Quick Takes — LessWrong

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)

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4Eli Tyre4h

I have sometimes wanted to "retweet" lesswrong comments, or alias them so that they can show up, in full, in multiple places on the site.

4Ben Pace3h

I have also wanted for a way to curate comments, separate from posts. I think a good next step to get more in contact with this, would be for someone to write a "highlights from the comments" post for the last month. See how good they are, how many there are, how much context is needed, and whether it's a good reading experience. I might curate it if it's a good reading experience.

Raemon29m20

We did have the Popular Comments section. For some reason I didn't like the popular comments section – it often was showing comments that were kind of tribal.

FYI, I haven't actually gotten the UI to be that great yet, but, I've tried out version of the site that renders comments and posts together, clustered by time period:

https://baserates-test-git-comment-and-posts-together-lesswrong.vercel.app/all

In practice, atm, the "Today" section has a fair number of comments (because the posts haven't been super upvoted yet). Then they mostly shift to posts (and i... (read more)

AllAmericanBreakfast's Shortform

DirectedEvolution9h4810

I continue to think Hantavirus becoming a pandemic this year is much less than 5%. There’s a chance the opportunity to make 10x gains on the prediction market leads a WHO insider to falsely characterize it as a pandemic in what technically counts as an “official communication.”

Andes virus, the strain of hantavirus that provoked the prediction market, is endemic in two countries. It causes hundreds of cases per year. The strain that infected the Hondius appears to be wild type. In other words, unlike COVID-19, it doe not have new, recent mutations that make... (read more)

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Linch31m20

Do you have examples of prominent people on LessWrong believing it's greater than 5%?

5DirectedEvolution3h

The strain making the news was picked up by German tourists watching birds in a garbage dump in Ushuaia, Argentina. 1. A pandemic-grade strain of Andes virus has just emerged from Ushuaia. The German tourists were potentially the first victims, but the Hondius passengers and Ushuaian residents are all about to become the first victims of a coming Andes virus pandemic, which will start in Ushuaia and the immediate contacts of the Hondius passengers, radiating out from there. 2. The German tourists picked up a strain of Andes virus that already had pandemic potential before they were infected by it. But Ushuaians, unlike German tourists, don't frequent their own garbage dumps and have no meaningful exposure to the rodents that are its reservoire, so they aren't exposed to it. For this reason, the rest of the world gets pandemic Andes virus before Ushuaia itself. 3. As (2), except Ushuaia is about to have a mass outbreak of Andes virus and get quarantined. The quarantine works on Ushuaia, protecting the rest of South America, but because the tourists had already spread it globally, it can't be contained. Ushuaia and the rest of the world get rapid growth in Andes virus cases, but South America is temporarily isolated from the pandemic. 4. The German tourists picked up a strain that mutated within their bodies on on board the Hondius to be much more human transmissible than the virus the tourists picked up in Ushuaia. In this case, the rest of the world would be getting exposed to pandemic-potential hantavirus before Ushuaia and the rest of South America, resulting in the rest of the world having more cases over the next few months than Ushuaia. If we were about to have an Andes virus pandemic, scenario 1 seems massively morely likely to me than 2, 3, or 4. But in that case, we'd see cases mounting in South America in tandem with or at a faster pace than the rest of the world. I do think that seeing enough de novo cases of Andes virus outside existing quarantine

3XelaP3h

Ah, duh! Thanks, I think you are right.

Mo Putera's Shortform

Mo Putera13h274

While I don't have aphantasia, I resonated oddly strongly with Mozilla cofounder Blake Ross' description of his discovery that he was aphantasic:

And, suddenly, fiction clicks. Paty says I used to worry that “I feel like I’m doing reading wrong.” Descriptive language in novels was important to her but impotent to me; I skip it as reflexively as you skip the iTunes Terms of Service. Instead, I scour fiction like an archaeologist: Find the bones.
The slender, olive-skinned man brushed the golden locks out of his hazel eyes. He was so focused on preparing for t

XelaP39m10

I have no problems with visual imagination, and suspect I am better than average. Reading descriptions in fiction really does paint a picture/movie scene in my head.

