I'm finding Claude Opus 4.6 instances to be making a lot more "excess enthusiasm"-ish errors than any instance of the 4.5 models, which were already making a lot of them. I personally am going to not be talking to 4.6 much most likely, unless I find a simple prompting approach that dodges this. The pattern I've seen so far is, opus 4.6 sees a thing, describes a possible reason for that thing, proceeds based on that assumption, the assumption was wrong and never checked, eventually crashes into a wall.

In general, my vibe about this release is that it's emba... (read more)

QiaochuYuan tweets:

> twitter did something amazing with its design: on most other platforms there are “posts” and “replies,” and replies are second-class citizens, lacking most of the affordances that posts have

> on twitter everything is a tweet! (ignoring articles) when you reply or QT a tweet you are writing another tweet, which has all the affordances a full tweet has. you can attach images (including screenshots), you can QT while replying, other people can reply or RT or QT your tweet, replies and QTs show up in feeds. this makes twitter “fully ... (read more)

When I'm having trouble on getting started with something unpleasant, this is the technique I use: simply count down 3, 2, 1, and then do the thing. There's also a specific feeling just before the countdown, but it's hard to describe.

This works every single time. Why? Because a tool like this is too useful to lose over some minor everyday issue. This means I don't attempt to use it when it might not work. It's a way to split an unpleasant task into two parts: committing to doing it, and then actually doing it.

It's a limited tool. It doesn't work for long t... (read more)

I'm interested in understanding why people sometimes start acting strange after extended conversations with language models. Davidad's recent shift in direction is the example that comes to mind, as well as accounts of AI psychosis. I think that one of the more naive ways to investigate this would be to measure the R0 (reproduction number) of attractor states like spiritual bliss and spiralism in a multi-agent setup. Are there factors that make people more or less susceptible to this effect? I believe that model personas are a monoculture, so prompt inject... (read more)

i predict that on Jan 1 2029, neither openai nor anthropic will be near-fully automated, by which i mean <=5 people are even plausibly making important decisions (like, everyone else could go on vacation and it would not slow the company down at all). Celestia predicts otherwise

if WWIII happens, resolves NA. if a localized Taiwan war happens but doesn't escalate to WWIII, the bet is still on. if there's a big recession, the bet is still on.

i really wish there were a better platform for repeatable cognitive testing than brainlabs.me. the website feels like it is about to fall over from a light breeze, and i would be very sad if i suddenly lost my method of measurement because the site disappeared. also, there doesn't seem to be particularly strong evidence that these tests in particular are the right ones to be looking at.

Why is utopia so broadly 'difficult to picture'?

This is a topic often brought up, but especially more recently where many people have given the same take on a short story (The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas), such as this take with this quote:

[Author’s note: literally right before I posted this, Scott Alexander posted his April 2026 linkpost, and whaddayaknow, link number four is a similar take on Omelas. I commented on this in r/slatestarcodex, and then u/EquinoctialPie informed me of two other posts on the same topic, both of which are slightly different

Does anyone know the rough OOM of the "n" such that there are "n" technical AI researchers that would cause a 2x slowdown in frontier AI capabilities progress over the next year if they all quit?

Edit: I think my question was unclear. Let's say that you know the history of every researcher at the top AI labs and have a really good idea of who the "best" ones are. You now get to pick "n" of them in order to maximally slow progress. They can be immediately replaced by additional hiring.

hendrycks recently published a paper introducing a new moral theory. the paper contains this insane table, which claims that you should value a foreign stranger at 3e-12 times the value you assign to yourself. even setting aside the fact that this is apparently supposed to be a prescriptive theory, even as a descriptive theory, i think this is utter madness.

the core problem is that it assumes if x% of your total caring is assigned to people other than yourself, then you must give away x% of your wealth to be consistent.

the argument goes that since most pe... (read more)

I go to a weekly rationality meetup at a bar in my area, which usually has 5-10 attendees. My unfortunate impression of half of the regulars is that they are depressed, pedantic, and bad at socializing, and that makes me sad because that feels like them being Spock instead of being Awesome.

What are other people's experiences with this? I imagine it's kind of hit-or-miss, with some groups being great and others being duds?

sometimes, my answer to a question flips multiple times as you move along the axis from literal answer to spiritually-accurate answer. unfortunately hard to share specific examples for privacy reasons

Some random thoughts about historical colonization conflicts

Aztec Empire

I read Aztec, by Gary Jennings, a retelling of (among other things) the encounter between Europeans and the Aztecs (note that they didn't call themselves Aztecs, they generally called themselves the Mexica). Though the book is fiction, a lot of the dynamics it talks about were real (warning for potential readers that the book doesn’t *just* focus on those dynamics and has a lot of disturbing sex content). I was partly interested because of the potential elements of AI, though there are... (read more)

why are malaria nets 9-23x more efficient than direct cash transfers? when in theory direct cash transfers can be used to purchase nets

some hypotheses

• people are irrational and don't spend money on nets because they underestimate the risks, are not educated, etc
• people don't value spending a few days wages to reduce mortality by 0.1 percentage points