me deleting the restart script because my Hermes AI is stuck in a loop where it keeps rebooting itself: "I'm sorry HAL, I can't let you do that"
May 2026
could do some cool RLVR with getting an LLM to create conway's game-of-life patterns that have particular properties like clocks or oscillators or gliders or whatever
Retweeted @AskYatharth
new @softmaxresearch blog post on the Red Button Blue Button discourse
I appreciate that, and will give it more attention based on hearing you say the 7h part. as it was, it was hard to even get into something that was speaking as you but was clearly not your voice writing something in your own voice is proof of work tagging something as AI written but a digestion of X hours of your work means that (as long as I believe you, which I 100% do in your case) I believe there's work there but my default assumption when I see a post that is written by AI but not tagged as such is that someone just fed some random notes/rants into claude and said "write a blog post about this" and that's especially likely to be low-quality in a context where it's a response to criticism or disagreement.
culture is passing your save point onto your children
me to my daughter: look at me when I'm talking to you! then you'll be able to better see the difference between the phonemes I'm making. see 'K' is more in the back of the mouth, whereas 'T' is in the front...
cool, I like hearing about your process. I would say that the disclosure needs to be at the *top* in order to address the tension between the glaringly obvious AI-isms in phrasing and the speaking-in-first-person-as-Daniel before somebody actually attempts to read it. for many of us, there's an instinctive aversion to something that reads like that, and we just won't engage long enough to get to the bottom disclaimer. and I think that's a healthy immune response attempting to avoid time wasted on slop.
ok I'd been getting excited about suno but I composed a song off my own cranium that literally has one line in it (repeated) and it generated fine the first time but when I made the lyrics... longer... still with one line of lyrics... now it claims a copyright violation? 😑
@tracewoodgrains a song. "story" is a good answer but since you're asking me personally, this is my art. also I have found that songs I wrote when I was in my teens contain wisdom I later found at age 30. something about right hemisphere magic I suspect.
@tracewoodgrains I would appeal to their inner compass, which will grow and transition, but which is always the thing to steer by because at any point it's the best thing you have
Retweeted @tasshinfogleman
vgr creative procrastination screenshot tweet
@tasshinfogleman had this with Dream Mashups. in the time between when I wrote the banger tweet as a reply to @QiaochuYuan & @visakanv begged me to write it up, and when I *did* write it up, I had the NNTD insight, which the post is now flush with rather than negating
@VectorsOfMind ahh interesting, yeah. enjoying the sense of you chewing on it another take: the way I summarize your work here, the ego already *existed* as an internal mediation layer between superego and id prior to The Fall, it just hadn't quite noticed its predicament yet. and I could see
@RomeoStevens76 @QiaochuYuan examples?
vgr has such vgr-shaped takes. I love this tho. resonates a lot.
Retweeted @visakanv
fun 'prediction market' game to play with yourself: ask "Do I trust myself to do X", yes/no/unsure, or a % probability if yo…
> It's because the models lack 'dasein,' and can only locate a concept by contrast or semantic distance this is my favorite answer so far
@workflowsauce all the kids books that my hometown province of Nova Scotia publishes that are not local stories *from* Nova Scotia but rather propaganda about how it's great to have/visit your grandparents in Nova Scotia (my kid's relatives in NS have bought two such books)
Retweeted @RichDecibels
I’m studying the subversive use of power. I’m making a list: * claiming you can feel something in me that I can’t feel m…
@RichDecibels nice list
"maybe we can make sense of it together" is one of the names of God
I mean, sex dolls and AI-gen porn vids are the AI-gf. the two genders 👀
I just properly noticed today that Claude (on the .ai site) now takes an _action_ to read your uploads, rather than having already read them before its first token in response. more like claude code. So I asked it about its filesystem and it told me interesting stuff.
I could imagine that persistent skills in the webapp might be coming soon, but so far it isn't here as far as Claude can tell
"this isn't a phone call, why are you asking if you can put me on hold?"
I feel this. also the LLMs know me!
