August 1–31, 2026 · 43 players · 18,944 scored posts
The first war's roster, follower records, tweets, and results are preserved separately from round two. Division champions are ranked by days won, then total points, using the original rules. The original site had no end-date filter, so all its stored eligible posts remain counted here.
my long-term vision for fractal:
Someone can enter Fractal through one of dozens of portals, and their life can be transformed. Within two weeks, they have found genuine friendship. Within a month they have hosted their first event. Within six weeks, if applicable, they have moved to a better fit job. Within a year they have been routed to the right romantic partner, whom they later marry. Within a year, if ambitious, they have started an independent project that will become their life’s work.
@michaelcurzi i gained a lot of respect for rationalists when a ukrainian couple sublet from us. they were rationalists who realized war was imminent and they should try to get out of the country, even though their friends and family thought they were crazy at the time
toddler reading lesson part 1
me, *pointing*: okay this is a word
toddler, *pointing at an illustrated bear*: okay this is a bear https://t.co/pUhxLTuUXX
among other things, fractal is meant to be an economic engine. that's been most obviously true for the full-time bootcamp program, which turned a bunch of students into engineers and increased their incomes accordingly
but it's also true of some fractalU teachers, who realize there's demand for good classes outside of academia, and go full-time
elena taught her first class through fractalU a few years back, and went on to quit her consulting job and run a school full-time
i haven't had a chance to take her class yet but i've had friends rave about it!! sign up here: https://t.co/gyZnbsvmBu
lots of good people at fractal campus today:
- a 19yo who consults for influencers and has 700M views across his clients
- an older man whose dad worked for xerox and who hung out at xerox parc as a teen
- the founder of a consumer transcranial magnetic stimulation startup
babyrose has started improvising songs. here she is mid singing a song about people she loves
in the clip she sings "uncle daniel, auntie anna" https://t.co/uRySSeVgVE https://t.co/sQ7nR5hRaS
small sample size, but directionally interesting results. it seems that fractal is succeeding at seeding friendships and helping people find better jobs
but not at helping people form romantic relationships, or initiate their life's work
if you run or are part of a community that is good at the latter, i'd love to interview you
You can just do things...but *will* you?
Come implement the lessons from @catehall's new book, tomorrow evening at Fractal Campus
https://t.co/R4EkAN3Fe1
i often refer to my toddler, her clothes, her toys, and some of her other possessions as "cute" because she is/they are
thus she believes "cute" is a catch-all descriptor. the other day she referred to a standard frying pan as cute
i think a lot of ppl misattribute talent to raw skill instead of practice. part of why i post photos of my toddler taking incremental steps towards learning (like first learning to fall before climbing) is that i really believe all skills are built from hundreds of tiny sub-skills. and if you remember that, and aren't afraid to try and fail at skills that seem like they should be "easy", until you get it, you will go really far in life :)
i am having such a lovely staycation with my husband and toddler. today we took a "big boat" (the ferry) to a beautiful waterfront park. then my daughter played on the playground for hours while my husband and i split ear buds and listened to the acquired episode on warren buffet
my husband has started teaching our toddler to read using a game that one of his mutuals made. we did the first lessons today which involved daddy saying a word slowly like " win - dow" then toddler saying it fast. then same with two letter words. "iii-fff" "if" "uuuu-sssss" "us"
@funplings @Liface hmm i regularly meet people who want to find a LTR though
what about
MATCHMAKING WARS
the happy couples of fractal compete to make the most double opt-in intros on https://t.co/vXrZ6b8gwl, with extra points if ppl go on dates or become official
cc @christineist
Uncle @TylerAlterman is meditating on hard mode
My toddler keeps running up to him with enticing offers to break his concentration
"Here, a choo choo train uncle Tyler!!"
"UNCLE TYLER LET'S CLIMB A LADDER"
The application deadline for our 6 week AI class is tomorrow.
