Sunday, August 16 — Rex Daily

I Daily Wisdom

Robert Greene The Daily Laws August 16 · Use Their Rigidity

A pawnbroker’s son once came to the great eighteenth-century Zen master Hakuin with the following problem: he wanted to get his father to practice Buddhism, but the man pretended to be too busy with his bookkeeping to have time for even a single chant or prayer. Hakuin knew the pawnbroker—he was an inveterate miser who was only using this as an excuse to avoid religion, which he considered a waste of time. Hakuin advised the boy to tell his father that the Zen master himself would buy from him each prayer and chant that he did on a daily basis. It was strictly a business deal. Of course the pawnbroker was very happy with the deal—he could shut his son up and make money in the process. Each day he presented Hakuin with his bill for the prayers, and Hakuin duly paid him. But on the seventh day, he failed to show up. It seemed that he had gotten so caught up in the chanting that he had forgotten to count how many prayers he had done. A few days later he admitted to Hakuin he had become completely taken up with the chants, felt so much better, and did not need to be paid anymore. He soon became a very generous donor to Hakuin’s temple. When people are rigid in their opposition to something, it stems from deep fear of change and the uncertainty it could bring. They must have everything on their terms and feel in control. You play into their hands if you try with all your advice to encourage change—it gives them something to react against and justifies their rigidity. They become more stubborn. Stop fighting with such people and use the actual nature of their rigid behavior to effect a gentle change that could lead to something greater.

Daily Law: People often won’t do what others ask them to do, because they simply want to assert their will. If you heartily agree with their rebellion, they will rebel again and assert their will in the opposite direction, which is what you wanted all along—the essence of reverse psychology.

The Laws of Human Nature

, 7: Soften People’s Resistance by Confirming Their Self-Opinion—The Law of Defensiveness

Steven Pressfield The Daily Pressfield Day 228

STANLEY AND ME AT THE C INEPLEX My screenwriting partner and I always wanted to do a film noir. Both of us, for some demented reason, wanted to write a movie that featured night streets slick with rain, women who could plausibly be called “dames,” and a climax where one of the lovers plugs the other with a.45 and a cynical quip. How did Stanley and I prepare ourselves for this enterprise? We went to the Aero (or the Laemmle or the Fine Arts or the Nuart on Pico) and bought tickets to Elevator to the Gallows and Bob le Flambeur and Le Samouraï . Not to mention The Maltese Falcon, Out of the Past, and Farewell, My Lovely. We weren’t just watching these films. We were studying them. We studied them to learn the conventions of the film noir genre. Unpublished Black Irish JAB, “Go Back to Genre” I know, I know. This section of the book is about A ct Two. Bear with me. Genre and genre conventions will be critical to the way we dig ourselves out of the Big Crash we have gotten ourselves into in our own second act.

Leo Tolstoy A Calendar of Wisdom August 16

We are spiritually connected on all sides, not only with people but with all living creatures.

Someone told me once that every person has an element of good and an element of bad within him, and that either the good or the bad can be manifested according to the person’s mood.

We possess within us two different ways of understanding this world.

One is the feeling of being divided, distanced, and alienated from each other; in this state, all things seem gloomy to us.

We feel nothing except jealousy, indifference, and hatred.

I would like to call the opposite way of understanding the understanding of universal unification.

In this state, all people seem very close to us, and all are equal among themselves.

This state, therefore, arouses compassion and love in us.

—ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

All people have the same origin, are bound by the same law, and were created for the same purpose.

Therefore, we should have one faith, one purpose to our actions, one banner under which we live and fight.

—GIUSEPPE MAZZINI

We should always try to find those things which do not separate us from other people but which unite us.

To work against each other, to be angry and turn your back on each other, is to work against nature.

—MARCUS AURELIUS

Try to understand the unity of all living things.

Try to serve and suffer with all living beings.

II The Day Ahead

Today · 11:00 ミサ当番 w/ 穂坂、村井 · 年間第20主日 2026年間予定
Tomorrow · all day Jakarta trip with Minori and Eisuke Primary
Tomorrow · 10:50 Flight to Jakarta, SQ 619 + SQ 964 Primary
Tomorrow · 18:20 Singapore connection, SQ 964 Primary

III Signals & Dispatches

AI / ML

@ChrisGPT source ↗ Sam Altman says a persistent multimodal descendant of ChatGPT that watches screens and meetings could become useful within six months.
@OrcaRouter source ↗ OrcaRouter released uncensored Qwen3.8 27B FP8 weights for AI red teaming and security research.

Drug Discovery

@GetDeepSignal source ↗ The claim is that AI drug discovery is reaching its real test as AI designed candidates enter late stage clinical trials.
@ZeDude1510 source ↗ A useful reality check: AlphaFold improves the structural map, but target validity, efficacy, delivery, toxicity, and human outcomes remain unsolved.

Biotech

@BRAINCURES source ↗ Dario Amodei told Matthew Herper that AI’s impact on biotech may not become visible for a decade.
@deanwball source ↗ Dean Ball argues AI biorisk may be offense dominant for at least the next decade, even if bio capability demos are harder than cyber.

Tech

@Supermicro source ↗ Supermicro is offering free bare metal tests of an air cooled AMD Instinct MI355X system for data center AI workloads.
@GeniusGTX source ↗ Peter Diamandis predicts a decade of rapid science fiction style expansion, including lunar infrastructure and massive orbital data center capacity.

Japanese Politics

@box217 source ↗ A post notes that Russia notified military exercises around Iturup and that Japan’s Foreign Ministry protested, reading the move as political signaling.
@kh_1283 source ↗ A post argues that Yasukuni’s A class war criminal enshrinements remain the central political problem and calls for debate over a compromise.

IV Sky over Ibaraki

🌤️ +26°C

humidity 73% · wind ←13km/h

partly cloudy with a light breeze

V What Rex Can Do Today

Review the Jakarta departure checklist and confirm the 05:50 taxi, 06:30 JR Ibaraki train, and 06:47 HARUKA.
Have Rex scan the latest StemRIM project files and prepare a concise status note before the trip.
Draft a compact travel handoff for family and work, including flight numbers and the Singapore connection.

VI Toward the Long Game

Read the Nature Reviews Drug Discovery overview on AI drug discovery and write five lines separating prediction, design, and experimental validation.
Run one small local Qwen experiment on a protein or molecular dataset, then record what the model can and cannot infer.
Message one computational biology contact with a concrete question about clinical translation of AI designed candidates.