i discovered some obvious things in a surprisingly visceral way
- lighting candles in a closed room was 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺, 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 bad
- opening windows made it better
- sleeping with closed windows sucked
- two doors for circulation was best
Jan 1 • 33 tweets • 8 min read
i like this question (try it! its deceptive) because it highlights that probability makes no sense unless u explicitly or implicitly have a distribution you're sampling from
in math, we autistically define out the whole distribution. in everyday life, it's implicitly constructed
some scenarios are normal, familiar, and unambiguous
"i flipped an ordinary coin. probability heads?"
almost all people implicitly construct the same probability distribution in their heads and calculate the answer correctly with respect to (w.r.t.) that distribution
Dec 23, 2024 • 28 tweets • 7 min read
period reminder to NOT donate to wikipedia
the ads deceive people into thinking wikipedia is under financial distress (it's not) and that donations go towards keeping the site running (they don't)
they borrow on the goodwill of wikipedia to fund a runaway NGO and its advocacy
instead, money goes to Wikimedia Foundation, an NGO that hit its 10-year endowment goal in 5 years, could keep the site running for 20+ years, and has big institutional donors
they raised $150m+ last year, and found ways to spend it anyway
Dec 10, 2024 • 22 tweets • 4 min read
if auto insurance in the US worked like healthcare:
1. you don’t pay directly for your car maintenance. instead, you pay a monthly premium to your “auto insurance” company, which handles all payments to mechanics, car washes, and gas stations. but you have no idea what anything actually costs until after the fact
Nov 30, 2024 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
i encourage everyone to try this right now before it's patched
it was a nice surreal moment of "wow, my tether to the corpus of human knowledge is increasingly depending on these few LLMs that can choose to arbitrarily censor"
and this is just the unsophisticated kind of information block. imagine when LLM makers are able to subtly mask information, or pretend there's no hole. china will be thrilled. every government will be
Nov 16, 2024 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
one example:
it was surreal. hearing professors repeat talking points that were so, like, 𝘵𝘸𝘰 𝘮𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘩𝘴 𝘢𝘨𝘰
what do you mean, "LLMs will never think"? what do you think solving novel IMO problems involves? have you read a chain-of-thought transcript?
every great philosopher since descartes has asserted writing is some form of thinking
because it gets us to generate more tokens, evaluate what we've written, reflect, correct, generate more, look back, be amazed
Nov 3, 2024 • 45 tweets • 10 min read
[semi technical explanation for why GLP-1 is magic drug]
imagine a fire (this is ur digestion btw). if u keep feeding it too much, it doesn't work. the fire needs time to break down what it's got. else, the fire keeps starving, even though it has plenty. this is essentially the modern western person
this is essentially the modern western person. too much food, too many calories. the body tries to cope, break the food down, but there's only so much it can handle. the systems are overwhelmed. it enters a perma "starving in the midst of plenty" dysregulated state
Nov 2, 2024 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
you can't reason with a computer, cajole them, you swear to all your gods you wrote the program right, and in the end, what do you find? it was doing exactly what you told it to. you were wrong. and to get there, you have to systematically disprove and question everything u know
"doesn't science work that way?" if only! there are a few subfields of science left that work this way, and they are the ones that seem to have made impressive progress
the rest? getting to p<0.05 on tiny effect sizes study after unreplicable study
what im about to say is apparently largely true and uncontested
- in 2000 election, in volusia country, florida, someone inserted a chip into a voting machine made by diebold systems. it gave al gore -16k votes and bush +2k
- bush's cousin worked for Fox News. he was the first to "call" florida for bush while polling was still going. staff begged him not to. NBC, CBS, CNN and ABC immediately followed
fast forward 4 years. it's 2004 election
- diebold inc bribed GOP ohio sec of state with $50k to use their machines
- lied to federal government about whether memory cards could be altered
- hackers proved you could hack their machines by plugging in a memory card. no passwords, completely undetectable afterward
- method was inserting "negative votes" into the system to balance out positive votes
florida election official overseeing this, baffled: "i would have certified this result"
two years later, princeton university showed anyone with 1 minutes of access to voting machine could install a virus that spread from machine to machine
Oct 31, 2024 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
so there's a guy named Roger Stone
- created DC mega-lobby in 80s
- "because of willingness to represent brutal third-world dictators"
- branded "the torturers' lobby"
- represented rupert murdoch, tobacco institute, and starting in the early 1980s, donald trump