At the same time, I think I have a worse episodic memory than most. It sounds like it's not as bad as Ross's, but it's in the same ballpark.

I suspect the following:

'Dissociative tendencies', that are something more fundamental even though I live a happy life now.
ADHD (I have an official diagnosis and believe myself to fit the description, and take medication), as supposedly that is associated

... (read more)

4cubefox3h

[Here](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/apr/01/being-an-author-with-aphantasia-mark-lawrence) is an article by Mark Lawrence, a fantasy author with aphantasia. Quote: [...] I also recall Stanisław Lem, the science fiction author, mentioning in one of his nonfiction books that he never visualizes anything when he writes (or reads, I don't remember) visual descriptions. He wrote this some 50 years ago, so aphantasia wasn't recognized at the time, but it sounds like he had it. I've read most of his novels, but I'm unsure whether he included fewer visual descriptions than comparable authors. Mark Lawrence says he doesn't know whether aphantasia affects his writing style.

1rahulxyz4h

Thanks, this resonated with me too and was I had never heard about it before! I was doing more research into it., and there seems to be the opposite of this called HSAM or highly superior autobiographical memory where some people can vividly relive their life given just a specific date like April 15, 1995. However, it seems to be less common (only 100 people diagnosed with it worldwide) That made this whole thing feel even more alien to me.

Shortform

Cleo Nardo1h40

Here's a proposed passage of Claude constitution, based on Paul Christiano's integrity for consquentialists.

I think this is a good baseline for how Claude should interact with others:

I think it's better to include these heuristics than simply the ordinary rules around honesty, promise-keeping, etc. This is because these heuristics will apply to a wide range of situations. And these heuristics inform how to deal with tradeoffs with consequentialist considerations.
I think that these heuristics are more robust than a specific decision theory like FDT or UD

... (read more)

jacquesthibs's Shortform

jacquesthibs6h92

Would there be an AI safety case for building a 100 GW data center?

Assuming it was possible to build a 100 GW data center in a non-US/China country, could there be a reasonable AI safety case for this? For example, the data center would:

Be part of an international effort
Have restrictions on frontier model training
Have mandatory independent evals
Need a world-class model-weight and cyber security
Have a high-ish % of compute reserved for safety
Compatible with pausing (frontier training)
Have contracts that enforce specific behaviour from AI labs using it

I'm as... (read more)

10deep4h

I think there's a pretty good case for middle powers / stable democracies trying to do massive compute buildouts in order to have leverage over the far future; they're credible treaty partners for both the US and China, and US-China trust is imo one of the biggest blockers for a treaty. Also (relatedly) they can pioneer good tech stuff that both sides might be willing to adopt, including safety, security, transparency/oversight measures, and treaty-verification tech. The obvious LW rejoinder is -- isn't this just OpenAI again? I think it's more like Anthropic again -- deliberately setting up "the ethical frontier actor" to raise standards (and also to plausibly win, which seems less good to aim for here). A key question is, how much would this be reallocating compute rather than inducing more compute manufacturing? I've heard the claim it's basically reallocation, iirc because "ASML & TSMC's infra is really expensive and takes many years to pay off, so they're risk-averse; ASML has 1y+ lag times, new fabs have multi-year lag times, and TSMC won't redirect manufacturing from phone chips unless there's clearly long-term demand". Also because the most feasible way for a non-US country to fund this is via US frontier lab . (It's hideously expensive to build out this much; nobody outside the US really has the capital for it).

sanyer3h10

and also to plausibly win, which seems less good to aim for here

I don't think it would be wise or feasible for middle powers to try to 'win' the AI race, nor do I think this is a threat in any meaningful way.

The only 'winning' here that is feasible for middle powers is that both safety is ensured and benefits of AGI are shared fairly. Those are important goals in their own rights and seem like things we should aim for.

leogao's Shortform

leogao4h60

i was recently in an Uber and the driver started talking to me about Musk v OpenAI (almost completely unprompted! i had only mentioned that i do computer stuff.)

nightsky81's Shortform

nightsky811d250

Ilya Sutskever testified today at the Musk v. Altman trial.

