Michael Shook @[email protected] @mshook

Space squid!

ISS National Lab @ISS_CASIS

a day ago

👀 Kall Morris Inc.’s REACCH system capturing a target object during testing on the ISS. Instead of a single small satellite test, the team completed 172 test runs, validating the system for debris removal and in-orbit relocation: ow.ly/gyO050Z5kji #SpaceDebris #ISS

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Andrej Karpathy shares a 3-step blueprint on how to master anything

What do you think about asking AI to give your work a read? I tell it NOT to write—the writing is bad, anyway—but to give me bullet points. About 1/3 are bad and wrong, 1/3 are good suggestions, and 1/3 are bad, but get at something I need to fix, usually a darling I need to kill. Doesn't feel much different to me from a human reader.

On the morning of January 2, 1492 AD, the long war ended not with a thunderclap, but with a key. From the towers of the Alhambra, the red banner of Islam was lowered, and Muhammad XII of Granada, known to history as Boabdil, surrendered the city to Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile. Granada—the last Muslim kingdom in Iberia—passed into Christian hands. Church bells rang where the call to prayer had echoed for centuries, and the Reconquista, begun nearly eight hundred years earlier, was complete. The story had begun in 711 AD, when Muslim armies crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and shattered the Christian kingdoms of Iberia with astonishing speed. Within a decade, most of the peninsula lay under Islamic rule. Only the mountains of the north held out. There, in damp valleys and stone fastnesses, small Christian realms endured—poor, divided, and stubbornly alive. They did not dream of swift victory. They prayed, waited, and fought—sometimes against Muslims, sometimes against one another. When Charles Martel halted further Muslim expansion at Tours in 732 AD, Europe was spared conquest, but Spain was not. Iberia became a frontier—of faith, memory, and patience measured in generations. Over the centuries, the Reconquista advanced not as a single crusade but as a grinding tide. Pilgrims walking the Camino de Santiago brought coin, soldiers, and conviction. Kings learned that faith could move men farther than gold. And legends rose alongside armies. Saint James the Greater—Santiago—was said to ride into battle as Matamoros, sword flashing from the clouds. The tale was never proven, but it hardly mattered. In medieval Spain, belief itself was a weapon. Monks became knights. Knights became settlers. Castles rose where mosques once stood. Toledo was reconquered in 1085, Valencia after that, and Christian rule crept southward, mile by hard mile. This war was never clean, never simple. Christians and Muslims fought together sometimes as often as they fought apart. Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, El Cid, served both cross and crescent, conquering Valencia with an army of mixed faiths and ruling it as a warrior-lord. For a time, tolerance flickered—especially after Toledo, where Muslims were initially allowed to remain, worship, and govern their own communities under Christian rule. Spain during this time was a land of uneasy coexistence, ambition, and compromise—until unity arrived in marriage. When Ferdinand and Isabella joined Aragon and Castile in 1469, the peninsula gained something it had not possessed since the days of Rome: a single, disciplined will. Muslim Granada stood alone by then—rich, cultured, but divided—its rulers consumed by intrigue and civil war. As Christian cannons, new and brutal instruments of the age, battered its defenses, the city’s fate was sealed as much by internal collapse as by external force. The Treaty of Granada was signed. When the victors entered the city on January 2, 1492 AD, Christian Spain was restored. They knelt in thanksgiving. They sang the Te Deum. They released Christian slaves from Muslim jails. The Reconquista was complete. #archaeohistories

@akshay_pachaar @svpino or you can just go to LM Studio settings? and LM studio by default only shows you models that will work on your machine. Why bother with installing anything else?

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The easiest way to find out which models you can run on your computer: 1) Install npm install -g llm-checker 2) Detect your hardware llm-checker hw-detect 3) Get recommendations by category llm-checker recommend --category coding Credits to @svpino for bringing this to my attention. I found it super useful and thought of sharing it with you all. Here are some of the recommendations I got:

#NewPublication The Letters of Mani: A Lost Scripture of the Late Antique World Iain Gardner, Oxford University Press, 2026 academic.oup.com/book/62904

New article in @PNASNews: We all know that ChatGPT loves to delve, bolster, leverage, encompass, showcase, underscore, et cetera. I analyzed full text of 7.3 million journal articles published 2020-2025, hunting for 228 words that spiked after ChatGPT launched in late 2022.