- fomented the Brooks Brothers riot, the original Jan 6. led staffers to storm into a recount happening legally, yell "Stop the count. Stop the fraud" , and violently shut it down. staffers later offered jobs in bush admin
Oct 30, 2024 • 30 tweets • 9 min read
i'd vaguely heard about the US election in 2000 actually being "stolen" and i looked it up and it seems consensus is
- the entire US election came down to florida
- the difference in votes was <0.1%, not statistically significant
- polling machine had hardware issues way higher than <0.1%
- florida could have decided to actually and properly hand count the votes
- the state's highest supreme court decided to do that
- bush asked the supreme court to intervene in a state's free & independent ability to run its own elections
- the voting was exactly on partisan lines: the 5 republican judges declared bush the winner
- they cited reasoning that competes for one of the most transparently dishonest rulings of all time
- the single most comprehensive study after the fact found that if the votes had been properly counted, gore would have won
- this is not factoring in a calculated, well-documented attempt by republican governor of florida to suppress thousands of votes, in black counties for al gore, by the official US election commission
tl;dr: the 2000 election was, for some definition of the word, "stolen" and bush's party controlled the florida executive, supreme court, etc. in partisan, sometimes illegal ways, forced the result against the will of the people
Oct 26, 2024 • 10 tweets • 6 min read
so i spent some time trying to understand this (5m) and it actually makes a lot of sense and is coherent and reasonable, actually
i did a workshop last week with some queer, white people who are activists for leftist causes in their own communities. they spoke about "burnout" and "activist fatigue". they felt demotivated and tired by their effort, like nothing was changing and they kept putting in effort and effort and things stayed the same
i told them that i, and my [race] friends, had to engage with a genuinely oppressive and demotivating history of our race. in the process, we began developing something liberatory: a way to find peace and joy, even as we were stacked against crushing odds. this process was embedded in us culturally, and socially, and expressed via dance, song, and deeply embodied, felt practices that came out of genuinely having felt the pain and oppression ourselves
...unlike those white activists! who were trying to intellectually imagine and advocate for our pain. they tried to cobble together and borrow from the set of thinking around activism and liberation my racial communities had to develop. their knowledge and experience was second hand
i told them they were tourist activists, like the white people who decide to come save a village. we were the people in the village who had generations who had lives there. they didn't get it. they came to save us, and got so frustrated and demotivated immediately by being in the trenches. we had already been in it for generations. we were used to it and had developed ways to cope with love and joy amongst it all
other person: how did they take that??
well! the truth us, we didn't really give them a space to "debate" with us. i had something important to say, about our experience. i wanted them to think about their own experience, and share back what they thought, but i didn't want to open myself and my feelings here for "debate" like they were facts
otherwise they could get bent like a 5yo asking "why?" "why?" "is that true?", not really engaging with their own felt experience or mine, but instead trying to scrutinise in a narrow was "is that true?" instead of reflecting on their own experience and really hearing me and hearing the deeper experience behind my words and then having an honest, open conversation
what we did was reflect on our own experience, and really take the time to think about it from our point of view. we showed how talked just about us being [sexuality] or [gender], it really was about the unique challenges that come with being both at once
we wanted them to think too, about how their experience wasn't just a reflection of being queer, but in particular, of being white and queer. let's face it, it's different to grow up white in america, have a certain kind of family background, culture, etc. and be white. no one, not even the racists are saying black and white culture are identical
we wanted them to realise this; to not think of themselves as just "normal" but realise they were "white" and queer, i.e., there was such a thing as not being white, as being black in this country, and it's very different. we wanted them to be aware of this difference and hold it in mind
lastly, we asked these queer white organiser to really take the time to think and reflect about their own experiences on their own. we didn't just want to give them the powerpoint on where the latest in our thinking and analysis about activism was, and they take down notes in their notebook, and don't reflect too hard on it, but go around parading and parroting
we wanted them to really take the time to reflect on their own experience, and come to the table with the kind of honesty and groundedness that comes after having looked at that
it's easy for them to come in like they are schoolchildren and we are some professors and when we say something, they can say, "actually is that correct?" "prove it!" "but is X really true?" that's not a conversation, and it's not a conversation between two honest people who care
