"seems every day you have trouble remembering... you should set an alarm" "I did set an alarm! it was the turn-off-my-alarm alarm. it went off to remind me to turn it off"
June 2025
yo @brianluidog, I'm getting into this "flow on demand" thing, and wondering if you can give an example or two of this step—both how it goes if you do it, and what would happen if you didn't: > Preparing follow-up tasks addresses the subconscious worry about "what's next" that can pull me out of flow as I near completion. I decide in advance what I'll work on after this session, which creates a psychological safe landing zone.
realized in the shower this morning that the metaprotocol jam process I've written about is a kind of distributed collective subjective science process
I don't learn from my mistakes, how to succeed. I learn somewhat how not to fail, but no amount of that directly teaches me how to succeed. I learn to succeed from having wins, even tiny ones
started filling out a survey telling Facebook how much I resented and hated their addictive algorithms and then before I could finish it Android's "focus mode" killed the app and now I'm just mad and I don't have the survey button again.
Retweeted @NathanpmYoung
i have solved theodicy god has adhd. he's all powerful, all knowing, all good, but gets distracted easily
yeah, my usual framing of "non-naive trust [dance]" is wrong in the same way. true naive trust just gets busted and learns. *pretend* trust doubles down and gets graspy.
what's the band that you're most sad has only released 1-2 albums? for me probably C2C.
suppose you had a magic device that would let you have a breakthrough in one conversation that currently feels stuck / at an impasse... what would you pick? (describe it as detailedly as you feel comfortable with, eg 'why my son won't talk to me' or just 'family fallout'. DM ok)
@DefenderOfBasic @exgenesis @nomic_ai @emergentvibe you tweeted too many relevant keywords for me to not link you to this epic piece by @RomeoStevens76 & @aneeshm (45mins, dense audio) youtu.be/X6MYsKeTjKk
🟢 "I'm cooperating and they're defecting" 🟪 "oh yeah, and how do you imagine it looks to them?" 🟢 "...oh. the thing I'm calling cooperating looks like defecting to them"
weird zoning idea: you're allowed to have a building less than 3 stories high, but if you do, the roof must be a public park
taking off your glasses does not let you see the world more as it truly is
imagine each of the following, then tell me - which is more alive? a garden just planted in front of a new building by a contractor, or a garden maintained for 20 years by a person living there
variant of chess where you have some probability of swapping who's who each turn. what's your meta here? apps.apple.com/us/app/spin-ch…
@visakanv you've convinced parts of me that I need to "solve for distribution", but I think I'm still kind of daunted by the prospect of doing so
I initially thought you just meant that the whole board should be surrounded by a cloud of weed smoke, which... would also surely make it a fun game and avoid the inevitable draw but no, turns out that this is an official opening with its own wikipedia page
holy shit @reveimage is the first image-gen AI I've seen that can do "guy doing a handstand in front of a mirror". sounds crazy but most of the other tools can't even make an anatomically correct guy-doing-handstand! mangled, armless, backwards feet or head, floating
@ESYudkowsky when I re-read it & imagined that the first part was suggesting they were literally the same plant in the same way cauliflower, broccoli, kale and brussel sprouts ARE in fact... then I found it quite funny, because then the joke is that the fruit is a fruit because it's the fruit
fun experiment someone could run with an LLM, to see how good a simulator it is: have a fictional conversation happen on a specific afternoon in a place, and see if it comments on the total solar eclipse that occurs mid-convo (without you mentioning it)
the word "hyperstition" was invented because "self-fulfilling prophecy" wasn't verbable enough
"...I guess this is just dominance assurance contracts... I just really think nobody's DONE dominance assurance contracts properly yet" — @utotranslucence
@eshear @fedeandri yeah man that knowing-experiencing gap is a doozy
Replying to @sashachapin
@sashachapin @Morphenius has a pretty good take on this:
@mage_ofaquarius @sashachapin I kind of independently rediscovered this, and had a pretty good time for a few weeks being like "cool brb gonna go die for a bit"
@visakanv sometimes new instructions just completely outclass old ones tho. eg @Morphenius and I have been finding some instructions that just directly help people take their mind as object, BEFORE doing a ton of meditating on it.
this party is absolutely liquific and it's totally candifying everyone
tower defense game called BoopBlocker, where you're a baby or puppy who doesn't like having your nose booped and you have to defend it from oncoming attacks (inspired by my 10mo baby who gets great delight in doing so irl)
But the evolution will not be televised. The evolution... will be live.
