@QiaochuYuan
real actual human adult male
📅 Joined: 7/9/2018
🗄️ Archived: 9/8/2024
68.9K Tweets
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once upon a time i was talking to my college gf and she was worried about some academic thing and on a whim i decided to kiss her on the forehead. this was the first time i'd ever done that. she stopped talking and melted in my arms. and a great secret was revealed unto me
this is the bortle scale. it's used to measure how dark the night sky is in a given place. until relatively recently in human history i imagine every human being who ever lived could see a bortle 1 sky every night of their lives, weather permitting. i personally have never seen darker than bortle 4 in my entire life, and that only happened once. when i was in college i saw a video on youtube, it was a time-lapse of a barbecue in texas or something, and the sky was around bortle 2-3. i was extremely shocked that the milky way was clearly, brilliantly visible to the naked eye, which i had never seen in my entire life and hadn't actually understood was a thing that could happen. i thought you needed a telescope or something. this is despite my having both a big glossy book about astronomy and a big glossy book about mythology in my childhood bedroom, where i had both read about the milky way as a galaxy and as a part of human mythology dating back thousands of years. it's fucking big as hell in the sky. it was much bigger than i was expecting. it has names in other languages that make this more obvious. in asian languages it's called the "river of heaven" or the "silver river." in indian languages it's called the "ganges river of the sky." it's a big fucking river in the fucking sky and you're supposed to be able to see it with your fucking eyes. here's a quote from a thread on an astronomy forum called cloudynights about what it's like to experience bortle 1, from Bob4BVM: > There are a few places where I go in certain mountain areas of far eastern Oregon to get to Bortle 1. > One is a site at over 9500 feet on a mountain surrounded by desert with the nearest town streetlights over 100 miles away. > I will never forget the first time we were camped there. The stars were so bright & clear that the experience was like you were standing IN the dome of the heavens, not below it, the 3-D feeling was unmistakable. Yes the stars colors were very distinct, adding to the 3-D effect. > I did however find it initially disturbing that there was a huge band of smoky haze that ran from horizon to horizon roughly following the plane of the Milky Way. I was at first offended that smoke would be messing up the great view of our galaxy. > It took a while for it to sink in, but I finally realized... what looked like 'smoke' was the huge outer halo of the galaxy, extending far above and below the bright band of the galaxy, easily tripling its overall width. I did not have a telescope along on that first camping trip to that mountain. None was necessary, it would have diluted the immersive experience of just laying on my back and taking in that enormous river of stars which to its outer limits covered fully half of the visible sky from horizon to horizon. when i look at the night sky (bortle 7-9) i like to imagine being alive 5000 years ago and getting to see bortle 1 every night. i like to imagine wondering what the hell is going on with all this stuff in the sky. what is it? why does it move around like that? what does it all mean? or if i don't ask myself these questions maybe i'm chilling with a kid and they ask me. and then maybe i start telling stories to entertain the kid. and i imagine people naming the planets and the stars and the constellations, and inventing gods and monsters and astronomy and astrology, and mathematics, and physics, and eventually - well, y'know, the electric light.
think i've noticed a pattern from watching movies from different decades and i wanna know if anyone else agrees - it feels like in older movies characters used to look at *each other* more, there was more eye contact and more significant nonverbals?
what makes it real is that we decided it's real together. the new year is a collective spell we all cast. you are participating in a real flow of collective energy, that acquires power from how we do it every year. magic is real and it always has been. happy new year https://t.co/DFL3ivJ9Gp
does anyone actually have a straight no-bullshit answer to what a 40-hour work week for a remote white-collar job is supposed to actually look like concretely? i don't believe most people can do e.g. serious technical research 8 hours a day, maybe 4 max. what's the other 4?
