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Ryan Moulton

@moultano.bsky.social

6.3K followers 1.1K following 8.4K posts

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Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · Jun 4

This, to me, is what artists owe to the world in an indoor, screen-saturated age. If people are going to experience the world second hand, fair enough. Let it not be third hand or fourth hand.

Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 5h

All of the things that we struggle at and train for years to do are actually easy. Humans are just bad at them, so we have to work hard. All the things that we do without thinking are what we are actually good at.

rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 8h

the basic problem is that it is easier to reproduce an artist's style in almost every detail or answer most questions with like 88% accuracy than to walk up four steps

Assistant HR Director of Antifa @sethdmichaels.bsky.social · 8h

AI HUCKSTER: "i built you a machine that reads books for you."

ME: "can you build me a machine that unloads the dishwasher for me so *i* can read a book?"

Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 6h

The nice thing about capital gains taxes is that they make you feel okay about any drop smaller than 15% because there was nothing you could do.

Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 6h

Man it sure would be nice if we could get the labor costs down far enough that rooftop/parking lot solar made financial sense, because it's the one place to put them that everybody loves.

Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 6h

Just in time for them to go extinct, we can mirror the tolkeinization of other fantasy creature plurals like elves and dwarves.

Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 6h

When facts on the ground force people to do some bullet biting, then that should make people unhappy, and not be something that they eagerly and speculatively do in advance.

Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 6h

... there will be many entities that are obviously unambiguously not us, and I expect loyalty to us.

You don't have to resolve all or really any hard questions about consciousness and patienthood to prefer today's actually existing humans to LLM++.

Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 6h

I expect that we will Theseus ship ourselves into something else in a continuous "transhuman since habilis" sense, and present day me with present day sensibilities would probably find that end result queasy, but whatever ambiguity that introduces along the way ...

Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 6h

Someone asked what kind of transhumanist I am (since you gotta be one) on twitter so I'm going to port my response ↓

Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 3d

I don't think you should be involved in AI if you don't prefer humans to other minds, and if society was paying attention and had the tools to they wouldn't let you be.

Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 7h

Also, it's high time that we changed the plural of reef from reefs to reeves

Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 7h

We long for tree roots that look like coral reefs.

Conor Nolan @nolanillustration.bsky.social · 9h

Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 8h

Nope!

Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 8h

Wrens have the best hops of any hopping thing.

Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 9h

How

Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 9h

We have a wren who spends most of his time in our backyard, and it's such a delight whenever I see him hopping around.

Natee (they/them) @himmapaan.bsky.social · 1d

I would have liked to have filmed the inking of this tiny wren and the shrub's very fine branches with this brush, but I needed to get especially close to the piece for this and it would have been too awkward.

1/2

Detail from a silhouette drawing in black ink of a tiny bird perched on a small, leafless shrub. The head of a hen just makes it into the crop, opposite the bird. The drawing is very fine and intricate. The detail shown is roughly comparable in size to two postage stamps, and is photographed with a penny and the traditional Chinese brush the piece was drawn with.

Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 9h

Two things I firmly believe that I'm not sure how to reconcile:
1. You have to look at your data record by record to understand it at all.
2. P-hacking is bad.

Emily Moin @emilymoin.com · 10h

I am open to the idea that there are people who don't have and don't want to gain the skills to engage directly with their data but every single day that I do I learn the answer to a question you'd never even think to ask unless you were personally staring into the abyss of an uncleaned dataset.

Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 10h

Not gonna name any names, but basically all of my favs have done this.

Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 10h

You're wishing your buddies well at the end of a party!

Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 10h

Performing The Parting Glass like a dirge is becoming a pet peeve. It's a drinking song!

Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 12h

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Senator Scott Wiener @scottwiener.bsky.social · 12h

MAJOR NEWS: @GavinNewsom signed SB 79, my bill allowing more housing near public transit — rail, subway, rapid bus.

It’s a huge step for housing in California. It’ll create more homes, strengthen our transit systems & reduce traffic & carbon emissions.

Thank you, Governor!

Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 12h

It is funny that we have so decoupled the word "straw" from its original meaning that even though we grow millions of tons of biodegradable cellulose straws every year, no one thought to use them as a plastic replacement, and opted for soggy paper instead.

Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 1d

Beyond the silliness, the inflatable suits are a precommitment to being useless in any actual fight, so they're impossible to spin as a threat.

Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 1d

www.wweek.com/culture/2025...

Can you put into words what that purpose is? You and the frog have really become icons of this protest.

There’s been a nice overall whimsy that has shown up. The frog is amazing. We had a bunch of other inflatable people here last night, too. I saw people playing Twister the other day.

What they rely on is fear. So by coming out in an absurdist manner, it speaks to them, to some extent, that we’re actually not that afraid.

It also dismantles their narrative a little bit. When they try to describe this situation as “war-torn,” it becomes much harder to take them seriously when they have to post a video saying [U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security] Kristi Noem is up on the balcony staring over the Antifa Army and it’s, like, eight journalists and five protesters and one of them is in a chicken suit.

Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 1d

So what are y'all listening to?

Hank Green @hankgreen.bsky.social · 1d

I heard someone on a podcast say that music is boring now and, look, I am saying this as kindly as I can…skill issue.

Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 1d

The level of artistry in even the most mass-market media is buttressed by the fact that everyone working in the industry wants to be an artist and wants to make art. Once the artists are gone the bottom of that is going to fall out.

Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 1d

All of those math and physics phds did not go that route thinking that of course all of those skills would be remunerative doing things on computers.

Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 1d

This was most directly inspired by someone I know who made their money and retired early, so definitely not recent.