Exciting Alignment Auditing paper from Anthropic! Attention is logarithmic, actually. In my career I’ve found that correctly modeling latency is very difficult, because there are trade-offs and step functions everywhere. Light evidence against neuralese (Anthropic post). The Ghibli Machine. Big circuits updates from Anthropic! I think people hopping on the mechanistic interpretability train is overhyped, but I think the progress of interpretability is severely understated. Two years ago my guess for how long it would take us to get where we are now would be three years from now, though it’s mostly because I overestimated how complicated neural networks were rather than how fast research goes.

Ben Kuhn on running major projects. Nadia on doing the Jhanas, highly recommended technical read about a particular kind of meditation. I don’t necessarily endorse it, but I am going on a Jhourney retreat in July. Matt Godbolt (of the famed compiler explorer!) wrote a really good characteristic post about Claude usage.

OpenAI is making big swings. Strong piece of writing; Superintelligence Strategy from Hendrycks and Alexandr Wang. I consider this to be in the same category as the Gradual Disempowerment post I read earlier this year, and to a lesser extent AI 2027, as a piece of writing that attempts to capture predictions of ASI outcomes now that we’re in the final few years and doing that is quite tractable now. I left out Eric Schmidt from that author list intentionally. I’ve read and skimmed a number of works with his name on it, and I’m fairly confident “Eric Schmidt” is more or less a pen name. If you want a good example of this, check out “The Age of AI: And Our Human Future”, which I have a strong suspicion was written by an eighteen-year-old. Also a good time to look at some of Kissinger’s work, much of which is worth reading and very likely written by Kissinger.

I have an upcoming very short trip to Türkiye, which of course means I need to read up! Korean politics (recent trip I took) and history is pretty wild, and I got a lot of mileage out of that but I suspect Türkiye might hit harder. The PKK and Öcalan are must-knows, with the weirdest Öcalan situation being his at least 1,000 guards as the lone prisoner on an island. Former Turkish PM Claims Gaza Still Part of Ottoman Empire, Gazans Turkish Citizens. Türkiye is in many ways, the center of the world after all. San Francisco’s long-dead Suicide Club.

Fraternal birth order and male sexual orientation is a mildly interesting article, mostly because when you combine those statistics with number of children per mother, you would expect there to have been at least 10% more gay men 200 years ago. Band of Thebes anyone? The Rippling Deel funny story. Ancient warfare lawnmower. What if we nuked the moon, for morale?