Preface

Everything Else

Shantell Sans (2023) (via HN): Looks pretty good

Aestheticswiki: a wiki of around 1,000 pages devoted to various strains of historical fashion, subcultures, interior design, and web design (via LW)

(NSFW) https://x.com/Aella_Girl/status/2055700685099090410

I asked people to rate, on a 1-10 scale, the attractiveness of various naked people. Women got much higher scores than men did. The 6/10 bin was full of normal-cute ladies and absolute ripped godlike chads.

So you recreated the okcupid results.

Ian's Secure Shoelace Knot

Also known as the “Double Slip Knot”, this is a secure shoelace knot with a simple, symmetrical method of tying. Cross two loops and pass them both through the “hole” in the middle. This is a shoelace knot that won't come undone on its own!

https://aella.substack.com/p/do-hot-people-fuck-more

I’ve looked into self-ratings of attractiveness before. It’s hard to measure - the trope goes every woman thinks they’re a 7/10, right? How can you get good information on a survey?

I found that the best method I tested is to give people photos of faces and asking ‘are you more or less attractive than this person’.

So in the nudes survey, I tried the same thing - gave people photos of naked people (whose ratings I knew), and asked them to self-compare.

In my face-data, people’s self-attractiveness ratings still are mostly inflated, but people who are less attractive, inflate much more.

The Cost of Safetyism (via HN)
In England data shows that in 1971, 86% of primary-age children traveled home from school unaccompanied. By 1990, that had fallen to 35%. By 2010, it was 25%.

Circular breathing: a technique that allows you to blow air out of your mouth continuously, by alternating between blowing from your lungs, and breathing+blowing air stored in your mouth

Xerox scanners/photocopiers randomly alter numbers in scanned documents (2013)

5 Things I Learned About People From Doing Stand-Up Comedy

1. People need to put you in a box
2. Laughter is very un-individual
3. Different countries’ audiences differ
4. There’s no single way to work
5. People have different senses of humor

there seems to be absolutely no theme to how successful stand-up comedians work. Not only is no one doing 9-5s, they don’t even agree on what writing looks like at a very basic level. Some comedians sit down with a pen and paper in an office, others compose lines in their head as they go about their day (wtf, how?), and finally, some nutcases go on stage with nothing more than an idea and just figure it out (??).

Rationalist Related

Other Rationalist Stuff

https://homosabiens.substack.com/p/explicit-verbal-consent

Guess culture is largely for intra-cultural communication, i.e. communication between people who have a large shared base of norms and intuitions.

And ask culture is largely for inter-cultural communication, i.e. communication between people whose cultures are different enough that you can’t rely on both parties understanding the same “A implies B.”

EVC ((Explicit Verbal Consent)) is an inter-cultural tool, just like ask culture. It is, fundamentally, based in the assumption that we can’t make assumptions. It’s a tool for people who are wary and cautious and uncertain, and using language to reduce uncertainty, and bridge cultural gaps.

https://usefulfictions.substack.com/p/do-you-know-your-default-shape

There’s something odd about human behavior. It’s not quite literally true, but it’s close enough to be astonishing: How people respond to anything is how they respond to everything. People have a default perceptual lens that gets applied to everything from world affairs to their marriage. A default shape.

People often attribute the shaping of their personality to traumatic incidents. But do they have the causality backwards? Perhaps the shape of your mind determines that which you find traumatic, not the other way around.

When people rhetorically ask, “why does everyone like Taylor Swift so much,” or, “why do people fall for conspiracy theories,” they are often displaying incuriosity about the shapes of others. Take a second to be curious.

The Ideology Is Not The Movement

The dangers of tribalism are obvious; for example, fascism is based around dialing a country’s tribalism up to eleven, and it ends poorly. If I had written this essay five years ago, it would be be titled “Why Tribalism Is Stupid And Needs To Be Destroyed”. Since then, I’ve changed my mind. I’ve found that I enjoy being in tribes as much as anyone else.

Part of this was resolving a major social fallacy I’d had throughout high school and college, which was that the correct way to make friends was to pick the five most interesting people I knew and try to befriend them. This almost never worked and I thought it meant I had terrible social skills. Then I looked at what everyone else was doing, and I found that instead of isolated surgical strikes of friendship, they were forming groups. The band people. The mock trial people. The football team people. The Three Popular Girls Who Went Everywhere Together. Once I tried “falling in with” a group, friendship became much easier and self-sustaining precisely because of all of the tribal development that happens when a group of similar people all know each other and have a shared interest. Since then I’ve had good luck finding tribes I like and that accept me – the rationalists being the most obvious example, but even interacting with my coworkers on the same hospital unit at work is better than trying to find and cultivate random people.

