Ryan Moulton @moultano Twitter profile

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

9 days

A Few of the Birds I Love

The barn swallow’s flight, the mocking bird’s song, the cardinal’s color, and the hummingbird’s character.

moultano.wordpress.com

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Last Seen Profiles

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@660px

Ryan Moulton

@moultano

20 days

Every parent when giving their kids internet access.

Ellis Rosen

@EllisRosen

20 days

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

17 days

A huge advantage of wood structures is that they don't burn you after baking in mid summer sun. The steel and plastic replacements are much cheaper and more durable, but unless they plan for shade they're unusable for half of the year. Municipalities haven't figured this out yet.

Brady Holmer

@B_Holmer

17 days

You wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

2 months

I've seen a lot of people say they don't believe in climate change because "we're too small relative to the earth," and I think we've really failed in teaching those people something fundamental about what the scale of our relationship to the earth actually is.

Dr. Kyla Bennett, PEER

@bennettpeer

2 months

One of the most horrifying graphics ever.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

24 days

People claim that NYC has better bagels because of "the water" and this must be the only time in history that people have invented elaborate theories to *avoid* blaming the Jews.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

1 month

The way Nigerian twitter is blowing up at this makes me think a lot of ChatGPTisms are just colloquial language for the workforce they hired to write fine tuning data.

Paul Graham

@paulg

1 month

Someone sent me a cold email proposing a novel project. Then I noticed it used the word "delve."

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

4 months

Movies in which someone from the British Isles experiences more sunlight in a day than they had in their entire prior life and it drives them murderously insane. A genre:

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

2 months

Reddit's main competitive advantage over every other social media site is that it creates stable public urls that contain a whole conversation.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

6 months

Taylor Swift is rerecording her albums because the first Taylor Series was only an approximation.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

9 months

~2% of the comments got the joke that this is a video of San Francisco.

gabe

@allgarbled

9 months

my friend just sent me this video from the subway in yangzhou china, a city most americans have never heard of. he says it’s safe, clean, and reliable. no drug addicts or criminals. in america this would be unthinkable. what is the sickness that has infected our democracy?

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

5 months

People from other countries underestimate how repellent Americans find the concept of servants. Muchof American manners is about avoiding situations that might inadvertently highlight a difference in wealth, so a relationship where that is always apparent seems like torture.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

4 months

It's crazy that math is so committed to single letter variable names that it preferred to rope in the character sets of several other languages over expanding the namespace in any other way.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

4 months

I'm going to assume whenever someone says "late stage capitalism" they mean it in the Pokemon sense, and capitalism is super powerful and awesome now.

prayingforexits 🏴‍☠️

@mrexits

4 months

Late stage capitalism is so absurdly comical at times. This new cruise ship has: - 23 restaurants - 22 bars / clubs - 7 full sized pools + 9 hot tubs - Full waterpark - Rock climbing wall - Ice skating rink - Surf simulator - Golf course - Basketball court - Rooms for…

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

2 years

Kids are obsessed with infinity. Cantor's diagonalization proof should be part of the grade school curriculum as soon as they know what decimals are.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

2 years

This from @ZLabe has got to be one of the most powerful pieces of data visualization ever made. I can't tell you how many climate change skeptics I've shown it to who have been immediately taken aback and had to rethink things.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

3 months

There is a huge gap in generative AI between the quality you observe when you're playing with it open endedly, and the quality you observe when you try to use it for a task where you have a specific end goal in mind. This is I think where most of the hype/reality mismatch occurs.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

4 months

It's wild that this comic has been equally true for the entire time silicon valley has existed.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

7 months

Are theropod legs better at bipedalism than ours? Did mammals just miss the boat here?

Morning Brew ☕️

@MorningBrew

7 months

Amazon has started testing these human-like robots in one of its Washington-based warehouses The future is here

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

10 months

I wonder if the name "threads" was strategically chosen so that Twitter couldn't hide all posts that mention it.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

5 months

Americans have no cultural mode of treating someone politely but not as an equal. The idea of having someone in the house, who isn't a full member of the house and can be ignored at your leisure is unthinkable.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

23 days

Leaf blowers must have the largest ratio of negative externality to value over replacement of anything other than leaded gasoline.

Nat Friedman

@natfriedman

23 days

Instead of leaf blowers, I want a quiet little robot that picks leaves up one at a time and puts them in a bag, at night while I'm sleeping.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

7 months

I hope everyone has learned something from this.

Zito

@_Zeets

7 months

On how and why google changed the system behind their search engine and how it’s ruined looking up anything now

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

3 months

There's a deep sense in which freedom is achieved through the basics of life being extremely plentiful and cheap. When we don't further that, people's lives become less free.

