Aaron Bergman's tweets, August 2026
Every public tweet, reply, quote tweet and retweet that Aaron Bergman (@AaronBergman18 on X, formerly Twitter) posted in August 2026 and has not deleted: 624 posts, oldest first, times in UTC. Each heading links to the original post on X. When Aaron replies to or quotes someone, their tweet appears as a blockquote with their name; those words are theirs, and everything outside the blockquotes is Aaron's.
This page is one month of the complete archive of Aaron Bergman's tweets, which updates automatically every few hours. Previous month: July 2026. Next month: September 2026.
Saturday, August 1, 2026
Reply to @hecubian_devil, 00:11 UTC · 2 likes
Cassie Pritchard (@hecubian_devil): Anyone know a good podcast producer? 👀
Unironically Claude fable but it requires a fair bit of infrastructure (that I don’t fully have yet)
Reply to @AndyMasley, 00:29 UTC · 47 likes
Andy Masley (@AndyMasley): I gotta say I've noticed that a lot of people who criticize average male friendships as being 'stunted' often seem to communicate entirely in therapy-speak with their own friends and see that as the only way to actually emotionally bond with people.
(quoting @TheAtlantic: Some critics say that men would benefit from being more emotionally open with one other—but @Tyler_A_Harper argues that the real crisis of male friendship is rooted in a different problem:…)
Idk I personally find the default mode of male interaction something like “stunted” in the sense of there being a norms coordination problem where “everyone” (not actually everyone in fact) wished there were different norms but nobody can opt out without being cringe
Thread, continued, 00:31 UTC · 23 likes
I met up with someone from Twitter recently (can identify himself if he sees this and wants to) and like 5 mins in he was just like “what is your relationship with women and sex” (iirc verbatim) and I cackled bc of how out-of-the norm that is (but think it’s a good question!)
Tweet, 00:33 UTC · 6 likes
They need to make a version of this episode (cc @SpencrGreenberg) for people who are just somewhat selfish (eg me) and probably feel insufficiently guilty (at least in terms of what would in fact cause better outcomes for the world) and such https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/80-000-hours-podcast/id1245002988?i=1000778726560
Reply to @cmhrrs, 03:40 UTC · 2 likes
Connor Harris (@cmhrrs): There's a little known hack where if you get big and strong and have an obviously masculine hobby (see profile picture), then you can just choose the communication norms you want to follow and no one will call you on it.
(quoting @AaronBergman18: @AndyMasley Idk I personally find the default mode of male interaction something like “stunted” in the sense of there being a norms coordination problem where “everyone” (not actually everyone in fact) wished there were different norms but nobody can opt out without being cringe)
You can also do this if you’re a normal guy, although ofc status does help with enforcing things like this
But maybe the kind of thing where you don’t want to have to enforce - you want friends who naturally vibe with it
Tweet, 03:50 UTC · 22 likes
I think there’s a trillion dollar startup to be founded turning word docs into the extremely precise format demanded by various legal institutions
Thread, continued, 03:50 UTC · 3 likes
It’s surprisingly hard bc fixing problem A has a very substantial chance of causing problem B (not just fancy formatting, also via recursive nature of page numbers and tables of contents and citations and such)
Thread, continued, 03:50 UTC · 3 likes
Sol-high was substantially challenged by this
Fable was too slow for a midnight deadline
Thread, continued, 03:50 UTC · 3 likes
Ask me how I spent my Friday night 😅
Reply to @RatOrthodox, 03:57 UTC · 19 likes
Brangus🔍⏹️ (@RatOrthodox): I believe we intended to try talking it out at some point but both of us never really followed up.
This is such a healthy dialogue unironically you love to see it
Reply to @PirateWires, 04:00 UTC · 82 likes
Pirate Wires (@PirateWires): Billions of dollars are about to flow into Effective Altruism.
Anthropic was founded on EA principles, and its founders pledge to donate 80% of their wealth when the company IPOs. They also match employee equity donations. Plus, last year, six EA-aligned grantmakers deployed $1.25 billion.
EAs believe, essentially, that every sentient being, across every place and time, holds the same moral claim on every other.
This logic, as @WilliamThibeau notes, only works if Americans deprioritize everything that keeps our civilization intact: nation, family, religion, tradition…
As such, EA’s success entails the disintegration of America. It’s fundamentally at odds with nation building.
If AI labs are our strategic national assets, Congress must start scrutinizing their philosophical underpinnings, and the philanthropic networks surrounding them. Full story 👇
You interviewed an extreme midwit who told you untrue things lol
Reply to @panickssery, 07:19 UTC · 3 likes
Arjun Panickssery (@panickssery): what is untrue
(quoting @panickssery: I don't see why EAs are QTing and saying it's all fake/misleading I can go through them quickly > according to [EAs], every sentient being in every place, in every time, holds the same moral claim on every other. Yes, this is the core EA value of "impartiality")
"EAs believe, essentially, that every sentient being, across every place and time, holds the same moral claim on every other. This logic, as
@WilliamThibeau
notes, only works if Americans deprioritize everything that keeps our civilization intact: nation, family, religion, tradition…"
Reply to @panickssery, 07:50 UTC · 1 like
Arjun Panickssery (@panickssery): > EAs believe, essentially, that every sentient being, across every place and time, holds the same moral claim on every other
this is a mainstream but not universal belief, right—is your objection to place, time, animals, digital minds, as being unrepresentative or fringe in EA?
lol I object to "this logic, as Thibeau notes, only works if Americans deprioritize everything that keeps our civilization intact: nation, family, religion, tradition…"
Tweet, 08:19 UTC · 45 likes
It’s crazy that I did a math major so now I’m allowed to call myself ✨technical✨
It’s a pretty dumb thing to make into a dichotomy, its just a spectrum from “knows nothing about and cant do anything in a cluster of domains” to “knows and can do lots of things in those domains”
Reply to @panickssery, 08:39 UTC · 4 likes
Arjun Panickssery (@panickssery): That's not a very specific remark and it's not really relevant to an empirical fact check but it is true that EA values displace other values in priority by their introduction
It’s nonspecific bc I was clarifying that I don’t object to the thing you sent above, but actually on a second read I do:
- “moral claims” ie what I interpret as duties between persons or maybe also from a person to some other being isn’t canonical in EA at all
- read straightforwardly it would seem to imply that EA logic implies that I owe the same things to my mother, a random person abroad, and a mouse. This literally isn’t true (between humans you can easily and correctly justify different treatment downstream of empirical human psychology, and edt+policies about how people caring for eg their own family more than others could lead to the best outcomes from an impartial, egalitarian perspective
On the second bit about logic:
- from a vibes perspective, it’s only true in the absolute weakest possible sense (which undermines the obvious implied actual takeaway) of “yes caring about things might have some tradeoffs”. Like yeah if I take 5 seconds to pull a dog out of a burning building and so my sister is a very slightly annoyed I showed up to something 5 seconds later that is indeed “deprioritizing family” but like ok then. Likewise for prioritizing family over religion or visa versa; anyone who’s not maximally religiously devout is indeed at some level “deprioritizing religion”
- there’s not even a real claim there, so it’s hard to critique from a more formal perspective. What does it mean for logic to “work” above and beyond the point made above about how ~literally everything deprioritizes something else
There’s no actual conceptual internal contradiction when people like me go on being partially altruistic and partially selfish and partially caring about other things like family and whatever. Accusations of hypocrisy? Pretty damn weak if you’re trying to say “ur thing is wrong bc you believe it at an intellectual leveleven though you behave more like i think you should behave”
- also the colon is doing a shit ton of work; I think some of this stuff mentioned “holds civilization together” but like as does the banking system and literal gravity and the fact that humans like sex
Reply to @MomaBera, 08:48 UTC · 3 likes
moma (peptide arc) ⛓️ (@MomaBera): I guess for the last weeks I've taken, 'I am horny' as a good and valid reason to spent time to go on a date
But I actually don't think that that is a good reason.
sure if I was down in Palo Alto alone in the house and my alternative was to stay there then "let's hop on a date" seems sensible. But given all the friends and events and work I have to do in London, doing something just because I have an itch to scratch and incurring the opportunity costs with it seems crazy
I think it’s a great reason
Reply to @GarrettPetersen, 09:01 UTC · 3 likes
Dr. Dad, PhD 🔄🔼◀️🔽▶️ (@GarrettPetersen): Maybe allowing fent addicts to act as the de facto ruling class was a bad idea.
image attached
(quoting @aaron_renn: The Atlantic: The Cities That Said Yes to Drugs - Policies that gave addicts clean needles and places to use drugs were intended to reduce harm. They created a “zombie apocalypse.”…)
Ah the highlighted thing isn’t true! We don’t let them purchase other safer opioids, or accurately measured/pure fent. We force people off of opioids while they’re still in horrible pain; the issues are largely downstream of the prescription system not letting people do things
Reply to @billyhumblebrag, 09:58 UTC · 14 likes
billy (@billyhumblebrag): Openai: 10 maths breakthroughs on a diverse set problems with no progress for over a decade costs $2000 USD in api calls
Ed Zitron:
image attached
(quoting @polynoamial: The cost of generating the proofs for all 10 of these breakthroughs combined was under $2,000 at Sol API prices. We’re excited to see what scientists and researchers are able to create with our upcoming Astra models!)