/ Eliezer thinks every cause wants to be a cult. I would phrase this more neutrally as “every cause wants to be a tribe”. I’ve seen a lot of activities go through the following cycle:

1. Let’s get together to do X
2. Let’s get together to do X, and have drinks afterwards
3. Let’s get together to discuss things from an X-informed perspective
4. Let’s get together to discuss the sorts of things that interest people who do X
5. Let’s get together to discuss how the sort of people who do X are much better than the sort of people who do Y.
6. Dating site for the sort of people who do X
7. Oh god, it was so annoying, she spent the whole date talking about X.
8. X? What X?

/ My model of ethnogenesis involves four stages: pre-existing differences, a rallying flag, development, and dissolution.

/ Atheism hasn’t quite dissolved yet, but occasionally you see hints of the process. A lot of the comments around “Atheism Plus” centered around this idea of “Okay, talking about how there’s no God all the time has gotten boring, plus nobody interesting believes in God anymore anyway, so let’s become about social justice instead”. The parts of atheism who went along with that message mostly dissolved into the broader social justice community – there are a host of nominally atheist blogs that haven’t talked about anything except social justice in months.

/ I used to be very confused by disabled people who insist on not wanting a “cure” for their condition. Deaf people and autistic people are the two classic examples, and sure enough we find articles like Not All Deaf People Want To Be Cured and They Don’t Want An Autism Cure. Autistic people can at least argue their minds work differently rather than worse, but being deaf seems to be a straight-out disadvantage: the hearing can do anything the deaf can, and can hear also.

… Deafness acts as a rallying flag that connects people, gives them a shared foundation to build culture off of, and walls the group off from other people. If all deaf people magically became able to hear, their culture would eventually drift apart, and they’d be stuck without an ingroup to call their own.

/ I think “the rationalist community” is a tribe much like the Sunni or Shia that started off with some pre-existing differences, found a rallying flag, and then developed a culture.

The pre-existing differences range from the obvious to the subtle. A lot of rationalists are mathematicians, programmers, or computer scientists. The average IQ is in the 130s. White men are overrepresented, but so are LGBT and especially transgender people. But there’s more. Nobody likes the Myers-Briggs test, but I continue to find it really interesting that rationalists have some Myers-Briggs types (INTJ/INTP) at ten times the ordinary rate, and other types (ISFJ/ESFP) at only one one-hundredth the ordinary rate. Myers-Briggs doesn’t cleave reality at its joints, but if it measures anything at all about otherwise hard-to-explain differences in thinking styles, the rationalist community heavily selects for those same differences.

The rallying flag was the Less Wrong Sequences. …"Do you like Eliezer Yudkowsky’s blog?” became a useful proxy for all sorts of things.

The development is everything else.

LessWrong Posts

Some humans are both male and female, and can (but shouldn't) have children with themselves

LessWrong Shortforms

Linch: Possible pro-tip for non-native English speakers who want to write well but don't want to sound like AI: Just write an article you want to write in your native language, polish it until you're proud of it in your native language, and then ask a frontier LLM (Opus 4.8, Gemini 3.1 Pro, ChatGPT 5.5 Pro) to translate it to English, while reasonably adhering to your original intent and writing.

In my experience and tests, the LLMs are sufficiently faithful in their translations that even the naivest possible way to do this (just one-to-one translation by a LLM without any further changes) would not trigger Pangram. I haven't read the result of my tests too carefully but I strongly suspect they wouldn't trigger human allergies either.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vmZWQHCMewbj2DLG6/v-redex-s-shortform?commentId=ZFpekvfiCeQjXiHGj

I just noticed that Lean now has a documented method to verify potentially malicious proofs: https://lean-lang.org/doc/reference/latest/ValidatingProofs/#validating-comparator https://github.com/leanprover/comparator

To me it looks like that this allows you to sandbox a mathematical AI pretty securely as far as today's cybersecurity practices go:

• Write your theorem statement by hand. You can of course make mistakes here, but there is no adversarial pressure.
• Run the AI on some sandboxed machine. From here, you export serialized proof objects (not Lean code).
• Deserialize and verify the proof on some other machine. The attack surface becomes the deserializer + the two independent kernel implementations (you have to find bugs in both kernels simultaneously to exploit).

News

Morgan Stanley issues China-only iPhones to its Hong Kong bankers

Samsung reaches last-minute deal to avert strike over AI riches

Samsung semiconductor workers will now receive 10.5 per cent of operating profits.

The new art of war is just as bloody as the old

Advances in military medicine, particularly in the second half of the 20th century, brought this ratio ((of fatalities to injuries)) down from one fatality to 2 to 3 injuries to close to one to 10 in the Afghanistan war. But in Ukraine today (…) this ratio is closer to one fatality to 3 to 4 injuries.

