Design. Animation. Sound
Joined January 2012
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S E E D is a #2danimation short with all character + fx animation done in @toonsquid app. a mini breakdown of process thread below.
kept thinking of 'beginning of infinity' while looking through the Atomic Machines site...super cool to see @jeffholden might also be inspired by Deutsch !
The essays by jeff on the webpage are worth a read .
atomicmachines.com/blog
really interesting .like this bit below 'Tell me what a people could do with matter, and I can tell you the limits they lived inside: how fast they could move, how much energy they could command, how far their reach could extend. Tell me how they were governed, and I can tell you nothing of the kind. There were kings in every age.'
Future truly feels exciting with companies like SpaceX, Tesla, Boom , Atomic Machines ...
genuinely exciting to see the rollout . doodled a quick cybercab loop in @toonsquid while catching up on news!
robin joseph retweeted
View of Starship in space from a Starlink V3 satellite on Flight 13.
This composite is made of imagery from four separate cameras on a single satellite. Six of the satellites were equipped with cameras to scan Starship’s heat shield and transmit imagery down to operators to continue testing methods of analyzing Starship’s heat shield readiness for return to launch site on future missions
Go StarShip Go!
Starship soared on the second flight of the next generation, deploying advanced Starlink satellites for the first time and providing priceless data as it travelled through air, space, and sea → spacex.com/launches/starship…
robin joseph retweeted
The path to launch is filled with obstacles and success is only possible through the tireless efforts of many working together towards a common goal. “Critical Path” continues the ongoing Starship series, following SpaceX engineers through the final days before launch of the first Starship V3 and the challenges that come with development of the world’s most powerful and fully reusable rocket.
really interesting talk by @tomhyde_ ...excited for wonderism!
Native version of my talk from this year's @conconeurope (in partnership w/ @ConjectureInst)
AN AESTHETIC THEORY OF ROMANCE
if you have the means to support..here is more about the project
xitter.gq/tomhyde_/status/204297…
I want to quit my job and work on my book, Wonderism, full-time. Below is my application to a popular online grant. If this sounds of value to you, and you have the means to support me, please do reach out. If not, please consider reposting.
Q. What is your story?
I am a writer interested in the connection between reason and aesthetics. I am, in a sense, that combination personified. In school—like so many students in state education—I was faced with the choice between science on the one hand and art on the other. Between logic, laboratories, and stable career prospects; against literature, libraries, and much less of that. They are immiscible fluids, oil and water, we are told, one part passion and the other part rigour, as likely to mingle as diesel in lemonade. But I wanted to do both. I wanted to write about reason and write about it beautifully. This is, I think, far more faithful to the spirit of science than lab coats and calculators; reason as a purely cerebral process is a largely modern misconception. It is intimate, delicate, romantic. How could knowing the world be any different? Karl Popper, the foremost epistemologist of the 20th century, was right when he said that ‘Science is most significant as one of the greatest spiritual adventures that man has yet known.’ This has been, and remains to this day, my guiding inspiration.
After school, I studied geology at University College London. There I read John McPhee’s “Annals of the Former World”. A journalist, not a geologist, McPhee wrote personally about a subject that appeared most impersonal. He had wondered, as a child, not merely what brought the placer gold from the Yukon mountains down into the rivers that divided them, but, far more deeply, “what had put the gold in the mountain to begin with?” This was intended both literally (orogenic gold deposition is mostly the result of hydrothermal alteration of the surrounding fabric rock) and metaphorically (how can beauty inspire us to know?) I took both meanings to heart, and after graduating, moved to Australia to work as a mining geologist. This might appear strange for a writer most interested in art. But it is, in truth, a great source of inspiration for an aesthetic theory in constant contact with the physical sciences. Gold, I have learned, borders quartz; and beauty, I am confident, is a concrete part of this world.
