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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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13:37

“10 non-boring ways I’ve used AI in the last month”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/21

I use AI assistance for basically all of my work, for many hours, every day. My colleagues do the same. Recent surveys suggest >50% of Americans have used AI to help with their work in the last week. My architect recently started sending me emails that were clearly ChatGPT generated.[1] Despite that, I know surprisingly little about how other people use AI assitance. Or at least how people who aren't weird AI-influencers sharing their marketing courses on Twitter or LinkedIn use AI. So here is a

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9:30

“Introducing LinuxArena” by Tyler Tracy, Ram Potham,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/21

We are releasing LinuxArena, a new control setting comprised of 20 software engineering environments. Each environment consists of a set of SWE tasks, a set of possible safety failures, and a set of covert sabotage trajectories that cause these safety failures. LinuxArena can be used to evaluate the risk of AI deployments by assessing AI's sabotage capabilities, assessing control mitigations such as monitoring, and developing novel control techniques. This post will cover what LinuxArena is and the

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19:47

“The “Budgeting” Skill Has The Most Betweenness...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/20

Epistemic Status: Abstract claims, but grounded in data science... though the data science is somewhat stale. I wrote this on March 5th of 2026 based on memories of work I did and methods applied circa 2017, and pushed it out for publication after realizing that maybe there is appetite for it, after I saw this post. Suppose we took a snapshot of each person in the US, and made a list of their "skills", as one might do with a D&D character. I would like to report on what I expect would happen if

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6:44

“Finetuning Borges” by Linch

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/20

My newest hobby is fine-tuning a Chinese open-source LLM to generate Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (originally by Borges). The ambition isn’t to write a so-called “Borgesian” story “like” Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote but to fully generate, token-by-token, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. Importantly, this can’t just be a mere act of machine transcription, or even memorizing the story in the weights [to-do: attach paper]. No, the LLM has to fully generate a story that completely

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6:05

“9 kinds of hard-to-verify tasks” by Cleo Nardo

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/20

Introduction Some people talk about "hard-to-verify tasks" and "easy-to-verify tasks" like these are both natural kinds. But I think splitting tasks into "easy-to-verify" and "hard-to-verify" is like splitting birds into ravens and non-ravens. Easy-to-verify tasks are easy for the same reason — there's a known short program that takes a task specification and a candidate solution, and outputs a score, without using substantial resources or causing undesirable side effects.By contrast,

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4:52

“Automating philosophy if Timothy Williamson is...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/20

Timothy Williamson thinks philosophy is unexceptional. Timothy Williamson[1] thinks that philosophy[2] is far less distinct as a science as many people believe, including philosophers themselves. I've read a bunch of his stuff, and here are the claims I think constitute his view: Philosophy is a science. Of course, it's not a natural science (like particle physics, organic chemistry, nephrology). But neither are mathematics and computer science — they are formal sciences. Philosophy is likewise a

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46:20

“CLR’s Safe Pareto Improvements Research Agenda” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/20

Executive summary Safe Pareto improvements (SPIs) are ways of changing agents’ bargaining strategies that make all parties better off, regardless of their original strategies. SPIs are an unusually robust approach to preventing catastrophic conflict between AI systems, especially AIs capable of credible commitments. This is because SPIs can reduce the costs of conflict without shifting bargaining power, or requiring agents to agree on what counts as “fair”. Despite their appeal, SPIs aren’t

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3:59

“LLMs are about to disrupt algorithmic media feeds”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/20

I predict that LLMs are about to disrupt algorithmic media feeds, and that this will start with a startup that curates blogs for you. Big Media is Misaligned If you look at a list of the world's top 10 websites, half of them are media websites. Of these 5 media behemoths, 4 (YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) are misaligned media feeds. By "misaligned media feed", I mean a website where the primary user interface is you go to the homepage and a giant machine learning algorithm shows you what

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2:15

“Resources for starting and growing an AI safety org”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/20

It seems that AI safety is at least partly bottlenecked by a lack of orgs. To help address that, we’ve added a page to AISafety.com aimed at lowering the friction for starting one: AISafety.com/founders. This page was built largely as the result of a suggestion from @Ryan Kidd, who found he was frequently sharing the same set of resources with potential founders and realised it would be useful to have something similar publicly available. It lists: Fiscal sponsorsIncubatorsVCsArticles and tools As

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5:44

“Quality Matters Most When Stakes are Highest” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/20

Or, the end of the world is no excuse for sloppy work One morning when I was nine, my dad called me over to his computer. He wanted to show me this amazing Korean scientist who had managed to clone stem cells, and who was developing treatments to let people with spinal cord injuries – people like my dad – walk again on their own two legs. I don't remember exactly what he said next, or what I said back. I have a sense that I was excited too, and that I was upset when I learned the United States had