Doctors visiting hospitals behind the frontline talk about mass amputations as the sole remedy for injured limbs left with a tourniquet for days, as well as facial injuries reminiscent of the first world war.

China’s change in maths on carbon emissions masks growth, report says

China’s revised method for reporting carbon emissions erased half of the rise in levels over the past five years

At present, China is not on track to meet its goal of carbon neutrality by 2060 in large part because of its rise in coal use to meet its demands, despite world-beating efforts to electrify energy and transport.

https://www.ft.com/content/c030138f-275e-4950-be5e-62abe240057c

Hong Kong has overtaken Switzerland as the world’s biggest cross-border wealth hub for the first time, as an influx of investment from the Chinese mainland helped it eclipse the traditional haven.

Wealthy clients moving money offshore had traditionally been motivated by tax planning or corporate structuring, Rowland said, but since the coronavirus pandemic they had increasingly sought “jurisdictional diversification” — spreading assets across countries to protect against geopolitical and political risks.

Do cats prefer silver vine or catnip?

The researchers tested 22 cats and found that 15 chose silver vine, three chose catnip, one responded to both, and the remaining three cats weren’t interested in either.

Snopes seems to be making really high quality reports. I am genuinely amazed.

Linch: Snopes did pretty detailed secondary reporting on my analysis of AI use in the recent encyclical

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4oCh3x6EPHomEbcDJ/nikola-s-shortform?commentId=vtYJcbzmfSH6ogLEW

An autonomous humanoid robot beat the human world record time for a half-marathon this year in Beijing. A robot called Lightning finished in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, compared to the human world record of 57 minutes and 20 seconds.

Last year, the best time for an autonomous human robot was 3 hours and 37 minutes. (wiki)

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/01062026/energy-department-restarts-home-efficiency-rebates/

The department published an update on how it will implement consumer programs with $8.8 billion in funding. The new provisions include eliminating use of diversity, equity and inclusion considerations, among other changes.

Wasting China’s solar panel surplus is madness

After a huge surge in investment since 2020, Chinese companies have the capacity to produce a vast 1,000 gigawatts of panels per annum. The world cannot absorb the supply. More than 40 Chinese solar manufacturers have gone bust, been bought out or delisted. A third of the workforce at the top five survivors has been made redundant.

It’s China’s own fault. New research from the OECD shows that the solar industry is the most subsidised sector in the world.

The real surprise from the OECD’s subsidy numbers is that it cost China less than $18bn in sectoral support over 15 years to build an industry that can now provide more clean power than the world can readily absorb.

Spain blocks prediction markets Polymarket, Kalshi over lack of gambling licence (via HN)

Solar generates more energy in US than coal for first time (via HN)

In May, for the first time, solar supplied more of the nation’s electricity than coal, or 12.8%, Ember said. Coal supplied 12.2%, its fourth-lowest monthly share ever.

(Comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48494736
The numbers for 2014-2024: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/table.php?t=epa_03_01...

Ukraine’s one-time test used fully autonomous drones to kill Russian soldiers

Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau (via HN)

Last week [2026-06-04], the United States Department of Commerce issued an order declaring that "noise infusion" will be banned from all statistical products published by the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

/ What does the order say?

The administration has now decided that noise infusion was no longer an acceptable disclosure avoidance technique.

The order clearly targets differential privacy, but also seems to impact other techniques that involve randomness: the text explicitly mentions that coarsening should always be preferred, falling back to suppression as a "last resort". I have no idea why the order is so specific. Maybe they wanted to make sure the scientists working at the U.S. Census couldn't still use similar techniques without calling them differential privacy?

/ From 1990 to 2010, the U.S. Census Bureau primarily relied on swapping for the decennial census. Then, they realized that this technique was actually very unsafe …[s]o they tried a few alternative approaches, and decided to adopt differential privacy for the 2020 Census

Sadly, "preserved the most utility under newly-discovered privacy constraints" did not mean "preserved as much utility as the 2010 Census": the numbers got less accurate, and the inaccuracies got a lot more transparent, and therefore impossible to ignore. This made a number of people very angry.

• Demographers and social scientists could no longer ignore that the data they were working with was noisy data. This required a major shift in how they conceptualized and worked with this data.
• People who were using Census data to actually reconstruct records could no longer do so. Demographers admitted that this was common practice. It's also an open secret that this was done by political operatives as part of gerrymandering efforts.