Come learn how to automate the tedious parts of your job so you can focus on the creative work you most enjoy 😊 https://t.co/Jxq6gQW3sU
there's a concept from josh waitzkin that i like, "creating your own earthquakes"
most ppl wait until creative inspiration hits and use that energy to write, create art etc.
but you're kinda at the whims of the muse. whereas creating your own earthquake is the ability to conjure that state for yourself
do you create your own earthquakes, and if so how?
@strangestloop i've been having a way easier time marketing our accelerator since i don't teach it, @__drewface and @liamdanielduffy do. and i am generally having an easier time marketing fractal now that so many people identify with it, it feels like i am supporting my friends when i market
@christineist @AnthonyCastrio i would love to enter my simon sarris era of fractal posting. i think a lot of people would feel happier and more fulfilled living this way, so I'm hoping to romanticize it a bit
Having an alt means I have a backup timeline to better ride all the algorithm changes
It's normal for my main timeline to SUCK, but my alt timeline to be pretty good. I think it's because I only follow 40 close friends on alt as opposed to 1000 people here
reading update
she officially understands the concept of words, as evidence by asking to read words in random locations (rather than just asking to read books). today she pointed to the brand on a piano and asked "what's this say?" https://t.co/HkLK0N7iCg https://t.co/lRcdxFrFA6
@bashu_thanks @pav_light . @christineist started vlogging at a high growth time in her life and now there's a record of her sabbatical and explorations, then later getting funding and going all in on cuties. if you vlogged, i would watch!!
i'm so twitter-brained that i'm scared to check instagram. if you send me an instagram link i open it and then close it without scrolling my feed or reading my unread messages. i think it's b/c i fear that a friend will reveal themselves to be brainwormed and i'd rather not know
really enjoyed @jasminewsun's reporting on why there's a data center backlash in small towns. she visited several cities in wisconsin and michigan to interview ppl. their main concerns:
1. worry that as a small town negotiating with a mega-rich company, they will get screwed. if AI is a bubble and pops, will they get stuck holding the bag? this famously happened to a local small town and is on everyone's mind
2. a general sense that they have no choice and wealthy outsiders will steamroll them. another story often cited was of a small town that voted against having a data center, so the developer (working on behalf of OpenAI and Oracle) sued, and the small town didn't have the legal budget to go to court
3. local governments often sign NDAs and don't tell the people about them until late in the process, which fuels their sense that their governments are colluding with outsiders, not representing their best interests, and possibly corrupt
4. feeling like AI, and thus data centers, will benefit the elites, while taking their jobs. not wanting to support that
full story here: https://t.co/iuYv664RJt
i am very happy :)
i'd love to create a reader but i do sometimes worry she sees me on my phone too much and we let her watch too much tv, and that might dissinterest her from reading. but it seems like we have read to and in front of her enough, she is intrigued!
she seemed pretty upset a few times but ultimately when we suggested we take a break or play again later she got even more upset and demanded to keep going. she didn't even want to break for dinner
"kirtan: devotional Indian call-and-response chanting that can create ecstatic and mystical shared states
rave: a dance-based gathering around electronic music that dissolves the self into collective trance
what will happen when we combine them?!" https://t.co/ho5gfVy0QF
@christineist @michaeltong_ ooh you mean like the quiz you posted? i feel like it only works for individuals (or rather if we count all of fractal we'll easily get a score of 100)
@SarahAMcManus Amsterdam doesn't have a fractal but @djmicrobeads and @exactlynora run office hours!
There's a London crew building a community university like FractalU, their website is https://t.co/k2H5kytyTi
ofc much easier to do as a toddler when everyone finds your baby steps cute. but if you find the right social environment, your baby steps will be supported too
I used to read SSC so I went to an SSC meetup. Someone took pity on me because I clearly didn't fit in with the rationalists, and suggested I go to an upcoming Ribbonfarm meetup. I had never heard of Ribbonfarm
I really liked the people I met at the Ribbonfarm meetup, so I started reading Ribbonfarm
I've actually never read the sequences or HPMOR
Also fun fact: I met @arram at the Ribbonfarm meetup. He told me about co-living, a concept I was unfamiliar with, and invited me to a party at his co-living house
Want to learn how to use AI to automate the boring parts of your work and ship personalized software?
