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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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24:39

“2025 Year in Review” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/01

It's that time. It's been a hell of a year.At the start we barely had reasoning models. Now we have Claude Code and Opus 4.5. I don’t code. Yet now I cause code to exist whenever something about a website annoys me, or when I get that programmer's realization that there's something I am planning on doing at least three times. Because why not? The progress has simultaneously been mind bogglingly impressive and fast. But a lot of people don’t see it that way, because progress has been

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11:26

“Chromosome identification methods” by TsviBT

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/01

PDF version. berkeleygenomics.org. This is a linkpost for "Chromosome identification methods"; a few of the initial sections are reproduced here. Abstract Chromosome selection is a hypothetical technology that assembles the genome of a new living cell out of whole chromosomes taken from multiple source cells. To do chromosome selection, you need a method for chromosome identification—distinguishing between chromosomes by number, and ideally also by allele content. This article investigates

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50:47

“AI Futures Timelines and Takeoff Model: Dec 2025...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/31

We’ve significantly upgraded our timelines and takeoff models! It predicts when AIs will reach key capability milestones: for example, Automated Coder / AC (full automation of coding) and superintelligence / ASI (much better than the best humans at virtually all cognitive tasks). This post will briefly explain how the model works, present our timelines and takeoff forecasts, and compare it to our previous (AI 2027) models (spoiler: the AI Futures Model predicts about 3 years longer timelines to

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13:52

“The Plan - 2025 Update” by johnswentworth, David Lorell

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/31

What's “The Plan”? For several years now, around the end of the year, I (John) write a post on our plan for AI alignment. That plan hasn’t changed too much over the past few years, so both this year's post and last year's are written as updates to The Plan - 2023 Version. I’ll give a very quick outline here of what's in the 2023 Plan post. If you have questions or want to argue about points, you should probably go to that post to get the full version. What is The Plan for AI alignment? Briefly:

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18:34

“Grading my 2022 predictions for 2025” by Yitz

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/31

Three years ago, back in 2022, I wrote "A Tentative Timeline of The Near Future (2022-2025) for Self-Accountability." Well, 2025 is almost over now, so let's see how well I did! I'll go over each individual prediction, and assign myself a subjective grade based on how close I got to the truth. Predictions for 2022 Post written by AI with minimal prompting reaches 30+ upvotes on LessWrong Score: probably D. I didn't see any high-karma posts from 2022 which were obviously AI-generated, but

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24:35

“Dating Roundup #9: Signals and Selection” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/31

Ultimately, it comes down to one question. Are you in? For you, and for them.You’re Single Because They Got The Ick The Ick, the ultimate red flag, makes perfect sense and is all about likelihood ratios. Koenfucius: The ‘ick’ is a colloquial term for a feeling of disgust triggered by a specific—typically trivial—behaviour from a romantic partner, often leading to the relationship's demise. New research explores why some are more prone to getting it than others. Robin Hanson: “Women also

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6:18

“End-of year donation taxes 101” by GradientDissenter

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/30

Tl;dr If you’re taking the standard deduction (ie donating <~$15k), ignore all this–there are basically no tax implications for you Consider how much money you want to donate to c3s specifically (as opposed to c4s, political stuff, random individuals, some foreign organizations, etc.). For money you definitely want to give to c3s, you can put it in a DAF to count them as a donation this year, then figure out where to direct it later. For non-c3 money, it doesn’t really matter when you give it A

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4:31

“Don’t Sell Stock to Donate” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/30

When you sell stock [1] you pay capital gains tax, but there's no tax if you donate the stock directly. Under a bunch of assumptions, someone donating $10k could likely increase their donations by ~$1k by donating stock. This applies to all 501(c) organizations, such as regular 501(c)3 non-profits, but also 501(c)4s such as advocacy groups. In the US, when something becomes more valuable and you sell it you need to pay tax proportional to the gains. [2] This gets complicated based on how

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58:10

“Steering RL Training: Benchmarking Interventions...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/30

This project is an extension of work done for Neel Nanda's MATS 9.0 Training Phase. Neel Nanda and Josh Engels advised the project. Initial work on this project was done with David Vella Zarb. Thank you to Arya Jakkli, Paul Bogdan, and Monte MacDiarmid for providing feedback on the post and ideas.Overview of the top interventions compared to RL and No Intervention baseline runs. All runs are trained on an environment with a reward hacking loophole except for the RL baseline, which is trained on a

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6:47

“CFAR’s todo list re: our workshops” by AnnaSalamon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/30

(This post is part of a sequence of year-end efforts to invite real conversation about CFAR; you’ll find more about our workshops, as well as our fundraiser, at What's going on at CFAR? Updates and Fundraiser and at More details on CFAR's new workshops) In part of that post, we discuss the main thing that bothered me about our past workshop and why I think it is probably fixed now (though we’re still keeping an eye out). Here, I list the biggest remaining known troubles with our workshops and our

