reading the intro to @EricNormand's book Grokking Simplicity, about Functional Programming & struck by how yesterday I wrote a function that asks an LLM to make some decisions, and how it: a) doesn't run the same way each time b) has the side effect of costing 10-70¢
got some alerts this morning that were SO CLOSE to being super useful, but somehow people worked so hard and so impressively to set up the infrastructure to send alerts and put apparently almost zero thought into what they should say to be useful in context. no info about: a) how long I have (which was 60-120s for the earthquake, and is 20-30mins for the tsunami) b) how far away to go re the tsunami (I'm fine, I live on a hill in the middle of SF, but how far "inland" is "inland"? I'm not "away from the coast" by many definitions) I want @USGS_ShakeAlert and Google to survey people not just about whether the alert arrived on time and what they did in response (which they did!) but whether the alert contained all critical information with which to act! the speed of earthquakes is basically a known constant, and you have my exact location. so you should TELL ME the exact few seconds the earthquake will arrive so I know whether I have time to get to a safer room or if I should duck in the room I'm in. (another technology win tho—I had an intuition that it wouldn't be instant if it was 300km away, so I got @AnthropicAI's Claude to give me an estimate, and it said it'd take like 80 seconds, well before it arrived. and was right! would have been hard to get that answer from a human assistant so quickly.) but yeah, these alerts need to step up their game in terms of being clear and precise and actionable. 🪨 the earthquake one (for SF, today) should say: "you have less than 60 seconds to not be under some unsteady glass that might fall on you". 🌊 and the tsunami one should say (for SF, today): "tsunami is coming in the next 15 minutes or so, you're [definitely/maybe/not] in an unsafe area, and should [go/stay] inland (ideally at least a mile) and uphill (ideally at least 100 ft)" this is important both because: 😔 in some cases a better alert will save lives, today 🙄 we don't want to waste time for people who don't have to do anything 🐺 of a crying wolf effect. you DO NOT want people to see "you are in danger" when they're not.
There's a quote I can't find from Sam Altman or someone big in the recent AI/LLM space that goes something like "the crazy thing is... play with deep learning enough, and you get the sense that the machine WANTS to learn. you just have to let it" saw in a vid on twitter I think
@Shadow_Rebbe sure sure I was just trying to construct one sentence for multiple scenarios, cut me some slack :P
golden gate claude was cool 🌉 what about manic vs depressed claude? surely there are a few features you can turn up or down for that
@QiaochuYuan totally but I wanna turn the dial and have the state be kinda locked in no matter what I say
what was your first tweet before you ever got on twitter?
Thread · Admitting I mostly hate the first four months of parenthood · 1 of 21 tweets
(there have been good moments and I'm sure it'll get better but) ...4mo into parenthood... I mostly hate it so far. I've been afraid to think/say this but I figure if I just tweet it then I might feel more free to have my real thoughts whatever they are.
@ruthgracewong it's not any one thing. it's just the relentless onslaught of hair-trigger needs and 120dB screaming. it's definitely way better now that she kinda does stuff. I think if I'd started here I wouldn't already be burnt out by now.
Thread · Admitting I mostly hate the first four months of parenthood · 1 of 21 tweets
this post from just before my baby was born has definitely been helping me hang in there
@xepo_ thanks. I do feel like I need people to talk to but I feel like I have too many of them online and not enough of them in-person where we can actually hang out with baby. so if you live in SF (or visit) hmu.
@cowtung you can sing your own songs! I've made up a lot or (easier) sing other existing songs. I've sung her: - House of the Rising Sun - Superstition by Stevie Wonder - various Jason Mraz favs - xmas carols we don't plan to do "kids songs" really
@ruthgracewong down to try em! but also like... I can't shake (/ don't want to shake?) the feeling that something is WRONG that babies cry this much in modernity. not that that feeling directly lets me DO anything about it.
@benpence yup yup, I get into that trap big time
@jaythesomething @sedatesnail yeah I'm looking forward to looking back and definitely in the midst of finding that transition. prayer seems to help so far, even tho I'm still figuring out what sort of godshape it makes sense to pray to.
Thread · Admitting I mostly hate the first four months of parenthood · 8 of 21 tweets
wow this is getting... attention. thought I'd become one of the dads with the cool dad posts. the universe was like "lol. lmao." I've been practicing saying what's so even when it feels hard, but this was a new edge for me (on a flight, not reading replies, btw 🦅🌎✈️🌏🦘)
okay flight hasn't taken off so I skimmed the replies. thanks all. I want to be clear, I don't expect to hate [parenthood] as a whole. And there have been lots of lovely moments. I just wanted to stop pretending that my experience so far is anything approaching fun or rewarding.
Also as I said to a few dad friends... I'm still proud of embarking on this journey and am expecting to be transformed by it. And proud I didn't wait longer. I was kinda telling myself I would have my shit more together as time passed but that was mostly bs.
re fun/rewarding... it's not that I thought that it would be, exactly. I thought it'd be difficult, maybe underestimated how difficult. thought I'd be more immediately engaged and interested in the challenge though! legit failure of self-knowledge there!! x.com/Ann1393676/sta…
but also some of this isn't directly about parenting but about a more general pattern of trying to present myself as having a good time even when I'm not. connects to some social pattern of being the "guy who lifts others' spirits". optimist/enthusiast
yo tracking "what mom is going through" is very salient to me. but my experience is not defined in relative terms! it is bullshit to say that because someone else is suffering/hurting more than me, I'm not suffering/hurting. I'm giving up that denial here x.com/Sarah_Comedy/s…
also my wife, sitting next to me on the plane, suggested I remark: imagining what mom is going through is the foundation of my marriage is based on. baby loves flying tho so far and we're taking off byeeee
this thread has escaped its context, and I'm getting commentary from people who really have no background on me and the scene into/from which I'm expressing this. if it helps random other dads who've never heard of me feel less alone, great, but my intent was more personal!
