I'm not sure if this is helpful (you might already know), but in Let's Think Dot By Dot, they found that LLM's could use filler tokens to improve computation, but they had to be specially trained for it to work. By default the extra tokens didn't help.

We haven't really established why OpenBrain's market dominance is inevitable.

I think they gave OpenBrain a generic name to indicate that they don't know which company this would be, so I think it's tautologically defined that OpenBrain is dominant because the dominant company is the one we're looking at.

This market seems valuable, but it depends on what you're using it for. "Experts can't predict what this politician is going to do" is useful information. Also it seems like a lot of voters were assuming the chance of Trump implementing major tariffs was tiny, so updating toward 50% would have helped them.

I’ve had emails ignored, responses that amount to “this didn’t come from the right person,” and the occasional reply like this one, from a very prominent member of AI safety:

“Without reading the paper, and just going on your brief description…”

That’s the level of seriousness these ideas are treated with.

I only had time to look at your first post, and then only skimmed it because it's really long. Asking people you don't know to read something of this length is more than you can really expect. People are busy and you're not the only one with demands on their time.

I would advise trying to put something at the beginning to help people understand what you're about to cover and why they should care about it. For the capitalism post, I agree with most of what you said (although some of your bullet points are unsupported assertions), but I still don't know what I'm supposed to take out of this, since ending capitalism isn't tractable, and (as you mention in regards to governments) non-capitalism doesn't help.

This seems to explain a lot about why Altman is trying so hard both to make OpenAI for-profit (to more easily raise money with that burn rate) and why he wants so much bigger data centers (to keep going on "just make it bigger").

Due to an apparently ravenous hunger among our donor base for having benches with plaques dedicated to them, and us not actually having that many benches, the threshold for this is increased to $2,000.

Given the clear mandate from the community, when do you plan to expand Lighthaven with a new Hall of Benches, and how many benches do you think you can fit in it?

I think it's more that learning to prioritize effectiveness over aesthetics will make you a more effective software engineer. Sometimes terrible languages are the right tool for the job, and I find it gives me satisfaction to pick the right tool even if I wish we lived in a world where the right tool was also the objectively best language (OCaml, obviously).

I updated this after some more experimentation. I now bake them uncovered for 50 minutes rather than doing anything more complicated, and I added some explicit notes about additional seasonings. I also usually do a step where I salt and drain the potatoes, so I mentioned that in the variations.

During our evaluations we noticed that Claude 3.7 Sonnet occasionally resorts to special-casing in order to pass test cases in agentic coding environments like Claude Code. Most often this takes the form of directly returning expected test values rather than implementing general solutions, but also includes modifying the problematic tests themselves to match the code’s output.

Claude officially passes the junior engineer Turing Test?