"sounds like the ophanim but instead of eyes it's mouths"
October 2025
@samhbarton I see your industrial megacomplex printer and raise you the printer that transcends dimensions and corrupts reality ghuntley.com/ideas/
@utotranslucence yes
@utotranslucence baby's first tweet it looks kinda like coastal salish, the indigenous language from the vancouver area
this grokking faith project is coming along AWESOMELY here's a teaser of a relevant fragment, from a recent Scott Alexander post reviewing a sequence on Trance.
also it relates hugely to @Morphenius's recent developments on subjective science and reflexivity morphenius.substack.com/p/subjective-s…
I mean a method that doesn't take O(N) work on my part. I don't see a way to export/print/download/copy [all/each] of the doc tabs as one step. if you see one lmk. x.com/HephaistosF/st…
some things that seem to be bottlenecked on time are actually bottlenecked on courage
also courage is often bottlenecked on clarity
although also
@HephaistosF 😂 no but I'm sure some people feel that way about it
@tnorthcutt no, it's about the desyncedness, and the feeling of being expected to pretend I'm also excited like if they just said "wtf somehow I'm back with my abusive ex, hope I manage to learn my lesson this time" when previous times they'd been naive & excited, that'd be huge progress!
@liquidprismata huh say more? and like, tie it in to self-deception? (also how old is this child? I have a 13mo and am always curious about others-in-my-circles' calibration of roughly what ages kids can understand things)
@asemic_horizon oof. well, maybe you need more clarity... about the difference between thinking "I can't do this" and in fact being unable to do something?
huh, the logic for why the metaprotocol must exist is the same as the logic for why the supercooperation cluster must exist
always be opening
overheard: "you are the same ream of duct tape as I am"
when the method of solving the problem is subject to the very problem the method is attempting to solve
the state of interpersonal rupture might be almost intrinsically characterized by a quality of confusion
this being a group of humans is a guest house
"your job, kind sir, is..." — me getting Claude to go through 3 yearlong bank statements to find the highest individual balances as well as highest total balances.
if you're having a community that's aiming to become trustworthy / high-trust, it inherently cannot work by assuming that somebody has already figured it all out
this, so much this follow me for tips and insights on how to adopt such a stance
nothing is completely ineffable nothing is completely effable some things are just orders of magnitude harder to eff than others
it would be cool if you could include custom text on the page where someone requests access to a google doc. you could direct them to a now-published blog post, or tell them what info they should include to get access, or...
huh, this 1.5yo tweet from my first stabs at grokking faith is so off to my new view: faith is precisely about things where there is no one correct referent (although there may be better and worse ones) and you need to choose and commit and not look back anyway
1.5y ago, shortly before the above tweet, I began in earnest a project of grokking the nature of faith as deeply as I grok trust. this tweet was one of my first moves: x.com/Malcolm_Ocean/…
this tweet was another public move in the direction: x.com/Malcolm_Ocean/…
oh and also this one!
watch this space 😉
@XLTREEE @AngularOcean haha yeah, both American citizens living out of USA, and foreign citizens recently moved to America (like me) have to file the FBAR form to report on non-US bank accounts & securities
@lolalucxy penguin down slope sometimes DOES behave approximately like a frictionless cylinder tho! (but I see your point! still, it begs for a single example where Aumann's theorem was a useful first approximation of what happened in practice!)
@RomeoStevens76 @tasshinfogleman okay great thanks to @jdublikesnacks I have now found it, but I didn't write down what I intended to do with it once I found it *sigh*. at least now I know I can find it again
me: no such thing as a non-real word. don't be cucked by big dictionary Claude: right, "Enactually" is perfectly cromulent I love the word "cromulent" so much. 🥰
I bet there's a particular kind of pleasure to be a wind tunnel engineer blowing your nose and exquisitely tuning the shape of the nostril for a perfect blow
I'll happily push the 'have insight' button even if I'm not sure it's hooked up to anything
one of the most simple ways to practice respecting your own distrust (NNTD) is to journal about the people in your life and what you think their motives/intentions might be, that they would disagree with (& plan not to show anybody)
cheating on your concept of your partner with your actual partner
just found this old photo
I spent 3 days on a silent retreat so that my mind could generate this meme for you, hope you like it
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF 🦋♥️
Retweeted @tasshinfogleman
privately writing about, journaling and reflecting on our experiences of other people and social reality, registering…
@HephaistosF huh. what do you think you'd be like if you had had the childhood you had but [somehow] didn't start doing this as a preteen?