9 distance measures in data science w/algorithms (v/@MaartenGr).

Follow the money on this one. It is rotten to the core. The Pentagon just lent $620,000,000 to a tiny North Carolina startup called Vulcan Elements. The company is two years old. It had fewer than 50 employees. And three months before the deal was announced, Donald Trump Jr.’s venture firm quietly took a stake in it. Here is the part the administration tried to bury. Of the dozens of companies the Pentagon was weighing, Vulcan was the only deal initiated by a top White House aide. That aide was Peter Navarro, a close friend of Trump Jr. The order came down to move fast. One official put it plainly: The call came from the White House. We have to get this done. Staff worked late nights to push it through in weeks. Deals like this normally take many months of vetting. And when it closed, Vulcan’s valuation jumped from about 200 million dollars to roughly 2 billion. A windfall for the investors, including the president’s son. This is public money. Your money. Routed through the Pentagon to enrich the president’s family and their friends. The Bush administration’s own chief ethics lawyer called it corruption we pay for. And there is more coming. A drone parts company Trump Jr. holds a stake in is also under Pentagon review. This is not a one-off. It is a pattern. The president’s family is treating the federal Treasury like a private bank, and the bill lands on every taxpayer. propublica.org/article/donald…

Einstein’s field equation on a wall in Leiden, Netherlands

The largest #tornado in recorded History happened on this day, 13 years ago, in El Reno, Oklahoma. This video shows the #Dominator 2 surging east for intercept of this 2.5 mile wide tornado, and we ran into a power line and launched the hood into the tornado. Very sadly, my friend and mentor, Tim Samaras and the TWISTEX team with Carl Young and Paul Samaras lost their lives to this tornado while doing ground-breaking science. RIP TWISTEX

There is no world in which this is okay.     Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito did not recuse himself from cases involving Trump’s Treasury Department while his own son was secretly working there as a political appointee and attorney.    His son's employment was hidden so thoroughly that his name appears nowhere on the Treasury Department website, he has no public resume, and his bar listings are outdated.    If Alito had recused himself, the secret would have come out. He didn’t recuse himself.    This is a clear conflict of interest, and the American people deserved to know about it.    The federal recusal standard is clear: a justice must step aside in any case where there is a reasonable basis to question whether he or she can be impartial. A justice ruling on cases involving the department where his son works fails that test. The Treasury Department sits at the center of some of the biggest legal fights of this administration, and challenges to Trump’s $1.776 billion January 6 slush fund could be headed to the Court next.    The Supreme Court is the only court in America with no binding code of conduct. That is completely unacceptable, and it has to change NOW.    Congress controls the Power of the Purse, and therefore the Court’s funding. If the Court will not adopt a binding code of conduct with real recusal review on their own, I support withholding their funding until they do.   notus.org/us-news/samuel…

I decided to overlay this with the video from @SpaceflightNow so you can truly grasp the scale of the explosion. The still frame didn't really convey it that much. Honestly such an insane thing to see, but knowing the dedication behind the team at Blue Origin, they will return better than before.

Chandler G @Echo5550

6 days ago

I still can’t believe that last night truly happened, the scale of the explosion was insane. I feel like many of us get caught up in so much views that its hard to see how much was covered in the blast. It’s literally insane. Keep your heads up high Blue, you can and will bounce