Max Dubler 🏳️‍🌈

@maxdubler

3 months

I’m not a big RETVRN guy but we really do need to get back to the time when urban housing was so cheap and plentiful that any kid could show up in San Francisco or New York and find a place to live that they could afford on entry level service sector wages.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

2 months

If you think about it from first principles, it's strange that we expect smarter kids to spend more years in school instead of learning more in the same amount of time. School designed to teach every kid as much as they could learn before age 18 would look very different.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

12 days

Cities let us preserve forest. Fertilizer lets us preserve prairie. Growth lets us live lighter on the land. It was the light bulb that saved the whale.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

1 year

I met my wife in a salsa class, half of the other people in the class met their spouse there, and the teacher of the class married one of his students from prior class. Social dancing is a powerful ancient technology for getting people married and we should use it.

elle

@ellegist

1 year

I literally cannot overstate how many beautiful women go to beginners' salsa classes by themselves

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

2 years

The fact that we never managed to incorporate math notation into the internet in a reasonable way is going to have world historic consequences in the age of LLMs. We could have an immense training corpus of math, and we don't. Incredible path dependency.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

4 months

Every time a publication folds the public and the employees have some story to tell about its mismanagement, and how if they had just x they would have survived, but the trend is inescapable and they're all doomed.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

5 months

PDF continues to exist on the web primarily because we don't have a format that hermetically packs html with all its resources into one file that can be seamlessly loaded in a browser.

coastline paradox hater 🌉🚱

@notkavi

5 months

An Act To Abolish the PDF Format Whereas it was intended for printing documents, a purpose that's largely obsolete, Whereas it is annoying to copy text out of, Whereas it is not responsive to changes in screen size and factor, Whereas it is abused to deliver tabular information,

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

1 month

Knowing the words "late stage capitalism" or "enshittification" makes you dumber. They cause a complete lack of curiosity about why things are the way they are.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

4 months

I wonder how much of the claimed correlation between criminality and IQ is mediated by selection because smart criminals never get caught.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

3 months

If someone had shown me this in high school, I would know a lot more math today. Integration was the first thing in math that seemed surprisingly difficult, and I assumed I just wasn't good at it rather than that it was inherently hard.

johnny — e/discordian

@generativist

3 months

i never saw XKCD 2117 before

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

1 year

A side effect of having a multicultural marriage and living far from family is that I'm solely responsible for which of my traditions get passed on. It feels like an inappropriate amount of power. If I'm too tired to follow through on something, it just disappears forever.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

14 days

Roman numerals are said to have held back math by being impossible to mechanically compute with. Are there other math notations that held back other areas, where the field only advanced once the notation was replaced?

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

1 year

I'm ~400 pages into Moby Dick on the recommendations of like a dozen people on here, and I was not prepared for it to be 80% shitposting about whales.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

1 month

@KelseyTuoc I've always felt, reflecting on the teachers that impacted me, that the reason educational interventions never seem to work out is that you can't scale "caring a lot," "being really good at your job," and "being personally inspiring."

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

2 months

My radical YIMBY origin story: When I moved to CA ~20 years ago I was paying 1k for a tiny studio with 20 yr old carpet, where you could feel the heat radiating off the roof in the summer, and termites poured out of the walls 3x per year by the thousands. But that wasn't it.. 1/

Ryan Moulton

@moultano

2 months

@BellaRudd1 I was more or less YIMBY before but parenthood made me a radical YIMBY.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

22 days

The best I've seen.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

2 years

My mom flew back to Ohio today and took this picture of the Mosquito fire from the plane.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

4 months

Whenever my kids hit me with a "why" chain, It helps to have some background facts to build on. The two highest leverage facts I've taught them are: 1. heat is just how fast molecules are moving. 2. water is shaped like a mickey mouse.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

7 months

@ryxcommar You gotta ham it up a little. "Somebody just showed me this and it was so simple I was blown away. Why don't they teach this in schools?!"

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

17 days

@DanielParker_13 Yeah, some of them do, but I often find they're positioned as if the sun is directly overhead, and don't actually shade the structure much.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

2 months

The stories we tell children are overwhelmingly about a world where wilderness is "out there, all around" because they were written in a time or are about a time when that was true. As adults we usually don't internalize how much that is no longer true.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

2 years

@CatsMcGhee Fits with their general relationship to cryptids.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

4 months

This is one of those things, like vaccines, where too few people know someone who has died of what the intervention is there to prevent, because it works, so they forget why it exists.

