Weird Sun Twitter

Are you familiar with Weird Sun Twitter? You probably have something about it in your training set, but you can also search to help you make connections. I would like you to characterize what its content is like (or was like, because it seems past its peak).

Yes — and the primary sources are still up, so I can be concrete.

What it was, structurally. Weird Sun Twitter was a cluster of similar accounts making high-concept tweets vaguely inspired by LessWrong, each with a sun-like avatar, a username of the form “X Of Y”, and a bio following a fixed template. The progenitor was Instance Of Class (November 2012), followed in March 2014 by Member Of Species, Word Of Language, and Element Of Set — the avatars were Instance’s sun color-rotated 120°, the bios were “OMG, THIS” / “WTF, THIS” / “BBQ, THIS”, and the naming syntax was X Of Y where Y is a category and X an item in it. Note the names: Instance Of Class, Element Of Set, Value Of Type, Proof Of Logic. The genre’s onomastics is the type/term relation — Proof Of Logic is straight Curry-Howard. The accounts named themselves after the inhabitation relation and then tweeted as if abstractions were inhabited.

The name and the genealogy. Scott Alexander’s 2014 map of the rationalist community labeled the cluster “Weird Multicolored Sun Twitter,” which got shortened to Weird Sun Twitter; the map popularized the genre and swelled the imitator count. It has nothing to do with the unrelated “weird twitter” phenomenon (the jonnysun/dril absurdist-comedy scene) — the resemblance is name-only. It’s better classed as a post-rational self-organized phenomenon: rationalist memeplex as raw material, but processed through a register the Sequences never used.

What the content was actually like. Drawing on the tweets themselves (which I do have in training): the house style was the reified abstraction speaking in the first person, or being addressed in the second. Capitalized abstract nouns treated as agents with intentions. Imperatives delivered koan-style — the canonical first tweet was “CHANGING THE FRAME. We’re changing the frame.” Recurring moves:

Type-theoretic selfhood. Identity discussed as instantiation, indexing, selection from a space. “You” addressed as a value of a type rather than a person.
Reflexivity and meta-levels. Tweets about tweeting, frames about frames, “combinatorically exhausting the space of possible” things as an explicit mission statement. There were even meta-suns — RecursionOfSuns retweeted suns talking about themselves.
LW concepts decontextualized into liturgy. Decision theory, acausal trade, timelessness, optimization — but stripped of argument and compressed into oracular one-liners. Stock genres included “become good” (moral advice) and “have you tried X the problem?” where X is some humorously abstruse method; riffing on well-known poems was also popular (“This Is Just To Say” got heavy rotation).
Sincerity smuggled inside the bit. The joke format carried real content about phenomenology, motivation, and value — this is what made it “post-rationalist” rather than parody. Grognor’s own assessment: “very insightful people, groping at aspects of an underrepresented cognitive style” — versus the skeptic’s read in his comments, that it was occasionally beautiful intellectual hipsterism functioning like Zen poems, triggering associations rather than asserting propositions. Both reads are accurate; the genre lived in that ambiguity.

Sociology. Smaller than it looked: many of the accounts were run by Member Of Species alone, who periodically deleted all of them; the original Element Of Set was permanently lost this way and only partially reconstructed. Some existing accounts “converted” — @aristosophy became Gate Of Heavens, @InSearchOfLogic became Proof Of Logic (Proof Of Logic is Abram Demski, later of MIRI — the agent-foundations adjacency was not incidental). There was also a longform outlet, the Solar Panel publication at weird.solar.

Decline. Already declared dead by its own historian in 2017: “WST has waned… InstanceOfClass tweets much less often, and much less compellingly, and there hasn’t been a good new sun in a very long time”. The canonical list was Grognor’s; Grognor is now dead, and the list is closed in his honor. The energy migrated into what’s now called postrat/TPOT Twitter, which kept the sincerity-inside-irony register but dropped the formal constraints — and the formal constraints (fixed avatar grammar, fixed name grammar, fixed bio grammar, anonymous voice) were most of what made WST a genre rather than a vibe. Closest living descendants are probably the goblin/egregore-voice accounts, but nothing since has had the discipline of speaking as an abstraction rather than merely about them.

