duck_master

I hereby release my tweets (and also any media I attach to them) under CC-BY or freer, unless I explicitly say otherwise. Retweet to do the same!

@AskYatharth excellent post! TIL that antonyms used to be a section on the SAT

on LLMs saying “not X, but Y” substack.com/home/post/p-18…

@AnalysisFact quick proof: |Γ(z)| = |\int_0^{\infty} e^{-x} x^{z - 1}dx| <= |\int_0^{\infty} e^{-x} |x^{z - 1}|dx| = |\int_0^{\infty} e^{-x}x^{Re(z) - 1}dx| = |Γ(Re z)|

For z in the right half-plane |Γ(z)| ≤ |Γ(Re z)|.

@brundolfsmith if i saw it taking off. the heavy rate limiting would likely make it useless if the community was too small

If there were a social app where you 1. Could only write one post per day to your friends 2. Couldn't read anyone's posts until the following morning, so there's no opportunity to scroll Would you be into that?

@voooooogel returning to this thread: last night I dreamt there was somehow a popular science misconception related to how water bodies drain into valleys

had an extremely realistic dream last night (due to very detailed visual field). felt genuinely unsure whether or not I was in base reality! content: I was following ~2 people around a building, one of whom had a @voooooogel T shirt. then I separated to ride an elevator

should I livetweet my batshit insane dreams?

@cxgonzalez if you're at a university you can ask students what year of undergraduate or graduate studies they're in

fellas what's a good question to ask to figure out someone's age in a subtle way?

@MesoAnglic @jazzloaf how many characters is your internal monologue at?

@jazzloaf There is an entire government inside of my head now. There is separation of powers between the legislative/executive/judicial inside my brain. I am not crazy.

If your social circle gets large enough and sufficiently robust you start developing institutions and state capacity by accident

@MesoAnglic thank you for sticking around on x dot com so long!

This is also time to remember that it's been about a year (March 2025) since I started actually posting as Zoso. It's been a crazy year and most of you have only known me for a few months, but you are all wonderful people. May I last another 12 months. 🤍

Happy Nowruz / Nevruz / Naw-Ruz / Bahai New Year, everyone! (I know BNY is independent of Nowruz by about a day but since we also call it Naw-Ruz, why not) (Pic is Istanbul, 2021)

@tenobrus never, upwards (but it could easily go "downwards" if I drown in student debt and/or burnout)

have you ever dyed your hair? // do you consider yourself more upwardly or downwardly mobile relative to your parents socioeconomic status?

@KrishanghArjun i've also observed claude using the frontend skill for creative writing and that's why i don't do claude creative writing

Why does it need a skill here? 😭

@mouse_math have you ever tried curating your for you tab?

the "For You" tab ought to be named the "Fuck You" tab.

@mouse_math pretty sure only RSA is just number theory though? i think cryptosystems like ECDSA are better seen as abstract algebra

the beautiful thing about cryptography is that it provides a unassailable counterexample when someone says "theoretical number theory has no practical application".

@thinkingshivers neither driving nor vibecoding is *always* bad though

Not enough people talk about how unpleasant vibecoding is. The best analogy I can think of is driving. It's cool that we can just hop in a car and drive to the store. It's a lot faster than walking. And yet, it's so stressful and infuriating, we had to invent a new word just to describe its effect on people: "road rage." AI-assisted coding is the same. It's so much faster--there's no going back to coding everything by hand, the equivalent of walking everywhere. And yet it's incredibly annoying and stressful. It's characterized by annoying delays between requests, time-wasting misunderstandings, blatant lying, and absurd overconfidence. Hopefully this gets better as models improve.

@AaronBergman18 which train system did you take the ride on?

I took one train ride and now I'm totally train-pilled It's night and day compared to a plane or bus or car. It is the perfect mode of transportation

@mimi10v3 facebook is basically 100% slop. i have a visceral aversion to it at this point

which platform is the most mentally ill?

@tenobrus i think you are not obligated to follow or be followed by anyone, so it's definitely okay

is it okay to unfollow a very very long time mutual if i've slowly realized over the course of years that they have incredibly unfathomably retarded takes on every possible subject and to make up for it are also unpleasant and abrasive

@cauliflwr_human personally i'm in *eleven* different AI-centric discord servers as of right now

so is there one discord server with the AIs that everyone keeps screenshotting or are there two and why discord

context: i was at brown university on pi day for sums 2026

nothing more quintessentially 2026!me than playing hanabi with strangers while eepy and also having a random song stuck in my head despite knowing that it's almost certainly AI slop

@SkyeSharkie @tenobrus same! I have never tweeted this phrase so I'm in the clear

@tenobrus i don't think i've ever even seen/noticed this phrase until now, lol

search your profile for the phrase "the real unlock". if there are any results, immediately delete your account

@Noahpinion cryptography and cybersecurity (among others) are both very much still active areas of CS research, but i think if you amend it to "almost all useful *product-like* software" it becomes true

I have a (probably dumb) theory that almost all useful software that isn't an AI application was already created by 2021. AI agents are crawling all over a search space already picked clean by infinite VC dollars a decade ago.