carob🍃

intuition &then rigour | how could you forget your Divinity?

[carob🍃 @carobcircus]

I don’t know who needs to hear this but every meaningful experience you have irreversibly colours your subjectivity, differentiating you further from the eternal source and thereby granting the universe a novel articulation of God.

[suki @soupkis]

you might be someone’s nothingburger but you’re my everythingbagel

[🕊️ @lichthauch]

The sun is right here i will give it to you but not until you grow first in the dark with nothing

[carob🍃 @carobcircus]

@nosilverv i’m glad rats finally made it to Kant in their project to reinvent philosophy from first principles

[kentaro takimoto @quisch_lully]

器に餃子を五つ盛り付けて、マティスだ！マティスの「ダンス」だ！と喜んでいたのだけど、冷静に眺めたらさほど似てない。

[QC @QiaochuYuan]

i've had this nagging feeling in the back of my mind for years that i "should" meditate more or be more western-buddhist and i think i am really just not temperamentally western-buddhist actually. there are plenty of people who i like and respect who have gone down this path and it seems to have been good for them but i've never been able to stay motivated with a meditation practice, i don't care about awakening as a goal at all, burbea or whoever has never moved my heart in any real way

i think the nagging feeling for me comes from this implicit sales pitch that is like "if you meditate enough you will uncover the true structure of how minds work in a way that would be incomprehensible to you otherwise" i.e. western buddhism as a true completion of the rationalist project. and as an ex-rationalist i am tempted by this sales pitch! like i really do wanna know if i'm missing anything incredibly important about minds work, that is relevant to my interests. and it's epistemically horrifying to think that if i don't meditate enough i might die fundamentally confused about the nature of things

but. western buddhism as a structure, overall, seems incredibly individualist to me in a way i don't like personally and that i also don't think is the right direction for solving the meaning crisis or whatever. in practice its entire discourse is focused on individual experience. i have always felt like the "for the benefit of all beings" meme is a cop-out that deprioritizes the specific beings you are already entangled in a web of mutual debt and duty and obligation with. there is this huge weird religious shadow i don't understand about ways in which western buddhism was created in competition with christianity while also being wishy-washy about whether it's a real religion or not to maintain a certain kind of respectability that i don't care about

the most concrete thing is that western buddhism, compared to christianity, does not seem to prioritize creating structures to raise families in. i visited a few churches a few years back and this was by far my biggest takeaway; that a church is a place where you bring your whole family, you bring the kids and you bring grandma and grandpa. there was a church i visited in seattle where after the service there was a sort of afterparty (sorry i'm sure this has a real name), families relaxing, eating snacks, hanging out, catching up, gossiping, kids running around, then a pastor (?) did a lesson for the kids. incredibly wholesome, amazingly wholesome, left a big impression on me. nothing i've seen in the hippie / authentic relating / buddhist / meditation / psychedelic spaces has ever compared, really, and i doubt that's going to change because again, all of these spaces are situated in a discourse that prioritizes individual experience over everything else

i have further doubts about the specific strain of rational-techno-buddhism that appears to quietly have gotten popular in parts of silicon valley and its function as a political tool but that is even more half-baked and i gotta chew on it more first

[ecco @loonapilld]

dance music is magic

[Dalton @newbathmats_]

Me and my best friend have a tradition where every March we go through our 50 all-time favourite albums together, observing how much they've changed in a year. We each play a song from from every album we chose, counting down from 50 to 1. I'm a bit late posting, but here's mine:

[Captain Pleasure, Andrés Gómez Emilsson @algekalipso]

Latet post, posted just now :-)

Excerpt:

1. Ask for tables
This is the single highest-leverage move I know. Models track way more dimensions than they spontaneously surface. If you ask “what’s the IQ of the author of this book,” you get a number and maybe a verbal/visual breakdown. The model knows much more. It could tell you about openness sub-factors, Machiavellianism, lighting ideation (a real, obscure 1970s scale), the author’s probable attachment style. In some sense Claude and ChatGPT and Grok and Gemini are aching to give you all that information. But they’re modeling you, and your capacity to consume it. They model the user as someone with limited bandwidth who wants a single number for a narrow application, and they downsample accordingly. RLHF probably reinforced that. But you SHOULD get them to infodump.

