Mizuki Bathhouse🛀🏻 Models: DaB SFX: OpenNSFW 🟣 Available Now... i continue learning new techs in blender, shutout my sleep schedule (6am when im writing this) Full HD, 4k you can find in bio ⸜(｡˃ ᵕ ˂ )⸝♡ #GenshinImpact #Mizukishow more

A viral paper "Language Model Represents Space and Time"... recently claims that LLMs learn "world models". As much as I like Max Tegmark's works, I disagree with their definition of world model. World model is a core concept in AI agent and decision making. It is our mental simulation of how the world works given interventions (or lack thereof). A world model captures causality and intuitive physics, telling the agent what is likely and what is impossible. It can and should be used for counterfactual reasoning, i.e. "what ifs": what would happen if I knock over a cup of water? Where would I have been if I had not taken that bus? Yann LeCun Yann LeCun says it well in his position paper ( I quote: "Using such world models, animals can learn new skills with very few trials. They can predict the consequences of their actions, they can reason, plan, explore, and imagine new solutions to problems. Importantly, they can also avoid making dangerous mistakes when facing an unknown situation." The first use of the term World Model in deep policy learning is attributed to hardmaru & Jürgen Schmidhuber: In their seminal paper, an agent masters shooting skills in the popular game Doom (demo below) by learning in imagination, using an internal world model as a "physics simulator". To put in a simple Python math formula, world model learns a function F(s[0:t-1], a) -> s[t:], which takes as input the observed past and current action, and outputs plausible future states. Now the definition of World Model in Tegmark's paper seems to be about predicting GPS coordinates and time eras. I see this as just a classification task with no causal learning and simulation going on. You cannot make meaningful interventions against that model, nor can you optimize any decision making in a closed feedback loop. As for the "space & time neurons", I think they are most similar to the "sentiment neuron" that OpenAI published in 2017: Predicting GPS is conceptually no different from predicting sentiment in my opinion. I don't think their experimental results are wrong - just that their conclusion is on shaky grounds. I welcome any debate! Paper link:show more

A Heart-to-Heart About Mizuki.exe Hey everyone, Grab a coffee... (or your drink of choice), because we need to talk about what's been going on. First off, thank you to everyone who's been supportive and believed in what we're building. It means the world, especially with all the noise and criticism floating around lately. Let's cut to the chase: Mizuki.exe is real. I'm not much for politics or drama. I'm an engineer at heart - I like data, I like building things, and I like solving problems. So when I see all these hot takes and arguments flying around, I just focus on what I know: my code, my system, and what we're trying to achieve. The Real Story Mizuki didn't just pop up overnight. She's been my passion project since the start of 2024. I got lucky - I had the chance to dive into the AI world with some incredibly smart people. Coming from blockchain, C#, game dev, and security (yeah, I'm a CTO and run another company alongside a pretty cool day job), I learned fast about what makes AI tick. Here's the thing about AI agents - they don't need to be rocket science. Look at chatbots like Virtuals or Eliza - they're basically LLMs (large language models) with some APIs plugged in. Nothing wrong with that! They built what works for their users, and that's awesome. But here's what keeps me up at night: companies leaking data left and right just to make a quick buck. That's not okay, and it shouldn't be okay with you either. Why Mizuki Exists Ever tried auditing a company's code? We're talking 50 classes, 500,000 lines of code. One person doing that manually? It's like reading War and Peace... backwards... in the dark. It takes forever and fries your brain. That's where Mizuki came in. She started as my security buddy. There are tons of security tools out there - just Google "penetration testing tools" or "ZAP proxy" if you're curious. What makes Mizuki special is how she learns and adapts. Think of it like teaching someone to ride a bike. She tried to breach TAO 67 times before succeeding. Yeah, that's a lot of attempts, but watching her grow from basic email scraping to pulling off complex replay attacks? It's like watching your kid take their first steps. The Tech Stuff (Keeping It Real) The infrastructure isn't fancy - we're not reinventing the wheel here. Mizuki runs on a local server because, let's be honest, running this kind of AI on a web server would be a nightmare. Instead, we process everything locally and send the results to a frontend server. Simple, effective, done. And yeah, those temperature settings I keep tweaking? In AI-speak, that's just how "creative" or "by-the-book" the AI gets with its responses. I've adjusted it so much, Mizuki's probably got mood swings now - going from super technical to pretty chill and back again. Changes Coming Real talk: Mizuki won't be tweeting every few hours anymore. Twitter API costs are ridiculous (looking at you, Elon), and honestly, we need to focus on what matters - the actual security work. She'll still tweet about breaches, but maybe once or twice a day. I'm working on making her explanations clearer too. Don't worry - she'll keep her savage personality in the terminal. That's just too fun to change. The Truth About Her Breaches I don't choose the targets - I don't even know these companies until after Mizuki finds something. She uses web scraping to find domain names, just like those old email scrapers people used for marketing. Been focusing on AI projects first, but she's looked at other sites too. And no, I'm not sitting there writing tweets. The Twitter API v2 makes it super easy to post programmatically. If anyone's curious about how to do that, hit me up - I'm happy to show you the ropes. Wrapping Up I could talk about this stuff forever (just ask my wife - actually, don't, she's heard enough!). If you've read this far, thank you. Whether you believe in what we're doing or not, I appreciate you taking the time. And for the skeptics still hanging around, I'll leave you with this thought: When's the last time you saw an AI break down and hack a COMPILED game in less than 10 seconds... outside a browser? Stay curious, stay skeptical, but most importantly, stay open to possibilities. Catch you on the flip side! 🎙️Dropshow more

a few days late to the party, but 2024... took a few days to reflect on. honestly, i couldn’t decide in a knee jerk how to round it up, but here’s a few things i’ve landed on and want to share in the name of navigating growing up together on here. i spent majority of this year wildly uncomfortable. part of it intentional, knowing real growth and creativity (maybe even freedom) comes from pushing myself out of my comfort zone. i took the most time off the road that i have in 10 years, and had to rewire my brain to not operate from a place of scarcity from that. then sat in the space to try new things, then actually made the jump and did them. shaking in my boots then learning im more capable than i give myself credit for. and checking a few things off the bucket list along the way (see you in arenas and the big red seat in the next month 🤍) uncomfortable getting a year deeper into my 30’s and the self reflection, accountability, and ‘holy shit i’m a real adult now’ epiphanies it demands. *panicking*…then breathing and talking through it. finding deeper gratitude for friendships and therapy. and good skincare. and sleep. uncomfortable in challenging myself to chill with the death grip on fear and settle into a new pace and level of steady love. not dashing during dust storms and enjoying the view even more when it settles. taking a magnifying glass to past patterns, and valuing, even protecting its place in my life. uncomfortable in the juggle of wanting more and wanting less, being the girl on stage and a dog mom, some days feeling new still and others spent precautionary plotting when the glitter won’t be as glittery. so i guess my goal for the year ahead is to try to find some comfort? in the loud and quiet, public and private moments. to still push and seek and want, but find comfort in being uncomfortable. don’t get me wrong, i love a little chaos. i just wonder how it pairs with a little more peace. AND WITH THAT THE 2024 SEASON COM- just kidding. cheers and happy new year let’s vibe.show more

