I had a dream about an old man climbing onto a table and flinging bottles. Then this beloved bar was about to die. That was the whole dream. No plot… just the sense that something circulating in the room had been attacked.I spent a month turning that into a short. A town set in permanent dusk. A tavern that used to pass one bone die around for a week at a time. Not a lucky charm. The many faces of chaos: some must win, some must lose.The father takes it off the table, wrecks the stock, and the town

This is a link post. [...] “Nearly every day, there is a frightening new story about how Big Tech companies are losing control of the technology they are developing, with potentially cataclysmic results,” Sanders said. “The leaders of the major AI companies publicly acknowledge that they do not fully understand the technology and that it is escaping their control. It is irresponsible for society to allow them to move forward and make these products even more advanced. That's why I am introd...

Are you ready to navigate the complexities of building a social enterprise? In this essential lesson, we distill the critical do's and don'ts for establishing and managing your organization, focusing on team recruitment, governance, knowledge management, and maintaining your social mission. Avoid common pitfalls and set your venture up for lasting impact.🎯 Learning Objectives• Understand the importance of carefully selecting founding teams, executive teams, and board members based on commitment and

Can We Stay Connected Without Becoming the Same?Most of us eventually discover that the hardest relationships are not always the ones without affection.Sometimes they are the ones where history, loyalty or dependence exists alongside a disagreement neither person can simply make disappear.A family member sees the world differently. A friend supports something you cannot understand. Someone you work with holds values that collide with your own. The instinct can be to solve that discomfort by choosing

This is a link post. [...] “Nearly every day, there is a frightening new story about how Big Tech companies are losing control of the technology they are developing, with potentially cataclysmic results,” Sanders said. “The leaders of the major AI companies publicly acknowledge that they do not fully understand the technology and that it is escaping their control. It is irresponsible for society to allow them to move forward and make these products even more advanced. That's why I am introducing

I'm pretty worried about how AI might change the world a lot very soon. In some of these cases things go very wrong very quickly, in others things go very right very quickly, but I'm increasingly (relative to 2024) expecting a messy middle path where, whether we end up with a good or bad outcome, things might get weird for a while. Our supply chains are fragile, fulfilment is largely just-in-time, and if we'll suddenly need way more of some things they might not be available. Thinking a lot

Part of a longer conversation regarding Dr. Watson's theory of Life as a Song.https://youtu.be/_jkgh0oSHkY

Stoic leadership teaches restraint with reputation. Scott Smith explains why leaders cannot manage every opinion or interpretation others hold. 🎙️ Episode Summary Marcus Aurelius lived under constant judgment, criticism, misunderstanding, and competing interpretations of his motives. Stoicism teaches leaders to distinguish between their conduct and another person’s opinion of that conduct. In this episode, Scott Smith reflects on the urge to be understood and the quiet temptation to manage

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit claremontinstitute.substack.comDolly Parton, a widely adored icon in country music and American pop culture, passed away last week at 80. A friend to both the right and left, Parton transcended national politics by her personal grace and remarkable philanthropy. Born to a poor, illiterate family, she leaves behind a legacy of generosity that includes Imagination Library, a nonprofit delivering millions of books to children worldwide at no

An outlier can disrupt a clean set of data, but it can also reveal something the current model has missed. The unexpected parts of our lives may not be mistakes. They may be invitations to look again.

This is a link post. The team will include me (Jeremy Gillen), Abram Demski, Sam Eisenstat, Scott Garrabrant and Kaarel Hänni. We'll soon recruit additional experienced researchers and later we plan to hire interns and junior researchers. The team will continue agent foundations research in the spirit of the MIRI Agent Foundations team. This means we’ll be trying to create new theory for understanding minds. Fundamental changes in how we understand minds are necessary before we can build ...

Sun Tzu Wrote is a podcast inspired by one of history's greatest works of strategy and wisdom: The Art of War. Written over 2,500 years ago by the legendary Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, this timeless text has transcended the battlefield to become a guide for life, leadership, and personal growth. The Art of War is more than a manual for military commanders—it’s a masterclass in strategy, adaptability, and discipline. Sun Tzu’s teachings explore the art of understanding your environmen...

TLDR: an org that pays people to "just read the fucking transcripts"; a large amount of people reading anonymized claude code/RL/eval transcripts flagged by a very high recall low precision monitor could catch warning shots, reward hacking and general weird stuff without needing to absorb any good people and this doesn't seem to exist. 5 million dollars per month could pay 1000 people to process literally all tokens in a frontier RL run and would catch ~15 serious incidents per month in bearish

A quiet invitation to soften the heart, enter humility, and listen beneath the noise—where love, truth, and the Tao have been speaking all along.Nigel Lott teaandzen.org In the quiet between heartbeats a whisper calls you home, you are not broken you are becoming. These threads of silence and sound are letters from the threshold, offerings from the edge of stillness. Nigel  TEA AND ZEN - MAIN LIBRARY

Power Is Incremental In StepsWe are after power. All of us, all of the time. Spinoza calls virtue nothing other than power, the capacity of a thing to persist and to act from its own nature, and once you see it that way you stop pretending that anyone is after something else. You are after power. So am I. The only question worth asking is how it is acquired.It is acquired in steps.That sentence is the whole of it, and it is also the part nobody wants to hear. You cannot leap to the finish line. You

To do a plank..Correctly..Is a hard thing to do.The instructor announced as we listened on the veranda of a steamy Costa Rican morning in San Jose.Often, it looks easy to do from the outside...Because we do not see the effort required,From the inside.Immediately, a Tibetan singing bowl was struck in the background: an elongated ringing followed by a trailing silence circling off into eternity - we held planking on our big toes.

This is a link post. The team will include me (Jeremy Gillen), Abram Demski, Sam Eisenstat, Scott Garrabrant and Kaarel Hänni. We'll soon recruit additional experienced researchers and later we plan to hire interns and junior researchers. The team will continue agent foundations research in the spirit of the MIRI Agent Foundations team. This means we’ll be trying to create new theory for understanding minds. Fundamental changes in how we understand minds are necessary before we can build

Playing the Second Half is about lived stories, not recipes for how to live.Through personal reflections, conversations and films, I explore the many second halves we experience in life - the ones we choose and the ones life chooses for us.A place for curiosity, connection, time, change and people trying, in their own way, to live a good life.Viva a vida!Music licensed through Soundstripe.Endless MotionCode: XZJ69AQVUOZYBUR5 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other

To all my fellow researchers doing SLT, computational mechanics, one of ARC's programs, natural abstractions/condensation, proofs on NNs (or any interp on small models), this is for you. Tensor transformers (ie replacing your MLPs & attention with bilinear variants) are performant and allow you to deploy the full power of linear algebra. In fact, our recent paper used generalized cosine similarity on the full tensor transformer. And yes, I mean cos-sim defined on the eg 9th order tensor, not

“Long may your awareness of Love and its power abide within you — its undying beauty always to remain.”Nigel Lott teaandzen.org Meditation Sans Frontieres 501 (C) 3 Registered Charity Tax EIN 81-3411835 May the work offered here serve peace, serve healing, serve remembrance, and serve the quiet dignity of being alive. May this sanctuary belong not to one person alone, but to the field of life itself. And may all who encounter it feel, even for a moment, that nothing is missing and they are not