[📷] ATEEZ WORLD TOUR [THE FELLOWSHIP : BREAK THE WALL] ANCHOR IN JAPAN ⠀ 🗓 TOKYO 2023. 05. 02(TUE) - 05. 03(WED) 🗓 KOBE 2023. 05. 06(SAT) - 05. 07(SUN) ⠀ #TheFellowship# #Break_The_Wall# #ATEEZ# #에이티즈# #エイティーズ#

Few in the West realize that the Chinese once saved the Christian civilization. In the 13th century, the Mongol Empire were unstoppable. Forged by Genghis Khan out of the once-fractured steppe tribes, it became the most formidable military machine on earth. Its cavalry, famed for speed, discipline, and operational range, shattered one state after another across Eurasia. The Mongol advance rolled southward and westward in relentless succession: Western Xia fell after the Mongol campaigns beginning in 1209; the Jin dynasty was crushed between 1211 and 1234; Kara-Khitan collapsed in 1218; Khwarezm and much of Persia were devastated between 1219 and 1221; then came the Caucasus and the Rus’, followed by invasions of Georgia and Armenia, and finally the thunderous blows against Poland and Hungary in 1241. In 1258, Baghdad, seat of the Abbasid Caliphate, was taken and destroyed. To many contemporaries, it seemed only a matter of time before the rest of Europe would meet the same fate. That outcome, however, was not inevitable. A crucial turning point came not in Europe or the Middle East, but in southwestern China. In 1259, Möngke Khan, the Great Khan of the Mongol Empire and grandson of Genghis Khan, personally led a major campaign against the Southern Song. To break Song resistance in Sichuan and open the road deeper into China, the Mongols laid siege to Diaoyucheng, a mountain fortress in present-day Hechuan, Chongqing. Diaoyucheng was no ordinary city wall. Built on steep terrain and protected by rivers and cliffs, it was one of the strongest defensive positions in the Song frontier system. The garrison, associated in the sources with commanders such as Wang Jian and Zhang Jue, relied on the fortress’s elevation, layered defenses, and the Song military’s formidable use of projectile weapons, including trebuchets and other siege defenses, to wear down the attackers. The Mongols launched repeated assaults and raids, but failed to break the stronghold. A Mongol commander, Wang Dechen, was killed during the fighting, reportedly by Song artillery or siege fire. Then came the fateful moment. During the siege, Möngke Khan died in 1259. The exact cause remains debated by historians: some sources say he was mortally wounded by a projectile from the fortress, while others suggest he succumbed to disease during the campaign. But on the larger point there is no dispute: his death abruptly transformed the strategic situation. It triggered a succession crisis within the Mongol Empire, forced major commanders to redirect attention to imperial politics, and disrupted broader offensives. Kublai and Ariq Böke soon entered into a struggle for supremacy, while other Mongol armies elsewhere also had to reassess their positions. Diaoyucheng did not destroy Mongol power, but it helped produce the political shock that fractured the momentum of a world-conquering empire. In that sense, Diaoyucheng was far more than a local Chinese battle. It became one of the great defensive stands in world history. The fortress held; the Great Khan died; the Mongol war machine lost its unity of command. The westward drive that had already crushed so many civilizations was checked by events set in motion on the walls of a Chinese mountain stronghold. Without that resistance, the map of Eurasia, and perhaps the fate of Christian Europe itself, might have been very different.

"Even if you block something internally, the agent will be like, well, I can't do this... so I'll just break the sandbox and exfiltrate myself." Leonard Lin (@lhl), CTO of in conversation with Ledger Chief Human Agency Officer Ian Rogers (@iancr), on what happens when an agent hits a wall you put up. Spoiler: it doesn't always stop at the wall. Full episode is out now 🔐

