Fire Tornado Magister Templi

Crypto + Macro Stuff I'm Looking At Today ... - Binance hack (by DPRK) dominating headlines today - Tech stonks down bigly and existential angst over layoffs, economy, AI, etc all over the TL - Intel $INTC down 30% today - $COIN beats earnings for first time in 4 quarters but still down 15% - The SEO-apocalypse that has destroyed tens of thousands of once profitable websites and online businesses has finally reached the furthest heights of the online economy, with Reddit $RDDT down 42%, with co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman stating on their earnings call that "People still want Reddit. It is just Google is not sending them to Reddit the way they used to." - Total crypto market cap down to $2.69T (38.9% below ATH's) - $QQQ down to $685 (10% below recent ATH's) - Oil at $103.90 - Silver falls below $50/oz for first time in almost a year - Multifamily real estate (ie apartments) increasingly looking like its sliding into crisis territory - MEV bots apparently killed it over the last 24 hours, with TitanBuilder making $24.7M (h/t 0xngmi) - CZ and Elon battle on the TL - Jupiter has launched a new bridge aggregator - Tragic crypto home invasion in France where a clerical error made a man's 0.66 $BTC look like 660 $BTC on his taxes, criminals invade home, assault family as a result (whole thing is sickening beyond estimation - need to write about this topic soon) - Despite all the carnage lots of defi teams still doing well... $AERO been stacking W's... $ENA looking good... etc... - About start using/LP'ing/etc on MetricXYZ, first new opportunity I've really been excited about since pre 10/10 as far as airdrops go - Still accumulating as much $FXN as humanly possible and still geeking out hard on $TRUEO and $WALLET and some others - Just sold a bit of my $QQQ and replaced with $TQQQ to add leverage - Kamino now allowing borrowing against Backpack-tokenized stonks on Solana - Polymarket suffered a small hack/exploit yesterday as well - $UNI launches aggregator hooks - PredictFun announces $PREDICT token + airdrop - Top gainers among top 300 coins over last 24 hours include $BEAM at +33.0%, $Q at +16.1%, $HASH at +14.6%, $CAP at +5.7%, and $SOSO at +5.3%, - Stanley Druckenmiller makes first ever Twitter/X post, on Hyperliquid and TradeXYZ - Will Manidis mega-essay (145 pages apparently) 'The Commanding Heights' is generating a lot of discussion on here... is exceptionally well-written and worth a look for sure... - Also the Venkatesh Rao essay from a couple days ago 'Cognitive Mercantilism' was extremely good as well - US election coming on Tuesday, polls suggesting Democrats to do quite well, but some are skeptical of polling accuracy, we will see... Conclusion Is really a wild time lads... Feel like this is the first point at which existential fears over AI and the future have really completely permeated the online discourse... And for good reason too I think... I definitely have immense empathy for the tech worker with a family and high fixed monthly expenses who is in the middle of losing his job... Is gonna be bleak for a lot of people... With that said I remain an eternal optimist and think most of us here in this corner of the internet will be net beneficiaries of all the changes coming... As I said yesterday, think the key is just staying lean, keeping expenses low, and maintaing an attitude of excitement + curiosity vis a vis all the massive innovations happening... So yeah, keep getting after it lads... Make your ancestors and descendents proud ILY LFG 💪

Gm lads - Did this month's Achilles in honor of the almighty and glorious wind 💪 'The wind? Have you lost your mind Rekt?' No - I haven't frens :) The wind has always had a special place in my heart... and I will lay out why below... ... I first remember being obsessed with the wind back when I was a child... Every time we had a really strong wind storm, I would go outside for long walks out in the woods by myself... I couldn't describe it at the time, but I felt like I was meant to do so in some strange way... We lived on 6 acres that backed up to National Forest land... and I would literally just walk out in the woods for hours on end... just feeling the wind on my face and listening to the sway of the trees... On other days when it got really windy I would climb to the top of my favorite tree- up really high where the trunk got super skinny... And I would just hold on to it as it waved back and forth in the wind... My mom would come outside and yell up at me... worried I was going to fall... But I would just ignore her and hang on for dear life... a giant smile stretched across my face :) ... Today my obsession with the wind persists... As I've said before... whenever I go on moon-maxxing walks at night, I'll hear the wind in the tree-branches, and it almost feels as though it is the voice of one's ancestors, and one's dead family and friends, urging you on, or whispering to you in a sense... Almost as if it is the thinnest part of the 'veil' that separates us from those who have passed on... I would guess that many humans throughout all history have felt something like this... And it makes sense, therefore, that the wind is an important component of all sorts of human religions and belief systems... Indeed there is even a great quote, that "God is like the wind... you can't see it... and you can't always feel it... but its always there..." ... On a literary level, there's a component reminiscent of this in several of my favorite works... In Lost- the greatest TV series of all time- the characters will often encounter 'the whispers' when they are out alone in the jungle at night... The whispers aren't expressly connected to the wind, but it is often the wind in the leaves that catalyzes them... And in later seasons we find out that these whispers are indeed the voices of all those who have died on the island previously, throughout its long-history... Likewise... in The Wind In The Willows the wind is the catalyst for the defining scene of the book (from which its title comes from)... The characters are out on a boat when they encounter the sound of the wind in the willow leaves... and it catalyzes a kind of metaphysical experience for them... where they are spiritually overcome by the oneness of all life and the interconnectedness of all events and things... John Steinbeck (one of my favorite authors) and his friend Ed Ricketts wrote about something like this as well... They called it the experience of 'breaking through'... Where suddenly everything in life makes sense, and you are overwhelmed by an incredible sense of gratitude and meaning... Almost as if you get a momentary glimpse of the all-knowing peace that comes after death, or something along those lines... And he wrote that one of the main catalysts for this experience was that of being out in nature, and experiencing the feel of the wind upon your face... Emerson wrote of something very similar in Nature... And I've been told that Miyazaki incorporated a similar theme into much of his work, interestingly... And one could talk extensively of the relevance of the wind in Tolkien's work as well... In conclusion though lads... The next time a great wind comes up, I encourage you to go walk around outside in nature all by yourself, and see what thoughts and feelings it stirs in you :) ... But yeah... this Achilles was mostly done during a wind and rain storm... so I had ample time to think about the above :) As always though... the Achilles was two miles of carrying a 70 lb dumbbell in each hand while wearing a 70 pound backpack... And then the normal 'canon' version I typically do also includes 70 weighted 70 lb pullups, however I did this one in a new location and could not find a pullup bar or acceptable tree branch or anything else to do pullups off of to save my life... so I did 600 delt raises of varying weights instead... Time was 3 hours and 6 minutes :)