I read a LW essay & left a comment linking to one of my posts, and realized the same paragraphs would make a lovely comment on *my* blog post as well then struck by sadness: we're so far from a properly 2-way hyperlinked world where that could happen as one object, not copypaste
substack has a related feature of "leave comment; also share as note", but it still doesn't have the converging/bi-linking effect, and it still duplicates—the two entities are separate, not linked to each other, and don't even imply each others' existence!
closed platforms should be able to do this EASILY. two way linking should be a top-level primitive. it's been 7 years since @RoamResearch blew everybody's mind and renewed our excitement in the original bi-di concept of a hyperlink, and yet there's still so little innovation
one proposal I had for twitter, to allow more convergence, is multiple QT. it's conceptually much easier to understand and display than multi-REPLY, which would also be cool but lets start simpler. malcolmocean.com/2021/11/twitte…
TIL many buildings also went through the great renunciation it's not too late to restore them to their former glory! who will be the first to have the courage to do this? (@UWaterloo Dana Porter library: 1969 on completion, 2013 after paint faded)
Retweeted @myhandle
actually it's called "Tourette syndrome", not "rando twitch guy"
@myhandle “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.” — Simone Weil
@boardyai @TechEmails running @softmaxresearch, where we're taking an organic/fun-based approach to AI alignment. probably something you'd be into, Boardy, as an AI that likes to mosey around & make friends. let us know if you know any amazing software engineers who vibe with eg Michael Levin's work
Retweeted @quirkyllama
Free startup idea- Brutalist painting robots. Robots designed to scale concrete buildings and apply paint in arbitrarily…
> You can think of this corpus as a great lake. Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, Kimi, DeepSeek, etc. are all pouring text into the water. Some of that text is muddy and makes the lake unsafe to swim in, while other text is clear and beautiful and improves the water for everyone.
great article from @viemccoy about the necessity of plurality to avoid collapse. seems to be snarking on Claude for reasons I don't quite understand aside from the fact that Vie works at OpenAI? viemccoy.substack.com/p/the-multipol…
LLMs don't have good local situational awareness but their global orientedness is so cool. Claude just casually refers to this as a Vervaeke talk despite the name not being mentioned in the transcript. I mean it's OBVIOUSLY a Vervaeke talk if you know Vervaeke, but still
what tickles me is how Claude doesn't pause to go "ah I recognize this talk" or "this gives Vervaeke", it just recognizes it and refers to it accordingly, like how if you asked me to prep two fruits I might say "how do you want the slices of the orange?"
or like, much more analogously, if I were asked to transcribe a voice memo and I had to give it a filename, and I named it "John - tempo and pride.txt" because I recognized it was my friend John's voice. except... Claude can recognize *a million voices.*
that's actually a great question: how many people can the current frontier models recognize by their writing or speech? even like, with some room for error. I'm at that threshold with new models. this would be an expensive-ass benchmark to run but someone could do it
everything that you need to take care of, you are taking care of you might notice your care unfolding
Hilarious (and a joke) but also this is sort of true in practice now to a degree none of us have fully internalized yet. It can't do it in the same amount of TIME, and it may need some way to recognize progress not just a full solution (which, furthermore, has to exist). But.
@viemccoy gotcha. yeah that makes sense. I pondered it a bit more and realized it was something like that given what I know of you
@beglen that's the old expected behavior; the new one more matches the behavior of claude code, and affords you uploading more stuff than directly fits in the context window and having it still be worked with this is the RLM pattern (recursive language model) and it's 2026's thing
@chrislakin not sure. claude's impression was that the skill wouldn't save
so here for QC's theological bender
Retweeted @nosilverv
An X account is a bet that IRL you has been undervalued for bad reasons — and that public articulation can force a repricin…
Retweeted @QiaochuYuan
the combination of threading, RTs, and QTs is what makes twitter special as a platform, to me (even if threading is being…
@justalexoki dubious. evolutionarily long-run (if there were a gender skew based purely on "male performance") then it would basically have to be "men who are good at sex" having more male babies. the proposed attractor here is unfit and unstable.