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Trump had another mental health episode today and posted over 50 times online: 11:15 AM - Trump attacks judge who said he couldn’t put his name on the Kennedy Center 12:03 PM - Says he may perform and give a speech at the America 250 event instead of artists who cancelled 12:08 PM - Says Obama filled the Reflecting Pool with Garbage 12:09 PM - Attacks Biden 12:09 PM - Posts edited photo of Columbus Circle in DC with the caption “CLEAN” 12:10 PM - Attacks Biden again 12:11 PM - Posts AI photo of him and George Washington riding horses in front of the White House with a space shuttle and race car in the background 12:11 PM - Attacks Rosie O’Donnell 12:11 PM - Posts photo of him in front of the American flag 12:11 PM - Brags about his endorsed candidates winning 12:12 PM - Attack Obama and Biden over the reflecting pool 12:12 PM - Posts photo of him pointing at the camera 12:13 PM - Posts photo of the UFC event cage he’s building at the White House 12:13 PM - Posts an AI image of a “golden dome” for the White House 12:15 PM - Defends Jaxson Dart, calling him a “winner” and his critics “losers” 12:45 PM - Posts an AI image of him as a NY Knicks basketball player dunking on Governor Kathy Hochul 12:56 PM - Posts an AI image of him with Tom Brady 1:03 PM - Posts a garbage can labeling it “The Obama Presidential Library” 1:16 PM - Says America is back 1:16 PM - Says America is back again 1:16 PM - Says America is back for the 3rd time 1:55 PM - Posts an AI image of him golfing 2:55 PM - Says he’s in “excellent health” lol 3:17 PM - Promotes his Fox News interview with Lara Trump 4:33 PM - Attacks the Pope again 4:54 PM - Posts a weird image of him staring at Greenland (which he has posted already) 4:57 PM - Posts an AI image of the “drone port” he wants to build on top of the ballroom 5:33 PM - Attacks Biden 5:33 PM - Attacks Biden x2 5:34 PM - Attacks Biden x3 5:34 PM - Attacks Biden x4 5:34 PM - Attacks Biden x5 5:35 PM - Posts cartoon image of Governors Newsom, Pritzker, and Hochul saying they like crime (Trump is a felon) 5:36 PM - Posts meme about Republicans who voted to release the Epstein files losing their primaries 5:36 PM - Posts an old tweet of his where he attacks “disloyal” Republicans 5:37 PM - Posts an old tweet where he said he wants to stop the world from “killing itself” 5:37 PM - Posts a mock up of a “Trump Peace Prize” which may be the most useless peace prize known to man 5:37 PM - Posts a photo of a B-2 bomber with the caption “Trump energy 2026” 5:37 PM - Posts a photo of his face on Mount Rushmore 5:38 PM - Posts an image of him kissing the American flag (he’s the least patriotic president we’ve ever had) 5:39 PM - Compares himself to George Washington 5:39 PM - Says you were convinced to think a photo of a family sitting on a car is “evil” and billions were spent to do that (???) 5:50 PM - Says we should “physically audit” Fort Knox 5:50 PM - Posts an image of him cosplaying as a navy commander 5:51 PM - Posts another image of his face on Mount Rushmore 5:51 PM - Posts another photo of him and George Washington 6:09 PM - Attacks Biden again 6:09 PM - Attacks Biden x2 6:09 PM - Attacks Biden x3 6:09 PM - Posts an old photo of himself and King Charles 6:12 PM - Posts an old photo of himself and President XI in China 6:12 PM - Posts another photo of himself and President Xi 6:22 PM - Posts a photo of himself walking in China 6:48 PM - Says the U.S. should have a ballroom because China has one 7:03 PM - Says he wants to cancel his America 250 celebration and replace it with a MAGA rally 7:56 PM - Promotes Mark Levin’s show on Fox News 7:59 PM - Promotes his Fox News interview with Lara Trump All in one day. This man is not well. Impeachment and removal NOW.

20 things Trump has sought to put his name, likeness, or signature on during his current term...

Internal memo from Marvel comics, 1972, ranking the importance of characters.

Breaking news: The Pentagon is moving to recruit hundreds of troops to appear as spectators at President Trump’s UFC cage-fighting event on the White House lawn, and requiring those who attend to pay their own way and meet height and weight requirements. wapo.st/3RFxaIK

This is what Trump's done to the people's house: A third of it is rubble. Another third is a cage match. What a metaphor.