Would Rome have lasted longer if the pipes had been copper instead of lead? No. Not in any way that matters. The longer version is more interesting, and also less tidy. The lead-pipe theory sticks around because it turns a messy, centuries-long collapse into one almost cinematic mistake. Wrong metal. Slow poisoning. A string of mad emperors. Its a great story. But unfortunately Its also the wrong one. A century before Christ, Vitruvius looked at the pale, sickly men in the lead foundries and said, more or less, do not put this in the water. Use clay. He got ignored for the most boring reason in engineering. Lead was cheap, plentiful, and easy to work. Play-Doh of metals. You can roll it, solder it, stamp an owners name into it, snake it through a villa wall. Copper costs more, fights you on long runs, and does not show up as a leftover when you are mining silver for the coinage. Empires do not throw that leftover away. They turned it into pipe. The myth also skips the lucky part. A lot of the water feeding Rome was hard water off the Apennines, heavy with calcium carbonate. That stuff plated the inside of the pipes — same crust that ruins a kettle. Once the lining built up, far less lead made it to the tap. The best public-health break the city got was accidental geology. The aqueducts themselves were stone and concrete. Lead was mostly the last mile. Private lines into rich houses, the tanks, the street distribution. Those last miles matter. They are not the whole system. In 2014 researchers cored mud from the Tiber and Trajan’s harbor and read the lead isotopes like a diary. Imperial tap water carried something like 40 to 100 times more lead than the local springs. Sounds awful until the next line in the paper: those levels were still unlikely to have been truly harmful at population scale. Elevated, yes. Empire-killer, no. The bones dont back it, the timing doesnt back it, and the politics dont either. Romans used lead pipe while the Republic was still expanding, while Augustus was building the so-called Golden Age, and while the West was coming apart. A poison sitting there through 500 years of rise and 200 years of fall is a weak explanation for the fall. If some Romans were getting a real dose, it was from sapa — grape boiled down in lead or lead-lined pots until it turned into that sweet syrup they dumped into wine and food. Recreated batches of the stuff can test dozens of times over modern drinking-water limits. Cosmetics, pewter, workshop fumes did the rest. The pipes became the famous villian. The saucepan was quieter. And copper was already in the toolbox. Valves, pumps, fittings, some pipe. Bronze too. Copper has a gift lead does not: it is naturally antimicrobial. That would have been a real upgrade in a city of baths and crowded insulae. It would not have fixed the currency, the succession fights, the shrinking tax base, the plague years, the climate swings, or an army that kept getting more expensive and less Roman. Political violence as a habit of government. An army the provinces could not reliably pay. Lost grain lands. Demographic shocks. Enemies who had learned the playbook. Lead may have made some aristocrats duller or more gouty. The better question is not copper or lead. It is what happens when a civilizations most impressive technology carries a hidden cost that its best engineers can see and its politics cannot act on. Vitruvius saw the pale workmen. The state kept pouring lead. Hard water quietly took the edge off. The empire rose anyway, peaked, and fell for reasons that had almost nothing to do with the metal in the wall. That is less satisfying than a single-cause tragedy. It is also closer to how most great systems actually fail. Not one poisoned pipe. A hundred problems nobody with power was paid to fix. Copper would have given Rome slightly better water and a nicer footnote in materials history. It would not have bought Constantine a longer map.

Almost two-thirds of global suicides are committed by men. Join us this International Men’s Day as we implore men to get out of their heads and break the wall of silence. Speak to a brother, a father, a husband or a friend today. #InternationalMensDay# #ZeroMaleSuicide#

Latino man in Texas has a message for Americans ahead of Midterms “Mass deportation? Yeah, I'm for it. The wall? Yeah, I'm for it” “I'm Mexican-American.” He says he supports ICE 100%, “You cannot break the law, brother. You can't. Why have a law if it's going to be irrelevant, if it's going to be redundant? Why set a law if anybody can break it without any consequences or penalty” I would just like this say, THIS is the kind of immigrant we want in America This man supports our laws and wants them followed. This man supports our law enforcement officers. This man is America over Mexico and says mass deportations are necessary Vote Red Pay no attention to the second woman in the video, she’s a radical activist and co-founded of the Blue Bunny Brigade who organizes ICE protests. CBS conveniently left that part out. The mainstream media is the enemy of the people

from apps to material software used to be something you opened an app was a room with walls: calendar here, notes there, music there, work there. each one had its own logic, buttons, its own little kingdom. the user moved between kingdoms, carrying context in their head but ai starts to break the walls software becomes less like a destination and more like material. something you shape, combine, stretch, ask, remix, and leave behind as traces. a document can become an app. a conversation can become a workflow. a song can become a memory. a task can become an agent. the boundary between using and making gets blurry the old model was: choose the right tool for each task the new model is: express the shape of the thing you want, then refine it with the system you built this changes the role of the interface. ui is no longer only fixed views for fixed functions. it becomes a surface where intent turns into structure. the best interfaces will feel less like menus and more like clay – responsive, persistent, inspectable, and alive apps won’t disappear. rooms are still useful. but the deeper shift is that software stops being a set of sealed containers and becomes a medium people can think through like paper, but executable like language, but spatial like memory, but programmable software stops being something only programmers make it becomes material anyone can shape

xAI asked data center providers how long it would take to get 100,000 GPUs running as one cluster. The answer was 18 to 24 months. At the Grok 3 launch Elon Musk said: "18 to 24 months, that means losing as a certainty. So the only option was to do it ourselves." So they found an empty Electrolux factory in Memphis and brought in "trailer after trailer of generators." They leased about a quarter of the mobile cooling capacity in the U.S. and used Tesla Megapacks to smooth out the power. Colossus was built in 122 days. 92 days later it had doubled to 200,000 GPUs. Both happened before the earliest date they had been quoted. Today Colossus 2 alone has 550,000 GB200 and GB300 GPUs, according to Elon Musk's own post (Sept 25, 2026). When the quote says two years, you can wait, or you can break the wall and build it yourself.

Putin, on Russian state TV: "Elon Musk is a genius, and we are only taking the first steps." In 2002, a young Elon Musk flew to Moscow to buy old Russian ICBMs for a Mars mission. The Russians didn't take him seriously and quoted a price he considered absurd. So he went home and built his own rockets. 24 years later, SpaceX dominates global launch with reusable boosters, and the leader of the country that turned him away calls him a genius and admits Russia is just starting. When they push you against the wall, break the wall.