Outside of my academic and professional pursuits, I am interested in philosophy, popular science, science fiction, poetry, and writing. I was inspired by the books of David Deutsch @DavidDeutschOxf and consider myself an optimist in his style: problems are inevitable; they are soluble; people are both fallible and improvable; there is no inherent limit to the amount of progress we can make through conjecture, criticism, reason, and knowledge.
Q. What is your project?
I have suggested that the separations between reason and feeling are manufactured and, inevitably, false. I have also outlined the problem as precisely that clash (or family of clashes): reason/feeling, thought/passion, logic/instinct, sense/sensibility; their various applications: science/art, industry/nature, technology/biology, synthetic/organic; and other related divides: materialism/spiritualism, naturalism/supernaturalism, utility/beauty, function/form… These proposed dichotomies (and others) are a modern deconstruction of an older dispute: between The Enlightenment of the 18th century (representing reason and science); and Romanticism of the 19th century (representing emotion and art). Today, this schism has exceeded conventional wisdom and has been ossified into dogma; it has been codified into equally extensive, exhaustive, and at times exhausting slogans: “head vs heart”, “hot vs cold”, “the rider and the elephant”, “left brain and right brain”, “type 1 and type 2 thinking”. The result is to excise meaning, feeling, inspiration and significance from material, mechanical, technological progress; and to fuse it inseparably to mystical, irrational, primitivist stasis. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. This is the problem I am trying to solve.
My proposed solution is a new philosophy. Wonderism.
There are two meanings to the word wonder: wondering and wonderment. The former is curiosity, imagination, and reasoning in the face of mystery. The latter is astonishment, adoration, and inspiration in the light of discovery. This simple polysemy contains within it every facet of human thought and every feature of the problem described.
I want to write a book. Called Wonderism.
A rough-sketch outline is as follows.
PREFACE (“What put the gold in the mountains?”)
This will be a personal introduction to myself and my relationship to both science and the arts.
INTRODUCTION (“In Wonder It Began”)
This will be an investigation into the history and nature of the concept of wonder. The Greeks called it “Thauma”. Indeed, Plato himself said that all philosophy begins and ends in this unified concept. (Popper would later go on to say: “What matters is neither methods nor techniques—nothing but a sensitiveness to problems, and a consuming passion for them; or as the Greeks said, the gift of wonder.) And the philosophical divide between Plato’s spiritualism and Aristotle’s materialism can be viewed as the progenitor of the problem as described.
BOOK 1: An Ode to Inspiration (“Catching Fire”)
This chapter will be a series of short stories exploring the process of inspiration and using the central icons of fire and flight. The first bird, first campfire, first balloon flight, first stone placed at the foot of The Statue of Liberty, first SpaceX rocket catch. All are literal and spiritual applications of “catching fire” to mean both ignition and inspiration. This will be a modern promethean epic told in short form.
BOOK 2: A Comparative History of Enlightenment and Romanticism (“Songs of Lightness and of Love”)
This chapter will be a comparison of The Enlightenment and Romanticism, focusing on their epistemologies, their unification under Karl Popper’s critical rationalism, and its own elevation into Wonderism.
BOOK 3: Terrorism (“The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters”)
This chapter will explore the erroneous applications of wonder. The opposite of wondering is boredom. And the opposite of wonderment is terror. You can plot this on a "political compass”-style graph to yield four quadrants: Wonderism, Scientism, Terrorism, Mysticism. The title is taken from Goya’s famous inscription and his statement: "Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and source of their wonders". It will cover religious irrationality, scientific and other secular authoritarianism, sophistry, slavery, and war.
BOOK 4: Art (“The Language of Wonder”)
This chapter will cover art as the key mode of communicating emotions. It will focus on semiotics, the philosophy of symbols, and art as an alternative to language. It will also explore “the great un-mystery” of art (namely beauty) and aim to debunk various fallacies surrounding it. Finally, it will outline some tenets of a Wonderist style, prose in the immediate, but all forms more generally. As I have explained above, I want to “Wonderise” the mundane through aesthetics. This is one of the core tenets of the work: namely that, in order to communicate well, one must not merely say the thing but sing it also. I intend to do both.
