alex @pawnofcthulhu Twitter profile

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

1 year

rude

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

2 years

oh no trans women in chess discourse is starting to be a thing people are really noticably not prepared for a world where in a few years a large % of the top female chess players are trans

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

11 months

... broke: kids started having mental health problems in the 2010s because thats when they started using technology (smartphones) woke: kids started having mental health problems in the 2010s because thats when their parents learned how to use technology

🌈 Hailey Piper 🌈

@HaileyPiperSays

11 months

Much of Gen Z has faced constant surveillance. Not like latchkey Gen X, not like millennials knowing comps more than our parents. - reduced outdoor spaces for kids - "track my child" apps for when they're out - keylog programs Everything filters through "what if my parents see?"

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

2 years

i propose we call such spaces autonymous zones

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

1 month

it appears putting my IMO results in my bio would be an excellent way to gain more followers it just seems an incredibly tasteless thing to do

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

15 days

spiciest rationalist take you should probably be long on is cryonics tbh. like if you look at lesswrong survey data people who haven't signed up for it are like "10% it works" and people who have are like "10% it works and that seems totally worth a few hundred a year"

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

3 years

TIL “believes all math can be explained to 5-year-olds” is a type of guy

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

1 year

(K is the cyclotomic field of degree m here in case you were curious; I think this lemma was reasonable knowledge to assume here but also wow)

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

1 year

@PradyuPrasad I have observed import math as maths

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

3 years

This is kind of a baffling norm “The drug works so it’s unethical to continue the trial because it means people who receive placebo will die, however the FDA will continue to ban it for the next month or so”

Eric Topol

@EricTopol

3 years

At interim analysis, overwhelming efficacy necessitated stopping the trial for ethical considerations: 389 people who got Paxlovid: 3 hospitalizations, 0 deaths 385 people who got placebo: 27 hospitalizations, 7 deaths @Carolynyjohnson

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

3 years

@waitbutwhy this feels like a challenge to collect all of them

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

5 months

@Authw8 @cheer_wine maybe hold these beliefs at the same rate but are more likely to be in a natural situation to opine on them

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

1 year

there's a weird autistic traumabrain difference between how easy it is to say "can I kiss you?" vs "i'd quite like to kiss you"

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

2 years

i do not want to be within a 100 mile radius if and when people discover we are living in such a world

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

2 years

thankfully in contest math we were spared this political shitshow by transitioning after we got too old to compete.

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

2 years

honestly one thing EAs can learn from the trans community is even in the face of bad press you can't be tearing yourselves apart yelling at people to stop wearing dog collars or using frog/frogs pronouns bc being weird is bad PR. just do good things and hope people come around.

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

1 year

ok there has to be a market for "contest math kid who's been unemployed like a year and a half" what would people recommend?

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

2 years

FTX vague impressions: - I'm not worried about the future of EA we'll miss the money but we've handled worse in terms of PR lol. Main thing that worries me is rumors of warnings of bad behaviour given to some higher ups some years ago.

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

3 months

... ok this is pretty unforgivable i've previously (admittedly uncharitably) made the comparison that this is like looking at incel fora to understand the lives of lonely men

Simon Whitten @simonwhitten.bsky.social

@Simon_Whitten

3 months

🧵 Hilary Cass misrepresents this big scary graph in her final report. It’s not from a study of people who detransition, it’s from an ethnographic study of the online detrans community (a socio-political subculture).

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

2 years

@JohnNemoBell I feel like you should be required to like ... use google before printing obviously false claims like "it's easier to get into a top UK uni as an international" in a major newspaper.

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

3 years

so like you know the "that's a very convincing argument for negative utilitarianism but have you considered you have depression" problem?

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

4 months

@arithmoquine ... is that a strand of DNA? some kind of mutagen?

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

1 year

cold take on transphobia in rat/postrat spaces is we do extremely well in keeping this stuff out compared to your average IDW-curious space because of a bunch of shared values (transhumanism, libertarianism, sex-positivity, tolerance of weird ppl, etc.)

