Build visual rules. Encoding mathematical meaning in the visual language hijacks our visual cortex into math-understanding. This could be simple color coding, or a careful choice of brushes.

Many people despise "middlemen" "bullshit jobs" and prefer "real jobs" that can be done by a pig wearing clothes in a children's book, like pork butchering. I argue this intuition is completely backwards!

"Write a Scott Alexander-style essay about walruses as anti-capitalism that analogizes robber barons with the fat lazy walrus." **Epistemic Status:** Low confidence. This is mostly a metaphor that got out of hand after I spent too long looking at pictures of pinnipeds while

I'm still calling it Open Philanthropy, like it's Twitter

This reminds me of when physicists called random independent sets in trees the hard-core model

i will bite actually. they're the only elephants in the world known to go deep into caves to mine for salt and generations of elephants have carved out the walls with their tusks. i love elephants so much they're so insanely cool

The existence of infinite zoom cellular automata troubles me deeply. Many go about their lives without knowing about this.

no words

Maia Median Twitter exchange

Very sober assessment of USAF vs PLAAF. - China has more combat ready fighters and the gap is growing - China is behind on stealth % mostly because the US retires 4th gen - J-20 is absolutely not funny - Chinese pilots are more trained Bro doesn’t want to die from kanging

People don't want to hear this but there are cool things that AI can create that are currently not possible through traditional digital effects. I think you can maybe get a barely moving image like this from Houdini, but I don't think I have ever seen anything like this outside

So this creepy looking brown leather onesie is actually a legit 19th century Inuit sealskin whaling suit from Greenland (pre-1834). It’s made entirely from sealskin, stitched with sinew, and that big hole in the chest...that’s the entrance. You’d step in feet first, pull it up

Bombshell: Oliver Sacks (a humane man & a fine essayist) made up many of the details in his famous case studies, deluding neuroscientists, psychologists, & general readers for decades. The man who mistook his wife for a hat? The autistic twins who generated multi-digit prime

This strange square 👇 is undoubtedly the most extraordinary work of literature in human history. Yet, unfortunately, barely anyone in the West has ever heard of it. There was this woman poet in 4th century China called Su Hui (蘇蕙), a child genius who had reportedly mastered

recovering bodies of loved ones was extremely important from a game theoretic view; if a predator fought a group of humans and killed one, you have to bring the deceased back so that the predator gets no reward for the kill, eventually realizing humans (in groups) aren't worth it

>>that when Szilard mentioned extremely powerful bombs, she "was sure she was working for a nut". Ending the letter with "Yours truly, Albert Einstein" did nothing to alter this impression. -Stenographer of the Einstein-Szilard letter to FDR, start of the Manhattan project

The Ancient Greeks and Romans probably did not paint their statues in gaudy, matte, heavily saturated colour as most museums claim. They *did* paint them, but: • A 1st-century AD mosaic from the Villa San Marco in Stabiae depicts a statue of a boxer with realistic shading. •