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LessWrong posts by zvi

zvi

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts by zvi

technology philosophy

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61:00

“AI #151: While Claude Coworks” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2026/01/15

Claude Code and Cowork are growing so much that it is overwhelming Anthropic's servers. Claude Code and Cowork news has for weeks now been a large portion of newsworthy items about AI.Thus, at least for now, all things Claude Code and Cowork will stop appearing in the weekly updates, and will get their own updates, which might even be weekly. Google offered us the new Universal Commerce Protocol, and gives us its take on Personalized Intelligence. Personalized Intelligence could be a huge deal

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15:00

“When Will They Take Our Jobs?” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2026/01/14

And once they take our jobs, will we be able to find new ones? Will AI take those too?Seb Krier recently wrote an unusually good take on that, which will center this post. I believe that Seb is being too optimistic on several fronts, but in a considered and highly reasonable way. The key is to understand the assumptions being made, and also to understand that he is only predicting that the era of employment optimism will last for 10-20 years. By contrast, there are others that expect human

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21:55

“Claude Coworks” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2026/01/13

Claude Code does a lot more than code, but the name and command line scare people. Anthropic realized a rebrand was in order. Two weeks later, we have Claude Cowork, written entirely by Claude Code. Did you know that chat interfaces were always (mostly) secretly a command line? This is still very much a research preview, available only for Claude Max users on Macs with a bunch of bugs and missing features. It will improve rapidly over time. Cowork combines a lot of the power of Claude Code with

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27:10

“Dating Roundup #10: Gendered Expectations” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2026/01/12

The game is asymmetrical. Life is not fair. Doesn’t matter. Play to win the game. You’re Single Because Your Emotions Gave Her The Ick Ah, the ultimate ick source. A man expressing their emotions is kind of the inverse of the speech in Barbie about how it's impossible to be a woman. It's easy. A man must be in touch with and transparent about his emotions, but must also be in conscious control over them, without repressing them, while choosing strategically when to be and not be transparent

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38:09

“Claude Codes” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2026/01/09

Claude Code with Opus 4.5 is so hot right now. The cool kids use it for everything.They definitely use it for coding, often letting it write all of their code. They also increasingly use it for everything else one can do with a computer. Vas suggests using Claude Code as you would a mini-you/employee that lives in your computer and can do literally anything. There's this thread of people saying Claude Code with Opus 4.5 is AGI in various senses. I centrally don’t agree, but they definitely

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36:27

“AI #150: While Claude Codes” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2026/01/08

Claude Code is the talk of the town, and of the Twitter. It has reached critical mass.Suddenly, everyone is talking about how it is transforming their workflows. This includes non-coding workflows, as it can handle anything a computer can do. People are realizing the power of what it can do, building extensions and tools, configuring their setups, and watching their worlds change. I’ll be covering that on its own soon. This covers everything else, including ChatGPT Health and the new rounds from

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35:10

“Advancements In Self-Driving Cars” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2026/01/07

Going Full San Francisco Waymo goes Full San Francisco West Bay except for SFO: Jeff Dean: Exciting expansion! @Waymo now serves the whole SF Bay Area Peninsula from SF to San Jose and is taking riders on freeways. They can serve SJC, and SFO is almost ready, employee rides are in place and public rides are ‘coming soon.’ Brandan: Would be nice if @Waymo comes across the bay to Berkeley! Jeff Dean: We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it! Going Down The Highway Waymo is

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50:33

“Fertility Roundup #6: The Art of More Dakka” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2026/01/06

The central message of the fertility roundups has always been that we have a choice.If we do want to raise fertility, we can do that. People respond to incentives. That means money, especially if paid up front, and it also means time, lifestyle and respect. If we do it purely with cash, it would be expensive, but a well-designed version of this would still be net profitable to the state. On the order of $300k per additional live birth would get this done in the United States, depending on how

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52:49

“Fertility Roundup #5: Causation” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2026/01/02

There are two sides of developments in fertility.How bad is it? What is causing the massive, catastrophic declines in fertility? What can we do to stabilize and reverse these trends to a sustainable level? Today I’m going to focus on news about what is happening and why, and next time I’ll ask what we’ve learned since last check-in about we could perhaps do about it. One could consider all this a supplement to my sequence on The Revolution of Rising Expectations, and The Revolution of

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45:28

“AI #149: 3” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2026/01/01

The Rationalist Project was our last best hope that we might not try to build it.It failed. But in the year of the Coding Agent, it became something greater: our last, best hope – for everyone not dying. This is what 2026 looks like. The place is Lighthaven. Table of Contents Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. 2026 is an age of wonders. Claude Code. The age of humans writing code may be coming to an end. Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility. Your dog's dead, Jimmy.

