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LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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4:51

“Eat The Richtext” by dreeves

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/18

A year and a half ago I vibe-coded a tool, Eat The Richtext, that I've been using practically every day (every week in any case) ever since. Friends tell me they continue to use it as well. I think that means it's time for it to graduate from the blurb I put on LessWrong to a proper LessWrong post. Ok, you know how sometimes you copy/paste a chunk of text into Discord or GitHub Issues or a text message or anywhere else that doesn't support rich text (aka RTF)? And then alllll of the following

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9:47

“Small batches and the mythical single piece flow” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/18

Context: Post #8 in my sequence of private Lightcone Infrastructure memos edited for public consumption. When you finish something, you learn something about how you did that thing. When you finish many things at the same time, you do not get to apply the lessons you learned from each of those things to the others. This insight, turns out, was non-trivially a core cause of the industrial revolution. The assembly line is one of the foundational technologies of modern manufacturing. In the

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20:32

“How Colds Spread” by RobertM

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/18

It seems like a catastrophic civilizational failure that we don't have confident common knowledge of how colds spread. There have been a number of studies conducted over the years, but most of those were testing secondary endpoints, like how long viruses would survive on surfaces, or how likely they were to be transmitted to people's fingers after touching contaminated surfaces, etc. However, a few of them involved rounding up some brave volunteers, deliberately infecting some of them, and then

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8:52

“Middlemen Are Eating the World (And That’s Good,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/18

I think many people have some intuition that work can be separated between “real work“ (farming, say, or building trains) and “middlemen” (e.g. accounting, salespeople, lawyers, bureaucrats, DEI strategists). “Bullshit jobs” by David Graeber is a more intellectualized framing of the same intuition. Many people believe that middlemen are entirely useless, and we can get rid of (almost) all middleman jobs, RETVRN to people doing real work, and society would be much better off. Source:

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5:05

“Why is American mass-market tea so terrible?” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/18

Note: definitely true, especially my aesthetic preferences, and the speculative historical synthesis. There are some hedonic treadmills which, even after I've climbed them, let me enjoy the entry-level experience. In the case of tea, the entry-level experience[1] is a cheap tea bag of black tea. Sadly, tea does not have one of the nicer treadmills. Having spent the last few years exploring high-quality Chinese tea of various stripes, a cup of tea brewed from a mass-market tea bag is relegated to

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8:37

“An Analogue Of Set Relationships For Distribution”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/18

Audio note: this article contains 86 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Here's a conceptual problem David and I have been lightly tossing around the past couple days. “A is a subset of B” we might visualize like this: If we want a fuzzy/probabilistic version of the same diagram, we might draw something like this: And we can easily come up with some ad-hoc operationalization of that “fuzzy subset”

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19:07

“AI 2025 - Last Shipmas” by Simon Lermen

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/18

ACT I: CHRISTMAS EVE It all starts with a cryptic tweet from Jimmy Apples on X. The tweet by Jimmy Apples makes people at other AI labs quite nervous. It spurs a rush in the other AI labs to get their own automated R&D going. They announce fully automated AI R&D on Christmas Eve during the annual “12 days of Shipmas”. Initially, AI agents work on curating data, tuning parameters, and improving RL-environments to try to hill-climb evaluations much like human researchers do. The main alignment

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98:49

“Varieties Of Doom” by jdp

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/18

There has been a lot of talk about "p(doom)" over the last few years. This has always rubbed me the wrong way because "p(doom)" didn't feel like it mapped to any specific belief in my head. In private conversations I'd sometimes give my p(doom) as 12%, with the caveat that "doom" seemed nebulous and conflated between several different concepts. At some point it was decided a p(doom) over 10% makes you a "doomer" because it means what actions you should take with respect to AI are overdetermined. I

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39:28

“Lobsang’s Children” by Tomás B.

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/17

I study so hard. My grandfather makes me. It is not fun. My life is studying. I am home-schooled. I don't have much freedom. Grandfather says it is important that I learn Chinese in both its modern and classical forms. I like to think I am smart, but I am not a genius. I have to work really hard to keep up with Grandfather's desires, while also doing well on the state-mandated exams. And I do pretty well. I write in English now because it's mine. It's what I learned for the state exams and not for

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8:38

“Mediators: a different route through conflict” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/17

(content note: discussion of war and mass death; also a long aside about the philosophy of apologies) After 100,000 people were killed in the Bosnian war, the three sides eventually met for mediation in the United States. To be clear, the attempted negotiators for most of the war were the EU and the UN, but after the Srebrenica massacre (8,000 men and boys killed) in an area that the UN had designated a 'safe area', the US was shocked and felt that if they didn't take responsibility for ending the

