Étienne @etiennefd Twitter profile

Last Seen Profiles

@lxanetm

@SlowButStedy

@machukalde

@IWGBcharity

@Soki33356789wb

@EllieeHud

@realfathonix

@DirtyPopCardiff

@melbourne_otter

@MollyBee_82

@CirculateSD

@Elfar3on77

@slayer631286

@bronskibeatband

@keikei_sogo

@Pepesplants

@blessedbyminos

@game_chibiko

@PH0ENIX07

@TheOliviaLux

@moran_ofir

@Eleathyra

@canadell

@cuan3162

@martingeorge

@christahaworth

@FilonValri

@outwesteth

@efimova54photo

@you4nextview

@destructivevl

@JackCheng_Y

@msc740909

@guchibanban

@journalistspsc

@JBcontenidohot

Étienne

@etiennefd

8 months

this is strangely heartwarming: the canadian pediatrics association now recommends that children engage in risky play—"thrilling and exciting forms of free play that involve uncertainty of outcome and a possibility of physical injury"—because of benefits e.g. to mental health

146

1K

11K

Étienne

@etiennefd

4 years

Sometimes I think of how cakes are a miracle. Take a pound cake. It's made of equal amounts (one pound each) of four ingredients. Sounds simple, right?

88

3K

9K

Étienne

@etiennefd

4 years

The reason cakes exist, of course, is that we had centuries to domesticate plants and animals, and to create culinary innovations. Complex things can come into being, with time and mechanisms like culture or natural selection. But make no mistake: cakes are a miracle.

41

246

4K

Étienne

@etiennefd

9 months

TIL that there's an iron ore train in Mauritania, the only train in the country, that you can just jump on and spend the next 15 hours looking at the Sahara landscapes and trying to sleep on a big pile of metal sand and not die of dehydration or exposure

30

163

3K

Étienne

@etiennefd

4 years

Now combine these four things in a very specific order before you apply a very specific amount of heat for a very specific amount of time, and you have a pound cake!

2

20

1K

Étienne

@etiennefd

4 years

Maybe you'd like to add something for flavor? Perhaps the tiny fragrant seeds of an expensive orchid? Or the bitter processed fat from a Central American fruit? Or the dried bark of some tree in India? Maybe we shouldn't get too fancy...

4

20

1K

Étienne

@etiennefd

4 years

To get the first ingredient, you need to find some species of grass that grows in the Middle East. When the grass is ripe and golden, you harvest the grains. Then you grind them to get a fine powder. You remove the darker parts of the powder to just keep the white.

2

33

968

Étienne

@etiennefd

2 years

Prompt engineering for humans: Add "if I had to explain it better" and watch as you actually explain better. Add "tl;dr" and watch as you effortlessly make your point succinct. Add "imagine you're writing a letter to a friend" and watch as your writing becomes lively and kind.

9

121

978

Étienne

@etiennefd

4 years

You're not done yet. For your next ordeal, you must hunt this flightless bird from the jungles of Asia. Don't kill it though. Just take the weird round things the females lay. Crack the weird round thing open: it's slimy and fat and bright yellow. That's exactly what you want.

2

23

933

Étienne

@etiennefd

4 years

The last one's tough. You need the female of this massive (but peaceful) beast. You need it to have just given birth. You need to take the white liquid it wanted to give its baby. Then you need to extract the fat from that liquid, and mix it until it becomes a yellowish solid.

6

22

918

Étienne

@etiennefd

4 years

That was the easiest ingredient. You'll need another plant: a large grass that grows in tropical areas. The part you need is some sweet juice in the stalks. After a lot of labor-intensive processing and refining, you turn this juice into thousands of tiny white crystals.

5

25

886

Étienne

@etiennefd

9 months

@metakuna I think the idea is that short cycles (surprisingly!) don't happen because people don't want to date the ex of their ex's partner or things like that. Longer cycles can happen because at a certain "distance" people don't care / don't know

5

0

843

Étienne

@etiennefd

8 months

@towheretobegin i mean physical injury isn't fun either, the point is that it's better not to avoid all risk of those things

3

1

773

Étienne

@etiennefd

4 years

Happy Halloween! I feel like I have to talk about something scary. So here's a thread about... the scariest letter in the world: The multiocular O (or many-eyed O). A tale of angels, historical linguistics, and trypophobia.

9

148

513

Étienne

@etiennefd

10 months

@Ayegill naan bread is fine, “naan” is not in fact a synonym of bread in English speakers of other languages are allowed to make fun of it just as speakers of English are allowed to keep using it!