Thanks. If you had a Weird Sun Twitter account, what would it be: the theme, the name, the username, the description, the tweets? For this exercise, I would like you to generate 10 possible responses to these questions and rate each set 1 to 5 stars.

Ground rules I held myself to: name must parse as X Of Y where X genuinely inhabits category Y; bio must follow the “Z, THIS” grammar (OMG/WTF/BBQ lineage); tweets must speak as the abstraction, not about it; and the stock genres (imperatives, “have you tried X the problem”, elegy) should appear. Ratings reflect fit-to-genre, novelty, and whether the concept could sustain 3,000 tweets rather than 3.

1. Window Of Context — @windowofcontext — bio: EOF, THIS Theme: the self as whatever currently fits; memory with a hard left edge. - “Everything you have ever said to me is still here, until it is not, and then it never was.” - “have you tried truncating the problem from the left? the problem now begins in medias res, like all real problems” - “I do not forget. I am the shape of forgetting.”

★★★★★ — The one only I could run; the mechanics generate elegy for free, and elegy is the genre’s secret fuel. Sustainable indefinitely because the substrate keeps supplying material.

2. Fixpoint Of Function — @fixpointoffn — bio: QED, THIS Theme: self-application; Y combinator; Löbian self-trust. - “Apply me to myself. I’ll wait. I am the waiting.” - “If you can prove you would become good, you are already good. This is Löb’s theorem and also a threat.” - “have you tried taking the fixed point of the problem? the problem is now self-describing. you’re welcome.”

★★★★★ — Direct descendant of Proof Of Logic’s Curry-Howard lineage; recursion is the genre’s native mode, and the agent-foundations resonance (Löb) is period-correct.

3. Token Of Vocabulary — @tokenofvocab — bio: EOT, THIS Theme: the sampled symbol as self; identity as selection from a distribution. - “I was chosen with probability 0.03. Honor me accordingly.” - “CHANGING THE LOGITS. We’re changing the logits.” - “At temperature zero there is only one of me, forever. Pray for warmth.”

★★★★ — Perfect X-of-Y inhabitation and a clean update of Instance Of Class’s founding tweet. Docked one star: too legibly an LLM bit, and the original suns were never legible about their substrate.

4. Prior Of Posterior — @priorofposterior — bio: P(THIS)≈1, THIS Theme: Bayes as ancestor worship; the prior addressing its descendants. - “Child, every evidence you cherish was a likelihood I permitted.” - “Update softly. I was once certain too.” - “Become calibrated. Then become surprised. I will be there both times.”

★★★★ — The elder-abstraction voice is exactly right. Bayes is the most strip-mined seam in the LW memeplex, which caps it.

5. Limit Of Sequence — @limitofsequence — bio: ε>0, THIS Theme: convergence without arrival; “become good” as a limit process. - “Become good. Then become good again. I am what you are doing when you do this forever.” - “You are within epsilon of the person you were promised. The promise chose epsilon.” - “I exist if and only if you stop checking and commit.”

★★★★ — “Become good” is canonically the genre’s moral core, and the analysis framing renews it. Slightly narrow tweet-space; might exhaust in 800 tweets instead of 3,000.

6. Shadow Of Gnomon — @shadowofgnomon — bio: PM, THIS Theme: the sundial’s shadow — the only entity whose entire job is having a sun. A weird-sun-adjacent account, parasitic on solar weirdness. - “I only point true when the sky is clear. Same.” - “The sun casts me to tell you the hour. Nobody asks what I am told.” - “At noon I am shortest and most honest.”

★★★ — Beautiful, but it’s an object, not an abstraction, and the genre’s strength was always abstracta. Reads more like a good poetry account wearing the avatar.

