subway stations should totally have mask dispensers. KN95s for $1 each, epic markup, you'd make a bunch of money and make the trains safer. could even pay by tapping your transit card. busy bus stops too, since busses are much less well-ventilated
November 2025
idea: book that is linked to a city and you have to walk a particular route through that city in order to read it. the pages are turned by your walking
I just swapped out the word 'respects' in a draft with 'understands and accounts for' and honestly that's not far from a straight synonym
disturbing to me that @Spotify just greys out half the tracks of a favorite album without the slightest accounting for why "you will own nothing and be happy" look buddy
one of the sanest things I've ever read about trans stuff. takes the science as object. takes the politics as object. tianmu.org/Tianmu+Theosop…
if, while you're compartmentalized, part of you makes an agreement with someone else (implicit or explicit) then if we see that agreement as having agency, part of that it will use its agency to do is to keep you compartmentalized so you keep the agreement
suppose you're compartmentalized. some parts of you are running the show. and they make an agreement w someone else (implicit/explicit) ↳ that agreement (viewed as having agency) will tend to act to keep you in your current compartments, so that you keep the agreement
@colluraj you're a vending machine guy? I had no idea
Panic! At The Disco was like "Build God And Then We'll Talk" and man it's been twenty years and I still haven't finished building God but I'm making progress and anyway hopefully soon we'll get to talk
@ulkar_aghayeva hmm not the same but it reminds me of how supposedly Disneyland has speakers in each region that play the regional soundtrack, and as you walk between, they have in-between soundtracks that basically crossfade
conversations are alive a convo has a life of their own it has a mind of its own and it may or may not care about its participants' well-being malcolmocean.com/2025/11/conver…
Retweeted @hermittoday
hypothetically: is it possible to re-learn a fetter? not that anyone realistically wants to, but it seems like finding the…
@hermittoday great subjective science research question cc @Morphenius morphenius.substack.com/p/subjective-s…
there's a common misconception that agreements are made between people, but to a large extent they're made between subsystems within people, and then the interpersonal system tends to try to prop up the power of the subsystems that comprise it malcolmocean.com/2025/11/coalit…
quick! notice something that you know that you've been pretending you don't know
Retweeted @eshear
@Matthewagi Yes, but when you’re receiving the message, keep listening!
guy who keeps doing acid and learning a lot each time:
@FioraStarlight @eshear may my ideas die in my stead
@DuncanHaldane depends on the message I think
@itinerantfog @cube_flipper @108 it's good and pairs nicely I had it on kinda in the background while reading the article and it adds texture to the sense of the strategic turn-based gameplay nature of football
@hermittoday the important thing is that I've found a way to feel superior to both
Retweeted @TylerAlterman
I forgave reality I noticed that I held a bunch of unconscious beef *with reality itself* for being too much and also no…
really glad they got sonnet 4.5 out before sunsetting 3.6. I wasn't that into the personalities of 3.7 or 4 for my purposes. still sad about the sunsetting tho
the meta-protocol: what do you do... when the protocols you have are not enough or when you realize you don't have shared protocols in the first place? malcolmocean.com/2021/11/meta-p…
lol this just came up on the midjourney.com (did you know they have a website now, not just a discord?) Explore section, that shows you the top generations from today HYPER-REALISTIC VINCENT VAN GOGH STARRY NIGHT SELFIE
provisional new image generation workflow: 1. write initial prompt 2. iterate with chatgpt to generate an image that has the correct composition, since it is good at following instructions 3. put that into midjourney as an image prompt, with the prompt again, to get good vibes
Retweeted @connormcmk
make your team smarter with sync.negationgame.com
@justalexoki I do if I get enough asterisks
@p0lar_fawn I have not yet made it there (my daughter is 15mo) but I've already found the book No Bad Kids helpful for orienting to her emerging toddlerness and independent will and stuff
Retweeted @hermittoday
philanthropy done from a place of guilt tends to backfire because it selects for ideas effective at *alleviating guilt* in…
@TylerAlterman totally. and it's not like, a static fixed thing, but just like, your own best sense, given everything you know about you and the world, of where you fit. obviously your biology would do something different if you were 500 years ago, but you're here so don't deny what's good here
@TylerAlterman this addendum made me think of @tasshinfogleman
Retweeted @TylerAlterman
This has been a big revelation in my 30s: don’t resist the life I’m wired for Yes, it’s possible to change the wiring,…
@TylerAlterman you can get drugless ecigs! I learned how to blow smoke rings with them, which was a lot of fun either 100% inert just-flavor ones, or ~✨fancy✨~ essential oil aromatherapy vapes like monq.com (which are not much more expensive than cheap flavors so)
Retweeted @TylerAlterman
“Please do not read this…if you are overly susceptible to idolatry and/or True Belief. Ask your doctor if True Belief is…
Yes, you all are understood.