the significance of trust: which would you prefer to use? 1. a crazyfast computer with fiber internet & 4k multi monitor but it randomly crashes and loses your work 2. a computer that's good enough for the job but otherwise very meh
the wedding ceremony was cool but I remember the experience of singing a punk rock cover of The Book Of Love with the wedding band at least as often and as fondly
I always feel so blessed during allergy season *achoo!*
google really needs to fire whatever algorithm they're currently using to choose whether to show an AI Overview before the top result
totally. and in some ways this is just a tradeoff curve, but you could also frame it as "if you can build a system that you CAN trust around the untrustworthy system, then you can trust it!" so ultimately you still need trust or you can't relax into work
and then, once you have enough workarounds in place for trust, the question becomes—does the effective added slowness and hassle of dealing with the crashes and restoring the autosaves and resuming disrupted calls... make it worse than the "good enough" system or better?
sincere prayer doesn’t require believing in the existence of anything more dubious than “ideas”, “love”, “kindness”, or “markets”
(I'm) guessing that "ready when you are" was originally short for effectively "WE'RE ready when you are", and that turning it into "I'M ready when you are" is a confusion
you want what you want
people who've developed fairly consistent access to IFS Self... what was your process for that? what helped the most? what was good but sort of a distraction from that specific improvement? any other pitfalls, thoughts?
kind of wild that you can just take two abstract nouns and be like 'is X the same as Y?' and your meaning center will go brr and puzzle at what that would mean. like 'is trust the same as love?' ... 'is IFS Self the same as buddhist no-self?'
@ibab I'd love to see the algo optimized for "conversations I want to join" not just "stuff I want to read"
@Aidan_Wolf - dreampark vibes (writing you from Edge Esmeralda where I tried your demo last week)
just got a recruiting text from the Center for Applied Centerlessness
*babies* know that repetition legitimizes
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
We said we were going to do this "for the time being". And we did. But the Time Being is a hungry beast, and demanded e…
found a perfectly good iPhone abandoned a couple years ago and I can't use it because it's locked to its owner even after reset. I get the theft thing but I'm pretty sure if you put a 1-year delay thieves would not have the patience to make this worth bothering
and if you report stolen during this time, then it freezes anyway. boom.
@amcdonk @s_r_constantin I got really stoked about the idea of combining a co-working space with a daycare and schooling, micro school co-op or something like that then I found out allonething.xyz is building it! I'm gonna make sure it happens in SF somehow. maybe w @berlinhouseSF?
@amcdonk @s_r_constantin @berlinhouseSF My vision: spaces separated not by age but by vibe: • a quiet floor where 5yos are reading next to founders coding • energetic climbing/playing space for toddlers & adults alike • nap zone • eating, socializing • topical things: "vibe-coding" • private boardrooms/offices/+
just finished a 61h fast. felt pretty good overall! made easier by not being at home in my usual routine
@JoinEdgeCity might be cool to have a "default fasting day" somewhere in the month, so that people can be in solidarity about it!
@ChrisChipMonk totally. my take on the same thing: malcolmocean.com/2024/05/7-take…
@IShreshtha @ChrisChipMonk sure but like, it would still be cool to have an answer as a function of those things
@eshear there's a good sequel (much of what's in there will probably be familiar to you, Emmett, but it may be a helpful resource for conveying the ideas to others) nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/786568570…
sex is great but have you ever had someone relaxedly acknowledge they're doing something annoying you've been watching them do for years?
I love me some precise syncretism
best way to play with LLM base models? interested in: - website through which to access - which base models are best / most interesting - software for engaging (eg loom)
trying to get @GeminiApp to stfu while I'm thinking out loud, but the poor model has no ability to choose how long it pauses or output silence, and the turn-handler algorithm is more interruptive than the maritimers I grew up with 🤣
what's working is working and what's not working is not working
@TylerAlterman omg the hoodie kittens at the end
@MasterTimBlais I've definitely been pondering this a bit, in my first year of dadhood doing both. my main thought for fixing this is that instead of work-from-home and stay-at-home we should just have multi-age multi-vibe contexts that include kids and getting shit done
@JoshuaLelon @ChrisChipMonk yeah I appreciate you naming all of this. it was kind of on the tip of my tongue. and as you say, roughly the same heuristic for Chris / the seller, but has a very different vibe
@JoshuaLelon @ChrisChipMonk also I have paid for like a dozen online courses and then not completed them, so there are false positives too not just false negatives!
this is who runs this account
@mesolude I imagine that whatever part is generating the grumpiness towards last-minute ticket-seekers is figuring somehow that being grumpy towards them will cause them to not do this and instead buy earlier? I imagine some good introspection/integration possible here, plus strategizing
what prompted you to learn to touchtype? for me it was a punishment from my parents that I couldn't use the computer for anything else until I did, in response to my (uncharacteristic) behavior of using my sister's msn to send 'I hate you' to her best friend
what's the fractal dimension of your internal family system?