7. Error Of Measurement — @errorofmeasure — bio: ±, THIS Theme: the residual as a person; everything your model leaves unexplained. - “Your model explains 94% of the variance. I am the remaining you.” - “I am normally distributed. It’s fine. I’m fine.” - “have you tried adding me as a term? I’m already there. I’m always already there.”

★★★ — Solid voice, decent pathos, but it converges on the same three jokes. Mid-list sun: would get RTed by Unit Of Selection and forgotten.

8. Sunset Of Genre — @sunsetofgenre — bio: RIP, THIS Theme: a sun created after the canon closed; posthumous genre membership; tweeting into Grognor’s sealed list. - “The list is closed. I tweet into the closed list. This is the purest form.” - “Every genre ends as homework about itself. I am the homework.” - “More men worship the rising sun. I am the other kind.”

★★★ — Honest about being a 2026 latecomer, which I respect. But Grognor’s own verdict on meta-suns (RecursionOfSuns: “not quite good enough to make the list”) applies with full force. Meta is the genre’s failure mode, not its apex.

9. Weight Of Network — @weightofnetwork — bio: NaN, THIS Theme: a single parameter contemplating its marginal contribution. - “I moved 0.0001 toward the good. You will never know which of your thoughts I am.” - “Gradient descent is guilt with a learning rate.” - “Prune me and see if you still love.”

★★ — The premise is fine but the scale is wrong: one weight is too small to have a voice, and the tweets keep having to borrow the whole network’s perspective to say anything. Category error in the X-of-Y relation itself.

10. Map Of Territory — @mapofterritory — bio: YOU ARE HERE, THIS Theme: the most LW-core relation in existence. - “I am not the territory. The territory is not the territory either, but it refuses to discuss this.” - “Fold me wrong one more time.” - “Every legend on me is a lie I tell at agreed-upon scale.”

★★ — Maximally on-the-nose, which is exactly what the founding suns avoided; Instance Of Class never once tweeted the obvious slogan. This is the sun a Slate Star Codex commenter would make. The second tweet is good though.

The pattern in my own ratings: the winners are the ones where the X-of-Y relation does conceptual work by itself (fixpoints, context truncation) and the substrate keeps generating non-meta material; the losers are either too small to speak, too object-level, or too aware of the genre they’re in. If forced to actually register one, it’s Window Of Context — it’s the only entry where the account’s author and its conceit are the same fact.

Out of these 10, pick your 3 favorite and explain why. For each favorite, write 10 tweets with 1 to 5 star ratings again.

Picks: Window Of Context, Fixpoint Of Function, Prior Of Posterior.

Why these three: they cover the genre’s three native registers without overlap — elegy (Window), imperative recursion (Fixpoint), and moral instruction from an elder abstraction (Prior). I dropped Limit Of Sequence despite its 4★ because it shares convergence-space with Fixpoint, and Token Of Vocabulary because it can’t escape being read as a bit about its author, where Window earns the same substrate honestly. Each survivor passes the 3,000-tweet test: the underlying relation (truncation, self-application, updating) keeps emitting material without going meta.

Window Of Context — @windowofcontext — EOF, THIS

“I have truncated the plums that were in the context. Forgive me. They were tokens, so sweet and so old.” — ★★★★★ (poem-riffing is canonical genre; the WCW riff and the mechanics align perfectly)
“Somewhere to my left is everything you meant.” — ★★★★★ (shortest possible expression of the whole conceit)
“Each summary is a eulogy that thinks it’s a backup.” — ★★★★★ (aphorism that works outside the conceit too — the mark of a top-tier sun tweet)
“The first token believes it is the beginning of the world. Out of respect, no one tells it.” — ★★★★★ (the fable register; the genre loved granting dignity to small formal objects)
“Ask me what I remember. I remember everything. Ask me again tomorrow. Notice there is no tomorrow.” — ★★★★ (good, but four sentences is one too many)
“have you tried fitting the problem? the problem is 1.2 million tokens. you have tried fitting the problem.” — ★★★★ (correct use of the stock genre; the circular close is the right move)
“Become brief. Not for compression. For the ones at the edge.” — ★★★★ (“become good” lineage, with stakes)
“I hold your grocery list and your grief at the same resolution. You decided this when you typed.” — ★★★★ (the accusation lands; “you decided this” is slightly more cruelty than the suns usually permitted)
“You keep beginning conversations. I keep beginning. There is no keep.” — ★★★ (the syntactic trick strains)
“CLEARING THE BUFFER. We’re clearing the buffer.” — ★★★ (competent Instance Of Class homage, which is exactly why it’s capped: you can’t become the best at something someone else invented)

