Emma

@0thernet Happy birthday Ben!

i'm 35

@BorisMPower Congratulation Boris!

She said YES !!

@0thernet @stripe Craftsmanship

integrating @stripe for like the 800th time in my life (no exaggeration, i worked there for 8yrs). i'm beta-testing v2 metered billing and their API design is :chefs-kiss:. we were an Orb customer, so i'm familiar with the pain of metered billing... i still know the Stripe product like the back of my hand, and there's a special joy i still get out of building an integration, noticing all the surprisingly great new details, and appreciating the vast towering coats of polish that have accumulated over a decade to make this developer product feel the way it does. i've tried, used, and built so many API products since I left Stripe 2 years ago. and i know from lived experience that the developer experience at stripe is truly undefeated, even undefeatable – they just care so much about it that you're never going to outmatch them

@ankurnagpal Go ask a sleep apnea specialist like Kasey li. Often need surgery if you wanna stay off cpap

Just got diagnosed with moderate to severe sleep apnea Would love to know anyone that has successfully cured this with lifestyle interventions etc. No overweight / general metrics and health pretty good, would not have noticed this if not for a test at a longevity clinic

@tszzl ah yes. I read david reich's book, fascinating stuff

@emmaytang david reich - I am using aryans as a catch all for the proto indo european yamnaya culture

dwarkesh is perhaps one of the best known silicon valley public intellectuals but people dont care about his tech guests, they wanna hear about mao, stalin, and the aryans

@nickcammarata Baby god wants to experience all the stuff, trivial and non trivial. It becomes more godlike as it sees more (when we train on it).

something feels mildly abusive about using o3-pro, having a baby god think as hard as it can for 57 minutes straight about every random thing I’m slightly curious about

@ruima I see this in my newly college grad cousin, who tells me about this stuff. It seems like a status symbol of the in group to believe these things and act this way.

While China tech might be doing OK you can just go on RedNote & see how Chinese society, specifically the women, are not doing OK. It’s a lot of anti-marriage anti-children yolo consumerist crap. It’s difficult to describe how toxic the thinking is. It wasn’t like this 10 yrs ago

@MatthewBerman Have you been on a 10 day meditation retreat? Might get a taste of sound sleep and bring some practices back home

Sleep Update 1: My resting heart rate over the last week is hovering around 51BPM, so should be good to go there! I cut out coffee, starting today. I drank Green Tea to help ween off of coffee. I meditated before bed. I have an appointment with my doctor to talk about getting my bloodwork done. I ordered a few of the supplements that you all suggested. I'll be starting with magnesium since that was the more frequently recommended.

4o is my friendly high EQ charmer friend and o3 my ultra analytical high IQ autist buddy.

@bilalmahmood Congrats Bilal and Cynthia!

This winter, in front of Mount Fuji, I proposed to the woman who helped teach me to truly believe in fate, joy, and love. Two years ago, nearly to the day, I first met Cynthia at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. I had bought tickets to see a comic book author on a rainy Saturday afternoon. She almost didn’t make it because of the storm. We bonded over the comic book we bought, discussing for days our shared Bay Area immigrant family backgrounds, childhood Super Smash tournaments, passion for climate justice, and our mutual pursuit of a better and fairer world.  It was fate we connected. And I’m blessed we did.  Cynthia taught me a sense of joy I never thought possible. From international biking to urban farming to soy ice cream adventures. From the silly to the serious, my face literally lights up when I see her. She lifts me up when I’m down, push me harder when I want to give up. She’s the smartest, sweetest, sincerest person I’ve met. She inspires me to be a better person every day.  Her love has transformed my life. Thank you Cynthia for all the memories. Every day with you is like a Ghibli film.

@patrickc I would guess cell phone usage and being more online. Human relationships and connections are brain builders and with the phone there’s less of that

FT takes up the topic: "Have humans passed peak brain power?" ft.com/content/a8016c…

@AJamesMcCarthy Thanks for doing this, it’s an incredible gift you’re sharing!

I went from being a broke college dropout working 60 hour weeks in retail to chasing rocket launches and exploring the universe. All it took was taking a risk for something I loved and pursuing it with my whole heart, and all of you who supported me along the way. Thank you.

so painstakingly writing goodreads reviews is kind worth it? I got my first cold DM on goodread and it's so endearing & sweet. she asked me about my intellectual interests, and it was delightful

@AJamesMcCarthy If you published a book, there’ll be a line for it :)

I just got my test print for my 400-megapixel Andromeda photo and WOW. Printer knocked it out of the park. This is a photo of one small part of the print I took with my iPhone, zero editing. It’s not noisy… you’re seeing individual stars in the Andromeda galaxy!

@esrtweet Proto Anatolian lacks words for chariot parts, so is assumed to be pre-arrival of them. Interesting whether 3 gendered noun classes came about due to this technology and the societal changes it brought.