we didn't want to be questioned that way. we wanted to have a dialogue and be challenged, but the kind that comes from them having thought about their own experience
this felt like a really powerful frame to approach that workshop with. normally, i feel like i have to defend, authorise, justify every bit of my experience. but this time, it felt right, like i was genuinely speaking what i thought to be my truth, and wanted them to think about their own, and then talk
we just held space for a discussion so they could talk about some of this stuff, rather than the dynamic being they question and nitpick us. to help their discussion, we used a technique from foreign language classes: we gave them specific realistic scenarios, that they could think about. this really grounded the discussion. we also shared about what some really powerful thinkers of [our race] thought about those scenarios. this made the discussion really concrete and specific instead of fluffy and vague and abstract
Sep 30, 2024 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
woahh
i just had my first alexander technique session with olivia lin and
i didn't expect to feel this great. i feel tall, like i'm one body, i feel the floor separate
normally i feel like a potato chip bag trying desperately not to be here and my body feels all disjoint
it feels more vulnerable, and scary, and yet reassuring, and comforting to stand like this
this is going to sound weird but i feel more ready to fight
more able to flirt
normally it just feels like i'm trying not to exist with my body
Aug 25, 2024 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
ive been thinking about shitting in the water supply. historically, there are actual ways we've stopped people from doing this
1. make it illegal + have people report when it's happening and inflict consequences 2. have enough of a social fabric and norms people don't do it
but with LLMs shitting in the public internet's water supply...
it's just too profitable. random growth hacker assholes in far away communities, and low income people in far away countries will shit in your water supply if they can.
Aug 25, 2024 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
initial reactions to racing-
this is surprisingly technical. like there is actually an art to going the fastest time on a lap and it's not the same as having the most fun or playing around
i had an instructor telling me to go faster, and it was almost like giving someone too much advice about math before they've had a chance to have fun? like hold up. i don't care. i'm here for something else
Aug 20, 2024 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
people say to have loved and to have lost is better than to never have loved at all. but tonight playing guitar, i am wondering to myself about that. i was so perfectly content in the moments in which i was. so content to spend a life together
from the moment we met, i knew we were soulmates. that our souls had wrapped around each other in many lifetimes. it's that recognition perhaps all souls have of all other souls in theory. but some pairs experience so clearly
May 16, 2024 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
at the preschool, i have to resist this idea to say to any question they ask, "let’s look it up on google"
but instead to leave the world shrouded in mystery, and make it so discovering more about it actually involves going out in it, being creative, finding people who might give you clues, and giving effort in it
Apr 18, 2024 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
when someone enters our life, and begins to meet certain needs for us, it can be tense and scary
as they begin to fill a hole we didn’t even know the size of, and we want them to never ever go away
needs like being seen. listened to. heard. romantically talked to
needs like being around a person we find beautiful, or being listened to so beautifully
Mar 18, 2024 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
one of the hottest, richest girls i was ever with kind of broke my brain in how she related to privilege
to her, it wasn't something to be ashamed about, or performatively guilty for. it was a gift made to her life, and she saw to it that it spread
i didn't know you could just leave the fear complex of the liberal america. you could just have your own compass and act on it as if people were already real and stakes were already real. i learned that from her
when i first came to america for boarding school, i was so confused why so many people here were depressed and suicidal. especially since they were upper middle class liberal kids. they had none of the money or gender restrictions of where i came from
over time, i came to understand. souls will commit suicide if they can't feel themselves. and some environments systematically raise kids who couldn't feel their soul
their economic output was good, and their knowledge was impressive, but they were dying at the soul
Jan 24, 2024 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
i once took my friend out to teach her surfing
to my dismay, all the tips and tricks i had spent weeks (two months!) accumulating meant she was as good at the end of day 1 as i was by week 8
she knew to start on the white waters. the board didn't hit her nose a hundred times
it seemed effortless
but damn, it took me a while to discover those things