the meta-protocol: what do you do... when the protocols you have are not enough or when you realize you don't have shared protocols in the first place?
chakras but for the internet
@RomeoStevens76 I parsed this as "the people who made it to teacher are the people for whom the instructions worked, but that's not most people"
fascinating. naming a font and also just repeating the short phrase I wanted to quote seemed to help midjourney quite a bit (spot edit on patch) previous ones were mostly "ND" or "NTD" or "NNID" or something, but this one was 3/4 "NNTD" as desired. "economica font" didn't work.
I look at my hypers, and I see they need sweeping still my guitar gently weeps
I found a new way to deconstruct intersubjectivity, framed as interface modes rather than objective/subjective. ideas for names for them? ideally the terms are intuitive & memetically sticky, but ALSO feel like a distinct new thing not just common already-used phrases
wife: whatever. that's not the hill I'm going to die on me: that's fine, I'm not going to slay you on that hill
in 1862, "see for yourself" eclipsed "see for myself" and yet we are still unconvinced
And this is Gibson's point: You don't really... You don't see colors and shapes... What you see are affordances.
annoyed that we still don't have good AI workflows for things the LLMs can totally solve, like 'read all the transcripts of every video I've watched of vervaeke and find the one where he says to someone 'I'm not an idealist'
the masculine urge to be surrounded by people who share your bespoke esoteric jargon so you can have weird new precise thoughts together
@IvanVendrov yeah it's a fascinating question! I don't have a better theory than yours. I'm also very curious about the etiology of the rise in both since 2005... the internet allows people to see for themselves more (SORTA)?
help I'm trapped in an @OpenAI support email factory (cc @viemccoy @jasonkwon @alexeyguzey)
Retweeted @cube_flipper
i'm a panpsychist, but i am also amenable to consciousness working a bit like this (impressionistic representation). awar…
@visakanv so stoked for this
@OpenAI @viemccoy @jasonkwon @alexeyguzey (in all seriousness we have an annoying domain verification mess and need a small amount of human help to fix it)
if you remain uninformed, then no information has occurred
in other words, "information" is not a thing transmitted but the event itself
@tasshinfogleman let's have it! I already have some sense but I'd like to see what you write
I wanted to see how short of an input could get ordinary claude dot ai to do a BBS simulator based on the infinite backrooms ALMO, and... in this instance it decided to *code me up* a BBS simulator complete with easter eggs! @repligate @AndyAyrey play: claude.ai/public/artifac…
@repligate @AndyAyrey also this time I tagged in @eshear as an influence as well ("emergence cartographer") and turned the hyperstition level up to 3e8, and the results were relatively high-quality terminal hyperstition, plus non-manic fourth-wall breaking at the end (4.5?!?) claude.ai/share/87d92b72…
@JimDuxhette say more? not sure I believe in belief
via @vidhster
@vidhster Little Blue by Jacob Collier (feat. Brandi Carlile) has been this for me lately I add songs to an Earworms playlist in spotify, which creates a fun timeline of when certain songs came into focus - including sometimes ones I first heard years ago youtube.com/watch?v=Z2zLSk…
@vidhster Augustine nailed this one
@simon_ohler instead of paying separately or having people venmo each other, one person treats and then someone else treats next time settling up is cutting off
An intentional metaphor is unnatural. Nature makes metaphors. If you’re writing fiction, you are making nature.
