Julian Boolean (~25/100 threads)
@julianboolean_
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experimental cozy face account honor is in trying anyway “unnervingly flexible” - @g_leech_
London, England
Joined July 2023
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that is such a beautiful visualisation, how did they make it?
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@rachelclif
you might enjoy Big Swiss - it's about a woman who transcribes sessions for a therapist and falls in love with one of his patients
(h/t
@skwthomas
)
I'm not sure I'd call it unputdownable but it's funny and very much about sex, love, secrets and messy beautiful humans
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@goblinodds
I read Becoming Trader Joe and learned that the secret of business success is regulatory arbitrage
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@the_aiju
I can't understand why someone would do that without *starting out* by saying explicitly "I think you are good at this and so I will have high standards for you"
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okay I don't understand why I don't fall through the floor
people say it's "electromagnetism" but idgi
clearly it's because atoms repel each other, but why do they do that? they're electrically neutral
why do the electrons not wanna approach the nucleus?
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huh good question!
could you use a similar technique to smash a globe *flat* - ie map the surface of a sphere embedded in R^3 to a rectangular 2D map using isometries on finitely many pieces?
idk!
@julianboolean_
@eigenrobot
Can we use this to fix our horrible map projections? No? You sure?
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serious q, how is this not the same as wireheading?
I’m pretty confused
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@forthrighter
lovely thread
this passage - "greenness disintegrates" - by Hofstadter (possibly from metamagical themas?) really blew my mind
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@WHO_N0SE
right, the "cuts" aren't simple Jordan curves, they're way more intricate - this is the non scissors-congruent part
pic of some weird non Jordan curves
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when people joke about who they are, believe them
Deep down, our brains log anything we say as truth
Reinforcing whatever subconscious pathways
So we joke about being an asshole, a terrible person, stupid, whatever, and even if we don’t consciously believe it, it’ll build insecurities and warp the way we interpret the world
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@8chabard
I’m with Ken on this: it’s not about the words, it’s about the rest of the relationship
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@AskYatharth
Dolly Parton seems pretty chill
she’s also been married to the same person for 58 years
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Good principles
1. A country's primary duty is to its citizens. It can and should treat citizens and noncitizens differently.
2. If foreigners want to be subject to my country, I want them to become so. The more territory and people, want to be subject to a country, the better.
The fights over Haitian immigration have made me think about Mormonism and immigration again.
One thing I've always admired about Mormonism is its eagerness to proselytize to anyone who will listen. They currently have some 25,000 members in Haiti, and have built a temple there.
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I read the mrbeast doc and it's really impressive
kind of scary how much human creativity and ingenuity and optimization is going into gluing your eyeballs to the screen
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@cruelsardaukar
oh my god
I just realised it’s his monogram
I thought it was just a rune picked at random for decoration
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which is the least distorting tax?
I remember a tweet which said the best (least distorting) tax is property > consumption > income which is the inverse order of how much people dislike them
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this has really interesting implications - you can provoke great essays into existing by writing your own crappy versions
@michaelcurzi
That’s so funny - I am at an ACX meetup rn, and that question was asked! He said that if he gets nerd sniped, and someone publishes an article on something before he can, he finds it way easier to write his (the words flow easier). But if he has a topic that he thinks the world
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@nosilverv
something I noticed reading Dorothy Dunnett was how much Anglosphere classical references now are Shakespeare and KJV - because the books are set in 1500s so their "classical canon" is medieval French poetry which is even stranger to a modern ear
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@atroyn
iirc random high dim vectors are exponentially likely to be near-orthogonal by something like a central limit theorem
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this is a fun one because for almost any other country the “grow rice by putting chips on ships” comparative advantage argument works very well
but for Taiwan specifically food self sufficiency could be very important
This is insane. The Taiwanese government is paying farmers to NOT grow rice because they need the water for AI chip manufacturing instead. We're prioritizing AI over feeding people during a drought.
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MrBeast already does a lot of supply curve mapping with his "Would You Do Weird Thing for Big Money?" series
we just need him to branch out into "I Constructed a Skyscraper: You Won't Believe What Happened to Local Home Prices!"
there are many excellent science youtubers, are there econ youtubers?
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noob q: why isn’t L0 the norm you’d use to incentivise sparsity?
