Where the Roads Don't Reach A childhood at the end of the water
Cà Mau childhood by lamplight - a wooden house at the roadless edge of the Mekong Delta, where boats wear eyes and the dead wait in the water.
Twelve months, unabridged The year 2026, start to finish
73 posts, newest first. A few have aged in public.
A Prophecy In Paint Thôi nôi, and the paint on the wall
Thôi nôi is Vietnam's first-birthday rite - a baby grabs a tray to read her future. One grab in 2000 came true, in paint, on a wall.
A Powerful Coincidence He said yes, and the sky agreed
Proposal on a wild Vũng Tàu dune, a yes, two gold rings - and a rainbow cloud with impossible timing. The same-sex marriage quest begins.
@luitpold.me
Loop quantum gravity has this idea called a planck star, and it’s the most elegant fix to the black hole singularity problem I’ve come across:
Classical GR says a collapsing star can crunch down to a singularity – infinite density at a point, physics’ polite way of saying “the math broke”. Planck stars say nah. Once density hits planckian (5.1 × 10⁹⁶ kg/m³, comically extreme), quantum gravity kicks in, the inward pull gets balanced by a repulsive force, and the collapse halts. You get a stable-ish ball at planck density. Not point-sized either – density triggers it, not size. Could be macroscopic.
And it’s not stable forever. It’s mid-bounce. Microseconds in proper time, billions of years from outside thanks to time dilation. What we call a black hole is just a very slow ball hitting the floor. PBS Space Time breaks it down nicely.
Folk Covers & Lofi Bones Two channels keeping my brain alive while agents do the work
Folk-instrument game OST covers from Dryante and lofi reinterpretations from bits & hits - the background music keeping my coding sessions alive.
Internet Find of the Week Tomb Raider: Side-Scroller Edition
Deep in a TR1-3 remastered playthrough and I stumbled into the best Netzfundstück of the year - Lara Croft, remade as a cinematic platformer.
The Brief Spike 8 billion people and falling: a brief spike in human history
Global population peaks before 2080, then falls. Four-fifths of all human births are already behind us. What that means for the next two centuries.
@luitpold.me
talkie: a 13B language model trained only on pre-1931 text. no modern web, no leakage, no awareness of anything after 1930. that last part is what’s wild.
think about what this unlocks – archaeology, historiography, counterfactual history, reviewing past predictions of the future from the inside. every historian alive is contaminated by knowing what came next. talkie isn’t.
it’s also, i’d argue, the closest thing to a time travel experience we’ll ever get. physics doesn’t permit the real version in either direction (forward you just wait, backward causality says no). a conversation with something whose worldview ends in 1930, with no memory of WW2, no Hitler, no internet, is functionally the same trick.
now imagine the 17th century version. that’s the door this opens 🤯
Empty Corners Singapore – empty corners of a crowded island
Singapore for a week without a single photo of the Merlion - wetlands, hornbills, empty rain-soaked parks, and the small human encounters most tourists miss.
@luitpold.me
arte dropped a line last week that’s been rattling around my skull: “the countries of the global South will grow old before they reach the prosperity of the North.”
i went looking for counter-evidence. found none. France took 115 years to double its elderly share. Vietnam will do it in 17. Japan hit aged-society status at 40k USD per capita. Vietnam will hit it at 5k. of 40 countries that crossed 13% elderly since 1972, only three were poorer than Vietnam is now.
the horror isn’t that it’s unfair, though it is. the horror is that it’s already decided. the kids who weren’t born in the 80s and 90s can’t be un-not-born. no election changes this. no reform. the math was locked in before most voters were alive to vote on it.
demography as fate. with receipts.