Retweeted @HephaistosF
Here is a good decision theory, for the kind of guy who just read this and said "what the hell is a decision theory?" - d…
Retweeted @JessePeltan
On average, we require more area to *use* electricity than solar takes to produce it. This is true even in our densest ci…
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF ah yeah, nice thread I think I'm more pointing at pretty basic differences in motive, not full-on to the level of "is a dick". like noticing "maybe my dad is [unknown to him] trying to reassure himself he has useful things to say, more than he's actually attempting to help me"
@FrankaMedic eh, I mean all of them; point is not to limit yourself to ones that they'd agree with. but tweet-length made it seem like it was only the disagreeable ones
@bostromsutopia yeah I generally take trust as being an implicit goal in service of other things (such as cooperation) but nonetheless it is a common and in some sense necessary goal
Retweeted @tasshinfogleman
adopting the belief "everything everyone does makes sense to them from their perspective even if I don't yet understan…
@mykola @tasshinfogleman @DiamonDie I would say simply feel into whether the motivation they articulate makes sense to you and changes your sense of what their motivation is if it does, it does. if it doesn't, it doesn't. you don't have to think they're lying to not buy what they say
Retweeted @metamitya
why [[treechat]]
@ulokwa oh huh, maybe this works on mobile but there's still no way on desktop? (inferring from the "3 dots")
@soiled_plants2 put on the right song
@EchoOfJesus not the literal bricks but beyond that it sort of amounts to the same imv: if you think the denomination is the authority, then who is the authority on what the denomination says? some guy at some local church? the catholic pope? the Orthodox orthodox?
@cube_flipper this has @eshear vibes tho it's probably too early for this kind of thing to become part of @softmaxresearch's programs :P
is it still the case that I can't link to @RoamResearch pages by page title? like roamresearch.com/#/app/graphnam… buy-in]] such an obvious thing to want for public references
me to the person I'm talking to: "hang on, I need to write something down" me writing in my journal: "do I even want to be in this convo? hmm"
is it still the case that I can't link to @RoamResearch pages by page title? like roamresearch.com/#/app/graphname/[[page-title]] such an obvious thing to want for public references
icymi dunbar actually had many numbers not just one number
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
Nothing went wrong. Nothing has gone wrong. Nothing continues to go wrong. Nothing is perpetually going wrong. Nothing i…
is there an app for distributed research experiments? ppl post study designs, get feedback, lock in a methodology. then others can sign up to do intervention & report results. might not pass peer-review but it'd be great for sincere curious citizens to answer real Qs we have
such a joy participating in the convo w @visakanv-from 11-years-ago (also Visa I'm writing rn about how convos are alive and @tasshinfogleman said you'd been tweeting about this (which is how I came to be reading your word-vomits tagged "conversation") ...link me if you want!)
@visakanv @tasshinfogleman this 10y post also a delight visakanv.com/1000/0412-on-c…
@davidmanheim imagine that we're doing it for fun and our own learning, not because we want to be legible to institutions imagine that we already aren't licensed by these institutions and have no desire to be
@davidmanheim like I agree that those existing incentives are not going to help make this app, but the existing taxi medal incentives didn't make uber happen and the existing uni/school incentives didn't make khanacademy happen and the existing...
@RomeoStevens76 yeah I came across this image again going through old drafts and opening the one titled "Who needs to be kept on the outside of your ego boundary"
tag yourself I'm Outside Events
@postmindfuck yep, the Oct 10-13 Berkeley one here: meditatewithtucker.com/group-retreats/
so curious if the 6 people who have bookmarked this have done so because they intend to use it as pointing out instructions later or because they want to use it as a funny reply-QT
it does seem based on a quick google that I'm basically the first person to use this word enactually (a few other people use it in a place where I'm not sure they didn't mean some other word)
also I have a thread with probably over a hundred examples of words that are not in the spellcheck dictionary (despite many of them being very common, not new coinings or conjugations by me)
Thread · Words that are definitely words but my browser dictionary rejects · 1 of 219 tweets
"enactually" is a word (I mostly stopped this thread because I switched computers and so my browser spellcheck got reset and I couldn't just use it as the source of new-word-ness, but it was a fun game for some months)
hmm I want a micro-app that I can plug a hotkey into (with keyboard maestro) and it'll send a prompt to an LLM based on my clipboard, and then put the result in my clipboard. instant summarize-link or other process (custom prompt per hotkey) #idea
wait can keyboard maestro just run API calls? maybe I could basically write it directly in KM. or it could be a simple script, not a whole mac widget, because it doesn't need a UI
10mins later and cursor is implementing this. we'll see how it goes. vibecoding is so addictive lol, I was trying to be writing/editing.
