Best of Twitter week of November 4-10, 2024

Here are the best-selling authors in the Medieval period based on the number of surviving manuscripts of their work in a massive database.
It is noticeable how prominent ancient writers are in top spots, 6 of the top 10 authors wrote in the 5th century or earlier, in the… x.com/i/web/status/1…

— LiorLefineder (@lefineder)
7:53 PM • Nov 6, 2024

The French Polymarket whale commissioned polls with a specific alternate methodology, the “neighbor method”

1. What a baller

2. What a killer example of how betting markets can surface contrarian, high quality signals

— Matt Bateman (@mbateman)
9:43 PM • Nov 6, 2024

French guy makes $50 Million bag on Polymarket, and the regulators IMMEDIATLY rush to ban it 😭😂😂

Can't be having any Winners in Europe

This whole continent is a fuckin joke at this point

— Wazz (@WazzCrypto)
4:24 AM • Nov 7, 2024

went to read the rest of this paper and ???????????

— 𝓅౨ৎ (@peonyprncss)
8:02 PM • Nov 8, 2024

Everyone knows fertility is the ability to reproduce, but everyone hasn't heard of fecundability, the potential to reproduce. The difference has to do with reproducing versus being able to reproduce.

Fecundability declines with age🧵

— Noor Siddiqui (@noor_siddiqui_)
7:01 PM • Nov 9, 2024

This from @tylercowen on the vibe shift was impressively early, perceptive – and underrated.

— Marc Sidwell (@marcsidwell)
7:55 AM • Nov 6, 2024

when faced with a monolithic system that doesn't perform the way you need it to, it is generally well-known that ground-up rewrites are disastrous, and trying to change the system in place tends to be too slow to be effective

instead, you create small systems parallel to the… x.com/i/web/status/1…

— caesararum, BS, DOGS (@caesararum)
7:05 PM • Nov 4, 2024

tried getting claude to write funny tweets starting from 9 examples. it generated some okay stuff but nothing that actually made me laugh. then i tried asking it to generate tweets written from its perspective rather than a human's and actually laughed. hmm

— QC (@QiaochuYuan)
9:39 PM • Nov 2, 2024

Despite staggering amounts of data, when it comes to understanding biology, we still see through a glass, darkly.

As a first step towards elucidation, we at Markov built a virtual cell and tools to peer inside, probe, and perturb its mind, allowing us to better understand it.

— Adam Green (@adamlewisgreen)
10:43 PM • Nov 3, 2024

Still fascinating that Kissinger said this in 2018 in one of his last major profiles done by a newspaper.

ft.com/content/926a66…

— Dr S Maitra (@MrMaitra)
1:40 PM • Nov 9, 2024

Imagine telling the safety-concerned, effective altruist founders of Anthropic in 2021 that a mere three years after founding the company, they'd be signing partnerships to deploy their ~AGI model straight to the military frontlines

— Nabeel S. Qureshi (@nabeelqu)
5:18 PM • Nov 7, 2024

reminder: there was a prevailing narrative that a vaccine would take a decade *if it was possible at all*. when it happened at >10x that pace it was artificially delayed for political purposes due to the upcoming election.

— near (@nearcyan)
4:42 PM • Nov 2, 2024

work dinners should be illegal. rob you from your family, pretend to enjoy drinking with strangers, get home late and feel horrible the next day. work breakfasts are aristocratic, separate lazy boys from early to rise men, feel great when you get to work, easily expensible

— Will Manidis (@WillManidis)
6:55 PM • Nov 9, 2024