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

2 years

why are twitter people shitting on caroline/sbfs taste look if you don't see the appeal of a stimulant-fueled partner in billion-dollar crypto fraud idk what to tell you

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

3 years

@jhtweets_ i raise you

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

3 years

Universities making money by acting as visa laundering services for overseas students >>> Universities making money by selectively admitting rich kids by legacy admissions/ judging on extracurriculars

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦

@Noahpinion

3 years

FOREIGN STUDENTS SUBSIDIZE AMERICAN STUDENTS, THEY DO NOT REPLACE THEM FOREIGN STUDENTS SUBSIDIZE AMERICAN STUDENTS, THEY DO NOT REPLACE THEM FOREIGN STUDENTS SUBSIDIZE AMERICAN STUDENTS, THEY DO NOT REPLACE THEM FOREIGN STUDENTS SUBSIDIZE AMERICAN STUDENTS, THEY DO NOT REPLAC

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

11 months

@ElytraMithra i guess there are 3 layers here 1) my parents cared about me 2) my upbringing was fucked up/abusive 3) my upbringing was fucked up/abusive as a result of my parents being fuckups who were nonetheless people

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

1 year

is "dropping a copy of hpmor into the math olympiad server" still the done thing or is there some more up to date resource?

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

3 months

@xsphi I think the model of 'how do prediction markets scale up' is like, participants in the market using them to hedge risk

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

3 years

it’s really amusing how my views on the power of the rat community have changed over the past 5 years i’ve gone from “oh no what if someone discovers i’m one of these crazy nerds” to “if the ny times wants to attack us, come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough”

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

1 year

huh the kids are alright?

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

3 months

think you have to be careful here there is an obvious reason why *muslims in the west* are disproportionately likely to be engineers

RandomSprint

@RandomSprint

3 months

A disproportionate share of terrorists are engineers. I remember reading this in 2010 and updating from "being smart leads to better beliefs" to "there are traps only smart people can fall for." I am often reminded of this fact.

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

1 year

@sullyj3 @goblinodds like, escalating slowly/doing lots of things out of plausible deniability because you're scared of getting rejected/scared of freaking them out when really they know full well you're attracted to them and would feel safer if there was a polite+clear way to reject you

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

3 months

looking through this and I'm starting to realise what a challenge it is to keep olympiads from being a contest of "how much of an undergraduate math degree have you done?"

Oggy 紅葉

@oggyxe

3 months

do you understand that you have time to learn and build stuff ? do you understand that this 500 pages math book on algebraic number theory through olympiad problems was written by a 17yo highschool student ?? skill and mentality issue

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

1 year

*record scratch* *freeze frame* "yep, that's me, you're probably wondering how I got here"

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

1 month

@anpaure skill issue i got my first kiss at the IMO

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

2 years

The answer to all the snarky doctors in the comments saying "so why are you seeing us anyway" is "because you're the one with the prescription pad"

Holly Brockwell

@holly

2 years

Ooh absolutely this

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

3 years

@jhtweets_ i kid you not the reasoning was "oh shit our capital doesn't have a port, let's give them one 200km away"

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

3 years

or in general how you should be skeptical of people using philosophy or math or econ to come to bizarre/blackpilled conclusions without considering like "this is a rationalisation of feelings of a person who needs to go outside"

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

3 years

anyway this heuristic holds triply when a person is talking about dating

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

2 years

ok i have to admit i'm struggling to see any reason documents produced by scotus justices should be confidential other than "if people see how the sausage gets made they might take the Very Serious Law People less seriously"

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

1 year

boring take on this is -talent is definitely a thing yes -especially in the US we are nowhere near the frontier of what people can be taught with adequate maths education

Daniel Litt

@littmath

1 year

Part of being a mathematician is finding something you feel you can’t understand, and nonetheless working to understand it. Rather than claiming expertise about the role of genetics in math, Murray might benefit by showing some curiosity about what it is mathematicians do.

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@pawnofcthulhu

1 year

@IDoTheThinking seems to be a reputation that's spread to Australia

Rose Jackson

@RoseBJackson

1 year

As NSW Minister for Housing and Homelessness I’m focused every day on policies that stop Sydney becoming more like San Francisco.

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

3 months

… what this woman wants is to be patted on the head and be told “you have brainworms” I am confused why this is a hard situation to read?

Richard Hanania

@RichardHanania

3 months

This should be mandatory viewing for all boys on the brink of puberty. Bookmarking it for when my children are old enough.