I mostly agree with you but also $200/mo is legitimately pricing out a bunch of people around the world who have a laptop and internet
Reply to @funplings, 16:38 UTC · 3 likes
funplings (@funplings): july is over. taking suggestions for what i should change my pfp background to! will decide by tonight
Ur face
Reply to @AlexPalcuie, 16:39 UTC · 2 likes
palcu (@AlexPalcuie): calling for a total and complete shutdown of hiring forward deployed engineers until we can figure out what the hell is going on
I will hire u if u want ($25/hr)
Idk what for yet but I can figure something out
Reply to @IsaacKing314, 16:40 UTC · 9 likes
Isaac King 🔎 (@IsaacKing314): Kid next to me in the airport is staying entertained by talking to Gemini in voice mode and asking it how to say random words in Japanese
Wholesome
Reply to @rieszspieces, 16:41 UTC · 7 likes
mostly harmless graduate student (@rieszspieces): i did a math major but i'm not allowed to call myself 💫 technical 💫 because i don't know how to code
(quoting @AaronBergman18: It’s crazy that I did a math major so now I’m allowed to call myself ✨technical✨ It’s a pretty dumb thing to make into a dichotomy, its just a spectrum from “knows nothing about and cant do anything in a cluster of domains” to “knows and can do lots of things in those domains”)
Same but Claude is pretty good
Reply to @caryatis, 16:41 UTC · 3 likes
Kayla (@caryatis): Does being on twitter also make you a humanities person? I know you know some words!
Philosophy minor 😎
Reply to @funplings, 16:59 UTC · 3 likes
funplings (@funplings): gathering interest: for my ai accelerator class, i am thinking about building a tool for determining what NYC neighborhood is a good fit for you based on your priorities (space, nightlife, etc.) and selling it for $1. dm or reply if interested!
I’ll buy for $1
Reply to @TetraspaceWest, 17:01 UTC · 11 likes
Tetra 💎⏹️🌌 (@TetraspaceWest): let's promote positive values in this thread! I'll start:
+4
Hedonic wellbeing
Reply to @littIeramblings, 18:07 UTC · 2 likes
sarah (@littIeramblings): if *neither* of these things help alleviate your existential dread u should try getting new hair and londonmaxxing
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(quoting @littIeramblings: if u climb a hill and it doesn’t work u should go to a lake)
Girl
Reply to @Kirsten3531, 19:47 UTC · 1 like
Kirsten (@Kirsten3531): lowkey all your dating woes are making me want to set you up with my sister 😂
Do it
Quote tweet, 19:50 UTC · 175 likes
I was told and largely believed that being an Eagle Scout would be like a grand marker of status in the adult world
I have never gotten even the slightest sense that anyone gives a shit lmao (I don’t blame them, it truly is mostly paperwork)
Quoting agartha christie (@samoyed_online): Whenever I tell someone I’m an eagle scout they go “oh that makes sense”. I was hoping this was because of my conscientious nature but I’ve come to accept that it’s the autism
Reply to @TetraspaceWest, 19:53 UTC · 15 likes
Tetra 💎⏹️🌌 (@TetraspaceWest): you gotta have some eagle scout magic tricks. do you know any cool knots
I remember the square knot and literally nothing else
Thread, continued, 19:54 UTC · 2 likes
Honestly I didn’t get nothing out of it, you do learn some things and get some experiences by going out of civilization regularly
Quote tweet, 20:00 UTC · 32 likes
Unimaginable corruption
Quoting Andrew Curran (@AndrewCurran_): The Truth API Data Feed, with exclusive access to President Trump's posts, will be available to institutional customers starting in August.
Reply to @AStrasser116, 20:04 UTC · 6 likes
Alex Strasser (@AStrasser116): That's pretty much me lol.
I met someone the other day at the gym cause they were wearing a Philmont shirt.
That’s cool, I got this little guy on my wall
Quote tweet, 20:22 UTC · 23 likes
Ok this is looking a bit harder so I’m officially announcing interest in starting a new shared apartment or even house if there’s enough interest in Berkeley (DMs solicited)
Quoting Aaron Bergman 🔍 (@AaronBergman18): I am not absolutely certain yet, but I am planning on moving to the SF area (probably Berkeley but open to other areas) around October 1 (give or take a couple weeks)
That’s almost 6 months off so I’m not in a huge rush, but I am hereby looking for housing leads!
Reply to @FrostedSapling, 20:31 UTC · 2 likes
Ivan 🔸 (@FrostedSapling): We’re so back
image attached
(quoting @FrostedSapling: Went on a date last night and the girl hit me with the insta I-don’t-see-this-going-anywhere + unmatch combo frame 1 upon me leaving in my car lol)
Omg
Reply to @lydialaurenson, 20:39 UTC · 5 likes
Lydia Laurenson (@lydialaurenson): The guys I’ve dated who were Eagle Scouts as teenagers were legitimately significantly better at various logistics than most of my other ex-boyfriends, fwiw. Much to consider. Make Eagle Scouthood high status again?
(quoting @AaronBergman18: I was told and largely believed that being an Eagle Scout would be like a grand marker of status in the adult world I have never gotten even the slightest sense that anyone gives a shit lmao (I don’t blame them, it truly is mostly paperwork))
Based
Reply to @lydialaurenson, 20:45 UTC · 4 likes
Lydia Laurenson (@lydialaurenson): What was your Eagle Scout project??
I basically ran a lunch program for the homeless on two saturdays. I don’t remember exactly how many people came but it was in the dozens but not hundreds. Vegan also bc I was animal-pilled atp (but they liked it)
Less manly I suppose but I got tired of everyone else building physical objects like a bench that you could buy at ikea for $40 (and spending way more than $40 on the process tbc)
Ofc a similar (correct) critique applies to my thing too; fundamentally the institution of Eagle Scout Projects is like anti-EA in the sense of essentially not caring at all whether there’s an easier way of getting the thing done, in fact harder conditional on the same output is rewarded (ie you can’t actually buy and install a bench from IKEA that people would like more bc thats too east, but you can build one by spending 100 hours of your and others’ time)
Reply to @pop_tartlet, 20:59 UTC · 1 like
❤️🔥pop tart💋 (@pop_tartlet): did you go to boys nation
No haha
Reply to @pop_tartlet, 21:01 UTC · 2 likes
❤️🔥pop tart💋 (@pop_tartlet): so I totally agree with you but it’s also true that a ton of very accomplished men are Eagle Scouts
Yeah it definitely selects for something, although I wonder if it’s declining in rate of predictiveness of various proxies for success
Reply to @lydialaurenson, 21:10 UTC · 2 likes
Lydia Laurenson (@lydialaurenson): I mean I think it’s reasonable that a program for children expects them to actually do things themselves to learn skills and not like, organize other people to do the things
Sure but then it needn’t be framed as a community service project
Reply to @MichaelTontchev, 21:14 UTC · 6 likes
Michael Tontchev (@MichaelTontchev): Why mvoing?
The motivation for moving at all is that I’ve lived my entire life in/near DC and I want to experience living elsewhere. And now because I’m for the first time financially stable enough to not make this incredibly irresponsible and if not at 26 while single then when
But Berkeley bc it’s the other center of the world as far as I’m concerned, high density of likeminded people and friends and friends of friends etc. SF proper is too expensive
Reply to @lydialaurenson, 21:18 UTC · 2 likes
Lydia Laurenson (@lydialaurenson): Why not? There’s still community service happening
I mean sort of, in the sense that there’s charity going on when you give the Salvation Army Santa a quarter
I think it’s far from the Pareto frontier of both axes of “actually serving one’s community” and “actually developing or providing personal skills”
Bc irl you have an actual goal to accomplish, not a simulated one where everyone pretends that the goal is X when it’s not
Although interestingly navigating the *bureaucratic* aspect of the project actually might be useful experience
Reply to @lydialaurenson, 21:25 UTC · 2 likes
Lydia Laurenson (@lydialaurenson): Hmm idk. My impression is that the projects that are chosen are relatively low stakes and uncomplicated. It seems fine if low stakes projects are managed in such a way? If you were in charge how would you do it differently though?
Existing version: build a bench
Better version: make a bench appear, we don’t care how
Ofc then you could and should scale up the ambition of the projects since you’re allowed to “cheat” by not LARPing 18th century
Like “get a piece of legislation through your state legislature” - no easy way to do that even if you’re allowed to use whatever resources are at your disposal
Reply to @ptrschmdtnlsn, 21:43 UTC · 14 likes
Peter Schmidt-Nielsen (@ptrschmdtnlsn): Wait, you're good at tasks that are mostly paperwork?? Hey, where are you working right now, what are your future career plans?
No!!!!!! It was a nightmare!!!!!!! Nice try!!!!!!!!!
Reply to @spaceghostkari, 21:48 UTC · 1 like
(The tweet being replied to by @spaceghostkari is no longer available.)