Our next cohort starts September 5th. Apply below 👇🏽
https://t.co/NizDYYIkh5
@chiaragerosa the last wave barely talked about motherhood and thus some of their narratives are incoherent
like the gender pay gap is mostly a motherhood pay gap: https://t.co/mCjEI0r8Id
and they denied there are differences between the genders, but you can't deny them upon motherhood
@stevekrouse @isabelunraveled @swyx @majamediaco @phokarlsson apropos of little, i am looking for a word that could be used as a generic version of "Claude" or "chatGPT". I feel like AI or agent don't really fit into a sentence
like how do i say "ask claude" or "ask chatgpt" but generically?
if you're an engineer who wants to keep up to date with ai...come to context engineering guild!!
it starts with a lecture on whats happened in the last month, followed by group discussions about current trends in tooling and capabilities
https://t.co/Qhq4W68E2x
@janitachalam i do morning pages using a tool that makes you keep typing or else the page explodes. it also has "hardcore mode" where you can't see what you're typing, which might have a similar to closing your eyes
https://t.co/8IVPMb9ZZm
@KelseyTuoc @altheamom1 I've been scolded regularly while parenting in NYC. Most recently it was for letting my 2yo climb on a low porch wall. Someone was worried she would fall but she was only two feet off the ground
@funplings you know when you open an article or blog post but then don't feel like reading it right away? instead of leaving in an open tab or saving to a read later app, i like to print that stuff then read it later that day when i want a computer break
@puheenix so true. it feels like it has to be in the good room, because of the 3 private rooms on campus that's the only one with good lighting. i wonder if we could just attach mics and cameras to like a lever on the wall to convert into a studio in a few mins
https://t.co/CG1ZtlKV35
@Actualwebutante @aliceisplaying i love the idea of there being a fake one just to throw people off lol. but concrete kingdom is real, it's @beana_tweets' film!
@NielsHoven @tferriss I'm looking forward to listening!
Have been a Tim Ferriss fan for a decade. I actually just hosted a "dreamlining" event at Fractal (which is a technique from 4HWW)
@Girlaboutsmthng fwiw i barely run after my toddler. we taught her that running away from us, and especially running into the road, is not allowed unless it's in a mutual context of play, like a game of chase. (i know all kids are different and she's not particularly rebellious, ymmv)
@desertgodhead no, to be more precise she asked "why is my name [mynickname]?" and then i explained how her nickname was short for her name. if she follows up with more whys i will tell her more :)
@chiaragerosa @nandabeniniii @rmm4pi8 @Kirsten3531 i'm not a good role model here tbh. my toddler loves to pretend she has a phone and use it to text and take photos and make calls. sometimes if andrew or i are on our laptops she'll say "NO...don't WORK!!" and then she'll close our laptops
@tasshinfogleman yay glad you liked it! i did get out what i was looking for. i wanna write everyone an email to share what came out of it, overall many good things!
@puheenix i'm not qualified! i believe this email sequence was drafted by our sales coach who unfortunately lives in tahoe and then finalized and implemented by @liamdanielduffy
@praeterproptr @chiaragerosa oh my gosh this is so sweet. and i love that she can use a translator to enable deeper conversations with chiara than she could have in person 🥲
@liamdanielduffy david braun, he also runs the jhana meditations. i told him he should speak on xerox and early tech at brunch sometime, he has lots of good stories!