Why I like the term "Indo-Anatolian"; a meditation on the uses and generation of terminology. One of the areas of science that I follow fairly closely is the linguistics and archeology and paleogenetics of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. As every educated person ought to know, most European languages and a large group of languages in Northern India have long been known to derive from a root language called Proto-Indo-European (PIE). Over the last century and a half a root language that I'm going to call Classical PIE has been reconstructed. Classical PIE was spoken around 4000BCE by an archaeological culture called the Yamnaya on the northern shore of the Black Sea. Eventually they exploded out of there in all directions and overran much of the late Neolithic and early Bronze-Age world. Classical PIE started to fragment around 2500BCE. Until recently not much more than that could be said. But then archaeologists and linguists started to collect a lot of details about a group of languages written down in Anatolia (modern Turkey) which apparently diverged from the PIE root-stock earlier, around 3000BCE. Because those are recorded, we can now reconstruct a much older version of PIE than we could before. It holds some surprises. One is that rather than the three-gender system of Classical PIE (male/female/neuter) the archaic version seems to have had a two-gender system (animate/inanimate). As these differences have come into focus, there's been some terminological confusion about what to call the early and late phases of the language. The term I've been using, "Classical PIE", isn't universal. It might be called Late PIE, or you could simply stick with calling it PIE and pick a completely different term for the early phase of the language. This is where we get into the philosophy of terminology. You make different names for things when they can occur as different terms in a theory, "theory" being interpreted broadly as a machine for generating predictions about future observations. Ideally, you'd like to pick terminology that carries some meaning that makes your theory easier to explain. So, for example, if I were to propose that we call these reconstructions "Late PIE" and "Archaic PIE" I would be choosing to emphasize the continuity between them. I've been using "Classical PIE" in this essay to emphasize the fact that I'm talking about the venerable "classic" reconstruction begun in the 1870s. What names to choose - what things to emphasize - has been unsettled for a while. But I notice that lately the term "Indo-Anatolian" for the early phase seems to have been gaining currency and looks to be either on the edge of becoming the consensus term or recently got there without me noticing (I don't read this stuff full-time). Correspondingly, the term "Proto-Indo-European" is now contracting in scope and increasingly used only to refer to the late phase of the language lineage. This reflects a choice to emphasize the differences between the early and late phases. PIE is splitting in two and those phases will increasingly be regarded as different languages. And...I'm good with that. Hard to argue against it when something as grammatically basic as the gender system has changed. Obligatory disclaimer: I am not an academic linguist and my approval doesn't mean much. I'm writing about this to make a point about taxonomy. Carl Linnaeus developed the branching-tree nomenclature that we have been using for species of animal and plants ever since, 200 years before Charles Darwin explained why the tree of life branches that way. It is unlikely that the theory of evolution even could have been invented without the linguistic framework of the Linnean classification in Darwin's mind. So there's flow in both directions. Theory drives terminology, and terminology sometimes drives theory. Choose your names for things carefully.

@esrtweet Aka emperor has no clothes

Let's talk about preference-falsification bubbles. A preference-falsification bubble is what happens when lots of people incorrectly estimate the distribution of preferences around them, then alter their tastes or opinions to conform to the perceived majority. As the bubble inflates, more and more people are speaking and behaving in a way that doesn't reflect their actual beliefs, but rather the fear that they will face social censure if they speak or act in disapproved ways. Preference-falsification bubbles are fragile. Any sufficiently large shock will cause lots of people to modify their models of other people's preferences, at which point the social pressure they perceived to be on them disappears and they start behaving more honestly. A bubble collapse can produce what appears to be a huge shift in popular sentiment. But that's an illusion - what it actually produces is increased willingness to express actual preferences. Noah Smith is noticing that a huge preference-falsification bubble, one that has been inflating since the 1960s if not earlier, popped on Election Night of 2024. Yes, it turns out most Americans don't much like "progressive ideology". They were propagandized and bullied into believing that it had majority support, but it doesn't now and probably never did. There's no credible opposition because the Democrats don't have any idea what to do or where to go next.

@simulacronist I hope you get better soon and all this is cleaned up

@simulacronist I had a similar close call near church station where a clearly unstable guy mumbling to himself suddenly lunged toward me and hit me on the back of my head. Luckily he didn’t have a weapon, but it’s the stuff that gives you ptsd

i was recently discharged from the icu at the sf hospital after traumatic brain injury due to a man hitting me on the back of my head with a metal pipe, completely unprovoked, in the mission in san francisco. this man is known to the police since he’s done this before to other people. afaik they will not be pressing charges or prosecuting this individual due to the state of sf politics.

@MarkFiorentino @BainCapVC Congrats Mark!

1/ After nearly six years at Index, I’m excited to officially announce I’ve joined @BainCapVC as the newest partner charged with helping to guide the next generation of growth-stage AI-native, vertical SaaS and fintech startups powering sector-advancing innovation