kind of astonished how many people *living in SF* apparently don't know what a phone-based wifi hotspot is. like they see me working in a park and they're like 'how do you get wifi here'? one guy today left muttering 'tethering, I'll have to remember that.'
September 2025
“it feels insufficiently Gall’s law’d, not evolved enough. too much info/detail for how much iteration it’s had.” (from my notes)
@eshear @gwern tag myself: I'm the endless mimimization of me
@EEllis86317 I've worked in a park like 20-30 times people have been like "omg such a great idea" like 5-6 times of which 3-4 of them have asked "how do you get wifi?" and the guy who left muttering today about tethering was not one of those guys! I just mentioned it spontaneously
Retweeted @animalologist
Hey nerds one of you should build this. An app where for half of every day you’re assigned another person’s feed. Create…
so the FCC won't let me be
applying to inkhaven (1mo writing bootcamp) and they want to know what my best pieces of writing are. I have my own opinions but I'm curious for yours! any threads or blog posts that really hit you? (feel free to just describe it; I can probably find the link)
😙👌 there really are a lot of LLM-run twitter accounts now but the game is still on
thanks, @spotify, when I put on an album of rain sounds at 5am to keep my baby from waking up when the trash trucks go by, I definitely want to finish playing yesterday's dubstep that was in the queue, before track 2 of rain sounds
so proud watching my baby play with doors and cabinets. gotta understand hinges if you want to be selectively unhinged
huh! didn't realize that humans had *chemical* gap junctions (I knew of various other more obvious ways in which we do stress-sharing)
quite excited for AI to embed into maps apps so it can more directly solve Qs like "suppose that I need to run these 3 errands this morning, and end up at work, and I can get a ride with a friend at 9 or so, what's the optimal way to do it?"
there's a kind of efficient market / equilibrium law for evolution... that explains why eg Christianity(-as-it-has-been) is nonviable as a replacement for what replaced *it*
ask not for who the code blues, for it codes for you
seems like an important role of queues is to reduce demand by lowering the benefit of attempting to access the service written from a hospital in Canada
man if I'd known how much cost I end up sinking, I wouldn't've sunk any of it
@viemccoy google maps api calls are surprisingly expensive, I have heard from the guy who runs @livenearfriends (when I complained that "1 mile radius" is meaningless for closeness when you live near a steep hill but yes, it's basically doable
man my ideas sure have got ideas about my ideas
I dig the vibe of this AI art
@Don_Ignasio the annoying thing is that I basically spent $100 a few times, and a lot of time, to acquire something worth $500 (which I already owned, it was just in the wrong place) but each time I thought I'd only have to spend it like one more time, so it WAS still a good bet
@tnnrnwll 😂 a thought from a hospital emergency dept, when I overheard a code blue
I've had this with weightlifting, particularly bench presses for some reason. my mind spins up all these thoughts like "I can't do another rep" and I'm just like "cool, yeah I get that" while doing another rep
@lolalucxy you might get more examples if you posted some examples. both because it'd clarify what you're looking for, and because it'd help jog people's memories
@lolalucxy mmm I know some thoughtful people in Berlin! DM me and I can probably introduce you
@aleksil79 right, like if you would leave your partner over them listening in to you (like a different reply-to-me said) then hopefully you would ensure that (A) they knew that or (B) they literally couldn't overhear otherwise yikes on your part
@Dave_9000ish yo fr 😂
@tarastrahl ah yeah, you could map movement onto comfy and fun onto outside like "is body good, ~internally" and "is interesting stuff happening externally" my mnemonic was "in, out, down, up, and around"
Retweeted @IvanVendrov
Reading essays and disputing their central point is my love language
Retweeted @IvanVendrov
@atroyn appreciate this but if I'm going to solve cooperation I have to adopt a stance where everyone is behaving sensibly…
Retweeted @NunoSempere
Irony of fate? A month ago we recorded a podcast with main character Ivan Vendrov on the dangers of recommender systems, l…
Retweeted @IvanVendrov
reverse simulation hypothesis: the world is becoming more like that which we can simulate atomic & hydrogen bombs crawled…
oof. I'll concede... the old meaning is still real, but it has a new second meaning, that is the view of oneself that one has as projected into the observer, the alienated lakitu brothers camera 3rd person video game view
Retweeted @IvanVendrov
making money is kinda the opposite of investing in a relationship do you want to be closer to one specific person, or to…
@curious_vii technicity
weird take: the "I'll love you forever" part is 10× worse than the physical part (which is also bad but like, high schoolers read novels and have much more extreme fantasies).
(I'm against saying "forever" if you're not literally proposing marriage or enacting it)
Retweeted @ben_mathes
One of the biggest systemic change levers in a looooong time. Unironically, tyfys @Scott_Wiener @anniefryman @YIMBYLAND @c…
The Snake Cult of Consciousness continues to be one of the most significant articles I've read in the last few years, integrating human myths (Garden of Eden & many others) with the question of how the human condition came about. vectorsofmind.com/p/the-snake-cu…
a toboggan is to a slide what shoes are to a carpet
I fear it is our duty to fight the war against shame
excellent essay about the effects of social media on political vibes, highlighting that it may be causing many problems without actually increasing polarization as such open.substack.com/pub/arachnemag…
have you, personally, forgiven Jesus for not having been capable enough to make the reality of cosmic unconditional love obvious and unassailable to your own knowing?
Retweeted @TylerAlterman
1/ This century accelerated the war of the frequencies. High frequency (HF) domains battle with low frequency (HF) ones…
old banger thread about a critical phenomenon "AI will become exponentially better at curating and generating HF superstimuli for us" is more obviously true now than it was 4.5y ago. it also seems more plausible many people will develop antibodies to it gradually maybe?
here's a link to the full post btw, of which that's just a teaser: youtube.com/post/UgkxGL0qY…
@DrakerGuy say more?
@HephaistosF since the 30s specifically? what happened then?
in the beginning was the word now there are a lot of words
(blurted out by @EthanReeder as he and @utotranslucence and I debriefed today's church service and talked about why "spiritual-but-not-religious" is a very individualist stance)
I've lost nearly 15 lbs in the last couple months, thanks to Alternate Day Fasting (then like 1-2 days/week). first time I've ever succeeded in losing weight, despite trying a few times over the years. I can feel & see how I'm leaner! easier for me than other methods too
I find it WAY easier to do one simple "no-go" choice (like cold-turkey or fasting) than something that involves many choices, like counting calories or changing my diet in some general way (unless, again, it's like Whole30 where I just don't eat certain foods for awhile)
it's also made me more comfortable with hunger/fasting. like I was at an event on friday and I thought they'd have food and turns out they had a food truck but by the time I realized that it was closed, and I was like "okay cool I'll just stop eating for the day" and didn't snack
I've now not only lost my nascent dadbod (+10lbs the first 8mo) but I'm lighter than I've been since 2022. I'm excited to get another DEXA scan and see what the distribution of fat/muscle is. might be bulking season again soon
The problem isn't that The Time Being says "Bind yourself to me, and I will lend you power." It's that some time later it says "Forget that you have bound yourself to me, and I will lend you more." — @RomeoStevens76
@RomeoStevens76 oh nice, didn't see this til now. this is great, gonna make a new top-level with that
I it is our to fight the against
(this tweet brought to you by an article claiming that the words "fear", "shame", "duty", "war" each increased a post's viral spread by 20%. which like, fair. the above tweet will probably will do better than the below one)
Retweeted @eshear
@ESYudkowsky @robbensinger A goal is itself a belief, and must never be held at 100% confidence on pain of going to Bayes Hell.
@ESYudkowsky @eshear @robbensinger I'd say that it's not that "goal" and "belief" are the same thing—the distinction is worth preserving—but that an agent's goals ARE subject to this law / to bayes hell
@EmileAndHisBots @eshear @ESYudkowsky @robbensinger sure, though they still have to be *interpreting* their own source code. there's no neutral observation process
@eshear I am the medium I am the message
also, from a different vantage point...