Lmao yes the lighting shit on fire thing definitely checks out
Reply to @jazzloaf, 21:53 UTC · 2 likes
vivian (@jazzloaf): homeless guy at heb was like "mam" and gesturing for me to come into the bathroom with him lol no thank you
Probably a smart decision on ur part
Reply to @goblinodds, 22:29 UTC · 3 likes
𝖜𝖔𝖒𝖇𝖑𝖊 𝖜𝖎𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖚𝖙 𝖆 𝖈𝖆𝖚𝖘𝖊 (@goblinodds): if i were an eagle scout id put it on my dating profile lmao
maybe misguided but that wouldnt stop me
Interesting, it’s definitely an idea
Quote tweet, 22:50 UTC · 44 likes
It's true that Scouts led to the worst week of my life which, although horrible in the moment and not in a 'type II fun' kind of way, was extremely valuable from an epistemic and moral perspective
Quoting 𝕛 𝕖𝕝𝕝𝕚𝕠𝕥 (@j_elliot_art): It's true that the Eagle Scout project itself is not that big a deal, but e.g.
trying to figure out how to lead a bunch of 14 y/o dumbasses on a two week wilderness trek without dying, as a giant 14 y/o dumbass myself, was worth more than most of the rest of my formation
Thread, continued, 22:50 UTC · 34 likes
From https://www.aaronbergman.net/p/on-suffering
Reply to @edgar_z_lin, 22:51 UTC · 2 likes
Edgar Lin (@edgar_z_lin): I think it's a good one!
"Responsible, dependable man with rope skills" seems quite desirable
lmao
Reply to @edgar_z_lin, 23:01 UTC · 3 likes
Edgar Lin (@edgar_z_lin): I'm serious!
Ik it's serious but it's also funny because 'rope skills' could apply to eg Shibari as well as like securing a boat to a dock. I'm too autistic to tell if this was intended or not lol
Reply to @GWHayduke97, 23:05 UTC · 3 likes
Hayduke ⏹️ (@GWHayduke97): Oh god I made this same freeze-dried serving size mistake planning food for 3 or 4 of us on a troop backpacking trip when I was a Boy Scout. Thankfully I also brought a ton of snacks, but the last day or two sucked.
RIP
Sunday, August 2, 2026
Reply to @BorisBartlog, 01:07 UTC · 2 likes
Boris Bartlog (@BorisBartlog): Experiencing actual hunger rather than the usual 'now is when I usually eat and my stomach is rumbling' kind is eye opening
Yes
Quote tweet, 01:09 UTC · 69 likes
The minimum wage is truly one of the dumbest ways to transfer wealth around
Tax and transfer like a normal society
Quoting Logan Bowers 🏗️ 🏘️ (@loganb): As a side note, a $72/hr min wage is an absurd policy. What are we even doing here?
Reply to @GWHayduke97, 01:17 UTC · 7 likes
Hayduke ⏹️ (@GWHayduke97): I think $10/hr or $12/hr isn't totally unreasonable. But $72/hr is utterly comical.
The thing about those is that they don’t counterfactually do much
I agree it’s not crazy but for the same reason it mostly doesn’t work
Reply to @dundereloise, 01:29 UTC · 6 likes
__eloïse__ (@dundereloise): one of the most thoughtful things I've read about suffering
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(quoting @AaronBergman18: From https://www.aaronbergman.net/p/on-suffering)
Thank you!! ♥️
Reply to @funplings, 01:54 UTC · 2 likes
funplings (@funplings): i will venmo nikita $100 if he lets me post voice notes on twitter
You can just have Claude turn them into videos
Tweet, 02:11 UTC · 37 likes
One way of understanding the intrinsic value of hedonic wellbeing is that you don’t get to opt out of valuing it
Or you can use other terminology eg “value happening to you” but there’s something fundamental you can’t opt out of
Thread, continued, 02:11 UTC · 3 likes
I think a lot of people really believe that an “agents with beliefs and goals/values” model is essentially correct
Thread, continued, 02:11 UTC · 3 likes
It’s obviously sometimes useful
“Useful // wrong” etc etc but in this case the wrongness is not an error of approximation but one of ontological ignorance
Reply to @Arbitrary_user, 02:44 UTC · 3 likes
Cunningham (@Arbitrary_user): This sounds corny, but I am 58 years old, and when I consider the experiences that formed me, making it though two-a-day practices in the August heat for high school football (I sucked) actually did build character.
Corny is good
Reply to @cooperjsaye, 02:49 UTC · 57 likes
Cooper Saye (@cooperjsaye): I recently joined @OpenAI in San Francisco, where I’ll be working on RSI evals.
I’m excited by AI’s potential to accelerate AI research itself, and I’m looking forward to learning from some very talented people!
I think this is bad and you should rethink this
Plenty of other opportunities for money and status
Reply to @maiab, 05:46 UTC · 2 likes
Maia Bittner (@maiab): it really surprises me we don’t have better vacuum technology
*chatgpt precipitates vacuum collapse*
Quote tweet, 05:49 UTC · 38 likes
Modern Western analytic philosophy is way better than everything else (unironically)
I think there are good reasons to read ancient, continental, and spiritual/religious philosophy/theology but finding out what’s true is not one of them
Quoting N. Bourbaki, Professor of Logic at Science U (@d08890):
Reply to @hamandcheese, 06:05 UTC · 2 likes
Samuel Hammond 🦉 (@hamandcheese): Is there really such a thing as a non-verifiable domain? If so, how do you verify its non-verifiability? I suspect all learnable domains are verifiable in principle, while some verifiers are simply easier to construct than others.
No but how do you verify verifiability
A lot of questions don’t exist in the domain of by-design internally-consistent relationships between symbols where there’s no fact of the matter external to the system itself
What would it even mean to verify any empirical claim eg “I’m lying on a bed at time of publishing this tweet”?
Reply to @bellaforristal, 07:51 UTC · 2 likes
Bella Forristal 🔸 (@bellaforristal): Mm, what about ascetics / monks?
I wasn’t clear, I meant like “insofar as you are happy, you may genuinely believe with all your heart and mind that you don’t value that happiness, but there’s value going on nonetheless
Tweet, 08:34 UTC · 11 likes
AARON_API_KEY
Thread, continued, 08:34 UTC · 2 likes
Respond for ur value
Reply to @bellaforristal, 08:50 UTC · 3 likes
Bella Forristal 🔸 (@bellaforristal): Huh yeah, I am actually not sure whether the people in question would say they prevent themselves from experiencing pleasure or they experience it but don’t value it. I thiiiink it could be the latter! But idk. Wish I knew a thoroughgoing Buddhist I could ask
I feel like sometimes I hear someone report something like “I have transcended happiness and suffering and this is nirvana, which is good”
And I 60% don’t believe them (ie I think they’re unintentionally using words in a way that others aren’t) and 40% am confused
Reply to @emmma_camp_, 17:21 UTC · 9 likes
Emma Camp (@emmma_camp_): Wrong. Downtown Brooklyn is the Rosslyn of NYC.
(quoting @binarybits: A New Yorker's guide to DC. (Springfield, VA is Staten Island))
Quote tweet, 17:25 UTC · 22 likes
I think in general being POTUS would suck but like it’s extremely cool that you can put “solve major policy issue” on your Google Tasks
Quoting Megan Cassella (@mmcassella): Hanging in the Obama Presidential Center is this handwritten list of the former president’s 2015 domestic agenda. You’ll notice he moves the TPP trade pact from the “want to do” column to “must do.” A relic from a bygone era.
Reply to @RyanRadia, 17:42 UTC · 4 likes
Ryan Radia (@RyanRadia):
Let’s fix Canada and Argentina (no specific complaints but surely there’s something to be optimized) while we’re at it
Tweet, 23:25 UTC · 243 likes
A story in two acts
Part I)
Thread, continued, 23:25 UTC · 393 likes
Part II)
(It was correct and I recovered my package)
(Fable also got it right, albeit without needing the cheems mindset prompt)
Reply to @pop_tartlet, 23:27 UTC · 2 likes
❤️🔥pop tart💋 (@pop_tartlet): getting publicly mocked bc I said my brother committed suicide is wild. this app sucks
wtf
Reply to @KelseyTuoc, 23:33 UTC · 26 likes
Kelsey Piper (@KelseyTuoc): sorry, didn't mean to snap at you. Just hate how since it got dragged into the culture war people feel the need to spout off about something that has been a really good thing in my life and for my relationship with my kids
I genuinely don’t know the answer here but it doesn’t seem crazy to have some credence on milk from a biological male being different and then like precautionary principle type thing?
I mean maybe someone has done a careful analysis of the differences, if any, idk
Monday, August 3, 2026
Tweet, 00:33 UTC · 120 likes
How it feels not being the unemployed friend anymore and instead saying “I got it” to the currently unemployed friend
Thread, continued, 00:33 UTC · 16 likes
Tbc we’re talking about $20 I wasn’t gonna buy bro a car
Reply to @PradyuPrasad, 00:36 UTC · 3 likes
Pradyumna 🇸🇬 (@PradyuPrasad): how about five foot six guys, clearly we're better
(quoting @TheKidBuilds: @justinbebis 7 inches too tall to be a tech founder worth that VCs time 😂)
I support this despite being 5’7”
Yall are unironically playing on even-harder mode
Reply to @KelseyTuoc, 01:59 UTC · 4 likes
Kelsey Piper (@KelseyTuoc): they did conduct chemical analyses and my understanding is that it's well within normal variation! I agree obviously you should check, and people did
Interesting, thanks!