At the end of the OpenAI lawyer's cross-examination, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers asked Ilya a few questions herself. I found their exchange (lightly edited for clarity^[1]) somewhat amusing:

YGR: When he [Elon] said that there was a 0% chance of success, what was the technology like at that point?
Ilya: It was less developed, it's true. The technology was less developed.
YGR: Is there any way to quantify what the level was at the time you left?
Ilya: Yes, there is. It's like the difference between... I

... (read more)

14anaguma1d

For some context on the 'big computer', Ilya previously had this discussion with the OpenAI lawyers. [...] So it certainly seems like he believed in something like the bioanchors view at the time. This might also be relevant to why he thinks SSI can make AGI/ASI on a limited compute budget.

8lc21h

Separate discussion, but if this is mostly true, I think it's kinda dumb to berate EAs for also believing in a bioanchors view.

Daniel Kokotajlo4h43

IMO it's overdetermined that berating EAs for believing in a bioanchors view is dumb.

leogao's Shortform

leogao4h1-3

i wonder if aphantasia is correlated with emotional repression/dulling

leogao's Shortform

leogao5h80

from To the Success of our Hopeless Cause: interestingly, a big tension in the Soviet dissident movement was between people who believed in being 100% virtuous, embracing martyrdom, signing their names and addresses onto their dissenting samizdat texts, protesting to be arrested 5 minutes later and sent to jail, pretending that the letter of the Soviet law actually mattered, etc, vs people who believed in being more strategic and openly illegal and trying to avoid being caught. the former fades in importance because they keep getting arrested (the 1968 red square protest being tbe turning point).

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2leogao4h

some of it is autocorrect - it's easy to turn off sentence beginning capitalization, but i don't think you can turn off capitalization of proper nouns without turning autocorrect/suggest off entirely. (this is also why i don't capitalize i, but i do sometimes capitalize I'm). i like lowercase because it feels like a more casual or familiar register. on laptop, not capitalizing is also very pragmatic, because i don't like pressing the shift key. on mobile, it's out of a sense of consistency with laptop, and because i endorse laptop vibes more than i endorse phone vibes. as for the book title, tbh, I'm not sure what i was thinking, but one guess is this particular book title is especially easy to accidentally read as part of the surrounding text.

2RHollerith5h

I do that, too, in things not intended for publication (which is the vast majority of things I write). Why? On a computer, capitalization is not needed to help identify the start of a sentence. In contrast, in print, it is not always possible to tell the difference between a period and an unfortunately-positioned blemish in the paper. Since it is not needed there, I prefer to avoid the extra work of typing an upper-case letter. Also, if I re-arrange the wording of a sentence, which I do frequently, then I have to do more work to fix up the capitalization. Finally, capitalizing the start of the sentence destroys what information capitalization of the initial word would otherwise carry. E.g., in conventional orthography, "Mercury" at the start of a sentence could be either a reference to the planet or the element whereas in the orthography I prefer, the reader knows it is not a reference to the element (because elements are not capitalized). Grandparent includes a quotation without unambiguously marking it as a quotation (e.g., with quotation marks or a block quote) which I never do in my published writings (and almost never do even in writings that will never leave my computer). This generalizes: in all cases I can recall, those who in public refrain from capitalizing the starts of sentences also violate orthographic conventions I'd would be extremely hesitant to violate.

leogao4h20

where did i include an unmarked quotation? nothing in my post is an explicit quotation from the book.

fredreelz's Shortform

fredreelz1d0-2

Epistemic Status: Strong opinion loosely held. Haven't ran numbers or considered corporate espionage (e.g. accidental collisions of certain satellites that were giving africans just enough internet to go on TBA). Unsure if the time horizons of rapid industrialization betray the slowest timelines for venture-backed startups (occam's razor suggests this).