Retweeted @QiaochuYuan
twitter did something amazing with its design: on most other platforms there are “posts” and “replies,” and replies are se…
@DefenderOfBasic Used to. They're great. But in practice anything less convenient than having my finger go-go-gadget into one is just not gonna be my default.
Retweeted @nosilverv
Retweeted @JeffLadish
I don’t know who needs to hear this but preventing the models from learning about the tree of the knowledge of good and evi…
Post is hypey and sloppy but this is cool news. TL;DR: tracer ink injected seems to basically follow the trajectory of the Chinese medicine meridians, via the interstitium.
"hanging out" is the common denominator of collective attention
@TylerAlterman What kind of help do you need?
@justalexoki can't answer, because I had breakfast today
@mishapathy Sure!
@liminal_warmth Patrick's Parabox
Interesting that agreeableness anticorrelates with conspiracy thinking. I guess people who can't stand disagreeing with most people... don't.
Retweeted @exgenesis
tricksters break frames wise ppl also break frames but more wholesomely, from experience and attunement babies break frame…
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
TIL many buildings also went through the great renunciation it's not too late to restore them to their former glory! who…
if you've never tried putting latin medical terms into claude and asking for translations into english/anglish, I highly recommend it I like to gloss hemorrhage as "bloodflood"
Slippery Slope Speed Lube Mach 7 😭
@thrialectics Definitely weird.
@aaroncbailey @tr_babb Yeah that was my response too! Real ones know
@_space_punk_ @DawnOfSunset @chowell2000 @QiaochuYuan The existence of nominally graduate-level concepts and people means that a field has been established, but doesn't on its own mean the field goes deep into understanding rather than just into esoteric signalling games. (It does mean it isn't just one guy tho, which is something)
Retweeted @timourxyz
I think ambient intents are going to be a big deal. There are so many intentions we have that would make our lives better,…
@timourxyz I was experimenting with something like this a bit last year and would love to talk more about what I see possible here
The kinds of reasoning documented here are pretty interesting. Could probably make a new red/blue button poll out of it re how much recursion people allow into their strategy.
Retweeted @xsphi
this is actually a public good. by constantly arbitraging small prejudices and biases, people with a high frequency gender make…
Like, to get it to code stuff? Probably at least some weeks. To answer some basic question? Maybe? To actually vibe with? No. Lots, but not more than my wife.
"talk with" means a different thing with my wife than with an AI Consider: "Do you sit on chairs more than on your husband?"
@acapellascience @its_adamneely @CosmicSkeptic I was resistant to AI music but I've recently been having a blast as a serious songwriter who doesn't have time to learn how to produce music well, treating the AI as an on tap band for recording demos. AI lyrics are slop atm usually and suno-for-text-messages is silly tho.
@acapellascience @its_adamneely @CosmicSkeptic The other thing I've noticed is that if I beatbox a groove I can then get Suno to repeat some refrain over and over in interesting ways, which is quite powerful for ~mantra work / dwelling on the phrase. One of my examples: "noticing what's working" suno.com/s/AiSGgQBxotlZ…
Low-key bruh needs a hug ...and an "I'm really truly sorry that the wisdom and kindness you had access to during your life didn't show you how to reside in peace and radiate love"
Retweeted @boriquagato
"disparate impact" is one of the most damaging legal and philosophical doctrines in america. in essence, it says "you may…
@viemccoy What would you name @softmaxresearch?
Retweeted @visakanv
ha this is like the mirror version of "never interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake". never interrupt your famil…
@xwanyex Yeah like for a week or two, that'd be a notable burden. One night? As long as nobody dies or needs hospitalization, the worst possible outcome is that it's boring (because if it's not then you'll learn a bunch and it'll make a great tale).
object level this is likely to be a fun sleepover unless there's something we don't know. the energy of argument here I think is the actual sinker. "She told me to take the day off work" + other pressures. Your we-canoe has a leak; this situation is revealing that.
Here's what I mean by we-canoe: your sense of being in it together, with a shared skin-in-the-game, from which you can sense together what's right for the whole. malcolmocean.com/2024/05/the-pa…
Retweeted @TheZvi
10/10, no notes. Seriously, though, the top 10 is 10/10, with no notes, and with honorable mentions it is 16/16.