also @AnthropicAI if your api doesn't already support just "gimme the latest opus" (and requires instead specifying a number) then you are being very silly given how often you deprecate models cursor definitely thinks you don't support this, and is hardcoding instead
@AnthropicAI okay boom done, <2h I had been hoping to spend more like 15mins on this but KM is hard and both Cursor and I are pretty unfamiliar with how to write good macros for complex stuff like this github.com/malcolmocean/k…
two LLM summaries of John Vervaeke's 2012 Relevance Realization paper. the first is the default one—book report vibes—and the second one is using my custom prompt which helps me focus on the ideas not the writer or the fact that there is an argument being made or whatever
based on the cake/buttzap principle, LLMs should have much more difficulty solving problems that are well-known to be unsolved, than problems that most people have never thought of
Thread · An LLM prompt for compressing writing into its core thesis · 11 of 12 tweets
LLM prompt I use many times a week: write a 1-paragraph summary of the core thesis of this writing, not as "this essay presents" / no reference to the author or the piece being summarized or "the thesis". 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! ...but don't refer to "the implications" either)
LLMs are very good at summarizing but by default they interpret "summarize" as more like a book report rather than a purposeful compression. they end up commenting on the writing as writing, or hitting each sub-point without attempting to convey the overall thrust
probably due to being trained on a lot of both random internet crap and on guess-the-teacher's-password homework. what are the purposes of such pieces? - content marketing - dumbing ideas down - getting people to read the original - convincing someone you read the original
I had to add quite a lot of caveats to get Claude to stop referring to the summary as a summary / adding outside text! like I had "no reference to the author or the piece being summarized" but it would say "the thesis" 😂 but now it treats the ideas directly, and it's great!
this is likely to be quite helpful for using LLMs to summarize other pieces of writing, which is a very useful use for them so that you can get on with writing your own takes!
before I added " ...but don't refer to "the implications" either" it would of course often say "the implications are profound:". now often I'm having it summarizing something whose implications ARE profound... but that phrase has got LLM smell, and also distracts
also what's fun is that with popular enough ideas or books or essays, you don't even have to put in the full text! you can just say "...the core thesis of Michael Levin's work" and it'll lay it all out! here's it compared with a simple "write a 1-paragraph summary" prompt
I wanted to speed up my loop on being able to run this prompt, so I built a system with keyboard maestro that lets me with one hotkey turn whatever's on my clipboard into a "core thesis" - and it'll fetch a url's content, or can just use a phrase copied from something I'm reading
I have a loose intention soon to take a bunch of works that have been influential for me, as well as some of my own writing or other unpublished pieces, run them through this, and then put 1-2 dozen summaries into a context window to get an LLM that's more on my wavelength
oh you can also do this with a conversation you've HAD with an LLM, if it lays out a case for something! in most convos this won't be relevant but sometimes it will be.
btw @aphercotropist I keep thinking of your work on removal of self when I look at the contrast between the book report summaries and the core thesis summaries. one of the main differences (aside from density) is that mine treats the ideas directly rather than referring TO them
faith as the willingness to leap through low-fitness territory when you sense a higher attractor basin ahead
wait macos v26 is available? how did apple jump from 15 to 26 all at once? did they accidentally increment both digits instead of just the ones place, and nobody noticed til the announcement, so they decided to run with it?
"Impregnating someone who is the best way to get the latest Flash player" - my keyboard's autocomplete
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
LLM prompt I use many times a week: write a 1-paragraph summary of the core thesis of this writing, not as "this essay p…
@_joshd @xuenay I'm sure that helps make it denser etc, but I still find the stuff about the author or the text annoying/distracting. I wanna see the IDEA, not the discussion of the idea example w @Meaningness—see how the quoted core-thesis one gets straight to "Reality"
@aphercotropist I ran it on your thread 4 times. curious if you notice any particular effect. it seemed like my prompt was more helpful than just "summarize as the author" and I didn't see much difference when I added "...as the author..." to my prompt. but maybe you'll have keener eyes than I.
@gojomo @aphercotropist tried your suggestion on this thread of @aphercotropist's that I did a few other related "as the author" experiments on. I notice we got the phrase "what I call" which is a different kind of non-withdrawal of the self! (this is just one sample; I wouldn't take the difference
Thread · An LLM prompt for compressing writing into its core thesis · 1 of 12 tweets
ah nice, this is great yeah maybe the concept of "summary" is just too fraught! mine seems to do okay though, and there is something about "core thesis" that feels a bit less about just "restructure the info" curious for others' existing approaches, also!
man my cover image is a year old at this point but it is still such a good sweep: my city, my love for baby/family, and the sunrise. lfg.
