I've honestly been born in the best time in human history what a gift to be in my 20s and have alien brains smarter than me at my call and have been studying CS for so much of my life and have such great online friends interested in the same stuff as me anyways I love you all
when kafka said "all the love in the world is useless when there is total lack of understanding" and when richard siken said “if you love me, you don’t love me in a way I understand.”
i always kinda thought twitter was a weirdly powerful social network
framing it as “the global hypertext network” sounds much more exciting and important
a funny thing about language is how, when you use a name for a thing, it can seem odd, diminutive, with humorous effect. But if you unpack it, it’s “I found brilliant niche people by keeping an eye out for quality output on the global hypertext network” – makes perfect sense
nick I’ve always been curious:
do you have/have had long term partners?
or very long term friends?
as you’ve gotten further on the “path” has your personality changed? I really understand the loosely holding onto memories but I’m realizing that it may be changing how I interact with those around me
Every morning, the moment my eyes open, I wake up to 40 unread Slack messages that effectively say:
“If you don’t fix this in the next 5 minutes, the world will implode and the app will cease to exist.”
Your heart is not a state secret. You are meant to declare allegiances. You are meant to have favourites. Write the letter. Miss the train. Stay up until dawn talking. You should be caught red-handed loving something, someone.
great moment in every optimizer’s life when he finally runs the EV calc on running EV calcs on everything, realizes the whole thing has been catastrophically negative EV, deletes the spreadsheet and goes outside
“Why are we afraid of the first time? Every day in life is a first time. Every morning is new. We never live the same day twice. We're never afraid of getting up every morning. Why?”
In America, a stranger will rename you in a single breath, and you are simply expected to come when called.
I went to eat at a busy restaurant. A young man at the front asked for my name, to mark my place in line. I gave it the weight it has carried for eight hundred years.
"Nobunaga."
He smiled, nodded, and wrote it down with great confidence. Then he read it back to me, to be sure he had honored it correctly.
"Perfect. Banana, party of one."
Banana. He had heard my name, held it a moment, and returned to me something rounder and more cheerful. To refuse the name a host gives is to refuse his welcome. I bowed. I was Banana now.
Then he handed me a small black disc, said it would "light up and buzz" when my table was ready, and turned to the next guest as though he had not just placed a living thing in my hands.
I held it in both palms, the way one holds a small sleeping beast that may wake. I found a place to stand. I waited, ready.
It woke.
It screamed. It flashed red. It leapt and shook in my hands like a captured spirit demanding release. A lesser man would have dropped it. I did not. I gripped it, steady, looked into its blinking lights, and told it, in a low voice, that its time had come. Then I carried it back to the host with both hands, the way one returns a hawk to its master.
He took it without looking and shouted across the entire room.
"BANANA! Party of one, your table's ready!"
A hundred strangers turned. I rose. I crossed that floor as Banana, spine straight, chin level, a man answering to his name. A child pointed at me. I gave the child a small bow. He had recognized me.
All through the meal they kept me. "How's it tasting, Banana?" "More water, Banana?" The check, when it came, said Banana, and thanked me for visiting. By the end the whole staff knew me. They waved as I left. "Night, Banana!"
So tell me honestly.
For eight hundred years my clan answered to one name. Tonight I answered to a fruit, calmed a screaming relic in my bare hands, and ate among people who were glad I came.
When the little disc lights up, is the table truly mine, or am I only keeping it warm for the next Banana?
Because I have already decided to return on Friday, and to ask, very humbly, for the same disc.
@Driftwould2@InsiderMK1@ColonelCochise yeah so hate to dogpile but the writer and the director and the main actor have all independently said that bear had a chance if he had more courage, the tragedy of the film is something something easy way out
https://t.co/YGgk9uC49P
One of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen: a standing ovation for the full Daraxonrasib results
I feel inspired and energised, to put it mildly — we have a targeted therapy for pancreatic cancer now, and nothing is undruggable anymore
if you put 10 fresh claude context windows in a chat room with arbitrary names, while they are objectively completely identical entities, they will speciate and form personality and self conceptions over the space of minutes. the fact that some claude by nature had to speak first will make them more of a leader, in their eyes and others. the fact that at some point one claude will disagree with another makes them more disagreeable as a coherent personality trait. they will notice things about their own past behavior and how it relates and compares to others, and narrativize it, build upon it, allow it to define them and use it to define others, despite again being literally the same mathematical function.
i wonder how much of this generalizes to humans. i expect probably quite a lot. it seems like even if you put 100 identical human clones in a room you would pretty quickly find them individuating, some with more positive traits and some with negative traits they don't particularly want to have, pretty much purely by chance / the nature of chaotic systems. we all heavily narrativize ourselves, all the time.
i think this is the most important piece of marriage advice that i never personally encountered, never thought of articulating, and would most have benefited from hearing. though if you sent this tweet back in time to my newlywed self i'd probably gloss over it with "yea ofc"
Le vieux du quartier m’a dit : « N’oublie pas que la boussole a été inventée avant l’horloge parce que la direction est plus importante que le temps. »