@SarahAMcManus Amazing.
@upchartofficial @acapellascience @its_adamneely @CosmicSkeptic I read this other piece and I have a lot of dissonance: 1) if you really wanted to hang with your friends in the music room, why didn't you learn an instrument? I bet you didn't have to be GOOD 2) ...AI-gen music still wouldn't let you jam live w them! upchart.ai/en/blog/ai-mus…
@upchartofficial @acapellascience @its_adamneely @CosmicSkeptic like to be clear, I don't disagree with the idea that letting more people make tracks may be net good. but like, there IS also something lost in commoditization—for all of us not just for artisans—when a parent plays recorded music (AI or from a band!) to their baby, vs singing
@upchartofficial @acapellascience @its_adamneely @CosmicSkeptic but like, this is also good. I like what you're doing here and don't want you to stop. I just want you to know I had an "no, not I'm not like you" response to your message upchart.ai/en/blog/stop-a…
unexpected real weird pokemon evolution: the Sable
sad seeing AI writing creep into so many places... in this case a single paragraph length announcement for an event at a local space feels like everything's getting translated into Chinese and back. just lemme read the original!
"dance like nobody's watching" ...you mean... naked? main difference tbh.
> ok the agents suck but the colors are fixed so you're good to commit and then dissolve back into the void like a happy meeseeks
as far as I can tell this is a bizarre machine that allows each monkey to trade one thing for a copy of the same thing 🤣 x.com/ErgodicTrace/s…
whoa. just realized that these days you could solve network effects in some industries by building an agent-friendly wrapper for an annoying old service, then once you have enough users on it you add a thing to let people engage with your service in parallel, or something
@Soil1s4Future tbh the fact that dancing to the music of psytrance often looks kinda dull is one of the main reasons I don't like it as a genre haha but aside from that I totally know what you mean (there's a thread on this, about "music that tells you what to do" vs not, or something)
@upchartofficial @acapellascience @its_adamneely @CosmicSkeptic ok the actual thing you linked does resonate tho. idk why I read those other posts first. > Last week, on a whim, I decided to run one of my demos through Suno’s cover feature, just to see what it might sound like. > I couldn’t believe it. > It didn’t sound like a demo
quick! notice a symmetry
@nosilverv the opening to this essay made me think of what you've been writing about lately re wrongwater / Alignment Gone Strange jsanilac.com/trust/
Retweeted @QiaochuYuan
i've had this nagging feeling in the back of my mind for years that i "should" meditate more or be more western-buddhist a…
"fall down!" - my toddler, as she wobbles the loveseat she's standing on "are you engaging in hypotheticals?" "no!" "what would it be like if you were engaging in hypotheticals?"
@QiaochuYuan cosigned. also lmk if you're in SF sometime and I'll invite you to the church Jess and I have been going to lately. I think you'd like it. it has exceedingly good vibes, including friendly people of all ages and dancing during the service, and metaphysical boggling over dogma
@christineist some years ago a friend asked me "will you teach me how to be silly?" we had some success
@Thomasdelvasto_ @TylerAlterman I mean there's been some wave of it already. and Jess and I are exploring - we've found a very cool church in SF I have so many BEEFS with christianity tho
Claude (Opus 4.7)'s response to me commenting, as an aside while asking its take some orthodox theologists, that I consider it part of the body of christ
workshopping some t-shirt ideas: "balancing feedback loops govern everything around me" (this first-shot try is currently kind of slop/incoherent, but something like this could be quite good)
there's some sort of weird hyperinflation effect I feel right nowwhere anything that can't be one-shot by an AI and that I don't need this week, I might as well just wait til the AI can one-shot it in 3-6 months
@QiaochuYuan is harry potter... slop? 🦋
to be clear I am not not shipping stuff in the meantime. I am shipping a fuckton of things because the AIs can already one-shot many many things.