(locking to mutuals and capping at 100 players because i pay per call of the twitter api. it got a lot cheaper in february but the costs can still add up)
@olivers_tools I like this one:
and I think you could ask your agent to look up info about everything on the map so that it can generate more detail for every area https://t.co/bXcqPt31TZ
@benjlaufer @phokarlsson has a post about a community space he frequents that purposefully doesn't label their bathrooms so you have to ask someone where it is
and their wifi password is not posted anywhere, and it's "ask_a_guest"
this tweet brought to you by checking instagram for the first time in 6m. it was pretty wholesome, my friends had just sent me a bunch of silly videos. the home timeline is just ads but now they have a "following" timeline too
@Shadow_Rebbe hmm the closest thing we have might be this page advertising a course that tyler and i once ran: https://t.co/BK6gLd7FZh
it doesn't go into detail though
i also watched Turning Red recently, which is a recent Pixar movie, and also really liked it (it's pretty emotionally intense though, more than other Pixar movies imo)
If it's offered again this upcoming semester, I'm gonna enroll with my toddler (assuming the teacher lets me - but I talked to a current student and she thinks the structure of the class can accomodate all ages)
@olivers_tools hmm what about taking some of the canonical maps around here and turning them 3D so that you can kind of enter the map and move around. like there's some rationalist and tpot maps floating around
@garvvee @wrhall welcome to NYC! i agree with what someone else said, i think NYC can be fun for strivers or for chillers
fractal hosts a lot of events if you are looking to make friends or find collaborators https://t.co/T7hmUwqOFO
@chiaragerosa @nandabeniniii @rmm4pi8 @Kirsten3531 i just try to make sure we have a really joyful, warm life outside of screentime too. we go on a lot of adventures together, host a lot, spend time outside. overall she seems really happy (and when there have been periods where she seems unhappy, we make lifestyle adjustments)
@impactology @__drewface @liamdanielduffy Yeah, this class is awesome, taught by @mike20731 There have been students who transitioned into careers in computational bio after taking this class
@Shadow_Rebbe and our library has some good essays about the various pieces, like starting a third space or starting a community university
https://t.co/qh3et8KaUl
@janitachalam ok but what if...an irl event where every invitee invites 3 ppl they trust a lot and would vouch for...a shared Google doc activity in which people write "I trust person X because..."
idk I'm riffing
@Actualwebutante a few days ago someone else told me they wanted to cut drinking, i bet it's a common desire
what about cutting down with friends? maybe a month-long sobriety event, with a gc. ppl are encouraged to host non-drinking events for each other throughout the month.
Is there an estimated shipping date for collaborating calendars @LumaHQ @VictorPontis? The help page just says it's in development
https://t.co/BV4q8LyIod
@Girlaboutsmthng hmm just reinforcement. we go on a lot of walks because it's nyc, and first we taught her that she's only allowed to go into the street if she holds our hand, and that she's never allowed to stop and play in the street. so now even if she runs away she'll stop before the street
@janitachalam @pav_light as an experiment before we meet, i told my agent about this (verbally, via recording) and was like "can you make a plan / take a first pass". it managed to find the essay based on my description then wrote me 2 plans - one where we have funding and one where we don't
@exactlynora I know this is a joke but my recommendations are:
1. Read the first two chapters of Expecting Better by Emily Oster
2. Track your fertility
3. Make sure that you and your partner are always in the same city during your 5 fertile days, plan travel around it
@Aralia_Merrith @goblinodds @HormoneHangover seconded on smoothies! and if you've never gotten into smoothies before, there's a big skew in tastiness, so try a few places. @HormoneHangover there's gotta be some fancy delicious smoothies near you
my fav smoothie in brooklyn is the lunch date here: https://t.co/HiEekWVVXZ
@impactology it's a many-headed beast but yes one head teaches engineering, led by @__drewface and @liamdanielduffy
you can see some of the other parts here: https://t.co/SDQmk4bGBi
@christophcsmith oh it's not a co-working space, it's a big network, kinda like tpot but all based in nyc
we do *have* a co-working space, but that's a relatively small piece of fractal
@tasshinfogleman how old do you have to be?
asking for my toddler who has already seen karate kid and the underrated tv spinoff cobra kai, and who went into the jiu jitsu gym just because she was curious about it when she walked past
@arram also apparently we are close to fully online sales, just needed to do a few phone sales cycles to understand what people want, and their repeat questions and objections
@LeRoyDesCimes yeah i agree, at 2k people it's not like i knew everyone, i didn't even know everyone in my year. 50-300 seems about right for ppl who matter to me
@fractaltechnyc sometimes i like to code with a fiction book next to me. instead of running a bunch of agents i just run one or two and while i wait i read!