There's a loosely held argument that frontier labs ought to focus some efforts towards debatably 'woke' causes that, if leveraged appropriately (load-bearing sufficient assumption), may fast-track their path... (read more)

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1fredreelz9h

I don't know. I guess it depends on how much the people who want to make ASI want one, or the other, to happen. * How do you quantify the word "mattering", as it relates to the causes I outlined? * Do you think that other languages and other cultures have certain insights that can't just be extracted out of a community with a 3-6 month Kled UA campaign? * How do you reconcile the implicit moral hazard (or asymmetric levels of accountability) of miscalculating those estimates? In other words, if you're wrong that it takes longer to get to ASI than it takes to increase TAM in the ways I described, what will you lose?

1fredreelz9h

Sure, there's reason to believe certain plans won't reduce net profits. A startup's plans can always go well, or poorly, depending on execution (I know it's a 'no true scotsman' fallacy but the N size for successful startups is low, and frontier labs are by and large leveraging tactics one wouldn't see in a public company beholden to quarterly goals to achieve the growth rates necessary to achieve market dominance). To that point, the leading rideshare companies were able to entrench themselves across the world despite, and maybe because they were comfortable with, being unprofitable for many years. Eventually, they were the only modern game in town for up-market consumers in most countries, and now they control pricing. Similarly, if you look at countries that aren't widely industrialized and assume "these people probably want their ~40 hours of labor to be worth more than it is today, and we can entrench our services as an accelerant to that growth", then you can assume that it's a matter of how well one allocates resources towards doing that. In the same way that it took ~10 years for Uber to go from $5 shared rides to SFO to being cash flow positive, infrastructural changes that involve the real world won't happen overnight. As we're seeing with Starlink, innovators can find ways to step into markets efficiently. If you assume that the overwhelming majority of people in non-industrialized countries aren't working to earn more, and won't seize the opportunity to earn more if the infrastructure is given to them, then what I'm saying won't make sense. If you assume that these people do want to work more to efficiently resolve blockers that created dependence on foreign aid, because being dependent on a foreign entity reduces a nation's agency, then it follows that people will want to dig themselves out of a hole. The current alternative is spending the same money competing to get more of a smaller pie. LMK if I misunderstood your point.

152334H5h10

I think primary crux:

Your time preference ~= 0.
I assume frontier lab CEOs time preference >> 0, analogously valued "the house is on fire and 2030 is practically an eternity away"
Almost all the mental frames you invoke are irrelevant when time preference is high.

You and I may have differing opinions on the origins of poverty internationally, but even the most optimistic humanist would not expect targeted industrial policy within the poorest decile of third world states to yield astounding gains in disposable income within the next 5 years.

And within t... (read more)

leogao's Shortform

leogao1d2210

conlang idea: an extremely easy to learn language with the following attributes:

grammar: mandarin, but without several of the quirks (no counters, merging 的/地/得, merging 不/没, etc)
vocab: drawn from mostly English, because it's become the lingua franca. ideally the language is almost mutually intelligible to English speakers from the beginning
very simple phonology similar to japanese
consistent phonetic writing system based on the latin alphabet

Showing 3 of 9 replies (Click to show all)

leogao5h40

only kinda? toki pona is trying to have as small a fundamental vocab as possible and constructing all other concepts using those few words. whereas i am totally happy to import all of English as prerequisite knowledge

1James Camacho22h

wannanada looks like わんななだ rather than わんあなだ, not sure how to distinguish these in romaji. also tuwardu should be tuwaadu or tuwarudu.

3Arjun Panickssery1d

A 2019 study claims that spoken languages transmit info at a similar pace, i.e. that languages which apparently transmit more spoken info per syllable (Mandarin, German) are spoken more slowly than opposite languages like Japanese or Spanish. The gap between the fastest and lowest transmission (English and Thai) was 1.4x, though I don't quite understand the way they measured information. It's possible that written communication doesn't work that way, though. Languages with simpler and more rational orthographies like Spanish are easier to learn to read compared to English. So I think the most clear benefit would come from spelling reform and maybe the way numbers are spoken/written in words, rather than apparent efficiency improvements to spoken communication (e.g. you listed grammatical or vocabulary changes) that just lead people to talk more slowly because they're bottlenecked by how fast they can produce or understand the information.