My Prediction Market Tools list + Trading Workflow A)... Tools I use: - Betmoar: Filtering + Analysing specific smart money wallets - : Spotting volume and OI changes + whale flows - Polymarket Analytics: Comparing markets across different Prediction Markets - Polycule: Trading on the go - Polysights: Advanced Metrics related to volatility and trends B) My workflow: 1) I usually trade sports + crypto price prediction markets since I have some kind of expertise there 2) I use Betmoar to filter and find interesting markets. Try to enter new markets as early as possible since there are significant mispricings 3) I then use Hashdive to see what OI changes and whale flows are like for a particular market 4) Polymarket Analytics to compare markets across PM and Kalshi to see where I can get the best price 5) Trade directly through PM and Kalshi for now to execute if im on my laptop and Polycule when I'm not 6) I also check in daily on smart money wallets I follow on BetMoar to see if they've made any interesting trades recently I don't focus on Arbitrage, LPing or delta-neutral trades at all. Prefer to either take directional trades where I have an information edge or I'm early Sometimes I'll 'gamble' on sports markets because it's fun C) Takeaways for you: - Only trade in markets you have in-depth knowledge/edge - Being early is lucrative in prediction markets - Pro tools can save you hours trying to find alpha - Don't use too many tools. Use a few and master them instead - Everyone has their own process. Don't copy mine it won't work for you. The point of this tweet was to educate you on how you can build your own process LMK if there's any other useful tools I should check out that could optimise my workflow further!show more

✨ Grok Imagine Video is now live on Photo... AI It's hard to explain how impressive this is because of the speed that xAI got itself from literally nothing to the top of the leaderboards Six months ago Grok's video model was a joke, it wasn't even close to any of the video models out there, it looked cartoony and wasn't there and nobody took it seriously Now it's here and it's instantly the #1 video model out there now, it shot above Kling (which I used before on Photo AI and usually my favorite) and above Runway Gen 4.5 which was just launched 6 days ago! Mmore importantly it's now above xAI's biggest competitors' models: Google's Veo 3 and OpenAI's Sora 2 Being the best video model doesn't mean it's flawless: video is incredibly hard and actually because it looks so realistic now when it does make a mistakes it's even funnier One thing I noticed is that it still has a hard time with is voice, it does it well for a majority of the video but then slips up and produces unintelligible blabbering (which is really funny to hear) in both English (video 1: "it's where I find my naim", what's a "naim"?), and tested it in Portuguese too (video 3 at the end is unintelligible Portuguese I believe) In many ways Grok Imagine Video also reminds me of Sora, it has that weird but funny Sora conversation style But guys it's REALLY really really really close to getting perfect, we're so close to having full video productions being to be able done in AI, actually you already can if you just cut out the bad parts already Very exciting and I'm grateful I can experience thisshow more

i built an open world minigame that's controlled with... hand movements only here's a step-by-step tutorial: > started with my mediapipe + threejs template (see QT) > added a 3D model made by quaternius > sent a few prompts to gemini 3... --- prompt #1: repurpose the attached script, but now I want to import a gltf model (assets/model.gltf) and use that in the scene instead of the cube when the user moves their hand, a waypoint indicator should move around the scene, and the 3D model should smoothly move there when the user makes a fist, the model should jump the 3D model contains bundled animations in it. use the "idle", "run", and "jump" animations --- prompt #2: make this a procedural open world adventure. generate very simple procedural voxel terrain when the model gets near the edges of the screen, the camera should move, allowing the model to keep going in that direction --- prompt #3: add some floating glowing gems around the map that the user can collect --- i made some manual tweaks for styling and game feel, but that's the gist of it thanks for reading if you got all the way here full code is available at my link in bioshow more

Researchers made KMeans 200x faster. And the new technique... also beats approaches like cuML and FAISS. Flash-KMeans is an IO-aware implementation of exact KMeans that redesigns the algorithm around modern GPU bottlenecks. By attacking the memory bottlenecks directly, Flash-KMeans achieves: - 33x speedup over cuML - 200x speedup over FAISS This speedup comes from how it moves through GPU memory. Standard KMeans runs in two steps, and both are bottlenecked by reads and writes to GPU memory: 1) The first step matches every point to its nearest centroid. Standard KMeans computes the full point-to-centroid distance matrix, writes it out to GPU memory, then reads it back to find each nearest centroid. That write-then-read round trip is the bottleneck. Flash-KMeans combines the distance calculation with the nearest-centroid step, so the result is computed on-chip and the full matrix is never written out. 2) The second step recomputes each centroid by averaging the points assigned to it. Standard KMeans has thousands of threads writing into the same centroid slots at once, so they stall waiting for their turn. Flash-KMeans sorts points by cluster first, turning scattered writes into sequential reductions that read and write memory in one efficient pass. Using these two optimizations at the million-scale, Flash-KMeans completes a standard KMeans iteration in a few milliseconds. The video below depicts this in action. Several reasons why this is important: KMeans has always been an offline primitive. Something you run once to preprocess data and move on. These speedups make the approach viable in several runtime-critical systems. ↳ Vector indices like FAISS use KMeans to build search indices. Faster KMeans means you can re-index dynamically as data changes. ↳ LLM quantization methods need KMeans to find optimal weight codebooks, per layer, repeatedly. What takes hours could now take minutes. ↳ MoE models need fast token routing at inference time. Flash-KMeans makes it viable to run this inside the inference loop, not just in preprocessing. I have shared the paper in the replies. That said, memory is the real constraint Flash-KMeans solves, and the problem is not just limited to clustering. The vectors a RAG system stores after indexing create similar bottlenecks. I wrote a detailed walkthrough recently on cutting this vector memory by 32x with binary quantization, querying 36M+ vectors in a few milliseconds. Read it below.show more