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32:48

“Dating Roundup #8: Tactics” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/12/29

Here's to everyone having a great 2026 in all ways, so I figured what better way to end the year than with a little practical advice. Like everything else, dating is a skill. Practice makes perfect. It helps to combine it with outside analysis, to help you on your quest to Just Do Things.You’re Single Because You Lack Reps A common theme in these roundups is that the best thing you can do as a young man, to get better at dating and set yourself up for success, is to get out there and engage

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33:38

“Childhood and Education #16: Letting Kids Be Kids”...

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/12/26

The Revolution of Rising Requirements has many elements. The most onerous are the supervisory requirements on children. They have become, as Kelsey Piper recently documented, completely, utterly insane, to the point where:A third of people, both parents and non-parents, responded in a survey that it is not appropriate to leave a 13 year old at home for an hour or two, as opposed to when we used to be 11 year olds babysitting for other neighborhood kids. A third of people said in that same

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76:41

“AI #148: Christmas Break” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/12/25

Claude Opus 4.5 did so well on the METR task length graph they’re going to need longer tasks, and we still haven’t scored Gemini 3 Pro or GPT-5.2-Codex. Oh, also there's a GPT-5.2-Codex.At week's end we did finally get at least a little of a Christmas break. It was nice. Also nice was that New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed the RAISE Act, giving New York its own version of SB 53. The final version was not what we were hoping it would be, but it still is helpful on the margin. Various people

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23:15

“Zvi’s 2025 In Movies” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/12/24

Now that I am tracking all the movies I watch via Letterboxd, it seems worthwhile to go over the results at the end of the year, and look for lessons, patterns and highlights.Last year: Zvi's 2024 In Movies. The Ratings Scale You can find all my ratings and reviews on Letterboxd. I do revise from time to time, either on rewatch or changing my mind. I encourage you to follow me there. Letterboxd ratings go from 0.5-5. The scale is trying to measure several things at once. 5: Masterpiece

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12:08

“Keeping Up Against the Joneses: Balsa’s 2025...

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/12/23

Several years ago Zvi Mowshowitz founded Balsa Research, a tiny nonprofit research organization currently focused on quantifying the impact of the Jones Act on the American economy, and working towards viable reform proposals.While changing century-old policy is not going to be easy, we continue to see many places where there is neglected groundwork that we’re well positioned to do, and we are improving at doing it with another year of practice under our belts. We’re looking to raise $200,000 to

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12:12

“Keeping Up Against the Joneses: Balsa’s 2025...

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/12/22

Balsa Research is a tiny nonprofit research organization currently focused on quantifying the impact of the Jones Act on the American economy, and working towards viable reform proposals. While changing century-old policy is not going to be easy, we continue to see many places where there is neglected groundwork that we’re well positioned to do, and we are improving at doing it with another year of practice under our belts. We’re looking to raise $200,000 to support our work this giving season,

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37:28

“The Revolution of Rising Expectations” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/12/22

Internet arguments like the $140,000 Question incident keep happening. The two sides say: Life sucks, you can’t get ahead, you can’t have a family or own a house. What are you talking about, median wages are up, unemployment is low and so on. The economic data is correct. Real wages are indeed up. Costs for food and clothing are way down while quality is up, housing is more expensive than it should be but is not much more expensive relative to incomes. We really do consume vastly more and

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113:50

“AI #147: Flash Forward” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/12/18

This week I covered GPT 5.2, which I concluded is a frontier model only for the frontier. OpenAI also gave us Image 1.5 and a new image generation mode inside ChatGPT. Image 1.5 looks comparable to Nana Banana Pro, it's hard to know which is better. They also inked a deal for Disney's characters, then sued Google for copyright infringement on the basis of Google doing all the copyright infringement. As a probable coda to the year's model releases we also got Gemini 3 Flash, which I cover in this

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37:38

“The $140K Question: Cost Changes Over Time” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/12/17

In The $140,000 Question, I went over recent viral claims about poverty in America.The calculations behind the claims were invalid, the central claim (that the ‘true poverty line’ was $140k) was absurd, but the terrible vibes are real. People increasingly feel that financial life is getting harder and that success is out of reach. ‘Real income’ is rising, but costs are rising even more. Before we get to my central explanations for that – the Revolution of Rising Expectations and the Revolution

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29:48

“The $140,000 Question” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/12/16

There was a no good, quite bad article by Michael Green that went viral. The condensed version was entitled ‘The Valley of Death: Why $100,000 Is the New Poverty,’ and a follow-up here. His actual claim in that post, which was what caught fire, was that the poverty line should be $140,000, and even that this number is him ‘being conservative.’ Obviously that is not remotely true, given that: America is the richest large country in history by a wide margin. $140,000 is at or above median

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