sean

hi! wanna be friends?

[sean @seanta___]

@Aella_Girl Am I supposed to do these with my own preferences or my estimate of consensus attraction

[sean @seanta___]

@bashu_thanks @daybower 😭😭😭

[sean @seanta___]

@the_varunrana yeah like why is SF just as loud as NYC but somehow also totally empty

[sean @seanta___]

@ArtirKel what is purring if not full body vibing

[sean @seanta___]

this is why I practice Buddhism, to purr loudly at my own wage cuckery

[anna (In Play, Chad(s)) @rockmeannadeus]

husband trapped the cat under an upside down laundry basket while playing and she just laid down and started purring really loudly. not only complicit in her own oppression but satisfied by it. sad

[sean @seanta___]

@silverarm0r I love to play the straight man, always here for it 😌

[Guy @nosilverv]

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

[sean @seanta___]

@00aarti I hear you but also after that winter, maybe they just need vitamin D

[sean @seanta___]

fascinating. The Ottomans and Mamluks faced the same problem: how do you keep a warrior elite loyal once peace makes it useless? and chose to buy or kidnap Christian babies from other regions to use as rootless, enslaved administrators

[Ruxandra Teslo 🧬 @RuxandraTeslo]

For 250 years, Japan maintained an extraordinary peace by forcing the entire warrior class to live in the capital Edo, a city that was essentially a giant consumption machine that produced nothing.

Half its population were samurai pensioners doing busywork, while the daimyo (the ruling elite) were burning money on mandatory mansions and endless processions between their estates. The whole city ran on agricultural surplus extracted from the rest of Japan.

Some surprising facts:

1) The city functioned as a hostage system. The daimyo (regional lords) were required to leave their families permanently in Edo as de facto hostages. Most noblewomen never once visited the lands their husbands governed. Instead, they spent their entire lives in the capital as insurance against rebellion.

2) Half the city were warriors with nothing to fight. At any given time, nearly half of Edo's population were samurai, which were living as state pensioners in a country at total peace. Most did little beyond civil administration and calligraphy lessons, since most work was considered beneath them.

3) It was probably the world's largest city, centuries before Tokyo's modern fame. Edo likely exceeded a million people by 1700. London didn't hit that mark until 1800, New York did not until 1880.

4) It had very high population density, almost entirely in single-storey buildings. Some commoner districts hit twice Manhattan's current density.

5) The poor were taxed at up to 70% of their harvest. The agricultural surplus flowed up through public taxation rather than rent, making the state the direct intermediary between peasants and the elite.

[Will Manidis @WillManidis]

I don’t think any of you understand what is about to happen in the market. We are about to live through the craziest five year run in technocapital history. God help us all. I pray that when Judgement comes He can see all that we did to ensure efficient price discovery.

[Neha Halebeed @nhalebeed]

In nyc I never heard people saying why nyc is better than sf, but in sf people are always saying why sf is better than nyc.

[ueaj @_ueaj]

the fact Eliezer isn't looksmaxxing is the ultimate condemnation of rationalism

[Paul Kuruvilla @RohitPaulK]

@BullTheoryio

[sean @seanta___]

@silverarm0r oh phew 🙌

[Alasar @aphrosociety]

Great thing about NYC is that if you’re an interesting sharp person, class markers just don’t matter. Like you can have the sloppiest appearance & still collect friendships w the coolest people in the city & no one will care

Opposite LA where status signaling is everything

[Leila Clark @leilavclark]

One of my favorite parts of working at Jane Street was the culture around hours. It was demanding, but in a very bounded way.

You’d work 9-10 hours a day, with a (actual work, not scrolling Twitter!) and the rest of the time was your own. You had to be in by 9, but senior people would chase new grads out of the office as they left around 7.

I got to work with incredibly smart people on hard problems, *and* also had a lot of time to explore NYC and keep up with university friends. And it clearly hasn’t been a drag on the firm’s growth…

[sean @seanta___]

@neharedy backpacks??

[sean @seanta___]

@NuneStarkie ooh say more?