Jason Benn

@onsoc63 @acesounderglass got any in mind?

@jasoncbenn @acesounderglass this thread needs to continue sir. there are lot more examples in just last 2 months

I've now read several posts now about people taking a serious medical problem into their own hands and solving it. They're pure competence porn, they increase my agency and hope just by reading them. First one, from @acesounderglass:

@chrislakin @utotranslucence Walkability score is the only one I’ve seen. If you’re willing to learn QGIS you could compute a heatmap of “distance to 15th nearest tree” x “distance to SECOND nearest coffee shop”. SF data portal has datasets of both

@utotranslucence @jasoncbenn ?

Is there anything like a zillow filter for 'how ugly is the neighbourhood?' this is one of my biggest desiderata for somewhere to live aside from proximity to friends and greenery and I only know how to find it by knowing the neighbourhoods personally

There’s an enormous gap in the longevity field that almost no one is talking about. No existing therapeutic modalities are capable of both systemic distribution and complex transformations. Until we solve this, we won’t solve aging. 🧵

@PrinceVogel sounds like a good time

I'm not in SF tonight, but is there any interest in a Anthropic Solidarity event tomorrow night? My place can do like ~140 people

@amydeng_ @andrewjrod I was so touched by the story and then I was shocked to recognize you in the photos. Thinking of and hoping for you.

As the girlfriend: 1. I'm ok! I am still doing research, with a forthcoming blog post analyzing coding transcripts to understand dev speedup 2. I'm also not 100% ok - it's impossible to be. Reading @andrewjrod's substack and revisiting all the intense moments made me really sad

@sufyanmaan Nice! Good luck!

@jasoncbenn Thanks for sharing. I love doing 30-day challenges, and I decided to do a 2-hour meal prep that starts at 220P/day, which is precisely what I need. Start date, Jan 15th/Thu

I've been spending the last 6 months getting my health on autopilot by hiring a cook from Care .com to help with meal prep and tweaking my workouts and peptides mix. A few friends have asked for more details so here's a thread of where I'm at.

@RhysSullivan @tayroga

i want a "notes app" that i can put thoughts / ideas in and claude picks them up and starts working on them in the background this is especially wanted for ideas that i think would be cool but don't want to have to setup, where an ai can implement it in the background

@arram energy... is emptiness? i don't see the connection. i think of emptiness as the insight that all phenomena are bundles of perceptions rather than solid, self-existing things. energy seems like perceptions of buzzing, tingling, heat, pressure, etc in my body. wdym?

@jasoncbenn Yeah. Energy is just the new age word for what the Buddhists mean by emptiness. When you process the underlying charge enough to unbind the priors it suddenly becomes this indefinable thing without any meaning attached.

Shit has gotten weird since I wrote this (in a mostly good way) and I’ve started experiencing a lot of very surprising ‘energetic’ phenomena. My mind has been in overdrive trying to understand how it all works and I’ve come up with some pretty compelling theories. Will need to do a write up at some point.

How to tell if you’re dissociated: Do your emotions have a specific location? No = Very dissociated. An unclear location with vague boundaries = Less dissociated High res emotional heat map of shifting ‘energies’ made of varied textures = Much less dissociated

@arram your definition of emotions as simplified labels for distributions of energy is great. i was confused about whether they were sensations + thoughts, or something. your explanation is much cleaner

Legitimately starting to think I have big chunks of a theory of everything for human minds / emotional systems worked out. Which is kind of alarming tbh.

@arram it's been wonderful to see you open up!!! for years you would say that all your meditation was good for having short, dramatic experiences, but that you were frustrated that it didn't seem to have a lasting effect. what do you think of all those years of practice now?

I kind of feel like I’ve been in life’s waiting room before this. Opening to feeling life means opening to both joy and suffering. It’s not all sunshine, but I tried the dissociative strategy long enough that I can confidentially say I wouldn’t trade this for anything . x.com/lichthauch/sta…

@Brandondoyle pretty good imo!

@jasoncbenn How has this been going?