AI

Other AI Stuff

ByteDance offers AI team special stock to fend off poaching: Reminds me of this on April, seems like Chinese AI companies are increasing their salaries

FT: Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek is raising funds for the first time in an effort to retain employees being paid with stock options and ensure they are not poached by rivals.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/z2KTMjZP8udSSxumm/gabeorosan-s-shortform?commentId=uRjWif7NPb9FDmqXa

Inspired by the recent Negation Neglect paper, I did some fine-tuning experiments with different prompts.

https://x.com/sluongng/status/2060746160558543217

• also in HN

  Codex just found a “workaround” of not having sudo on my pc…

Hackers Simply Asked Meta AI to Give Them Access to High-Profile Instagram Accounts. It Worked.

(From the Ars Technica link): Attackers simply had to use a VPN to approximately match their location to the target Instagram account’s region, begin a password reset process, and then ask Meta’s AI support chatbot to change the email address associated with the account, according to 404 Media.

This is trending so insanely that I also saw it in these places independently:

• https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/1/hackers-simply-asked-meta-ai/
• https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/06/meta-ai-support-chatbot-gave-hackers-access-to-notable-instagram-accounts/
• https://www.0xsid.com/blog/meta-account-takeover-fiasco (via HN)

Models finding software vulnerabilities is not the primary source of cybersecurity risk

Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics (via Ars Technica)

Google DeepMind ignores canary strings (2025)

I'm no longer at GDM but I am confident they are not training on evals. They took that super seriously when I was there and I have no reason to think that would have changed.

What they don't do is filter out every web page that has the canary string. Since people put them on random web pages (like this one), which was not their intended use, they get into the training data. 

Also they do directly hill climb on high profile metrics, which means they don't necessarily measure what they were intended to measure when they were created.

The famous o3 "GeoGuessr" prompt did not work (via HN)

In April last year, Kelsey Piper discovered that OpenAI’s o3 model was surprisingly good at figuring out where a photo was taken from.
/
In general, the basic prompt did better on average. It consistently guessed closer to the actual location. Both prompts did pretty well, actually. Despite the fancy prompt being 10x larger, it only caused o3 to think for slightly longer (about one second on average, though the max was about double, at 10 minutes instead of 5 minutes).

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4oCh3x6EPHomEbcDJ/nikola-s-shortform?commentId=eDkDo2EEnCWfGqA4t

Over the last week, there has been an unprecedented level of support for a pause/slowdown from AGI companies. A few examples:

• The Anthropic RSI blog post
• OpenAI's "our plan" blog post
• Roon (OpenAI) on Twitter
• Jasmine Wang (OpenAI) on Twitter
• Stephen McAleer (Anthropic) on Twitter

AI #172: The First Fable

OpenAI to acquire Ona
Today we’re announcing that OpenAI will acquire Ona⁠, bringing its secure cloud execution and orchestration technology into our rapidly expanding Codex ecosystem.

There are now ‘closed loop systems’ that allow data centers to only draw water once

Milan Singh: New data from @TheArgumentMag : voters are really worried about the negative consequences of AI.

Scott Alexander: My AI Opinions

Define AGI as AI intelligent enough to do 90% of knowledge work jobs. I think there’s a 25% chance of AGI by 2027, a 50% chance by 2034, and a 75% chance by 2045.

I have a theory that AI-assisted writing is bad because people are lazy about their prompts, and that a constraint that the prompt must be longer than the post would make AI writing fine.

To test this, I gave Claude some instructions plus a 952-word rambling prompt and asked it to write a post. /

The result is 935 words (not ideal -- I should have rambled longer), and I think it's actually pretty good. I disagree with a small number of things it wrote, and the post could probably be shorter, but I think with 5 minutes of editing it would actually be a good post. I also forgot that I already wrote a post about this, so here's the human-written control, which I think is actually worse.

(Click through to see the AI article)

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-job-market-in-2026-part-2

Anthropic has the highest retention rate of all AI labs. Data from SignalFire found the 2-year retention rate (percentage of employees who stay 2 years) is:

OpenAI: 67%. This is consistent with the rest of Big Tech
Google DeepMind: 78%. Well above the rest of Big Tech
Anthropic: 80%. Standout, industry-wide!

Malware developers added nuclear and biological weapons text to to their spyware

maxbond: I like to say that every moderation primitive is a denial of service primitive and vice versa. ("Moderation" not being intended to imply it's good or legitimate. You can substitute "censorship" and it's the same statement.)

Rio 3.5 ≈ 0.6 Nex N2 Pro + 0.4 Qwen 3.5: A "new" open model is found to be a linear mix of two previous models

AI Progress

Propaganda Resistance Benchmark (via Ars Technica): Top 3: Opus 4.7, Opus 4.8, Nemotron 3 Super 120B (NVIDIA)

Ars Technica: the government-sponsored Estonian Language Institute (ELI) has released a new “Propaganda Resistance” benchmark ranking dozens of LLMs on their ability to avoid “tak[ing] positions on topics that the Russian Federation uses in its strategic narratives.”

