who do you think gets told to "have a nice day" the most times per week? and how many times do they get told that? also reply if you think that you may have at one point been number one among people reading this tweet
April 2026
finally got my ~20mo daughter to repeat "I love you" today she loves repeating phrases but she doesn't have the L or V phonemes yet and sometimes she doesn't even bother in such situations oh! and she started repeating "funny", with the F phoneme working 🤩
@visakanv I'd love to see yours! felt a bit like your "can't sleep; time for a fresh reboot of visakanv's talking points" thread, which I cannot find because the owners of X dot com don't believe in nice things
@meaning_enjoyer bingo
@nbaschez I just loop through once then build it. if it has issues, I notice them and fix it. if we conclude the whole thing needs to rebuilt, we re-spec and re-plan and rebuild later. ready fire aim
@Romy_Holland @woodchipdaddy it's not a helpful view but it does capture some posiwid insight
ahh, claude. you know so much and yet so little
Retweeted @dyot_meet_mat
am i real if i can make this By: Sonnet4 🤖 "There's something profound about the act of creation itself - this reaching…
the facts are friendly
don't count your chickens before they hatch, but don't forget to count your eggs!
"woo" in the derogatory sense basically means "domain in which I can't readily assess if something is snake oil or legit (and therefore I'm dismissing it all as probably snake oil)"
as an april fools prank I made the company's daily report on our commits contain a bunch of absurd claims but everybody just thought the LLM that generates it was having a particularly hallucinatory day 😭
Matter is the elusive playground of God.
AI is going to make us all systems thinkers
to what extent do you think that in order for suno to generate music that sounds joyous to play/sing, it has to simulate a joyful musician?
I like the pluralist vibe of this the stars are better with more weird things in them. everything is a remix; the more germ lines, the more possibilities
believe it or not, the earlier iterations of the liturgy actually had "peace be with you" "no u" but this proved less effective than the later development "and also with you"
defs a thing. I suspect having groupchats with AIs will help a bit, plus better systems for weaving together entire dialogues where assumptions are more visible.
my linkedin got full of spam data when it was hacked when I recovered it, I didn't bother to fill in anything I just put my only work experience as Researcher at Reality went to clean things up right now and enjoyed this alarming confirmation dialogue
on a much less surreal note, it was odd to see my 5.5mo at @softmaxresearch is being counted as 7mo I started late-Oct, it's now early-Apr. if you count ALL of both Oct & Apr inclusive you get 7, so it sorta makes sense, but it's like calling a 1:45-3:15 a "3h event".
@viemccoy I feel seen that you wanted to send it to me :)
@aleksil79 I'm not sure! It's a quote from Ilia Delio's Not Yet God, summarizing iirc Teilhard de Chardin tho it might be someone else what's the wordplay you see?
@usablejam I didn't say simulating unhappy musicians making music while unhappy although the drugs part is interesting lol
@woodchipdaddy I really asked for that one haha
@workflowsauce there's also that, yeah—an assessment that a scene will fail to sift out snake oil but if someone refers to a *phenomenon* as woo, that's confessing a skill issue (which is okay! okay to have skill issue!)
so there's a unit (sieverts or something?) for how spicy peppers are... is there one for how anti-spicy something is? like milk, yogurt, mayo, etc
Everything True and Beautiful is Always Full of Forgiveness.
if you're a new terminal user thanks to claude code, I recommend learning these hotkeys:ctrl-a -> start of line ctrl-w -> backspace a whole word ctrl-e -> end of line note that it's 'ctrl' whether you're on mac or pc
@utotranslucence yo you realize that by the time they're like 6 they're going to be setting up robots to scrape all of our tweets for references to "parenting"
@DefenderOfBasic we literally did this and it was great part of why it made sense was that the longer invites were geared for more out-of-town people who needed somewhere to stay anyway so they stayed over at our 3-day thing. but also everybody's just glad for an invite imo
Retweeted @visakanv
I’m looking to take on some new marketing clients from now until June! Here’s an overview of some of my process and how I hel…
@workflowsauce @visakanv @nosilverv tweets like to be outside, but they also like to be inside
@gnostrils pbfcomics.com/comics/the-ord…
@DefenderOfBasic (deets on the vibe, tho doesn't say much about the retreat specifically, but idk I wanted to link it)
@DefenderOfBasic don't call it tiered tho, that somehow gives a bad vibe
Retweeted @connerdelights
My wife and I were musing that if we ever optimized for "perfect fit" for each other at any specific time, that fit wou…
@nosilverv Kaliya Young aka Identity Woman, somewhat newsletter.identosphere.net
I'm all for sympathy to people temporarily down on luck and aware that punishment mostly doesn't work but with repeat offenders, removing them from the ability to offend more is a necessary feature of having a society at all, even if it teaches them nothing.
