Man every time I am no longer distracted and I have to face my thoughts life instantly gets so much worse. Back to distractions it is.

A tricky thing about modern society is that no one has any idea when they don’t die. Like, the number of lives saved by controlling air pollution in America is probably over 200,000 per year, but the number of people who think their life was saved by controlling air pollution is zero.

Claude wouldn't share what music he listens to.

"Don't look up" is getting more relevant each week

At least every other day, if not every day, I think about how it's the year 2025 and that’s just wild to me. Like, we’re living in the future. 2016 doesn’t seem that long ago, I still recognize myself in the Jeroen from back then. Yet at the time, I would’ve thought 2025 was far in the future.

Cooking would be radically more enjoyable if you could skip the cutting veggies part

How does this have so many likes when clearly its opposite from the truth. WTF.

Trying to speak French to Claude to practice but the transcription is so disappointing lol. And half the time it thinks I said "Claude" or "Anthropic" while I don't mention them at all.

Asking Claude for advice on a problem by prompting "You are my bestie who knows me better than I do. Write a few paragraphs of advice, takeaways and possible next steps for me given my situation. Try to make me feel better." works surprisingly well!

I had 4 unknown calls this morning, a new record. Oddly enough one was from Spain and one from Alberta! Getting tired of these spam calls.

Can't believe I just spent 16 euros on the saddest avocado toast ever because it was the only vegan option... Like it was just mashed avocado and baked mushrooms without any flavor or spice whatsoever. Toasted bread with grocery store guacamole tastes better.

One of my custom ChatGPT instructions is to apply bayesian reasoning and to give percentages when answering. It rarely actually did that but now with the "Reason" function it's always doing that, even in situations where it's clearly a silly idea. (prompt is an example, not a real request)

A Belgian TV quiz show already does this game since 2003, earlier than BBC's "Only Connect". Though unsure if they are the first, and it's with 12 words (3 connections) rather than 16. I hate this game so much.

This surprised me! I wasn't actually mad at Google because I figured they were just following a protocol. But to also translate it to Dutch? Why?

Absolutely no idea if this is based or not, their website is so vague.

When DOGE got announced I just thought it was something Trump did to make Elon happy but mostly useless in practice (since everyone said it's not an actual government department). I didn't expect it to actually have all these big consequences and for Elon to get this much power and influence.

wow just logged off and there are problems there too

I wrote this before the inauguration 😭 The world is depressing right now. Like, do we have actual reasons for optimism?

Obligatory youtu.be/ashcHjCfdbQ

US President Trump signed an executive order for the US to leave the World Health Organization. Everyone around the world deserves to have a healthy and happy life. No one chooses where they are born. No one chooses to experience extreme poverty.

Absolutely morally bankrupt behaviour that will directly lead to more people dying of preventable causes www.politico.com/news/2025/01...

huh...

This is a beautiful tribute.

Over the past few months I have come to believe that the likehood the world will become worse has become bigger than the likelihood the world will become better over the next 100 years. The biggest recent update coming from the 2024 elections worldwide and especially the U.S.

The world’s richest 1% are people who make more than $140,000 per year. Maybe instead of a private jet in the thumbnail, they should have put a recently purchased single family home in Seattle.

I can't get over how silly this is

I hate the end of the year because it just makes me think of all the things I didn't achieve yet and realistically won't be able to achieve anymore before the new year. For some reason it feels like this big deadline. Lots of shame that many projects I started this year aren't yet finished.

It's that time of year again 🎉 Another virtual fundraiser for the EA Animal Welfare Fund! Help reduce the suffering of animals while maybe increasing ours a bit (drinking huel)

I'm sad mine won't turn on anymore. 12-year-old me tried to make music videos with this thing.

I've got plenty of ideas for global health, but could still use ideas for other causes like pandemics, AI, animal welfare and moral circle expansion. Ideally stories with identifiable main characters such as Petrov and Benjamin Lay. Stories of projects that had to stop early still welcome too! 💡

I'm giving a talk about EA in february, about success stories from an EA perspective (so not necessarily EA stories but just impactful). If you have any ideas, please share! 😊 I already plan to talk about Stanislav Petrov and getting rid of lead in turmeric in Bangladesh.

I'm still finishing a video I've been working on since January. But because of my job search and now being fulltime employed, progress is slow. I'm working on it every week but I'm barely going forward. I feel so bad and guilty about it. At this pace, it will still take months to complete.

Why pledge to donate 10% of your income to effective charities? @rutgerbregman.bsky.social and others share their perspective! Also a nice brief look into the history of the pledge 😊

This is just sad www.theguardian.com/food/2024/no...

At this rate I may reach a 1000 followers faster on 🦋 than 🐦

So when is Bluesky adding fleets?

The world has already eradicated smallpox. Polio is the next disease we could eradicate. Here's how we got to where we are now, mostly thanks to the polio vaccine. From our work on Polio: ourworldindata.org/polio

I got Gemini Advanced rather than a ChatGPT or Claude subscription, because it's the cheapest option (I already pay €10/month for Google One, so it's just 10 euros extra). However, whatever the benchmarks may claim, Gemini is just straight up awful. In a conversation it has the memory of a goldfish.

Hello, I am an EA bear and I like to give what I can! Which is mostly marmalade toast. Here I am toasting the 15th anniversary of @givingwhatwecan.bsky.social!!

80K is now on Bluesky - highly recommended follow

Happy Birthday to Giving What We Can, which turns 15 today! 🥳 When Toby and I started GWWC 15 years ago, we had just 23 members, each of us pledging at least 10% of our income to effective charities until we retire. Now, over 9,000 people have taken this pledge. www.givingwhatwecan.org

The main reason music is bad these days is that producers are too cowardly to put all the drums way over in the left channel

I thought I had just finished listening to an album but then suddenly a few minutes later I heard music again. I assumed I must have hit play on accident or something. But nope, I actually just listened to a 6 minute song that's pure silence in the middle of the album 😭

All three statements are true at the same time

I really like the threaded mode. It's perfect for posts with not too many replies. But with popular posts it's a pain as you can't expand/collapse anything like you can on, for example, Reddit.

Is there really a sudden influx of users here? What's the cause? I just had @ethai.bsky.social encourage me like a week ago so I finally gave it a shot. I see no mention of bluesky on my Twitter feed :o I'm really liking it so far, it's a lot more like Twitter used to be.

Seems like a lot of the discourse is "We shouldn've have abandoned spaces like Joe Rogan's podcast" but also I absolutely feel like I have no choice but to abandon spaces like Elon Musk's Twitter.

I made the EA list I created into a starter pack, though I still don't fully understand the difference between the two. Message me if you want to be on the list! go.bsky.app/MgD94eP