Shakes, A Large And Particular Man

Most prepper fantasies are extremely silly and adding AI doomsday fear does not make them more serious Consider: “In 3 days, a major city is out of food in the major stores. Looting starts, first whats left on shelves, then people start taking from one another.“ A few bags of rice and a backup generator will not protect you from looters or armed mobs “Prepping” actually makes you a target If order really breaks down and the government is unreachable society will return to its natural state: “To the strongest” You don’t need bags of rice, you need Chad You need to become Chad, or be friends with him You need to become a leader or follow one You need to know your local firemen or veterans, your family, your neighbors, your priest, your frat bros, your church group, the clerk at the shop everyone knows You need your wits and charisma, you need your reputation for honesty and strength, you need your good name Which is to say you need the same things in war that you needed in peace It’s the same as it ever was: pick good heroes and surpass them

Gen2 Whitney is one of the hardest battles in Pokémon because of when it happened. 2000. Nobody knew there was a Machop to trade for, or Heracross in a tree, the grand majority disliked Chikorita, and Onix was dogshit. You got blasted, then did better. Stop rewriting history. 😂

WOW. These new angles REALLY put the sheer SCALE of Arlington's proposed skyline transformation into perspective. We're talking FIVE residential towers, nearly 1,800 new homes, and a hotel rising on the former Key Bridge Marriott site. An entire new high-rise neighborhood overlooking the Potomac River and Georgetown. This could completely redefine Arlington's waterfront skyline. Would you build it?

No its not. No it isn't. If it was really 'ready from an engineering standpoint' he could prove it on any number of animals *right now*. Elon has been promising these miracle medical cures since 2022 when he promised to restore 'full body mobility' in spinal cord injuries. He's a genuine psychopathic Lair, just like Elizabeth Holmes.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has fired the Pentagon's top military planner, a Pentagon official told CBS News late Wednesday. Army Lt. Gen. Brett Sylvia is the latest in a series of generals to be ousted. The firing comes even as President Trump is weighing renewed strikes on Iran in the eight-month-long war. The Pentagon official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters, said Sylvia was accused of misconduct for leaking classified information related to the Iran war and the Russia-Ukraine war. Sylvia failed three polygraph tests about sharing classified information with the press, the official said, adding that the case has been referred to the Department of Justice. Read more: cbsn.ws/4eZdHeN

10k Starship launches/year is just from Starbase Louisiana

Michael Pollan reveals how the introduction of caffeine completely changed human history and consciousness. "Before caffeine, it was a very different world and a very different consciousness. People were drunk a lot of the time, buzzed almost all of the time because it was safer than water" "Water was really how you got diseases. If you fermented things, even low alcohol, it killed a lot of the microbes. So people, even kids, drank hard cider for breakfast" "Tea, chocolate, and coffee all arrive in the same decade in England, and things start to change... no one ate or drank boiling water or hot beverages before" "Boiling it made it much safer. This gave this incredible public health boost to these places, and then you have the drug that fosters a kind of more linear, rational, focused way of thinking" "People in the 1600s started writing about it saying, 'Wow, we have this new civil and sober drink that we can use.' And that, I think, makes possible things like the Industrial Revolution"