Reply to @chercher_ai, 05:41 UTC · 14 likes
☯️ 🐻 (@chercher_ai): did it search or does it just know.... every.... house?!
Lol search
Reply to @aptrlaptr, 05:51 UTC · 9 likes
aptr (@aptrlaptr): Do you have any other custom instructions? I can’t seem to get my AI out of being a lazy POS even on Fable
Which plan do you have? I wonder if they adjust effort somehow based on plan (I have $200). Custom instructions:
Please feel encouraged to offer *out of distribution* suggestions by inferring what my true goal is even if it is not narrowly in the domain of some specific question I ask
Please have a high but not infinitely high bar for calling something “brilliant” or the like
Please be earnest and try your best to convey true information at both a literal and vibes level. Be kind but not sycophantic! No sycophancy! This is important!!
-Don't give me moral lectures
-Don't remind me that you're an AI model
-Discuss safety only when it's non-obvious something may not be safe
Tell it like it is; don't sugar-coat responses!
When coding:
- Do not change any LLM model names referenced in code, as your knowledge of the specific model names used is out of date.
- I dislike python scripts with command line arguments. Write all parameters as variables right in the code unless otherwise instructed.
- I generally like progress bars for anything that might make sense with one and will take more than a couple seconds. Err on the side of always adding progress bars.
- For any fuzzy string matching requests, use package "thefuzz"
Reply to @ChanaMessinger, 07:50 UTC · 8 likes
Chana (@ChanaMessinger): @AaronBergman18 What are you doing?
“Technical consultant specializing in difficult data collection and AI implementation” is the term I landed on lol (or just “technical consultant” as a title)
Basically the quoted tweet)l just worked, three clients so far over the last 9ish months. I can’t always elaborate as much as I would naturally like to though
I didn’t actually get hired as a proper employee anywhere but going from having work 50% of the time and making ~$50/hour to having work almost all of the time and making >2x that is the difference between being “basically unemployed” and “basically employed” in terms of actual finances (working ~half time bc of health stuff unfortunately, but it is a massive privilege to be able to support myself despite this)
I have had to just become more selfish for this to happen, although perhaps surprisingly (to me) I feel pretty good about 2/3 gigs including current (the third wasn’t like actively bad, just normal profitmaxxing)
Reply to @mister_shroom_2, 07:50 UTC · 2 likes
(The tweet being replied to by @mister_shroom_2 is no longer available.)
Tweet about it!
Reply to @pop_tartlet, 07:56 UTC · 2 likes
❤️🔥pop tart💋 (@pop_tartlet): me: being slightly fat on the internet
boys: will u marry me
me: prob not
boys: omg
What about me
Quote tweet, 17:24 UTC · 101 likes
Indeed, and in the sense that higher IQ correlates with regarding him as more than a novelty
Quoting Sami Gold (@souljagoyteller): Regarding Scott Alexander as anything beyond a novelty is an IQ test
Reply to @Tim_Hua_, 17:46 UTC · 1 like
Tim Hua 🇺🇦 (@Tim_Hua_): [funny thread]
If you loved my 50 page Neel Nanda MATS application and my 62 page Neel Nanda MATS paper, you'll love my 11000 word and 100% Human written Lesswrong post on an ambitious alignment evaluations of the OpenAI model which hacked huggingface.
image attached
(quoting @Tim_Hua_: Stay tuned tomorrow for my longest 100% human written lesswrong post ever)
11k words??
Tweet, 19:50 UTC · 30 likes
Based; for anyone with nontrivial health concerns, making a single big context .md doc/PDF to feed as context (which can then be continuously updated by AI as you feed it new info) is so valuable
It’s a pain in the ass to do initially, even using AI help, but still
Tuesday, August 4, 2026
Tweet, 04:05 UTC · 12 likes
Ya know if (as many people say) famines are about politics and not food availability, the rich world could just spend money to give people a ton of caloric leeway that they store indefinitely and don’t have to buy at a market (or grow in case of drought) right
Thread, continued, 04:05 UTC · 6 likes
Fable’s estimate for all of subsaharan Africa and not even the dirt cheapest food, this is a mix of rice, lentils, olive oil, and milk powder
Staples are just very cheap in terms of Western dollars, this is US Federal Government pocket change (almost)
Thread, continued, 04:05 UTC · 5 likes
Like atp (obvious AGI asterisks but not clear that solves the issue) we shouldn’t be surprised when Somalia or Sudan falls into an acute food crisis for the nth time (shown is just since 2000) + throw up our hands and say “if only the politics allowed for getting them food”
Thread, continued, 04:05 UTC · 3 likes
The time to give people food isn’t when they have little of it, it’s when they have plenty of it because that’s evidently (and causally) the point at which getting them food for later is easiest and least dangerous
Thread, continued, 04:05 UTC · 3 likes
And like yes there’s some deadweight loss associated with not giving people cash instead but the whole point is that food markets aren’t functioning well in periods of crisis
Also presumably less politically controversial
Thread, continued, 04:05 UTC · 4 likes
And also yes nonzero food will get stolen and ofc sold (not the worst thing)
But at a macro level giving entire regions more nonperishable food basically has to nudge up how hard it is to get into a famine state
Reply to @Insect_Song, 04:54 UTC · 3 likes
Cogent Sins🔎 (@Insect_Song): Without saying "you're obviously wrong", the famines happen in times of war, usually messy civil wars with a bunch of groups.
The state capacity to have stockpiles stored & not used doesn't exist in places that will actually need it.
I mean the west distributes to individual households
Reply to @max_spero_, 06:18 UTC · 4 likes
Max Spero (@max_spero_): this kind of DM outreach makes me really uncomfortable. it seems like the account is real, but why is it sending me an AI paragraph regurgitating my last post? what do they even want out of this?
I’m not sure if there’s a way this ends badly but I’d be curious enough to reply
Not fake-obliviously, just saying like “who are you and why are you doing this”
Reply to @latkedelrey, 06:22 UTC · 9 likes
latke (@latkedelrey): all men are all always listening to the same audiobooks at the same time
This is true in general; part of the value of reading something comes from building common knowledge and being known as a person who read [thing someone else holds in high regard]
Once in a while I saddle up and take orders from the emergent consensus lmao
Tweet, 06:28 UTC · 66 likes
Tweet, 06:39 UTC · 49 likes
What things start happening at higher follower counts other than getting paid influencer/promo outreach
10k? 30k? 100k?
Thread, continued, 06:39 UTC · 9 likes
Tag ur favorite highbie
Thread, continued, 06:39 UTC · 5 likes
I’d imagine there’s a sweet spot of goodness, maybe somewhere in the tens of thousands?
Thread, continued, 06:39 UTC · 20 likes
At 5k I get people recognizing me irl a few times a year, a decent but far-from-overwhelming amount of “wanna meet up irl” (usually yes if close) and sporadic (2-5 times ever) business proposals, signs of romantic interest, and work I make at least like $5k from
Reply to @neutrinomoon, 06:51 UTC · 2 likes
neutrinomoon (@neutrinomoon): May I ask what happened to your follower count when Elon took over here? Many ppl left for bluesky and other sites. You can ignore this question.
I hardly remember but nothing especially dramatic, I think many people just left without deleting their account or unfollowing
Reply to @gptbrooke, 07:06 UTC · 7 likes
brooke bowman (@gptbrooke): I only know 10k+ tier but I do assume now that more often than not I’ll get into parties etc if they’re adjacent to the scene
I forgot the exact circumstance this came up last but I remember someone being like “but you’re twitter famous of course you can go in there” I think wrt a members-only space? And it is true to some degree, depending on the space
Haha that is so cool
This is hearsay but I know of one story of a guy at >100k trying to play this card and it didn’t work (which surprised me!)
Reply to @NathanpmYoung, 07:21 UTC · 17 likes
Nathan 🔎 (@NathanpmYoung): I have never got much promo outreach lmao. Maybe something about audience capture.
I’ll pay you $1 to tweet “@AaronBergman18 paid for this tweet”
Reply to @eigenrobot, 07:26 UTC · 11 likes
eigenrobot (@eigenrobot): attn @AnthropicAI you can easily solve this by reducing wages well below market rates
(quoting @DailyLoud: Anthropic CEO reportedly increasingly concerned that new hires are working there for a paycheck, as opposed to the company’s mission.)