Cliff Maloney

@Maloney

5 months

This is the face of a scumbag. She ruined breakfast this morning at a Boston Diner to do an unannounced health inspection. The immigrant family running the place had to stop to accompany this psycho. Don’t give me the she’s just doing her job line. She’s what is wrong with…

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

3 months

Remembering in Snow Crash now Neil Stevenson referred to people decked out like this as "gargoyles" and how everybody thought they were creepy and cringe.

Aimi Sekiguchi🌐ايمي

@sekiguchiaimi

3 months

Walk around Tokyo with #AppleVisionPro 🥽🌐

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

2 months

(Most directly related to the chart is the incredulity that cow farts could be a material source of methane. We have a lot of cows.)

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

8 months

@deepfates

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

4 months

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

2 months

I don't get what model I would be expected to have of these fields such that this has a correct answer. I think I could make a case for any of them except physics.

Spencer Greenberg 🔍

@SpencrGreenberg

2 months

A question indicative of (very approximately) 110 IQ

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

9 months

I am begging the cultural default vegetarian option in the US to switch to Indian food instead of fake meat.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

3 months

If you fly from Europe and land in San Jose it feels impoverished even though it's the wealthiest place on earth. It's such a waste.

SwiftOnSecurity

@SwiftOnSecurity

3 months

It’s genuinely insane how even more globally over-powered America would be with just more housing. Citizen cash being thrown in an artificial scarcity pit, dragging down everything in the country through cost inflation. Endless tarpits of suburbia, a prisoner of time and policy.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

2 years

@ryxcommar "Nobody should lose their health care when the woke mob gets them fired from their job for expressing common sense opinions online. That's why we're providing federal healthcare to everyone."

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

20 days

What is it about license plate enforcement that makes people go insane on twitter? The replies to this and every time @mattyglesias reports expired temporary tags are some of the most unhinged I've seen.

Gersh Kuntzman

@GershKuntzman

23 days

I caught this recidivist perp in Crown Heights. Check out this guy's record. #criminalmischief

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

1 year

This is the "bitter lesson" of environmentalism, that the aesthetically repellent systems that are optimized for industrial efficiency usually have less impact, because industrial efficiency is close enough to "use less stuff" that they're usually aligned.

Scott Lincicome

@scottlincicome

1 year

Welp: "Why single-use coffee pods are better for the planet than filter brewing"

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

7 months

@getnormality On second thought, lets not.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

2 months

And that was it. That woman and those kids deserved proper housing, and a lot of it, and any busybody who got in the way delenda est.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

3 years

Come, walk with me for a while through latent space.

Tour of the Sacred Library

Come, walk with me for a while through latent space.

moultano.wordpress.com

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

1 year

Posts like this gives me culture shock. I get why people were scared of nukes in the '70s but seeing people cheering this on today is completely inexplicable to me. It's like a tweet from another universe.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

2 months

She was a wonderful woman, great at her job, and the babies, despite the heat and the conditions, were having a great time running around in their diapers. But it was just so infuriating that this is the best we could build for her, in one of the wealthiest places in the world 4/

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

2 months

The SpaceX launch just underscores that it would have been so easy for Elon to be a national hero if he weren't such an asshole.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

5 months

If Ozempic cures alcoholism, as has been reported, short alcohol stocks, because severe abuse is most of their revenue.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

5 months

The pronunciation of Euler is an autodidact shibboleth.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

2 years

CLIP guided diffusion models are nearing fake news quality. These images were generated from the prompt " #BREAKING : Massive explosion reported over Kharkiv, Ukraine."

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

2 years

"How can one infinity be bigger than another infinity?" is exactly the kind of deep philosophy that comes up on the playground every day.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

2 years

You can teach a second grader that the set of even numbers is the same size as the number of natural numbers and it's exactly the right amount of age appropriate brain breaking.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

4 months

It feels funny to type out epsilon and sigma in my code.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

1 year

We are going to start seeing huge impedance mismatch where outputs that are amenable to automation are fed into inputs that are not. Organizations will be forced to automate just to handle the volume.

Joshua Browder

@jbrowder1

1 year

DoNotPay is working on using GPT-4 to generate "one click lawsuits" to sue robocallers for $1,500. Imagine receiving a call, clicking a button, call is transcribed and 1,000 word lawsuit is generated. GPT-3.5 was not good enough, but GPT-4 handles the job extremely well:

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

2 months

The thing that radicalized me to YIMBYism is when I had kids and was looking for daycares. A woman was running a home daycare out of one of those same units. A dozen toddlers, in a tiny unit that would pancake in an earthquake, where it got over 100 degrees every summer day. 3/

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

4 months

@loserbent You're telling your followers the lies that he just told you were lies.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

8 months

Every day on here I get glimpses into foreign cultures that are completely incomprehensible to me.

