once you've got custom twitter searches set up you'll also want to learn a few of twitter's search operators. these are weirdly poorly documented (the documentation i found has ones i don't think work anymore) but here are the ones i personally use to search tweets faster
1. from:username searches tweets from a user, that's how the custom searches for my own tweets and visa's tweets above work. to:username searches tweets to that user. you can combine them to look for a specific interaction if you remember who was involved. example:
2. min_faves:N restricts searches to tweets with at least N likes. at least that's the theory; in practice it doesn't seem to be exactly N, idk what's going on with that. use this to find popular tweets or at least filter out unpopular ones. example:
i use min_faves both to search a specific person's tweets (either i'm looking for a specific popular tweet or i just wanna see their popular tweets) and to search twitter globally for the most popular tweets about some meme or w/e. like this:
3. since:YYYY-MM-DD searches for tweets timestamped on that date or after, until:YYYY-MM-DD searches for tweets timestamped on that date or before. combining both lets you search a date range. example:
and that's it those are all the search modifiers i actually use. if i find more i'll add them here
4. ah i forgot about this one - this one is deprecated for me by the custom search i use but "filter:follows" searches from your follows
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tried getting claude to write funny tweets starting from 9 examples. it generated some okay stuff but nothing that actually made me laugh. then i tried asking it to generate tweets written from its perspective rather than a human's and actually laughed. hmm
asked claude to use a more authentic voice, then asked it to reflect on the nature of humor and what kind of humor would be more authentic to it. not bad, a couple of these made me laugh out loud. that last one though lmao
asked claude to lean more heavily into being an AI. these are cute i like these. "just large language model things"
there’s this woman awhile ago who tweeted something like “i was mentally ill until i fell in love with someone i had to have my shit together to be with, so i decided to stop being mentally ill and it worked” and not to overstate this but there’s something real and impt here
coherence therapy takes the pov that many (most?) mental illness “symptoms” are on some level strategies for getting needs met. it assigns the “patient” enormous amounts of agency, which starts out shadowed, and part of how the therapy works is reclaiming this agency
the internet complicates this picture by providing many incentives for being mentally ill (sympathy, fitting in with peers, Generating Relatable Content); i think there’s sort of a mentally ill online lifestyle attractor, which provides benefits like avoiding responsibility
> ADD has much to do with pain, present in every one of the adults and children who have come to me for assessment
> "Every aspect of my life hurts," a thirty-seven-year-old man told me during his second visit to my office
> These men and women... have never been able to maintain any sort of a long-term job or profession. They cannot easily enter meaningful, committed relationships, let alone stay in one. Their moods fly back and forth from lethargy and dejection to agitation.
on the question of whether human-level AI is possible even in principle, people seem to reflexively believe “obviously yes” or “obviously no,” and i’ve never seen anyone publicly change their mind in either direction. and the split is like 80% predictable by STEM background
being a rationalist in the yudkowskian sense selected heavily, among other things, for people who believe that human-level AI is obviously possible. to me at age 22 it boiled down to “humans are just very complicated machines built out of molecules by evolution”
and similarly “human brains are just very complicated computers built out of molecules by evolution”
and the thing is that despite having loosened the iron grip scientific materialism had on me growing up, i still believe all this and have not seen compelling arguments against
short reviews of / commentary on movies i watched on netflix because netflix told me they were leaving soon, or some other place, or for some other reason:
1. the road to el dorado (2000): aged weirdly. it's impossible to ignore the colonialism now and chel now stands out as bizarrely horny for a kids' movie. nobody's allowed to be that horny anymore. some cool animation but deeply mediocre music. watch prince of egypt instead
2. kung fu panda (2008): fat jokes aside, the real story is about shifu getting his heart broken by tai lung, being hardhearted with the five, and getting his heart re-opened by po, and that's a surprisingly strong emotional core that still holds up