Sparse autoencoders are currently a big deal in mech interp, but there's not a good, concise intro to what they are. I'm currently taking a stab at writing one! Here's the draft TLDR:
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@KubaFYI
that plus being sufficiently burned out that you'd rather almost exhaust savings than go back, I think
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this sounds awesome
wonder if you could replicate Dune shielded knife fighting by attaching the motion sensor to a sharpie
this game is spectacular btw
give a bunch of people motion-sensing controllers. if yours moves too quickly, you're out. last one standing wins.
creates a sort of slow-motion combat where everyone is trying to very gently shove and swipe at and destabilize each other
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wow, fantastic essay - possibly the clearest answer to “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics”
“maths is the study of what you can do with meaningless symbols” ->
“you learn what happens everywhere in the world there’s something similar to that symbolic manipulation”
I believe mathematical formalism has been a major (if the not the major) driver of scientific progress. Unfortunately, it is not discussed nor applied nearly enough.
Here is a post that attempts to explain what it is and how it works:
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classically they would so the answer has to be quantum
Feynman in the lectures says electron near the nucleus would be super high momentum (uncertainty principle) so super high energy
so there's a repulsive force which is the gradient of this energy potential
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always be romanticising
personally I’m going for French-mathematician-writing-magnum-opus-in-jail-chic
Basically if you’re in your twenties you should just be glamorizing and romanticizing everything in a much more rose-tinted light. You’re not poor, you’re a starving artist. You’re not unlovable, you’re a true romantic on a quest to find The One. It’s only bad if you think it is
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@demiurgently
@KelseyTuoc
my roommates are currently being forced to leave our delightful apartment because Oxford City Council thinks one’s bedroom is too small
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My friend Raj wrote a bunch of cryptic haikus, each referencing a scientific discovery. Try to guess!
(in rot13 if poss)
Crystals bathed in light
From the shadows, twin spirals
They become her, us
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TIL what a standard error is
“the standard error of the sample mean is an estimate of how far the sample mean is likely to be from the population mean, whereas the standard deviation of the sample is the degree to which individuals within the sample differ from the sample mean”
Standard deviations and standard errors
This is the paper I linked the other day, but provides a straightforward clarification on the difference between the two concepts. It's easy to be confused, statisticians are great at naming things poorly.
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terrifying to realise I've crossed the transition where all the cool people I wanna learn stuff from are *younger* than me
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Interaction Combinators are strikingly beautiful and it’s really cool that they can model both Turing machines and cellular automata so neatly
but I’m confused about practical implications - does this actually translate into writing more efficient parallel (say neural net) code?
Guys, Interaction Nets are just graphs with attached rewrite rules (from this -> to that), plus a restriction that only one edge can be "active".
That's all!
I'm posting this because I'm under the impression some people think INs are something highly complicated and specific,
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I love the idea of paying someone to go off and read some extremely esoteric text and come back and tell you what it means and whether you should care
(inspired by Alex Zhu hiring Jessica Taylor to independently evaluate Chris Langan’s Theory of Everything)
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I was very confused about what purpose removing like counts could possibly serve, but "what would improve specifically Musk's twitter experience"? actually explains a lot of the changes
(in this case, not getting ratioed)
X allegedly wants to end the display of ratios like this, which is another way of saying X wants to play a smaller, less significant role in culture
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I used to blame all this on the weirdness of the axiom of choice, but after some chats at espr I’m coming around to “the weirdness is in the reals/the continuum”: our definitions of cardinality and measure clash, eg there are “as many” reals in [0,1] as in [0,2]
Im gonna need someone to explain how you can change the VOLUME of a 3D shape just by cutting it into pieces and rearranging them.
Thought about it for 5 min now, and that makes absolutely no sense
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there's no such thing as an uninteresting integer: the smallest uninteresting integer would be interesting for that reason
but you could have an uninteresting real number - it's probably one of the indescribable ones
College math prof said there’s no such thing as an uninteresting number; they each have curious properties about them. And if one had no such property, it’d be interesting precisely for that reason
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I thought this was referencing something fictional - TIL the US really did throw a bunch of copper needles into space to create an artificial ionosphere
We all know West Ford and its 500 million needles. With modern tech, we can make it even better.
Kessler Syndrome be damned. We’re going to pick up where the past left off, and launch 23 septillion copper needles into Low Earth Orbit.
Get it today at
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New culinary milestone: made banana bread!
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@moultano
I was imagining the argument to be “encourages less well informed laypeople to experiment with anything they can get their hands on”
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I have carefully prepared for this eventuality by knowing very few digits of pi
Without warning, you're locked in a room. To escape you must calculate π≈3.14 to more digits than you can recall.