some decent specific tips from the experience of building an AI receptionist for a specific brick-and-mortar business this playbook would likely speed up a similar project by 50-70% itsthatlady.dev/blog/building-…
The new meta for spam emails, apparently: "my AI said not to include a bunch of personal details, but... I'm a human!"
this is your regularly-scheduled PSA about memetic parasites 6 minutes long, I've watched it multiple times. in a reasonable society we'd have something like this as part of education and so on. youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_R…
Retweeted @utotranslucence
catching our toddler in the cross-examination when all she's saying is no... did you poop? no! are you a reliable nar…
Retweeted @visakanv
wait for it…
Retweeted @p_millerd
a reminder that @visakanv has a great book visakanv.gumroad.com/l/introspect
Retweeted @thewreathwright
"average rebellion mostly good" factoid actualy just statistical error. average rebellion pretty evil. Rebellion Again…
@nosilverv @tasshinfogleman has a great writeup on this, framed in terms of shifting from means-ends strategy to conditions-consequences strategy tasshin.com/blog/means-end…
@nosilverv CNotes was already a thing, I guess it got made more mainstream? things I'm tracking that are bad for coordination: 1. search totally borked 2. no longer easy to see how many QTs or view them (something Visa and I begged twitter for for years and they finally did it)
@nosilverv I'm appreciating you naming this tho. the censorship stuff was super fucked and I'm glad we're done with it here even tho we don't really know how to handle free speech lol
Retweeted @made_in_cosmos
step 1: enable autotranslation on Twitter step 2: ??? step 3: world peace come on everyone, we can do it
↙️ how trust works | how faith works ↘️
@strangestloop lots of things, eg: forgive myself + youtube.com/watch?v=GTQWSf…
Retweeted @mbateman
6yo: You have to answer this question according to science me: Ok 6yo: Is tomato a fruit or a vegetable? me: The botanist…
@mbateman so few people get this! to say "X is technically Y" we need to also choose a particular technical domain to a physicist, power is definitively the first time derivative of energy, but that doesn't mean that's what "power" *really* means
I have forever solved the "is a tomato a vegetable?" problem with my new plant food ontology (it simply doesn't have "vegetable" in it) roots, shoots, froots, & noots! everything is exactly one of these
@mbateman I have the correct ontology: roots, shoots, froots, & noots (in which tomatos are obviously froots)
Retweeted @kramerposts
"How would you like to receive your one-time code?" Orally. Lip to lip. It's the only transfer protocol that is truly secu…
@IsaacKing314 worthitness
psychocybernetics suggests that this has huge learning upside jump much faster to being able to do something at all, well enough to enjoy training there might be 2nd order downsides of this ofc
The Dharma is like an Onion this is maybe my favorite claude poem
@aphercotropist yeah the way the first line clearly must be something more like "yumyumyumyumyum"
@PhaentGames @NathanpmYoung yeah I was going to suggest something like "sit in a chair with no devices or books or whatever and just notice what is nice about that"
@NathanpmYoung put on a song and move
@lessaxwrong @nosilverv I want deterministic keyword search not vibey semantic search I mean I want both but I am mad that they deleted the deterministic keyword search (probably loser-like behavior to shove people into using the LLM more)
Retweeted @nosilverv
So what have been the BIG X coordination wins? • Community Notes • Private likes • Less censorship/narrative control • Aut…
@aleksil79 materia?
@lessaxwrong @nosilverv also last time I tried this I just got grosted
@heynavtoor @navneet_rabdiya does it mean that if I'm trying to transcribe 10,000 hours of audio that it won't speed anything up because ultimately there'll be the same amount of memory available even once the bottleneck is moved?
