If you need a good marketing slogan:

Yudtella -- if anyone mass-produces it, every bear dies

I am fascinated by how often I read something about LLMs and it seems to illustrate something about human psychology. I wonder how many psychologists think about these things. (I suspect not many, because psychologists typically don't read technical articles about LLMs.)

For example, in "GDM: Consistency Training Helps Limit Sycophancy and Jailbreaks in Gemini 2.5 Flash" the part "Bias-augmented Consistency Training", specifically "Train the model via SFT to give the clean response ... when shown the wrapped prompt"... that reminds me strongly of "Asch’s Conformity Experiment", "On Expressing Your Concerns". Specifically that it becomes much easier to resist pressure when you have seen an example of resisting the pressure.

This is fascinating for me, and so are the other articles on your blog!

The sad truth is that you probably need to get that damned piece of paper from the educational system, because during your entire life there will be a chance that people in HR will use it as their first filter. Even if not now, maybe ten or twenty years later. So the options seem to be:

• avoid the school system as long as possible... but join at the last moment, to get the final paper. The specific details depend on your school system; if being admitted to the institution that gives you the final paper requires you to get the previous paper first, etc., maybe starting with the kindergarten, then you are screwed.
• accept the risk that you will never get a job, and will have to start your own company, or get homeless.
• become so famous or so good at networking that you will never have to use the standard channels, because when you apply somewhere, the CEO will call the HR department and tell them to shut up.

The last two options are very high variance, I would probably recommend against them.

In my experience (probably not relevant: different country, different decades) there are a few tricks one could use without the diploma:

• networking: a friend inside a company recommends you directly to their boss
• get a shitty job in the same industry, they will accept you because no one applies to them, when you apply to the next job you already have experience in the industry (this assumes that a diploma is more relevant fresh after school, but your previous jobs are more relevant later)
• apply to the same company to a different position (e.g. software tester instead of developer), when you are hired, demonstrate extra skills and try to get promoted to a new position
• a combination of the previous two steps, where you get a different but similar position in a different company, and as you change companies you try to slightly adjust your role

But none of this will probably work if there are many candidates and the HR is free to apply simple filters.

What advice/concrete instructions would a future superintelligence send down to me that would completely transform my life

This is tricky, because there is a tradeoff between how good the advice is, and your ability to use it properly.

When I thought about an advice I could give (using some kind of time machine) to my younger self, I thought "but there is little chance that my younger self would interpret these instructions correctly". It would be cheating to post the entire Sequences. I am not sure if I could make a useful extract, especially one that cannot be easily misinterpreted by a teenager.

So similarly, if suddenly a portal opened and my older (post-Signularity?) self gave me some good advice, I would probably start screaming: "I need more details!"

Why is the number of different vegetables not exploding?

Map vs territory: are we really missing new vegetables, or only new names for vegetables? I mean, are there some things that we just call "adjective1 X" and "adjective2 X" because they appeared relatively recently, but we would have separate names "X" and "Y" for them if they appeared millennia ago?

I mean, who decides that red / yellow / green bell pepper are considered the same kind of vegetable, or white / yellow / red / purple raddish, but e.g. broccoli and cauliflower are considered different vegetables?

How exactly did we bootstrap ourselves to smaller and smaller computer hardware?

Not sure I understand the question. We started with big. But if you try making things faster, you are limited by the speed of light (or electricity) in you circuits. These days, with gigahertz speeds, it's literally centimeters. Though I am not sure whether this was the actually the first reason for computers getting smaller.

In my opinion it's pretty good, especially for a first post on a philosophical topic.

people in those cultures seem to just come to value beauty less

Is it "less" in the sense that their standards simply got higher and shifted the beauty curve, or in the sense of diminishing returns? Not sure I could operationalize this, but intuitively it feels like there is a difference between:

• this person (beautiful by other country's standard) seems repulsively ugly to me
• this person seems pretty, but so are most people, so I am looking also for some other traits

what is the unit of measurement of beauty?

Dollars per hour on OnlyFans?

This seems similar to politics. In theory, I would like a politician who is able to change their mind. In practice, if the politician changed their mind after election, about something that made me vote for them, in a way that I don't agree with (that's practically guaranteed, unless I changed my mind in the same way at the same time), I would feel betrayed.

There are other parts of my life that have taken large hits because of this project.

Yeah, "doing something" and "doing something sustainably" are two different things. I think there is some hope that with enough practice you get more efficient; or that if you get enough subscribers to generate an income, you could use that income to outsource some other time-consuming parts of your life.

The former is about your skills, but to increase your chances at the latter, you also need to promote yourself -- the easiest way is to create accounts at various social networks, and share links to your posts.

I do 'feel' I have gotten better at communicating ideas clearly, and spotting mistakes in my communications

That's amazing!

I basically require ambient music to inspire my writing.

Download the good ones.

New love is wonderful kindling for ideas. Even if your ideas don't seem to relate to love at all.

I suspect this is a general rule: if you feel that your life is on a good way, you can put more energy into your projects; otherwise your energy and attention are spent worrying about things.

I do not yet know if I will continue to post a blog post every two days, after this ends.

Perhaps once a week would be more sustainable? My first idea was to suggest every other month, but regularity is probably better for creating an audience.

I guess they do get some lessons at Inkhaven -- and if any of them is reading this: describing those lessons for the rest of us would be a simple way to meet your daily quota. ;)

I am not an expert, but if I tried to give some advice, I would try this:

1) Train your inner LLM. Choose a blogger you want to emulate. Read three of their articles. Then try to write something in the same style. Don't worry about the content, even if it is factually incorrect or whatever; it just has to look right. Compare the texts, notice the differences, try again. You could use an AI to point out the differences in style.

2) Think about different genres of writing, such as an essay, a manual, a poem, a political call; and try to write each of them. Again, an AI can generate the list for you.

3) Generally, you can ask AI to give you critique. It probably helps if it doesn't know that the texts are yours. You do not have to follow the advice if you disagree.