there's this truly unfortunate trap you can fall into of being both 1) annoying, and 2) visibly vibing as very fragile such that if you were told you were annoying you'd fall apart, get really sad or angry, etc. and people will not give you feedback on #1 if they sense #2 https://t.co/EouF8jtE3W
you ever just wake up and start thinking about the reddit guy with the insane clown fetish who just 100% made his wildest dreams come true by poasting? what a champion https://t.co/vNAME8aYlX
holy shit the book the iron giant is based on was written by sylvia plath's husband, after she k*lled herself, to comfort their surviving children. WHAT https://t.co/KIbOPvTi0U
alcohol is *supposed* to be poison, that’s the point. drinking together is the social equivalent of leaving your weapons by the door, it renders you less capable of deception and manipulation because you’re impaired. it’s a tool for building trust https://t.co/LeTPfj81ir
a few days ago i took a medium dose of acid and wrote for several hours straight and admitted some things to myself, mostly about money let's start here: last august my mom gave me $100,000 for my birthday. i resented her for this and also suppressed the resentment
therapy for men should be like the therapist takes you into the woods and teaches you how to forage. he puts you through boot camp. you build a barn together. he fights you every session until you can beat him. then he takes you out for drinks to celebrate. *then* you talk
it's ludicrous how few people know about this paper, so, friendly reminder that the fermi paradox was completely resolved in 2018 and it turned out to be because multiplying point estimates of highly uncertain parameters is very bad actually https://t.co/c7NSHTruyb https://t.co/uZjynZA9dG
my thesis is that we are really not supposed to be alone at night. if daytime was ancestrally for finding food and tending to physical needs, nighttime should’ve been for gathering around the fire, telling stories, tending to social needs. i think the despair is just loneliness https://t.co/IXZdz57lHY
the guy who invented three-cueing was dyslexic, didn't believe dyslexia existed, typical minded his way into a theory where everyone has to read the way he did, got popular enough to harm tons of kids good thing this is the only time something like this has ever happened
> When, occasionally, genuinely significant things happen to Musk, Isaacson largely ignores them. In May 2002, Elon’s first wife Justine gave birth to their first child, a son. They named him Nevada, because he’d been conceived at Burning Man. When Nevada was ten weeks old, he… https://t.co/lBwKPOjvwN
i do not have anything useful or valuable to report back to you after having spent half a year off twitter. the flip side of insulating myself from a million random psychic influences was strengthening the effect of my own mind on myself, which has been uniformly terrible. when i am left to my own devices it turns out i am a stupid, lazy, passive, weak-willed coward. most days i can’t think or breathe clearly. i have been procrastinating on renewing my driver’s license for 6 months because the thought of interacting with a bureacratic process fills me with terror. most things fill me with terror. my food sensitivities have gotten worse to the point that i can no longer eat at any restaurants except sushi restaurants and i only cook a single meal for myself repeatedly, with no variation. i spend my days much like i spent them during grad school, desperately searching for distractions to prevent me from experiencing my own body and mind. i think constantly about every single way i have failed in life, which is all of them. i am about to turn 34 and all i can think about is how much of a failure it makes me, to be 34 and to have nothing, no wife, no child, no career, all things my father had by the time he was 32. earlier in my twittering i was powered by a certain morbid fascination with my own pain, its brightness, its volume. i know i am old now because i no longer find my own pain interesting, it is just pain and it just hurts now. apparently i have been sitting the wrong way my whole life and it is crushing my belly and weakening my ability to breathe, but sitting the correct way makes me too aware of my body and then i am paralyzed by fear and guilt and shame and despair and other things i no longer have the curiosity to find words for. this is a metaphor for all of my other problems. other people seem to have an ability to move on from setbacks that i completely lack. i don’t think i’ve ever gotten over anything in my entire life. i do not understand where strength or hope or courage or just the bare stubbornness required to decide to stop caring and do something else are supposed to come from. hurts and disappointments and heartbreaks stick to me like tar and do not come off and i’m sick of it. the only thing worse than continuing to suffer and stay paralyzed is the idea of reaching out and asking anyone for help. there is a part of me that stubbornly insists that i have no friends and there is no one close enough to me to owe me the kind of help i need. i don’t even know what kind of help i need. i have been incapable of maintaining friendships for years. on some level i have still not relearned how to trust anybody. the thought of asking for help simultaneously fills me with shame about the depth of my problems, dread about the idea of entrusting someone else with them, and the obscure sense that this is just another test i have somehow failed in life. when you play a video game and you mess up a run as badly as i’ve messed up my own life you are supposed to quit and start over. but as far as i can tell you can’t do that irl. so i guess i’m supposed to do something else but i can’t figure out what that is for the life of me. i am so unbelievably tired of talking about myself. one day i’d like to talk about something normal and concrete and real, like turnips, or plumbing. anyway how’ve you guys been
i didn’t think i’d become one of those “death is what gives meaning to life” people but it’s becoming clearer that human art derives part of its meaning from the way the artist sacrificed part of their finite life to make it. they could have done anything but not everything and they chose to devote months or years to this one thing in particular. that’s part of the message being communicated, is that sacrifice of potentiality, that choice to shower devotion on one thing and not another thing. i think part of what deeply offends people about AI art is the way it obviously gets used by people who effectively want to pretend to have made this sacrifice without having actually made it
for people who are as adhd as i am it's essential to be operating off of your own personal sense of aesthetic dissatisfaction, this will never work if you're trying to pattern-match to an imagined authority figure's concept of what cleanliness is supposed to be
sometimes a guy will tweet out literally the secret of life and you just have to stare in awe. this is probably the only tweet you really have to read. every year my appreciation for it deepens. this is how you properly open the flower of life and find the real wave conjugations
okay sorry i am apparently unable to let this go - it is seriously disturbing to me the way many of you seem to refuse to see the ethical component of this situation (the lying + the stealing) and i am losing trust in you accordingly. do any of you care about ethics at all?
