eric antonow

@shiraeis so much easiest to shorthand this as ‘chosen people’

ok so my theory that ashkenazi judaism was an unintentional eugenics program for a trait cluster that overlaps heavily with autism and adhd but isn't exactly either clinically: talmudic scholarship is different from normal scholarship. it's recursive pattern extraction across massive corpora, exception-finding, holding contradictory interpretations in working memory while searching for reconciliation, basically what we'd now call hypersystemizing. gematria (assigning numerical values to letters and finding "meaningful" correspondences) is literally recreational combinatorics with religious characteristics and for ~40 generations (~800-1600 CE), the marriage market explicitly rewarded this. the shidduch system matched talmudic prodigies with wealthy families' daughters. functionally, it's assortative mating for systematizing ability with direct reproductive consequences. meanwhile occupational restrictions pushed ashkenazi jews into finance, trade, medicine, which are all high cognitive load niches where the same traits would be advantageous the cognitive profile this produced is wild and lopsided. verbal IQ highest of any group, mathematical also highest of any group, but spatial ability decidedly not. that's a specific phenotype being selected hard the result: 0.2% of world population, 22% of all nobel laureates (110x base rate), ~30% of fields medals, 41% of economics nobels but here's where it gets interesting. i don't think this selected for "intelligence" as a clean construct. i think it selected for a trait cluster that overlaps heavily with what we now diagnose as autism and adhd, a cluster including intense pattern recognition, ability to hyperfocus on abstract domains, and reduced sensitivity to social consensus when it conflicts with logical consistency the genetics support this. the TBCB gene mutation linked to autism has a carrier frequency of 1:80 in ashkenazi jews vs 5:100,000 in the general population. in israeli studies, jewish children's ASD referral rates are 6x higher than bedouin-arab rates, and high-functioning autism specifically is dramatically more prevalent (29.6% vs 2.6%) baron-cohen's hyper-systemizing theory of autism finds that parents who score high on systematizing are more likely to produce autistic children, which is literally what the shidduch system was optimizing for across a millennium of closed gene flow it's probably not selecting for autism or adhd as clinical entities. it's more that the underlying trait distribution got shifted. the same alleles that in certain combinations produce clinical autism/adhd, in other combinations produce the kid who argues with the rabbi for six hours about a single line of talmud and then grows up to win a fields medal personally, i come from a lineage of rabbis dating back to 1400s lithuania so i'm basically a heritage breed at this point lmao

@tkanarsky tempting...

High desert payphones road trip anyone?

you can now find an optimal route to visit the payphones in your area at tkanarsky.com/payphones-tsp/

@emollick for context, at the time of the donation the magazine was almost 100 years old, had a staff of 4, and an annual budget of <$800K.

@emollick Poetry Mag was a very modest org when the $100M grant was given by Ruth Lily. The NYT got this quote: "It seems like an eccentric amount of money," says Billy Collins, the former U.S. poet laureate and a longtime contributor. "It's like leaving a fortune to your goldfish."

I know it is a small thing, but, in these dying days of the open web, it is lovely that such a large proportion of famous poetry is online, mostly due to a $100M gift from Ruth Lily, who loved poetry (even though she never got any of her own published) poetryfoundation.org/poems/guides

A DOZEN steps to kit this year’s Spring project, Path to Passover. It’s a linen map of the steps of the Seder and a cool mini-matzah token to track the evening’s progress. LIMITED EDITION of 100, less than 20 left. mindless-toys.com/products/path-…

@petergyang This feels strange to me. Raised two kids here, there were infinite things to do in our area, a flood of activities locally from building airplanes, rockets, go-carts, many theater programs to plug into, and lots of other parents who were makers. ex: amazon.com/Dangerous-Thin…

Life in the Bay Area burbs with family - Costco, library, and playgrounds. Been to the zoos, cal academy, and Golden Gate Park many times as well. Want to do something other than work and vibe code but kinda bored out of our minds tbh 😅

@christiantdavie @davedavieskinks @TheKinks visionary!

Happy 79th birthday to my rockin' dad @davedavieskinks of @TheKinks 🎂 🎸 💗

@kevinroose @kplikethebird as opposed to a metronym

@kplikethebird yeah i more mean "SF" as a metonym

i follow AI adoption pretty closely, and i have never seen such a yawning inside/outside gap. people in SF are putting multi-agent claudeswarms in charge of their lives, consulting chatbots before every decision, wireheading to a degree only sci-fi writers dared to imagine. people elsewhere are still trying to get approval to use Copilot in Teams, if they're using AI at all. it's possible the early adopter bubble i'm in has always been this intense, but there seems to be a cultural takeoff happening in addition to the technical one. not ideal!

@joannejang @ElizabethHolmes @MillionInt best part is what you did outside the lines. makes the the tiger 100x more scary.

@ElizabethHolmes @MillionInt

NYE party coloring corner

@NekoMichiUBC hand modeling 🧑‍🍳🤌

100% plastic and glass. Needs no charging. Requires no software updates or dongles. Will last a few weeks until the novelty wears off. Same size + weight as the iPhone. It's a $10 store display model that can do everything a Methaphone can do for a fraction of the cost.

Hand rotation 10/10. Tremendous.

@benblumenrose Love the enthusiasm for this. I will ship a free Aluminum Methaphone 2 to the best comment (as judged by the most likes). This comment obvs excluded. @grex

100% solid aluminum. Needs no charging. Requires no software updates or dongles. Will last hundreds of thousands of years vs 2-3. Same size + weight as the iPhone. The new Methaphone 2 is 🔥

@thistimj @benblumenrose we'll probably be fine - the mirrored surface works equally well for mild narcissism

@benblumenrose Hope there's good tech support! Most won't know how to operate it, lol.

@PuaPuaNow @benblumenrose actually was included!

@benblumenrose How much does the sold seperately polish cloth cost?

@benblumenrose @jamesdebrock 🧠

@jamesdebrock 0% but also 100%

@elizlaraki @benblumenrose I love how you design people have perfected this hand turning!

@benblumenrose May last thousands of years, but now I’m craving an upgrade from my “liquid glass” clear version!

@joannejang true

it's hard to overstate how legit & rare they are as far as a founder pair: technical expertise, background, character, customer obsession, agency, cool factor see if you can join them!!

@radbackwards always happy to give you a ride. that's kind of what it's a for. hail or DM. 2002adventure.wordpress.com

It’s 2027. There’s no more Ubers, just robotaxi’s…. Some of us still pay in cash to ride in 2002 BMW Taxi’s up University Ave— similar to how they ride horse carriages thru snowy Chicago streets— to remind us of the good old days.

@patrickc It’s easier to view them as different and non-competing divisions of the same company, all benefitting from a common infrastructure. They also all achieved the level of brand default for their category where 8/10 buyers will choose them because there’s no risk.

These companies are ostensibly in totally different businesses and yet seem to exhibit the same growth dynamics. What's the explanation? (Pictured: ~$200B -> ~$3T.)