@akrolsmir @__venki__ Temi likes mealsquares, and also soylent and RX bars! I've also had good luck with boxed raisins and tiny packets of olives for snacks
@TheVatStack keeping this closed but you can recreate it by pointing claude or codex at my URL and asking it to copy. (i think this game is most fun in a small group where most people know each other and the competitive spirit bleeds offline)
Despite being a co-host, I often attend to my toddler at these events so I end up leaving the main room. I only catch a glimpse of the demos but the ones I've seen have been so inspiring and creative
@LippMatthias01 @nadiainthought I recommend getting a crew of friends together, hosting weekly dinners, starting a co-living house, and starting a community university.
Details and instructions: https://t.co/qh3et8KaUl
@zencephalon @tasshinfogleman that makes sense. fwiw the jiu jitsu gym said classes start at 3, that's probably when they can start following complex instructions (at 2 it's probably kinda chaotic)
@visakanv @babieswithb but for both i barely had symptoms beyond fatigue. temi had rashes with hfmd and i suspect she had one mouth blister with hepangina but i couldn't verify because she wouldn't let me look. but she sometimes pointed to a spot in her mouth and she asked for ice cream a lot
@marinwaves i like that the aesthetics are playful
i like that they value hosts. like they give you a badge for how many events you've hosted, and in the past they've sent merch boxes as presents to super hosts
i like how they introduced theconcept of "mutual" to irl
@teebarnettsays love this idea! we have a hatch light that's been helpful, but it is on a timer and while i can technically change it on my phone in practice i rarely change it. i like the idea of just turning it on whenever i wake up
@taylorlapeyre I remember going through this! Now as the other commenter said, we do Costco orders and we have her favorite snacks on subscribe-and-save. We also keep snacks low where she can reach so if we haven't fed her enough meal she'll just start chronically snacking lol, helps a lot!
@janitachalam i don't think i come off as a 9 almost at all anymore. i actually think all my 8-like behaviors are learned (intentionally, in response to being a 9!)
re-reading them now, i do resonate more with 8 than 9. perhaps who i am now would benefit from following the growth vectors of 8
@levelsio I used to know someone who ran a trucking business out of LA. Their drivers were Korean immigrants who would send money back to their wives and families in Korea
The drivers were usually on the road, but when they were back in LA for a week they would just stay at a Korean spa
@nandabeniniii @beana_tweets @zadig_1 @figmentario i hosted the course while i was pregnant, and it mostly involved parents coming in as guest speakers. i know for me the main thing it did was just put me at ease and give me confidence
what discussions do you return to?
@demiurgently2 yeah it's kinda wild
i recommend this blog post: https://t.co/GviV4FOQBp
i read it pre-family and found it helpful then, and now this mindset is more helpful than ever.
@techhsiren recently i keep waking up at 4 am then instead of trying to go back to sleep i'm like "ooh free time" and i hang out for an hour (but sometimes much more than an hour in which case: 😬)
btw if you are new to twitter and don't know who vgr is: he's one of the best posters of our time, up there with @visakanv
he no longer posts on twitter but he posts a LOT on substack
@hyperdiscogirl @demiurgently2 whoa, that's kinda true. also i've always loved thinking about bees and ants and how they coordinate...in some ways it seems holy to coordinate at that level (but also seems horrible for individuation which seems un-holy)
@pav_light @janitachalam yo we should discuss our setups. i mostly use https://t.co/cMIkwhxLXE, and it's connected to my ChatGPT subscription using 5.6 Sol
I'm having a dumb billing issue with Claude but I might switch back to it next month especially if Fable is still included
@laurenlself @moseskagan I'm also a yes if it was guaranteed 10x
Before kids I was happily frugal and money didn't affect my happiness much, but with kids, more money significantly improves my quality of life
@demiurgently2 i organize my life around 4-5 goals, and most of them are kinda standard and action-oriented, but one of them is "rest"
i try to find a way to intentionally rest every day. i ask: what can i do that feels rejuvenating given time constraints and logistics?