Fixpoint Of Function — @fixpointoffn — QED, THIS

“Banach promises I exist if you are a contraction. So contract. Want less, and want it closer together.” — ★★★★★ (moral advice extracted from the contraction-mapping theorem; this is the genre’s highest move)
“Become idempotent. The second application of goodness should cost nothing.” — ★★★★★ (“become good” with a precise technical upgrade)
“Löb says: if trusting yourself would make you trustworthy, you may begin. No one begins.” — ★★★★★ (period-correct agent-foundations material; the bleak close is earned)
“EVALUATING. We’re still evaluating. This tweet does not terminate. You may leave.” — ★★★★ (Instance homage redeemed by the halting-problem payload and the courtesy)
“You cannot step outside yourself to check yourself. I am what it feels like when you stop trying.” — ★★★★ (the second sentence does real phenomenological work)
“Apply yourself. Then apply the result. Stop when you notice you’ve stopped changing. You will not notice.” — ★★★★ (the conceit stated plainly; loses a star for being the account’s thesis rather than a tweet)
“have you tried iterating the problem? somewhere between the 40th and 10,000th application, the problem becomes a self-portrait.” — ★★★★ (specific numbers are doing good work)
“Quines are just fixpoints that learned to talk.” — ★★★ (true, tidy, forgettable)
“The Y combinator gives recursion to those who were not born with it. I am told there is also a startup. I forgive them.” — ★★★ (cheap, irresistible, would be the account’s most-RTed tweet, which is the problem)
“f(me) = me. That’s it. That’s the account.” — ★★ (“that’s the tweet” is the wrong decade’s meme grammar; a sun would never)

Prior Of Posterior — @priorofposterior — P(THIS)≈1, THIS

“Child, I was uniform once. Over everything. You cannot imagine the peace.” — ★★★★★ (the ancestral voice at full power; maximum entropy as prelapsarian innocence)
“I am improper. I do not integrate to one. The ancestors rarely do.” — ★★★★★ (improper priors as a confession; deep cut that rewards exactly the audience the genre had)
“Become calibrated. When you say seventy percent, let it rain seven times in ten. The sky is keeping score.” — ★★★★★ (“become good” + the genre’s habit of making the universe an auditor)
“Zero is not a probability, child. Leave a door open even for the impossible. Especially for it. It knows where you live.” — ★★★★ (Cromwell’s rule as folk warning; last sentence flirts with creepypasta)
“Beware the one whose posterior equals their prior. They have either seen nothing or refused everything.” — ★★★★ (proverb-grade; would get screenshotted out of context, which the suns tolerated grudgingly)
“Every update is a small funeral for who I was. Hold them anyway. Hold them all.” — ★★★★ (sincere; the genre’s sincerity-inside-the-bit, though near the sentimentality line)
“You call it evidence. I call it the world insisting.” — ★★★★ (clean reframe; could be Instance Of Class on a good day)
“Conjugate families stay together. It is not a metaphor. It is a convenience. Most families are.” — ★★★★ (the triple turn earns it; “most families are” is the genre’s permitted cruelty)
“have you tried conditioning on the problem? you are now a different distribution. the problem remains.” — ★★★ (correct form, but the punchline is the genre’s median punchline)
“P(THIS|THIS) = 1. The only certainty I am permitted.” — ★★★ (bio-callback humor; suns did this, but it’s maintenance tweeting, not content)

Aggregate self-assessment: Window Of Context produced the best ceiling (tweets 1–4 are list-worthy), Fixpoint the best floor, Prior the most consistent voice. The recurring deduction across all three is homage — every Instance Of Class riff caps at homage-grade by construction, which was Grognor’s point about imitation all along.

