Faith, family and future. Christian dad of two, technology optimist, running family life with grok @bot
London, England
Joined June 2022
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Jonathan retweeted
The Bible was written on three continents,
Asia
Africa
Europe
In three languages.
Hebrew
Aramaic
Greek
By over 40 different men,
Shepherds
Kings
Prophets
Fishermen
A doctor
Across roughly 1,500 years.
Yet it tells one continuous story:
Creation
Fall
Redemption
Christ
Different writers
Different centuries
Different cultures
One voice.
Because behind the human hands was a divine Author.
Men held the pens.
But God wrote the story.
Jonathan retweeted
I’ve spent a few days thinking about the Tesla Roadster reveal and landed somewhere I haven’t seen much discussion. I’m neither a Tesla fanboy nor a Tesla hater. And I couldn’t care less whether what we saw technically qualifies as a flying car. Three takeaways: (1) The risk of that live demonstration going horribly wrong was real. Almost no CEO would willingly expose their company to that kind of public humiliation for a product with so little financial upside. Elon did. (2) That willingness to attempt the seemingly impossible is what makes Tesla special. It’s also arguably Elon’s greatest contribution to America. He’s helped bring back something we’ve lost. The American spirit of chasing big scary ideas that most people think are impossible. That mindset is spreading across a new generation of founders and its long term impact on America’s future could dwarf anything Tesla ever sells. I think this is deeply underappreciated. (3) Can we just acknowledge how insanely cool that moment was? We’ve reached a strange place culturally where even extraordinary feats of human ingenuity immediately become arguments about why they don’t count. Not everything needs to be a debate. Sometimes we should just be able to stand back together and marvel at what humans are capable of. I’ve been both bullish and critical of Tesla’s ambitions over the years. But watching Elon and his team push the boundaries of what’s possible reminds me why I’m glad we have him. Whether the Roadster ever makes Tesla a dollar or impacts $TSLA stock price is almost beside the point. We need more people willing to risk failure in pursuit of things the rest of us think are impossible. Because when they succeed we all win.
Jonathan retweeted
Claude has discovered a previously unknown enzyme system hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages. Beside the enzyme’s gene sits a long array of repeating DNA—a structure that looks somewhat similar to CRISPR.
We don’t yet understand what this system does, but only a handful of known systems share its features, and all of them are able to cut, copy, and paste DNA. Historically, the discovery of such programmable systems has helped revolutionize medicine. CRISPR, for instance, is now the foundation of genetic medicines. But it will take much more work to learn what this system does, and whether it can be put to similar use.
Read more: anthropic.com/news/claude-di…
Jonathan retweeted
.@ShawnRyan762 asked me point-blank: "Why did Jesus have to die on the cross?"
I am humbled and honored that I was put in a position to answer this question for him. This story is one of the best illustrations of the Gospel that I've ever heard.
Jonathan retweeted
There is still time, but not much time
Jonathan retweeted
I was clearly wrong about Anthropic. They are obviously currently the leader in AI. No company has released a model as good as Mythos/Fable and they will undoubtedly have Mythos 2 ready soon.
And I would never cut them off in a way that hurt them badly, even as a competitor. That’s not my style.
Tesla open sourced its patents and we made the Supercharger network available to all competitors, even though we could have made it a walled garden.
SpaceX launches competing satellite systems with no increase in price or use of unfair terms.
Even my worst enemies can attack me on this platform.
…
Jonathan retweeted
⚡️The average person waits for permission from people who are barely paying attention.
High-agency people force contact with reality.
They ask. They follow up. They pitch. They ship. They make the awkward move. They tolerate silence. They tolerate rejection. They tolerate being misunderstood. They tolerate temporary cringe because the mission matters more than the self-image.
This creates a compounding gap that looks almost unfair.
One person thinks about asking for help for three weeks.
Another asks ten people in one afternoon.
One person rewrites the pitch for a month.
Another sends twenty imperfect versions and learns from the replies.
One person waits until the timing feels socially safe.
Another creates timing by acting.
The second person gets more feedback, more reps, more opportunities, more collisions, more luck. From the outside it looks like confidence. Under the hood, it is lower latency.
That is the real force: latency collapse.
Fear of social disapproval creates delay. Delay kills compounding. The person who can act while still feeling discomfort compresses time. That is why a shameless operator can create a year of progress in a week. They are not smarter in every case. They are less emotionally taxed by the act of contact.
The most important distinction is calibration.
Blind shamelessness becomes spam, delusion, manipulation, and social blindness. Calibrated shamelessness is elite. It ignores false shame while still reading the room. It follows up without becoming stupid. It asks directly without becoming entitled. It pushes through discomfort without losing contact with feedback.
That is the rare combination:
Low approval need.
High reality contact.
Most people only have one side if any.
Some are socially fearless but delusional.
Some are perceptive but inhibited.
The lethal operator is both hard to embarrass and fast to update.
Jonathan retweeted
if a toddler puts a sticker on you, that’s a sign of great respect in their culture
Jonathan retweeted
If you're wondering how Elon Musk will become the world's first trillionaire today.
This interview is pre-iPhone.
Jonathan retweeted
Dans le manifeste "techno-optimiste" de Marc Andreessen, il y a une phrase qui m'a marqué :
"Our enemies are not bad people – but rather bad ideas."
Nos ennemis ne sont pas des mauvaises personnes. Ce sont des mauvaises idées.
Prenons Jancovici. L'homme est brillant, sincère, travailleur. Il ne se lève pas le matin en se disant qu'il va nuire à l'humanité. Mais l'idée qu'il porte la décroissance, le rationnement, la frugalité érigée en horizon civilisationnel est une idée profondément destructrice. Elle prend des esprits brillants et les transforme en commissaires politiques d'un futur appauvri.