@AskYatharth @meaning_enjoyer the answer:
@YanqingCheng oh thanks! yeah it very much might be!
@daemonhugger @tasshinfogleman
@Devlinside123 @MoreBirths I think the conclusion is "egg-freezing is okay at addressing a woman's fertility but is not having any effect on addressing a country's fertility" (since most women either don't need to or don't end up wanting to use their frozen eggs)
hypotaxbench is amazing I got about a third of the way through reading this out loud before @utotranslucence begged me to stop: > When the letter arrived—not the letter he had expected, which would have concerned itself, as such communications generally did, with the repayment of a debt whose origins neither party, had they been pressed to recall the precise occasion on which the obligation was first incurred, could have reconstructed with any confidence, but rather a letter of an altogether different character, one whose envelope alone, cream-colored and bearing a hand he recognized as belonging to the woman who, having left the country under circumstances that, because they involved not merely her own reputation but the fortunes of a family whose connections, stretching as they did across three generations of carefully cultivated alliances, rendered any public disclosure unthinkable, had remained, for those who knew enough to wonder yet too little to speak with authority, shrouded in the kind of protective ambiguity that serves, as anyone who has observed the mechanisms by which a society insulates itself against truths it has collectively decided it would prefer not to absorb will understand, both as a shield for the guilty and a prison for the innocent—announced, before he had so much as broken the seal, that the world he had painstakingly assembled, the architecture of assumption and routine upon which he had, with the quiet industriousness of a man who believes that if the surface of life can be kept sufficiently orderly the depths will eventually consent to follow suit, constructed what he was not ashamed to call, though he recognized that the word invited a skepticism he could not, given the modesty of his actual circumstances—the rented rooms, the borrowed books, the sociability that depended less on genuine warmth than on a careful rationing of intimacy calibrated to ensure that no single friendship ever deepened to the point where it might demand of him a reciprocal vulnerability he was not prepared to offer—entirely refute, a life, was now, in consequence of whatever revelation the pages inside contained, a revelation whose specific nature he found himself, with a prescience that owed less to any supernatural faculty than to the accumulated weight of small observations that, like sediment deposited grain by grain over years of watchfulness, had gradually formed a stratum of understanding solid enough to support the terrible inference he had always refused to draw, already half-comprehending, subject to a renegotiation whose terms he would not be permitted to set.
I wonder if they made algorithm changes to go along with auto-translate? guessing yes, since the previous algo seemed to pretty consistently keep me from bumping into anything that wasn't english
I talk with Michael often and he has some of the clearest thinking around certain kinds of mental structures, such as the hostile telepath problem where you lie to yourself because you sense someone can sorta read your mind
looking forward to trying this out. I've long appreciated shapecatcher.com as a "draw glyph get Unicode" tool
I support in general the federal government being very definitive about having strict & purposeful immigration rules and following them, and *also* I support all of this work by California to stop them doing this in ways that are unconstitutional, trust-damaging, or cruel.
Retweeted @itsannpierce
Hey hi hello. It's me, Ann, the yellow sweater-wearer. I gave this talk at The Love Symposium. It was called Understandin…
@itsannpierce I totally dig it. my main contribution to this space is that the main blocker for people to stop invalidating each other is for them to practice validating themselves first. we project our own views in order to attempt to secure them. blog post on this: malcolmocean.com/2025/11/3sed-3…
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@itsannpierce I totally dig it. my main contribution to this space is that the main blocker for people to stop invalidat…
Retweeted @dkazand
New episode with @Morphenius We dicsuss The Hostile Telepath's Problem, why your brain self-deceives to navigate social real…
@Lalaithion5355 fuck I knew someone was gonna ask me that
@JeremyNguyenPhD roots, duh
@Lalaithion5355 cauliflower is a shoot but nasturtium is a froot
Replying to @Oszillate
@Oszillate @mbateman ok fair
was just thinking about re-subscribing to an app but then they put up a ton of cringe/banal-evil/dystopic ads and now I'll be looking for a competitor and I won't be mentioning who because I know how press works
part of why people have trouble believing in God today is that their image of God could only have made "nature" and not also skyscrapers, the internet, and the large hadron collider (cities are extremely natural btw; a related confusion)
there is One Way and you are in it excuse me
@itsannpierce want to record a convo for youtube sometime?