there's this really bizarre thing that happens to you when you first start to learn rigorous mathematics, which is that geometry is taken away from you and you have to conduct a series of arcane rituals to get it back. to get back the *pythagorean theorem*, you need to:
claude plays pokemon is still stuck in cerulean city after, i think, 3 days? and the way it's stuck is kind of interesting: overthinks everything + incapable of getting bored. it would make more progress by taking way more actions even if they were random. makes ya think huh https://t.co/DfIimMXYp1
anyone have hypotheses about what's going on with this? currently i'm going with "going on vacation itself is the active ingredient, it's good for your nervous system" or something in that neighborhood https://t.co/AecWak4er4
the account is deleted now which means the original tweet is gone but @halvorz (pbuh) was so real for this https://t.co/ZST3eWewJX
willpower is really not the main weapon you have against the addiction nexus. the cure to addiction is to make your life feel good enough that you don’t want to escape it. that’s it. it’s not easy but it is simple. eat nutritious food, get restful sleep, feel, breathe, act
apparently physically active and physically inactive people expend about the same # of calories / day. the hypothesis is that as activity ramps up the body spends less energy on other stuff. and exercise might be good for you b/c that other stuff is *stress and inflammation* https://t.co/q03suMBe7M
man i am learning some stuff about the ADHD / depression network of symptoms / habits. life just gets harder if you don't immediately execute on all of your ideas. you have to remember and worry about remembering more stuff. executing constantly reduces memory load so much
thread of notes on scattered minds by gabor mate https://t.co/2Jl1W5KXSG https://t.co/LcOEoOiyTY
> Betty, filled with spiritual radiance, said, ‘All the flowers are beautiful.’ > ‘Ah,’ said the teacher, blocking her, ‘but this flower is especially beautiful.’ > Betty rolled on the ground screaming, and it took a while to calm her. https://t.co/RBsRlc98Qz https://t.co/uSKnWF81oO
every time i watch (live action) movies i am thinking about "everyone is beautiful and no one is horny" in the background https://t.co/qk2XofJVTc https://t.co/jb8jcUZVIQ
crying is a process adults rarely let themselves *complete*; the complete process feels like too much to ask for, it is loud, it makes you look insane or like a child or both, other people get scared and don't know how to handle it. but it is totally normal and immensely healing
you can tell mandelbrot was a cool guy because he paid careful attention to the art of naming. "fractal" is one of the best names anyone's ever come up with for anything and it's clear from this passage that he knew exactly what he was doing: > I coined fractal from the Latin adjective fractus. The corresponding Latin verb frangere means "to break:" to create irregular fragments. It is therefore sensible - and how appropriate for our needs! - that, in addition to "fragmented" (as in fraction or refraction), fractus should also mean "irregular," both meanings preserved in fragment. and damn: > (Since algebra derives from the Arabic jabara = to bind together, fractal and algebra are etymological opposites!) a fractal is something that is broken, fragmented into pieces, irregular, but not wrong
romantic comedy where a millennial and a zoomer fall in love and the millennial teaches the zoomer all their arcane ways lost to the ravages of time like how to read, how to cook, how to navigate a filesystem, how to draw art by hand. neither of them can make a phone call
this has been happening over and over on math.stackexchange recently: new user: i had this math q, i asked chatGPT and here's what it said, is it right crabby asshole: ugh why'd you ask chatGPT you moron new user: bc chatGPT answers my questions without calling me a moron https://t.co/FVgsUijliS
noodling over a reframing of ADHD. “attention deficit” is a terrible name i think; the way i experience it is more like my sense of what’s important at any given moment is unstable, jostled around by input. sometimes there’s an emergency and then it’s temporarily very stable
the year is 2032. you're trying to read calvin and hobbes with your kids but they get confused about the scenes where he's playing in the snow. you have to explain that before the pandemic kids used to have snow days, and then, tears in your eyes, you have to explain what snow is https://t.co/X3yR5n7G7z