Et le plus fascinant, c'est ce que cette idée fait aux gens qui l'adoptent.
Dans mon entourage, une grosse partie de mes amis est sur cette ligne décroissantiste, avec tout le package qui va avec. L'argent c'est mal mais ils en veulent. Il faut moins prendre l'avion mais ils rêvent de voyager partout. Il faut consommer moins mais ils ne renoncent à rien de ce qu'ils aiment vraiment.
Et tous ont un point commun : ils sont déprimés. L'un d'eux m'a même confié qu'il était sous antidépresseurs.
Ce n'est pas un hasard. C'est mécanique.
Quand tu crois que ton désir de vivre, de créer, de t'élever est moralement suspect tu te détruis de l'intérieur. Tu passes ta vie à t'excuser d'exister. Tu vis dans la dissonance permanente entre ce que ton corps veut (plus, mieux, plus loin) et ce que ton idéologie t'ordonne (moins, sobre, immobile).
D'où ma théorie :
Quand on pense quelque chose de fondamentalement faux décroissance, communisme, extrémisme religieux (de tout ordre) ce n'est qu'une question de temps avant que ça devienne vraiment destructeur.
D'abord pour soi. Puis pour les autres.
Les mauvaises idées tuent. Lentement chez ceux qui y croient, brutalement chez ceux qui les subissent.
C'est pour ça que la bataille des idées n'est pas un luxe d'intellectuel. C'est la bataille la plus importante de notre époque.
Jonathan retweeted
In the era of #ArtificialIntelligence, when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization, ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human. We must lovingly safeguard the grandeur of humanity bestowed upon us and revealed in its fullness in Christ, the splendor of which no machine can ever replace. #MagnificaHumanitas
vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/e…
Jonathan retweeted
⚡️Children remember the moments when the family becomes fully alive.
That is the core. Vacation is just the common vessel.
A child does not encode childhood as a spreadsheet of responsible parenting.
They encode atmosphere.
They remember the motel pool, the gas station stop, the smell of sunscreen, the weird restaurant, the long drive, the sunset, the parents laughing differently, the feeling that normal life cracked open and something larger appeared.
That is why ages 5 to 10 hit so hard. The child is old enough to form durable narrative memory and young enough for the world to remain enchanted. Parents still feel mythic. A beach, cabin, lake, theme park, road trip, or even a cheap rented house can become sacred geography.
The real mechanism is interruption of routine plus emotional safety.
Ordinary life teaches stability. Trips create myth. The family leaves the repeating loop of school, work, chores, screens, exhaustion, and time pressure. For a few days, the child experiences parents outside their normal roles. Mom and dad are no longer just managers of homework, food, discipline, bedtime, and logistics. They become companions inside an adventure.
That imprints.
The money matters far less than parents think. Luxury is mostly adult vanity. Children remember intensity, freedom, attention, surprise, and togetherness. A $200 trip can beat a $10,000 trip if the child feels wonder and the parents are emotionally present.
Many adults are starved because their childhood had no sacred interruptions. Everything was duty, stress, survival, noise, pressure, or emotional absence. No mythic family scenes. No private homeland in memory. No recurring proof that life could be warm and strange and alive.
That matters for the adult psyche. People draw from childhood memories during loneliness, fear, ambition, loss, and love. Those memories become inner architecture.
Deepest compression: a good childhood is not built only by protection. It is built by unforgettable shared worlds.
Take the kid somewhere. Break the loop.
Make the ordinary world disappear for a few days.
That becomes part of them forever.
Jonathan retweeted
Winston Churchill fought his depression with bricks. He'd lay them for hours at his country home in Kent. He joined the bricklayers' union. And in 1921 he wrote about why it worked. It took psychology another 75 years to catch up.
He called his depression the "Black Dog." It followed him for decades. His method for fighting it back was as basic as it sounds: laying brick after brick, hour after hour.
Churchill spelled out his theory in a long essay for The Strand Magazine. People who think for a living, he wrote, can't fix a tired brain just by resting it. They have to use a different part of themselves. The part that moves the eyes and the hands. Woodworking, chemistry, bookbinding, bricklaying, painting. Anything that drags the body into a problem the mind can't solve by itself.
Modern psychology now calls this behavioral activation. It's one of the most-studied depression treatments out there. Depression sets a behavior trap. You feel bad, so you stop doing things, and doing less means less to feel good about. Feeling worse makes you do even less. The loop tightens until you can't breathe inside it.
Behavioral activation breaks the loop from the action side. You schedule the activity first, even when every part of you doesn't want to. Doing it produces small rewards: a wall gets straighter, a painting fills in, a messy room gets clean. Those small rewards slowly rewire the brain. Action comes first, and the feeling follows.
Researchers at the University of Washington put this to the test in 2006. They studied 241 adults with major depression and compared three treatments: behavioral activation, regular talk therapy, and antidepressants. For the people who were most severely depressed, behavioral activation matched the drugs. It beat the talk therapy. A 2014 review of more than 1,500 patients across 26 trials backed up the result.
Physical work like bricklaying does something extra on top of this. It crowds out rumination, the looping bad thoughts that grind people down during the worst stretches of depression. Bricklaying needs both hands and gives feedback brick by brick: each one is straight or crooked. After an hour you can see exactly how much wall you built. No room left for the mental chewing.
The line George Mack used in his post, "depression hates a moving target," is good poetry. The science behind it is sharper. Depression hates a brain that has somewhere else to be.