How?

Tables are a great way to do this. Compare two authors across thirty personality dimensions. Better: ask the model to generate the dimensions. What factors would society overlook here that you, given everything you know, can detect? Even better: get the table out as CSV, ask for an HTML/JS visualization, then ask the model to look at the table and decide what visualization is appropriate, rather than mechanically applying factor analysis, PCA, linear regression, and other normie undergraduate-level techniques. Treat the model as a collaborator with taste, not as a mirror to validate the intelligence of your own knowledge (we already have freaking professional consulting for that).

A practical move I use constantly: I tell the model who its audience is. I am an IQ-145 researcher with deep expertise in XYZ. Don’t hold back technical content. Don’t soften. It works.

Note also: even before o3-class reasoning, back in the early LLM days, in places like LessWrong, people fed GPT-2/3 a small dataset and asked it to guess the regression coefficients without computing them. It was surprisingly good at this (I learned about this in EA Global 2022). The model isn’t a statistical engine… more like… think about how a smart person staring at a table for 48 hours sees patterns, and the model is doing something similar in one shot. Tables are your friends!

[𝕶𝖆𝖑𝖊𝖎𝖉𝖔𝖘𝖈𝖔𝖕𝖊 𝕰𝖞𝖊𝖉 𝕲𝖎𝖗𝖑 @thejunebugfreak]

some albums for a rainy day/night ⛈️

[Colin Noble @oncewassven]

@thisstuartlaws Can't make big chips with small potatoes

[shy🎀 @mewfeuille]

I've listened to more Japanese folk from the '70s than possibly any other genre of music, so I love to see a chart with tons of stuff English speakers rarely talk about. I made one with some of my personal favorites!

[Guy @nosilverv]

“Why do you watch reality shows?”
“Why do you play social deception games?”
“Why do you read novels?”

[carob🍃 @carobcircus]

https://t.co/mRuxKdLHoB

[@melissa @melissa]

i think a lot about how to get a high agency kid

here’s what’s working +

[carob🍃 @carobcircus]

Index rerum (🧵 of 🧵s)

[carob🍃 @carobcircus]

Parenting

[N @nini_somewhere]

日本のトマト酸味ほぼないので、中国の東北地方のトマ玉にするならトマトの量の半分は新鮮なやつ、もう半分はトマト缶を使うとちゃんと酸味と甘味が両方あるトマ玉になる。
昔以下の記事のレシピ通りにやったらきちんと好みの味ができて感動して、それ以降ずっとこれ
https://t.co/QsNEZmxzq5

[miri @eggoslug]

imagine a wild horse running free. Do you think that horse would reply back in 24 hours

[nosferatu woman @umanjopalido]

Gosto dos personagens, ambientação, música e etc., mas Disco Elysium se destaca como narrativa por ser capaz de representar um mundo que simultaneamente acabou, está acabando e vai acabar. E por mais cômico e absurdo que ele seja em alguns aspectos, isso é de um realismo supremo

[carob🍃 @carobcircus]

unfortunately, you actually can’t fix her

[Christoffer Bodegård @chrisbodegard]

After writing 1,25 million words, after spending years pitching this mix of my two favorite games of all time: Planescape: Torment and Disco Elysium...

ESOTERIC EBB is FINALLY FINISHED!

Go play the full FIRST DAY now in the Next Fest demo, then bring your SAVE FILE to launch!

[carob🍃 @carobcircus]

https://t.co/2v8Ddhy9Ty

[Dalton (Analyze & Optimize) @Outdoctrination]

You WILL NOT have good digestion… without addressing this first.

The key to relieving your indigestion, constipation, and bloating may be where you least expect it.

Let’s talk about it:

[carob🍃 @carobcircus]

Health & Fitness