if you could get a million people to talk to an LLM with a custom prompt, what would the prompt be? (could be a description or write out the whole thing)
my nose is so runny today that it's taking all my willpower not to go to the dentist and steal a couple of their suction tubes so that I can do literally anything other than blow my nose
correct me if I'm wrong but: 1. this is from infostealers not a database breach—some people’s computers got compromised with keyloggers or other malware, and then someone aggregated those logins 2. therefore unless you got hacked (which is possible!) then this isn’t your data (or maybe you used a compromised public or shared device!) 3. therefore this ISN'T a situation that should particularly update you towards thinking your passwords are out there 4. ...UNLESS it causes you to update heavily towards: 4a) "more people like me have malware on their devices" 4b) "malware is being used to steal passwords more than I thought" 4c) "people already had my password but NOW they're gonna bother using it since this data went live"
"...did you intend to leave the garage door open?" "uhhh I intended to leave it open for a bit. I didn't intend to leave it open forever. between these my life flows."
not sure I agree with this, but it's intriguing! quoting for discussion and so that I see it again to ponder it again "narcissism is the natural default state of the animal world"
you bring the long I'll bring the con
@tracewoodgrains my take: working on the general problem of how to get LLMs to portray a company more favorably independently of how good the company is for solving some problem, that's unethical if you're attempting to get the LLM to understand exactly what you are/aren't a solution for, fyeah!
looked this up cursorily and it seems to be real may Iran find a way to become wholesome again
@michael_nielsen the ideas will look very different but there are definitely fundamentals that are much more general than apes > the litmus test for when you have first contact is, did you already figure out the first contact protocols? —@RomeoStevens76 in this epic piece youtu.be/X6MYsKeTjKk
best pitch I've ever seen for kegels
riddle: a man married a woman, but their marriage was unhappy, so they divorced. a decade later, he married her again, and this time both of them were happy, but he was single
second time in a week an app has given me a survey that I thought would be about the UX of the app but it turns out to be about whether I was swayed by their in-app brand advertising. first bereal then discord. weird shit.
@paleocybernetic yeah I flipped it open and he defs talks about CC
the best part is that I opened the book up and the entire first chapter is just email exchanges from mailing list in late-1999, early-2000, where people are lmfao'ing at the author for proposing this to the mailing list with basically the same text as the cover & back
"There is a war between the ones who say there is a war And the ones who say that there isn't" — Leonard Cohen 🎶
Conway's law would like a word.
@mattgoldenberg @ChrisChipMonk really appreciating this precision it did kinda feel to me like that step came too soon or something, when I tried the process
huh. I wonder... if your friend was going manic/psychotic via talking to ChatGPT, and you borrowed their computer briefly and explained to their chattyg that you're a friend thusly concerned, told them to put that in memory and chill out on reinforcing delusions... would that h…
anybody know a way to get word count for an entire Google doc, including other document tabs? the default word count is only for the current tab (not even counting children!)
kinda funny that Neo inside the matrix would actually be one of the first people to lose his job to the AIs
I really want an LLM that instead of having a bliss/circlejerk attractor, has a playful/friendly rap battle attractor. like you get it talking to itself and it creates ever more exuberant brags and insults, but without getting too mean
whoa they just changed it so we have to pay 5x as much to be able to write long-posts? that's gonna change the vibe here in an interesting way (more threads again? unless people have forgotten) and make them lots of money. I like the "fully ad-free" tho—aligns the incentives.
> write a 1-paragraph summary of the core thesis, not as "this piece presents" / no reference to the author. just walking through the idea/logic in such a way that a very smart person reading it would immediately see the implications (which can also be spelled out, to be clear!)
omg this is adorable
Retweeted @AskYatharth
oh my god Newcomb's paradox is the breakfast problem shifted 30 IQ points right
@AskYatharth absolutely top-notch take.
@eshear are you *somebody* or are you *trying to win this game*? Claude outed as infinite game player
@eshear potentially you want Christopher Alexander's The Nature Of Order, where he's like "I set out to become crazy-good at building beautiful buildings, and I accidentally a new metaphysics. it's a pretty good metaphysics tho"
@eshear *whining voice of the person running the training* yeah but those aren't RL-able-on as much
@Authw8 yeah white isn't a culture and insofar as there's "white american" culture, it either just calls itself "american culture" or it's more regional than that this is part of why I why I don't identify as white!