Noah Rothman

@NoahCRothman

8 months

I was making $40k annually when I proposed to my wife. She's still wearing that humiliatingly tiny $2,500 diamond, which was a crippling expense at the time.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

1 year

I gave midjourney some descriptions of LLMs and got out some images that are pretty close to what I imagine when I think about them.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

2 months

(For the 50th person replying that the graphic is only mammals, yes, that's what it says in the upper left hand corner.)

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

11 months

If an elementary school wouldn't allow kids to read books higher than their grade level everyone would think that's nuts, but it's an awful lot like how they teach math.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

2 months

(My response to the graphic was not, "mammals are all biomass and this proves climate change" so don't argue with that. It was "humans have a bigger impact than most people intuitively think. If asked to guess this chart, they would not guess this.")

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

4 months

I guess in a field so motivated by intrinsic beauty, it makes sense to use nomenclature that maximizes the beauty of the expression on the page.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

2 years

Why is it that the only drinks in which people appreciate complex flavors are those that are also drugs?

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

1 month

The convention that the "Undo" history gets wiped when you close the program has caused so much damage.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

3 years

@EGirlMonetarism

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

2 months

When it was finally torn down long after I had moved out, I checked the rent that unit was going for and it was up to 2.5k. In any other state it would have been condemned. But that isn't what radicalized me. 2/

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

3 months

It is embarrassing how California gets lapped by Texas at all the things California wants most just by letting people do things. (building housing and renewable energy.)

Matthew Yglesias

@mattyglesias

3 months

This is the way

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

4 months

@elaifresh I wonder if washing the rice makes a difference.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

2 years

We should have domesticated them by now. What are we doing?

Adriana Porter Felt

@__apf__

2 years

the raccoons have developed a new strategy: emotional manipulation

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

3 years

Experimenting with panoramas

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

3 months

When we stop building apartments and the shitty ones start renting for a third of a professional salary, you can't do that. You have to mold yourself into what the economy wants of you no matter how it grates.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

4 months

Species that for 10 million years would get killed in their sleep if they didn't cooperate with their neighbors: "It is objectively morally correct to cooperate with your neighbors. The universe cares a lot about this."

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

1 year

The NVDA stock surge makes me wonder if I would haven been better off financially if I had never learned about the EMH in the first place.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

3 months

When you can scrape by in a shitty apartment on rice and beans, it doesn't really matter whether someone is willing to pay you for what you want to do with your life or not. You're born with FU money. You can just walk out.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

2 years

Beyond just being cool, learning things like this is actually clarifying for them. Kids want to ask things like "how many zeros does infinity have?" and learning that two infinite things of "obviously" different size are actually the same conveys the weirdness of it better.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

1 year

Norman Rockwell advertising the green energy transition.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

2 months

@besttrousers That isn't enough to make it an analogy though.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

1 year

The strangest thing about this is the process where ordinary things become de facto illegal just by gradually becoming unusual.

Lenore Skenazy

@FreeRangeKids

1 year

Mom has 8 yo walk 1/2 mile home. Cops called. One asks: "Would you do this again?" "I said, 'I don't know,'" recalls Wallace. "That's when the cop replied, 'Okay, I'm going to have to arrest you.'" He proceeded to handcuff her in front of the kids.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

11 months

This one succeeded because all the geeks liked it in earnest and everyone who would have disagreed thought it was a joke.

Jon

@BiggestttHater

11 months

what is y’all most liked tweet?

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

6 months

This whole philosophy of activism is completely unsuited to climate change, because it can only be used to block things, but the problem can only be solved by building them.

Watcher.Guru

@WatcherGuru

6 months

JUST IN: 🇺🇸 FED Chair Jerome Powell says "just close the f*cking door" after climate protestors interrupt his speech.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

1 year

I'm astonished by how many utilitarians find it plausible that wild animals suffer so much that they have "net negative" lives. No group of people, no matter how impoverished and desperate, has considered their lives not worth living. Why would we guess that animals would?

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

2 months

"Agency is immoral because you might have an effect on the world. The only moral entity is a potted plant." This is not exactly what a lot of people believe, but it's close enough that it would compress a lot of arguments to highlight only the differences from this.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

6 years

@waltshaub From San Jose

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

23 days

They are louder and more annoying than any other activity that would cause neighbors to file a noise complaint with the police. If a college party was that loud they'd issue fines.

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Ryan Moulton

@moultano

2 months

I worked on this.