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5:09

“Many can write faster asm than the compiler, yet...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/30

There's a take I've seen going around, which goes approximately like this: It used to be the case that you had to write assembly to make computers do things, but then compilers came along. Now we have optimizing compilers, and those optimizing compilers can write assembly better than pretty much any human. Because of that, basically nobody writes assembly anymore. The same is about to be true of regular programming. I 85% agree with this take. However, I think there's one important inaccuracy: even

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8:01

“More details on CFAR’s new workshops” by AnnaSalamon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/30

(This post is part of a sequence of year-end efforts to invite real conversation about CFAR; you’ll find more about our workshops, as well as our fundraiser, at What's going on at CFAR? Updates and Fundraiser.) If you’d like to know more about CFAR's current workshops (either because you’re thinking of attending / sending a friend, or because you’re just interested), this post is for you. Our focus in this post is on the new parts of our content. Kibitzing on content is welcome and appreciated

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55:05

“What’s going on at CFAR? (Updates and Fundraiser)”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/30

Introduction / What's up with this post My main aim with this post is to have a real conversation about aCFAR[1] that helps us be situated within a community that (after this conversation) knows us. My idea for how to do this is to show you guys a bunch of pieces of how we’re approaching things, in enough detail to let you kibitz.[2] My secondary aim, which I also care about, is to see if some of you wish to donate, once you understand who we are and what we’re doing. (Some of you may wish to skip

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10:05

“Re: “A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/29

A decade+ ago, there was this post A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design, which noted that we seem to be designing all our devices to have smooth glass omni-interfaces. And when you look at like Marvel Movies that depict the Near Future, it's basically the same thing except holograms: Which is 3D which is nice, but, there's something fundamentally... sad/improverished about it. The essay notes: Before we think about how we should interact with our Tools Of The Future, let's consider what

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9:08

“The CIA Poisoned My Dog: Two Stories About Paranoid...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/29

[Cross-posted from my substack, https://neverthesamerivertwice.substack.com.] The whole family was home around christmas time. We were hanging out in the kitchen after dinner. My brother started asking me about national security law. He’d graduated from a well ranked law school about six months before, and I was about six months away from graduating from a slightly higher ranked law school, and both our parents are lawyers, so law was not an unusual topic in our house. Maybe twenty feet away the

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26:59

“Have You Tried Thinking About It As Crystals?” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/28

Epistemic Status: Written with my Simulator Worlds framing. E.g I ran simulated scenarios with claude in order to generate good cognitive basins and then directed those to output this. This post is Internally Verified (e.g I think most of the claims are correct with an average of 60-75% certainty) and a mixture of an exploratory and analytical world.[1] This post also has a more technical companion piece pointing out the connections to Singular Learning Theory and Geometric Deep Learning for the

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2:33

“Glucose Supplementation for Sustained Stimulant...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/28

The ObservationI take 60mg methylphenidate daily. Despite this, I often become exhausted and need to nap. Taking small amounts of pure glucose (150-300mg every 20-60 minutes) eliminates this fatigue. This works even when I already eat carbohydrates. E.g. 120g of oats in the morning don't prevent the exhaustion. The Mechanism Facts: Wiehler et al. (2022) found that cognitive fatigue correlates with glutamate accumulation in the prefrontal cortex. Glutamate is the brain's main excitatory

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4:11

“A Conflict Between AI Alignment and Philosophical...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/28

(This argument reduces my hope that we will have AIs that are both aligned with humans in some sense and also highly philosophically competent, which aside from achieving a durable AI pause, has been my main hope for how the future turns out well. As this is a recent realization[1], I'm still pretty uncertain how much I should update based on it, or what its full implications are.) Being a good alignment researcher seems to require a correct understanding of the nature of values. However metaethics

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3:47

“Shared Houses Illegal?” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/28

As part of the general discourse around cost of living, Julia and I were talking about families sharing housing. This turned into us each writing a post ( mine, hers), but is it actually legal for a family to live with housemates? In the places I've checked it seems like yes. While zoning is complicated and I'm not a lawyer, it looks to me like people commonly describe the situation as both more restrictive and more clear cut than it really is. For example, Tufts University

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1:43

“Show Funders Your Utility Function Over Money...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/28

You have more context on your ability to make use of funds than fits into a specific numerical ask.[1] You want to give funders good information, and the natural type-signature for this is a utility function over money - how much good you think you can do with different funding levels, normalized to the max EV your project has. I[2] made a little tool for drawing utility functions over money[3], for use in funding applications. Features: Copy graph to clipboard as CSV and paste back in[4] By

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