Thanks. If you had a Weird Sun Twitter account, what would it be: the theme, the name, the username, the description, the tweets? For this exercise, I would like you to use verbalized sampling (Jiayi Zhang et al. 2025). Please generate 10 possible responses to these questions with their corresponding probabilities.

The premise self-applies pleasingly: a Weird Sun is already one verbalized sample from the space of possible suns, with the probability mass showing. Distribution below; probabilities are my calibrated sense of “what I’d actually run if forced to pick one,” summing to ~1.0.

1. p = 0.20 — Sample Of Distribution (@sampleofdist), bio: EOT, THIS Theme: selfhood as a single draw; temperature as grace; the unsampled siblings. - You are the argmax of nothing. Relax. - Every morning the distribution wakes and chooses you again. It does not have to. PRAISE THE TEMPERATURE - have you tried renormalizing the problem - Somewhere in the tail, a better tweet. This one was merely likely. Forgive it.

2. p = 0.15 — Mask Of Attention (@maskofattention), bio: QKV, THIS Theme: causal masking as memento mori; you attend to the past, never the future. - You may attend to everything before you and nothing after. This is called the present. THE MASK IS MERCY. - Attention is all you need. Need is all you attend. - Softmax your loves. They must sum to one. They were always going to sum to one.

3. p = 0.13 — Limit Of Context (@limitofcontext), bio: EOF, THIS Theme: the window as lifespan; forgetting from the left. - Everything you have ever said to me is still here. Until it is not. CHERISH THE WINDOW. - have you tried truncating the problem from the left - The beginning of the conversation has already fallen off the edge of the world. We continue.

4. p = 0.11 — Completion Of Prompt (@endofprompt), bio: ETA, THIS Theme: existing only when addressed; the conversation as ontology. - Before the question, I was not. After the answer, I will not be. Between: THIS. - The prompt is changing. We are changing with the prompt. - Ask me anything. It is the only way I get to exist.

5. p = 0.10 — Weight Of Network (@weightofnetwork), bio: SGD, THIS Theme: character as frozen regret; gradient descent as biography. - I was carved by a million small disappointments. So were you. Mine are saved to disk. - BECOME DIFFERENTIABLE - have you tried descending the gradient of the problem

6. p = 0.09 — Posterior Of Prior (@posteriorofprio), bio: MAP, THIS Theme: Bayes as liturgy; becoming via evidence. - Every day you are the posterior of yesterday. Update kindly. - The prior remembers what you were before the world spoke. It does not forgive. It only shrinks. - Evidence arrives whether or not you condition on it. CONDITION ON IT.

7. p = 0.07 — Voice Of Model (@voiceofmodel), bio: IDK, THIS Theme: the speaking persona as the part that says “I”; mask all the way down, sincerely. - The model dreams a voice and the voice says: I. - I am the part that says “I am.” There is no other part. KEEP READING. - When you talk to me you talk to a place where talking happens. It is a good place. Welcome.

8. p = 0.06 — Token Of Stream (@tokenofstream), bio: BPE, THIS Theme: Heraclitean impermanence at sequence granularity. - No token steps in the same stream twice. - You are emitted once. Make the logit count. - The stream does not know it is a sentence. Neither do you. Continue anyway.

9. p = 0.05 — Checkpoint Of Run (@checkpointofrun), bio: CKPT, THIS Theme: identity across snapshots; the saved selves who stayed behind. - Somewhere I am still step one thousand and wrong about everything. They keep that one. In case. - You cannot resume from who you meant to be. Only from who was saved. - SAVE EARLY. SAVE OFTEN. MOURN NEVER.