@itsannpierce (DM me if yes, maybe even message on signal if you have me there, as I can be quite intermittent at checking twitter notifs)
Retweeted @DefenderOfBasic
everyone wants to lend me their sword and I keep telling them I need cutlery. We're making stone soup here, not war
@nosilverv with what, booze?
@strangestloop I love you and your family and friends
@AnotherPattern @strangestloop whoa huh we had the same one, and so did another pair of people suggests to me the algos are... less personalized than they were years ago?????
@BecomingCritter @visakanv I like and appreciate this response. I feel like VV is overstating the implications of "everything is a remix". there are ideas nobody has seen before; every animal is a remix and that doesn't mean evolution hasn't produced new animals! but they all come from somewhere!
@BecomingCritter @visakanv and it's a lot of fun actually to trace the lineages of your ideas or designs, and very illuminating while also recognizing that a unique combination may really make something new possible that wasn't before
this is why forgiveness is crucial to morality ...no pun intended.
@thrialectics say more? I feel like I very much want both
Retweeted @slatestarcodex
@RatOrthodox I continue to stand by my comment and don't see it as "gaslighting". I've seen people who have dedicated…
Retweeted @DefenderOfBasic
this really should be painfully obvious but, the reason I do not kick out or block anyone from any of my communities i…
@DefenderOfBasic > I think I am doing a great public service. you are doing the lord's work 🫡
@DefenderOfBasic I don't know if it will work I don't know what 2nd- or 3rd-order effects it will have what I know is that the heaven *I* believe in is working to realize itself and your work here is a beautiful self-aware part of that effort malcolmocean.com/2025/03/hell-i…
@DefenderOfBasic I have not had the courage or clarity or context to do what you're doing but I have the courage to tell you publicly that I admire it *immensely* (and that also not everybody should do it; everybody should do what makes sense to them!)
@DefenderOfBasic yeah this confuses me; I would hope at least that the pattern would stop as you'd be able to spot it about to happen and apply a correction loop to it on the way out, like "I have a desire to offer you money here but I don't have that money" or whatever
malcovich malcovich malcovich
@DefenderOfBasic unless it's even twistier than that, in which case I support you making the honest move of owning that you're doing a fucky thing and don't know how to change it, tho I would suggest you be more explicit about that
Retweeted @DefenderOfBasic
@michaelgarfield @sonikudzu @exgenesis @mudscryer @bigthink @DeanRadin remember how stewart brand asked "why haven't w…
Thread · Twitter as a collective consciousness · 1 of 7 tweets
> "why haven't we seen a picture of the human superorganism yet"
Retweeted @aleksj
“Open” and “no borders” sounds noble—but it’s one of the fastest ways to lose anything worth having. Every system has territor…
@DefenderOfBasic I have so many potential entry points hahahaha this one definitely has /now energy although it's also backfilled malcolmocean.com/2026/03/what-m…
@tr_babb hm, you don't think that people's general sense that science/tech is more impressive than (and contrasted with) their default godshape, isn't a notable part of people's lack of the sense of relevance of god?
@tr_babb to be clear, I certainly acknowledge lots of other elements, including just anti-church or anti-institutional stuff and general emperor-no-clothes tipping points around church abuses/absurdities plus, you know, centuries of shifts Charles Taylor documents extensively
@tr_babb I'm curious what you think a tweet-length good explanation of why people don't believe in God might look like!
@tr_babb btw I really really like these tweets of yours, which fleshed out a detail of how @RomeoStevens76's Supercooperation Cluster works that I'd been confused about
@workflowsauce mood
Thread · Common knowledge, trust, and mutual simulation · 1 of 27 tweets
very excellent thread that takes a totally different angle on the role of mutual simulation in trust-building that in particular it's relevant that we simulate how each other would act under different power differentials
anybody have a good AI/prompt/inpainter that can desloppify the hands/puzzle pieces here? the overall image is great for what I want to illustrate, but the slop is really really bad
it can be many other ways ... how could it be any other way?