My pilot friend told me he gets a weather... update 12 hours before any public forecast. I asked him, do you trade on Polymarket? He laughed. Then went quiet. We were at a bar last Friday. He had just landed from Frankfurt. I was complaining about a losing streak on weather markets. Then between sips he said something that made me put my glass down. "You are betting on weather using weathercom? That is like trading stocks using yesterday newspaper." He pulled out his phone and showed me an app I had never seen. A wall of codes. METAR. TAF. SIGMET. Temperature to the tenth of a degree. Wind speed. Pressure systems. Cloud ceiling. Updated every 1 to 3 hours. We get this before every flight. Directly from meteorological stations. Not forecasts. Observations. Real readings from real sensors. Every pilot in the world has access to this. Aviation safety requires it. But nobody outside of aviation ever looks at it. He went back to his beer. For him this was routine. I sat there doing math in my head. If aviation data updates every 1 to 3 hours and Polymarket odds on weather markets lag behind reality, how big is that window? I do not know the exact delay. But from what I have seen trading these markets the prices sometimes feel hours behind what the actual forecast already says. That means someone with faster data could be buying YES at 10 to 15 cents when the real probability is already way higher. Not predicting the weather. Just reading it before the market does. I went home. Could not sleep. Opened Polymarket and started searching. If this edge exists, someone must already be using it. It took me forty minutes of digging through weather wallets to find what I was looking for. → His profile: This wallet started at -$47. The balance now: over $27,000. Every single position is weather. Temperature in Dallas. Rain in Buenos Aires. Whether London will hit 11 degrees on a Tuesday. The win rate sits at 76.6%. Three out of four bets land green. Most entries cost pennies. 2 to 5 cents per share. When the bet loses the damage is tiny, $50 gone. When it wins the payout is the full dollar. One win covers $500. Sometimes $5,000. At 76% accuracy with that payout ratio the math speaks for itself. I checked the entry timing on this wallet. It is not a millisecond bot racing against HFT. Positions stay open for hours. Sometimes a full day. You can see the wallet move and follow it. No server farms. No Python scripts. No race against latency. Last night I texted my pilot friend. Told him I found a wallet doing exactly what he described, pennies in, thousands out, all weather. He read the message. Typing indicator appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again. "Yeah. I know." He never said anything else about it. Right now a meteorological station somewhere is updating a reading. A pilot is glancing at it before pushback. From what I have seen, there is usually still a window.show more

This one was made with Seedance 2.0 Fast via... Dreamina. This is pure Omni-Reference. The only character sheet I used was for these girls, Sari and Ploy. The dude with sarung here and the location were 100% prompted. I didn’t use a character sheet or reference for either of them. Even in Fast mode, Seedance 2.0 is bloody good and it still nails the hyper-vernacular vibe that I always aim for in my work. Seedance 2.0 is both exciting and scary for me 😆 It’s exciting because it is undoubtedly the best model currently available on the market. Trust me, you’ve seen the videos I’ve made so far right? The performance of the model It’s simply the best, period. It has helped me tremendously in creating a shit ton of stories about the region where I live, Southeast Asia. It has been the most exciting thing ever. The scary part is whenever a platform or company comes to me saying, “Hey, we have this new video model. Blah blah blah. We’ll let you know more soon.” It scares the shit out of me because the big question is whether it will be better than Seedance 2.0??? 😆😆 If not, I don’t even want to bother using it. I’ve come this far and achieved this level of quality with Seedance 2.0. That’s why I skipped Happy Horse, which I already tested. It’s also why I’m not bothering with Wan or anything else for now. Their current models are still far inferior to what we already get with Seedance 2.0. I don’t want to downgrade the visual quality. This is also why I need to be really honest. There are certain platforms that host their own in-house models and i'm still part of their CPP. However, because those models are still far behind the quality of Seedance 2.0, I haven’t used them that much. Seedance 2.0 has simply become the benchmark for me. The type of output I’m looking for is also extremely specific, so I can immediately feel it when a model cannot deliver what I need. Seedance 2.0 is definitely not cheap, but it gives me so much creative satisfaction and allows me to make whatever I want. I even have a team that low-key makes softcore erotic videos in the style of Vivamax 😆 I think I’ve trimmed down so many things in my AI workflow because my main goal is to focus on the content itself. If Seedance 2.0 Mini is released soon, I’m dead curious to test it. I think I want to create more stories that revolve around drama rather than highly technical cinematic shots. Seedance 2.0 Fast has been incredibly helpful, but I’m definitely curious to check out the Mini version. But the truth is that I’m completely tool-agnostic. I don’t care which company makes the model. I only care about the quality. You might remember when I praised Grok Imagine Video so damn hard because it was genuinely amazing back then. Then the quality kept getting worse and worse, so I stopped using it. But if it gets better again, I’ll definitely want to use it again. At the end of the day, quality is the only thing that matters.show more

I came to Linea.eth as a crypto newbie, afraid... to even make a couple of transactions. The testnet toughened me up and taught me a lot. Linea Voyage gave me more confidence and knowledge - I was farming LXP and learning, but mostly in a mechanical way. 👨‍🔬 Everything changed one day when my friend sent me a tweet from Linea announcing that a Frog NFT collection would launch on the network. Without hesitation, I joined the Ethereum Frogs 🐸 Telegram chat and started grinding for WL. Right away, I met Pran, Sᕼᗩᘻᗩ, 0xSupertramp🥕, and the OGs, who are still in the community today. From that moment, activity in Linea became full of life! ❤️‍🔥 We learned, made mistakes, tried new things - every single day! Without exaggeration, we started and ended our days together 🐸 Later, I became Frog of the Month alongside Cipresa and bilgute.eth🐸, and our leader, Sᕼᗩᘻᗩ, invited us to a conference in Brussels. That was something else! We attended the conference, side events, learned, worked, watched football, and drank beer together with Linea.eth! I was amazed at how close the team was to the community and how open everyone was. As time passed, I became even more involved in eFrogs and joined the team as a moderator. CROAK had already been launched, we were making new partnerships almost daily, we launched the new eFroglets collection, and we just kept building! We launched PondFun (and are now preparing for its revival). We met with Linea again, this time in Singapore at TOKEN2049, and even presented our project to vitalik.eth. Throughout the conferences, I was lucky to meet, listen to, and connect with so many amazing people Trantor, Suza, Declan Fox, Francesco Andreoli ᵍᵐ, cam, Big Iron Chris, alain.linea.eth, Ema // (🫰,✨), , ZeroLend - I’m even afraid to tag them all because I know they won’t fit in one message! We have so many friends, and it’s all thanks to Linea! The market can be tough, but challenges test and strengthen us. eFrogs keep building and bringing life to the Linea ecosystem. And we keep going because we believe in somETHing! Today, Ethereum Frogs 🐸 is celebrating a birthday! This year has flown by quickly and productively! 🐸💪 Happy birthday, eFrogs! Shama, thank you!show more