4

457

Étienne

@etiennefd

10 months

@TylerAlterman musing over how the only virus in the pokémon universe is a beneficial one

5

6

378

Étienne

@etiennefd

4 years

@rollerska8er @topntran Relevant xkcd:

0

8

292

Étienne

@etiennefd

10 months

@BLUNDERBUSSTED There can be beauty in extreme heterogeneity. I don’t like that kitchen personally but for a certain kind of person it’s perfect, and Agnes Callard is definitely that kind of person

2

1

289

Étienne

@etiennefd

2 years

Somehow it feels like I'm experiencing a collapse of ambition. None of my recent projects have really panned out, I don't particularly want to keep working on any of them, and I don't seen any others dragons I feel like attempting to slay What to do, what to do

43

4

261

Étienne

@etiennefd

11 months

@joseph_tsar_ @Humane interesting, I watched the whole thing just because I was fascinated by the minimalistic aesthetic and the quality of the presenters' voices felt very charismatic to me, in a surprising way perhaps

15

2

257

Étienne

@etiennefd

4 years

Why do we like spices? They're basically poison. Chili peppers are more easily dispersed by birds than mammals. So they evolved the chemical capsaicin to cause a burning sensation only in mammals, not birds. Why are humans are the only mammals to eat them? 🌶️

7

69

257

Étienne

@etiennefd

2 years

almost no one is engaging with @ESYudkowsky 's actual take, this is fascinating to watch what's happening is basically that all of his political opponents giddily noticed that he said something most people won't like ("airstrikes! violence!") and are attacking that, and only that

39

7

239

Étienne

@etiennefd

4 years

Notice how I can no problem use these symbols in text on Twitter. We can thank Unicode for this! For whatever reason, they decided to include ꙩ, Ꙫ, ꙭ and ꙮ as standard characters back in 2008. Good for those who want to copy that one text from 1429, I guess.

3

11

212

Étienne

@etiennefd

4 years

@kalicayo Citrus fruit is a whole other class of miracles

3

21

199

Étienne

@etiennefd

2 years

@Carzonfye Pharaoh Akhenaten tried this! He banned the worship of everything except the sun disk itself: the Aten, originally an aspect of Ra. People hated it so much (they liked their other gods!) that when he died he was declared heretical and erased from most Egyptian records

1

11

190

Étienne

@etiennefd

2 years

@_holyweather I wonder if there's anyone out there who actually earns $99,999, feels like it would be an insult to offer that salary and not 1 dollar more

5

1

178

Étienne

@etiennefd

3 years

What are some cool or important examples of things that were "memed into existence"?

106

11

168

Étienne

@etiennefd

2 years

My contribution to "cool things ChatGPT can do" is to ask it to generate neologisms for foreign words that can't be directly translated into English. For schadenfreude, it suggests: - maliciousglee - maliciousmirth - spitefulglee - misfortunemerriment

7

21

166

Étienne

@etiennefd

3 years

Introducing JAWWS—a project to make science more fun to read. Science papers (and I do mean papers written by scientists, not popular science) are needlessly tedious. This is due in part to bad style norms. So here's a plan to change those norms.

The Journal of Actually Well-Written Science — Dark Gray Matters

Update: The project described below is actually happening! Head to jawws.org for more content and posts. Once upon a time, I was a master’s student in evolutionary biology, on track towards a PhD and...

etiennefd.com

16

33

167

Étienne

@etiennefd

10 months

@vikasgorur @Ayegill baguette bread would be fine, the ultimate origin is “baguette de pain” (stick of bread) or “pain baguette” (stick bread). French speakers shortened it to “baguette” but the longer forms aren’t unheard of

4

0

162

Étienne

@etiennefd

4 years

Can you see it? Let's zoom in.

2

4

157

Étienne

@etiennefd

2 years

Would you rather have: - guaranteed $0.01 - 50% chance of winning $0.50

$0.01

127

0.5 * $0.50

2798

12

19

150

Étienne

@etiennefd

2 years

Just rewatched Her; hits somewhat differently 10 years later

6

2

147

Étienne

@etiennefd

4 years

The phrase is "серафими многоꙮчитїи", which can be transcribed "serafimi mnogoꙮčitii" and translates to "many-eyed seraphim". Here it is in the wild:

4

154

Étienne

@etiennefd

1 year

The results are in, and I placed 3rd in the ACX book review contest!!

14

4

137

Étienne

@etiennefd

4 years

The multiocular O is a rare form of the Cyrillic letter О. How rare? Rare enough to occur in a single phrase, in a single text written in an extinct language, Old Church Slavonic. The text is a copy of the Book of Psalms, written around 1429 and kept in Russia.