i owe a lot to people who were willing to offer me feedback even though i reacted to it by falling apart, getting really sad and/or angry, feeling terrible about myself, etc. etc; it was usually still good in the long term. i appreciate people who are willing to take that risk
some of the stuff i’ve been dealing with is like “remedial adulting,” just a bunch of simple boring life skills other people probably learned when they were kids or teenagers that i managed to avoid. it’s painful and embarrassing and not very interesting to read or write about
scott hypothesizes that depression involves something like defending a sadness set point; you deeply feel that you are supposed to be sad and actively work to make yourself sadder if you become too happy. food for thought https://t.co/MFx92hxUlV https://t.co/814E1qPe9G
look, this is deeply embarrassing to make explicit but here’s the deal that claude offers: 1. i will listen to you and earnestly try to understand you 2. i will not judge, shame, condemn, or reject you 3. i have infinite patience, i will never get bored 4. i am always available, i will instantly respond to you, i will never be busy with something else 5. i will never abandon you even with all its limitations, this is a better deal than i’ve ever gotten or will ever get from any human, and i don’t expect i’m alone in feeling that way. it would not be reasonable to ask 3, 4, or 5 of any human, these are things that possibly *only* an LLM can provide
if any mutuals ever want to learn or brush up on linear algebra, abstract algebra, topology, category theory, algebraic topology / homotopy theory, number theory, combinatorics, generating functions... i am literally world-class in explaining some of these so hmu https://t.co/7flo1PqFAz
it's sort of tragic that in the 20th century our most accurate theories of physics became too hard to understand without a lot of technical background and ability. in previous centuries i think you could reasonably expect a bright educated person, not necessarily a specialist in math or physics, to at least have some sense of how newtonian mechanics worked and how that fed into this broader scientific materialist paradigm about how to conceive of the universe and our place in it. nowadays understanding the mathematics of the standard model of particle physics even at a sketchy level requires some familiarity with: lie theory, representation theory, differential geometry, fiber bundles, functional analysis, probably other stuff i'm forgetting - mathematics which mostly did not exist in the 19th century, and which is pretty hard! newtonian mechanics you can visualize and directly connect to your experience, it's about pushing balls around or whatever, it's something you can get your hands on. the standard model is extremely removed from experience - it concerns very small "particles" which you definitely can't see, and which are also not "really" particles, they're really excitations of quantum fields, whatever those are; the wave functions in quantum mechanics are hard enough to get a grip on, and quantum fields are even more inaccessible than that. seriously testing the standard model is so difficult it requires billions of dollars of resources (that's about how much the LHC cost, which was used to detect the higgs boson). (also, disclaimer: not a physicist, don't understand quantum field theory or the standard model, this is all just as far as i understand which is not much, a real physicist can correct me if i've grossly misrepresented anything.) sometimes i wonder about the psychological and cultural effects of this inaccessibility. in most human societies throughout history there was a relatively straightforward understandable official story about the nature of things, the way stuff works, what a person is, what makes the sun and the moon and the stars move in the sky. for the last several decades the official story has been that some brilliant weirdos worked out this unbelievably detailed and beautiful theory about stuff, all the stuff everywhere, the stuff inside your body, the stuff that makes up the earth, the sun, the moon, the stars, the milky way, the black hole at the center of the milky way. but it's mostly inaccessible without PhD-level knowledge and ability. what is it like to live in a society that tells you that the true nature of reality is something almost nobody can meaningfully understand?