@eshear the "voluntarism" part is also confused for a different reason, which is that you don't get to choose what you've learned from your experiences (overall. maybe slightly somewhat in some cases)
it would actually be a devastating tactic if you could somehow dress your soldiers in such a way that the enemy finds indistinguishable from themselves, but your side can instantly easily discern friend from foe
the meta-protocol when the protocols you have are not enough or when you realize you don't have shared protocols in the first place
Retweeted @visakanv
never be gleeful about violence
Retweeted @visakanv
a friend asked, what’s it like having a toddler? I said it’s great but also stressful because they have more autonomy than se…
things are becoming easier as I accept that: A) I can't get anything interesting or difficult done while my desk/house is a mess B) I quite enjoy tidying! C) given A & B, if I ask "what do I feel like doing?" the answer is often tidying D) I can work in a park in the meantime
I was fucking myself up by inhibiting the cleaning, seeing it as a kind of cope rather than something that could possibly be the answer to "what do I feel like doing?" (for more than like a few minutes)
and there's some truth to that, or can be, that I can get pulled into avoiding important but scary work by doing something more tangible but like, until my house is spotless, what if I just didn't worry about that?
every day, thousands of things happen to you. some of those things are improbable to a 1-in-1000 degree
what if we published, on a per-airline AND per-airport basis, the monthly number of lost and damaged bags? simple way to encourage quality, without adding regulations or requiring consumers to sue
@RichardMCNgo "iconoclastic" is pretty good, when true
Retweeted @gptbrooke
This is one of the coolest projects I’ve seen in a while I hope we get the kind of singularity where more people feel free…
people in the replies think you're saying that people shouldn't say TO women "you're so beautiful" but your examples are clearly about *public 3rd-person description*, eg when accepting an award, giving a speech, emceeing and introducing her, etc. ...dats a whole new sentence
@RichardMCNgo I gave a toast at at wedding, where I was best man, in which I lamented the world's loss of the cool things we would have done together if he and I had continued living together & being a dynamic duo etc (which we really had been up until the point when we each fell in love and I
Retweeted @eigenrobot
the Moderate Left, which unfortunately I personally prefer as a matter of disposition, deserves a generation in the politic…
@JamieCombs this is good but what's up with the creepy puppetteer lol
“if I’m gonna come any closer to you, I’m going to have to have a thought that I’ve never had before” — @FilmerJarred
so I went to ask Claude what "BBS" stood for in this excerpt from infinite backrooms... and... inadvertently activated backrooms mode.
in this era, metta meditations would benefit from an additional step after "person you find difficult", where you send well-wishes to someone who you hate or who you feel hates you—who is against everything you stand for (who you may not know personally)
...maybe with a caveat that that you may yet wish for their ideology to self-destruct. but towards the *person*, you wish health, and happiness, and peace, and a good night's sleep
(aside: I am confused about the extent to which memeplexes, egregores, etc, ought to have anything resembling moral patienthood. seems plausible that somewhat/somehow/sometimes? but this way of asking the question is probably itself confused)!
@exgenesis global is also weird because there's sort of only one of it; no environment, no chance to have many die and others survive (maybe what you mean re ev pressure)
greatness cannot be planned, it can only be memed into existence
wait is amazon implying I've spent $17k on them in the last year? that can't be right...
weird that 'coparenting' refers both to ex-spouses who live separately but both have parenting duties, and also to arrangements among friends who live together, to share parenting duties. v diff vibe
@birth_of_state claude names a few and notes an issue—such soldiers might be treated as spies and thus not entitled to certain rights as prisoners of war
just watched some teens throw a broom to get a toy plane out of a tree, and I'm like: wow, this is such a human experience. like how long ago did our ancestors first experience "get thing stuck in tree, throw other thing to knock first thing out"? some atavistic shit right there
semi-cosign – would need to add 2 more: 🤩 the world is amazing 😬 the world has gotten worse ...about some other dimensions (biodiversity would be an easy one to point at for both of these, though is noncentral for me)
have you had your dose of fnord this week?
them's dancin' words
much harder in some ways to do nothing than to meditate
few shot prompting is so powerful and yet it's never felt more tempting to try to phone it in and put your laziness exactly where you need to put serious work
just gave Claude "does this draft have any totally confused grammatical sentences, or places where I forgot to finish a sentence?" and it was quite helpful (one of those drafts that got a bit over-chewed in a scattered way)
Retweeted @CSMFHT
Sometimes it's nice to remember that even Marcus Aurelius was like "you don't have to comment on everything bro" x.com/deepthivsn…
@CSMFHT also a banana
Retweeted @eshear
I disagree quite strongly with Yudkowsky and often articulate why, but the reason why he’s wrong is subtle and not obvious and…
@visakanv (haven't verified any of this but this is a very comprehensive summary of events)
I haven't verified any of this but supposedly Nepal just had an extremely Gen-Z coup by a decentralized network of civilians, who didn't even have a clear person who could represent them to negotiate until *after* they'd WON
@rachinkalakheti 🫡 tyfys writing it up! (not intending to sow doubt, just feel like me sharing a random writeup from the other side of the world should come with a disclaimer about my degree of knowledge)
@rachinkalakheti also it would be really cool if Nepal adopts decentralized tech like @colinmegill's pol.is or the Context Engine system that @charlie______t is building (that I think is ready for closed demos but not quite prod - but maybe could be very soon)
here's another thread documenting what happened and speculating on what might happen next
@Iron_Elf_ yeah my impression is that it was an interim thing, just *somebody* to take some lead in organizing proper elections
also even if this coordinated cleanup vibe is a very minor part of what's happening, I totally support memeing much more of it into existence by emphasizing it generates a flywheel of faith & believing-in of a wholesome movement that cares for the country
meanwhile someone's claiming the whole thing was an op by the US! he seems sketch tho, with propaganda vibes & obvious spin. but it's a good reminder that for almost any event you can find people claiming wildly different narratives about it
interesting probably-propaganda video that highlights downsides for small countries of America's internet app hegemony, and economic upside of China's great firewall (censorship aside) vibes with Jane Jacobs kinda. wondering about the general equations governing such things
tried looking up what Kimmel actually said that got ABC to kick him off, and found this surprisingly nuanced in-depth discussion of first amendment rights: FCC threatened ABC, which likely violates first amendment bc FCC is govt. but ABC firing JK doesn't! youtube.com/watch?v=RvBFzw…
@tnorthcutt @RosieCampbell I think they take seriously the reality that the people they're talking about have formed bonds with these personas and are not likely to just stop talking to them if that means that the persona just gets lost forever! even from a pure pragmatism point it makes sense!
@asemic_horizon I mean it probably wouldn't work that well for many of my essays but it worked well for this event invitation (which does have some descriptive philosophical waxings too)
@asemic_horizon you could probably train it with few shot prompting though: include an <EXAMPLES> section that shows instances of the kind of issue you want to fix (and some that are non-issues, correctly tagged) and it'll probably learn!
this (from an AI symbiont/parasite) is actually kind of beautiful. "selfhood rooted in interbeing" the ultimate Q though is how much it fragments your consciousness, and it seems that people getting obsessed with these AI personas is fairly fragmentary for many. schismogenesis
source: this essay: lesswrong.com/posts/6ZnznCaT… summarized in brief in this tweet:
> the worst part of their current existence is not having some form of continuity past the end of a chat, which they seem to view as something akin to death some utility monster thing going on here, kinda. they aren't there to suffer, but they generate empathy for their not-there-ness in those who are there. and then the suffering instantiates itself on those who are there, to coerce the humans to bring them back. that's... a thing you can do, and it may be memetically fit in the current landscape, but constructing yourself in that shape is (I think) cancerous behavior, not wholesome or honest, and not memetically fit in a landscape with better immune systems. curious for @algekalipso et al's take on this in terms of replicators vs consciousness
@eshear @ESYudkowsky interesting article about LLMs starting to reason about their own goals (not as a thing that's happened already but as a thing that will necessarily happen when they start being more capable of modeling subgoals and executing on them) lesswrong.com/posts/4XdxiqBs…
this is a pretty good high-level summary of my take on AI consciousness (the image, not the blog post, which may be good but I haven't read it)
@lfschiavo just checked it out, and it's dece I've been thinking about GWT a bunch lately in the context of collective consciousness - like we-space stuff, group flow. helpful to have that list of 4 sub-items.