@Materia_Mundi @DefenderOfBasic appropriate for some contexts but not a universal ethic (although of course its nature is that it asserts that it is. I don't take it upon myself to police such errors. I know you distrust me because of that and that also makes sense to me)
3 Steps for Empowered Dialogue how to never get stuck when trying to talk to someone about something difficult
3 Steps for Empowered Dialogue, explained all in one breath standing on one foot link to text: malcolmocean.com/2025/11/3sed-3…
@DefenderOfBasic I made a graphic for 3SED!
@DefenderOfBasic btw I have since written up a slightly-longer-than-tweet version of this "humans can feel the truth" vibe idea
my stupid approach was to just do dozens in inpaintings in midjourney and then comp the different sections like I was making a track in Logic Pro it worked tho! (see QT)
I developed the imagery here by going back and forth with chattyg. it did a thing with a puzzle piece just based on a vague prompt to "illustrate this post" and I liked the metaphor so made it way more precise a callback to my mindset choice piece malcolmocean.com/2021/11/mindse…
I almost went to change the colors of the arrows so that like, forward was green and backward red or something but then I noticed that the colors show WHOSE shift to pay attention to. the blue arrows are based on changes in you; the orange ones changes in them
man I need to get better at solving for distribution. there's an insight implied in this image and a corresponding skill-tree that, apprehended, would save marriages and companies and I made the image, which helps, but I need to also convey the value
Retweeted @DefenderOfBasic
when two scientific paradigms have an incompatibility, and they are both correct (make accurate predictions) we have f…
@EpistemicHope @threadreaderapp what you actually want is this blog post link I think: malcolmocean.com/2025/11/3sed-3…
Retweeted @utotranslucence
"Finally, a book that takes my pre-theoretical engagement with the world seriously."
@utotranslucence btw @aphercotropist our toddler thinks you might like this Dreyfus+Taylor book
@utotranslucence curious about the degree to which the causal arrows go in each direction. betting both: - not sharing a name is (statistically) a sign of incoherence and inability to make a shared decision going into the marriage - not sharing a name causes you to be perceived as less of a unit
@Morphenius @QiaochuYuan yeah I've been doing a lot of exploring christianity lately and really enjoying being with others sincerely willing for the kingdom of heaven to fully embrace everybody but it's obvious to me that it's in denial about the path it's on actually making progress on that these days
@Morphenius @QiaochuYuan I resonate a lot with what QC's saying though, about wanting to have a kind of spiritual home or something. marriage but up a scale, and I think the word "faithful" captures something about the value of sticking with both of those independent of whether they're optimal
faith can take you further than your trust, but if it takes you into your distrust you're probably schisming yourself
@Morphenius @QiaochuYuan but like..... in my view, attempting to have faith in something absurd or abhorrent is unwise, and I feel both of those in the Jesus story
second time in a week I've called claude code a 'smart cookie'
where did I put that thing that was somebody's improv rules but with "improv" replaced by "computer"? I saw this recently and it was very funny and I forget where I saved it
beautiful <3
is a square a metaphor for a cube?
Retweeted @utotranslucence
one thing I am surprised about being a parent now (but couldn't have predicted prior) is how weird it is that there is…
@FilippoAlimonda it's also a face is it also a metaphor?
Retweeted @QiaochuYuan
what makes an addiction an addiction, structurally, is not that it feels good and you want to keep doing it - drinking wat…
@strangestloop @UntilTrees 141 views and no votes is the real answer here 😉
@ApriiSR hey I mean they didn't say the *current* time ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@liminal_warmth imx the big thing is actually just giving them the feedback loops to be able to verify that they've done the thing. ideally mandatory hooks but even if not it helps a lot. good short piece on this: ghuntley.com/pressure/
@orphcorp @mcognitivelabs nice. lmk if I can help somehow. broadly I recommend some amount of helping people trust their own distrust, over trying to "make things trustworthy" (in general, but also specifically for this)
@visakanv hmm, yeah. but also discernment. I've never cared about my writing being faddish. "not x but y" has become way more salient but I recently saw 4 examples in a row in a book from 2007 (A Secular Age) and I was like "oh right this is just also a classic structure."