I automated Hinge using Claude Code, a spare Android phone, and a few markdown files. Getting around 20–25 matches/day, and almost 60% of them are people I would've actually swiped right on myself. I've been experimenting with this setup for a while now. Here's a detailed breakdown of how I built it, how it works, and a few things I learned about optimizing my own Hinge profile. 1. The setup is pretty basic - Took a spare Android phone and installed Hinge. - Connected it to my MacBook using ADB. - Connected Claude Code to the phone. - Gave Claude a prompt with my preferences, deal breakers, non-negotiables, locations, etc. That's pretty much all the hardware you need. Also, please don't over-engineer this. Be smart about it. I know some of you are already thinking about replacing the Android phone with a cloud emulator or some complicated setup. I wouldn't recommend it. You're just increasing the chances of getting flagged or banned. Keep things simple. There's no point building an entire infrastructure around something that was supposed to save you 45 minutes a day lol. 2. Giving Claude enough context about me I already have a personality.md file that Claude keeps updating whenever I use it. It has almost everything about me. Places I've travelled, people I've met, experiences I've had, things that went wrong, things I liked, how I generally think, my preferences, etc. It's obviously not 100% accurate, but it has a pretty decent understanding of who I am. I also gave it my entire Hinge profile, including all my photos, prompts, and preferences. So now, when Claude sees someone's profile, it can actually evaluate whether I'd be interested in that person instead of just blindly swiping. 3. How the actual automation works I keep travelling between three cities in India, so I've set up three scheduled sessions. Morning: City 1 Afternoon: City 2 Evening: City 3 Each session runs in batches, with fixed intervals and frequent breaks. Whenever a profile opens: Claude reads the basic details first. If there's an obvious deal breaker, it skips immediately. Otherwise, it goes through all the photos, prompts, and polls. Cross-references everything with my preferences. Decides whether to like or skip. It's not perfect, but the decisions are surprisingly close to what I would've made myself. 4. The interesting part is how it comments on profiles I spent some time going through Instagram reels and comment sections about Hinge openers and replies. Collected around 150 comments that seemed to work well and were also somewhat aligned with my personality. Put them all into a comments.md file. Now, whenever Claude decides to like someone's profile, it uses those comments as references. It doesn't just pick one and paste it. It reads the entire profile and then writes something specific to that person. For example, if it's commenting on her first prompt, it might reference something mentioned in her third prompt or one of her photos. So the comment actually has context instead of being a random pickup line that could be sent to 100 different people. I think this is one of the reasons the setup has been working reasonably well. 5. Everything gets tracked in a Google Sheet For every profile, Claude logs: - Profile details - Whether it liked or skipped - Why it made that decision - What comment it sent - Whether we eventually matched The sheet also gets updated whenever a match happens. I occasionally go through the sheet myself to check how accurate the decisions are. That's where the ~60% number comes from. Around 60% of the matches are people I would've personally swiped right on. There's still a lot of room for improvement, but that's not a bad hit rate for something running on autopilot. 6. Something else I tried: optimizing my own Hinge profile This was actually quite interesting. Since Claude already has my personality.md, I asked it to analyze my current Hinge profile. Everything from photos and their sequence to prompts, relationship intentions, and the little descriptions you can add below certain fields. I also asked it to go through research around dating apps, published studies, and insights shared by people who've worked on products like Hinge. There are so many small things you generally don't think about. For example, one claim I came across was that having a black-and-white photo among your regular coloured photos can significantly improve engagement. The reasoning is that it breaks the visual pattern when someone is scrolling, which might get you a couple of extra seconds of attention. I haven't independently verified the numbers behind that claim, but it was an interesting thing to test. Another example is how you describe what you're looking for. Most people just select something like "short-term, open to long-term" and leave it there. But you can add a small description below it, which gives you another opportunity to communicate what you actually want. Small things, but they add up. I've been experimenting with different photo sequences, prompts, and descriptions to see what changes the match rate. It's basically A/B testing a dating profile lol. 7. Where things stand now The setup has been running for a while. Getting around 20–25 matches a day, with roughly 60% matching my own preferences. Earlier, I'd spend at least 45 minutes a day scrolling through Hinge. With this experiment, the manual effort is almost negligible. One thing I found interesting is how much difference having proper personal context makes. Without my personality.md and comments.md, Claude would probably just be another bot sending generic pickup lines. With those files, it can make decisions and write comments that are much closer to how I'd actually do it. Again, this was just a fun experiment to see how far I could take Claude Code and phone automation, not something I'm actively using as my regular dating approach. There are obvious questions around authenticity and dating-app rules too. I've documented the entire setup, including the prompts and files. If anyone wants the setup file, let me know. Happy to share it. Thank me later for saving you a few hours every week. Now go get back to work :)

good read for what might come next: emanueleviola.wordpress.com/…

Morena will stay in power. The window for American intervention has closed, if it was ever open in the first place. The United States does not overthrow governments that comply. It disciplines them. Mexico has been disciplined, and Mexico complies. In September, Rubio said Mexico's fight against the cartels "is not nearly enough" and that the U.S. would confront those organizations "one way or another". He also claimed that vast territories of Mexico are controlled by narco-terrorist organizations rather than the state. Yet this is pressure, not regime change. Rubio himself said he does not want to disrupt the relationship with Mexico, citing his rapport with Sheinbaum. Although Rubio would certainly prefer an ideological ally, he does not need one. He needs results on fentanyl, migration, and Chinese transshipment, and he is getting them. What guarantees this arrangement is the succession. The key variable is 2030. Omar García Harfuch is not an ideologue. He is a career police officer from a family of the old security state. Polls place him at 40% of Morena sympathizers' preferences for the 2030 candidacy. Velasco of the Green Party openly promoted him, Washington reportedly backed him, and Morena's hardliners distrust him. He publicly rules out running, saying his priority is security, but that denial is standard Mexican ritual. If Harfuch is the heir, Washington gets a security partner and right-leaning man inside a left-wing party. The same logic explains the foreign policy theater. Morena is, in large part, a continuation of PRI-style governance. Its cordial ties with Havana and its silence on Managua are not alignment but leverage. Refusing to condemn the Cuban and Nicaraguan dictatorships costs little and buys the appearance of independence. Washington understands this perfectly and allows it. It knows Mexico is not following the Cuban path. The rhetoric is domestic consumption and negotiating posture. In substance, the Mexican state is bound to the American one. The old PRI played the same game for decades: nationalism in the speeches, but the U.S. interests in the decisions. At home, the road from 2024 to mid-2026 was bumpy. Sheinbaum had to govern with a party built around another man, and the AMLO loyalists held key positions. That has largely been resolved. In February, Adán Augusto López left Morena's Senate coordination, with Ignacio Mier taking formal control while the Tabasco politician moved to "territorial work". Reports also emerged that Andy López Beltrán would leave the party's organization secretariat, to be replaced by Citlalli Hernández. The lesson of Mexican history applies: the outgoing caudillo's network always erodes. Calles fell to Cárdenas. Every PRI president eventually emancipated himself from his predecessor. Sheinbaum is following the script. Here lies the modern caveat. The PRI controlled people through unions, peasant leagues, and patronage. Morena is building control through data. The biometric CURP took effect after a decree was published, with reforms backed by Sheinbaum and Morena. It incorporates facial recognition and fingerprints to verify citizens' identity. Mobile phone lines were tied to registered owners, and unregistered lines were to be disabled after June 30, 2026, allowing only emergency calls. It is also linked to social programs and pensions, including registering for and collecting benefits. Combine this with direct cash transfers, and the state no longer needs union intermediaries. It knows who you are, where your phone is, and what money you receive. This is corporatism without corporations. The patron-client relationship has become individualized and digitized.