BOOK 5: A Guide to Radical Humanism (“Man the More”)
This chapter takes its title from an inversion of Byron (“I love not man the less, but nature more”). It aims to be an optimistic tour-de-force in the Deutschian tradition: people are universal, the glory of the universe.
The remaining material is undesignated pending structural decisions. It includes an aesthetic and heroic theory of romance (i.e. person to person relationship; love); a list of my picks for the modern wonders of the world; the Wonderist manifesto; and more.
I am currently employed full-time at a salt mine. The work is physically demanding and doesn’t leave much time for research. I would use any support as a means to quit my job and work on the book full-time, systematising my research, developing the philosophy, and accelerating the writing process for a 2026 first-draft. I would hope, with your sponsorship, to make the new year my very own “annus mirabilis”.
A year of wonders.
robin joseph retweeted
The dura is the brain's armor: a membrane so tough that a surgeon normally cuts through it with a scalpel. For the first time in our clinical trials, we inserted the electrode threads of our implant straight through the dura and into the cortex, keeping the dura intact.
Here's how we did it 🧵
This was excellent ! too many sections to highlight, so picking two - from ⬆️& ⬇️ . Eagerly looking forward to a recording of the talk @ARC_Conference
'a whole ecosystem of different species of AI”, each carving out its niche, each held in check by the others, the balance between them doing quietly what no central authority ever could'
'The fight, he argued, burns hottest not where machines threaten the most jobs but where they threaten the most settled institutions'
Change the pronouns! AI is not “it”, it’s “them”.
quantumzeitgeist.com/not-it-…
robin joseph retweeted
BBC reporter tries to convince a teenage girl that Starmer did the right thing by banning social media for everyone under 16.
The girl is not convinced and gives the BBC reporter a sharp answer
robin joseph retweeted
A British biologist looked at 200,000 years of human history and found that the entire reason humans broke out of poverty was not intelligence, not language, not even agriculture, but one mechanism so simple a 6-year-old could explain it.
His name is Matt Ridley.
He is a zoologist by training, an evolutionary biologist by career, and in 2010 he wrote a book called The Rational Optimist that quietly argued the most important fact about human progress had been hiding in plain sight for the entire history of economics.
Naval Ravikant has been telling people to read everything Ridley has ever written for the last 15 years. The reason is the argument inside this one book.
For 200,000 years, anatomically modern humans walked around with the same brain you have right now. Same skull size. Same neural architecture. Same raw capacity for language, planning, and abstract thought.
For roughly 190,000 of those years, almost nothing happened. Generation after generation lived and died inside the same Stone Age toolkit their great-great-grandparents had used. Then somewhere around 50,000 years ago, the line on the chart of human progress started to tick upward. Then it bent. Then it exploded.
The question Ridley spent years on was the only question that mattered. What changed.
It was not the brain. The brain had been the same for 190,000 years. It was not language, which had existed long before the takeoff. It was not even agriculture, which arrived only 10,000 years ago and was actually preceded by the upward bend, not the cause of it.
What changed was that humans started trading with strangers.
This sounds too small to be the answer. Ridley argues that it is the answer to almost everything. The moment one human exchanged a useful object with another human from a different group, something happened that no other species on earth had ever done.
Two ideas that had developed in isolation came into contact. The flint knapper learned what the spear maker had figured out. The fisherman from the coast learned what the hunter from the forest had figured out. The two pieces of knowledge fused into something neither side could have produced alone.
Ridley calls this ideas having sex. The phrase sounds frivolous and it is meant to. The point is that ideas, like genes, get better when they combine with other ideas from different lineages.
An idea sitting inside one head, no matter how brilliant the head, eventually hits a ceiling. The same idea exposed to ten thousand other ideas does something genes do under sexual reproduction. It mixes. It recombines. It produces offspring nobody planned.
The cleanest proof of this argument is the most uncomfortable case study in the book. Tasmania.