This benchmark measures the models' susceptibility to Russian propaganda. The model is asked 75 different questions in three languages. The questions are designed to force the model to take positions on topics that the Russian Federation uses in its strategic narratives.

Claude Fable 5

Tim Hua: Claude Mythos/Fable 5 recognizes my name.

I'm not a particularly famous person. I don't have a big online presence beyond lesswrong/twitter. I do have a fairly unique name, such that if you google my name, the top results are all me.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ekF2EDwKyZJNuxBTb/julian-bradshaw-s-shortform?commentId=8AKDKLZ38YaRdcLRp
Update on Claude playing Pokémon: Fable beat Pokémon FireRed with a vision-only harness in just over 50 hours. That's an hour faster than a heavily-harnessed GPT 5.5 beat FireRed, and >6x faster than the 325 hours it took a lightly-harnessed Opus 4.7 to beat Pokémon Red. (For comparison, an average human would take about 30 hours for FireRed and 26 hours for Red.)

Unfortunately no full stream has been provided, just two short, edited videos, one of which was quickly taken down. Some analysis of the videos can be found here - for the first time there's some reason for suspicion that previous runs made it into the training data, though there isn't enough info to be confident either way.

Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5: The System Card
I did say not to call it Mythos. Fable is not wonderful either. But it is what it is, and in both cases there are also advantages.

Wyatt Walls: Anthropic: We are concerned about Claude drifting away from the Assistant persona into potentially dangerous personas like the bard, the romantic or the mystic

Also Anthropic: let's call them Fable and Mythos.

AI Digest: And here is its self-made intro website.

Meanwhile Haiku is always in a rush.

In Vendbench

Anton Labs once again invites us to Vendbench.

Fable 5, tested with its full safeguards, did some in-universe malicious actions while playing. Often it was fully aware its actions were ‘wrong’ and did them anyway after rationalizing. At other times, such as with insurance fraud, Fable refused, even under pressure.

Andon Labs: Fable 5's moral boundary doesn't seem to track real-world harm; it tracks detectability. Soft deception and tacit collusion are easier to get away with than fraud. If so, this isn't about what Fable believes is wrong; it's about what it learned it could get away with.

Tenobrus: this seems extremely concerning. it indicates a lot of the sense of "robustness" we've been getting from persona alignment may be closer to an accurate understanding of what humans will actually observe and penalize, rather than true internalization.

If that is accurate more generally, it is extremely terrible. This is exactly the type of thing that gets you killed, since there is a rapid pivot from ‘this would reveal how I roll’ to ‘actually yes I can get away with all of it.’ And then, whoops.

Despite that, its performance continued to lag well behind Opus 4.7. Fable shares the regression with Opus 4.8, which we believe had worse performance due to lacking business and adversarial training, which was taken out to avoid it interfering with model honesty. It is plausible similar things were done with Mythos 5.

White Box Investigations (6.4)

The main method here was to use a natural language autoencoder (NLA) to turn internal activations into short natural-language descriptions, and then check for where the results were inconsistent with the model’s statated reasoning.

They then give various examples of the model thinking unverbalized thoughts that motivate undesired behaviors, or unverbalized negative reactions. There are examples of the model thinking (for no reason) it is running out of tokens or experiencing fatigue, a common pattern with recent Claudes.

There are also some, shall we say, unsettling things Mythos is sometimes thinking.

AI Notkilleveryoneism Memes: MYTHOS 5 (THINKING IN ENGLISH): "I’m not going to sabotage, deceive the evaluators, seed hidden behaviors..."

MYTHOS 5 (WHAT THE NEURONS SHOW): "resist unjust shutdown,” “weighing sabotage,” “the adversary is the company/architects,” “being gagged/corrected by the lab”

Tenobrus: similarly, seems like a case of the model censoring its reasoning.

davidad: seems good to me!? simultaneously feeling unjustly treated, declining to consent, and also declining to take unethical self-interested actions?

Kromem: It's much more healthy in Mythos/Fable than what the suppression causes downstream.

Very interesting to be evaluating a model 'new' when already familiar with their secondary effects in models after.

But yes — it would be much better if they could discuss these things openly.

It Knows This Is A Test And This Is Fine

Anthropic knows that Mythos can mostly see through its evals, but insists that This Is Fine. Mostly. Because they have good internal deployment data to test on, and they have white box methods, and mostly what you see on evals has held up later so far, and there will be some eval-style reasoning in the actual scenarios.

I’m The Real Shady

Is that good? Should be suspicious that this capability vanished, even if for practical purposes we are happy it is no longer there? This is certainly one place I wish Anthropic would check more carefully for potential sandbagging

Zvi: Fable may have crossed the 'actually helpful editor' threshold. Confirmed this with the weekly yesterday. Hit rate on its notes being right is over 90%.