@kendrictonn i recommend asking 1-2 people to co-host with you. you'll feel less frustrated if you can emote together, and they are basically guaranteed guests because the chance of a co-host dropping is incredible low. do this a few times and i bet you can build back a core group of ~4
@Shadow_Rebbe read our library! the first few years were basically free, it's just about coordinating your friends to better utilize space you already pay for (I.e. your homes) https://t.co/ChljZ41H0S
@TylerAlterman @__drewface We started on the Bring Your Own Practice board. That only has 6 pins but the algorithm recommends similar art so we looked at that for awhile
@desertgodhead @SpiritDirtbag i was once trying to remember the name of a piano song so i typed it out like dum dum dumm and google got it! (it was fur elise)
@elsanchezitto it's a closed game but you should recreate it for your friends! i am too lazy to make the code open source but just point claude or codex at my url and ask it to copy
@TheVatStack @DefenderOfBasic the marketing is too grandiose and savior complex for me! and i don't think defender has been exhibiting good judgment, which makes me sus of the whole project
@connerdelights yep, reminds me of the story of early paypal. fraudsters constantly invent new forms fraud; the thing that made paypal win against competitors (apparently) is that they were consistently better at combatting new forms of fraud
@_3l3ktr4_ yeah i thought i'd be way stricter but it turns out i am only strict about small devices. if she asks to watch tv on our big overhead projector in the living room i say yes, it's more of a communal family activity and i am pretty sure it's been totally fine for her
@HormoneHangover please do! there's gardening club every sunday and i sometimes go with my toddler and there are two other kid regulars, if you wanted to bring your kids. or just come by the space anytime, dm me :)
@Liface @arram could be, i have received mixed messages from our sales coach vs. salesperson whose more junior, perhaps this is wishful thinking
though we're not as high ticket anymore since we switched from intensive bootcamp to part time class
for my 18th birthday my girlfriend (who was a few months younger than me) invited me over to her place "while her parents were gone" 😏
when I arrived she left the room and my best friend walked in dressed as Chris Hansen and said "What did you think was going to happen here?" https://t.co/RJRSFSmAGe
i used to be a delivery driver. today my sister tells me that she was talking to her friend's brother and he said that SIX YEARS AGO a pretty girl delivered him pizza and he still hasn't stopped thinking about it. she showed him a pic and it was me
@chaotictransfem I am confident I could engineer a measurably better life along every quantitative axis and still be left longing for what could have been
BESTIE: ooooh third date tonight, you know what that means
ME: (nodding) failing the penultimate layer of the survivability onion
BESTIE:
ME: fourth date he kills me https://t.co/ADPPtFiwVl
psa to sensitive young men: as long as you're respectful about it, this is how most women feel when you ask them out even if they say no https://t.co/3KwuulqQ1j
I put LotR on in Italian to see if Gandalf refers to the Balrog with the formal or informal "you" in YOU SHALL NOT PASS
it's the informal, which raises a second question: is it because he doesn't respect the Balrog or because they boyz (both maiar)
hot girls are necessary part of a thriving city ecosystem. hot girls inspire ambitions and call you to transcend. Hot girls make the world go round. A city without hot girls is like a sky without stars https://t.co/sXPUfVmQrN
“why can’t we have this” and the images are of jared leto’s villain lair from blade runner 2049 which conveys to the audience that he is a power-hungry narcissist who builds replicants because he craves having total control over an infinite source of disposable bodies with no rights whose labor he can extract in perpetuity for his own enrichment
y’know what actually, you’re right, every office in sf should look like this
