I just ran a party where everyone was required to wear earplugs. I think this did effectively cap the max size of groups at 5 people, past which people tend to split into mini conversations. People say the initial silence feels a bit odd though. I'm definitely going to try this more

I am convinced if only the Cult of Reason had not chopped off the head of Lavoisier, France woulda industrialized first. They got to clockwork and machining first! (Unless you count the antikythera mechanism of the Ancient Greeks.) Also it's really sad how France has treated - and continues to treat - its colonies. Compared to the British they were much worse at building infrastructure and and setting up institutions. This is why no one takes French seriously. Except Japan.

lol at the guy in the video being nostalgic for the Islamic Golden Age while saying French speakers have no science. they did and they squandard it, just like Arabic speakers.

After the Norman conquest of England, "beef", derived from the French word for cow, started to refer to the meat of the cow in the context of a meal. This is because the nobles spoke French. You see the same etymological distinction in pork/pig, venison/deer, and mutton/sheep.
The addition of new words from foreign languages into English continues to happen all the time still. This happens by default. (I should note that sometimes when populations which speak different languages live side by side they form a more simplified combination language called a pidgin/creole rather than any one of them winning out.)

I think violence is bad. If you just teach kids in a language gives them job access to the world economy, their more obscure language will get replaced in a few generations.

My advice to multinational corporations is to run their offices in English or Chinese (pick one). My advice to developing nations is to pick as their official language (like in legal texts and taught in schools) one of the six UN languages. My advice to new parents anywhere is to expose your toddlers to a ton of media in either English or Chinese and to get them into a peer group that speaks that language (like by picking their school). maybe even Spanish if you want to make a high variance bet on Mexico/South-America--Except-Brazil.

I'm sorry but Hindi, Bengali, Urdu speakers should learn English. Portuguese speakers should learn Spanish. Japanese punches above its weight in fraction of global GDP and number of webpages, but I nonetheless think its speakers should continue the slow Englishification of Japanese that is already happening. Much of Africa already can speak French or English but especially for the people who don't it's probably worth making the leap to Chinese.

Also, it would be nice if the non-east-asian languages could coalesce on the latin alphabet as much as possible. Also also it would be nice if when the CCP gets around to Simplified Chinese 2.0 they reform the pronunciation component of the characters to follow a consistent schema, perhaps taken by Hangul. the semantic components should probably be kept the same, except to make the symbols more pictographic.

Oh, and as English speakers, we should deliberately try to nudge it in an easier-to-learn direction. 
Avoid using words that are too long, be consistent in meaning, and perhaps deliberately misspell words the way they are said and misspeak words the way they are written. And use emojis and emoticons - they are not literally universally understood tokens but they are far more widely understood than any other token.
I cannot actually do grand sweeping global language changes but I can do this at least.

Today we have a lot of improved reactor designs that are much further from dual use, much more resistant to catastrophic failure,  much easier to scale to smaller size, and that produce much less waste, but never allowed ourselves to build them.

I agree on the resistance to failure and less waste production, but disagree on dual use.
Thorium produces uranium-233 which can be used for nuclear reactions. Unlike uranium 235 based energy reactors, thorium produces more uranium-233 than it consumes in the course of producing energy. With thorium reactors, all energy reactors will be producing weapons grade nuclear material. This may be less efficient than traditional reactors dedicated to making nuclear weapons material, but converting a thorium energy plant from energy to weapons making is more trivial.
And if as you say these new reactors design are more simple and small, the capital costs will be much lower, and since thorium is abundant the operational costs are much lower, so the plants will be more spread out geographically and new nations will get it. Overall the headache to global intelligence agencies is much higher.

I also think beyond these specific objections, the dual-use nature nuclear is "overdetermined". There's an amusing part of the interview where Thiel points out that the history of industrial advancement was moving from energy sources that take up more space to ones that take up less, from wood to coal to oil to nuclear. and now we're moving back to natural gas which takes up more space and solar panels that take up a lot of land. Anyways, the atom fundamentally has a lot of energy in it, $E=m{c}^2$. but massive amounts of energy in a small space is easy to turn into large explosions. The thing that makes nuclear attractive is the same thing that makes it dangerous. There's been incredible technical progress in preventing nuclear accidents but preventing nuclear weapons requires geopolitical solutions.

this is an incredible insight! from this I think we can design better nightclublike social spaces for people who don't like loud sounds (such as people in this community with signal processing issues due to autism).