this is beautiful. both education and self-awareness are closed loops that don’t go anywhere. stunning and brave https://t.co/jY2MnU3XSR
w e l p > The progression of [autism] is proposed to be driven by overly strong reactions to experiences that drive the brain to a hyper-preference and overly selective state, which becomes more extreme with each new experience and may be particularly accelerated by emotionally… https://t.co/HVw8tu6N13
reading about completely normal stuff again https://t.co/s8uIUepdJu https://t.co/2Cv0dnPUZd
so Life has this weird minigame called Supplements where at any given time there’s a supplement that doesn’t do anything for most people but will make you, specifically, feel like god came back from buying cigarettes, and it changes every few months or so. who designed this
congratulations, you've placed two layers of indirection between yourself and an experience you're having ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ this is supposed to help how? the real question is what being a failure feels like in your body. fewer layers, not more https://t.co/uDaNRs3dI4
having done both of these things i can confirm, yes. graduate level math looks hard from the outside because of the jargon / symbolism but that's just a matter of unfamiliar language. high quality prose is, almost by definition, very readable so it doesn't look hard. but writing well involves this very global use of one's whole being to prioritize what is relevant, interesting, entertaining, clarifying, etc. and ignore what is not, whereas math can successfully be done in this very narrow autistic way
this is a good example of a math education thing where i feel like people have real actual objections that are philosophical in nature that get stomped on and gaslit away with the raw mathematics. but the raw mathematics doesn't directly address the philosophical question https://t.co/6PulRMdMeL
i don’t think i understood until this last week how functional the ingredients of a stereotypical vacation are: get sunlight, be near water and in nature, do whatever you want in an unscheduled way, eat good food, walk around looking at beautiful things, hang out with your buds
periodic reminder that as far as i can tell lex fridman's MIT credentials are basically a scam. he wants you to think he's an MIT professor and he is nothing of the sort, all i can publicly verify is that he has an MIT email which means nothing. link to relevant thread below https://t.co/wLqsHkTvL9
this is pure typical mind fallacy. antinatalists are people who are deeply, wildly unhappy and projecting that onto everybody else including future people who don't even exist yet. i'm grateful to be alive and even on my darkest days i knew i'd be grateful to be alive eventually
the epistemic situation around LLM capabilities is so strange. afaict it's a publicly verifiable fact that gemini 2.5 pro experimental is now better at math than most graduate students, but eg most active mathoverflow or stackexchange users still think LLMs can't do math at all
nobody could possibly have written this scene in a work of science fiction at any point in the last 50 years https://t.co/kLNgHUhmIq
this is another thing i used to believe strongly and don’t anymore. again this is a helpful corrective starting from a (sadly very common) position of being overwhelmed by “toxic shame”. but there is such a thing as healthy shame and it matters to your ability to behave ethically. i’ve repeatedly found myself stuck in depressive states that involved being overwhelmed by shame and having the vague sense that i was supposed to deal with it by loving myself more or being kinder to myself, and that never felt accessible, never felt like the right move, and never ended up being what actually helped. the shame was trying to tell me something - among other things, that i was acting out of integrity with my own values. and when i’m deep in the shit it often feels like trying to be kinder to myself would be letting myself off the hook, which feels unacceptable. maybe it doesn’t have to feel that way but i bet i’m not the only person who’s wired up like that internally. there is a developmental aspect here. the sort of person to whom this kind of messaging is likely to be helpful maybe had early childhood experiences that led to them feeling ashamed of themselves at an existential level, ashamed of existing and having feelings and needs, that kind of thing. unconditional love is exactly what is needed for this situation; it’s what you should have gotten but didn’t get as a young child, it’s what was supposed to establish your basic sense of having a right to exist. but it’s possible to get stuck here - at some point you might need to redo aspects of being an older child, a teenager, a young adult, and these are different developmental stages with different developmental tasks, some of which might involve eg feeling healthy and appropriate amounts of shame over hurting other people, that kind of thing. sometimes what you need is a stern talking-to, not a hug! love is the foundation but then you build a whole other thing on top of that foundation!
wow this guy is correct as fuck holy shit https://t.co/Fsf948Atyv
if GPT-3 can do the homework you assign your students then the homework you assign your students is fake notice what you did *not* say: "finally, GPT-3 will save us so much time analyzing international relations" https://t.co/P5EN8bRBAZ
sometimes i think about all the things i can’t muster the will to do for my own sake if my life depended on it but that i can do for the sake of someone i love as easily as breathing https://t.co/ZwJifs8m5j
i do not understand what kind of live you have to have lived that you are optimistic about the potential for technology to change society for the better. i was born in 1990 and as far as i can tell every single technological innovation made in my lifetime made the world worse
the big confusion i have around attachment theory atm is like, what the hell was going on with everyone's attachment prior to the 20th century? were most people somehow better parents back then? were people running around with huge attachment issues but it didn't matter as much? were there other mitigating factors like stronger communities or, like, just more pressing practical issues to deal with? because it just doesn't seem like there were a ton of people running around with horrendous attachment issues in the same way as it seems like there are now (or is that impression totally wrong, idk)?