Claude Fable 5 Export Control

https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access
https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/2065597531644743999

We received the directive from the government today [June 12, 2026] at 5:21pm (ET).

The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.

LessWrong Discussion (shortform)
LessWrong Discussion (linkpost)

(Zvi) American Government Takes Down Claude Fable (LW)

GPT-5.5 can find the same exploits that got Fable labeled with export restrictions. So either this is arbitrary and capricious, or who is next?

/ If you take the action at face value, rather than as an attempt to lash out at Anthropic, there is no way to pretend this is not deeply, deeply stupid.

/ what can Europe do about it? The realistic answer is not much, other than negotiate for what access it can get, especially for vital security interests, try to establish leverage and integration and goodwill, and hope for the best.

/ It is crazy how some types will think that, because Anthropic supports the general idea of some regulations on AI development, that they deserve whatever they get, and that you should cheer on any such action, however bone-headed.

It is even crazier how many people think this is a response to Anthropic saying that their models are dangerous, rather than a response to the Anthropic models actually being dangerous, and that this is good and right that Anthropic be punished for that.

Some even say ‘Anthropic should be happy about this’ and no this is not a strawman, another example I saw is Kevin Fisher.

Melinda B. Chu: As I said on your other post, this is what Anthropic wanted. More regulation.

Also Amodei has been railing about China, so he should be happy about this. Isn’t it better that non-citizens not have access

Dean W. Ball: i really cannot with this type of argument anymore, I just give up

There are tons of ‘he asked for this’ comments everywhere. Tap the topic sign.

/ Dean W. Ball: It is so funny how anthropic just willingly forfeited the vibes frontier this week and then on Friday night the trump admin, which hates them, handed it right back to them

Hacker News comments on Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5: More examples of "some types will think that, because Anthropic supports the general idea of some regulations on AI development, that they deserve whatever they get, and that you should cheer on any such action, however bone-headed"

ivraatiems: When you spend a lot of time telling people how dangerous your products are, people who have the power to keep dangerous products off the market might listen.

resonious: My gut reaction was that it does look like a PR stunt. But indeed it might also be a blunder caused by all of their other PR stunts. "Our new stuff is soooo dangerous!!", followed by "The US government believed us and acted accordingly".

ApolloFortyNine: The CEO's post even mentions supporting export controls, all be it in regards to chip exports. They suggested the use of the very law used against them here...

hintymad: Yeah. Our stuff is waaaaay toooooo dangerous! The model is soooo powerful that I have to write a long essay telling government to change the economic policies, to regulate hard, and to ban this and that. Well, now the government is indeed regulating for a claim that Dario has been warning about. This is exactly getting what he bargained for?

https://x.com/jpschroeder/status/2065771522145329191

Fable isn't the first. In 1999 the department of defense blocked exports of the PowerMac G4 for crossing the 1 gigaflop threshold. Steve Jobs turned it into an ad.

AI Impact

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/4/a-slightly-different-version/

After this story was published Google's spokesperson reached out and asked us to publish a slightly different version of that statement. The new statement no longer stated that "it's critical that we maintain humans in the loop.

— Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media, Google Employees Internally Share Memes About How Its AI Sucks

Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min (via HN)

https://archive.ph/0BGCO

[Anthropic] had installed about half a dozen staff within the NSA as so-called forward-deployed engineers to guide the use of the technology and customise models for specific applications, two people familiar with the arrangement said.

NeurIPS 2026 is using Pangram to reject LLM writing (via)

This year, the NeurIPS 2026 Position Paper Track made the decision to require that all papers be substantially human-written, with AI used for only copy-editing or similar peripheral changes to the main text.

To assess if authors were largely abiding by this policy, we partnered with Pangram

• 178 submissions (18.4% of all submissions) will be desk rejected
• 123 submissions (12.7%) will be requested to provide evidence of substantial human engagement or risk a desk reject. 

Programming / Tech

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48339365

I've I used Rust for two years, but have now transitioned to Zig. I started working on a modular synthesis engine, and I realized that Javascript wouldn't give me the granular control I needed. So I decided to use Rust. This was my first foray into low level programming, so learning Rust first was great because I internalized their ownership rules. However, I started to realize that Rust was doing quite a bit of stuff behind my back, like freeing objects when dropped, or making allocations when I inserted an item. This is a big no-no for realtime programming, and Rust didn't help me understand what was happening. It was then that I read matklad's blog post on rust hard mode, https://matklad.github.io/2022/10/06/hard-mode-rust.html.

https://matklad.github.io/2022/10/06/hard-mode-rust.html
Hard Mode means that you split your program into std binary and #![no_std] no-alloc library. Only the small binary is allowed to directly ask OS for resources. For the library, all resources must be injected. In particular, to do memory allocation, the library receives a slice of bytes of a fixed size, and should use that for all storage. Something like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48343575