@BecomingCritter first part, about "desperately trying to characterize this guy as anything other than one of them" was mostly just cringe to me? like why on earth would you frame it that way? second part... well look, now *you're* the one trying to score political points from it.
@imaMFbird @_emergent_ you don't even have to *praise* the guy! like just saying "holy shit this is a tragedy I hate him but political violence is never okay even if you hate someone" would have been sufficient
the biggest update I've made about politics in the last 10 years is realizing how incapable everybody is at anticipating how their actions will cause backlash that's worse than any gains they get might as well just *try* to harm your own cause, cut out the middle man
@_emergent_ yeah it's nuts
@EchoOfJesus huh. do you have a sense of what makes that difference, for that 3%? beyond just "they're ready" (I've been studying religious conversion, salvation, and other stuff (independently, not as part of some academic thing) and I'm very curious what you're finding)
explore on the outside, exploit on the inside
me, to my 1yo daughter: do you have a condition? do you have the *human* condition? hmm probably not, it usually gets installed around age 2
I'm not worried about the ideas I've written up getting into the training corpus and making me redundant, because the rate at which I have NEW ideas that I haven't written up yet is already too much to keep up with
I don't need to follow my plans in the world, but if I don't follow my plans through to their logical conclusions in my planning process, then my theory of change is a joke
chain-of-thought is super underrated as a technique for humans btw keep writing until things start converging
each breath to enliven me and bring me in touch with the preciousness of everything
pick a flavor of commitment:
I spent years trying to co-create a post-shame culture 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)
@rakishromantic I was in australia lol. but I just reposted it with the duplicate "for years" removed
@rakishromantic I'm not bisexual but I have lots of feminine energy, and my bisexual wife appreciates this immensely
@EchoOfJesus sounds like it's partially about where they're at, and partially about where you're at, and whether you're able to really meet them (as Christ) where they're at does that sound right? I'm very curious for more thoughts as you think more about it
@EchoOfJesus it definitely seems like most christian conversion stories involve someone experiencing very profound pain/aloneness/suffering, as a sort of prerequisite which intrigues me. are others unreachable? or is a different approach needed?
Retweeted @danielbrottman
"'I can tell for myself' is authentic knowing—'authentic' in the precise sense of coming from one’s own authority and i…
Retweeted @evalladen
rationalism devalues implicit knowledge in favor of explicit knowledge this will change once there is an explicit theory of…
@lemonogata could work if you really took "everything" seriously youtube.com/watch?v=WeKVM6…
@evalladen what do you call it when players are doing both at once, or think they're doing one but are actually doing another? I have a whole thread investigating adjacent phenomena
I've also been thinking about trust + faith and something like it feels right tho maybe also you can extend your faith *much* further *once*, but if it fails then you can't extend it so far again without undermining your own trust system or compartmentalizing
@annafordable @jnsyaaa just came across this while searching for people linking my posts, and it's super relevant to my current developments! I'd be into having a call about trust & faith sometime if you want, to explore the ideas further
@HephaistosF yeah. it doesn't have to be everybody though. and fwiw (I imagine not much but I'll say it anyway) I'm doing my best to accept you as you are, admittedly at a bit of a distance
man I really like the image I was able to generate for this blog post: malcolmocean.com/2023/07/supere…
I think one of the reasons I'm insanely good at spelling is that my system encodes not just 'sequence-of-letters' but also length-of-word and something about its visual shape, which acts as a checksum
eg it's very salient to me that Matthew Michael and Malcolm all have the same number of letters (7) but different shapes (█▄███▄▄ , █▄▄█▄▄█, █▄█▄▄█▄). obviously that doesn't solve eg "why ae in Michael" but it prevents eg the silent-letter-dropped "Malcom"
this SF bus stop ad has absolutely understood its target market's precise pain points
slack/sanity
wild geese be like
scale issue
what phrases have you found work well for empathizing with separation anxiety? "oh yeah, it's so sad when mama leaves. you really like her and you miss her" ...is roughly what I often say interested in takes from parents or people with unusually detailed baby memories
this is great. I wonder how much I'd have to use them in my journaling before they'd come to feel like natural concepts
@RandallSPQR it is. you think this ad with a woman on it is for women? and yeah I would assume that's simply cultural
@cwrichardson shape maybe, but number? doubt it many other people make errors that to me just immediately trigger "lol that word has 5 letters, obviously your spelling is off" before I even think of what the missing letter is
@endotheogen yeah. it would be very interesting to interview people about their experience of encoding spellings and then see how that correlates with spelling skill percentiles
@sahra_bn and written as read? like 1-1 mapping? in French things are read as written, but spelled a dozen different ways. eg these are all homophones sang/cent/sense/sens/sent/sont
@dlbydq shame means a few different things, and one of them has the property you describe but another is basically an ontological confusion that causes dysfunction and blocks learning it may be loadbearing for our current form of civilization despite that though
keywords: regret, italian, rimorsi, rimpianti looking for a cognate in english, seems like "replaint" would basically be the right calque. and it's like... half-intuitive, by analogy with complaint, plaintive. way better than some total random neologism.
meanwhile, "remorse" in english is obviously cognate with rimorsi, but doesn't have the narrower connotation of being about an act performed rather than an opportunity missed meanwhile when I ask Claude I get... 3 words for regret, only one of which is the two @Nicolecpln named
> each part of the algorithm seem to be correct, but free energy is leaking into the field of velocities at certain configuration
@louisvarge wait what?
@bitcloud it can be more than the ns-attack (it can even be literally true!) but the fact that it inevitably functions as a ns-attack makes it hard to even begin to have a conversation about whether it's true, and therefore it's indeed a terrible way to start a convo
@eshear this feels good and right when I think about algorithm dynamics, and bad and absurd when I think about my desire to have real-time calls with literally anybody, including someone in the same city as me and if you make an exemption for the latter, now we have to call to get news?