realizing the shock here is kind of an identity crisis. I've seen myself as the "type of guy for whom human relating and development is very interesting/engaging" / "type of guy who makes case study out of anything even very difficult things" but I'm (so far) beyond my limit here
Thread · Admitting I mostly hate the first four months of parenthood · 3 of 21 tweets
this is sort of the core of what I've been finding surprising here. it's not just "being a new parent is hard". duh. it's "I thought it would be the kind of challenge I'd be able to lean into and I'm having more trouble *with that* than I expected"
anyway, when I manage to zoom out from the hour-to-hour chaos and look at this as an arc, I'm not worried about who I am & who I'll be in relation to all of this. I trust my transformation process, my ability to adapt... my ability to find out what integrity means for ME, here.
on a different level, getting this off my chest—in public, not just in private confidence to a few friends—has been liberating, as intended I feel more space to notice all the ways in which I'm really enjoying this already, and more capacity to creatively find new solutions
but talking about this is part of how I'm managing to reorient to it in a way that actually feels good, feels right for me. tho first and foremost I'm not here for it to be a case study, I'm here for it to be a life worth living. x.com/Malcolm_Ocean/…
Thread · Admitting I mostly hate the first four months of parenthood · 1 of 21 tweets
Listen by Patty Wipfler talks about the importance of venting to someone, and I've so far found that to be very true. to other parents out there, if you haven't had the chance to just speak openly about what's really going on, to someone, I highly recommend it. I've had lots of people offering this to me in response to this thread, and I don't think I need more of it from internet folks (tho I do need to make a point of connecting with my friends about it) but if you don't have someone at all you might consider DMing someone who has offered in the replies
@pragueyerrr amazing. parenting is a fractal project that radiates out through space and time
@AniseNot yup, I'm going to give it all the time it needs
@ropAIrito seems to me it could be both, or either-but-it-depends-how-you-respond does seem like it doesn't automagically make you into a better person, any more than getting married does. but it provides a context & challenge that can create that transformation
Thread · Admitting I mostly hate the first four months of parenthood · 1 of 21 tweets
thanks for sharing this. I've been coming to realize that it could be okay for me to be like this. and then it feels more spacious to ask how I might enjoy this stage more, from a place of not feeling like I have to
@carminelagoozio ❤️🔥
@jchenelly definitely.
> if you were expecting parenthood to be meaningful or rewarding, you fucked up like a soup sandwich it's not that I was expecting it to automatically be meaningful/rewarding. I was expecting to be better at finding meaning/reward in it than I turn out to be. skill issue 😉
@queenwartooth > inside out hot dogs that scream "meat with intestines inside"... checks out 😂
Thread · Admitting I mostly hate the first four months of parenthood · 3 of 21 tweets
also I've been having a great convo with my wife about all this, and we're very glad to not be the horrific images that a few people in the replies are projecting on us 😛
and also we're seeing parenthood as something to be enjoyed not just endured. which is a creative challenge, and will take skill and patience! it will be hard. but yeah.
oh also it's striking to me how obvious it is why the sense of "hate" comes up here, given this observation I made back in May (also, my wife is helping me re-learn how to calm the baby, which is reducing the powerlessness and therefore the hate)
I wrote a letter to a team I cofounded, giving the whole project to them after a few janky months where I tried to simultaneously leave the team and also continue to control it. Letting go worked a LOT better. Read the letter here: malcolmocean.com/2024/12/a-lett…
a pediatrician said to offer solid food to our baby at 3-4mo before she has teeth (WHO disagrees btw) which ofc implies baby food I was like "where tf did that come from?" and figured this was downstream of corporate lobbying. lobbying + state paternalism is disgusting 🤮
ahhh gotta love that "can't close my account because it has a single penny stuck in it" hell on the plus side, UIs that look really stupid when unexpectedly small numbers are put into them (@Wealthsimple)
@sonikudzu iirc @SarahAMcManus has a great story about someone coming out of ayahuasca being like "I MET INTERPLANETARY DRAGONS THEY SAID I NEEDED TO LEAVE MY LIFE I'M THE CHOSEN ONE" and the shaman was like "lol those dragons are always pulling shit like that don't listen to em"
@sonikudzu yeah this connects for me with the question of like, when you pray to some sort of godshape, who are you praying to? even if there is one true biggest benevolent god (and I've seen a decent proof of this) you can construct misconceptions about it x.com/Malcolm_Ocean/…
why are you reading other books for advice when you could read something about your exact situation, literally written by the person who knows the most about your life? (your journal entries from last week)
I spent years trying to co-create a post-shame culture for years but the thing that actually freed me from shame was being actually accepted as I was and not subtly pressured into being different (ostensibly in service of creating the post-shame culture)
if an idea is good, it's worth saying many times in different ways
remember one of your favorite tweets? (yours or someone else's) write a new tweet that expresses the same idea (without looking at the old one)
write a sentence that defines "shame" and/or "should" in terms of the other one
true - it good - we beautiful - I — Ken Wilber
From threads app, re bird flu. Gotta be careful around anything like "no evidence", but "no unusual patterns in the data" is actually real "evidence of absence"! (Upthread it enumerates cases, all of which linked to farm workers. Tho are we just missing ones that aren't?)