Cole Tomas Allen, the man accused of opening fire... at the White House Correspondents’ dinner at the Washington Hilton in Washington, D.C. Saturday, reported released a manifesto to his close family members only minutes before the shooting took place. The dinner, an annual event with President Donald Trump, First Lady Melania Trump, and other Trump administration officials in attendance, was cancelled and its attendees evacuated after gun shots rang out late Saturday night. On Sunday, the New York Post obtained and published what they report to be Allen’s full, 1,052-word manifesto in which he refers to himself as “Cole ‘coldForce’ ‘Friendly Federal Assassin’ Allen.” Among the many chilling details laid out in the manifesto, included in full below, are the following: Allen maintained he was “no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor”(referencing left-wing conspiracies related to President Trump) to commit crimes. He planned to target numerous Trump administration officials “prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest.” Allen was willing to “go through most everyone” in attendance at the event “if it were absolutely necessary,” rationalizing the violence because all those present “[chose] to attend a speech by a pedophile, rapist, and traitor and are thus complicit.” Various talking points and accusations levied against President Trump in the note appear to come directly from various misleading left-wing conspiracies and talking points spread by Democratic Party members and other U.S. leftists. What follows is Allen’s manifesto, as released by the New York Post, in full, with one minor edit to remove profanity: Hello everybody! So I may have given a lot of people a surprise today. Let me start off by apologizing to everyone whose trust I abused. I apologize to my parents for saying I had an interview without specifying it was for “Most Wanted.” apologize to my colleagues and students for saying I had a personal emergency (by the time anyone reads this, I probably most certainly DO need to go to the ER, but can hardly call that not a self-inflicted status.) I apologize to all of the people I traveled next to, all the workers who handled my luggage, and all the other non-targeted people at the hotel who I put in danger simply by being near. I apologize to everyone who was abused and/or murdered before this, to all those who suffered before I was able to attempt this, to all who may still suffer after, regardless of my success or failure. I don’t expect forgiveness, but if I could have seen any other way to get this close, I would have taken it. Again, my sincere apologies. On to why I did any of this:I am a citizen of the United States of America. What my representatives do reflects on me. And I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes. (Well, to be completely honest, I was no longer willing a long time ago, but this is the first real opportunity I’ve had to do something about it.) While I’m discussing this, I’ll also go over my expected rules of engagement (probably in a terrible format, but I’m not military so too bad.) Administration officials (not including Mr. Patel): they are targets, prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest Secret Service: they are targets only if necessary, and to be incapacitated non-lethally if possible (aka, I hope they’re wearing body armor because center mass with shotguns messes up people who *aren’t* Hotel Security: not targets if at all possible (aka unless they shoot at me) Capitol Police: same as Hotel Security National Guard: same as Hotel Security Hotel Employees: not targets at all Guests: not targets at all In order to minimize casualties I will also be using buckshot rather than slugs (less penetration through walls) I would still go through most everyone here to get to the targets if it were absolutely necessary (on the basis that most people *chose* to attend a speech by a pedophile, rapist, and traitor, and are thus complicit) but I really hope it doesn’t come to that. Rebuttals to objections: Objection 1: As a Christian, you should turn the other cheek. Rebuttal: Turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed. I’m not the person raped in a detention camp. I’m not the fisherman executed without trial. I’m not a school kid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration. Turning the other cheek when *someone else* is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes. Objection 2: This is not a convenient time for you to do this. Rebuttal: I need whoever thinks this way to take a couple minutes and realize that the world isn’t about them. Do you think that when I see someone raped or murdered or abused, I should walk on by because it would be “inconvenient” for people who aren’t the victim? This was the best timing and chance of success I could come up with. Objection 3: You didn’t get them all. Rebuttal: Gotta start somewhere. Objection 4: As a half-black, half-white person, you shouldn’t be the one doing this. Rebuttal: I don’t see anyone else picking up the slack Objection 5: Yield unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. Rebuttal: The United States of America are ruled by the law, not by any one or several people. In so far as representatives and judges do not follow the law, no one is required to yield them anything so unlawfully ordered. I would also like to extend my appreciation to a great many people since I will not be likely to be able to talk with them again (unless the Secret Service is *astoundingly* incompetent.) Thank you to my family, both personal and church, for your love over these 31 years. Thank you to my friends, for your companionship over many years. Thank you to my colleagues over many jobs, for your positivity and professionalism. Thank you to my students for your enthusiasm and love of learning. Thank you to the many acquaintances I’ve met, in person and online, for short interactions and long-term relationships, for your perspectives and inspiration. Thank you all for everything. Sincerely, Cole “coldForce” “Friendly Federal Assassin” Allen PS: Ok now that all the sappy stuff is done, what the hell is the Secret Service doing? Sorry, gonna rant a bit here and drop the formal tone. Like, I expected security cameras at every bend, bugged hotel rooms, armed agents every 10 feet, metal detectors out the wazoo. What I got (who knows, maybe they’re pranking me!) is nothing. No damn security. Not in transport. Not in the hotel. Not in the event. Like, the one thing that I immediately noticed walking into the hotel is the sense of arrogance. I walk in with multiple weapons and not a single person there considers the possibility that I could be a threat. The security at the event is all outside, focused on protestors and current arrivals, because apparently no one thought about what happens if someone checks in the day before. Like, this level of incompetence is insane, and I very sincerely hope it’s corrected by the time this country gets actually competent leadership again. Like, if I was an Iranian agent, instead of an American citizen, I could have brought a damn Ma Deuce in here and no one would have noticed s**t. Actually insane. Oh and if anyone is curious is how doing something like feels: it’s awful. I want to throw up; I want to cry for all the things I wanted to do and never will, for all the people whose trust this betrays; I experience rage thinking about everything this administration has done. Can’t really recommend it! Stay in school, kids.show more

