Amarko

I'd be interested to see an example that you consider high skill?

Use --- instead of —

I've noticed that a lot of people these days have purple as their favourite colour. When people tell me their favourite colour is purple, I like to bring up a colour picker and ask them to choose their favourite purple. Someday I should do a survey on people's favourite purple.

I think it's also that the public doesn't understand maths well enough to judge the importance of these new developments. What's most visible is the AI companies themselves pushing these results hard, which they would clearly do for marketing purposes regardless of whether it is actually sensational.

Given that the mathematics community as a whole is not freaking out (or at least the reactions are very mixed), caution is probably an appropriate response if you don't have enough experience to form your own opinion.

I think it would be different if AI solved t... (read more)

Ok after going through the proof of the chain rule, here is my sense for what is going on. Please correct me if I am mistaken.

An approximately-shortest program outputting is very similar to an approximately-shortest program that outputs just using as an intermediate output. This means that, given , there are few programs that output for some that have a length approximately , so has a small index in the enumeration of . This means that .

We get by searching for programs with an appropriate K-complexity bound that output triples , and we describe the ... (read more)

Party like it's 1997

Relive the glory days of the internet when web design was at its best.

I've been particularly impressed by 3.1 Pro's ability to do math problems. I have 3 problems that I like to pose to AIs in increasing levels of difficulty (all requiring or greatly aided by a postgraduate-level knowledge of mathematics).

Gemini 3.1 Pro and Opus 4.6 are the first models that could solve the first one, or even come close to a correct solution. Opus was unnecessarily verbose and appealed to some advanced mathematics jargon, while Gemini gave a much simpler, far more readable solution.

The second problem was eventually solved by Opus after a cou... (read more)

I also wasn't a heavy user, it's just something that I noticed from a few conversations with Sonnet 4.5, then I started noticing it in writing that other people co-wrote with Claude. It wouldn't surprise me if Opus uses it even more but I'm not really sure.

As a data point, I did notice the overuse of "genuinely" before the constitution was added to Claude (at least publicly). So I think it would have been introduced somehow during training.

It refers to the existing norm. The author is saying that a recently developed norm is likely less load-bearing than a long-existing one, so the attempt to abolish it is less likely to be flawed.

Sometimes you are a bad friend in ways that you don't realise; everyone has their blind spots. Telling people before taking actions that affect them can let you adjust your expectations before doing something you don't realise is harmful.

As someone who recently got too wrapped up in "just doing things" at the expense of a friend whose permission I did not ask, this post strongly resonates with me right now. Seems like a good word of caution.

On the other hand, things will probably be fine in the long term and as @Bastiaan said, I probably have a more accurate sense of where the boundaries are than I would have if I just avoided doing things. So it's maybe a grey area. But you'll probably always be better off asking permission from the people you might be affecting, as long as you care about their opinion and they are in good faith.

My experience of a Goenka retreat was basically the exact same as yours, with the added complication that I got sick during the retreat, which was very much not fun but also didn't seem to stop my body from eventually dissolving into waves of vibration (so to speak).

Cool and interesting, but it didn't seem much more than that and enough of the retreat made me feel skeptical/put off that I didn't go again.

I suspect that "enlightenment" is probably a bundle of different things rather than one discrete thing, and maybe what it means depends on the culture and even how an individual relates to the world. This is based on the heuristic that when you dig into the nature of mental states, they tend to not fall into neat categories that are the same from person to person.

However, there are people existing today who claim to be "awakened" who were certainly self-aware, and still describe a dramatic change in their perception of the world. The descriptions tend to f... (read more)

I'm getting the impression that "consciousness" is inherently not well defined; that is, there is no singular thing we can point to that will meaningfully determine whether or not something is "conscious".

In this sense, consciousness might be a red herring. A similar but more concrete question worth asking: what behaviours would an AI agent have to exhibit for you to want it to be granted fundamental rights/autonomy? Or otherwise for it to be intrinsically unethical to create and run an instance of it?

That makes sense—everything in context. I wouldn't want to go around assuming that I can just tease anyone who is experiencing psychological distress, but I think I do have a sense of specific circumstances where it feels appropriate. And hey, I cannot remember the last time I looked like an asshole, so I'm probably overdue anyway.

Reading this has made something click for me, I think.

The other day a friend of mine had what he felt was an extremely embarrassing moment—although really it was not nearly as bad as he felt like it was. I kind of had this blog series in mind when we were assuring him that it was fine, and it didn't quite connect with him, and I knew it wouldn't, but I also didn't really know what to do so I felt kind of awkward even though I worried that feeling awkward would make things worse.

Part of it is that I was hiding information, in that I actually found the situa... (read more)

Another excellent post. This particular post has clarified the framework for me enough that I could imagine it impacting my interactions with people.

It seems like this is formalising things that people tend to gain a partial intuition for through social interaction. 

How much of this is perscriptive vs descriptive? I could use music theory to explain why a song sounds good, but in most cases music theory works better as a post-facto explanation than an instruction for how to write good music. Do you think this framework is useful for learning how to change people's expectations/beliefs/attention/etc. or is it a description of something that could be learnt just as well without the framework?