Top postsTop post
[Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare by Edward Fishman (2025).] There are different ways state A can make state B do something that the state B doesn’t really want to do. In the extreme, state A can attack state B. But wars are messy: people die, they...
When talking with my friends about the OpenAI/HF incident, I realized that for non-coders who've never used an agent or terminal it's quite difficult to imagine what this 'escape' entailed. I tried to write a post that would be helpful for such people. You may have seen headlines like An...
Parkinson’s law says that "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." I think that a similar observation can be made for people worrying about stuff. To paraphrase: "Problem salience expands so as to fill the capacity available for worrying.” Suppose a person is worried about...
Everyone knows that people usually post social media content that presents them in a favorable light. In fact, TikTok has a Social Media Isn't Real category, where the typical video starts with a polished, stylized shot of something or someone (usually a girl), and then shows what was edited or...
Neural networks may often behave differently from the intentions of the programmers. A useful distinction between the failure modes is between outer and inner misalignment. Suppose you want to train an assistant to play a multiplayer strategy game for you. In the game, you build villages, train troops, create alliances...