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Stream: the internet coming at me (230 items, baked 2026-09-06). Shelf: what I decided to keep. Surprise draws from both.
misc — 190 items
Overcoming Bias · latest 9/4/2026
Disclosure Seems Unlikely Modern Worries Aliens Are Not Crazy Unlikely Testimony Data Project Make Peace With Darwin No-New-Physics Consciousness Digital Mind Suicide Digital Mind Castes The Modern Mind's Fatal Flaw Easy To Hard Discipline Academic Careers Paths How To Be A Usually-Right Contrarian Status And Social-Skill Bias Why Sheep Need Pigs in Sheepdog’s Clothing Who Are Your "Descendants"? Our Likely Future Filter: World Govt The End Of Culture 200yrs of Reasons For World Govt LLM-judged policy debates Overly Smooth Drained Strict Costly Norms Callard's Uni-Context LessWrong · latest 9/2/2026
How My Students Think About AI Brief independent investigation of agents’ behavior, reasoning and collaboration in the OpenAI / Hugging Face hacking incident On Writing #3 Big-World Intuitions Four LLM loss functions → four flavors of LLM misalignment FAQ: Isn't AGI coming too soon for reprogenetics to help? LLMs are (still) mostly powered by imitative learning, not RL The Long (Self-)Correction The worthlessness of vitamin D is mildly exaggerated AI 2040: Plan A Shtetl-Optimized · latest 9/1/2026
LLMs and self-referentiality Anthropic’s LLM watermarking Better than gold Michael Rabin memorial conference Enough with all the world-historic milestones NISQ and quantum supremacy did not fail Held Prize call for nominations (+ call for postdocs) Announcing BQP Partners: my and my brother’s new angel-investing venture Happy 250th! An American privacy emergency: Guest post from Cynthia Dwork et al. SLIME MOLD TIME MOLD · latest 8/30/2026
Links for August 2026 For the Love of the Game Meet the Meetups Czar A Stupid Idea for AI Alignment We Came up with by Looking at the List of Specification Gaming Behaviours Links for July 2026 Homework for SMTM-6941: Lithium Problem Sets You Can Discover the Drives Links for June 2026 Links for May 2026 Links for April 2026 Maggie Appleton · latest 8/18/2026
August 2026 In Memoriam, Encountering World War I, and Thinkable Horrors One Developer, Two Dozen Agents, Zero Alignment Gas Town’s Agent Patterns, Design Bottlenecks, and Vibecoding at Scale January 2026 A Treatise on AI Chatbots Undermining the Enlightenment Vibe Code is Legacy Code May 2025 Statistically, When Will My Baby Be Born? ChatGPT Would be a Decent Policy Advisor March 2025 Humanity's Last Exam DeepSeek Common Misconceptions in AI Undetected AI Exam Answers Unbaited Smidgeons How to Import Academic Papers from Zotero into Tana Growing a Human: The First 30 Weeks December 2024 Aesthetic Command Lines with Hyper, Spaceship, and Oh My Zsh Leaving Elicit July 2024 Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers Faking William Morris, Generative Forgery, and the Erosion of Art History On Opening Essays, Conference Talks, and Jam Jars Spinning Worlds, Seasickness, and Dealing with Vestibular Neuritis A Collection of Design Engineers Gathering Structures Speculative Calendar Events Ambient Co-presence Historical Trails December 2023 September 2023 Squish Meets Structure Nintil · latest 7/11/2026
Loving boundaries: Conditional love applied to parenting and therapy Links (97) There was only mom Links (96) Free Radicals Podcast Links (95) A first glimpse of non-duality Anthropic's Claude Constitution; or love as the solution to the AI alignment problem Alzheimer's: from causes and risk factors to models and interventions Links (94) Links (93) Links (92) 33 Things I've Learned at 33 Slutcon, or the attractiveness of embodied authenticity Systems Biology: understanding beyond genes From chaos, order: On the nature and measurement of biological aging Links (91) Links (90) A jhourney in Costa Rica: experiencing the jhanas Agencymaxxing Links (89) Links (88) Retinoids probably don't slow skin aging Links (87) Links (86) Explaining Circling Links (85) Links (84) Links (83) Links (82) Wait But Why · latest 11/25/2025
The sights and sounds of Bhutan Tales from Toddlerhood All My Thoughts After 40 Hours in the Vision Pro 10 Thoughts from the Fourth Trimester A Short History of My Last Six Years Mailbag #2 The Trump-Biden Debate The Big and the Small You Won’t Believe My Morning It’s 2020 and you’re in the future Meaningness · latest 11/20/2023
Seriously bright light vs. winter blahs YOU NEED MORE LUX Natural misunderstandings of adult stage theory The collapse of rational certainty No meaning of life as a whole No meaning without justification Some other varieties of objectivity No objective meaning No meaning without proof Vaster than ideology No cosmic meaning No meaning from the Big Bang Lite nihilism, on the way to completion No eternal meaning No meaning for mortals Nihilistic reasoning errors Sexy cynicism and nihilist elitism The nihilist apocalypse Nihilism is black magic “Nihilism is OK” is not OK Melting Asphalt · latest 3/17/2020
Outbreak Going Critical A Natural History of Beauty The Elephant in the Brain Here Be Sermons Crony Beliefs A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning Minimum Viable Superorganism 2015 Meta Social Status II: Cults and Loyalty Paul Graham: Essays · latest
Superlinear Returns How to Do Great Work How to Get New Ideas The Need to Read What You (Want to)* Want Alien Truth What I've Learned from Users Heresy Putting Ideas into Words Is There Such a Thing as Good Taste? Beyond Smart Weird Languages How to Work Hard A Project of One's Own Fierce Nerds Crazy New Ideas An NFT That Saves Lives The Real Reason to End the Death Penalty How People Get Rich Now Write Simply Donate Unrestricted What I Worked On Earnestness Billionaires Build The Airbnbs How to Think for Yourself Early Work Modeling a Wealth Tax The Four Quadrants of Conformism Orthodox Privilege Coronavirus and Credibility How to Write Usefully Being a Noob Haters The Two Kinds of Moderate