birthdays are incredibly powerful social technology and almost nobody uses them well.

it's the one day you can make your loved ones do exactly what you want. you can use it to blow open the window of what is 'normal' to do together. and they will almost certainly love it! most social activities are half-baked rule-by-committee compromises. birthdays give a rare break from status games and negotiations and let us experience at least one person's idea of a perfect day. turns out that's usually more fun for the other people too

want to feel, on a gut level, what it's like to interact with AI optimized to exploit your blind spots? try playing chess against LeelaQueenOdds

you start a queen up and winning seems so easy - just trade pieces! and yet inexorably, imperceptibly, your lead is chipped away... lichess link:

huge thanks to the folks who trained it!lichess.org/?user=LeelaQue…

one of my favorite music genres is "haunting ballad about historical events" but there are so few songs like that even though I'm pretty sure they were super popular in the past

starting an evergreen thread of the songs I find, contributions welcome Marty Robbins' Ballad of the Alamo, a little jingoistic but incredibly moving nonetheless. I associate it with driving on the endless highways of the western US

thread on Dunbar's "anatomy of friendship" paper, expanding on the famous "Dunbar number". h/t @__drewface for the rec 150 is the number of people with whom you can have a "mutual, reciprocal relationship of trust and obligation, combined with a willingness to act prosocially". So Dunbar's number is mostly trust not memory (you can maintain about 500 acquaintances and remember about 1500 faces).

my beef with mental health culture is that it adopts the medical frame, so saying you have a mental health issue is equivalent to saying "I have a problem and I'm outsourcing the solution to the professional class of therapists and psychiatrists". (1/N) I guess I just don't accept the legitimacy of that professional class in helping solve people's life problems! Unlike surgeons and antibiotic-prescribers (doctors) they just don't seem to have great quality control, so you have to rely on your judgment when choosing one. (2/N)

The famous "36 questions that lead to love"... don't. The NYT and everyone else reported a different set of questions from the same authors, modified to be less romantic! The original set of *40* questions wasn't online, but I emailed the authors and got a copy. Details in 🧵 I was trying to reproduce the original study as closely as possible (you know, like a normal person) and stumbled on this paragraph in the famous 1997 paper that everyone cites (journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117…)