tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3498088266607942041.comments 2026-02-18T12:36:02.573-08:00 Encinitas Undercover Encinitas Undercover http://www.blogger.com/profile/04071321730581304823 noreply@blogger.com Blogger 0 1 25

Published on February 19, 2026 1:36 AM GMT In thinking about how RLHF-trained models clearly hedge on politically controversial topics, I started wondering about if LLMs would encode these politically controversial topics differently than topics that are broadly considered contro

Published on February 19, 2026 1:53 AM GMT Crosspost of my blog article . Over the past five years, we’ve seen extraordinary advancements in AI capabilities, with LLMs going from producing nonsensical text in 2021 to becoming people’s therapists and automating complex tasks in 20

Published on February 19, 2026 1:30 AM GMT Who Let The Docs Out launched their AI Safety Grant yesterday ( linked here ), which was aptly named ‘ The Automation & Humanity Documentary Fund’. This granting fund was established to provide early-stage research funding ( $8,000 ) to

A young woman is taking legal action against her high school, alleging she was awarded honors at graduation even though she’s illiterate. – Thomas Sowell The problem is that a class action lawsuit of this kind that encompassed even a small fraction of those for whom this is true

Published on February 19, 2026 1:35 AM GMT Abstract: Emotional Dispersion is an emotion-regulation technique that focuses on accepting emotions as they are and letting them be to lessen their control over the person feeling them. Patience is not a resource that gets depleted over

LadybirdBrowser/ladybird: Abandon Swift adoption Back in August 2024 the Ladybird browser project announced an intention to adopt Swift as their memory-safe language of choice. As of this commit it looks like they've changed their mind: Everywhere: Abandon Swift adoption After ma

Published on February 18, 2026 9:44 PM GMT If you understand German and these books are still on your reading list, here’s a convenient way to get familiar with their contents. On Buchdialoge.de , I publish 15-minute podcasts on non-fiction books. Instead of a dry monologue, we u

Preface This essay argues that rational people don’t have goals, and that rational AIs shouldn’t have goals. Human actions are rational not because we direct them at some final ‘goals,’ but because we align actions to practices [1] : networks of actions, action-dispositions, acti

Published on February 18, 2026 10:36 PM GMT Trillions of dollars are flowing into AI, and there is almost nowhere to trade it. There’s no exchange for hyperscalers to hedge their $100M training runs. No benchmark markets to bet on the speed of AI progress. No public markets on Op

Ordinal0 (via Hacker News): In this post, I’ll walk through the process of reverse engineering the .car file format, explain its internal structures, and show how to parse these files programmatically. This knowledge could be useful for security research and building developer to

Brent Simmons: Spotlight has recently become terrible for launching apps after being so good for years. Now when I type something like Cal or Calendar or even Calendar.app I have to manually select the actual app in the list, if it even appears. I’ve never used Spotlight for this

Mohammad Azam: We started with a simple model. Then we added a new property and transformed existing data. Then we introduced a uniqueness constraint and cleaned up duplicates before enforcing it. Each change felt small in isolation. But every one of those changes altered the str

Published on February 18, 2026 9:46 PM GMT If the new technology is as dangerous as its makers say, great power competition becomes suicidally reckless. Only international cooperation can ensure AI serves humanity instead of worsening war. Dario Amodei, the CEO of leading AI comp

What is it? I can’t tell you! When will you be able to know? I can’t say! But when I can tell you, will I? We’ll see! What I can tell you is that Athena is working on it with me, she’s been great to work with so far, and my decision to hire her at Scalzi Enterprises was pretty sm

Published on February 18, 2026 8:37 PM GMT TL;DR: AI today feels tantalisingly close to unlocking a long-anticipated epistemic revolution from abundant high-quality public probabilities. As this moment approaches, though, it's important that we don't miss the full potential of ch

Published on February 18, 2026 8:30 PM GMT There really is a lot going on these days. I held off posting this because I was trying to see if I could write a net helpful post about the current situation involving Anthropic and the Pentagon. Anthropic very much wants to help DoW de

Germany’s population is projected to shrink by nearly 5 per cent within 25 years — a significantly steeper decline than previously forecast, according to an Ifo study. The German economic think-tank on Tuesday revised its forecast for a 1 per cent population decline by 2050 to ne

Published on February 18, 2026 7:49 PM GMT I'll have a weird dream and wake up in a funk. Be overwhelmed w/ work. Read lots of news/reddit and become very upset or angry. Obviously it's good to feel these things, but sometimes I continue to feel awful no matter how hard I try to

Multiple studies have either shown that smartphone and social media use among teens has minimal effects on their mental health or none at all. As a 2024 review published by an American Psychological Association journal put it: “There is no evidence that time spent on social media

25+ years into my career as a programmer I think I may finally be coming around to preferring type hints or even strong typing. I resisted those in the past because they slowed down the rate at which I could iterate on code, especially in the REPL environments that were key to my

Published on February 18, 2026 6:55 PM GMT Since this website is called Less Wrong , I think there should be a good overview of Karl Popper's falsifiability concept somewhere. It's a surprisingly subtle concept in practice -- the short version is that yes, falsifiability is neces

Published on February 18, 2026 6:40 PM GMT I wrote a survey about social influences on people's level of altruism. Please take it! (I am deliberately oversampling extremely altruistic people because they are an interesting demographic for my research question.) I will report my f

As most of you know, I live on a rural road where Internet options are limited. More than 20 years ago, DSL became available where I live, which meant that I could ditch the satellite internet of the early 2000s, which topped out at something like 1.5mbps and rarely achieved that