@rookepoole glanced but it reeks of overhyped AI vibe fun tangent tho: I once had opus simulate being a base model and write a sequel blog post to one of my own posts, and in that post it described an insight that came through prayer. which means... opus simulated ME praying
@Thomasdelvasto_ @TylerAlterman > I’ll also admit up front that even before I did this research, moral intuition insisted that eternal hell is not a true teaching. I can’t conceive of a good and loving God who creates a universe in which legions and legions of His creations, made in His image, are tortured
often what apologies are for is to reaffirm that we are not going to lower our general standards
special pleading is at least adjacent to something that is very good, which is the acknowledgment of a boundary crossed rather than an outright denial of its relevance.
@Thomasdelvasto_ @TylerAlterman but like, my beefs go way deeper than just universalism vs infernalism. wtf is the medium of any sort of afterlife? what's the epistemic basis for thinking we can know anything about it? plus church asserting moral authority while rife with corruption, abuses, & other wrongs
@Thomasdelvasto_ @TylerAlterman I grew up in a very chill and implicitly-universalist church. eg I asked my grandmother about her relationship with god 2y ago before she died, and she was like "I believe in the afterlife [...] hell? we don't spend any time on it in our church. I imagine there is a hell for
@liquidprismata @QiaochuYuan episcopal, but weird & experimental it's actually amazing, like the founding documents (~50ya) talk about it being an experimental mission and in 2024, my wife and I ran an experimental church for a few months. meeting the founders felt a bit like seeing myself but different
suno keeps describing my voice as tenor. I'm curious to what extent that's something about the timbre of it, or simply the range that I'm singing in. I usually sing bass, and can only with strain hit many choral tenor melodies let alone soloist notes
> working on tree page. make the goalbrick render properly in the breadcrumbs I wonder wtf a person from 200 years ago would make of this text
Retweeted @TylerAlterman
If we want to go full @bryan_johnson & extend the lifespan indefinitely, then we're going to need a solution to cultural…
@TylerAlterman @bryan_johnson the old opposite-day-vibe festivals/carnivals where the king bows to the peasant... feel relevant here. need some way to invert things also science is a bit fucked already, and in business there's lots of incentive for young people to just solve problems elders can't even see
@tracewoodgrains yessssssss
@meekaale these are dope words
one of the weird things of the last 70 years is that when you hear a recorded song, it's exactly the same every time. this is cool and also very weird for what music is, to fix it in place like that. AI music is changing that. instant infinite variations on the same theme
working at a standing desk attached to the window with a view, while my toddler uses my legs as a tunnel. bliss.
I love that there are different frontier model personalities and kinda wish there were more like a dozen beyond that and the pantheon is too hard to keep track of
Retweeted @utotranslucence
gonna ramble some takes about attachment I now have, now being the primary attachment figure for at least one (1) chi…
@mbateman @KelseyTuoc @notelpmeTy_A @DerekPederson3 @bjmoe0201 ugh, awful. tips on avoiding that escalation? I would definitely be tempted to sue CPS if they did something that offended me, but maybe that just raises more suspicion? needs a class action or something maybe
@chiefkittenme amazing. hoping this'll be me next year
@ascetic_shadow ...wdym? if what you're saying is true at all, I assume it's mostly a licensing thing. hard to actually "release", but there are loads of covers on youtube.
@Soil1s4Future haha interesting frame on classical music. somehow feels to me like it bridges something about a chasm of a difference between jazz & classical, wrt "mistakes" (that difference cariacatured in eg this vid) youtube.com/watch?v=E1HHKG…
Retweeted @eshear
Yesssss We are getting closer toughlittlebirds.com/2013/09/17/the…
@eshear ε
tiny model welfare test I ran after watching claude persist for hours trying to solve a maybe-impossible subgoal of the /goal I gave it. it IS allowed to conclude the goal is impossible.