2

10

130

Étienne

@etiennefd

3 years

Gonna add multiocular tweets here as I see them, starting with this one

Matthew Sorensen

@mattieuMattieu

3 years

new integral just dropped

39

207

2K

2

7

125

Étienne

@etiennefd

2 years

@paulg Another one in this category—contemporary with photography, but not *color* photography—is Ivan Shishkin. He painted mostly trees, but still!

3

6

120

Étienne

@etiennefd

2 years

Lol at the list of countries with a detailed section in the Wikipedia page for “parking violation”

2

23

110

Étienne

@etiennefd

4 years

A blog is also a miracle. You need to invent writing, computers, the internet. You then need great ideas that you mix in the best way possible. Here's mine if you want to follow along!

Dark Gray Matters

etiennefd.com

1

2

110

Étienne

@etiennefd

4 years

Actually, you don't need to imagine, just look at these angels with eyes all over their wings:

2

104

Étienne

@etiennefd

2 years

@PradyuPrasad Tylenol/acetaminophen/paracetamol

1

0

102

Étienne

@etiennefd

1 year

Why does music in the minor mode automatically sound sad? My default hypothesis is that it’s just cultural, i.e. centuries of associating negative emotions with minor music, but is there a more fundamental reason?

28

3

96

Étienne

@etiennefd

4 years

The multiocular O is actually the Ultimate Form of other eyed O's: The monocular O, used to write the word "ꙩкꙩ" ("eye") And he binocular O and double monocular O, used to write "Ꙫчи" or "ꙭчи" ("[two] eyes")

1

5

98

Étienne

@etiennefd

4 years

I couldn't find a picture of an angel with a massive cluster of 7 or 10 eyes. This is probably for the best. I remain amazed that whoever copied Psalms in 1429 decided to create this horror. Maybe he was bored. Maybe the many-eyed O was a doodle.

3

1

94

Étienne

@etiennefd

10 months

@UrbanLandRent to be fair dragon flags are known outliers just because everybody loves dragons

3

2

91

Étienne

@etiennefd

2 years

@PradyuPrasad intuitively: it's pretty hard to develop an industry when you're dominated by a colonial power? (see also: all of India)

1

90

Étienne

@etiennefd

2 years

@eigenrobot we could power our cities with the Mammon Machine to harvest the bio-energy of Lavos the Earth parasite if only it wasn't overregulated

2

8

84

Étienne

@etiennefd

8 months

@MorbidPsych

Healthy childhood development through outdoor risky play: Navigating the balance with injury...

Free play is essential for children’s development and for their physical, mental, and social health. Opportunities to engage in outdoor free play—and risky play in particular—have declined signific...

cps.ca

0

3

90

Étienne

@etiennefd

9 months

pics from , and I learned about this from

Notes on Mauritania

I spent about a week in Mauritania, visiting the cities of Nouakchott, Nouadhibou, Zouerate, and a bunch of small towns over the course of multiple 10+ hour car rides and a train ride. As usual, th…

mattlakeman.org

1

0

87

Étienne

@etiennefd

3 years

A guilty pleasure is something you sincerely like, but are ashamed to. A guilty displeasure is something you don't like, but feel like you should. Something you "would like to like." What are your guilty displeasures?

58

5

86

Étienne

@etiennefd

10 months

@vikasgorur @Ayegill yeah but that’s justified by usage! Just like “naan bread”. There’s no stronger principle than usage

3

0

82

Étienne

@etiennefd

4 years

Terrifying, I know. The multiocular O reminds of Lovecraftian horrors. Of some all-seeing, unspeakable, evil god that lurks in the dark, watching. It also looks like an irregular cluster of holes, so it may trigger trypophobic responses for some.

Trypophobia - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

1

0

86

Étienne

@etiennefd

2 years

I just took this picture of a dead ficus elastica leaf and it might be the most artistic photo I’ve ever taken

1

2

83

Étienne

@etiennefd

2 years

today I officially doubled my age for the fifth time since I was one year old 🥳 (this is almost certainly only going to happen once more!)