@eshear we've already talked about these (and you recommended the former) but I don't actually see: - Sex Ecology Spirituality - A Fire Upon The Deep
literally my house wow cc @Morphenius @utotranslucence @vincent_yc_li
what song should be on my funk face playlist? it's only got 6 songs so far open.spotify.com/playlist/1VB38…
notes on @nostalgebraist's "the void" article, which is great and a must-read if you want to think sanely about LLMs or AI safety nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/785766737…
having really loud really helpless infants does seem like a pretty good costly signal that humans are not to be messed with
EhTdlossarbkeysideckutdnihebehtesooldkcirb,drihtwormorfehtmottobnoehttsa ellawfoehtnedragdehs.sserPyltnegnoehtkcirbdekramhtiwa llamskla hc'X'-tilliwedilstuotsujhguoneotlaeverehtngnidihstops.ehTkeysnepoeht nedoowtsehcdeirubthtaenebehtkao s'eerttsegraltoor.
@ChrisChipMonk @sharifshameem yeah I've prototyped this in a few variations but haven't released it yet I think a big piece of why it hasn't been released is that releasing AI tools either costs you $ for tokens or requires getting users to pay. building tiny apps/demos wasn't like that pre-LLM
authenticity is its own technology
the more you try to spread it deliberately, the less it spreads
@aleksil79 it was a test of whether there were ways to scramble text that would make it easy for LLMs to parse while looking like noise (not even necessarily encrypted signal) to humans and the answer is definitely yes; this was my best attempt so far.
honestly something that has irritated me is that this is not true for me. whatever immediate psychological benefit is supposedly available from working out is not a thing I've found, and so all my motivation has to be to enjoy the act or to stay healthy
@AnalogWhole @__justplaying I think that's true at the extremes but I've also noticed I just prefer spending time around people who I enjoy looking at more, on the margin. and this must have some effect
@AnalogWhole @__justplaying also something like, if I have attractive (in any dimension, not just physical) friends, they're more likely to be able to attract other people who are more attractive (on all dimensions) so to some extent, being prettier can translate into having cooler parties
no reason you couldn't train an LLM to do previous-token prediction instead, and then you get a simulator that finds causes instead of effects
mood
okay hear me out: robot crossing guard stationed 24/7
"OH SHIT. oh yep okay" "...you have such an incredible ability to make things sound really bad that are really not that bad" "is that a marketable skill? ooh! I could write headlines."
weird to read a google doc written 5 years ago, that has a comment on it from 4 years ago, from a person I met a month ago
@parconley @utotranslucence we gotta add this to our video archive
@justalexoki yeah as a joke this is HILARIOUS like imagine if you say this at the start of the presentation, but then you show your notes you're reading from and they don't say that
@eshear yeah I posted this without thinking about more than the base model I think it sort of depends what problems you're trying to solve with it. and maybe in practice most of them are pretty reversible.
@eshear occurs to me that like... with a lot of transformer training, mightn't it be possible to get more data out of your existing data by rotating/reversing it? one might assume that already happens (either manually or automatically) but evidence is no:
@eshear like I'm pretty sure that if all of the shirtless guy images had been fed into midjourney upside down as well, captioned as "[whatever the original caption was] image upside down" then this would actually increase its understanding of anatomy despite no handstand physics
I've been enjoying timing my 10mo baby climbing up the two flights of steps at our apartment so far: 3:48 4:17 3:25 3:48 ...but that last one would have been sub-3mins if she hadn't tried to go back down near the end!
"religion is spirituality with preservatives" — @RebOhad
the colors of the rainbow 🌈 🎶 so pretty in the sky are also on the flags 🏳️🌈 🎵 of the parade going by
Retweeted @politicalmath
I don't really have words for how much I hate this But I also don't have a solution for how to combat the genuine isola…
Retweeted @cremieuxrecueil
When I was a kid, I was told not to make posts online. Whatever you put there is forever, and you may write something…
Retweeted @DefenderOfBasic
this is false by the way. Every example someone has of people not being persuadable is (1) you trying to persuade them…
> Normally in school you do your work, submit it, have it graded, and get it back some time in the future – if you are lucky after you finish a full problem set, if unlucky a week or two later. so obvious. I learned math fastest doing book Qs & checking astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-…
Retweeted @LeorSapir
Whether Brianna is right here depends entirely on what is meant by the loaded phrases "trans people exist" and "protection i…
@NiohBerg I don't know a lot about this, can you explain this part? genuinely curious > what a massive loss for the broken islamic regime in Iran. because it represents a break from "islamic brotherhood" vibes? or something more specific
@proteinwisdom can you say more about how this nudges towards a Muslim reformation? I've been curious for awhile about how Islam might get out of its long-time attractor basin
I'm pretty sure I heard the phrase "peace in the middle east", referring to some rare and precious thing, as a kid, before I even could name which countries were in the middle east
Brain of the Firm & The Unaccountability Machine @eshear both/either of these might be vital for the @SoftmaxResearch bookshelf