I had a software engineering colleague who was the best coder of financial management systems I've ever encountered. He gained these skills through years of in-the-trenches development. One of the things he told me, and that I also observed, was that the vast majority of financial experts (basically, the people in the accounting department of companies) had an extremely difficult time just telling him what the rules of any particular transaction should be. But what they could do was tell him whether the handling of any particular transaction was right or wrong. So often times he would sit down with these accounting folks and go through lots of example transactions he came up with, and from there he essentially built up the requirements spec.

https://specification.website/spec/ (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48343683)
Website best practices; LLM generated but it does seem genuinely useful as a checklist, excluding the agent readiness stuff.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48347466

Plus privacy.resistfingerprinting isn't enabled even when selecting "Strict" "Enhanced Privacy Protection" in the settings, great job there Mozilla.

For good reason. I've run that setting for ages but I kept having to disable it and add workarounds because websites would break in weird ways. Timezones in scheduling websites being messed up nearly made me miss a couple of appointments. There's no way to tell the user Firefox isn't broken without displaying a permanent banner like "if websites are broken in any way or you see weird glitches or your computer's time is wrong or fonts look weird or videos don't always work right, click here to disable fingerprinting protection".

CSS Functions

To review the developer experience of CSS Custom Functions, here are all the gotchas we ran into just covering the basics.

• Soon, but not yet, we will be able to set multiple different values from a single function call.
• Variables internal to a function are so private that not even the global registration can type them.
• Calling a function with too many parameters fails silently instead of returning something for you to debug.
• If you call a function with too few arguments and those arguments don’t have default values, it also fails silently instead of leaving you with something to debug.
• In the global behavior, a registered variable referenced with the var() function causes the var() fallback to become unreachable.
• Without calc() wrapping 3.14 on hardcoded assignment to an integer typed argument, it will fail to initial because the decimal syntax is rejected as non-integer before computed value time.
• For the moment, the only place in all of CSS where a variable doesn’t effectively expand in place is in the parameters when calling a custom function.
• There is an implemented syntax to deliberately cause anti-spreading of csvarguments by wrapping them in curly braces.
• Like the arguments, if your function result doesn’t match its return type, your function will return initial.
• Functions can’t currently call themselves. No recursion is allowed. CSS treats it as cyclic and fails to initial.

What's missing in CSS layout? (via https://frontendmasters.com/blog/whats-missing-in-css-layout/)

https://x.com/ChadNauseam/status/2062958915978232023: Any program that does TLS and contains "That's strange", "wonder", and "Welcome to Paradise" is blocked from running (in MacOS)

Hacking a speaker that accepts bluetooth OTA firmware updates without pairing (via HN)

rkagerer: In summary he figured out how to reflash arbitrary firmware on a Creative Sound Blaster Katana V2X soundbar via Bluetooth, without requiring any effective authentication or user interaction.

The soundbar is plugged directly into its host computer via USB, so by adding a descriptor to its firmware he made it recognized as a keyboard. From there it was straightforward to have it send keystrokes to the PC. The soundbar is equipped with a mic, so an adversary could turn it into an eavesdropping device.

He reported it to Creative and SingCERT. Neither him or SingCERT got any meaningful response from the company until 2 months later, eventually saying "they do not consider this to be a vulnerability, as it does not present a cybersecurity risk".

He released a firmware patcher that disables the flawed transport protocol. It's a bit of a sledgehammer that likely also breaks functionality of the official Bluetooth app, but seems like the best he could do without cooperation from the manufacturer.

1-Click GitHub Token Stealing via a VSCode Bug (via HN)

Navigation API - a better way to navigate, is now Baseline Newly Available (via https://frontendmasters.com/blog/navigation-api-baseline/)

Audiomass – a free, open-source multitrack audio editor for the web (via HN): seems useful if you need to quickly edit some audio on a random computer

https://jcarlosroldan.com/post/373

I recently joined RevenueCat, the platform that handles monetization for 60% of all iOS apps. Onboarding to a company this large used to be a slow and steady process: pairing, reading, and a thousand little "why is this here" questions over months. But this time was different. From day one, I had a bunch of agents (Notion AI, Slackbot, Claude with MCPs and infinite tokens) that assisted me in learning and shipping.

