habryka Hey Everyone! As part of working on dialogues over the last few weeks I've asked a bunch of people what kind of conversations they would be most interested in reading, and one of the most comm

The morning after had come, and all the students had gathered silently around the four Tables of Hogwarts, Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres among them. He had collapsed in exhaustion last night and been awoken in the infirmary next morning, still muzzy, with the Philosopher's Stone underneath his…

If an unaligned entity invests billions of dollars into an application which you use, where they benefit from wasting your time, and you haven’t at least done a cost-benefit analysis so that your usage minimizes your costs and maximizes your benefits—You are probably getting fucked over. Mistake:…

dynomight.net/theanine-2 Theanine is an amino acid that occurs naturally in tea. Many people take it as a supplement for stress or anxiety. It’s mechanistically plausible, but the scientific literature hasn’t been able to find much of a benefit. So I ran a 16-month blinded self-experiment in the…

And it was evening and it was morning, the last day. June 15th, 1992. The beginning light of morning, the pre-dawn before sunrise, was barely brightening the sky. To the east of Hogwarts, where the Sun would rise, that faintest tinge of grey made barely visible the hilly horizon beyond the Quidditch…

Apr 2025 Comments at lemmy, substack. I don’t know how to internet, but I know you’re supposed to get into beefs. In the nearly five years this blog has existed, the closest I’ve come was once politely asking Slime Mold Time Mold, “Hello, would you like to have a beef?” They said, “That sounds great…

When I started graduate school (for math), I was very interested in big ideas. I had had a couple experiences of having general research intuitions pan out really well and felt like the core of good research is having a brave idea, a gestalt. I went into grad school looking for the “gestalt people”.…

This is a cross-post from https://250bpm.substack.com/p/accountability-sinks Back in the 1990s, ground squirrels were briefly fashionable pets, but their popularity came to an abrupt end after an incident at Schiphol Airport on the outskirts of Amsterdam. In April 1999, a cargo of 440 of the rodents…

I speak to many entrepreneurial people trying to do a large amount of good by starting a nonprofit organisation. I think this is often an error for four main reasons. ScalabilityCapital counterfactualsStandardsLearning potentialEarning to give potential These arguments are most applicable to…

At first Anna had been gratified to see the final Quidditch Cup go on so long - as a Gryffindor she was a bystander at the House Cup thing, it wasn't like Gryffindor ever won. In contrast, last year's World Cup of Quidditch, to which her family had bought some very expensive tickets, had been over…

AI Futures Project is the group behind AI 2027. I’ve been helping them with their blog. Posts written or co-written by me include: Beyond The Last Horizon - what’s behind that METR result showing that AI time horizons double every seven months? And is it really every seven months? Might it be…

The Sun shone down on the Scottish green, striking sparks of reflected white from every passing dewdrop or reflective leaf that happened to position itself correctly, a clear blue sky for a funeral. Harry had declined to give the eulogy. He'd declined for the second time. Professor Flitwick had…

The gibbous moon riding higher in the cloudless sky, the stars and wash of the Milky Way visible in all their majesty within the darkness, all these shone down upon the graveyard to bear witness from their unimaginable distances. In the instant when Harry had realised there was no way at all left to…

I’ve had this sitting in my drafts for the last year. I wish I’d been able to release it sooner, but on the bright side, it’ll make a lot more sense to people who have already read AI 2027. There’s a good chance that AGI will be trained before this decade is out. By AGI I mean “An AI system at least…

image source AI job displacement will affect young people first, disrupting the usual succession of power and locking the next generation out of our institutions. I’m coining the term youth lockout to describe this phenomenon. We are on track to build AI agents that can independently perform…

Epistemic status: highly certain, or something The Spending What We Must 💸11% pledge In short: Members pledge to spend at least 11% of their income on effectively increasing their own productivity. This pledge is likely higher-impact for most people than the Giving What We Can 🔸10% Pledge, and we…

dynomight.net/paper Paper is good. Somehow, a blank page and a pen makes the universe open up before you. Why paper has this unique power is a mystery to me, but I think we should all stop trying to resist this reality and just accept it. Also, the world needs way more mundane blogging. So let me…

John Henry First Encounters the Steam Drill by Nick Danzi The AI labs are aiming to create AGI that could obsolete all human labor, severing the dependency that powerful actors have on the regular people. If they achieve this, they risk triggering the intelligence curse, leaving humans irrelevant…

In 1996, as the World Wide Web was taking off, Larry Page and Sergey Brin watched from the sidelines. Unlike the rest of Silicon Valley, they weren’t interested in using the Internet to buy and sell stuff, or to read and publish stories, or even to score Grateful Dead tickets. They wanted to use it,…

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. We have no elected government, nor are we…

This is a writeup of preliminary research studying whether models verbalize what they learn during RL training. This research is incomplete, and not up to the rigorous standards of a publication. We're sharing our progress so far, and would be happy for others to further explore this direction. Code…

TL;DR Having a good research track record is some evidence of good big-picture takes, but it's weak evidence. Strategic thinking is hard, and requires different skills. But people often conflate these skills, leading to excessive deference to researchers in the field, without evidence that that…

I. A spectre is haunting Europe. Several spectres, actually. One of them is the spectre of communism. The others are literal ghosts. They live in abandoned mansions. Sometimes they wail eerily or make floorboards creak. If you arrange things just right, you might be able to capture them on film. Or…

*Disclaimer* I am writing this post in a personal capacity; the opinions I express are my own and do not represent my employer. I think that more people and orgs (especially nonprofits) should consider negotiating the cost of sizable expenses. In my experience, there is usually nothing to lose by…

The Fight Between Carnival and Lent by Pieter Bruegel the Elder “Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought.” - Albert Szent-Gyorgyi About a year ago, Dwarkesh asked Dario Amodei a question about LLMs and novel discovery. Marginal Revolution recently…

“Who do I call if I want to speak to Europe?” — Kissinger It was sort of an accident that the EU was first to regulate AI. Issues will tend to drift up to the European level if they are politically uninteresting to national governments, and needing an unpleasant solution or technical implementation.…

The go-to slogan for AI aficionados—and the tagline of this very magazine—is that we should "capture the benefits, and mitigate the risks". Its essential qualities are, one, that it acknowledges pros and cons, but, two, is sufficiently abstract that everyone can assign their own meaning. We all…

In AI, 2025 is a year for strategic clarity. We can finally part the fog of war and glimpse where this technology is headed, how companies & governments are likely to react to it, and how you, dear reader, should think about its effects on your life and work. In this essay, the first of two on AI’s…

This post is brought to you by my sponsor, Warp. This is the fifth in a series of timed posts. The way these work is that if it takes me more than one hour to complete the post, an applet that I made deletes everything I’ve written so far and I abandon the post. I gave myself two hours for this one.…