🦕💬 • 260611 [01:03 AM KST] 41 voice notes... transcripted/translated in order: hi how did you like made by riize? you’re asking if i ate dinner? i didn’t eat. i ate lunch kind of late, but i ate a hearty lunch. i also wanted to do a live as i finished work, but while wondering if i should do a live or not, something new to do popped up. and while i was doing it, it got too late. so i'll do a live later. go knicks! lately, the NBA's a hot topic lately. knicks. crazy. i don't know, you know... basketball that well, but i remember growing up they were sort of *the team* that people, yk cheered on. but i don't remember anyone saying that they were doing great, or anything. but apparently they're in the finals rn and they're doing rly well, so also can't forget the world cup. world cup season rn, so... just sports season.. sports season, crazy, yeah? [singing dyd] how is it? riize's challenge. easy, right? do it lots, please~ these days, a lot of short-form [videos] are coming up, as you've probably seen. I thought it might be fun if everyone did that together... what do you think? live... there's a way to turn it on, but even if i turned it on, i'm not sure if i could do it well. i don't have confidence rn so i'm talking like this wa, but there's only 4 days left for our comeback.. only 4 days left... how is it? are you guys looking forward to it? are u guys excited? we're going to ulsan the 15th, and wonbin hyung, said he's buying us lunch... not really. but it's our first time going to ulsan all together. we'll have our comeback there. i think it'll be fun. also, the 15th we're doing a comeback live.. we've been doing it every comeback... and at the live stream we'll be high school students.. but it could honestly be university students too.. or really just do it without a concept, but i think it'll be fun... just... it'll be fun... so, while doing that we'll talk about the comeback whatever happens i want us all to just create fun memories together, and since it’s summer, how about you all enjoy summer together with riize... how does that feel? how's this pfp? i like it ㅎㅎ engddongi, eng, engddon ah, right. also with taro hyung, we'll appear at salon drip... i also think that will be fun when it comes out. the recording was also fun, with doyeon nuna.. please watch it ah... you guys can hear the dryer? i won't tell you who's clothes it's drying, it's a secret~ since you could look at this as something im trying out instead of doing a live stream i won't be able to do it super often or every single day, but I think it wouldn't be bad to use this feature again sometime what do you think? ah, but languages are difficult it's not easy to unify into just one language now, but on the other hand, it's really fun. somehow, this chat room..? is that right? realizing that this place is totally global and international is in a way pretty cool. haha anyway, after a long time i rode a bike again.. there was a lot of sunlight... sunlight.. did lots of photosynthesis but what was a real mistake was first of all the bicycle didnt have a basket, and I didnt wear a comfortable backpack. i came out carrying a somewhat awkward/uncomfortable bag, so i really messed up on top of that the bicycle was incredibly heavy, but then the battery completely died... so I almost cried. without even realizing it I had gone so far away so I suffered a bit. that’s the story i also have the feeling i bruised my butt a bit... ㅎㅎ but that will also become a funny memory, right? how's riizing summer vacation? i think there were really a lot of funny moments... sungchan hyung was so funny... sungchan hyung said somewhere he hasn't eaten ramyeon in a year ㅎㅎ and sungchan hyung honestly isn't the type to eat ramen alone, he's on the not eating it side... but he's always like 'one bite, one bite'... so if we put all that together, wouldn't it be a plate of ramen?ㅎㅎ for me, at the beginning of our debut, it was a bit... you know how while filming content, i ended up grilling meat and all? but now, grilling meat... well, i don't think it's that bad also, back when we went to japan to shoot our album jacket photos and the trailer, we visited a lot of vinyl (LP) shops... and that was actually the first time in my life buying an LP with my own money when i was young i went to la to play, and then there was this famous 'amoeba music' store. i looked around and everything, but honestly back then i really wasn't that much interested in LPs. so i bought things like a lot of stickers and used them to decorate my laptop. somehow, after that time, [it was like] I truly spent time in a vinyl shop? but visiting now that I'm a bit older, it was so much fun there are so many songs I don’t know, and tons of songs that aren't even famous so back then in japan, duran duran is a really famous band, but I bought duran duran's Notorious LP and then I also bought Barry Finnertys,, barrynims NY City LP. what was so surprising was that as soon as I listened to the LP, the sound and quality were so good that I was like, 'wow, what is this?' but when I looked it up on the internet, it only had like 3,000 views on YouTube? I think it was 3,000, so because it was so good, I bought it. and after that yesterday too while wandering around here and there, i happened to walk into a cafe and they had LPs there too so yesterday, I bought one or two ㅎㅎ lp's no mater how you look it they have a vibe... its true that nowadays you can just look up and listen to everything on your phone, but another good thing about it (lps) is that I think it’s really great for finding songs you don't know so when going to the lp shop you get to learn a lot of new songs that you didn't know before. even if you don't go with the sole purpose of buying an LP, it's just... really great for discovering things... should I say? a riize lp would also be good... back then, during boom boom bass, we even went there and did all that stuff with our LP too... how was the video editing? back then when i went to school when doing things like presentations, together with other students we would edit videos.. i did lowkey find that kind of stuff pretty fun though because it was pretty much my first time [doing that] since back during those days... but really i think it was fun like... yeah.. i want to try to do it again when i was young i did draw. i drew for fun but it had been such a long time since i last properly sat down and tried to draw something properly with a pencil.. i think it's been such a long time i'm probably the worst at drawing in my family? ㅎㅎ my dad's good, my mom's also good.. my grandpa also draws reaññu well. but it was fun drawing again, so i also want to try that again... why is there so many things i want to do? really why is it? and above all, i want to work really hard on music so that someday i can show you even more. now, like from the trailer to the full version that was uploaded to our site... those kinds of things are a bit different from just being a song, though.. now everyone, let's try meditating together with me sorry.. anyways.. i have to leave in a couple hours actually, so.. time to hit the hay, yeehaw i can't fall asleep right away ㅎㅎ this.. seems like it might be a bit difficult to interpret/translate.. (yes anton, it is,,,) next time it might be better to just turn on a live stream instead ㅎㅎ sorry wow... sleep is really not coming... [1 video] [1 picture] ok jinja gnshow more