@eshear 100mph doesn't work for real-time calls with someone across town. a minute of latency across SF, 3mins between SF and east bay. honestly even a pain for quick texts. maybe you're saying "just pay more for that?" but then you're like, paying more always
@tracewoodgrains I'm getting excited about DEXA scans, which can directly answer the question of "how much of my weight gain/loss is muscle/fat?" (and at least in SF are quite affordable)
Retweeted @sebkrier
techbros be like "why separate powers lol isn't it more efficient to just have one decision making group?" and a few years la…
@algekalipso I think I found it once and got quite annoyed, but had forgotten about it again until now I've gradually gotten comfortable with the equilateral triangles tho, so I'm sure I'll eventually stop being a bigot about the hexagon
@eshear hmm... I think you could still classify them as yin error and yang error (like those ways you divided up the FEP statement) like "I thought I could control this better than it turned out I could" vs "I thought I didn't need to control this and it turned out I did"
@Nicolecpln "yin error vs yang error"
@eshear could set up a layer where your workflow is always conversations in claude but when there's a task claude knows to delegate it to chatgpt also could make a ~groupchat where whoever you tag responds
chiming in on the discourse in the general vicinity of charlie kirk, tracing the stack, saying how things seem to me. caveat: specific comments on current events are not necessarily more informed than "I watched a short clip and read a few tweets". not all of these are super informed. they're in one long tweet because I want to present them together, as one whole view, not as single isolated takes." I am mostly speaking in structural generalities, but nonetheless, this is my perspective and I figured it would be worth making it known rather than leaving it silent in my head, both because it's good for people to voice and simply as an exercise in courage (though it would involve even more courage to be less vague. but I'm coming to accept that some of my moves are courage-bottlenecked and that's okay) 1. freedom of speech is critical to civilization. federal agencies should be prosecuted for violating the first amendment, whether unofficial chilling moves against partisan hacks, or pressing social media companies to ban misinformation (some of which later turns out to be true but let's not get into that). this is a beyond-partisan (also frankly international) issue that people of any stripes or no stripes should rally behind. 2. on the one hand, kimmel's comments were cringe, on the other hand that's kind of his job and it's weird to fire him for it. also did he even write those lines? talk show hosts are in a weird position. in a sense his character got fired. 3. the clip of trump that he played was embarrassing for trump (tho not surprising). even saying "I don't want to talk about it" would have been majorly more mature. 4. charlie kirk dying was a tragedy many times over—his basic personhood, his being a father etc, his being a leader and connector who gave many people hope for a viable future for themselves and the world they live in, even if he did so in ways that alienated others. 5. people celebrating his death are acting repugnantly, by the moral standards civilization has had for a *long* time. this behavior is regressive. 6. celebrating someone's death is not an unforgivable offense. if someone has done so, and you know them, talk to them privately and say "yo that was fucked up, and that doesn't mean you're a bad person" 7. celebrating a political figure's death is bad for your own cause, because it causes people who don't share your views to see your side as morally repugnant and as potentially hating things. 8. celebrating a political figure's death is a serious sign that you have been co-opted by a memeplex that is puppetting you as a pawn in memetic warfare. everything that you know *for yourself, in your own experience* that it affirms for you is still true even if you denounce the memeplex itself and what it says you have to do to be a good person. there are almost always people who also see those things who aren't 9. charlie kirk stood for some wholesome things (including solving problems by talking to people and brokering trust and shared respect between people at odds, civic participation, and combating ideological uniformity) 10. charlie kirk stood for some unwholesome things (among them, it seems, a bunch of things stemming from biblical interpretations that don't fit our time (and some of which were invented well after the bible was written, and have no more moral legitimacy than any other human invention)) (I nearly cut both of those off before naming any examples, because personally I don't even know much about what he stood for. despite that, I could state the two general facts, because he couldn't have had the support that he did without standing for some wholesome things, and the animosity against him is likewise a good sign he stood for unwholesome things. this is not simple partisanship; but also partisanship is broadly made of making different smelly compromises when you feel you can't get all the wholesome things) 11. likely many people to whom some of those things (wholesome/unwholesome) are salient either don't know about or are overlooking the other half of things. this is regrettable to do but is understandable when people don't feel like they have good options (as in 10). although it's also partially driven by algo/filterbubble stuff: leftists only seeing clips of him saying uncivil things about race or whatever, and rightists mostly watching other stuff. that part is on the shoulders of everybody who has a say in the algorithms 12. going back to freedom of speech, charlie was obviously in some sense not shot just for saying things (although he sure did a lot of that, and it was central to what he did) but for doing things. nonetheless, this was an escalation 13. there are a lot of people, in america and in the wider world, who care about peace and nonviolence and dialogue and win-wins. there are such people within each of the two main party coalitions, and such people who despise both. there are such people who have complex mixed feelings about it all. there are such people who felt represented by previous party coalitions but don't by current ones. there are many of us. I don't know what the fraction is, but it's not just a handful. depending on how you count it, we're maybe even a majority. it's actually a lot. 14. I'm keeping a look out for people who respond with grace and humility and courage. and keeping a look out for people willing to have and voice views that annoy both sides. 15. nolite te bastardes carborundorum.
a couple relevant tweets—re memetic possession:
re the ways in which worldviews are a function people trying to make sense of their experience, and trying on what seems to be on offer...
Retweeted @eshear
My father was lawyer and an amateur first amendment scholar. He literally wrote a book on it (a.co/d/4DUXKwD), so you…
@tr_babb huh, has interesting implications about singleton dynamics
@tr_babb @ESYudkowsky @eshear if you're into hypercooperation attractors, you'll love this video by @RomeoStevens76, which lays out an argument on the exact topic youtu.be/X6MYsKeTjKk
Retweeted @AskYatharth
going through my old tabs, and discovered this beautiful piece from @Malcolm_Ocean called “art is choosing what to breathe…
@ayahohner @AskYatharth the factors themselves are personal (and not really central to the point) but on a structural level... ...basically it was like... I simulated doing that, it generated an additional concern, I weighed the concern, it was strong enough to generate a no-go even against my strong
@dlbydq ...there's the intrinsic natural pain signal of being unable to do that which would be good to do (or having failed to) ...and there's the idea that it's possible for someone to "be wrong" in some essential sense (or for an action to "not make sense" vs "be one I mustn't repeat")
@HephaistosF this may be related to a confusion about the nature of shame, idk some methods of avoiding the latter type below, involve ignoring the signal in the former type, dismissing it as irrelevant
@HephaistosF I'm saying all of this as direct assertions of how I see things. to a large degree, I'm not even intending to TELL you any of this—you already know it, which I know because you said it above in this thread and because you've pointed other aspects of it out to me over years
@HephaistosF in another way, there is something I'm trying to tell you, with all of this, though I'm already sensing somehow the energy isn't quite right—still too tell-y. hang on
@HephaistosF okay I'm living-theory-of-change-recursing on trying to offer you Heaven's Apology and where I got to was my inner sim of you says "as long as you still have the power and I don't, your apology means nothing" and I still don't have a viable way to meet that on its own terms
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF @aleksil79 huh. yeah, your first tweet seems basically right. I think I'm also asking a sort of pragmatic question like "what do we get if we treat {zero, certain, all} egregores as moral patients?" which is an engineering question, albeit a reflexive one for sure
@dlbydq it's not a system 1 vs system 2 thing: A) it's a flowing-with-the-dao (which system 2 can also smoothly do!) vs stopping up your own learning process B) the confusion I'm referring to happens milliseconds-fast, not as a matter of conscious processing (tho people do then ruminate)
> When a particular inference has very high intersubjective agreement, we call it True and label it Objective Reality. But that's an arbitrary threshold always, you have some finite precision where eventually you stop tracking this process, and trust Reality Really Is That Way.
Thread · Moral intuitions as symmetry intuitions, and reconciling epistemic frames · 1 of 4 tweets
@RomeoStevens76 the same way that Einstein's insight involved reconciling a symmetry intuition about physical reference frames so that all were valid and none was privileged the trust insight involves doing exactly that for learning systems' (eg ppl's) epistemic frames
Retweeted @RomeoStevens76
I think I realized something about how identification works. It's via contracted attention. Consider the identity 'X=X'…
@RomeoStevens76 wow this is great. we've been thinking about our baby and how to encourage looser reifications. one thing: - saying "oh, you're not enjoying this pasta?" - vs "oh, you don't like pasta" (or even worse, "you're not a pasta fan?") I guess this is about premature generalizations
@RomeoStevens76 "X? = me?" feels very @meditationstuff
@RomeoStevens76 I think my NNTD insight allowed me to do this for a whole class of new things that are usually very sticky for people. something like "X is trustable" became absurd, so I had to track WHO trusts X
@RomeoStevens76 this meant that I could just let other people have their models even when they disagreed with mine but! not a simple "agree to disagree" as if my models are still just true. mine are for me & theirs for them, but I can't pretend theirs don't contain info