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

1 year

man i feel like even if you have a baseline male sexuality if you're willing to date trans women theres an insane amount of alpha in transitioning now that you're a girl and have gained ppl's trust you can get an instant harem by taking advantage of the top shortage

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

3 years

interesting common thread between people who hate Kelsey Piper/people who hate Natalie Wynn/maybe Ezra Klein to some extent for some people being 99th percentile calm/agreeable is seen as a status play and pisses them off

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

11 months

@ElytraMithra i think correcting both the modus ponens and the modus tollens from "if my parents were abusive they couldn't have ~cared about me' is important

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

2 months

@Codeword375157 @VlineGunzel its called "bribes"

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

2 years

@leaacta yeah i roll to disbelieve and think they messed up the age encoding here

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

3 years

@ElyEelee hrt feels very Artistic License Science to me "you take the Girl Juice and become a Girl" nooo that can't be right it's like one of those movies where genetic mutations can make you part dinosaur isn't real biochemistry supposed to look like this:?

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@pawnofcthulhu

1 month

i am aware this post gives off "oh, I went to university in a place near Boston" vibes

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

2 months

i feel like if we keep talking about bombing data centres at some point someone will actually bomb a data centre ratspace has lots of ideological weirdos

Thiago ✱

@thiagovscoelho

2 months

Who’s building this?

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

3 months

love the Bay Area culture thing of “you are invited to do this Event At Extremely Short Notice”

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

4 months

@littmath

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

4 months

feels like i'll probably be the last trans generation of the ghetto and there's something poignant about that. 20 years from now the youth will think i'm a lunatic for buying hormones of the interwebs bcause "you can't trust the gubment"

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

3 years

@paulg @NateSilver538 oh come on it cant be hard to come up with confounding factors here

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

1 year

"do not attempt to use on any person"

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

1 year

@LukeSAroundYou @NLRG_it

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

3 years

@comewhatmaenad @TWakalix if we're going to principle of charity this: i think a lot of women are socialised to need an excuse to not have sex with someone 'i have a boyfriend' etc and like sometimes some of them discover and grow to rely on the excuse "i'm a lesbian" this predictably goes terribly

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

2 months

retracting my “estradiol injections are the hottest forcefem method” take

Name

@somethingmoder

2 months

Thinking about this woman who used CRISPR to make her testicles produce estrogen (and it worked) I wish stuff like this was more researched and implemented widely Getting a "feminization vaccine" once and escaping the dependency on regular hrt is the Holy Grail of transition

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

1 year

i didn't realise i was allowed to ask for things asking for things sounds scary but i am allowed to state True and Relevant facts about the world

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

1 month

@peak_transit Eh I think the low text format might be objectively better but it’s more generic and less Haus

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

4 months

@cheer_wine I feel like drawing graffiti is sort of like building on 2b2t ephemerality is part of the art form

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

3 years

@pervocracy the more I hear about us evangelical Christianity the more wack it sounds. there’s like absolutely no epistemic filter idk how people think that way

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@pawnofcthulhu

1 month

@xsphi I think you cant break lightspeed without also breaking causality (which would imply a *very* weird universe)

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

3 years

@punish_d_egg @peaktransit if you didn't use RNG for this you are why we can't have nice things

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

3 years

@ESYudkowsky as always tired: getting annoyed at stupid people wired: making money off stupid people

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

11 months

... you people know Australia bioengineers rabbit pandemics right? it occurs to me most countries don't do things like this

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

1 year

filing "you're not really poly you just have avoidant attachment style" along with "bsdm is self harm" and "there is some social contagion wrt kids IDing as trans" in my 'spicy takes that are true but not actually a big deal' cabinet

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦

@Noahpinion

1 year

Like, Burning Man is a networking event, "just put LEDs on it" isn't art, everyone thinks "free speech" on the internet means "censorship for everyone but my team", and no you're not really poly you just have avoidant attachment style

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

11 months

feeling guilty for developing any special interests that are not mathematics because then i feel like a dilantette

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

2 years

@Birdyword ok thats a much bigger number than I thought perth has almost 2x the gdp per capita of the uk

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

1 month

@xsphi trans (vs cis) guy: green flag "hey look, I'm safe, I used to be a girl": weirds me out

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

1 year

leads to a trans-friendly space with an unusually low rate of tearing each other apart but also 0% surprised than many trans ppl don't get this and are suspicious

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

1 year

@endless_sine when your only exposure to chemistry since high school is Things I Won't Work With and DIY transfem endocrinology

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

11 months

my reading of the 'you broke up with him, right?' is monog women terrified their partner will break up with them as soon as they find someone more conventionally attractive then themselves do you really think that little of yourself and your partner?