@irl_danB This is how I work too. How does this fit with using Ralph loops? My plans are organized in phases, and between phases I run adversarial validations with /review and the model asks me questions until it, the spec, and myself are in alignment. Where does Ralph fit in?

the thing that I have always enjoyed the most about programming was architecting the system in my head coding it was tedious, testing it was tedious, reviewing it was tedious the good news is all three of those can now be done by models, and the fun part is the part that remains the bad news is the thing doing the implementing does not magically know your mental model spend lots of time with the model architecting the system out. spend hours answering questions about the system design before it begins, as it works, after it completes, while it tests, after tests run. your code reviews are no longer reviewing the code for bugs. if you're doing this right, you don't even need to look at the code. instead, they're interrogation sessions with the agent, making sure the boots on the ground are aligned with your mental model most of the problems in this discipline happen when your mental model is not faithfully implemented by the agent, and this often happens because you were not explicit, or you were explicit at one point but the implementer didn't have your mental model in context at implementation time this is model-reality drift, and keeping your mental model aligned with reality is both the fun part and your remaining primary job

@ColinCrowell @patrickc @brian_armstrong Just acquired both of them - thank you

@patrickc @brian_armstrong His travel books are indeed compelling and beautifully written. I also loved the slower-paced, contemplative A Time to Keep Silence.

I was walking to the office in New York this morning and noticed an arrestingly beautiful high-rise above me. Turns out it was the Woolworth building, which I'm a bit embarrassed to say I'd never noticed or heard of before. It was the tallest building in the world for 16 years (until 1929). Construction took 20 months. The architect was apparently inspired by European cathedrals; one clergyman called it "the cathedral of commerce". It contained its own power plant. It's adorned with the full Gothic package: gargoyles, spandrels, mullions, pilasters, corbels. It contained the world's fastest elevators when it opened. The world is a museum of passion projects.

@kanjun This looks so useful! I can't wait to try it! Congratulations on the launch!

Sculptor: the missing UI for Claude Code 🎨 Imagine running 5 Claudes in parallel, safely in containers, while you stay in flow. Then bring their work straight into your IDE to test/edit together. This is how one developer ships like a team. Try it with Sonnet 4.5!

@noahchonlee @m_adams @zarinahagnew @autumnlooijen Probably because we had a $700M public deficit, and the Mayor is cutting across the board to make ends meet.

@m_adams @jasoncbenn @zarinahagnew @autumnlooijen Why the general decline in funding public bathrooms The political reasoning

I just moved someone away from the door where I work as he was taking taking a s***. He just moaned and screamed and gave me this terrible look of shame and fear. I washed it with a hose. What can we do to reclaim public restroom availability? This is solvable. A 🧵

@CurtTigges Yeah. My rule is that I only cowboy experiment with stuff that's reversible. Anything that risks permanent side effects like TRT, I'd find a doctor.

@jasoncbenn I've read enclomiphene is likely better for that (TRT has irreversible fertility and self-T-production effects even when used experimentally for a few months)

@CurtTigges Just modulating hunger for now, but I'm down to try a 3 month TRT experiment when my T levels drop below 600 ng/ml

@jasoncbenn what sorts of things are you doing with peptides?

@chrislakin When I compare hourly rates for less skilled labor on TaskRabbit (male-dominated handyperson, $55/hr avg) and Care .com (female-dominated eldercare and domestic tasks, $30/hr average), I see one spot where the gender pay gap is obvious 😬 I pay a little above their market.

@jasoncbenn wow that's cheap?

Right now I naturally want to eat ~2600 calories/day. This will be a ~2-4 month experiment with an eye towards learning more about what it would take to get back to 15% bodyfat - if and when I achieve that, maintenance would be much easier to do naturally I think.

4. I bought retatrutide from Peptide Partners, which a friend recommended. I'll microdose it (dunno how much yet) and tweak my dose every week until I find the minimal dose where I feel satisfied from just eating my meal prep food and don't want to snack beyond that.