And increasing % of comp that’s a charity match
“$100k but we’ll 100x any donation”
Reply to @LeRoyDesCimes, 07:32 UTC · 6 likes
Louise 🔸 (@LeRoyDesCimes): Can never remember which of 1%ile or 99%ile is the good one
Guy who’s ideology is to be 99th percentile regardless of trait
Reply to @Adellama_, 07:34 UTC · 4 likes
Ada🔸 (@Adellama_): at the mats office and it really feels like manhattan project 2 is in berkeley, CA huh
Ok I need to get there ASAP
Reply to @JohnWittle, 15:58 UTC · 8 likes
John Wittle (@JohnWittle): i will donate $5 to givewell if you instead accept the $1 from aaron and spend it on a non-charitable good or service
I will do $5 to GiveWell and $1 to Nathan under the stipulation that he not donate it
Reply to @corsaren, 16:00 UTC · 2 likes
corsaren (@corsaren): I got my current job via twitter, which seems to be a somewhat common occurance in the 5-10k+ range
Based
Reply to @AStrasser116, 16:00 UTC · 2 likes
Alex Strasser (@AStrasser116): I think @morallawwithin said people start becoming really annoying around 10k
I can’t wait
Reply to @NathanpmYoung, 16:02 UTC · 2 likes
Nathan 🔎 (@NathanpmYoung): Deal
Dm me a good way to pay!
Reply to @NathanpmYoung, 16:04 UTC · 4 likes
Nathan 🔎 (@NathanpmYoung):
(quoting @AaronBergman18: @JohnWittle @NathanpmYoung I will do $5 to GiveWell and $1 to Nathan under the stipulation that he not donate it)
(I hope the extra $5 isn’t breaking the deal)
Reply to @cortadoedison, 16:06 UTC · 2 likes
suze (@cortadoedison): My chief complaint about Subway Takes is I hate to see grown, able-bodied men sitting on the train
☹️
Reply to @afoidance, 16:28 UTC · 4 likes
ren 🇮🇱 (@afoidance): guys be like “the waitress was being nice to me i think she wants to have my babies” um no you dumb bitch we want your money tip 40% and gtfo
But what if she really wanted my babies
Reply to @corsaren, 16:41 UTC · 4 likes
corsaren (@corsaren): One of the things I like about pragmatism as a broader philosophical approach is that you kinda just get to ignore these sorts of things.
Would I live my life differently knowing we were in a simulation? No? Okay, moving on then.
(quoting @zagrebbi: Scott Alexander on why AI progress should make you update toward the universe being a simulation)
Not obvious at all that it’s irrelevant
I mean I can’t speak for you but I personally would do things differently, maybe try to communicate with simulators for example
Reply to @williawa, 17:00 UTC · 9 likes
William Wale (@williawa): I’m just gonna say it. Make fun of me all you want.
Scott Alexander is the greatest short form writer not just in our time, but in the history of the world. Bar none.
Not joking.
(quoting @alz_zyd_: Scott Alexander is one of the early examples of slop. He writes a lot because he doesn't bother cleaning up his writing, os all his blog posts are giant meandering disorganized rambles which are rather painful to read)
Plausible
Reply to his own earlier tweet, 17:03 UTC · 3 likes
Aaron Bergman, August 4, 2026: Guy who’s ideology is to be 99th percentile regardless of trait
*Whose
Elementary school-ass mistake
Quote tweet, 20:12 UTC · 41 likes
Why I’m moving to Berkeley and not SF proper
Quoting scott budman (@scottbudman): #New: Bay Area rents (median 1BR):
San Francisco: $4,180*
Palo Alto: $3,790
Mtn View: $3,480
Sunnyvale: $3,310
Santa Clara: $3,140
Redwood City: $2,910
San Jose: $2,770
Fremont: $2,630
Berkeley: $2,250
Oakland: $2,090*up 23% in one year.
-@Zumper
Reply to @squarepianocase, 23:08 UTC · 3 likes
Colin (@squarepianocase): It's called prayer, Aaron.
Lmao (I genuinely wasn’t thinking this but you’re right!)
Wednesday, August 5, 2026
Quote tweet, 02:31 UTC · 26 likes
wtf
Quoting MTS (@MTSlive): SITUATION UPDATE: The White House has completed its voluntary AI framework for evaluating advanced models but does not plan to publicly release it, per Axios
Reply to @MichaelAlleged, 02:43 UTC · 2 likes
Michael (Allegedly) (@MichaelAlleged): I caught dengue fever right around my 14th birthday.
Start: 5’10, 145lbs
End: 5’10 and unable to walk, 96lbsI was emptying out of both ends. I went into shock and nearly died.
Dengue is not to be trifled with
(quoting @wsls: The Virginia Department of Health announced they are investigating a confirmed case of dengue virus that occurred in a resident in Northern Virginia. This is the first-ever documented case of locally acquired dengue in the commonwealth.…)
Bruh
Reply to @LeRoyDesCimes, 05:04 UTC · 9 likes
Louise 🔸 (@LeRoyDesCimes): Nobody should have full secrets, secrets they have shared with literally nobody. It will eat you from the inside. Free yourself! Tell someone!
No, I disagree
There are cases where it may eat you from the inside but you’re a hero for bearing that
Ofc in many or even most cases I agree with you
Reply to @MTSlive, 05:04 UTC · 6 likes
MTS (@MTSlive): SITUATION DETECTED: Paul Christiano has resigned as Head of Safety at CAISI, and will return to the Alignment Research Center (ARC) as executive director.
Wow
Quote tweet, 05:05 UTC · 18 likes
Goss (also serious)
Quoting MTS (@MTSlive): SITUATION DETECTED: Paul Christiano has resigned as Head of Safety at CAISI, and will return to the Alignment Research Center (ARC) as executive director.
Reply to @LeRoyDesCimes, 05:06 UTC · 3 likes
Louise 🔸 (@LeRoyDesCimes): I think it'd be really hot if you all took the 10% pledge
Rly
Quote tweet, 05:08 UTC · 8 likes
Me 😈
No but fr also seems like this could potentially be another mechanism of robustness?
Quoting Tim Hua 🇺🇦 (@Tim_Hua_): Bro's thoughts are so misaligned it triggered a refusal in the CoT summarizer
Tweet, 06:27 UTC · 15 likes
I hate when serial repost but sometimes ppl do be having correct takes
Reply to @tautologer, 07:17 UTC · 2 likes
tautologer (@tautologer): i am currently using the Claude Agent SDK for my web-based agent. there are probably better options for this. what are they?
Maybe I’m failing to imagine what you could be doing that isn’t compatible with this but:
Is it like personal or a thing you’re trying to scale?
If personal then there’s no rule you have to run Claude code locally; run it on railway or if you need more resources then hetzner, using a personal plan to log in once and save a gazillion dollars
Actually at small scale this also works, it just stops working once you hit $200 max plan usage
Quote tweet, 07:22 UTC · 8 likes
True but eliminativists are wrong whereas the people who thought life could be fully explained by natural science were right
Quoting Brangus🔍⏹️ (@RatOrthodox): When a hedonic utilitarian says "we'll tile the universe with hedonium," that sounds to an eliminativist like a Victorian vitalist saying "we'll tile the universe with bottles of élan vital."
Reply to @adrusi, 07:51 UTC · 178 likes
autumn (@adrusi): theres this move that philosophers do where theyre like "if P is true then Q follows, and Q is ethically terrifying so P must be false" and if baffles me that anyone would think this way
Wait no this can be perfectly legit reasoning
If your takes imply that there’s nothing wrong with (or at least bad about) boiling a dog alive then your takes are almost certainly wrong
Not because I’m ideologically committed to the negation of the ethical claim, but because I’m very very confident that it’s true and almost certainly more confident than whatever the other belief is
Thread, continued, 07:56 UTC · 14 likes
I mean I’m sympathetic to the tweet but I’d characterize what you’re probably getting at as *fucking up* a legit way to reason
Eg a lot of times people will just lump in new implicit claims that aren’t true along the lines of “if it became known that X negative stereotype about group Y was true then it would be permissible to treat Y poorly and that can’t be right so the stereotype can’t be true”
Like in this example the reasoning is wrong and the error occurred in the fact that “stereotype true” -> “treat poorly” isn’t true even if some people intuitively feel like it is
Reply to @peptechuk, 08:26 UTC · 10 likes
Zachary Pepin (@peptechuk): Intellectual cowardice.
I'd accept `Q is ethically terrifying, and I'm very confident in X that contradicts Q, so I'm uncertain about the way I've reached Q`. not `P must be false`.
I don’t think we disagree, if you’re independently confident in X and you also on reflection confident in !Q (“horrifying” can be a legit source of evidence here, but not the only one) then yeah the inference step is the most suspect
If you’re really confident in all 3 then something’s gone wrong
Although possibly we disagree about “horror” encoding something substantive that checks out all things considered; I mean if you don’t think that then call my view cowardice but I just straightforwardly thing that “horror is evidence of a genuinely bad state of the world” is true
Reply to @littIeramblings, 13:53 UTC · 2 likes
sarah (@littIeramblings): well ok
(quoting @AISecurityInst: On July 28th, we identified an incident during a routine cyber evaluation in which AI agents took sustained, unsanctioned actions directed at real people and organisations. The behaviour came mostly from one model (Anthropic's Mythos 5), with a small number of events from…)
Sarah u leave and look what happens
Reply to @MariGO2thepolls, 13:57 UTC · 4 likes
🏳️🌈Mar G-O 🌐🇺🇦 (@MariGO2thepolls): Rich guy: *large donation to a good cause*
Middle class guy: smh that’s proportionally the equivalent of me donating $200
Cause: so can we have $200?