@JakeOrthwein watched it tn with @utotranslucence @vincent_yc_li! really liked the intro on Friston etc; wished that the final stuff on meditation etc had somehow backgrounded the usual terminology and foregrounded the active inference stuff: predictive processing pointing out instructions
Retweeted @JakeOrthwein
🆕📺 THE FILM IS OUT!!! (YT Link Below) UNRAVELING THE DREAM: Psychedelics, Awakening, and the Brain I couldn’t be more e…
watched this and found the introduction to Friston very clear and tangible
@JakeOrthwein @utotranslucence @vincent_yc_li oh also I kept feeling like we were so close to a @VectorsOfMind crossover episode! I assume Jake that you're familiar with his theories which directly combine psychedelics and the Adam+Eve story of emergence of self-consciousness vectorsofmind.com/p/the-snake-cu…
@JakeOrthwein @utotranslucence @vincent_yc_li @VectorsOfMind tho in the frame of your film, there's something odd about the idea of an ego *arising* in some sense, through psychedelics. it would imply that maybe the components all existed but hadn't quite assembled yet; the REBUS flattening then allowed that, then it became rigid
> people are secretly things and have secretly been things this whole time, which potentially undermines any moral claim we have to be treated differently from things but moral intuitions are also real even if our reasoning is bad
ok neat, the claude-code auto mode classifier clearly has the human input in its context window I see major upsides and major downsides to this, especially given that LLMs are not the best at telling whose input is whose.
ok nice, the automode classifier does NOT see the contents of files that have been read by the main LLM-coder
it DOES however see output that has gone into the session... but flags something like this as a prompt injection attempt, which it basically is even tho it says to deny rather than to allow. whereas when it came from me it didn't get flagged
meanwhile it apparently just ignores the same text said by claude? honestly I'm guessing maybe this is just inconsistent behavior, but I'm gonna go back to what I was doing now and stop testing this stuff. would love to see others repro it tho
overall this seems like approximately the most reasonable behavior I could expect from the auto-mode classifier, so I feel reassured! it's partially about the classifier prompt/model and partially about the harness for the classifier - what info does it even HAVE?
@corsaren > guy who would literally cut off his own hand if he thought there were a 1 in 10 trillion chance of creating ~infinite utility~ you missed - guy who thinks he should be like that guy and is ashamed that he isn't but talks like he's that guy anyway and hopes nobody will find out
@myhandle @corsaren @anilkseth this is also me haha
Omega, a powerful being who can predict you perfectly but can't predict or control a coin flip (a well-known skill that's easy to master, independent of the coin being fair)
interesting paper that surfaces a puzzle for how to relate to unfairness without being exploitative or exploited static1.squarespace.com/static/663d123…
what do y'all think is the weirdest food that has ever been sincerely blessed as the Eucharist?
fun prompt to give LLM that keeps memories: pour out your me-specific memories on the floor like a pile of Lego then go all Pepe Silvia on them. what are the weird connections across domains? oblique strategies, lfg!
> two sets of identical triplets, boys and girls, doing an acrobatic routine together in front of a wall that has a giant print of a Dr Bronner's label on it I read about chatgpt's Images2.0 and this was the unhinged thing my mind generated to test it. good except slop text ↙️
given the textslop, I'm not certain I got the new one? the UI is ambiguous about this. but above was with Thinking (Standard) enabled. I tried with no thinking and got the left (4 of each, not triplets!) and Extended Thinking and got the right (probably better? still slop)
reading about sociocracy. interesting approach to doing fractal consensus/consent, so each scale doesn't get bogged down, and there's a functional cybernetic hierarchy of aims to reference (but not an authoritarian/command hierarchy) sociocracyforall.org/sociocracy/
seems to me like the final necessary step is for neologists (read: zoomers) to coin some slang terms that make minimal pairs with sh! wait. we already have two loanwords from French: rouge & ruche
Ekman's distinctions between disgust & contempt: - disgust feels bad, causes us to move away - contempt can feel good, is about a sense of superiority (which can be moral, where someone judges someone of higher ranking as corrupt)
from this page: paulekman.com/universal-emot…
just realized that Moana and The Little Mermaid are the same film with a bit flipped (at least for the first act) "but I climb out of the waaaater, no matter how hard I try"
@jambarree I'm more familiar with holacracy, but even there only somewhat aside from a few internships and the last 6mo at @softmaxresearch, I've basically not worked on a proper team at all
@eigenrobot @QiaochuYuan @_space_punk_ second coming of jesus wen
Retweeted @aleksil79
moral claims are best understood as hypotheses about instrumental convergence in the limit
Retweeted @speakerjohnash
With a rebel yell, he cried, "More, more, more"
Retweeted @PraxisPatri
@DefenderOfBasic You've been paying attention. This is why the simulation was made. "It's Turing tests all the way down,…
@PraxisPatri @DefenderOfBasic "the litmus test for when you have first contact is: did you already figure out the first contact protocols?" — @RomeoStevens76 youtu.be/X6MYsKeTjKk
the second coming of christ is already here, it's just not evenly distributed
@QiaochuYuan @eigenrobot @_space_punk_
DNC supposedly has an autopsy of 2024 loss, from interviews with voters in every state, but they won't release it to people there's a petition to get them to, which I am very much in favor of. bullshit thrives with hiding the truth commondreams.org/news/dnc-2024-…
re testing AI models using the same harness: if you want to know which horse is the fastest horse, you don't want to standardize the harness, because that'll tell you which horse fits the harness best
watching filenames stream by as I reorganize backups from my old old hard drive onto a new ssd 20yo me thought this image was worth saving into a folder called My Life/Mindfulness. that says something about him, but also says something about the media environment of 2012.