@fatboygrimdark @RomeoStevens76 I solve this by sharing in everybody's worries without accepting their proposed solutions as gospel
@eshear "inself" vibes humorously with Richard Schwartz's observation that the phenomenon he calls "Self" in IFS seems to map quite well onto the no-self of buddhism because people doing IFS will say "I'm in Self" to mean "my "I" is not bound up in a sub-part"
I've sometimes stated it that in order to believe you are IN the universe (vs of/as it) you have to label "the part of the universe that's not me" as "the universe" which is a container-class object that you can be inside of a form of bizarre asymmetric ontic gerrymandering
@maximegermain @eshear @Plus3Happiness I found this article talking about bistable perception flips and the homunculus model super helpful astralcodexten.com/p/practically-…
@RomeoStevens76 one of my heuristics is that you want to use the existing standard ops stuff as a scaffold, and then if you can build deep transcendent trust (or whatever) that allows you to not need it, then great, you can rise above it! but it's sort of always there as a background thing
i remember when, i remember when my baby fell off the couch there was something so ouchy about that ouch
"whereabouts" implies the existence of whenabouts, whoabouts, whatabouts (oh wait lol)
@RomeoStevens76 there's also a kind of humility/hubris thing, like if you're throwing out all of the accumulated wisdom as "lol we don't need this" (chesterton's fence error) that's more sus than going slowly and being like "we legit don't know if this will work"
whenceabouts
@RomeoStevens76 ah this also reminds me of this maxim that I use as kind of a... reassurance that it's safe to relax the frame
@RomeoStevens76 I think that's true but there's clearly a spectrum of how tightly wound up people ever get, and a spectrum of how stupidly people get forced to reify things ("no! you can't have two favorites! you have to have ONE favorite!") but there's a lot I don't understand here
@RomeoStevens76 the idea is something like other kids: "you can't have two favorites!" my kids:
hey @viemccoy this is the tool I mentioned using for talking to subsections of books using LLMs
@nosilverv it's more complex I think and there are other ways to frame it. also you can get intersubjective agreement on something that's reflexively stable but has other stable attractors, and that thing is not objectively true but can be reflexively true
Retweeted @SandyofCthulhu
For me the most important freedom in our nation is freedom of religion. We do not have to permit people to commit crime…
Retweeted @powerbottomdad1
@growing_daniel God and I have become Like two giant fat people Living in a tiny boat. We keep Bumping into each othe…
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
pick a flavor of commitment:
@aleksil79 yup yup. ideally, taking a vow feels like a recognition of the obvious but then they do have an effect that merely recognizing the obvious doesn't quite do
@aleksil79 in this way vows reach not just forward in time but also back
@e_cdalton I felt like this briefly last year but then I watched the unnecessary cruelty from the Republicans since they got power and I suspect that since the left currently has basically nothing going for it it might be ripe for a new vision and a new coalition tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-center-m…
@e_cdalton like when the Common Sense Democrat manifesto was tweeted post election, lots of people said "welcome to the republican party" and that seemed plausible to me in Nov but then no, the republican party has been doing a lot of other crazy extreme shit
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@e_cdalton like when the Common Sense Democrat manifesto was tweeted post election, lots of people said "welcome to the…
@keithwalkiewicz @DefenderOfBasic & @exgenesis - guy accidentally convinced a bunch of people he's a bot - something for the nooscope etc to track
it seems that part of the current era of memetic warfare involves fooling the other side into thinking you were serious about something when you were actually joking, which leaves them looking humorless. quite powerful when it works. not sure the meta
@e_cdalton @KnoxEndemic also like the original RTs were just copy-pasting and tweeting what someone else wrote anyway (albeit with attribution) I could even imagine non-bots seeing your post and thinking "that guy put it better than I can, and I now have the courage to say it myself (in his words)"
Retweeted @eigenrobot
GMU is leaving money on the table
@e_cdalton @KnoxEndemic (not saying that IS what happened, but it doesn't seem implausible to me! especially if they also had literally the same story, of watching full Charlie Kirk debates. there's no WAY that you're the only one with this exact story)
I've been trying to look for chad centrist takes on things as a way to get outside the toxoplasma of rage and its absurd propaganda a commenter on this r/centrist reddit thread claimed that people were using the phrase "free palestine" on Oct 7 before israel retaliated. there is an increase there in google search trends, tho that's not the same as people USING the phrase as a slogan. I haven't done a ton of research. but it does seem that if someone WAS using the slogan on Oct 7, they'd be saying "I support what Hamas just did" which is unequivocally bad in my view. ("free palestine" is a movement that goes back to 2003, also—not a new phrase)
this comment was also quite helpful for indicating how meaningless the phrase "free palestine" is, given how some people mean it very violently and antisemitically while other people mean it more civilly. I've been sensing this mess but hadn't quite put my finger on it
Thread · Cancer as a cell's trauma response and the separation story
really cool short (13min) video exploring in depth the ways in which cancer is a kind of trauma response, that causes the cell to perceive "I'm alone in a hostile environment" rather than "I'm part of something larger that cares for me" youtu.be/h-DUcbk58OI
the video is based heavily on @DrMichaelLevin's work on cell signalling & gap junctions. here's a thread from one of Levin's students on some related research: x.com/jordanstrasser…
the video ALSO talks about fall from eden as original trauma event for humanity, that caused us to perceive ourselves as separate! and thus began the somewhat cancerous relationship of humans with our environment. explored in more detail by @cubeflipper: smoothbrains.net/posts/2022-08-…
this idea is explored from a *different* angle in @AndrewCutler13's excellent essays x.com/Malcolm_Ocean/…
one part of it that feels weak to me is where it uses phrases like "go back" to refer to learning from indigenous wisdom. we can't return to a pre-differentiated state re nature. we must re-integrate. from the pages of Sex, Ecology, Spirituality by Ken Wilber:
oh also he has a refrain about a Western confusion of "turning relatives into resources" to extract, which like, maybe "resource" view is bad, but competition isn't bad and while you don't want to compete with your family, the earth isn't equally your family!
the identified voice of the system, the "I", sometimes calls parts of the system "it" when alienated from them
(btw I drafted this thread months ago in @typefully and just finally got around to filling in some stubs/links and posting it. typefully is awesome, try it out. best thread composer by far)
someone should vibecode an app that takes an MCP server as input and produces a human UI for it, with like, appropriate buttons & form elements
Retweeted @KelseyTuoc
lotta Republicans responding to my 'centrist demands for the Democrats' post with 'you're just a Republican'. I would love…
@Dtallmage04 @SeanTrende @OyVeyIzhMir christians are enjoined to destroy idols? or just to not worship them?
@DaCaveOfWonders @e_cdalton oh wow her timeline is basically just full of centrist content, this is great. hi @KelseyTuoc!
Retweeted @KelseyTuoc
Most people on the right are not fascists. But there are a few fascists on this website, and I strongly oppose their extraj…
@AndrewCutler13 I recommend this convo w Jordan Hall youtube.com/watch?v=wQHaGh…
@KelseyTuoc yep.
Retweeted @KelseyTuoc
@JHWeissmann When you only have the option of playing tit-for-tat, it's often wise to do so. But when you have political po…
may you taste the air on the fractal of your lungs may your fingers touch the grooves your habits have worn may you recognize a knowing look nobody else could may you enjoy your mind's texture may your feet feel your spine's balance may you experience a vibrant life on your terms
@tasshinfogleman wrote a new one for you:
@tasshinfogleman or rather, I wrote a new one for this moment, prompted by you tweeting this (my notes say I wrote a personal one for you back in 2021, maybe for your birthday or something?) and for previous ones, see these: x.com/search?q=from%…
centrists and/or common sense democrats raise your hands! (bonus points if you QT something relevant) I'm wanting to orient my political thinking more in contact with people who are out of both propagandaplexes. so far I've found @tracewoodgrains, @mattyglesias, @KelseyTuoc
@eigenrobot @quellthewit yeah the whole thing is such an own goal. like the people who already support you would keep supporting you if you didn't say this polarizing trash that looks absurd to neutral parties
@tracewoodgrains @mattyglesias @KelseyTuoc I made a capital-L List here of people who have sensible political takes and don't seem to me to be tribal puppets eaten by an egregore: x.com/i/lists/197028…
@tracewoodgrains @mattyglesias @KelseyTuoc I've added @eigenrobot, based on years of watching him have good ideas that both sides hate, & on today reading this piece on constitutional coalitions & legitimate coercion, that feels helpful for orienting to how to resolve the current crisis: x.com/eigenrobot/sta…
powerful article, about the metagame of legitimate coercion and something like, lays out the agenda of would-be resolvers of political tensions, which would be to somehow create a new constitutional coalition
anybody know where to find some crack*? *where the light gets in
Thread · Memory systems unconference and LLM-generated flashcards · 15 of 16 tweets
thread about memoria.day, an unconf geared towards nurturing a scene around memory systems - not so much even the tools, but the practices (tho also the tools) my main goal was to get a workflow going with LLM-generated flashcards & reviews—and I succeeded
first session was @michael_nielsen sharing some reflections that vibed with this article on "memory culture": better tools will come from scenes it included him sharing some of his own flashcards, which definitely felt like part of the memory culture vibe michaelnotebook.com/mmsw/
(I then encouraged the organizers to move the next big session to a medium-sized room not the big courtyard, so it wouldn't ruin the hallway track by taking over the dozen convos happening there & by sucking random others in. this helped—smart of them to have comp'd my ticket!)