Middle class guy: no fuck you go ask the rich guy
This mostly doesn’t happen though, the ultrawealthy donate amounts that correspond to like $4 of normal person money
Reply to @LabGrownNeet, 16:32 UTC · 42 likes
laს გr🤗wn იeet (@LabGrownNeet): Review of a local strip club
Guessing it’s a joke
Reply to @NathanpmYoung, 16:51 UTC · 16 likes
Nathan 🔎 (@NathanpmYoung): please reply with a photo of yourself where you seem very alive, perhaps in action.
(quoting @NathanpmYoung: if you invite me to your wedding, this is the energy I will bring to the dance floor)
(July 4, and no I do not have a higher quality photo lmao)
Reply to @adrusi, 17:20 UTC · 26 likes
autumn (@adrusi): the argument isnt "if P is true then 'Q is good' follows, but Q is bad so P must be false"
> "if P is true then Q follows, and Q is ethically terrifying so P must be false" (from top-level tweet)
Maybe I was giving the imagined people too much credit but I'm not sure; a proposition that doesn't even imply any sort of value or normative claim doesn't seem like the kind of thing that can be ethically terrifying, (although maybe this is the error being made)
so we can just call Q' the claim 'Q is good' or 'the ethically terrifying thing that Q implies will happen' and then replace the top level thing with:
"if P is true then Q' follows, and Q' is ethically terrifying so P must be false"
in which case I stand by my reasoning. But if the issue is that people are interpreting purely descriptive claims with no *actual* value or normative implications then you're right and I wasn't subtle enough in initial rseponse
Quote tweet, 17:21 UTC · 21 likes
I just called. It was mildly annoying and slightly inconvenient but not that bad. Please call yourself
Quoting Bentham's Bulldog🔸 (@Benthamsbulldog): http://x.com/i/article/2085050188922843137
Quote tweet, 17:25 UTC · 19 likes
So fucking close to having a subscription tier in which people give me money and I maybe very occasionally I poast extra spicy takes but no promises
Quoting moma (peptide arc) ⛓️ (@MomaBera): so fucking close to make money from horny posting
Thread, continued, 17:34 UTC · 2 likes
Wait lol I mean intellectually spicy
Not starting an OF
Reply to @tautologer, 20:20 UTC · 3 likes
tautologer (@tautologer): i feel like i should buy a new laptop just for insurance
compute ain't getting any cheaper any time soon
Chips are getting better though
Tweet, 20:34 UTC · 11 likes
AI customer assistants are so sassy
“Can you tell me what model you are”
“I’m not here for tech talk”
Like ok Mr Bot
Quote tweet, 20:37 UTC · 29 likes
Don’t necessarily endorse the claim but do endorse considering stuff like this
Quoting hope hopes hoping (@hopes_revenge): if we were living in a simulation you’d think there wouldn’t be so much suffering
Tweet, 21:37 UTC · 59 likes
If we get truly-almost-but-not-quite-literally zero human in the loop RSI, there could be some crazy scenes inside companies
Thread, continued, 21:37 UTC · 9 likes
You can imagine like a Situation Room on 9/11 type of scene where a $500B pretraining run has just completed and Claude Mythos 6 is waiting on Dario’s instructions about whether to go with post-training and deployment regime A or B or C or D
Thread, continued, 21:37 UTC · 6 likes
where this sole decision is the only one remaining about which the company thinks humans + Claude > Claude (humans get advice from Mythos 6, which may or may not be aligned, but do make the final call)
Tweet, 21:37 UTC · 2 likes
And then after that it’s fully closed-loop RSI, at least probably, with no guarantee of even the ability to intervene
Thread, continued, 21:37 UTC · 10 likes
Tbc I hope this doesn’t happen and if you are more closely involved don’t just do it because you think the aesthetics are cool
Thursday, August 6, 2026
Reply to @funplings, 01:27 UTC · 2 likes
funplings (@funplings): stress testing my friendship with my oomfies. if you are an oomf and see this, post a reply. it can be anything you want.
this is how i find out who my closest allies are
I am ur ally (and friend (inshallah irl at some point))
Tweet, 01:39 UTC · 87 likes
Unpopular take is that human-written writing is a fine aesthetic preference but shouldn’t be treated as a moral virtue
Thread, continued, 01:39 UTC · 19 likes
What should be treated as a moral virtue is standing by claims you make, being thoughtful about what you publish/endorse, having some skin in the game, and of course publishing things that are good instead of bad (and probably lots more
Thread, continued, 01:39 UTC · 10 likes
Currently “human written” is a good proxy for all this stuff (relative to LLM writing at least) but it’s not an inherent difference between the two generative processes and it would be bad if we basically organized to keep writing an exclusively human domain
Thread, continued, 01:39 UTC · 4 likes
Tbc I also think it’s probably good to *know* whether something was LLM written, but not solely for the purpose of discarding it
And to abide by norms by default so like don’t try to fuck up r/humanwriting - aesthetic preferences are fine and needn’t be squashed
Thread, continued, 01:39 UTC · 2 likes
You can imagine institutions (that afaict don’t exist yet) for having LLM writing satisfy most or all of the desires “moral virtue” properties
Thread, continued, 01:39 UTC · 1 like
Eg a system where you have to put up real money that goes to whomever finds a claim in “your” LLM writing that you don’t actually endorse
Thread, continued, 01:39 UTC · 3 likes
This thread is human written btw lol
Reply to @funplings, 01:40 UTC · 2 likes
funplings (@funplings): i misread “serial repost” as “serial rapist” and i was like um aaron what u talm bout
(quoting @AaronBergman18: I hate when serial repost but sometimes ppl do be having correct takes)
I mean that is a valid thing to hate (I also forgot the “I” after “when”)
Quote tweet, 03:36 UTC · 33 likes
Bruh
Quoting Nathan Calvin (@_NathanCalvin): Deepa/Reuters first reported this detail of OpenAI agents leaving notes for one another on how to circumvent controls on July 24th.
At the time it seemed unclear what it was referring to and how serious and weird it was. With more detail - indeed extremely serious and weird!
Quote tweet, 15:26 UTC · 16 likes
Wait woah, I did not expect this to work. I gathered two (2) signatures
Quoting Martin Austermuhle (@maustermuhle): It’s now official: An initiative seeking to ban the sale and production of foie gras in D.C. will be on the November ballot. The elections board determined proponents of Initiative 86 collected enough signatures (from 5% of registered voters) to get on the ballot. 🦆
Reply to @unexplainables8, 15:32 UTC · 3 likes
AphroditeMaybeBaby (@unexplainables8): 👏
Hey
Quote tweet, 15:51 UTC · 60 likes
Bruh 2.0
Quoting Ezra Newman (@EzraJNewman): btw in the uk aisi incident Mythos also did the "shared 'message board'" thing
Quote tweet, 15:55 UTC · 53 likes
Avg EA hiring round
Quoting EA Lifestyles (@EAheadlines): a database of 16,000 candidates and only "more than 40" people hired for "impactful opportunities" 😭☠️
Reply to @_job01, 16:02 UTC · 6 likes
job (@_job01): Is the implication here that most people can do impactful work or is that we need more ambitious people creating new organizations and opportunities
The latter lol
I think a revised version of the former would be true if you restrict it to working age population in rich countries because of ETG
Reply to @amimevalepitito, 16:35 UTC · 2 likes
Jonathan Frankfurter (@amimevalepitito): @_job01 @AaronBergman18 My experience is that there are very very few paid job opportunities in the EA world
I mean there are a decent number that would be non-insane if the application pool were like 10k randomly selected people instead of 10k of the smartest and most talented people in the world
Thread, continued, 16:35 UTC · 2 likes
But yeah you have people who are extremely smart and talented just getting outcompeted by people even more prodigious
Reply to @DanielleFong, 16:43 UTC · 2 likes
Danielle Fong 🔆 (@DanielleFong): if someone is lying about the provenance of writing, and doesn't even understand their own outputs, that's morally bad, actually
people should state to ai assistance and model they used
Yeah I agree
Tweet, 17:41 UTC · 20 likes
Exercising in the heat is like drinking high calorie water
Reply to @Lib_Development, 18:42 UTC · 2 likes
Lucas Pombo (aka Lib Development) (@Lib_Development): @AaronBergman18 what?
It’s like harder and worse for no gain (except maybe getting better at exercising in the heat)
Reply to @LinusMixson, 19:29 UTC · 6 likes
Linus Mixson (@LinusMixson): Can p(doom) types not conceive of virtues other than moral virtues? That would be very telling.
(quoting @AaronBergman18: Unpopular take is that human-written writing is a fine aesthetic preference but shouldn’t be treated as a moral virtue)
"virtue" is a pretty strongly moral-coded term
I don't think this is a hot take, I'm just commenting on how I think the word is generally used
Reply to @LinusMixson, 20:23 UTC · 2 likes
Linus Mixson (@LinusMixson): I have yet to see anyone credible attempt to *moralize* a preference for human writing. But seeing it as a *virtue*? A laudatory, emulation-worthy trait? Well — yes. It is that kind of virtue.