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6:45

“Feel like a room has bad vibes? The lighting is...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/20

I have now had a few years of experience doing architectural and interior design for many spaces that people seem to really love (most widely known Lighthaven, but before that we also had the Lightcone Offices, though I've also played a hand in designing some of the most popular areas at Constellation a few years back). Most people (including me a few years back) have surprisingly bad introspective access into why a room makes them feel certain things. Most of the time, people's ability to describe

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14:16

“I did a jhana meditation retreat (in 2024) with...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/20

I wrote this in 2024 and lightly edited it in April 2026. It doesn't substantively incorporate any post-2024 information, but Jhourney has continued to grow and seems to have a positive reputation in Berkeley circles, so I thought I'd post this as a slice of my experience at an earlier version of retreats they are still running today. I have not changed my mind on anything substantive, except where footnoted, and I stand behind my conclusions. It is not a strong general argument about jhanas, but

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11:45

“R1 CoT illegibility revisited” by nostalgebraist

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/19

This is a brief research note describing the results of running @Jozdien's research code for the paper "Reasoning Models Sometimes Output Illegible Chains of Thought" using the Novita provider on OpenRouter. tl;dr: I re-ran the paper's R1 GPQA experiments with no changes except using Novita, and got an average illegibility score of only 2.30 (vs. 4.30 in the paper), with no examples scoring above 5 (vs. 29.4% of examples scoring above 7 in the paper).Novita uses fp8 quantization, but as far as I

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49:52

“Reevaluating AGI Ruin in 2026” by lc

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/19

It's been about four years since Eliezer Yudkowsky published AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities, a 43-point list of reasons the default outcome from building AGI is everyone dying. A week later, Paul Christiano replied with Where I Agree and Disagree with Eliezer, signing on to about half the list and pushing back on most of the rest. For people who were young and not in the bay area, like me, these essays were probably more significant than old timers would expect. Before it became completely

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4:04

“If It’s Worth Arguing, It’s Worth Arguing With...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/19

It's easy to disagree with people. You just say, "That's wrong" and decline to elaborate. But that's not very interesting. If you want to be making progress — instead of ragebaiting — it usually helps to find a way for your disagreement to be productive. Productive disagreements start in the place where you are already in agreement. The places where your models of reality overlap. Without any overlap at all, it gets quite difficult to successfully converse. You need to be speaking a language your

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10:07

“There are only four skills: design, technical,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/19

Epistemic status: Completely schizo galaxy-brained theory Lightcone[1] operates on a "generalist" philosophy. Most of our full-time staff have the title "generalist", and in any given year they work on a wide variety of tasks — from software development on the LessWrong codebase to fixing an overflowing toilet at Lighthaven, our 30,000 sq. ft. campus. One of our core rules is that you should not delegate a task you don't know how to perform yourself. This is a very intense rule and has lots of

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59:00

“Having OCD is like living in North Korea (Here’s how...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/18

[Author's note: this post is the narrative version that explains my journey with OCD and how I treated it. The short version provides quick, actionable advice for treating OCD.] The following is the most painful experience I've ever had. Four years ago in the parking lot of my rock climbing gym… …my heart was pumping out of my chest, I was sweating profusely, and an overwhelming sense of panic and impending doom had a vice grip on my soul. A painful death was surely imminent. I felt like I was

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4:22

“Claude knows who you are” by Smaug123

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/18

Kelsey Piper noticed that Opus 4.7 is the first model which can identify her from her unpublished writing. I replicated the experiment myself, which is absolutely terrifying given that I am one of the most minor Internet personalities who has actually written stuff on the Internet. Claude professes not to know who I am, but reliably identifies me from my writing. Methodology: clear your custom instructions in claude.ai, and set your name to Unknown Visitor. Enter incognito chat mode with Claude

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8:58

“Vladimir Putin’s CEV is probably pretty good” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/18

(Written quickly for Inkhaven, I hope someone someday makes a better case for this than I will here) Kelsey Piper on Twitter: me: it's not okay to hit your sister 5yo: is it okay to kill Vladimir Putin? me: ...yes, if you were in a situation where it was somehow relevant it's okay to kill Vladimir Putin 5yo: well, my sister is WORSE than Vladimir Putin Now, I do think Vladimir Putin is probably a pretty bad man all things considered. I personally am sympathetic to the current equilibria among

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12:33

“Post-mortem’ing my earliest ML research paper, 7...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/18

Written quickly for the Inkhaven Residency. One of the things I like most about LessWrong yearly reviews is that they occur a full year after: for example, the reviews for posts written in 2019 happen at the end of 2020; we just reviewed the posts for 2024. As the LessWrong team writes: LessWrong has the goal of making intellectual progress on important problems. To make progress, you gotta examine your community's outputs not only when they're first published, but also once enough time has passed

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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

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