What kind of crazy f*cked up world do we live in where it takes sixtysomething rockers from Ireland to light the way in a somnambulant music landscape? One in which the Irish rockers were brought up on a divided island where the IRA fought for… We haven’t had that spirit here sin

Published on February 18, 2026 6:30 PM GMT Technically skilled people who care about AI going well often ask me: how should I spend my time if I think AI governance is important? By governance, I mean the constraints, incentives, and oversight that govern how AI is developed. One

The Enlightenment promised to replace superstition with reason, tyranny with liberty, and ignorance with progress. Three centuries later, the results are in. Democratic governments no longer represent their citizens. Economic models that predicted shared prosperity have delivered

Published on February 18, 2026 5:55 PM GMT Alignment Is Proven To Be Tractable At least the systems that we build today often have that property. I mean, I’m hopeful that someday we’ll be able to build systems that have more of a sense of common sense. We talk about possible ways

1. “Australian abattoirs are adopting AI to count sheep, allowing farmers and processors to sleep more easily at night after decades of rows over miscounts stoked distrust in the outback.” (FT) 2. Richard Ngo on educational signaling theories. 3. “There is no secular alternative.

Published on February 18, 2026 5:28 PM GMT The conversation begins (Fictional) Optimist: So you expect future artificial superintelligence (ASI) “by default”, i.e. in the absence of yet-to-be-invented techniques, to be a ruthless sociopath, happy to lie, cheat, and steal, wheneve

The A.I. Disruption We’ve Been Waiting for Has Arrived New opinion piece from Paul Ford in the New York Times. Unsurprisingly for a piece by Paul it's packed with quoteworthy snippets, but a few stood out for me in particular. Paul describes the November moment that so many other

LLMs are eating specialty skills. There will be less use of specialist front-end and back-end developers as the LLM-driving skills become more important than the details of platform usage. Will this lead to a greater recognition of the role of Expert Generalists ? Or will the abi

Published on February 18, 2026 4:26 PM GMT This is a full repost of my Hidden Agent Substack post Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand is usually treated as a metaphor. A poetic way of saying “markets work,” or a historical curiosity from a time before equilibrium proofs and welfare the

Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: I believe there are sexy people who are doctors, but there are no sexy doctors. Today's News:

It increasingly appears that the tail is in firm control of the dog, and that Netanyahu is going to get his Round 2 with Iran for which he has been working to enlist the US military. A large wave of American airpower is heading toward the Middle East to bolster forces already the

Published on February 18, 2026 3:10 PM GMT I think there’s something interesting going on at the intersection of the Enneagram and Zen. To explain it, though, first I need to tell you a bit about my kind of Zen. I practice Zen in the lineage of Charlotte Joko Beck. Her teaching s

Published on February 18, 2026 2:57 PM GMT Status: This was inspired by some internal conversations I had at Anthropic. It is much more optimistic than I actually am, but it tries to encapsulate a version of a positive vision. Here is a way of understanding what a large language

Look how hard we had to work: OK, it wasn’t all that bad. We did it, after all. Still, it was a lot of work. The next page of the paper describes how we used a third-degree-polynomial to approximately compute … Continue reading →

The AI arms race broke the global semiconductor supply chain. SK Hynix and Samsung are sold out through 2026, Sony delayed the PS6, and hyperscalers are hoarding capacity — with ripple effects hitting everything from consumer electronics to Bitcoin mining ASICs.

In Rivendell, the ground shook. It was not a great sensation. It was merely a tremor, a shudder, the sort of thing that might have been mistaken for a cart passing on a nearby road. But the water in the fountains rippled, and the leaves of the ancient trees trembled without wind,

When I was a new VP of Marketing I got a painful lesson of who my PR (Public Relations) agency actually worked for. Later I realized that it was true for all of my external vendors. And much later I realized what I really should have been asking them to do. The lessons still appl

Published on February 18, 2026 1:53 PM GMT Written as part of MATS 7.1. Math by Claude Opus 4.6. I know that models are able to represent exponentially more concepts than they have dimensions by engaging in superposition (representing each concept as a direction, and allowing tho

Published on February 18, 2026 1:28 PM GMT It seems to me that the Hamming problem for developing a formidable art of rationality is, what to do about problems that systematically fight being solved. And in particular, how to handle bad reasoning that resists being corrected. I p

Senator Bill Cassidy (R-La.) released a new report on how to modernize the FDA. It has some good material. One of the greatest challenges innovators face, particularly small- and medium-sized companies, is that FDA’s process for reviewing new products can be an unpredictable “bla

Shopify is poised to be one of the biggest winners from AI; it would behoove investors to actually understand the businesses they are selling.

A clumsy attempt…to put a cuddly face on a rather dystopian reality. – Chris Gilliard The Vultures Descend (Bragging Rights) No evil is too sleazy for forced-birth fanatics: An anti-choice group called “Voices for Life” is trying a new strategy to put a target on the backs of abo

VIII. The Shape of Renewal The path forward is not a return to pure dialectic, as though the lessons of the Enlightenment’s victory over the last three centuries could simply be unlearned. Nor is it an embrace of pure rhetoric, which would make a neoclassical tradition no better

Describe your writing desk. My writing desk is nice and clean. This did not used to be the case. I used to have a horribly messy writing desk. One time my husband, Ross, said to me, “What would happen if you cleaned off your desk?” And I said, “Well, no. All my creative notes are

I suggest looking at whether real estate prices in a particular locale have been rising or falling. If immigration is “ruining” a particular city, we would expect homes and other property values in that place to become much cheaper. Home values have historically served as a stron

I really enjoyed this conversation with the creator of Claude Code. Share this: Share on Tumblr (Opens in new window) Tumblr Share on X (Opens in new window) X Share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook Share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn Share on Pocket (Opens