Aella

@Aella_Girl

11 months

one of my partners once was like 'you're not that pretty' during a tender moment i rolled over in the fetal position and groaned for like an hour, and then he went and made me an im sorry card out of construction paper and markers and stickers

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

1 year

@parafactual i have a maybe slightly uncharitable reaction to the shtick of 'dropped out of math to cry a lot and process feelings about girls' of like if you're not taking estrogen this seems like not your comparative advantage?

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

1 year

@typedfemale man at the end of the day i can't help but have any reaction to zack-m-davisism other than "this is an exotic flower of an ideology that can't grow anywhere else but this greenhouse we've built"

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

10 months

increasingly developing a theory that stimulants are bad for a lot of traumaqueers drawn to the rationalist community and they should instead do a bunch of psychedelics

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

1 year

here = in the context of the notes they are from I am not expecting strangers on twitter to know Galois theory!

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

11 months

feel slightly weird posting gender essentialism on main but uh i guess i don't have to worry about this being a side effect of estrogen?

Crémieux

@cremieuxrecueil

11 months

A new study presented data on mental rotation ability and digit ratios among cis, trans, and nonbinary people. It also had data on sexual orientation change with hormonal transition. First, check out mental rotation differences:

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

1 year

@Aella_Girl guys just use an RNG

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

1 year

@ChessProblem um notably missing is the sentence "we sent an email to the team alerting them to the accusations and asking 'are you sure this is a good idea?'"

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

3 years

im starting to notice this weirdly ahistorical narrative among the IDW that the '90s and '00s were a libertine egalitarian utopia until feminists/queers/whatever suddenly developed a severe case of Deranged Takes and everything went wrong none of these are true please stop it

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

1 year

uhm. sometimes i am reminded that my overton window is very different from normies'

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

1 year

we really need to fix the thing where people think learning math=learning to do the Approved Algorithm rather than conveying ideas/solving problems

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

1 year

@bryancsk look it's "hey these scary sigmas and pis are just for loops :)" again

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

11 months

the bluepill/redpill discourse reminds me of the time my dad sent me eleventy paragraphs with citations trying to persuade me not to transition. he meant well he's just a conservatively minded guy who was terrified for me. conservative redpillism from a place of empathy :p

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

2 years

@tara_chara @alicemazzy

alex

@pawnofcthulhu

3 years

@ElyEelee hrt feels very Artistic License Science to me "you take the Girl Juice and become a Girl" nooo that can't be right it's like one of those movies where genetic mutations can make you part dinosaur isn't real biochemistry supposed to look like this:?

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@pawnofcthulhu

3 months

(It seems quite likely to me that the epistemic environment in these places as deteriorated in the past 10 years as a result of evaporative cooling, fwiw)

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

1 month

it was like 10 years ago guys and this is not linkedin

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

11 months

ok i did not hear about this but apparently oat milk companies are now doing the obvious thing and fortifying their stuff with vitamin b12 etc i think probability of me going vegan in the near future has gone up significantly

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

3 years

eggridy beggridy test for integrity: do they treat people in fursuits with care? cruelty to people with anthropomorphozoo- -philiac tendencies? don't give them air

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

3 months

off the top of your head, can you name a prime number bigger than 10000

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no

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

10 months

they're just kids, octavia sometimes kids will bullshit you and be shitty to each other

Ra ⏺️

@slimepriestess

2 years

"I'm trying to not be abusive but it's really hard, I just make mistakes sometimes, can you please just go easy on me?" AIRLOCK.

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

10 months

man i guess im the intellectual equivalent of the girl who goes on insta and develops an eating disorder lmaoooo

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@pawnofcthulhu

1 month

guys

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@pawnofcthulhu

1 year

answer is i think to double down on these values and get ppl to realise how weird they are + make sure newer blood is on board. appreciated when poly discourse was a thing for precisely this reason.

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

2 years

what's the deal with the '2/3s of people who call themselves vegetarians/vegans have eaten meat in the past week' statistic (or whatever) i have never met one of these fake vegetarians in my life and bet there is polling shenanigans going on.

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@pawnofcthulhu

3 years

Like, is it ethical to not give the drug to people who test covid positive or not?

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alex

@pawnofcthulhu

15 days

i havent signed up or anything but its on my todo list

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