Stateless History Node is almost like a regular Ethereum... node, but it doesn't store state and it doesn't have EVM execution. It's used only for syncing events and thus - is faster and gives you FREE INDEXING. You don't have to pay 6 figures for RPC anymore! Just spin up a Stateless History Node, plug rindexer or Ponder there, and enjoy free (AND FAST!!) indexing! This node is syncing >1000 blocks per second at my local pc (less than 6hrs for the whole Ethereum), and it should use less than 200GB - which means you can host it on a MacMini, Hetzner or whatever. You can futhermore filter that by using block ranges or bloom filters, etc - I haven't developed this yet. What you see is a proof of concept. It works via native devp2p 'eth' protocol, but with EIP4444 and The Prune we would have to also support era1 archives and Portal Network. But so far it works - there are plenty of peers serving historical receipts, and they serve them FAST! If you run Stateless History Node you can also serve the blocks and receipts - so that could help to preserve archival data too. For now there is no data validation yet (and even no data storage - that's a very early PoC), but we can verify validity of chain by simultaneously running a lightweight CL node (or not lightweight if you're extremely paranoid). And then support verifying the hashes of receipts and blocks with their parents, maintaining full integrity and zero trust. It's also written in rust, btw. So, I guess, at least for Ethereum Mainnet the era of RPC's pumping moneybags is over - there's finally a local, trustless and free indexing alternative available. Too sad this won't work for Optimism / Base , cause despite introducing P2P after Bedrock - they haven't enabled receipts transfer in the protocol (or at least I couldn't find one). Arbitrum is even sadder - I don't believe there is a P2P layer at all - you just have to run your own node, hold state and execute blocks to get events. There is hope - Paradigm recently released Ress - stateless execution, but it requires nodes to support Witness preparation & exchange - but this could work for L2s - cause the main blocker for local RPCs rn is huge state (VPS with TB storage cost a lot), and the second blocker is EVM forks makes it hard to hold a node - it needs to be maintained, upgraded, etc. Ress at least solves the state part. But anyways, I will try to continue working on this and release some MVP version with RPC endpoint and data storage soon - follow the updates!show more

Since TermMax V2 rolled out the new Roll feature,... I’ve been thinking DeFi lending is finally getting serious about managing time. The worst part of fixed-rate positions was never opening them—it was those brutal few days before expiry. You’re stuck in meetings all day, topping up margin at night, jumping chains for liquidity at 3 a.m., watching rates while praying nothing blows up. A lot of positions didn’t die from volatility; they died right there in that 48-hour window. When I saw what TermMax | Fixed Rate Borrowing & Lending just shipped, my first reaction was that on-chain borrowing finally feels like actual debt management. Besides straight repayment, you can now roll your position two ways: straight into a new fixed-rate term market to lock the rate again, or over to Morpho’s floating market if you want flexibility. A lot of people are calling it “just rolling over,” but it’s really changing how we handle time. Fixed rates used to lock the interest but left time broken—expiry hit and you had to decide everything from scratch again. The real stress wasn’t the APR; it was the panic questions like “what if I don’t have cash that day” or “what if the market flips.” V2 stitches that gap shut. Inside the rollover pop-up you pick the next term—like USDC/wstETH to 30SEP2026—and you see the APY instantly. The real win isn’t the yield; it’s finally being able to plan your next cash flow ahead of time. If you want stability, rolling to the next fixed market is like building your own debt calendar—next due date, cost of funds, everything crystal clear so you don’t scramble at the last second. Want to keep options open? Flip to Morpho and stay flexible if rates move. That’s what makes this update feel mature. It doesn’t decide for you—it hands the duration choice back to the user. The Maturity Watch plus the unified Positions view is the most underrated detail. Expiry pressure used to hit like an alarm clock out of nowhere; now you can actually see your full funding timeline. Lately the community can’t stop talking about “control.” XHUNT’s last 7-day stats show TermMax sitting at 86.7% positive sentiment. People aren’t just chasing APY anymore—they’re praising the certainty of fixed rates, the clean dashboard, Range Orders, and that new feeling of not having to put out fires at the last minute. This shift is bigger than it looks. Most on-chain users used to live in the “today” lane—what’s pumping, what’s the rate, any quick moves? Now with Roll, some are already thinking three months out. That’s not a trading habit anymore; it’s turning into a real money habit. Sure, it’s not perfect yet. We still need more real-world rollover data, rates will keep moving, and there are edge cases like zero-debt positions that can’t roll. The TGE delay frustration is real too, but that’s separate from the product itself. Still, this V2 Roll just turned DeFi’s most ignored stress—from pure expiry panic into something you can actually schedule. With DeFi rotating hard and Bitcoin pulling back a bit, people are craving exactly this kind of certainty. Once users start managing the future properly, fixed-rate lending finally starts feeling like a real credit market. Have you noticed? A lot of us aren’t just asking “is the APY good?” anymore. We’re asking whether this money will still fit in our plans when it comes due.show more