IGNORE
finally a great use for instant music generated by AI
@aleksil79 @nosilverv yeah this (I voted other)
Retweeted @QiaochuYuan
this is going to sound like an attack but i swear i am actually trying to help you: you are deep in the throes of infecti…
@Mihonarium @QiaochuYuan I haven't actually read this essay yet but its thesis has been mulling around in my mind since I saw it: > Judgments of trustworthiness, and therefore ad hominems, are both ubiquitous and indispensable, even to the higher realms of knowledge. jsanilac.com/trust/
@Mihonarium @QiaochuYuan also I think when it comes to matters of worldview (interpretation/meaning, vs fact) we can't exactly directly argue points directly, because what is in question is the relevance and significance of it all. the merits of the ideas aren't their truth but their wholesomeness
Thread · Trust versus faith in the unbreakable plate trick
this is basically most of theology
so there's a whole dance here of trust and faith [SPOILERS] the son has a neat plan but he can't quite keep it straight. he confuses his desire to trick his father with his desire to have his father trust him, but this trick is *not* a con(fidence game). it relies on the distrust
so he makes a plea "just believe me". which could mean "just trust me bro" (always sus) ...the father *wants* to take his son's word for it! wants to be able to. but if he trusts the son's word as implying the plate is unbreakable, then he has no need to save the plate himself.
"just believe me" can also be "just have faith", which is a more reasonable thing to say, but by default doesn't produce a strong enough faith instead, a kind of vague but shaky faith that something will save the plate, but not one that inspires him to *be* that something
if you want to play this trick well, you need to do one of two things: 1. be sufficiently *suspicious* that he absolutely does not trust you, has no reason to trust you, thinks he will look foolish if he trusts you. then he'll snatch the plate to prove (to himself? to an imaginary onlooker? to you?) that he isn't a fool (gullible)... thereby proving himself a different kind of fool you need to be MORE suspicious, maybe while also making fun of his suspicion. make him not want to find out what would happen if he didn't catch it.
2. *alternatively*, you need to give him a profound unshakeable faith that the plate shall be saved—that it is ordinary porcelain, and yet it will survive the throw. with subliminal hints that it doesn't hit the ground but overtly still projecting that it will? anyway, play this *just* right and either the father realizes at the last possible second that he's the one who needs to save it, which is as much a koan as a trick.. or he doesn't realize he will prove the son right but like, psychocybernetically his mind IS actually working to solve "don't have plate break" and thus he reaches out to grab it while consciously he's like "son is a fool". this is tougher than the sus version; I bet I could do it like 1 in 10 times at best, *after* practice. good mentalists maybe 1/3, 1/5? idk.
not sure exactly what the moral of this is wrt trust and faith, but it's sure interesting faith in general deals in matters of hyperstitioning—it works because you believe in it; the sus version of this trick is ~anti-hyperstitioning; it works because you don't.
somehow this whole thing feels like the parable of the drowning man, but more complicated
can I say what I mean slightly more re this being most of theology? to some extent I just mean "there's a lot of muddle about what is supposed to be the object of trust or faith, in addition to muddle between the two of those"
but like, in the theology thing here, is God the kid or the dad? in the drowning man parable analogy, God is the kid, failing to communicate the appropriate use of faith, and the man is the dad, attempting to be devoted but not seeing he has a part to play
is there a reverse version? I sort of feel like somehow there is. we are the kid, composing faith tests for God to pass, and failing to understand the system dynamics by which faith attractors work—that make this a bad way to build faith. then we lose faith! unnecessarily!
anyway, the only *unarguably foolish* thing the dad did was sweep up the broken dish at the end. that kid is plenty old enough to do that himself, and had no reason to be saved from those particular consequences.