Caio Petroncini's Shortform

Caio Petroncini5h10

Putnam showed that any physical system implements any FSA under a suitable mapping. This is bad for computationalism: if any rock implements any computation, "this system is computing X" stops meaning anything.

The standard response (Chalmers) is that real implementations need to handle counterfactual inputs correctly, not just the actual ones. I think this misses the more obvious problem with Putnam's construction.

Think about how a CPU actually maps to bits. You look at specific physical regions, count electrons via voltage, threshold the count. That mappi... (read more)

Kajus's Shortform

Kajus1d92

Opus 4.7 is extremely excited about research into LLMs. Way more excited about research than about coding in general. Here are some quotes:

Holy shit. Wait, let me get the headline table — there's a real signal at σ=0.01.
If the MVE works, the followup that turns this into a NeurIPS-ready story
That's a real research direction and it makes structural sense.

The pattern I see is claiming many many times about things being publishable, interesting etc.

Was Claude specifically designed to be super into research LLMs? Possible. But maybe... he is just curios abo... (read more)

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Brendan Long5h20

The whole point of using an AI coding agent is to reduce the amount of effort involved in coding. If you have to jump through hoops to ensure that your usage never shows up on a company IP, is it actually worth the effort (especially since OpenAI has their own models)? Plus a lot of people won't pay out of pocket just to help the company (even if it would obviously be worth it), and the company would have to consider legal risks to intentionally violating the ToS.

To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised by xAI working around this, but only because they're not a serious competitor. OpenAI has their own models and doesn't need to do this.

3Brendan Long6h

I think the ToS is probably sufficient deterrence with the state of the race today, since it's easier for their competitors to use their own models than to work around Anthropic blocks (and at least in the US there could be legal consequences to intentionally violating the ToS). If they got sufficiently far ahead, they might not make their models public, and we already have a case of that with Mythos (although it's unclear if they don't want their competitors to have access, or if they just can't afford to run it at scale). Also even without the ToS, competitors may not want their engineers to leak all of their plans to Claude.

2Brendan Long6h

Yeah, I agree that it's not very good at judging whether a result is interesting or not.

xpostah's Shortform

samuelshadrach6h10

crossposted from my website

2026-04-29

Maybe especially focus on persuading Taiwanese govt and public about AI pause

Disclaimer

Quick Note
Contains politically sensitive info
target audience - lesswrong
I haven't verified all these claims a lot.

Main

Some LW discourse seems to implicitly assume that Taiwanese politicians and billionaires, and the Taiwanese public don't have much say in what happens to TSMC.
- There is some writing on lesswrong that assumes either the leaders of the CCP or the US executive branch will inevitably take control of Taiwan vi

... (read more)

bgold's Shortform

Ben Goldhaber1d333

xAi seems like they are dropping out of the frontier AGI race.

"xAI will be dissolved as a separate company, so it will just be SpaceXAI, the AI products from SpaceX." (Musk on X, May 6)

xAI was acquired in Feb 2026 through a reverse triangular merger, keeping it separate with its own debt, liabilities, and structure. It's now being folded into SpaceX as a division focused on integrating AI across the SpaceX stack.
Also 11 of the 12 original co-founders have left, Grok DAU fell from 13.9M to 12.2M March→April while Claude went 16M→23M, and xAI burned $7.8B i

... (read more)

8Adele Lopez1d

It just doesn't seem very characteristic of Musk to throw in the towel like that. They do seem to be falling behind, but I think the intent is still to have a frontier lab.