@meekaale @xuenay 🫡 I feel like we're still lacking so much tech for discovering each others' reusable/composable prompts. like that kind of thing could be built into the main apps. hell, claude.ai could even hash every prompt and notice when you've used the same instructions for different
finally sorted stuff out to get my first payout from gumroad! I now have a few hundred dollars that I made selling this ebook. it's not a ton of money but it's still really cool and makes me think it would be good for more people to be self-publishing ebooks
this is total loser behavior on facebook's part. we don't want your dumpster-fire social network we just want to talk to the people we've connected with through it. but we will leave if you become too fucking annoying. be magnanimous instead find a way to excite people about fb
do you have an LLM prompt you re-use regularly? what is it?
graffiti on former bunkers is moss on fallen logs
someone else may have a problem with you, but that doesn't mean there IS a problem with you in some sense divorced from them being there to have it
maybe corporations need a confession booth where they can acknowledge their sins without that opening up liability
audible: let us know why you canceled me: it was charles taylor
Retweeted @richardludlow
also maybe we need a jesus for corporations. some way that they can repent and renew and be saved and shift to serving the glory of god rather than mammon tall order but idk man original jesus was also a tall order so might as well pray big
@agrippasoft it's... not so much about the dollar value... it's more like I have now had my first kiss and I'm like "wow this feels great, more people should fall in love" and like, the lips are already right there—various friends of mine have long unpublished gdocs that could be for sale
zoom has been storing this file in their cloud for the last 5 years
I really like the phrase 'give it a go' to point at the version of 'try' that isn't about effort but is just about, well, the other thing. we don't have a good unambiguous single-word verb for it afaict.
tried to get claude's help with this, and man in some ways LLMs were better before they had access to search (and had the idea that they should search for answers)
at first I thought Claude was ultra-inclined to search because I asked "what are those again?" (implying some previous context, although I just meant I'd read them and was trying to recall them) but I removed that and it still search. it switched to drive after I turned off web
Retweeted @eigenrobot
everyone is reading A Secular Age now and my wife bought a copy without asking whether I bought it ten years ago so now we…
@eigenrobot part of how I came to be getting the audiobook today is that I mentioned the book to my mum and she said to send her the link then asked if I figured the audiobook would work since she has a lot of projects to do this winter
Retweeted @eshear
The universe is not omnipotent or omniscient, the universe is merely an omnibenevolent optimal learner. It is making the fewest…
@eshear yep this is also my religion (below I describe it as omnipotent but in a limited sense)
@justalexoki I hope that part of this involves digging up old amazing lindy content that you'll obviously want to read today based on what you posted today not just finding the hottest tweet-just-posted for everybody
some outfit pics for a friend who wanted his style to go more in my direction. keywords: wizard mars semiformal style fashion clothing outfits flared
some of these I bought, some I didn't. ironically the main full-body shots I have of outfits are at clothing stores, because otherwise without a mirror it's hard to take a pic of my full outfit!
@davidmanheim I've been wanting to make better systems for chaining alt-identity prompts like this I have a system for talking with an LLM in which it can make sub-calls to another LLM (that has no outer context), which I guess would mostly handle this although it's a lot of steps
@Lari_island wait what?
@SpiveeWorks I feel you. you can turn off web search btw
@enolan nice, this is good. I like the collaborative vibe
@aphercotropist hmm? like years ago they were trying to get people off facebook dot com and into messenger? and that bothered you?
@SurenVynn ⬜️🌌
@_joshd @xuenay @Meaningness huh. still has claude's 2k word system prompt tho, whereas mine which is an API call does not oh and yours had extended thinking mode on — probably the biggest difference tbh
@Shmoooooosh I'd love to see an example of that, including the kind of context where you use it
@vibepreserver haha hilarious. yeah I spent a lot of time looking at your socks through mostly-closed eyes haha
@davidmanheim yeah the question of how to bootstrap is an interesting one. that's a good point.