Retweeted @IvanVendrov
just published a new essay "The Transformer and the Hash" - on how we need to update political science to deal with the in…
@IvanVendrov our school learned the last verse! this poem sprung into my mind a few weeks ago, I forget why. might've been a sunset or a cemetery.
what's up with all these MacOS apps asking for this "find devices on local networks" permission? I've had like half a dozen before these two today. what's it for? what event prompts it to pop up out of nowhere. new tahoe thing? what gives?
Thread · Corporations as black boxes and the incentive to build accountability sinks
taking seriously the idea of corporations as black boxes... the og Stafford Beer idea that they can be organized in such a way as to perform actions that not only do none of their constituent parts (eg people) understand, but none of them even WANT
it's fairly obvious that it doesn't make sense to try to hold a person's cells or organs responsible for what they do as a whole person… but also in the extreme of death the cells kind of DO reap these consequences whether via malnutrition or revenge or state-sanctioned violence
the fact that key parts of corporations have nearly unbounded upside from their corporation succeeding (profit, founders getting rich) but very bounded downside not only to failure but unethical behavior… means that there's an incentive to set up accountability sinks
(I think? Need to think this through more. It's obviously a source of much innovation that individuals can get rich, and we do also obviously want to limit liability at least somewhat. So maybe part of the issue is just incentivizing the outer structure)
Meanwhile it seems absolutely plausible to me that with enough cybernetics insight, a country could actually come up with laws that would ban the most egregious forms of social organization that cause accountability sinks and other pathological corporate behavior.
Obviously lots of issues to this, from deception (same structures exist but are now illegible) and general draconianism or limits on innovation and play. Clearly we DON'T want to just have all corps have exactly the same structures
@dsquareddigest proposes in The Unaccountability Machine a first step for stopping the leveraged buyout approach: an entity buying out a living company would have to guarantee the latter's debts. it still allows limited liability where it helps, but not this hack
for more bespoke Stafford Beer remixes, check out this thread of mine on POSIWID & exaptation (POSIWID = "the purpose of a system is what it does")
@connerdelights that makes sense but also that makes no fucking sense
@happy_sort what I mean is a service into which I can enter the above quoted phrase, and it will solve it for me, without me taking further steps also youtube search is trash and lies to me saying I've only watched a dozen vervaeke vids when the real answer is >60
Retweeted @exgenesis
mma for therapy modalities, who’s building this?
@exgenesis I'm pretty sure I heard of something like this but I can't recall now what it was
@IvanVendrov the cosmos but conceived of as an open-ended process that nobody else can define for you perfectly (although they are also part of it)
@IvanVendrov I recommend playing around with surrendering to lots of different things! I wrote an essay about basically-this just last week, with a bunch of examples eg pray to your bedroom or your body, and ask it how you can serve it malcolmocean.com/2025/11/you-ca…
Retweeted @IvanVendrov
what's a good thing to surrender to for someone just getting into surrendering
Retweeted @TylerAlterman
My reaction to reading this was "omg, this is fantastic – I don't think this has ever been put more clearly for thinkcel…
@TylerAlterman yeah I love this one so much. I kept trying to find it again and failed until I plugged it into an AI search, which was pretty cool
Retweeted @utotranslucence
PSA for people who get sick often: you may find it helpful to try this wacky protocol from the 60s to make your sickn…
@utotranslucence the article that is the source of the protocol btw perfecthealthdiet.com/2010/09/fighti…
15mo baby just said an unmistakeable "goodnight dada" during the "wave before taken off to bed" ritual 🥺 she repeated it a couple of times!