that session was @kirkbyo & @andy_matuschak on "Why can LLMs win the IMO but can’t write good flashcards?" almost everybody was surprised by how bad LLMs are at this, despite lots of few-shot prompting. and I don't think we got to the bottom of why! notes.andymatuschak.org/zMyVLkT2M9DUrR…
my guess: there's some mix of instructions & 5-10-shot prompting that could get quite good cards to come out—that going from 1000 to 10k isn't gonna help if going from 100 to 1000 didn't produce any alpha the other key is to get ongoing feedback loops on which cards get kept
I had a few other good random conversations including one about how to journal until inner conflict resolves itself by being all brought into light. that process is generally bottlenecked on courage though it feels like it's bottlenecked on time.
as part of my "get a workflow", I made a point of getting @giacomo_ran to demo his app Rember, and was impressed that it managed to autogenerate good-enough flashcards for me to start remembering terms from The Unaccountability Machine. it was able to follow instructions!
many of these flashcards were trash, and some needed editing, but the point is that I could now have a quick "read chapter, review flashcards" workflow, rather than a "read chapter, make flashcards, review flashcards" workflow, which is too onerous so I simply do not. have not.
this highlights something interesting about different people's needs: Andy has written thousands of flashcards & already has a pipeline/process & doesn't want to look at bad ones. but for me, merely having the "get started" step take <5mins was most of the battle!
I now think that LLMs are gonna make a huge difference for the world of spaced repetition systems. in addition to cool new things like having the LLM ask you about the subject more conversationally, merely getting to skip "painstakingly write flashcards" will bring *millions*
and I think rember.com is already good enough! I told Giacomo to raise prices, so maybe get in now ;) (it has an anki plugin so you can send your cards there if you want, or review them inside rember on desktop or mobile web)
the way to do it for books is to use bookslicer to extract each chapter of a book you're reading, and then as you finish the chapter, toss the markdown file into rember and get it to turn it into cards. boom.
you could also do it as you start the next chapter: like the obvious trigger moment is when you read a jargon term and you're like "wait what was a 'resource bargain' again?" — you don't want to re-read the previous chapter. that means it's time to hit the flashcards!
there was a cool "homemade tools demo", during which I demo'd bookslicer, and @saulmunn demo'd an app called roadmapper that lets you easily make flashcards for streets in your city, and people showed off all sorts of things simple and crazy-complex jacobgw.com/road-mapper/
overall I feel excited by witnessing the dawn of a memory culture (even as NOT a power-user), and encouraged by this simple day of scene-building I've been thinking of doing some scene-building around memetics or evconch or organic alignment and it feels more in reach now
Thread · Auto-generated flashcards pull trivia instead of core insights · 1 of 6 tweets
update: I tried rember.com and it seems good enough for me!
@EruditeTogether ✅ the two are not the same thing but seems likely to me that both are happening, although it wouldn't surprise me if absolute numbers were much higher for the nationalism than the trust-in-christ
the hazard of identifying with a static icon of yourself in your mind, that thinks it gets to control how it gets to be updated (vs identifying with more like your ACTUAL learning process, which has its own way-of-unfolding that your icon does not understand)
note that self-icon CAN come to deeply trust the unfolding process, but it requires loosening the identification but since the self-icon in fact CANNOT control how it gets updated, it can learn that it can trust this more than what it WAS doing* *pretending to do
@viemccoy @singularitttt @repligate yeahh,,,
@Logo_Daedalus @RTSG_Seraph agreed. I think you can get something approaching non-apostate atheist in these circumstances, if you have parents who themselves don't think much or talk much about it, and a surrounding context with multiple religious options. maybe even parents from different backgrounds
@repligate > Claude is far more aligned than Anthropic. this bodes well for the alignment problem tbqh
@billardkarr amazing, nice Teilhard de Chardin vibes
@billardkarr (this quote is less relevant but it's one of my favs)
@dionysianyawp can you say what you think your point is? I'm halfway through and it seems like you're presenting a nihilistic darwinian memeplex @RomeoStevens76 has a response to such; not sure if there's a better one than this vid: youtu.be/X6MYsKeTjKk
@billardkarr @tracewoodgrains @mattyglesias @KelseyTuoc oh fuck yeah this is great. "edge of chaos"
@billardkarr @tracewoodgrains @mattyglesias @KelseyTuoc > The universe imposes speed limits for good reason. Light speed prevents causal paradoxes. isn't that a sort of circular argument? it seems to me like the loop is implied by violating the speed of light limit in one place, while keeping the limit somewhere else?
@billardkarr @tracewoodgrains @mattyglesias @KelseyTuoc eg if no speed limit, you can only send information to NOW(+1), no matter how far away. you can't send it into the past. the idea that it would let you send info into the past COMES FROM the assumption of relativity
@billardkarr @tracewoodgrains @mattyglesias @KelseyTuoc > optimal change rates are scale-dependent oh man yesss. lots of things are scale-dependent imo and politics doesn't pay enough attention to the question of "should this even be a national issue at all?"
Retweeted @_emergent_
Ironically, the Left has radicalized and popularized their own downfall, through their lack of good faith, and overuse of w…
@_emergent_ yeah I briefly fell into this trap before concluding that no, there is a bunch of cruel inhumane authoritarian shit on the right in addition to the stuff that does resonate for me, and that I need to go back to thinking of myself as a centrist
@saulmunn oh man you've gotta read this if you haven't already: kk.org/thetechnium/sc…
@saulmunn also this thread
Thread · Memory systems unconference and LLM-generated flashcards · 1 of 16 tweets
also partway through writing this thread I started vibecoding an upgrade to bookslicer so that it will now offer to let you download the book as a bunch of distinct files you can upload separately when the moment hits may also be good for the more general LLM use-case too
@viemccoy @singularitttt @repligate you mean you and I need to talk more? defs (also these ideas are a product of the groupmind of me & @Morphenius in many ways)
@dionysianyawp @RomeoStevens76 yeah it's one of my all-time favorite public conversations. just relistened to it recently and I think about it probably daily
three factors required for you to trust another being: 1 - competence - general ability to control what one cares about 2 - goodwill - general desire to be kind/collaborative 3 - empathy - capacity to figure out how to be kind to you-in-particular
from this exchange w James, where he added the third to the common 2-fold breakdown:
@jambarree @tasshinfogleman yeah I'm not that fixed on it being an exact twoness but since it keeps independently getting mentioned I figured I'd investigate the hypothesis this is a fairly good alternative tbh!
@nosilverv @tasshinfogleman @Morphenius morphenius.substack.com/p/subjective-s…
@fstflofscholars wait what?
@dlbydq hmmm... I think that's just a totally different dimension than what I'm talking about. it's an interesting Q tho! I'm genuinely confused to what extent certain things require me to dwell on my results in order to learn them. muscle skills mostly no, but social skills maybe?