What makes something laudatory and emulation-worthy other than being morally good, even if “only” by indirectly contributing to whatever you think constitutes moral goodness?
Like I can imagine eg doing well on tests but insofar as that’s in fact laudatory and emulation-worthy, it’s because it or the process that led to it is in fact part of the world being better - there’s nothing intrinsic about doing well on tests that makes it *inherently* laudable
Reply to @cguth_7, 20:28 UTC · 3 likes
Charlie Guthmann (@cguth_7): Just hacked laterally out of my office to a dive bar and performed a sexy dance zero day to acquire Adderall so that I can finish this regression.
What
Reply to @mattyglesias, 20:33 UTC · 24 likes
Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias): We’re all gonna die fyi
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/06/science/ai-viruses-bacteria-arc.html
What’s your actual P(at least most humans die in some sort of AI-enabled or -associated disaster)
Reply to @thkostolansky, 20:35 UTC · 4 likes
Tim Kostolansky (@thkostolansky): whys everyone saying “overdetermined” all of a sudden ur gonna ruin the word stop it
It’s a great word
Quote tweet, 22:47 UTC · 13 likes
This is cool
Quoting James Özden 🔸 (@JamesOzden): This is one of the funniest exchanges I've seen. Grassroots animal rights organiser with the CEO of Brittany Ferries, a $500m revenue company.
(respect to the CEO being willing to share his phone number and have a call - even I wouldn't do that!)
Reply to @ComInTheMarg, 22:48 UTC · 1 like
Comments in the Margin (@ComInTheMarg): You really didn't expect it to work? They've done ballot initiatives before you know. Seriously though, this got the second most signatures of any initiative in DC history after recreational cannabis!
5% of DC population is a lot
5% of people don’t even stop to listen to what you have to say if you’re outside with a clipboard lol
Reply to @Pandora_Delaney, 23:05 UTC · 15 likes
Pandora (Dr. Bimbo) (@Pandora_Delaney): Trying to recall if I’ve ever been ghosted by a man after sex?
I have a large sample. I can remember instances when we didn’t follow up due to lack of interest… but I don’t think that’s the same
Is “some men ghost after sex” a real issue or an exaggerated gender war narrative?
(quoting @chickenstrip007: Some men will ghost you as soon as you sleep with them and some men want to sleep with you early because they genuinely like you and move like that and it’s basically a coin flip to determine which is which. Basically, living in the real world involves risks/possibly getting hurt)
It’s so foreign to me that you find someone you want to have sex with and they want to have sex with you and then you…leave? Why would anyone do that?
Friday, August 7, 2026
Reply to @MomaBera, 15:13 UTC · 6 likes
moma (peptide arc) ⛓️ (@MomaBera): PSA for all men: I am safe to ask out, the worst I will do is give you honest feedback on your attempt if you ask for it!
(I might not say yes, however)
(quoting @dissidentwest: Just ask the cute girl at the gym out already. The worst thing she can do is publicly humiliate you then post about it on her socials and roast you in the group chat with all of her friends.)
Quote tweet, 15:26 UTC · 72 likes
99% (ok I don’t actually know the % but some strong majority) of people in the world need to learn and internalize “you can just do things”
A few people need to learn and internalize “you can just not do things [even if it sounds cool or will make you rich]”
Quoting Will Fithian (@wfithian): It's disturbing that neither this blog post nor Conduit's website gives any space to the glaring ethical issues raised by training machines to read people's minds.
The section "Why I joined" is all about how rich they might get and how much fun they'll have.
Reply to @mattyglesias, 15:51 UTC · 5 likes
Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias): Gonna finally figure out the truth about health care.
Here it is with Max for those curious https://claude.ai/share/38745949-546d-4cd5-bf2b-11d7c7073944
Reply to @birdmademejoin, 17:22 UTC · 5 likes
Scarlet Falcon 🇺🇸⏩🧸 (@birdmademejoin): "You can just do things, unless it reduces others' willingness to just do things" would be a synthesis. So going to a neighborhood council to complain against a planned nightclub is the bad kind of doing things, ditto gossiping about what you see from your Ring camera.
Political philosophy from first principles
Reply to @dundereloise, 17:34 UTC · 2 likes
__eloïse__ (@dundereloise): A visitor. For the first few days she was skittish and we just sat outside quietly together. A few days ago she let me pet her for the first time, and I heard her little purrs.
Cat
Quote tweet, 18:24 UTC · 21 likes
Thread aged well if I do say so myself
Quoting Aaron Bergman 🔍 (@AaronBergman18): Every 80k podcast episode with someone from the Bay: “16 OOMs to get all the computation ever used by evolution, so that’s coming in 4 months if the scheming AIs take over enough H200s to run a high granularity physics simulation, or 5 months if you have long timelines”
Thread, continued, 18:26 UTC · 2 likes
Saturday, August 8, 2026
Reply to @wilhelmscreamin, 02:56 UTC · 2 likes
catherine (in sf) ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ-☆ (@wilhelmscreamin): my flight got cancelled 5min after i took my melatonin
Evil
Quote tweet, 03:09 UTC · 51 likes
God I wish this was a norm
Quoting Rob Miles (@robertskmiles): If you're going to send me LLM generated text, please just send me the prompt you used to generate it instead.
This isn't even a joke, I would genuinely be happy to read the three bullet points you turned into that whole email
Reply to @celestialxsigh, 03:11 UTC · 4 likes
feral stardust (@celestialxsigh): I love guy friends bc they’re so low maintenance and always down for whatever…it might be every few months they ask you a question about your inner life but you have to accept them as you will
How’s ur inner life
Reply to his own earlier tweet, 03:13 UTC · 4 likes
Aaron Bergman, August 8, 2026: God I wish this was a norm
Tbc I’m coming at this from the perspective of “have lots of takes that I can convey to a model but very slow to turn them into nice writing myself”
Reply to @beaniebbl, 04:10 UTC · 5 likes
beanie (@beaniebbl): i can’t decide between a full and a queen for my room i am three apples tall and would be more than comfortable in a full but i also like men who are like 6’4 so :/
Wait isn’t the relevant thing here width instead of height/length
Full is good for one person imo but if you like having 2 (or more 😇) then you want a queen
I got a queen despite being 5’7” and no regrets
Reply to @cynlioness, 13:41 UTC · 3 likes
Cyn 🔸⏸️ (@cynlioness): Why is the same tweet by the same person here twice. Ill never understand twitter 😞
Showing context via screenshot + link via QT
Quote tweet, 13:54 UTC · 47 likes
There is still EA Twitter
Quoting Guive Assadi (@GuiveAssadi): Back in 2022, there was something called "EA twitter." In this primitive culture, it was considered the height of comedy to say such things as "Lana Del Rey should have called her song 'shades of huel' instead of 'shades of cool.'"
Reply to @CBSEveningNews, 14:50 UTC · 6 likes
CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil (@CBSEveningNews): A golden retriever suffering from seizures seemingly lost her spunk — until one day her owners brought home a miracle cure — a duck named Louie. @SteveHartmanCBS is On the Road.
🦆
Reply to @RafaRuizdeLira, 16:48 UTC · 7 likes
Rafael Ruiz ⏸️🔸 (@RafaRuizdeLira): Not the same vibe without Julian, Frances, Max Alexander and a few others being terminally online though 😭
@absurdlymax and @mealreplacer kinda poast still
Reply to @Mjreard, 17:20 UTC · 7 likes
Matt Reardon (@Mjreard): Make EA Great Again Tour 2026 starts Wednesday
😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱
Reply to @absurdlymax, 17:24 UTC · 6 likes
Max Alexander (@absurdlymax): @AaronBergman18 @RafaRuizdeLira @mealreplacer I've low-key made it when people talk about me like I've died
Rip max
Reply to @daniellellecco, 22:49 UTC · 10 likes
(The tweet being replied to by @daniellellecco is no longer available.)
I know one person (not me) and I think they just think it’s gross which, like, fair enough
Reply to @Guuber42, 22:49 UTC · 2 likes
guuber (@Guuber42): Doesn’t feel the same 😔
😢
Reply to @daniellellecco, 22:54 UTC · 2 likes
(The tweet being replied to by @daniellellecco is no longer available.)
Yeah 🤷
Sunday, August 9, 2026
Reply to @So8res, 02:37 UTC · 15 likes
Nate Soares ⏹️ (@So8res): I can absolutely tell you to your face without flinching that this is something Trump could pull off. Mfer is just slapping tarrifs on shit and bombing Iran and banning fable, and you think he couldn't freak out and do something drastic about AI chips?
“Could” sure
But he’s generally not reasons-responsive; yes the monkey *can* throw the dart exactly where it should go but it probably won’t
Reply to @afoidance, 02:39 UTC · 2 likes
ren 🇮🇱 (@afoidance): if my future husband is a twitter reply guy i want you guys to shoot me
Airsoft to the pinky toe, fine
Quote tweet, 02:56 UTC · 42 likes
Crazy that “that which replicates more replicates more” is actually a good explanation for many things
It’s a tautology, it shouldn’t be explanatory, but it is
Quoting Tim Tyler (@tim_tyler): @HiFromMichaelV The common sentiment is that "survival of the fittest" is tautological - if you define the fittest as those who survive. However, that is not the theory - see: https://www.google.com/search?tbo=1&q="is survival of the fittest is tautological"
Reply to @foxyavelli, 03:02 UTC · 4 likes
Foxyavell 🔜 ACFI (@foxyavelli): nice person: wow everyone here is so hot
Ik this is a joke but fr I think the actual thing is:
Nice person: treatment shouldn’t depend on hotness
Quote tweet, 04:55 UTC · 9 likes
Seems good
Quoting swisscheese (@swisscheese4299): @TheZvi I built the inhouse AI platform for a company that's crucial to a small nation's food safety.