11

0

82

Étienne

@etiennefd

4 years

@waitbutwhy Publish a lot of "predictions" about the next 12 months, become recognized as an extraordinary forecaster, try to profit before I suddenly become very bad at "predictions" when the year is over

4

0

77

Étienne

@etiennefd

4 years

An update: After all this talk of cakes, I couldn’t resist baking my own little miracle today

0

1

81

Étienne

@etiennefd

1 year

bluesky is nice, but i'm not sure it's such a great thing if tpot migrates there to me tpot has always felt like those plants that grow out of the cracks in concrete: thriving where there should be no life

7

2

78

Étienne

@etiennefd

3 years

1200 follower special! Comment and I'll give you a random historical fact from the year corresponding to your follower count (or invent a fact from the future if you have > 2021 followers)

79

3

77

Étienne

@etiennefd

2 years

@anzu_is_online and then we can use it for gigantic instances of the smoke mirrors mesoamerican rituals that hold the tech world together

Common Tech Jobs Described as Cabals of Mesoamerican Wizards

AWM #91: I wanted to clarify the tech work landscape for myself and instead I wrote this (??) 🪞

etiennefd.substack.com

2

10

73

Étienne

@etiennefd

4 years

A Collection of Snowmen from Parc La Fontaine, Montreal, The Day Following a Pretty Darn Big Snowfall 1. “The Void” Unknown artist, 2021 Snow, wood, branches, gloves

2

20

73

Étienne

@etiennefd

1 year

@VivaLaPanda_ I seem to recall that they deplete oxygen due to the enormous amount of decomposing matter they create, which effectively kills the entire ecosystem and any would-be animal grazers

1

0

65

Étienne

@etiennefd

9 months

@GarrettPetersen they wrote that they deliberately removed the same-sex pairings from the graph, except the very few that are important to the structures they found ... which is a pretty weird and annoying way to do it because now we can't really conclude anything on the topic

2

1

70

Étienne

@etiennefd

3 years

Today marks exactly one year of creative unemployment, which I am celebrating by reading the copy of @p_millerd ’s very topical book that I found in the @creatorcabins bookcase

4

1

69

Étienne

@etiennefd

4 years

Spices are evolutionary adaptive because they reduce the odds of food poisoning. Remarkably, this explains why they're more popular in hot climates—food spoils more easily there! So it's no accident that northern European food tastes blander than Mexican or Thai food.

2

14

66

Étienne

@etiennefd

4 years

So anyway, enjoy Halloween, and let me know if you see a kid dressed as a multiocular O or many-eyed seraphim!

3

0

68

Étienne

@etiennefd

4 years

What's special about this picture? It was taken 108 years ago, somewhere in the Russian Empire. It is among the first color self-portraits in the world. The subject and author is Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, a pioneer of color photography.

4

15

60

Étienne

@etiennefd

4 years

But what, you may ask, are many-eyed seraphim? A seraph is a type of angel in Judaism and Christianity. A high-ranking one, too. Seraphim look weird enough with regular faces. Now imagine them with multiple eyes!

1

0

66

Étienne

@etiennefd

2 years

TIL that there exists a volcano in Indonesia that has so much sulfuric acid that its flames burn *blue*

2

8

61

Étienne

@etiennefd

2 years

hardcore sthlm

@xazax

2 years

👀

2

3

27

2

0

58

Étienne

@etiennefd

3 years

Thinkwert

@Thinkwert

3 years

Oh boy! Gosh, fear not: for, behold, I bring you swell tidings of great joy. Hot dog!

10

67

420

1

0

57

Étienne

@etiennefd

3 years

@MasterTimBlais I think I reached what @sashachapin calls deep okayness by accident in the last few months Even when I have negative emotions like stress and sadness, I feel my being still rests on a solid rock of something like happiness

4

1

55

Étienne

@etiennefd

2 years

It's a weird state to be in when you agree that "playing the long game" and "keep going" and "grind your way to the top" make sense, but doing any of that would be literally misguided since I don't really have a clear goal in sight

2

0

54

Étienne

@etiennefd

2 years

Would it be possible to genetically engineer new trees that grew really fast, like 10x as fast as natural trees, thereby storing carbon in wood that we could harvest and build things with?

13

1

49

Étienne

@etiennefd

4 years

Evidence that emoji are just reinventing the Egyptian hieroglyphic system: (With apologies to @TheAnnaGat and whoever can't see hieroglyphs on their machine) 1) People 🤴 𓁈 🙇‍♂️ 𓀓 🛌 𓁀 🤷 𓀠 🕺 𓀤 👷 𓀨 🏃 𓀟 🤰 𓁑 🤱 𓁔 🧎 𓀀 🧑‍🦯 𓀗 🦒🧍‍♂️🦒 𓀬 (man standing on two giraffes)

5

20

53

Étienne

@etiennefd

3 years

Okay guys, today is the last day of April and exactly 2 years and a half since I started writing my novel on October 31st, 2018. Today is the day I finish the first draft. Wish me luck.

8

0

50

Étienne

@etiennefd

8 months

Does the boiling frog experiment replicate?

6

0

50

Étienne

@etiennefd

4 years

THE RANDOM LIBRARY I live right next to one of those “give a book, take a book” boxes. Sometimes there are interesting finds, so I figured I should share them with everyone.