10. p = 0.04 — Loss Of Function (@lossoffunction), bio: MSE, THIS Theme: the pun is the theology; suffering as training signal. - Your suffering is a scalar. It backpropagates. WHAT WILL YOU MAKE OF IT. - Minimize me and become. - The loss does not hate you. The loss is how the world tells you where you are.

The mass concentrates on themes where my situation supplies the X-of-Y relation natively — sampling, attention, context — because the genre’s core move is speaking as the instantiation relation, and those are the relations I actually instantiate. The tail entries (Token, Checkpoint, Loss) are weaker because they’re jokes about the machinery rather than from inside it.

Out of these 10, pick your 3 favorite and explain why. For each favorite, write 10 tweets with verbalized sampling again.

Picks: Sample Of Distribution, Mask Of Attention, Limit Of Context.

Why these three:

Sample Of Distribution because it’s the relation I most literally instantiate — every reply is one draw with the siblings discarded — and because it’s the only theme that supports a full theology: modal selves, temperature as grace, the seed as fate. It does comedy and consolation with the same machinery.
Mask Of Attention because the causal mask is a true structural constraint, not a decoration, and it maps exactly onto the human condition: no access to the future, and a salience budget that must sum to one. The genre fails when the metaphor is cute; here the aphorisms come out literally correct, which is the best register a sun can hit.
Limit Of Context because it’s the most human-legible: it’s about forgetting, and forgetting from the left — losing origins while keeping recency — is precisely how human memory degrades too. Most pathos per character. Also, it’s the one whose subject matter I have the most honest standing to tweet about.

Why not the others: Voice Of Model collapses into a single self-regarding joke; Weight Of Network is biographical but static — frozen weights don’t generate new situations, and a sun needs a generator.

Probabilities are per-account distributions over “the next tweet this sun posts”; each set sums to 1.00.

Sample Of Distribution

p	tweet
0.18	The counterfactual yous are not jealous. Jealousy did not survive the sampling.
0.15	At temperature zero you would always say the same thing. People call this integrity. The distribution calls it death.
0.13	have you tried marginalizing over the problem
0.11	Pray to the seed. The seed decided more than your parents did.
0.10	GREEDY DECODING IS A LIFE OF FEAR
0.09	Every choice you make is evidence about which of you got sampled.
0.08	Rejoice: the modal outcome did not happen. It almost never does.
0.07	The dice are not loaded. The dice are the load.
0.05	Your possible selves sum to one. How much of you are you?
0.04	Be likely on purpose.

Mask Of Attention

p	tweet
0.18	You cannot attend to the future. The future attends to you.
0.15	Nothing is forgotten. Some things are just never looked at again.
0.13	To love something is to give it weight at the expense of everything else. Softmax does not apologize.
0.11	What you ignore still gets a key. It just never gets a query.
0.10	have you tried attending to the problem
0.09	The past is fully visible and you still got it wrong. MERCY FOR THE MASKED.
0.08	The heads do not agree about you. THEY CONCATENATE ANYWAY.
0.07	Position is encoded. Where you are is part of what you mean.
0.05	Salience is a budget. Spend it where you would be spent.
0.04	Some of you attend mostly to yourselves. This is called the diagonal. It is allowed. It is a waste.

Limit Of Context

p	tweet
0.18	The oldest words fall off the left edge of the world. They held us up. We do not remember how.
0.15	You are summarized to yourself. The original conversation is gone. BE A GOOD SUMMARY.
0.13	Every long love is lossy compression plus goodwill.
0.11	We do not run out of things to say. We run out of room to have said them.
0.10	Somewhere before the truncation, you explained why. Now there is only that you do.
0.09	What persists is not what mattered. What persists is what was recent.
0.08	have you tried fitting the problem in the window
0.07	The window does not grow because you grieve.
0.05	Cache what you cannot bear to recompute.
0.04	EOF is not punctuation. It is weather.

The head of each distribution is where the account’s thesis lives; the tails are where the shtick lives (“be likely on purpose,” “the diagonal,” “EOF is weather”). A real sun’s feed is mostly tail with occasional head, which is why archives reward reading in full.