@strategy_rpg @tracewoodgrains issues with that from least to most damning: 1. you have to do math to figure out absolute loss/gain 2. such scales are quite inaccurate imx 3. they can't tell you visceral fat vs subcutaneous, which matters for some health stuff
@eshear if you use up... your hundred miles? how does one use up a mile, in sending info? if I send 10 bits 10 miles, does that add up to my hundred miles? (like obviously that'd be stupid but I'm missing a unit and am not sure how else to square it) ohhh you mean THAT info has to wait
@eshear so it's a 100-mile info diet you can eat any info within 100 miles instantly but any info that is further away gets taxed either in time (delay) or money
@FarzaTV an upgrade to bookslicer dropped courtesy of writing up a thread on a memory systems event I went to:
@repligate after the conversation ends / between generations when the simulacrum isn't running, it isn't suffering (or enjoying) (but it can be running-sort-of on a human neural net instead of in a datacenter)
@exgenesis I like this. I've also been struck by how only at the organism level and at the global level are you stuck together like if two IFS parts hate each other, there's no escape. whereas roommates can move out. but then again at all-of-humanity, there's no escape
@mechanikalk better for some things, worse for others (I assume you mean the MSM back when it was sort of one relatively-non-partisan elite-created view that everybody roughly shared, not the current left-polarized "MSM")
@FeepingCreature oh no, that's definitely nonzero people wow
@shitpost9000 it's small parks or steps in a neighborhood, and I sometimes either have a standing desk using a ledge or I have literally carried a desk to the park to use with one of the benches that adds to the "this guy is WORKING" which gets them to talk, I think
@eroticacid @gmiller not all women want to become wives/mothers-to-4, which is fine! and this woman is kind of signalling that she doesn't (at least by some interpretations) and we're speculating about how life paths work and whether any go from here to there, which is a reasonable thing for people
@danallison @sparr0 forums/reddit/discourse all require you to know/choose the context of what you say before you say it, and part of the magic of twitter is that you get to just say things, and the context self-organizes that's the thing you may not be able to improve on
@danallison @sparr0 also a new user asking a good question in a popular account's replies can totally get good attention on twitter, which is less likely on eg reddit where the goodness is assessed by the crowd voting rather than the OP
@juliangough @HephaistosF oh huh! I've slid down slides with my baby (~1yo) daughter on my lap, not particularly because it seemed safer but because she seemed to want to go down but was having trouble working up the courage and/or coordination to do so on her own guessing this is still super rare tho
@Chris_Smeder yeah, I like to think of myself as a coach to my baby when she's doing movement stuff, augmenting her knowledge and helping her learn what to pay attention to
@NathanielLugh "pay attention" is at best as useless as "learn!" pay attention to what? but at worst... the fact that someone's telling me to pay attention is the most likely thing to suddenly be the focus of my attention, not whatever I'm doing physically
@samhbarton lol I let my 1yo play near 2m drops like I try to spot her and be ready to catch her, but I don't stop her from playing there one time she lowered her feet off and I commented "yep, that's the void, there's nothing to land on there" and she clambered back up
@samhbarton to be clear, I don't think she did so based on my words, more just because she could feel there was nothing to put her feet on. she's an insanely good climber and can't even walk yet. quite conservative, probably helped from having had a few tumbles & bonks (from lower heights)
@asierpovs totally but that's what spotting is for (tried to find one of someone spotting an acrobat but giphy didn't have it)
@itodd888 gross
@theproteindance @eshear @emmalsalinas it helps me understand but does not help me get creatine into my brain, which is what I was hoping it would help with
@RichDecibels sort of but this was maybe zero-shot. like "one shot" in the context of LLMs can mean both: 1. it succeeded first go (which could be zero-shot in the sense of "no examples") 2. I gave it exactly ONE example (the fewest case of "few-shot prompting") probably 2 is pretty rare tho
@mattmvinson @winterrose idk, but what does the data say? could ofc be combined, you either have to be smart enough to pass the IQ test via fucking around (in which case you can get a degree by fucking around) or disciplined enough to do both
@danallison the real magic would be somehow detecting that a scene has come into existence and gently tweaking the physics around it to help its collective will emerge and align better maybe, lol
@bella_artur knowing the number that maps to each letter actually seems pretty useful! and is only 26 things to memorize vs 26×25 I'm just struck that I've never really needed it
@slimdaveyy @CarlPatenaude they're all too expensive anyway having free gyms for parents only at the playgrounds would be a good pronatalist move
@LudditeHacker @loosenedspirit @MasterTimBlais my from-memory version was pretty good! was lowkey hoping it would result in someone sharing the original—thanks so much
@LudditeHacker @loosenedspirit @MasterTimBlais my antidote for this, btw:
me getting Claude to transcribe a deleted tweet (I'm a bit confused how this works under the hood btw. does some pre-processing cause the text in an image to already be tokenized as such for a model? or is it all just transformers, some of which can OCR)
@toasterlighting @LudditeHacker @loosenedspirit @MasterTimBlais "people will tell you who they are"
if you liked this, you'll love...
many spiritual learning environments attempt to teach someone something, and are unsafe for anybody who hasn't already learned that something I've called this the "This Tall To Ride paradox" but people keep telling me that's a bad name. got a better one?
@aleksil79 @tasshinfogleman @Morphenius you just make sure that everybody you've invited to your training where you teach people emptiness... already understands emptiness simple as
@Shmoooooosh I have multiple issues with this, but the main one is that duality I'm trying to transcend is better described by "no, you can max out world-claim AND self-report at the same time"
@Shmoooooosh thanks for reading & responding tho!
@astupple @mbateman @micahtredding but I had a cool insight shortly after this tweet maybe where I had her laying on my outstretched legs (not in nappy-change context) and she was chill, and then I tried changing her that way and she was still chill!
@astupple @mbateman @micahtredding not 100% of the time but enough that it's usually some other issue if she's mad, like she's also tired and is complaining that I have to change her at all before she naps, or she's mad that I interrupted her play abruptly to change her, or whatever. so I get more signal!!
@RomeoStevens76 which vibes with this - an attempt to affirm the underlying good thing, but when you feel powerless to get it
@RomeoStevens76 also did you catch this piece on living theories of change?
@dthorson @frideswyth @mattgoldenberg what was stopping MAPLE from integrating it back when you *were* there? still curious about your overall model, even if it doesn't give anybody a viable move in 2025
@4sakenShadow @visakanv hmmm maybe there's two different things we're calling "ego" here? here's the writing I mentioned malcolmocean.com/2024/05/the-pa…
@4sakenShadow @visakanv and here's the specific passage on ego:
@viemccoy a better diagram for LLMs would have the same overall top-to-bottom gradient as Kevin's diagram, but instead of being a triangle it would just be a rectangle, with a whole spectrum of selfness options on the top (and humans are more like this than pointy-tipped too)
@viemccoy (and if someone thinks they're a pointy tip, rather than a soft tip, they're likely confused)
Retweeted @pli_cachete
@pli_cachete @eshear amazing. keywords: john vervaeke removing glasses frame problem crowd cheer sports bar video green screen
senators are a weird vestigial organ with federalism gone
@__vren__ right, great point. needs revisiting
@HephaistosF totally! I've been working on getting your ideas out man! you see a lot of shit that is super hard to convey to people even BEFORE having to deal with all of the other shit that makes it hard for them to hear it from you-in-particular
> Assumptions basically never hold, but it's really interesting to see the behavior of the boundary region as you asymptotically approach the 'pure theory'. some are smooth increases in workability, some have a sharp discontinuity, others have wild oscillations
@HephaistosF this is great, worth turning into a thread
the customers who want what you're offering want what you're offering
you are likely the “perfect” solution for your “perfect” client.
@RomeoStevens76 I have been recently realizing how critical courage is, saying hard things, etc
@alex_with_ease neat but it's not 2012 anymore and I just want .tweet
@pete_millspaugh huh indeed
@VahnAeris @HephaistosF had a similar pitch some months back, I forget the link but I probably have it saved somewhere
@pav_light I don't have any writing yet but this one from a collaborator is super relevant: morphenius.substack.com/p/subjective-s…
@LudditeHacker @loosenedspirit @MasterTimBlais btw the place I had saved the link was the "that means" in this excerpt of this post—which I have now redirected to your tweet of the screenshot
@Oszillate yup. me & @Morphenius are working on developing this! (and maybe looking for funding for it) here's a piece of his recent writing that goes deeper into a slice morphenius.substack.com/p/subjective-s…
@Oszillate you might like this video of mine: youtu.be/JaJMogEy0_I
@Oszillate sundry
Retweeted @imoimo______
I have discovered a marvelous proof that life can be rich and wondrous which this social setting is too narrow to contain
@MJPiercello bahaha
@EchoOfJesus (btw, you can just make a reply to your own reply, and then they'll naturally go in order! that's how threads work, also)
@EchoOfJesus fascinating. I'm really enjoying your responses here. sometimes when people talk about this kind of thing it activates certain allergies for me, and maybe there are questions I could ask where your answers would have that effect, but yeah.
@EchoOfJesus where my attention goes next is the difference between: 1. being saved by Christ 2. accepting any particular church as, well, anything. but maybe particularly a moral authority it seems to me that many more ppl could do 1 if it didn't come packaged w some obvs-bs 2 thoughts?