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4:37

“Close open loops” by habryka

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/17

Context: Post #6 in my sequence of private Lightcone Infrastructure memos edited for public consumption. David Allen, of Getting Things Done fame says: Every commitment unfinished is an “open loop”; and when it is tracked in your psyche, instead of your system, it will require energy and attention to track and maintain. Once the open loops are captured, you can manage completion by using an external system that takes much less energy than keeping it in your head. Every commitment unfinished

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31:51

“Video games are philosophy’s playground” by Rachel Shu

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/17

Crypto people have this saying: "cryptocurrencies are macroeconomics' playground." The idea is that blockchains let you cheaply spin up toy economies to test mechanisms that would be impossibly expensive or unethical to try in the real world. Want to see what happens with a 200% marginal tax rate? Launch a token with those rules and watch what happens. (Spoiler: probably nothing good, but at least you didn't have to topple a government to find out.) I think video games, especially multiplayer

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11:19

“Mixed Feelings on Social Munchkinry” by Screwtape

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/17

This is less me expounding on a thesis and more me musing about a topic where I have conflicting intuitions. Epistemic status: exploratory. One thing: What do I mean by munchkin? "Munchkin" is a term from the tabletop roleplaying game community. It's talking about the kind of person who treats the game as a system to optimize, doing weird or unexpected things that aren't against the letter of the rules but often are against the spirit in order to gain some advantage. It's a term that usually has

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8:04

“Diagonalization: A (slightly) more rigorous model of...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/17

In my post on Wednesday (Paranoia: A Beginner's Guide), I talked at a high level about the experience of paranoia, and gave two models (the lemons market model and the OODA loop model) that try get us a bit closer to understanding its nature and purpose. I then made a big claim that went largely unargued in the post, that there are exactly three kinds of strategies that make sense to pursue in adversarial information environments: You blind yourself You eliminate the sources of deception You act

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18:07

“Where is the Capital? An Overview” by johnswentworth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/17

When a new dollar goes into the capital markets, after being bundled and securitized and lent several times over, where does it end up? When society's total savings increase, what capital assets do those savings end up invested in? When economists talk about “capital assets”, they mean things like roads, buildings and machines. When I read through a company's annual reports, lots of their assets are instead things like stocks and bonds, short-term debt, and other “financial” assets - i.e. claims on

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12:20

“Matrices map between biproducts” by jessicata

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/16

Audio note: this article contains 98 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Why are linear functions between finite-dimensional vector spaces representable by matrices? And why does matrix multiplication compose the corresponding linear maps? There's geometric intuition for this, e.g. presented by 3Blue1Brown. I will alternatively present a category-theoretic analysis. The short version is that, in the

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36:20

“Why does ChatGPT think mammoths were alive...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/16

The is a slimmed down version which omits some extra examples but includes my theorizing about ChatGPT, my investigations of it, and my findings. Epistemic status: Pretty uncertain. I think my conclusions are probably more right than wrong, more useful than harmful, and would especially benefit people with only an average or below-average understanding of LLMs. There may be prior art that I'm unaware of; if not, maybe this will provide a launching point for others to begin deeper investigations. In

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9:48

“7 Vicious Vices of Rationalists” by Ben Pace

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/16

Vices aren't behaviors that one should never do. Rather, vices are behaviors that are fine and pleasurable to do in moderation, but tempting to do in excess. The classical vices are actually good in part. Moderate amounts of gluttony is just eating food, which is important. Moderate amounts of envy is just "wanting things", which is a motivator of much of our economy. What are some things that rationalists are wont to do, and often to good effect, but that can grow pathological? 1. Contrarianism

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6:40

“Put numbers on stuff, all the time, otherwise scope...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/16

Context: Post #6 in my sequence of private Lightcone Infrastructure memos edited for public consumption. In almost any role at Lightcone you will have to make prioritization decisions about which projects to work on, which directions to take a project in, and how much effort to invest in any aspect of a project. Those decisions are hard. Often those decisions have lots of different considerations that are hard to compare. To make those decisions you will have to make models of the world. Many

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10:13

“The skills and physics of high-performance driving,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/16

High performance driving = motorsport = racecar driving Even if you have a license and drive a car, you probably don't understand what is hard about racing. I think the answer is interesting (in general I think knowing why things are hard is interesting, but this is my hobby) and it's further interesting to think about why people don't get the difficulty. Motorsport is interesting because (1) people have a lot of experience with the adjacent activity, namely regular driving, (2) few people have

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