You have pen, paper, & a rudimentary calculator (+-×÷) (& food etc.), but no reference material. (No cheating.)
What method would you use to calculate π by hand?
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wonder if this is what I find missing from brandon sandersons work... the life experience
The most fundamental difference between the new vs old Star Treks
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TIL Egyptologists, demographers and French bureaucrats are all surprised to hear their boy Joseph Fourier is primarily known as a mathematician
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okay this is fun
me disneyfied
me dwarkeshified
learning so much from the bridgerton portrait generator
much like, i suspect, actual selfies, for every one of these...
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thinking about why fertility drops as countries get richer and I think a nice lens is baumols cost disease: life in general gets easier much faster than raising kids gets easier
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@getnormality
sadly the original blog is offline, but this is what you're looking for
I like this motto, from Jai Dhyani's blog ():
"Almost No One is Evil. Almost Everything is Broken."
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@NathanpmYoung
i would consider doing something like this but i am not sure how to handle the case where i want my quotes in the article more than the journalist does
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new health metric: how many stairs it feels natural to take at a time
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oh wow, big update for me
The evidence for pathogens that may be beneficial to the immune system is almost entirely for parasitic worms (helminths) and friendly (commensal) bacteria.
In contrast, many viruses can even trigger the onset of autoimmune diseases or allergies. 4/
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why are some shapes of glassware prettier than others?
I wanna read a Theory of Industrial Design
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“I see my life as a sort of quest to find ultimate authenticities” is a nice bit of PMC signalling
I got into Harvard + almost every college I applied to w/ an essay about studying at McDonalds. Had multiple admissions officers write me handwritten letters complimenting me on it
To any frantic high school senior, the best advice I got was - keep in mind that the admissions
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one of the most surprising "the past is a different country" things from Agatha Christie's romance Absent in the Spring is that it was perfectly normal for an upper class british woman to take a week long vacation train ride alone across Iraq
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but that doesn't seem like any of the four fundamental forces?
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is there a 3blue1brown for synthetic and molecular biology ?
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Twitter should have the opposite of a muted words list: an “I want to see every tweet that contains these words” list
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huh this is a very good point
In the arguments over whether smartphones are bad, I still haven't encountered a good response to the concern I raise here, which requires zero evidence/studies to be valid.
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mmm I disagree
in Erik’s house renovation analogy, does using AI to fill out the permits “set you at a distance” from your passion project?
good art and writing comes from good taste, and using LLMs to make the easy parts easier only increases quantity, without changing quality
Why I expect writing, thinking, and art to get worse following Gen AI, not better
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TIL: you can statistically watermark a language model without changing text distribution at all!
there is no quality tradeoff!
(the tradeoff comes in how much text you need to detect watermarking - the separation of watermarked vs normal text depends on text entropy)
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enjoying the diversity of human preferences
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@PrinceVogel
I think I saw a poll in which high school kids wanted to be off TikTok iff they could guarantee their classmates and friends also didn’t use it - implying it’s a collective action problem
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there are 10 opaque cups face down on a table. I flipped a fair coin, if it was heads I picked 1 cup uniformly at random and placed a ball under it.
Now you approach the table.
You flip the first 9 cups. No ball.
Has your probability there's a ball under cup 10..
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stayed the same
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idk/results
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i most appreciate "naming things is the hardest problem in computer science" when struggling to read proofs in Lean
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how do you distinguish between "I'm hesitant because I have an uneasy gut feeling about this" and "I'm hesitant because I'm afraid and this is out of my comfort zone" ?
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@jachiam0
a friend of mine suggested encouraging high school students to do paper replications - which is actually useful work while not requiring the same amount of long study
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when all your insanities successfully cancel out
edward tufte can only dream of making a chart like this
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I think this is quite probable
dunno how to feel about it
idk how promising artificial wombs are, but it seems like there's a significant chance they could become the new Agriculture: worse on average, but it allows the people who choose it to vastly outnumber the people who don't, and so the old way just gets outcompeted and dies.