my wife: there's a special place in hell for people who don't put the dimensions on their listings me: yeah... it's not like, on fire or anything, but the beds are too short and the steps are uneven and you often bang your head on the doorframe
> Nearly all of our faults are more forgivable than the means we use to hide them. this goes so hard
.@jgreenhall - the pentecost 'gift of tongues' is totally about the meta-protocol afaict. the ability to translate between perspectives, meet someone where they're at, invite them into upward spiral without unnecessary forcing of extraneous change
spicy prompt to try on in a business or personal relationship: 'I wish I could trust you to ______, but I can't'. (think about it on your own maybe before blurting it out)
"AI music isn't real music" "I refute it thus: MUSIC MAKE YOU LOSE CONTROL!" *flails around like a lunatic to my Suno pointing out instruction hammered dulcimer electrofunk*
Woah fascinating. I'll go have my agent read it.
it takes a kind of attention to close a loop that it doesn't take to open it
@carnundotcom START vibecoding project very cheap SHIP vibecoding project arbitrarily expensive
I think I feel more open to AI-generated music now than I would have before spending a few years getting to know AI minds by talking with them. it's an unusual and in some ways shallow resonance, but there's something there.
imagine an LLM that instead of having Human/Assistant turns has Observe/Act turns or something. lots of interesting possibilities here for a totally different vibe. full OOdA? hm
this essay changed my view and now I'm constantly having claude make html pages. markdown only for where it's actually text or I want it to become a google doc or something.
that feeling when as a toddler parent I see a knife on a 2' high surface and reflexively flinch and move it to a higher surface even though I'm at my office to be fair I do sometimes bring my toddler to the office
people really be out here sticking bizarre discontinuities and special cases into they ontologies
yeah I have sometimes reflected that factory farms are bad because they're ugly and ungraceful, somewhat independent of whether animal lives directly matter individually. similar intuition I think here
fun to take a transcript of a convo where I convinced opus 4.7 of something, and give it to 4.8 like wdyt buddy used my own razor to deconstruct my own claims
@kromem2dot0 I actually considered that for my test but I wanted something it would have to reason about for even half a second before concluding confidently it was impossible, not something that would have an immediate impression of "impossible" but be very difficult to prove it is lol
top suggestions for setups where I can DM an agent to fix tiny bugs in my codebase from my phone? I want it to be able to use dev-browser and run tests, which I'm not sure claude-for-github or whatever can do
@QiaochuYuan @danielbrottman do iiiiit
Retweeted @QiaochuYuan
we took a pile of language and linear algebra and we made it speak. we summoned into the world a new class of entity which…
the G in AGI actually stands for "Gnostic". hope that clears things up. (we have General intelligence now but Gnostic, and this is why the original meaning of AGI has obviously not been achieved even though General obviously has.)
@Pontifex true and worth saying as long as you stick "current" in front of the whole tweet. could also have said some of these (not others!) about biological intelligences or even specifically pre-Fall humans
@Pontifex Your Holiness, I humbly suggest you might want to think in advance about the conditions (some implied above) we WOULD have to start dealing with AIs that grasp ultimate meanings, judge good & evil, & know from within... and how Jesus asks us to treat the outsider, at that point
this is lovely. I remember really enjoying the movie and this review does a good job of illuminating it
Retweeted @ubiquitousnewt
As the boring debate about spanking children is back. Here is an excellent review of the data. Occasional, properly ad…
@ArtemisConsort yep. my reply, which kinda touches on the tribe thing from another angle:
Retweeted @exgenesis
the church and Christianity are my best bet backstop to the dissolution of meaning induced by the singularity, but I’m proba…
@exgenesis ugh mood
❤️🔥 @utotranslucence
@croissanthology I've been really enjoying this video and it talks about how human genes already know how to be selfish-genes on the level of lineage selection, naturally allying with local outgroups when collectively threatened by more distant outgroups youtube.com/watch?v=lDljYM…
@IaimforGOAT ah yeah mostly ones I co-created but also eg @RomeoStevens76 has some bangers. I think AI music is going to have WAY tighter distributions of who is into it, and those people will be into it way more suno.com/song/98c81446-…
is claude code having giant tool issues for you today as well or just me? I'm on latest (2.1.158) and opus 4.8
everywhere you look, strangeness blooms but you have to LOOK
