Joined June 2022
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- Followers 1,308
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Pinned Tweet
17 Oct 2025
new vals arc: vulnerability, earnestness, rawness, unfliterdness, ugliness
i'm so used to wanting a good appearance, to choosing to say the things which are good for me.
I'm weak, I have problems, I'm struggling with things.
Give me feedback as u like. I'll continue existing
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I get a little too offended when I notice my moots following slop posters. It's okay if I disagree with my moots' taste/discernment
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Trying to solve your psychology by following simple rules works as well as trying to play chess by following simple rules - surprisingly good at first but can't solve any new problems.
You've gotta learn your psychology in details and move past simple models.
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Jun 13
nyc is actually glowing rn. best city on earth during these months and it’s not particularly close
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I remember as a kid I loooooved being small, darting between people in crowded places, crawling under and around things.
I'm not so small anymore but in fact I can still do all these things, just in different playgrounds :D
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Jun 13
When you're performative (eg. obligate people pleasing), you present an unsustainable version of yourself. At some point it cracks and people are disappointed.
At that point you can run away and search for new bridges to burn, or you can learn to expose yourself and change.
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Jun 13
The bomb will not find me, for I will find it first. I will be riding the bomb trying to disarm it to the last second.
If I die in the crash but it doesn't explode, I will be glad for everyone else, and live on through them.
'where will the bomb find you'
livingbulwark.net/wp-content…
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Jun 13
There's an art to this:
If you're lower status, you phrase compliments as objective "you have an amazing sweater!".
If you're higher status, you phrase compliments as personal "I love your sweater!"
I want to give people compliments but you are supposed to phrase them as fact claims abt the person which feels wrong. I am expressing an affective claim abt me towards them . E.g "I think you are cool" or "i admire you" etc. Why do I have this alien bug brain....
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Jun 13
In practice there's a spectrum and different cultures do it differently, but it's worth considering the implications of what you say, evaluating them by Grice's maxims (what you say should be only as long as needed and useful to your listener).
When you say "I love your sweater", it implies this is information they would like to have, which would only be true if they cared about your personal opinion, aka it's a high status move.
When you say "your sweater is amazing", you're phrasing it as a neutral observation, and maybe they'd appreciate people noticing their good taste in general, but the compliment is more towards the receiver's good taste than the complimenter's good taste.
But these "natural readings" are only true depending on tone and sensitivity you share the compliments with. It's also "humble" to only share your opinion rather than try to make a true fact of the universe, so "I love your sweater" can be the right move even if you're indeed lower status than who you're talking to.
Btw between friends I recommend both treating the other as high status.
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Jun 13
I was cuddling with a friend in a park in the evening, and stayed and stayed and stayed, when suddenly the sprinklers came on and we had to rush off the grass laughing and dodging the sprays. When we'd escaped, somewhat wet but alive, we shared a long hug.
10/10 would recommend.
Jun 13
Being caught in the rain is my favorite part!
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Jun 13
Yesterday I arrived in NYC. Beautiful warm soft weather and lighting.
I enter the tube, I exit the tube - it's storming, strong wind gusts picking up empty bins and swirling the air with dust, followed by torrential rains sweeping the streets.
10/10 would recommend.
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Fable is now down, but they helped me with my website before going. To pay homage, check out my website vals.quest
Also I'm in NYC from now til vibecamp next Thursday. NYC moots hit me up let's chat.
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vals🔸 retweeted
19 Nov 2024
Oh and an important meta-meta-level point: many people in my circles (especially AI safety people) implicitly believe that the biggest bottleneck to the future going well is powerful people caring about the right things. But I think the actual biggest bottleneck is more like: powerful people being emotionally healthy enough that they actually contribute to the things they think they care about. Emotional dysregulation surprisingly reliably produces the opposite of the outcome you tell yourself you’re aiming for. Concretely, a bunch of the biggest fuckups in the AI safety space seem to me pretty directly traceable back to emotional dysregulation, and may well have made the overall impact of the AI safety community net negative (though I don’t really like “net negative” as a concept and am primarily using it because it’s important in the ontology of people who I think should be paying attention to these points). Plan to say more about this in the future but it’s sensitive enough that I want to take the time to get it right. For the foreseeable future though I’m primarily operating on virtue ethics: my main goals right now are to reliably do things for the right reasons, and also to develop better intuitions for what the right reasons are.
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I (intentionally) save 0% of my salary. Either I have use for spending the money and I do, or I don't. I look up to a year ahead and compare my best uses of money within that time. My savings went down over last 4 years. My future expected impact goes up faster by reinvesting.
People save just ~20% of their salary, which is wild to me.
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* this is not advice for others to follow this path. I have quite a peculiar situation and psychology and skills
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Tag yourself I'm FeedFrof
in 2027 all companies will be built with Datadog Posthog StreamClog CloudJog HashHawk BufferBog CacheCog FeedFrog StackSquawk TokenFog
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The problem with being unemployed is you can't ever take holidays. It's only a holiday when there's a job you're not doing.
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vals🔸 retweeted
Jun 11
one precise, small, unmemorable moment on a call a couple years ago, someone paused & said "we're doing a thing where we're showing each other how cool we are, and I'm wondering if we can find another pattern to bond from"
and that moment turned out to change my whole life
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Jun 12
On my flight to NYC I saw a guy using ChatGPT to refine pick-up lines for dating apps, then switch to a dating app and send it.
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