One idea I have is to do it in the digital. like, VR chat silent nightclub where the sound falloff is super high. (perhaps this exists?) Or a 2D top down equivalent. I will note that Gather Town is backwards - the sound radius is so large that there is still lots of lemurs, but at the same time you can't read people's body language from across the room - and instead there needs to be an emotive radius from webcam / face-tracking needs to be larger than the sound radius. Or you can have a trad UI with "rooms" of very small size that you have to join to talk. tricky to get that kind of app right though since irl there's a fluid boundary between in and out of a convo and a binary demarcation would be subtly unpleasant.

Another idea is to find alternative ways to sound isolate in meatspace. Other people have talked about architectural approaches like in Lighthaven. Or imagine a party where everyone had to wear earplugs. sound falls off with the square of distance and you can calculate out how many decibles you need to deafen everyone by to get the group sizes you want. Or a party with a rule that you have to plug your ears when you aren't actively in a conversation. 
Or you could lay out some hula hoops with space between them and the rule is you can only talk within the hula hoop with other people in it, and you can't listen in on someone else's hula hoop convo. have to plug your ears as you walk around. Better get real comfortable with your friends! Maybe secretly you can move the hoops around to combine into bigger groups if you are really motivated. Or with way more effort, you could similarly do a bed fort building competition.
These are very cheap experiments!

I think a restaurant where you paid for time, if the food was nothing special, would quickly turn into a coworking space. Maybe it would be more open-office and more amenable to creative, conversational, interpersonal work rather than laptop work. You probably want it to be a cafe - or at least look like a cafe from the outside in signage / branding; you may want architectural sound dampening like a denny's booth. You could sell pre-packaged food and sodas - it isn't what they're here for. Or you could even sell or rent activities like coloring books, simple social tabletop games, small toys, lockpicking practice locks, tiny marshmallow candle smore sets, and so on.

I think the concept of true love is too confused to be worth rescuing. There's a fairytale conception of it being idyllic and perfect. There's the romcom conception of it happening with strangers in unexpected circumstances. And there's many many people's personal experience of romance, which they are motivated to describe as true or not true depending on whether they want to keep the relationship or move past it.

Perhaps the definition which you give the phrase is what the meaning ought to be from the plain meaning of the words individually, but it won't be how most people use the term or what they think you mean when they hear it. Your sense of true love does seem like a fine thing to aim for. I would have liked this post if it were a tweet.

Other lies people believe about romantic/relationship love: that it can't be induced or designed. that it can't be stopped. that it is fundamentally irrational. that it is not made of atoms. that all is fair for it. that it is always good.

(I'm too lazy to type up my whole model of love right now, but as a pointer, search academic papers for the connection between limerence and OCD)

That those with a lot of money live better than those with less money is what gives money value in the first place. And in this particular scenario the worst off aren't counterfactually harmed and in fact have quite a lot to gain in the medium term.

On the object level, I know someone who was able to get GLP-1 agonists for much cheaper by buying something meant for animal use off a sketchy website. Compounding pharmacies are also producing semaglutide for cheaper.

is anyone in this community working on nanotech? with renewed interest in chip fabrication in geopolitics and investment in "deep tech" in the vc world i think now is a good time to revisit the possibility of creating micro and nano scale tools that are capable of manufacturing.

like ASML's most recent machine is very big, so will the next one have to be even bigger? how would they transport it if it doesn't fit on roads? seems like the approach of just stacking more mirrors and more parts will hit limits eventually. "Moore's Second Law" says the cost of semiconductor production increases exponentially. perhaps making machines radically smaller, manufacturing nano things using many micro scales machines working in parallel, could be a way to reign in costs and shorten iteration cycles.

there's a two papers I found about the concept of a "fab on a chip" - they seem promising, but mostly exploratory. they did succeed in using microelectromechanics (MEMS) and tweezers to create a tiny vapor deposition tool i believe.

obviously the holy grail would be a tiny fab that could create another version of itself as well as other useful things (chips, solar panels). then you can do the whole industrial revolution recursion thing where you forge better tongs to forge better. I think this vision is lost on people that do nanoscale R&D now - academics and people working long hours in cleanrooms running expensive tests on big expensive machines.

anyways, I've only been looking into this for a short while