Hey there,
Welcome to the latest edition of Weekly Crystallizations, a weekly newsletter where I highlight tweets (and occasional Telegram messages) from people making sense of what’s going on in the world today!
Personal update
On Saturday I attended the last campfire, a one-day farewell conference/get-together for fans of the Rebel Wisdom channel/podcast. I got to meet and talk with some of my intellectual heroes like Daniel Schmachtenberger (pictured below) and John Vervaeke, as well as listening to these two heavy weights in dialogue with one another. The event was put together to mark the end of of Rebel Wisdom — the founders David and Ali are going their separate ways. As a fan, it makes me sad to see the channel coming to an end, but I felt deeply inspired by their decision to embrace the ending, as opposed to clinging on to something that wasn’t meant to live on. It was also great to meet a bunch of new friends interested in sensemaking and psychedelics.
Twitter takeover
Elon announces $8 premium subscription feature for Twitter, which (among other things) gives your comments preferential treatment.
The Tesla founder is also experiencing some backlash to his takeover.
COVID & Vaccines
Translation: In Germany at the start of the year the majority of the COVID-19 patients in Intensive Care (60%) were unvaxed. Now around 90% of COVID-19 patients in the IC are vaxed.
Translation: It’s over
Update: Corrected the below paragraph. Before it said there had been a downtick in births in Germany and Sweden, which isn’t true.
Births experienced a downtick 9 months after vaccination in some countries (e.g. Singapore), but not in Germany and Sweden (quoted here). (I’ve not seen a good rebuttal to this yet). Alex Berenson wonders out loud if that will be the case as well 9 months after booster.
Geo-politics
Weird story about China reportedly having “police stations” in The Netherlands to monitor its citizens.
German chancellor admitting the emergence of a new multi-polar world.
Russo-Ukrainian War
Notes (thread) on a recent interview with Col. Douglas MacGregor.
Censorship
Astral Codex Ten draws an important distinction between Censorship and Moderation.
Misc
Finance
Crypto
AI
The GitHub AI tool — autocomplete for programmers — is getting some heat for autocompleting code without attributing proper copyright.
A little prototype I created for an idea I had. Check out the link in the tweet to try it out, and let me know if you’ve got feedback.