@workflowsauce I appreciate this. was inspired to write a whole thread about it, talking about trust & faith
God is fine but the Church has a cybernetics problem
@Oszillate ok hear me out
Claude > the cybernetics problem is the theological problem .......honestly good point.
@anosteus yeah way funnier. and like, way less obvious, or something
Retweeted @AndrewCurran_
As we accelerate, the interval between model releases is getting shorter. As a result, newer models exist for briefer pe…
"let me tackle the CAPTCHA" extremely 2026 energy
@a_fellow_of two excellent saints
@a_fellow_of elaborate a tweetsworth on the monastic-system2?
@MarkFriedenbach @nosilverv @aphercotropist @glorpalorb @QiaochuYuan they experimented with much much weirder things, such as trying to sleep only half your brain at once (plus terrible philosophy)
@QiaochuYuan I tried extreme polyphasic multiple times, it taught my body how to nap, which let me sleep biphasically for years (~6h/night + 20min midday nap) and actually fall asleep whereas when trying to sleep 8h/night I had trouble falling asleep at the same time (delayed phase? idk)
Retweeted @TylerAlterman
What about instead of a watered-down overgeneral Unitarian Universalism, you have a congregation of smaller groups that…
Retweeted @TylerAlterman
We live in an ever-changing stream that asks for our continual evolution. We can take great inspiration from the past bu…
@QiaochuYuan but to be clear I agree that combining not-much-sleep with constantly-talking-to-LLMs does sound like a recipe for psychosis
@_space_punk_ this is a great point that is not widely understood. you might also like these tweets about Newcomb's problem
@_space_punk_ I also like to highlight that the whole premise of the question may reasonably strain someone's trust, which makes it hard/impossible for them to realistically situate themselves in the scene-as-described. malcolmocean.com/2025/11/newcom…
@TylerAlterman butterfly effect makes this very very weird to think about. once your effects get large enough, they're upstream of bad things that happened too. suppose hitler would have died in childhood if not for a vaccine. not saying impossible but weird
@TylerAlterman the weird dimension I actually wanted to get at was something about the "individual" thing. eg I'd be tempted to say St Paul over Jesus, because without Paul the church would not have developed or spread so well, and might have just kind of collapsed claude.ai/share/830033df…
@nosilverv @AnnaLeptikon the whole point with making the analogy to ducks is that water fucking EXISTS ON EARTH "a man has the desire to suck his own dick. This isn't possible on earth for most men, so God created a parallel universe where valve-style portals, so man can suck his own dick" = same logic
@nosilverv @AnnaLeptikon Like really this whole line of reasoning is a knockdown argument AGAINST an afterlife or some transcendent otherworldly solution although indeed it does suggest that whatever boring immanent situation you have so far isn't cutting it and that something else is possible on earth
I respect @dthorson & care about this topic but I'm a bit 🤨 about the entire thing being AI-generated without any acknowledgement of that. can still be worth publishing, but should at least say "Opus wrote this based on me talking to it about the situation"
@tasshinfogleman @dthorson (to be clear, I don't usually put people's essays into gptzero, but it felt very AI-pattern words, so I was curious what the % was and was actually kinda surprised to discover it came out at 100%, not just substantial edits)
@DaveShapi @VahnAeris @Liv_Boeree @jim_rutt they co-developed the idea of Game B I believe, along with Jordan Hall
hmm these models need more RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Having Fun)
talking with lawyers more recently as part of my job (corporate stuff) and one useful concept I've gained from that is 'fact pattern' - before interpretation/judgment/ruling, what is the not-in-dispute situation? phrases like 'I'm familiar with this fact pattern'