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Epistemic status: Written quickly. I have no specific expertise or training in writing or literary analysis. Recently, the NYTimes released a nifty quiz. Readers were asked to indicate their preference between prose written by Claude Opus 4.5 and famous humans in five head-to-head comparisons. The Claude outputs were produced by...

Purchasesforce Superintelligence is excited to announce some new research. While we do not generally share research on LessWrong, this work was particularly influenced by prior work on LessWrong, so we found it appropriate to share back. As you know, Purchasesforce Superintelligence is a leading AI R&D laboratory. Recently, our research...

Perhaps this is a somewhat unusual subject for LessWrong, but hopefully it's of some interest, if only as a case study of what we lose through translation. "Palm of the Hand stories" refer to short stories written by Kawabata between 1923 and 1972. This is a review of a collection...

This is my favorite article in Stanford's student newspaper: the Stanford Daily. It raises the question: why are students at an institution so prestigious... so boring? At this late hour of Stanford history, can anyone hope to bring up a serious subject in a dining hall? Every so often I...

Comp sci in 2017: Student: I get the feeling the compiler is just ignoring all my comments. Teaching assistant: You have failed to understand not just compilers but the concept of computation itself. Comp sci in 2027: Student: I get the feeling the compiler is just ignoring all my comments....

Acknowledgements Thanks to Joe Benton for proposing the analogy to diffusion models. Thanks to Alex Spies, Erik Winsor, Lee Sharkey, and many others for deeply valuable and insightful discussion as well as red-teaming of this technique during EAG London. Thanks to Justis (via LessWrong Feedback), Scott Viteri, and others for...

At some restaurants, you will be asked after ordering if you’d like to have your meal “for here” or “to go.” As far as I can tell, the only thing that changes based on your response is how your food is served. If it is “for here,” it’ll be served...