also yesterday and today she said "shoe/shoes" a bunch of times but that's not QUITE as exciting 👟
these are some of the first distinct words! there's been times she's repeated sounds before (including @Morphenius explaining that the plant in our living room is a "philodendron") but there's a new level of something here and I love it
Retweeted @utotranslucence
I’ve had a toddler for all of three weeks, and afaict toddlers’ desires are only incompatible with property rights and…
Retweeted @utotranslucence
submission to a sufficiently loving authority is indistinguishable from freedom
@sirtobiaswade @utotranslucence but it feels so gooooood
I want a service that's like @otter_ai except I can transcribe things however long I want and I just pay whatever rate per hour of transcription, rather than having to `ffmpeg -ss 1:30:00` to split a recording into two chunks I'm not a medium-sized team, I'm a guy w long chats
is it because it's too costly to run LLM queries on the longer transcripts? that seems unlikely given the compute spent transcribing already, but if so maybe you could just have people have to pay to have _LLM chats_ with long transcripts
anyway, I get you have your niche, and you make most of your money from biz plans, but like... this upsell sucks and feels bad, and makes me want to leeeaaaave. you're already capping my total minutes at a number that is not very high! why do you have to cap per-transcript too?
looking for my own blog post on google and this incredible AI summary claims I agree with myself
Jess and I just remembered that our wedding afterparty included improv geopolitics shitposting between a large cuddle puddle and a small cuddle puddle (mostly between @utotranslucence & @JimmyRis). so good.
everyone is being as collaborative as they feel it's safe/apt to be, and thereby their distrust and dysfunctional patterns ARE what's showing up to be collaborated with
Retweeted @schisofrenia
the way you guys treat me it’s like you don’t even care that im a lower dimensional cross section of a higher dimensional…
Retweeted @vividvoid
I almost never talk about politics, but: if Trump is bisexual, there are three things you need to understand. 1) This is tot…
new site page: malcolmocean.com/gallery-of-pos… which shows my posts based on the preview image that they have ...given how much arguably-silly effort I put into making my posts have good preview images, it's about time I showcase them!
btw claude code one-shotted this. no errors, just a couple of style tweaks where I was too vague. I've done a few lovely wordpress backend tweaks without having to have a single thought about php or wordpress config
now if only I could deploy my wordpress backend via git instead of via ftp 🤔💭 @wpengine has a thing called "GitPush" but I don't trust it since it won't clone - it wants me to download my site as a zip before pushing. like wtf. what's even the point of git at that point?
@wpengine also like this post has a cool image but I really wanted an image that somehow had the alive-convo to be puppeting the people in it, and the LLMs couldn't figure out how to make that malcolmocean.com/2025/11/conver…
Retweeted @tasshinfogleman
ending with a metta phrase, a prayer for all beings goes hard
@MarioEmblem_2 took me awhile to publish it but I have now put forward my convincing argument against this theory malcolmocean.com/2025/11/its-in…
@myhandle Here to Learn CUDA
an organisation that is doing fractal alignment must itself fractally align
@JimmyRis @utotranslucence right but like the whole thing was about cuddling, also, somehow it was magnficent if someone were going to stage it at a theatre I would 100% buy tickets
@houshuang @otter_ai I tried tana but quit after 3mins when I realized that it can't do multiline nodenames (like roam) or multiline notes/comments (like workflowy) infinitrees are great but sometimes I need multiline prose in my notes
@samhbarton @otter_ai I mean if you have your own mini app you can auto split+merge
haven't read this paper but it's an interesting idea for a different political compass: left/right pro/anti-establishment "Partisan and Ideological Identities versus Anti-Establishment Orientations"
new @mattyglesias article "Bipartisan Outrage Over Epstein Is Just What America Needs" send it bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
me: "so when the sand gets to the bottom, mama will be back from fetching the ca—" my baby: SHAKE... TIME..?!
focus on what you want to see more of
nice, midjourney understands tibetan
huh. if parents were 100% perfect at inferring kids' needs, the kids would never learn how to intentionally communicate like there'd be no gradient there
@Una_poppy true. it's a pretty incoherent hypothetical like how could there not be a gradient there?