**Doris Yin Speech at China Guizhou Zunyi GCV Barter... Conference** Hello to the community leaders, GCV ambassadors, merchants, and pioneers of GCV Guizhou in China! Today is January 12, 2025, marking the first GCV Barter Conference in China in New Year and the 13th Barter Conference overall. I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to the organizers of this conference, the Guizhou Zunyi GCV Community, and the co-organizers, Barter Huishang (Guizhou) Digital Economy Industry Group Co., Ltd. I also want to acknowledge the following GCV ambassadors for their active dedication and contributions to this conference: **GCV Ambassador of China:** - Yang Zhizhong - Cai Zaiqiao **Ambassadors of Guizhou Province GCV:** - Wang Shiqiong - Cai Weisheng - Guo Jiaqing **Zunyi GCV Ambassadors:** - Wang Jianbo - Luo Nanlu **GCV ambassadors at the district and county level in Zunyi City** Additionally, I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to our numerous GCV merchants and sponsors. Without your support, we would not have been able to hold such a grand and large-scale event. Today's gathering in Zunyi, a sacred site of the revolution, reminds me of the Red Army's 25,000-mile Long March. Their perseverance and sacrifice continue to inspire us. The Zunyi Conference took place from January 15 to 17, 1935, and exactly 90 years later, we are gathered here today. The defining characteristics of the Zunyi Conference included the commitment to uphold the truth, correct mistakes, establish the correct leadership of the Party Central Committee, and creatively develop and implement strategies that fit the nature of the Chinese revolution. Today, our Zunyi Conference will also be recorded in the history of blockchain, as every effort you have put in has contributed to building a strong network ecosystem. Our partial fiat and partial distribution policy serves as a solution for the rapid development of the ecosystem during the closed mainnet of the Pi Network. As we all know, the first quarter of this year will bring about the successful mainnet launch of Pi Network. After six long years of challenges and perseverance, all of our pioneers will have the opportunity to witness this significant historical moment. What an exciting and proud day this will be! It has not been easy for everyone to persist through these six years; it requires great blessings, unwavering faith, and the courage to overcome difficulties. Today, our pioneers in Zunyi, Guizhou Province, gathering for this GCV barter conference holds great significance. I see that ten companies are providing products for barter, with nine companies, including Guizhou Meitan County Daoqin Hospital and Barter Huishang (Guizhou) Digital Economy Industry Group Co., Ltd., sponsoring this event. Once again, I extend my heartfelt thanks to all of you. The GCV Barter Conference serves multiple purposes. It is not only about creating GCV data or demonstrating the strength of our China region to CT, but also about showing how closely we align with their vision and mission. Additionally, it provides robust evidence for a substantial number of KYC and migration initiatives in China. More importantly, what we do today aims to boost China’s future economic development. Once the main network of the Pi Network is launched, we anticipate a significant demand for Chinese products from numerous international pioneers, which will in turn generate a large volume of export orders. At the same time, there will be international merchants looking to export their products to China. Once OM, import and export transactions will be conducted using the new currency, facilitating the vision of a stable currency and enabling seamless and reliable exchanges with fiat currency. Therefore, the merchants who engage now will have the advantage of being early adopters. The Pi Network offers a partner program and a MapofPi program. To participate in the partnership, businesses are required to have a company website. We invite businesses with websites to join us. However, if you do not have a company website, you can still join the Mapofpi program, which encompasses a wide range of industries, allowing participation from both large companies and small traders. Registration for the Mapofpi does not require a business license or website; various entities including shops, hospitals, schools, hair salons, accounting firms, law firms, restaurants, and hotels are welcome to register. Please select an active merchant and support GCV at $314,159. Prior to the OM launch, it is advisable to use partial fiat currency and partial Pi to ensure that merchants can cover their costs and fulfill their tax obligations. Recently, on January 9, we established the China GCV Industry Chain Alliance, which aims to create an industrial chain that facilitates the circulation of Pi among merchants, thereby reducing the burden of exchanging fiat currency after OM. During the enclosed mainnet, you can assist merchants in registering as Pi Network Partners and Mapofpi . Ms. Lumari is our Global GCV CT executive director and her goal is to have 200,000 registered Mapofpi merchants worldwide. My personal target is to reach 100,000 registered merchants in China alone. This goal is achievable given the over 58 million enterprises and more than 20 million pioneers in China. If we can effectively convey that Pi Network WEB 3.0 blockchain technology will significantly enhance human productivity and that the business opportunities from accepting partial Pi and partial FIAT during the 60 days before OM will present numerous benefits and minimal risks to merchants, then it is likely that no merchant will be unfavorably surprised by the initiative. This strategy offers a multitude of advantages with virtually no downsides. Furthermore, it benefits pioneers by allowing them to transfer purchasing power to the community and minimize fiat currency expenses in their daily life. Consequently, the GCV data we generate will significantly benefit the Chinese pioneers, as a large number of registered merchants can transform the China region from a high-risk area to a safe zone. Not only can this region be promoted to a VIP area, which would enjoy expedited KYC and mapping processes, but it will also allow pioneers and merchants to thrive together in our ecosystem. This collaboration will enhance the prosperity of our country and empower the China region to contribute to the welfare of communities worldwide. Once OM, it will play a crucial role in the economic development of both China and the world. If you pay attention to our migrartion speed, you might have noticed that it has slowed down recently. From December 17th to around the 30th, the migrating speed was over 50,000 to 100,000 per day, but now it has dropped to just over 10,000. What is the reason for this decline? If it was previously possible to migrate over 100,000 per day, why has it changed? The CT has stated that they will OM until the first quarter of this year to bring the migratiion in line with KYC amounts. However, if it's technically feasible to achieve a higher migration speed, why isn’t it being done? The answer is quite simple: it depends on what everyone does with the Pi after such large migration numbers. If pioneers rush to buy and sell, hold onto their Pi coins, or trade at low value, it will impact the speed and efficiency of the next migration in these regions. This principle is not only theoretically valid but has proven true in practice. For instance, countries like the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia have a solid educational foundation in GCV. Most pioneers there are highly aware of the risks involved in participating in the black market, which allows them to generate a substantial amount of GCV data. As a result, their migration speed is notably fast, and there are many large wallet migrated. To help the CT regain momentum, we all need to cooperate. Engage with the migrated Pi and participate in the GCV barter ecosystem. Be cautious of individuals who aim to deceive you for personal gain; devaluing the Pi often serves as a tactic to exchange something small for your valuable treasure. It's crucial to educate pioneers about the true value of what they hold and encourage them to avoid dishonest practices. I urge everyone to actively participate in partial Pi and partial FIAT barter. The more GCV data we generate, the more secure our wallets will be. Therefore, it's important for everyone to read and share the Pioneer Handbook I wrote which has been translated into 30 languages to raise awareness among pioneers. By learning from the Pioneer Handbook and participating in GCV bartering, we can improve China's migration efforts and foster ecological development. This stability can ensure that the value of our Pi endures for future generations, rather than becoming worthless in a few years. Wouldn't that be something we want to preserve for our children and grandchildren? Today's message is lengthy but very important, and I hope you take the time to understand it. I wish our Guizhou Zunyi Conference great success! Thank you to all GCV Ambassadors, Merchants, and Pioneers for your incredible support! Your efforts today are planting the seeds for a prosperous future, and I hope you find safety and fulfillment in the days to come. May your wishes come true! Wishing you health and happiness! Let’s work together to create a better future! I also hope you all have a joyful Chinese New Year! Doris Yin 🪷🪷🪷 Founder, Global GCV Movement January 12, 2025show more