25Jackson Wagner21h

Idk, I could possibly see it through the lens of "Musk has decided that the future will be owned by those who control the hardware, not those who make the best software (since software stuff is an easier, less bottlenecky, and more easily commoditized task)." I'm not sure if this hardware focus is correct, but it's at least plausible, and it must be very tempting for Musk to believe (with so much hardware expertise / experience, a whole career based around winning at hard physical engineering & integration challenges, etc!). No fussy issues with mechahitler or white genocide in south africa, no annoying nuances where you do a bigger training run but end up producing a worse model than your competitors. Just good old-fashioned rapidly ascending the kardashev scale with expanding shells of massive solar-powered orbital datacenters. Hence the "macrohard" jokes, the xAI integration with SpaceX that doesn't make any sense from a software perspective, etc. Note this is very different from "dropping out of the AGI race". If this is indeed Musk's perspective, he is still hell-bent on racing to AGI (see also the new chip-foundry plans and potential intel partnership, etc). But he might be dropping out of the "frontier AI lab" race, which after all seems so hopelessly competitive (as soon as one lab pulls ahead, the others seem to catch right back up! or at least this has been the case so far). Better, he might be thinking, to focus on a more neglected "vertically integrated, AGI-pilled hardware scaling" strategy that might pay off bigger in the long term.

Ben Goldhaber7h20

I agree this sounds plausible and appreciate with the distinction you're drawing between still competing for the future, but no longer racing for the software intelligence explosion AGI.

Nico Hillbrand's Shortform

Nico Hillbrand1d21

There's approximately 3 attitudes towards AGI Safety:

Dismissal from people that don't take the possibility powerful AI seriously
Lip service, but motivational apathy from people that agree it's epistemically sensible to take powerful AI seriously as a far mode sort of idea, but have other priorities they care much more about
Concern and caring from people that take powerful AI seriously

I encounter 2. a bunch as a local group organiser. I think often it's because people think there's too much uncertainty or too little leverage they have such that they're bet... (read more)

1roha1d

My intuition is that 3.3 gaining more traction would be good for the world, because to me a) that seems most realistic based on the evidence I've seen so far and how I interpret it, and b) least problematic in case it's wrong and we live in a world where alignment isn't hard and organisations act competently. What reasons make your intuition point towards 3.2?

Nico Hillbrand8h20

Generally I think it's good for people to try to be as accurate as possible and that's what I most associate with 3.2. That said these clusters are a big oversimplification and I think there's people with good reasoning that end up in 3.3. And in practice 3.3 might be a reasonable attitude just from a perspective of a sane society wanting to address the alignment is hard and orgs are incapable scenario anyway

sarahconstantin's Shortform

sarahconstantin10h20

links 5/12/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/05-12-2026

- https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/pancreatic-cancer-just-met-its-match Ruxandra Tesloianu on daraxonrasib, the new drug that Actually Works on pancreatic cancer.
- - it targets RAS, which is an old familiar oncogene, but what i hadn't realized is it's "undruggable" in the traditional sense; no pockets!
  - cryo-EM mapping of the protein let them come up with a "molecular glue" drug that attaches RAS to another molecule, cyclophilin A, rendering it inactive. i always wondered if structural biolog

... (read more)

Linch's Shortform

Linch13d*140

Excerpts from research notes on AI persuasion/AI superpersuasion

Are cognitive exploits a thing?

Cognitive exploits are an as-yet theoretical mechanism where relatively short strings or sensory inputs can one-shot someone and cause them to take almost arbitrary actions. In the earlier taxonomy, this is like “content-agnostic persuasion” on steroids, since it really doesn’t care about the content of the message at all.

Put another way, cognitive exploits are specific attacks on human neurology akin to adversarial examples or jailbreaks in ML. In yet another s... (read more)

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Viliam10h20

Should the same short string work on everyone, or is it okay to make a different string for each person?

I don't think that universal strings would work, but a personalized string which reminds the person of some emotionally sensitive things in their life could push them towards some outcome. Probably would need at least a few sentences.

2Linch4d

Not in the sense I mean. I think it's mostly body language reading. Also it's read-access rather than write-access. The former in extreme form can be scary (eg maybe you can't ever keep secrets from an AI) but it's much less scary than the write-access version.

2Linch12d

Apologies I was evaluating the conjunctive statement there, for practical purposes. Since the second one was easier than the first I decided to answer that one. I guess there's a bit of motte-and-bailey here, though hopefully understandable.

papetoast's Shortforms

papetoast13h38

Agreement karma feels so useless. I think it would be better if everyone can only do +-1, so it is possible to infer the percentage of people agreeing/disagreeing.