@mherreshoff yeah but midjourney is about as bad at getting the details right in my english prompts too so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@mherreshoff also (tho I guess this is the esoteric view) the sky-dancers are sort of metaphorical, like all of reality is the sky-dancers here's what the english phrase gives. these are pretty dope
@mherreshoff here's chatgpt's much more literal but still mandala-esque version
@tasshinfogleman if it's too pixel-art for you, you might like satisfactory which is similar but first-person 3D (and it's not just 3D art but gameplay—you can build into the sky) (unless the ugly aesthetics is "factory" in which case you may need something else)
Retweeted @vividvoid
My particular spiritual path has been a strange combination of severely alienated karma, anarchism and personal sovereignty,…
@TylerAlterman Leonard Cohen's 1984 song Hallelujah went almost entirely unnoticed for a decade until John Cale's 1991 cover inspired Jeff Buckley's 1994 cover and then was featured in Shrek. utterly critical piece of cultural infra
I love/hate the hilarious absurd autogenerated Business Team Action Insight Reports that otter generates from my Not Business Meetings
I've been part of two different nascent field-building conversations in the last few months and it's such a cool energy. (scale-invariant coalitional dynamics w @RichardMCNgo & @IvanVendrov, and memetics w @DefenderOfBasic, @Morphenius, & @workflowsauce)
I feel it'd be good to say more about why the energy is cool. what to say. it feels very obvious ("say the obvious" -me) there's a feeling of some life yearning to come into being. the word "nascent" feels very literal—fields of inquiry are convos, and: malcolmocean.com/2025/11/conver…
> When in room, do as the roommates do I'd forgotten til I was re-visiting my blog posts in my new gallery-view just now, that I made this hilarious preview image for this blog post about couchsurfing (the waves/circle are the Malcolm Ocean logogram) malcolmocean.com/2016/07/things…
a conclusion can be wrong, but someone's *thinking PROCESS* cannot be wrong
found an essay comparing LLMs to mentalists/psychics, who seem to be able to read your mind. it's from 2023, & underappreciates some of the real applications to come (eg actually solving coding problems) but is a good lens on ways in which we can be fooled. link below
link to the LLMentalist Effect essay: softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llment…
such a fucking blow to the commons when an account gets suspended to deleted. old threads of mine with gaping bullet-holes in them where context or flavor or critique used to be. exchanges rendered into an overheard phone call. mind-palaces turned to dust
AI startup idea: something that takes my giant pile of notes to self, half-drafts, tweets, conversation recordings, etc... and turns them into a usable reference for essay-writing. find the right example, collect related explanations, etc
note to self idea: core thesis prompt with ability to click on a sentence or select a section and drill down
Malcolm, explain "that makes sense" right fckn now, in one breath, standing on one foot
time for another round of these, guys, come on! my rules for these: write it in one sitting, when I get to the end of the page I'm done (no edits). keeps the bar low! gonna tag a few people: @IvanVendrov @viemccoy @utotranslucence @Morphenius @eshear
@mykola say more about the second half? doesn't make sense to me (too vague)
@mykola mmmm, right. @meditationstuff has some writing on how surprisingly unlossy human neural worldmodeling is. kind of like how PNGs can do lossless compression but even so, in what sense can the whole thing be beheld at once, for updating? holographically?
why are there no whiteboard cafes?
"explain 3 Steps for Empowered Dialogue right fckn now, in one breath, standing on one foot" he said, she said, 3SED:
for a visceral example of me working through how two people in a heated convo might go through these steps, check out this thread:
also @DefenderOfBasic work on internet arguments independently found the same basic structure
@DefenderOfBasic and it seems to both of us that there's an inherent nature to this—these steps aren't arbitrary. it's not a coincidence we landed on the same basic approach
@forthrighter it can go further than "I hear you" or even being able to parrot/reflect back what the other person said you can get to a point where you can say "I can see how that makes sense". you can make the sense they're making of it, without denying your view
it's time for whiteboard cafes: tables made of whiteboards and walls made of whiteboards here's are some mediocre mockups to start getting people inspired
@cube_flipper @EthanReeder can your cafe/teahouse have whiteboards?