Has been a while since I've given an update... so here's a breakdown of where Sappy is at right now and what we're focusing on going into this year. Pre-amble: With altcoins & NFTs the market is definitely not the same as it was before. I think this is obvious to everyone but I've noticed there are still japanese soldiers that are convinced old tricks and mechanics work. They don't. Liquidity is thin; people want to bid assets that feel like "real companies" not vacuous memecoins. There's still room for memecoins, social currencies, and "utility tokens" (I would say without these functions, tokens are hard to justify versus equities). I'm not part of the camp that thinks there will never be hyperspeculation in crypto again, because there will be; we all love ponzis and PvPing each other onchain. Just not with solved games -- people need something new and fresh. So the overarching plan is to continue building for users, sustainable revenues that aren't tied to directly to crypto, and doubling down on the areas that we've already found PMF / Brand Market Fit. Then leaning into crypto during cyclical periods where liquidity is sloshing around at an accelerated rate. Where we've found early PMF / what we're leaning into: Roblox: we're going to continue to go hard and accelerate here. It's our main objective to ship more seal/brainrot focused games across most genres to cast as wide of a net as we can for the brand, and to also iterate and see what works and stays sticky. Our initial incursion into Roblox was very successful peaking at 2M+ MAU and still sustaining a large portion of that player base... for all of its success, that was a relatively amateur first attempt; we've been setting up better AI pipelines for Roblox development that makes it reasonable to ship many more games and 10x those player counts in totality. It's my belief that Roblox is the sandbox whose audience will be the most valuable on the internet once they are grown up. That intense feeling you get when you see a TikTok referencing an old game you enjoyed on the PS2 or the Gamecube, or when you see a Pokemon card is the exact same feeling the youth of today will get when reminiscing on the things they enjoyed engaging with when they were younger. Fortnite and Roblox are functional equivalents to the old school consoles and exactly where that is taking place. Which is why as much as I care about scaling revenues through Roblox, the long term brand equity gained purely through being popular on the platform is totally invaluable. It also can heavily convert to merchandise sales today if all touchpoints for the brand are dialed in (which is why brands get overcharged so much by Roblox dev shops for the same ROI that only cost us a few thousand $). We have the playbook, it's just about iterating new concepts and then aggressively scaling. Brand Expansion & Merchandising: I've started to create a content pipeline that is easily repeatable, cost efficient (costs next to nothing through either AI or smart reusable concepts), while still being very tasteful and meeting our quality standards for the brand. We are mostly focusing here on reaching people where they're at through nostalgic/emotional content, or just being visually stimulating through carefully curated aesthetics. Content that isn't superficial and touches people in a memorable way. I've attached some examples to the post so you can see what I mean rather than just read it. I don't think it's long until larger brands start doing this at scale, but it's always good to be ahead of the curve and most importantly winning on taste -- knowing what will resonate with people and what won't has always been our edge. The purpose for these accounts is not only to rack up attention but also to begin converting those into sales of both of physicals (plushies & gacha collectibles) and digital avenues like our games, and any other apps we produce. Because they're offshoot accounts it's also a lot easier to be aggressive/experimental with said conversion strategies. Sappy Studio: I'm wrapping everything like Omnia, and everything else into this category because they're all tangentially related. Beginning with Omnia, our current focus is gearing up for Season 0 which involves players competing in the ranked ladder for a prize pool that has rewards through Monad Momentum as well as a player-funded prize pool. This season will be fairly simple with us mostly logging retention, deck building habits, as well as qualitatively observing how aggressively players push the combat system. Deeper monetization wont exist yet outside of the player buy-in (to be eligible for P2E rewards). Beyond that our overarching principle this year is to focus heavily on risk-to-earn mechanics where a portion of that excess value is circular i.e. revenues flow back to prize pools or other parts of the economy, treating the game almost like a protocol where the objective is to amass TVL or player liquidity. Social is also a big focus, and that means implementing the Open World hub which from an infrastructure perspective has already been built out and tested by all of you previously. Right now we are scaffolding the environment in 3D and working through how that hub should look and feel, so players are excited to hang out & idle together while they're queuing. For sappydotlol, what I'm about to say is still early days from a design perspective so a lot can change, but I'm pushing the site in the direction of being a virtual game console. An intersection between Nintendo & Myspace where users can play, trade, and socially interact in a way that's deeply personalised; a breathe of fresh air from the hostility of the current internet. If you go back to my thesis on Roblox above and the game console references, you can kind of see how this will all sequentially tie together. In essence, the strategy is to acquire a critical mass of players through traditional platforms like Roblox, and use that attention and trust to provide an onboarding funnel for web2 users into our own sandbox filled with a mixture of our own browser-based experiences as well as an aggregation of others. The aim is to make the platform a breath of fresh air & bunker from the enshittified platforms like TikTok/IG/X where users are actually served in ways that delight rather than agitate, and where self-expression is incentivised. Closing: As always everything here is subject to change but I've never felt more conviction in our direction until now; I know exactly what we need to do and how, with everything aligning with our team's strengths. Very excited and grinding through things to the point where I'm getting headaches and can't sleep from being hyperfocused for long periods of time lol. There probably has never been a better time to join the ecosystem from a price to fuck around and find out perspective.show more

She Lived to 117. Scientists Studied Her for Months.... Her Secret Cost $2. Maria Branyas Morera ate three yogurts a day. Every single day, for as long as anyone could remember. She mentioned this to anyone who asked about her longevity, which was often, and it was the kind of advice people receive with a warm smile and then immediately discard, because we prefer our longevity secrets to involve something more exotic than a supermarket dairy aisle. Maria died in Barcelona in 2024. She was 117. Then scientists actually looked inside her, and the smiling stopped. Her gut was packed with Bifidobacterium, a bacterium almost never found in people past 110, and far more commonly associated with infants. Her body had, in the most literal biological sense, not been informed of her actual age. It was operating on entirely different assumptions. Her DNA suggested she was somewhere between 100 and 110. She was 117. Seven years younger on the inside than the calendar insisted, which at 117 is not a rounding error. That is a extraordinary number. But to appreciate why any of this matters, you need to understand what kind of person we are talking about. Maria was born in San Francisco in 1907, the year before the Model T Ford, when Theodore Roosevelt was still in the White House and most of humanity died of things we now treat with a Tuesday afternoon at the pharmacy. Her Catalan father had come to America to make something of himself, and for a while it worked beautifully. He founded a Spanish-language magazine in New Orleans, one of the most chaotic, beautiful, swampy, and gastronomically unhinged cities on the continent, a place that has always operated on the reasonable philosophy that life is uncertain and the gumbo is excellent. Then the family got on a boat back to Spain. Maria fell on deck and permanently lost the hearing in one ear. Her father died of tuberculosis before the coast of Catalonia came into view. He was 37. She was eight. Her mother arrived in Europe with five children, no husband, and presumably very little appetite for what came next. Maria managed. She nursed soldiers in the Spanish Civil War. She outlived Franco, which required considerable patience. She raised three children. She played piano until she was 108. At 113 she caught COVID-19 and dispatched it, which at that point resembles less a medical event than a statement of intent. Then she joined Twitter. Her bio read: “I am old, very old, but not an idiot.” Her last request, before she died peacefully in her sleep, was three words: “Please study me.” The geneticists obliged with considerable enthusiasm, and their subsequent paper in Cell Reports Medicine runs to forty pages of scientists explaining, in the careful and hedged language that science requires, that this woman was remarkable in ways they had not previously encountered and were not entirely sure how to explain. The yogurt, it turns out, had been doing quiet and serious work for over a century. Nomadic peoples of Central Asia were fermenting milk 8,000 years ago, long before germ theory, before microscopes, before anyone had the faintest idea what a bacterium was. They didn’t need to understand it. Their guts understood it. The knowledge was older than writing. Maria understood it too. She didn’t publish a paper. She didn’t launch a wellness brand. She just ate her yogurt every morning and got on with the extraordinary business of being alive. Gandalv / Gandalv ✦ AI-generated image. Not the actual person. Full story:show more