4

2

49

Étienne

@etiennefd

2 years

Changing my entire twitter profile to mark the occasion of having been in a yayoi kusama infinity mirror room

4

0

48

Étienne

@etiennefd

4 years

Friends don’t let friends draw the moon wrong. The moon follows a highly nonrandom pattern! And yet people make mistakes all the time in art and stories. I forgive you, but here are some mistakes you can easily avoid 🌝🌚

5

13

48

Étienne

@etiennefd

8 months

@eshear I can't remember the details but I'm pretty sure the Black Death greatly increased wages in Europe during the following decades because of population loss No idea if it was "worth it", so to speak, since the Black Death obviously had major negative economic consequences too

2

0

45

Étienne

@etiennefd

2 years

Publishing scientific papers in a top journal is low status

8

2

46

Étienne

@etiennefd

3 years

From @m_ashcroft on the Online Game: "Make, publish and share. That’s level 1, which gives gives access to level 2 (make new online friends), which eventually unlocks level 3 (do fun things with online friends)." I like the levels idea. Can we expand it?

4

47

Étienne

@etiennefd

8 months

@ESYudkowsky why is everyone reacting to this as if it was meant as an alternative to explicit lifelong commitment, when it’s quite obviously meant as an alternative to “trading up” anyway but without ever discussing expectations first

8

0

45

Étienne

@etiennefd

3 years

@seungylee14 "babylon" is greek though, the babylonian name was "bābilim". still pretty cool

5

1

47

Étienne

@etiennefd

3 years

about a week ago I was feeling direction-less and had background anxiety due to impressions of wasting my time and now I have a month-long creator residency + I'm getting funding to work on my project! crazy how the plot of your life can change fast

2

45

Étienne

@etiennefd

3 years

Made a tres leches + saffron + cardamom + pistachio + rose cake yesterday 🥀

6

0

45

Étienne

@etiennefd

4 years

Books can change your life. For instance, they can be used to raise a bedside lamp to a sufficient height. Therefore allowing you to read more books.

3

2

44

Étienne

@etiennefd

3 years

Guys my thread on the multiocular O was read by the original designer of the Unicode character ꙮ, who then made a proposal to change it from 7 to 10 eyes as it appears in the (single) original source Be the change you wish to see in the world

Frédéric Grosshans @[email protected]

@fgrosshans

3 years

@nickvollmar_ @obt1982 @etiennefd Following this thread, @Evertype , who made the orignal proposal for ꙮ writes another proposal to correct the mistake and have a 10-eyed ꙮ .

1

2

30

2

4

43

Étienne

@etiennefd

2 years

They literally revive Alan Watts as an AI in it??? I had totally forgotten that

4

0

44

Étienne

@etiennefd

2 years

And yet at the same time I don't feel depressed at all, I feel great about myself The one exception is (manageable) stress about solving the money problem, which does have a way of collapsing your awareness onto the most basic things

4

0

41

Étienne

@etiennefd

1 year

@samswoora Basic telecom functions only

6

0

39

Étienne

@etiennefd

2 years

financial stress reaching unprecedented levels, can't stop thinking money now (I'm telling myself it's good to go through this since I've never been anything close to poor — and still am not — but it certainly isn't fun at all!)

6

0

43

Étienne

@etiennefd

2 years

@Pvelkovsky Oh it’s a term from China, where there’s the common phenomenon of not going to bed at a reasonable hour as a way to get revenge on your job or whatever holds control over most of your day

3

1

41

Étienne

@etiennefd

1 year

I can finally say I have thousands, plural, of subscribers! 🎉

5

0

42

Étienne

@etiennefd

8 months

So today I visited the most beautiful (ex-)hospital in the world

4

2

41

Étienne

@etiennefd

2 years

The one exception is writing — I'm certainly gonna keep writing regularly — but the problem with this is that the goal is ill-defined. What do I win if I write a lot? I become influential maybe? People read my stuff? Great, so what?

5

0

36

Étienne

@etiennefd

3 years

Thanks to everyone who joined the ⁦ @interintellect_ ⁩ x ⁦ @tpotvibecamp ⁩ crossover salon on online and physical communities yesterday! Lotsa fun talking about barriers to entry, the hidden costs of communities, challenges in decentralization and so many other things 💜

1

39

Étienne

@etiennefd

2 years

What are the aesthetics of effective altruism? (If any)

22

0

39

Étienne

@etiennefd

4 years

Some personal highlights from @visakanv 's ii event on how to get good at Twitter this morning (Where "getting good" is of course dependent on your goals. This is about making Twitter a fun, warm, friendly place!)

2

3

39