed up too. the camera got a little better, the chip got a little faster, and the battery lasted a little longer. once apple put all of that on a giant screen with percentages, my current phone suddenly looked like a calculator.

five minutes before the event, i was perfectly happy with it.

the apple watch once again reminded us how little we sleep, how stressed we are, and why we are out of breath after walking up a flight of stairs.

airpods got better at blocking out the world too. once i saw the price, i kind of wanted to block out people completely anyway.

i watched the whole event, got hyped, and genuinely liked the new phones.

then the prices came out.

i wiped my current phone screen with my shirt, looked at it for a second, and thought, “yeah, you still got a few good years in you.”

the foldable iphone is expected to start at around $2,000 in the u.s.

apparently it will also support apple pencil and come in dark blue and white.

after the orange iphone 17 pro max, looks like rich people just found their next fetish object.

meditations completely captivated me. every sentence in that book feels like it could be a book of its own.

for example:

"death and life, fame and disgrace, pain and pleasure, wealth and poverty come to both good people and bad. none of these things are inherently beautiful or ugly, and therefore they are neither good nor bad in themselves."

song playing right now

today cloudflare announced cloudflare wallets and cloudflare.pay.

these services are designed to give ai agents running on cloudflare a persistent identity while also allowing them to make online purchases safely within limits defined by their users. for the first time, both buyers and sellers will have the building blocks needed for agent based commerce with confidence, knowing exactly who they are interacting and transacting with at every step.

don't forget to reserve your username.

cloudflare wallets: https://blog.cloudflare.com/wallets/

reserve your handle: https://cloudflare.pay/

if you're tired of chatgpt constantly telling you things like, "you're actually doing fine," or "don't be so hard on yourself," and you want to hear something brutally honest instead, try this prompt:

"based on everything you know about me, roast me and don't hold back."

then sit back and watch the ai point out the things you've probably been avoiding about yourself for years.

image

today i uploaded a scanned document—a plain white page with text on it—and asked it to "extract the text."

instead, it extracted the text by literally removing all the words and giving me back a completely blank white page.

if it's making mistakes like this on the plus plan, i don't even want to imagine what the free version is doing.

looks or personality?

own republic.

without a doubt one of the best films ever made about war. the thin red line, the film that marked terrence malick's return to the big screen after a long absence, goes far beyond being just an anti-war film and holds deep inquiries into human existence. and indeed, the director's own closeness to philosophy, particularly his engagement with heidegger, is well known to everyone.

a bandit working hard to make sure societies don't talk about their real problems, to make the public fight windmills instead, to keep the actual source of all the trouble, politicians and the rich, off the table. when he had his falling-out with trump, trump revealed that he'd wanted to keep getting government subsidies through the politicians he'd helped get elected by pouring millions into their campaigns.

the windmills here are the culture they've branded as "woke." it's a concept thrown in front of citizens as the enemy while politicians and insatiable types like elon, who want to get even richer through them, rob the public blind. the enemy that used to get pumped into the public through the media they owned now carries on in social media under different labels, courtesy of blue-check trolls.

why'd they make athena black, why'd they cast the sinon character as trans, there's lgbt stuff in the shows... in shows and films full of one-eyed giants, monsters, dragons, and other fictional characters, these are the kinds of issues that don't actually affect people in real life. meanwhile the average citizen in the usa deals with the cost of living, the housing crisis, the immigration issue (which they do talk about, because they can pin the blame on the other side for it), uninsured people being too scared to even call an ambulance because of how brutal the private healthcare system is, mass shootings and high crime rates because guns get sold like candy, the massive student debt faced by people who want to go to college without a scholarship, the country's kids getting sent off to war because the rich keep starting wars to serve their own interests, and so on... these problems just keep on existing. no matter which politician from which party comes to power, since they're funded by the rich, no solution ever gets brought to the table, but the enemy is woke.

it's the scene in the 1970 film they call me trinity where our man terence hill mercilessly plows through a plate of mexican beans out of a cast-iron pan. director enzo barboni starved the guy for a full 24 hours before the shoot, not letting him eat a single bite, so that trinity's state of just coming in from the desert, worn out from exhaustion, and half-crazed with hunger wouldn't look fake but would look real. as if that weren't enough, right before the scene was shot he had terence riding a horse around the desert for hours, the guy's mother must have really cried over this one.

by the time the man starts eating, he's not acting anymore. he digs into the food as someone who's been half-crazed with hunger for 24 hours, blood sugar in the negatives. youtube

you enter unicef's photo contest in your son's name and you win. and then, by pure coincidence, out of all those footballers, the baby gets paired with messi for the photo shoot. exactly 19 years later, that kid turns into a player with almost the same abilities, playing the same position at the club messi used to play for (the club he's a legend of), and one who'll go up against him at the world cup. there's no side to this thing that can be explained by science, reason, or logic. i don't know if the people who don't believe in god feel ashamed. it's flat-out like a movie script, and there's a director up there writing the script for us. and look, i'm not even some extremely religious guy while i'm saying all this.

as someone who's been obese for years, here's my experience: for me it isn't some small calorie deficit, it's flat-out walking around hungry. unless i eat around 1500 calories and put in 20 thousand steps on top of that, the scale doesn't budge. if, keto, low-carb... i tried them all. the names change, but nothing changes for me. my body only gets convinced once it sees a serious calorie deficit.

i left almost nothing untried in this process, including a bunch of performance and fat-loss drugs. some make you feel like they boost performance, some suppress appetite, some speed up fat burning, but at the end of the day none of them take the place of discipline. the moment you quit the diet, the magic ends too. so if you don't have solid motivation, my advice is don't even get mixed up in that stuff.

everybody gets hyped the first week. the real issue is not eating the pizza when you're craving it, being able to say no when your friends order dessert, being able to keep going even when the scale stalls for a few days. if you don't have a reason strong enough to make you do those things, willpower stops being enough after a certain point.

the conclusion i came to is this: there's no shortcut to this. the most expensive drug, the most popular diet, the coolest eating model, they all bring you to the same place in the end. eat less, move more, and manage to keep it up for months.