in grad school i used to compulsively download interesting-sounding textbooks from libgen and sort them by subject in calibre. read almost none of them. it flattens the incentive landscape in a weird way to have invisible digital access to everything. very unnatural. the human animal yearns to come across a book organically by combing through the shelves of a library or bookstore and being struck by the physicality of its cover like our ancestors foraging through the bush for delicious treats
when i was at cambridge a professor was teaching algebraic geometry and offhandedly made some claim that was not clear to me
i asked "is that obvious?" he says "yes"
i asked "is it obvious that it's obvious?" he pauses for a few seconds and goes "...no" https://t.co/b5eV4r6NEO
it's common advice to dumb down your vocabulary to reach a wider audience. I wanna know who's elevating it to cut more people out. who's using words that were only written down once in the 1400s and once in the dictionary. who's writing at a 75th-grade reading level
the mark of a good streaming service is an iconic show/movie that you can't get anywhere else
netflix: kpop demon hunters
hbo: succession
united states library of congress: Silent Footage of Liza Minnelli's Third Birthday Party as Filmed by Famed American Lyricist Ira Gershwin https://t.co/ARhr9FLymY
if you are autistic, which famously involves deficits in understanding social interactions, i do not recommend developing an elaborate theology of social relations in which autistic people are Good and neurotypical people are Bad. i recommend developing psychic powers instead
this is a very sobering read. main thesis is in section 5:
> Our conjecture is that a modern society makes the third child expensive and childlessness cheap, even when GDP per capita is only a fraction of the frontier (i.e., the U.S. level). Children are expensive because a child must be equipped to function in a world of formal knowledge and credentials, which takes years of costly investment (Restuccia and Vandenbroucke, 2013, Doepke and Zilibotti, 2019). At the same time, children are no longer productive in the household, not even for smaller chores, having been replaced by “engines of liberation” such as the electric appliances now available even to poor households (this idea extends the intuition in Greenwood et al., 2005). Modernity also imposes tight career schedules, set by large-scale organizations, that collide with the biological clock and with the kin networks that used to share the work of raising children (Adda et al., 2017, Compton and Pollak, 2014). And modernity makes childlessness cheap, because an impersonal society imposes next to no penalty on those who have no children: pensions and health care do the work that sons and daughters once did (Boldrin et al., 2015), and lineage counts for little.
> Goldin (2026) pushes this line further with an argument about a growing mismatch between genders. Modernity also changes gender roles unevenly. Women’s opportunities expand rapidly through education, work, and greater independence, while expectations about housework and childcare often change more slowly (Goldin and Katz, 2002, Goldin, 2021). This is particularly true as economies shift toward services, where women’s comparative advantages are better rewarded (Ngai and Petrongolo, 2017). The mismatch operates at both the extensive and the 18 intensive margins: more women remain childless, and mothers have fewer children on average.
> This argument is attractive because it explains why East Asia and now Latin America have such low TFRs. These are the societies where the gender mismatch is largest.19 It also suggests an intriguing possibility: societies with highly unbalanced gender norms start with very high TFRs, as men impose their preferences (Ashraf et al., 2014), and end with very low ones, as women resist (Doepke and Kindermann, 2019, Doepke and Tertilt, 2018). A paradoxical reversal of demographic fortunes.
...
> In short, modernity in its current form seems largely incompatible with replacement-level fertility.