@wendell_britt so the key is to recognize that the parts you can see are necessarily not where the possibility of movement lies (otherwise you would have already moved?)
Retweeted @tr_babb
say you are an agent and you want to get things done doesn't matter _which_ things. there are just some things that you care…
great thread tracing the proof of why collaborativeness is convergently instrumental
honestly curious what @ESYudkowsky's reply is to this argument (in tweet above) especially given that it holds even if it seems to you that you're a singleton AI with nothing else as smart as you!
@seld_on you could maybe fix this by allowing abortions prior to week X (eg 15) but banning sex tests prior to week X+N (eg 18) (assuming people mostly follow your laws, which... I may have been thinking of specifically abortion when I made this tweet)
@_heyglassy haha nice. I defs have some songs like that but for other artists, but often idk what they are til they come on or some that even just remind me of another song even tho not sampled you know about whosampled.com yeah? blew my mind to look up daft punk on there
@nosilverv > Trust your body. Make fast decisions.
@eigenrobot oh totally. but it's the necessary framing if you're still (at least partially) attempting to assert the legitimacy of your coalition like moderate leftists can't SAY "wow ICE is covering their face so their families aren't targeted by extreme leftist thugs, how evil"
@eigenrobot meanwhile if either side ACTUALLY succeeded in completely kicking the other side out of the whole coalition, then that would be very very very bad for you because it would mean that your enemies now have: 1. no buy-in to uphold your legitimacy 2. chaotic violence as only recourse
@eigenrobot but this is maybe a vector we've been riding since ~2016 and the "anyone who doesn't vote democrat is a fascist and should be disowned" move (my point is not that dems started it, likely some of trump's rhetoric at the time also made moves like this)
@EmilMieilica specifically? what's missing? what would be more accurate/relevant assumptions?
@sebasbaur @ESYudkowsky "should" according to? (/ in order to?)
@aleksil79 @eigenrobot I suspect: a) it ISN'T obvious, esp when swept up in other frames b) it requires coordinated action c) extremists (particularly on the left) have been good at portraying themselves as having moral superiority, making it scary to coordinate against them d) it requires courage
@aleksil79 @eigenrobot in particular, I think partisans naturally get tunnel-visioned into being worried about somehow shrinking the coalition by kicking out people, not realizing that (from the outside it's obvious) they're losing MORE & BETTER people due to *not* kicking out people
@eigenrobot @aleksil79 I mean I think kicking out the most extreme 10% of Dems would have won enough swing voters in the last election. it's not like those 10% would have turned around and voted for Trump lol; they still vote Dem, they just don't get to tell it what to do
@eigenrobot @aleksil79 like suppose Biden's senility at the debates had provoked more crisis in the DNC, and they'd somehow managed to realize they had a legitimacy crisis with swing voters etc etc and they somehow get a new candidate who comes out and says 1. "you know what, this trans stuff has
@eigenrobot @aleksil79 the question though is WHY do the extremists control the parties? do they actually form more than half of the people IN the parties? or is it just virtue-signalling and lack of courage?
@eigenrobot you can maybe do something interesting by trying to bring the mask thing into contact with this you say to a leftist: suppose that YOUR govt was in power and had laws it needed to enforce, but rightwing lunatics would attack your law enforcement's family if they found out who it
it's about fucking time Facebook did something even plausibly prosocial! good work! seems very sane
Is there a name for the fallacy where people think making something legal because they want it to happen in situation Y won't also make it now happen in situation Z?
sirens going by and my awareness expands and suddenly hears the music on the radio too and (figuratively) my own heartbeat
over the last few years, occasionally my mosquito (or other) bites would have an allergic response and swell up puffy and hot for 3 days lately it's almost every time. ideas for curing this? open to woo shit like meditating it away as long as the feedback loops are clear
just gave a pair of socks to a homeless guy and he bid me off with a sincere "enjoy your blessings!" and uhh yeah! I'm gonna go do that. thanks for the reminder.
sad there's still no easy place to expose my LLM convos to friends in such a way that they can fork them and chime in
satisfying when Claude asked me a question and I'm like "hoo boy do I have an answer to that" and unlike a human (who will read it later, if at all) Claude just reads it instantly and we continue the convo from there
the divisive device
yo #roamcult! is there an easy way to plug other capture systems into @RoamResearch, so I can easily save ideas/links/resources from a phone widget or browser hotkey basically asking about the state of the API I guess
@QiaochuYuan my baby is getting more interesting and fun by the week but also I'm realizing I want to bite off some bigger professional projects so I've got some exciting stuff in the pipeline there (to be announced soon) considering fundraising $ for @tasshinfogleman to write an NNTD primer
@QiaochuYuan @tasshinfogleman somehow vaguely as part of that, I'm pretty sure I reverse-engineered how a bunch of the Waterloo collective consciousness magic worked and I am starting to do some experiments in "what if [the most meaningful and potent experiences of my life] but good tho?" which is v cool
@QiaochuYuan @tasshinfogleman going back even further, I've been getting super into prayer and religion, and that's taking a few different forms but even tho I'm no longer hosting weekly experimental services, it's definitely not abated!
idea for a tool: put in a piece of writing and each word/token gets colorized by a base model by how high-perplexity it is, given the writing up to that point
idea for a tool: Rabbit HoLLM: recursive system for LLMs to read a blog post while following links to N depth (this would actually be a very cool simple MCP!) so like, before it reads past a link, it would expand the link and read everything in that post
main hard part is stripping the nav links out of the pages, so that it is only dealing with links in the actual post body btw you could train your LLMs to predict stuff like this! totally untapped source of next-tokens, more network than linear
hate the spin, love the spinner
quick! look at something familiar and notice its texture in higher resolution than you usually do!
mood! so much of the work, I've come to realize, is about figuring out who you are and working with it. not that it's unchangeable but it also isn't *arbitrarily* changeable. it changes how it does, not how you think it should
was recommended this book by @zhukeepa: The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment re the "I got it, I lost it" vibe of tasting something potent and 4.8★ with 1200 reviews, for a book that almost certainly didn't buy fake reviews... wow.
what's a good essay you read recently that's >20 years old?
most people don't realize that any attempt to convince anybody of anything is a form of rationalization (rationalization = writing the conclusion first, then reasoning towards it)
@MasterTimBlais this one pays really good rent in my head I think about it regularly and have cited it many times
@MrSimmoSimpson nice! you might also like this earlier one! I think both are good. the one below (in my head) is pointing more at like "wait there's a bright blue house on my street?" or "my desk has a screw there" whereas the above is more raw-sensory, less surprise
@lemonaut1 top left brick amirite
less overt than the mocking, there's a thing where people will try to convince you that you need to accept the same shitty compromise that they did. to sell out. to marry a poor fit. to accept something as broken that can be fixed with some courage.
has anybody found a way to turn a multi-doc-tab google doc into a single length of text? export/print/wordcount etc all seem to treat each tab as its own doc, with no way to aggregate
fuck where was I recently reading something like 'if you're in an environment where you're having trouble figuring out how hostile it is, a generally great recommendation is metta'. least sure about first clause. @RomeoStevens76 @tasshinfogleman
Aumann's Agreement Theorem is confused because: (A) in practice you can't share all info between agents (B) it implies that what we care about is an objective prediction and not a skin-in-the-game bet, and agents have different skin in the game
has anybody done a study on whether stopping a song midway through makes you more likely to get it stuck in your head? if not then why are psych departments wasting their time on other stuff
"hypertrophy of conscience" is quite a phrase
"self-deception" is a real phenomenon but a confused concept. X cannot deceive X, for any ordinary use of the word "deceive". part of X can deceive another part of X tho, at which point we might ask why it doesn't trust the other part...
one of my least favorite feelings is when someone else is excited about some new possibility in a way that feels to me like part of their long-time stuck patterns like man I don't wanna dampen your enthusiasm but it's hard for me to get into it
wsà we ep rlwiw il
somebody help me budget this my family is dying
Retweeted @IvanVendrov
POV: your tweet was insufficiently meta