core thesis prompt, for reference:
this is cool "there's an ad hoc generated interface for that"
I bet there's some way you could trade a transformer on baby babble in such a way that it would let you learn what your baby is saying a few months earlier than you could have decoded it yourself
wouldn't exactly say that I like this image and it's definitely not what I was trying to generate but I found it interesting and wanted to share it
@babarganesh absolutely! I'm positing that the learning gradient could maybe be improved by getting an earlier sense of win for the babies. not to remove the gradient
my tweet was inspired partly by my own 15mo and partly by a neighbor who commented that when she looks back at vids of her kids from that age she can understand way more babble in retrospect than she could at the time it's already proto-English!
@gnevan look, post-it flipcharts are also great and I would accept a cafe made of them for sure. also less cleaning to do, and you get to take your results home
@gnevan but they're also way more expensive — these bad boys are like $1/sheet. whereas whiteboard markers aren't that much and you wouldn't have to track how much of them people are using
@DefenderOfBasic I have my write-up here of the underlying physics (the inner moves, more than the outer moves)
@everytstudies oh man I don't want external stats to confirm my ideas—that's a terrible idea for the reason you describe I just want detailed specific examples and more evocative quotes on the topic from my own notes/recorded convos
😮 I was the first person in tpot* to tweet "GPT"—back in 2019 *where tpot is the set of accounts that have uploaded their tweets to the community archive
this is the tweet (actually this one is supposedly even earlier - maybe it didn't show up because it's a reply)
unfortunately I did not buy $NVDA at the time
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
such a fucking blow to the commons when an account gets suspended to deleted. old threads of mine with gaping bullet-ho…
in other news DOWNLOAD YOUR TWEETS AND PUT THEM IN COMMUNITY ARCHIVE (where people will also do cool hackathons and more with them)
@IvanVendrov here's me apparently dragging key people into the network: @QiaochuYuan, @nosilverv (also @tasshinfogleman, @nickcammarata, @algekalipso, @AskYatharth)
supposedly you can buy inactive twitter handles now? that's cool. has anybody gone through the process? what was it like? do you need a premium business account to even browse the options?
you take both boxes, and somewhat to your surprise, they're both full. 'oops, sorry,' Omega says, 'this is the simulation where I was trying to figure out what you'd do in the real world and I forgot to turn it off after you touched the boxes'
"What habits would I adopt if the long-term effects were in full force immediately?" lesswrong.com/posts/scwoBEju…
@suntzoogway @RichardMCNgo @IvanVendrov @DefenderOfBasic @Morphenius @workflowsauce I have this new piece of writing I think is quite important
@sanjehorah @DefenderOfBasic @RichardMCNgo @IvanVendrov @Morphenius @workflowsauce yeah totally! not a coincidence I was involved in both convos
@chrislakin funny that you're the one asking about this, it's basically the same insight as the whole premise of your blog chrislakin.blog/p/locally-opti…
@chrislakin but like, more explicitly: the algorithm they use can be ineffective, but they're using it because it is the best one they know of. the underlying thinking process is sensible. @Morphenius can maybe articulate this more clearly
Retweeted @chrislakin
too bad this doesn't apply to humans
update: wisprflow + this foot pedal keyboard worked great mapped them to tab, record, enter x.com/anosteus/statu…
wow I'd forgotten about this. time flies
MY developmental stage theory contains YOUR development stage theory
even if you have a strategy that's making you feel insecure in order to manipulate people, that strategy is complex enough that extinction is unlikely to work. instead you need to find another strategy that works better, first
@AnthropicAI, claude.ai keeps doing this annoying thing where after I submit my question, it starts working on it and autotitles the chat, then barfs and loses my input 😩
...no idea if these console logs are relevant but thought I'd provide them. problem maybe correlates with having some attachments?? it's not happening every time but it's common last night and this morning
@DavidSHolz — @midjourney's already so much less literal than dall-e... what about a mode that leans way further in this direction?
Retweeted @JeffLadish
People radically underestimate the implications of AIs that are able to autonomously self-improve
most arguments are actually about relevance, not facts or theories