Retweeted @majamediaco
every object is layered with secrets, and all it takes to see them is the right kind of looking just by nudging attention…
@HephaistosF sure! but for many people, even noticing that dad is has different motives than he says he does is something that will require the kind of journalling that I describe (can eventually tell the dad but may have trouble getting the thoughts to consciousness first if that's step 2)
@HephaistosF guessing that you implicitly underestimate the degree to which most people don't experience these hypocrisies be glaringly obvious & unignorable (like, on some level they experience it as subtle distrust, but they are running strategies that involve not being conscious of them)
@lolalucxy yeah I'm all for that. and agreed that if you're in more like a scientific context with a shared sense of how to go about measuring things, then you can approach it more like this!
suppose I wanted to buy a domain to make a single-page site that explains a neologism. what would be a good tld? unfortunately '.word' isn't a thing
oh man I so wanna try this youtube.com/watch?v=JsPIzR…
what is the deal with people snapping their hand forward (not just down) after a salute? I keep seeing people (mostly *not* military folk) do it but I've been unable to find any reference to it being an official way any country does it, nor some other origin (eg hollywood)
just came across this glorious call to arms by @meditationstuff from years ago, which was in my gdrive where I had formatted it for printing (to share with the people I lived with at the time) I understand the stuff about meditation & fragmentary will better than I did in 2019
@Oszillate I'm thinking .fyi or even .xyz
@shitpost9000 idk which you mean but yes
@Reu_nathaniel get at it! it's long, but like many long books, even the first chapter or two can change your view
Retweeted @made_in_cosmos
@made_in_cosmos quite a POV!
@sympatheticopp excited for Creatine 2: Brain Boogaloo
you can just thank people
(from @tasshinfogleman's post on fundraising) tasshin.com/blog/learn-you…
is there a term for like, "make the best possible version of a plan under multiple different assumptions, before committing to any of the paths"?
I say this phrase to myself probably once or twice a month in my journalling. Today it occurred to me that it's very @tasshinfogleman-flavored. ILUUGTIWI
Retweeted @EigenGender
compromise position on trans children: they can access hrt but they are not allowed to speak to any trans person over the…
yeah turns out that it's at least as important for things to SEEM fair & just as it is for them to BE fair & just some outcome that was optimal for everybody but seems otherwise creates a whole mess of problems
@EigenGender sent a tweet to a friend brainstormed fundraising pathways for getting more distribution for my writing texted with a friend/colleague about work/life updates, mission ate some chocolate put some laundry in (on which note probably time to move it, bye)
@EigenGender oh and prayed. earlier today I did some day/week/month planning, worked on a song arrangement in logic pro, went for a walk, read a bit of A Secular Age, ate some food
"free" as in energy
being *able* to honestly sing Battle Hymn of the Republic as you march to war doesn't automatically mean your cause is noble, let alone holy. but if you *can't*, well...
@_catwu I'm stuck in an infinite loop, plz help
all of the answers to this so far don't capture the spirit (or precision) of what I'm looking for like it's not about planning for contingencies or scenarios out of your control. it's about getting clear on what the maximum upside is, for things *within* your control
@vivaldibrowser is there no way to use a single hotkey to make just the website be fullscreen? I see ctrl-cmd-f which makes the WINDOW fullscreen with no chrome, but then I have to use separate hotkeys to hide sidebar, status bar, address bar, which is just too many
Retweeted @eshear
Jesus loves you, and he wants you to regularize your recommendation systems and automated assistants. Overfitting is the sin of…
@eshear yeah I did some solid hours of this at a multi-day meditation retreat a couple weeks ago and at first I thought I hadn't learned anything but then I realized I have a new "dislike something but not get worked up about it" move and I'm like "wow this is great"
guy who has the ability to walk through walls, floors, etc, and only uses it to get places slightly faster
quick! notice a way in which your current experience is pleasurable
@vibepreserver lowkey why don't you upgrade your vibe fourier device to handle multidimensional jhanas
@kushaal4 hm kind of the opposite. it's more about choosing the option BASED on having first fleshed out the best possible version of each option but you flesh out those best possible versions while being agnostic about which one you'll choose
Retweeted @tasshinfogleman
non-naive world peace
@tasshinfogleman mmm. I love @dthorson's podcast and others though where it's *not* an interview but more of a dialogue/drop-in/emergent-exploration
@vividvoid here's my lover <3
lowkey disturbed at the loss for our collective learning process, by the fact that so many questions get asked and answered in private LLM chats now, NOT on public Q&A sites or twitter. real opportunity here.
information wants to be free, and this means not just that it'll tend to sneak onto the public internet but also that it will tend to ooze out of the cracks in your knowledge management system
they make these baby smocks, which are so good for avoiding messes when babies/toddlers are learning to eat... but I always put off cleaning them. now I'm wondering if you could make a compostable version out of the same thing compost bags are made of (but thicker probably)