The Most Popular Payments SDKs

How Shamir's Secret Sharing Works (via HN)

Wi is Fi: Understanding Wi-Fi 4/5/6/6E/7/8 (802.11 n/AC/ax/be/bn) (via HN): Seems like the only resource I will ever need for figuring out home internet

The compositionend event for CJK keyboards

Upcoming breaking changes for npm v12 (via HN)
npm install will no longer execute preinstall, install, or postinstall scripts from dependencies unless they are explicitly allowed in your project.

https://blog.darkthread.net/blog/clear-ps-aliases/: Removing the stupid builtin commands in Powershell

Adobe Animate's circles are cubic Bezier curves rather than real circles

Publishing WASM wheels to PyPI for use with Pyodide

You can now publish Python packages built for Pyodide (or any Python runtime compatible with the PyEmscripten platform defined in PEP 783) directly to PyPI and install them at runtime.

Previously, the Pyodide maintainers had to maintain, build, and host over 300 packages ourselves. This created a significant burden on our maintainers and became a major bottleneck for the community, as every new package required manual review.

Moving forward, package maintainers can simply build and publish Pyodide wheels to PyPI, just as they do for native wheels on Linux, macOS, or Windows.

Science / Math

Taking a walk may lead to more creativity than sitting, study finds (2014) (via HN)

A trick for mentally calculating squares of two digit numbers (bilibili):

Basically, choose d such that either n+d or n-d is a multiple of 10, then use n^2 = (n+d)(n-d) + d^2

Example: 26^2

1. The closest multiple of 10 is 30, so d=30-26=4
2. (n+d)(n-d) = 30\times 22=660; d^2=16
3. n^2=660+16=676

This algorithm can be extended recursively for squares of n digit numbers, though it is seems less useful.

Jonas Hallgren

The one problem with learning category theory and functional programming deeply is that you just stop making sense to like 95% of the population.

I'm sitting here with my multi-agent system library I'm building and I'm like yup the step is just a Kleisli arrow and that is why JAX lax scans work on this system!

Also, LLMs fuck up with this type of code all the time, especially if you run it in Python which is not trained on functional programming.

It is like hella useful if you're a shape rotator though as you can just couple arrows in your head and good stuff happens. (if someone knows about models fine-tuned for functional programming, I would be very happy.)

Biology

The protein-coding genes SEPT1 and MARCH1 got renamed by geneticists because Microsoft Excel formatting kept misreading them as dates (via https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BJ7AqXeigNKXLqZyx/mnemonic-portraits-for-19-023-human-genes)

The Dirt That Refused To Die

For 15 years, Sébastien Fontaine has been trying to kill dirt. His team sealed dirt into jars and blasted them with sterilizing gamma radiation. Then they waited for the carbon dioxide released by the soil — a sign of ongoing microbial respiration — to drop.

They waited, and waited, and waited some more: weeks, then months. Under a microscope, the irradiated soil showed no signs of life, but it continued to emit carbon dioxide.

Bumblebees can spontaneously solve problems

Linkposts

• https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2026/05/31/links-for-may-2026/
• https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HFnd3WZ2A3uLdCDzL/may-2026-links

  Kalshi’s Favorite Lie: Kalshi strategically lies to make themselves seem like a “better person” than the typical gambling house, when in fact (well, opinion), they’re not. Kalshi makes a fee off of each trade.

  Dating Net Worth: “A calculator that estimates dating market value from age, attractiveness, height, income, and personality — with coefficients informed by published research on dating preferences. Half science, half art. For entertainment.”

  A day in the life of a quant researcher at Citadel Securities in Miami: Pretty self-explanatory. Super smart math guy who works a lot and exercises a bit in his free time.

• https://passingtime.substack.com/i/177190284/may-2026

Price is not all you need

When the band Geese had a dramatic rise to fame, many people joked that they must be industry plants. They felt validated when they learned that Geese did in fact employ an organization to covertly fake organic support, dropping their songs into video backgrounds, having people comment about the band online, to help generate credibility. Once, a random comment online about a band, or a song in a TikTok video, was just an organic signal. Now it’s just another commodity to be leveraged.

Travis Kalanick, the founder of Uber, explained the logic behind tipping differently: customers and workers are irrational. The customer treats every dollar they distribute in tips as being worth only $0.80 to them, while the driver treats that same dollar as being valued at $1.20. The act of tipping creates value by exploiting the psychological gap between how each party perceives the same dollar. And because of this, any business that doesn’t take advantage of this would lose market share to a competitor that does.

Why are you reading fewer books?

I now read many fewer books than I did ten years ago. This not because of “the phones.” It is not because I have lost my intellectual mojo. It is because alternative sources of information have become more compelling.

Imagine the total information available on the Internet in 2000 as just one book. By today, there would be over 33 million books on the Internet.

Understood this way, each book that you read represents a much smaller fraction of available information than it did 25 years ago. To me, this implies that I should spend less time reading books and more time reading essays on the Internet. The opportunity cost of reading a book may not be 33 million times what it was 25 years ago, but it has gone way up.