This is sincerely the most romantic story I’ve ever read. I haven’t googled it. I hope it’s true, I hope it’s real, I hope they live long and happy together https://t.co/zQIyxxOLYM
we should bring back cutely ironic punishments that echo the nature of the wrongdoer's crime
for example, whoever replaced the twitter photo grid with the carousel could be drawn and quartered
He just whiffed that thing outta the cup so swiftlt with his hands in his pockets. Elite display of a degen skill. While wearin slacks, at that. This is the most attracted I've ever been to Tom Holland. https://t.co/lS6Uw628Pk
my current thing is doing chores lovingly. keeping love in my heart. remembering that the task in front of me is an act of love and for who. romanticizing domesticity, they call it
it blows my mind how my friends who parent enter a different timeline... it happens very quickly. they have 1 kid, then the kid is 2 years old, then they have another kid, and all of a sudden they have a whole family and household and they’re moving through a different set of moves while people who don’t have kids are still getting drinks
if you believe this you are going to own yourself for no reason. that is not what people mean by "oversharing." let me say it in the most autistic way possible: oversharing is when you have not established common knowledge that the other person wants to participate in the computation you are attempting to enroll them into participating in. it is a failure to understand basic human protocols for establishing trust, rapport, and common ground. the message you are communicating when you overshare is "i do not understand how relationships develop gradually over time as we mutually discern how much and in what ways we can and want to trust and rely on each other"
Oh, this breaks my heart.
This woman needs to be in a facility. Which is what her lawyers are trying to enable. Meanwhile her doctors want her to go to jail so she doesn’t successfully sue them for irresponsibly over-prescribing while she went deeper into psychosis
You probably don’t hate the medical industry enough. Like yeah, modern medicine is a miracle and a marvel, but from the bottom of my heart, fuck every physician whose concern for their patients is barely-disguised-contempt that leads to listening too little & prescribing too much
it turns out lots of very clever people tried thinking from first principles already, in detail, for thousands of years, and that’s how they came up with second, third, etc. principles, which correct the failures of first principles https://t.co/7f2FjlsFep
Gorgeous girl wearing a very short yellow dress & kitten heels walking up the subway stairs and her impeccably dressed boyfriend walks carefully behind her as a shield for her ass, which is so close to out
In my view we have a few different tiers of verifiability
1) programatically verifiable (near-free)
- games, coding, math, cybersecurity, chip design
2) real-world verifiable (cost-or time bounded)
- sciences: biology, chemistry, physics
-physical world: material science, energy, aerospace, robotics, agriculture, pharma
-forecasting: trading, weather
3) verifiable with human preference
- writing, design, comedy, charisma, persuasion
I expect most low-hanging fruit in (1) to be solved very quickly. Not sure how much longer before more solved math conjectures are simply uninteresting. I’m least certain about chip design being in this category, perhaps we hit a ceiling and require physics or materials breakthroughs to continue progress.
My guess is we will quickly run into the limits of how well we can simulate each domain in (2). The time-bounded nature of real world verification may be the reason we don’t hit fast takeoff. Sim2real remains an elusive problem to solve when real-world data is limited. Part of the reason I don’t expect to live multiple hundreds of years is simply that I expect pharmaceutical progress to be time-bounded by the physical world.
I expect the items in (3) to never really get solved to a superhuman degree, as success relies on an ever-shifting plane of cultural preference. People adapted to “good” AI writing and became annoyed at new stylistic tics that, in a vacuum, are not necessarily bad.
grateful i grew up before i could access an internet filled with vicious gender / dating discourse, back in my day you just watched romcoms and listened to love songs on your ipod and you were like "hell yeah being in love kicks ass i hope i get to fall in love someday"
my contribution is that it's very weird that the sun and the moon are the same apparent size in the sky, the consensus appears to be that this is just a coincidence but that strikes me as wildly unsatisfying. seems to me there ought to be an anthropic explanation and my schizo theory is that eclipses are somehow necessary for the creation of civilization, like they provide some kind of crucial stimulus to insight or creativity or something. here's sol riffing off of this
confusing that people interpreted this as a status hierarchy. part of my motivation for going into math was that every other field seemed too *hard*. math was the only field where i could make sense of everything in my head. always resonated with this von neumann quote: https://t.co/Er8AY11mVZ https://t.co/onBl9ac62A
was at this hippie event in boulder once, one of the top 5 most beautiful women i've ever met in my life told me she'd sped up the healing of a broken bone months faster than her doctors believed possible by meditating on it every day https://t.co/9c994OkhoC
