Eric Slavich

@ythrthx2 In high school, I remember a rule against displaying drug or alcohol brands/images. Since a lot of school supplies were "Mead" branded, I did a little smart ass thing and wrote the definition under the word "mead" on the cover of my spiral notebook I had to turn in for English.

What’s the most unnecessary rule your school had?

@scottvspaul @1sPlaza Also filtered water, right?

@1sPlaza Coke tastes better at McDonald's because the ship it on stainless steel. It's an agreement. Other franchises get plastic.

Something I like to do when I’m out and about running errands is stop by McDonald’s and order a large Coke Zero. It tastes better from McDonald’s and it’s only like $1.37 after taxes. Way cheaper than a 20oz from a c store.

@bscholl The funny thing is that the value gained in the transaction is the same regardless of whether the seller's profit is $0.01 or $1,000,000. It's just a question of which of the parties is enjoying the majority of the value. If I'm the buyer, I want to minimize your profit. Obv.

Guys we need to remember what profit is: the difference between how much a buyer is willing to pay for a thing versus what it cost to create it. Profit happens only when the outputs are worth more than the inputs. Profit is literally value creation. Profit is good.

@CliftonSellers Watch for extreme tendencies that may need moderation. Too much screen time... allow less. Never have friends over? Encourage socialization.

Parents, honest question for you all My kids (3 daughters) are 10+ years away from turning 18 and college is looking less and less like the path What’s the new plan?

@DavidDack 10:30/mile. Overweight in my 50's.

What’s your honest easy pace? Not race pace. Not “it felt easy because I survived it.” Not the pace you wish looked better on Strava. Your actual leave-the-ego-at-home pace. Comment it.

@AndrewGspeedrun How bad would it be to "just" have someone make a second site for tracking speedruns with different rules? If there were a site where the default was to always create a new category instead of changing rules for existing categories, would that implode the speedrunning community?

I would say there is an extreme disconnect between casual viewers/speedrunners and the top runners of any given game. You'll spend a year getting a world record but you're "taking it too seriously" if you disagree with rule changes that effect the top players: Turbo, Breaks, Etc

@fintechfrank If a married couple is worth, say, $1.5 million, does that count as 0, 1, or 2 millionaires?

Only 60 million people on earth (1.6% of adults) have a net worth over $1 million. Those 60M people hold 48% of all global wealth. The bottom 1.55 billion hold 0.6%. Source: UBS Global Wealth Report 2025

@uaivito Go to their house and knock on the door, followed by face to face talking.

Pessoas que eram adolescentes antes das redes sociais existirem... como vocês se comunicavam com os amigos??

@GTM5471 Normalize using age buckets or just the birth decade.

the vague classification of generations kind of pisses me off why cant it be more precise ? Or maybe the whole concept itself is just a little stupid. Does anything really matter

@FollowIncentiv I disagree; that is not an unpopular opinion.

Unpopular opinion: if your mortgage rate is 3.5% or lower, paying it off early is one of the worst financial decisions you can make. Your money earns more in an index fund than it saves on that interest. Agree or disagree?

@thinkingshivers Maybe use a prompt so Claude points out sentences you might want to rewrite, without Claude making a suggestion.

I submitted a draft of my short story to Claude for copy editing. Sometimes he’ll suggest a re-write of a particular sentence. My version: “She was just a rich girl, with a carelessness about her that could only come from being born into privilege.” Claude’s suggestion: “She was just a rich girl, careless in the way only privilege allows.” It's a matter of taste, but I personally think Claude's version is better. It's saying the same thing but more deftly. But when I swap his sentence in then plug the paragraph into Pangram, it goes from being high confidence that it's human to low confidence that it's human. If I keep doing this, will it start to read like AI slop? If I keep doing this, is it even my writing anymore? So I'm keeping my version, the one I think is worse, and I'm disquieted by the fact that there could be a better version of this story that I now need to specifically avoid.

@thinkingshivers @PKMerlott @BarneysRubble0 My take: "But alas" could just be "Alas."

@PKMerlott @BarneysRubble0 "Alas" is goated.

@nkmyztcha In addition to just listening to songs, I bet there are many people who use Beattles stuff for, like, intro music for podcasts, ringtones, alarms, that sort of thing. Recurring.

when do you guys think was the last time nobody on the planet was listening to a beatles song. have we been on a nonstop streak since sometime in 1964 or have there been breaks, like, in the 70s maybe. when will the streak be broken next

@PanasonicDX4500 Muscle pain and pancreatitis are the rate but serious side effects I've heard.

so are there any actual downsides to these things or is it just negative "it's too good to be true" vibes like mRNA vaccines?

@BenBryant2017 I recently had this thought that refusing to buy something overpriced, even if you can afford it, is the morally correct thing to do. Especially if we're not talking about a luxury good. Don't help them justify exorbitant prices; not everyone can afford it.

I said this as a reply to another post. When people’s head explode because you tell them that if a soda is $5 then just get water, it becomes clear that in their mind, soda is a non-negotiable; the price is irrelevant to them; they deserve a lifestyle where they can afford a soda regardless of price. But when you are willing to buy a soda regardless of the price, whoever is selling the soda is going to maximize the price. These people cannot fathom voting with their wallet, because they don’t start from a place of “here is my money, now what can I afford with it”. They legitimately start from a place of “here is what I am buying, and this is BS that it is causing me to be in debt”

@kittenaround_51 Got most of them. Nostalgia.

Sounds that every 80’s kid will remember. A few I didn’t recognize myself. How many did you remember?

@Sys7emsGal @Riley_Gaines_ Bad maybe, but I do not see how you know it was *intentionally* bad. When you say "no coz theyre afraid of the girl being harmed" I assume you mean the girl in the video. But the teacher might have considered the impact on other students.

@EricSlavich @Riley_Gaines_ No, its bad. When they allowed poems that mocked Jesus and include LGBT+ rights, but bar this poem? Thats for bad, not cuz theyre afraid of the girl being harmed. The teacher wanted to shut this girls message down, and thats all there was to it.

2.2 million views is a heck of a lot more than the ~30 students in her class. What the teacher meant for bad, God used for good. Bravo to this brave girl!

@allie__voss I remember calculating the cost of making a pan of corn bread when I was a teen in the 90s.

The younger and poorer the generation, the more they eat out and DoorDash This is part of the problem

@NishantBalepur I'd be interested to know if some test setters are better than others at making it difficult to infer the correct answer without knowing the question. As a former actuary, I suspect actuarial exams would be a likely source of hard-to-guess questions.

🚨 New Paper! 🚨 One of my first Ph.D. papers found that LLMs can answer multiple-choice questions without seeing the question 🤔 At #ACL2026, I'm presenting a follow-up showing that current reasoning LLMs can still do this! And quite similarly to a clever test-taker 🧑‍🎓🧵