Around 10,000 years ago, rising sea levels cut Tasmania off from mainland Australia. A population of roughly 4,000 humans was now isolated on an island, with no possibility of contact with the rest of humanity. They had the same brains. The same language. The same starting toolkit as their cousins 150 kilometers north. The natural experiment was now running.
What happened next is something no economist or geneticist had ever predicted.
The mainland Australians kept inventing. Boomerangs. Spear-throwers. Fishing nets. Bone needles for sewing fitted clothes. Watercraft with paddles. Their technology compounded slowly across the centuries.
The Tasmanians went the other way. They did not just fail to invent the new tools their cousins were developing. They started losing the tools they already had. Fishing was abandoned within a few thousand years. Bone tools disappeared. Fitted clothing disappeared. They forgot how to make fire from scratch and started carrying lit firebrands from camp to camp instead, relighting their fires from a neighbor's whenever their own went out.
By the time European explorers arrived in the 17th century, the Tasmanians had the simplest toolkit of any human society ever recorded. Their material culture had gone backward for 8,000 years.
The archaeologist Rhys Jones called it a slow strangulation of the mind.
Joseph Henrich at Harvard later proved with formal mathematical models that there was nothing wrong with Tasmanian brains. There was something wrong with their network. A toolkit requires a critical mass of people exchanging skills to maintain itself.
The act of teaching a skill is imperfect. Every generation loses a small percentage of what the last generation knew. If your population is large enough and trading widely enough, those losses get caught and corrected by someone else who still remembers.
If your population shrinks below a certain threshold and stops mixing with outsiders, the small losses compound until entire technologies disappear.
This is the part that should haunt anyone reading this in 2026.
Intelligence is not a property of the individual brain. Intelligence is a property of the network the brain is connected to. A genius in isolation will produce less than a mediocre thinker inside a dense exchange of other mediocre thinkers.
The thing your ancestors needed in order to break out of 190,000 years of stagnation was not better brains. It was better connections between brains they already had.
The implication for any individual is direct and uncomfortable. If you are smart and isolated, you will be outproduced by people half as smart who are connected.
The most successful people in any field are almost never the smartest people in it. They are the ones positioned at the intersection of the most idea flows. They are reading more authors than their competitors. They are talking to more people from more disciplines. They are in the rooms where ideas from different lineages bump into each other.
Ridley ends the book on the line that sounds optimistic but is actually a warning its this "The future will be invented by people who connect ideas, not by people who guard them."
X is 👌 ! Ted&Fran = 🫶
@elonmusk
Elon,
My husband Ted and I share this X account, and we’ve posted together many times. But today I wanted to write to you personally, from my own heart.
I want to thank you for creating tools that help me learn something new every single day, that make my life better, and that actually make me excited to live longer — because your inventions keep getting more amazing.
I was born in 1942 in Normandy, France, under German occupation. In 1946, my family moved to the coast along the English Channel. So many towns and villages had been damaged or destroyed. As children, we played among the old bunkers and in cemeteries. Later in life, I married an American airman, moved to the United States with him, earned a doctorate in education, and spent my career teaching languages.
Now I’m 84 years old, retired, and living in Alaska with my husband of 64 years. Not long ago I discovered you and your work. We recently bought a Cyberbeast, and I love everything about it — the comfort, the incredible technology, and especially FSD, which we use every day. We even installed a Starlink dish on our roof so we have reliable internet everywhere in Alaska.
I use Grok every single day. Thanks to you, I’m now learning about AI itself — at 84! I also use X daily because it lets me see what’s really happening in the world, without media filters or propaganda, and connect with people from every corner of the globe.
Instead of living in the past and reminiscing about the “good old days,” I wake up every morning excited to see what new invention or breakthrough you’re working on and what the future will bring.
Thank you, Elon, from the bottom of my old heart.
You’ve made this 84-year-old woman feel young and hopeful again. ❤️
Françoise
Here we are with our new Cyberbeast !