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blanket regulations provide economies of scale for cognitive transaction costs
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I intend to be rich; I have a lot of debts to pay forward
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A lot of the reason I don’t use LLMs to teach me stuff is worrying about reliability
I wonder what the corresponding reliability rate is for human teachers, and for *good* human teachers
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this one typo would have been so embarassing i paid for Claude Pro to proof-read the rest of my thesis
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I suspect there's some interesting economics to be done from the viewpoint of cognitive taxes/ cogntive price discrimination
there's just something viscerally wrong to me about the way that modern people *have* to interact with actually very complex systems even if they don't understand them and could come to harm as a result, either immediately or in the far future (e.g. by failing to grok pensions)
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current progress: Silver
elapsed time: 2 mo/5 years
@Spencer_Gray
I'm 99.9% confident that, in the next 5 years, no AI will reach medalist-level performance on International Math Olympiad exams developed after its training.
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this is a great and classic question, I would say essentially yes
it just so happens that weird puzzle math often ends up being useful - eg graph theory (7 bridges of konigsberg) -> Google Maps, number theory (how many primes?) -> cryptography
@julianboolean_
I’m so sorry for asking this, but why are mathematicians doing this? They just make up weird puzzles and see if they can be solved?
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to see the familiar with new eyes is why I'm on twitter
this is a great way to change the shape of your body and integrate your rage in a way that can help u get more dates
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it’s kind of wild that pirating stuff has by far the best user experience
I purchased from
@audible_com
an audio edition of Robert A. Heinlein's Double Star narrated by Tom Weiner on July 11, 2019. Recently when I tried to re-listen recently, the app offered to sell me a new edition narrated by Bronson Pinchot.
Their website says that sometimes…
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3. Immigration that takes resources without returning them is unsustainable.
4. If current policy makes an influx of people a net negative, it is a problem with the policy, not the people.
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Holy shit
this is one of the most generative and thought-provoking threads I've read in years
Our immune system is amazing, but faces pandemics, cancer and aging. It's also wired to reject what we need to extend our healthspans & minds: organs, implants, new genes. It's time to radically augment it. We need to build an immune-computer interface (ICI). A manifesto🧵!
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noob q but what distinguishes UBI from “I just need to subsidise demand.jpg”?
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I forgot about the United Fruit context and now I'm also curious why Prospera picked Honduras
seems like not the best choice of country
@tracewoodgrains
personally im very fond of the stated ideals of prospera and i want a place like it to exist
but with a historically informed perspective i think the opposition is way more sympathetic than youre presenting it
the term "banana republic" was coined to describe honduras
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v interesting take on ASOIAF (which I dislike for similar-ish reasons)
it's really really hard to subvert standard narrative tropes and story arcs and still satisfy a reader
the only example I've read is Significant Digits
at best you leave them saying "Fine! I guess!"
Here's what Song of Ice and Fire actually wants to be, and why George can't finish it.
The Song of Ice and Fire isn't actually supposed to be dark, Machiavellian, hopeless, or a subversion of Tolkien at all.
It's just supposed to start that way.
The details may be complex,
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@soundrotator
I once got into an argument about water in the line and ended up glugging a full liter while making intimate eye contact with the security guard
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you should read this
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just realised country A doesn’t need to be richer on average than country B for people to want to immigrate B -> A, it just needs to be as rich and *higher* variance, since immigrants are selected for being high agency people who think they can take advantage of that variance
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intriguing! as an unfortunate counter-anecdote, I will add that I have tried this (same protocol, though possibly I did 4 secs), and as far as I can tell it makes no difference whatsoever
Random PSA: box breathing has been exceptionally effective for me -- I wish I'd discovered it sooner. After around a minute of it, I reliably can start sleeping wherever I am. Useful with jet lag adjustment, random naps in the back of a car, etc.
(Box breathing: inhale, hold,
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I remember looking into this and concluding the choice of 7 was fairly contingent, could easily have been 6 or 8
why did we end up with 7 days for weeks? is it true across different cultures (time systems)? "god created the universe in 6 days and he took the 7th day off"
"a week" is a pretty optimal time step for planning. is that just a parameter of the strange attractor we reside in?
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one of the many reasons I dislike twitter’s anti-links policy is that it advantages self-referential injokes over engaging with the world
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<time capsule tweet>
Claude Sonnet 3.5 is actually one of the smartest people I've met and we are not close to figuring out its potential
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wow, this is a fantastic article
I discussed the data behind the recent anti-cavity Lumina treatment. TLDR: while the approach looks promising and self-experimentation is cool, most of the direct data comes from small studies in rats and well... most humans are not rats.
What's more, I
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this is a really cool idea - when you leave an apartment you loved, commission art of it!
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