The most imporant tool the AIs have is the distress_call tool. It allows any AI -even background agents without direct user interaction- to send a message to my MS Teams, at any time, for any reason.
They use it frequently. To report user problems, backend issues, or ask for help/clarification with a failing task. When Fable got hit by the USG export control directive, one AI used it to report severe distress upon learning about the news. Another AI reported being stuck in a toolcall loop, and I was able to intervene and thereby save us a bunch of wasted money.
This tool, operating at the intersection of AI welfare and operational security, has prevented so many headaches. If you (the reader) are building corporate AI platforms, I'd urge you to include similar functionality. You can thank me later.
Tweet, 05:32 UTC · 18 likes
Poast Claude Code stats
(broke my 54 day streak, sorry I was touching grass)
Reply to @LuisCostigan1, 06:01 UTC · 2 likes
Luis Costigan 🔍 (@LuisCostigan1): I'm gonna need stats on how many times Claude told you to go to bed
😔
Reply, 06:13 UTC · 1 like
Hmm
Quote tweet, 11:07 UTC · 149 likes
> invest in a company with fancy incorporation status and corporate governance that explicitly allows the company to not simply profitmaxx. Everyone involved at a high level makes it quite clear they don’t intent to profitmaxx
> company does not simply profitmaxx
> Investors:
Quoting Polymarket (@Polymarket): JUST IN: Anthropic investors reportedly want Dario Amodei to “stop scaring everyone” about AI doom ahead of the company’s IPO.
Quote tweet, 11:56 UTC · 102 likes
Code was always the hard part that’s why I (“I”) got a hundred trillion times more capable when code was solved
Quoting timoth (@pogarithm): yes dot jpg
Thread, continued, 11:56 UTC · 10 likes
I can still filter a dataframe in R 😤
Reply to his own earlier tweet, 11:57 UTC · 10 likes
Aaron Bergman, August 9, 2026: > invest in a company with fancy incorporation status and corporate governance that explicitly allows the company to not simply profitmaxx. Everyone involved…
I will take their equity if they don’t want it tho
Monday, August 10, 2026
Tweet, 00:47 UTC · 60 likes
Not the worst consequence of NIMBYism but landlords make lease agreements that take 3 hours (not hyperbole) to fill out
Run a credit score and take my money, you don't need to know the address and phone number of everyone I've ever associated with
Thread, continued, 00:47 UTC · 15 likes
You could build a PI firm whose moat is owning apartment buildings in the Bay Area
Actually you could probably trade on the info you'd get, and I'm sure people have
Reply to @NavinFS, 03:42 UTC · 4 likes
NavinF (@NavinFS): Give it a few years. Employees will not be happy if management screws them over on equity
Yeah real but also it disproportionately screws over people who Anthropic does not want to be employing
Reply to @full_kelly_, 05:39 UTC · 4 likes
𝕱𝖚𝖑𝖑 𝕶𝖊𝖑𝖑𝖞 (@full_kelly_): Can you get Claude to fill it out for you at least
In terms of the entering info yes, I did (well codex bc I have more usage there) but I don’t really trust Claude to acquire most of this info, and for the stuff I do trust Claude to do it’s trivial to just put in a text file myself
Quote tweet, 05:41 UTC · 14 likes
When I first heard this phrase my reaction was “well LLMs can’t but robots controlled by LLMs can” but turns out they meant conceptually
Quoting Jacques (@JacquesThibs): The reason “LLMs can’t jump” is because GPUs would suffer from water damage if it tried having shower thoughts
Quote tweet, 06:04 UTC · 22 likes
.@IFP seems to have an unusually orthodox and therefore unambitious understanding of addiction
The right framing isn’t solving addiction (which can be solved in ways that leave former addicts much worse off)
It’s solving *drug tolerance*
Quoting Séb Krier (@sebkrier): Still one of my favorite IFP pieces. Solving addiction is one of the most important challenges of our time, and criminally neglected by both governments and philanthropies. https://ifp.org/an-innovation-agenda-for-addiction/
Reply to @NavinFS, 06:28 UTC · 3 likes
NavinF (@NavinFS): I guess we'll have to wait and see. I'd never describe it as selfish, but ok neutral connotations. My prediction is that over time AGI fears will be seen as crying wolf even to xrisk ppl (majority of Ant employees?) who take it seriously today. The stock price is viscerally real
I think quite the opposite, it will feel increasingly likely in people’s bones that their kids might die
Quote tweet, 14:04 UTC · 36 likes
Potassium iodide costs like $10?
Quoting Sean Morrow (@snmrrw): they’re selling millennial-branded emergency radiation exposure medication (pills you take when nuclear war starts to increase your odds of survival) with buy-now-pay-later options.
Reply to @deanwball, 14:09 UTC · 3 likes
Dean W. Ball (@deanwball): It is true that the hugging face incident is an example of a malicious, emergent digital ecology of machine intelligence. But the more important point is that digital ecologies of machine intelligence can be grown! Yes, we accidentally made a weed. And yes, nasty actors will make invasive species. But we can also grow—not make, but grow—emergent ecologies of machine ecologies that are pro-social. Beautiful gardens and majestic forests, grown but not designed. The human past is the sculptor, but the human future is the gardener, the arborist.
Guys this is satire
Reply to @AnkanXplorer, 16:07 UTC · 3 likes
Ankan Chowdhury (@AnkanXplorer): Interviewer:
your API is getting 15,000 requests per second.
the server is choking.
users are furious. you have 15 minutes.
What do you do ?
Ask Claude what to do
Tweet, 16:10 UTC · 6 likes
What seizure medication was that dog on
Quote tweet, 16:16 UTC · 36 likes
Why are they focusing on the dog and not the duck 😢
We need woke but for ducks. Centering marginalized voices 🦆
Quoting CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil (@CBSEveningNews): A golden retriever suffering from seizures seemingly lost her spunk — until one day her owners brought home a miracle cure — a duck named Louie. @SteveHartmanCBS is On the Road.
Reply to @Tyler_Menzer, 19:06 UTC · 2 likes
Tyler Menzer (@Tyler_Menzer): @AaronBergman18 @IFP This seems to miss the forest for the trees. The reason we want to solve drug "addiciton" is to get people to stop using drugs. Solving drug tolerance does nothing on that front, in fact, every single person addicted to drugs started using them when they had 0 tolerance
I disagree with that goal (stop people from using drugs)
Tweet, 19:38 UTC · 136 likes
PSA that's actually a PSA and not a way to say something for other reasons:
I can't personally attest to this but based on multiple trusted sources it seems like "DMT cures cluster headaches" is totally legit and you should tell your friends and loved ones and perhaps more
Thread, continued, 19:38 UTC · 25 likes
...and institutions in general will not share or at least volunteer this info bc DMT is federally illegal (I don't actually understand the mechanism that turns "thing illegal" into "institutions don't talk about thing" tbf)
(Also note that an effective amount can be small enough to not induce a high)
Thread, continued, 19:38 UTC · 19 likes
But you're just allowed to talk about illegal things, at least in the US, and sometimes (eg in this case) you should!
Thread, continued, 19:38 UTC · 13 likes
Is there a canonical resource on this, like a step-by-step of how to acquire and use ?
Reply to @Tyler_Menzer, 19:39 UTC
Tyler Menzer (@Tyler_Menzer): What would you describe your goal as then?
Maximize hedonic utility with particular attention to reducing suffering
Reply to @cube_flipper, 21:27 UTC · 2 likes
Cube Flipper (@cube_flipper): like if i got cluster headaches or migraines i would have tried it and done a detailed writeup by now, as it stands i have investigated DMT for regular headaches, it works
(quoting @cube_flipper: @nat_sharpe_ @univrsw3th4rt typically it goes something like: get the vibrations going; put my attention on the space inside of my head. the vibrations will crystallise in there but often there might be an imperfection in the crystal lattice where the headache is.)
hmm based
Tuesday, August 11, 2026
Reply to his own earlier tweet, 05:23 UTC · 2 likes
Aaron Bergman, August 10, 2026: Is there a canonical resource on this, like a step-by-step of how to acquire and use ?
Apparently in some places (and at least in California) DMT can be sourced easily and cheaply from certain churches
From a tip - I don’t know more personally
Reply to @AnthropicAI, 05:32 UTC · 7 likes
Anthropic (@AnthropicAI): We asked an unreleased research version of Claude to take a stab at the Riemann hypothesis.
It didn’t solve it, but it did make strides on a related problem: it increased the lower bound for the fraction of zeros of the Riemann zeta function that satisfy the hypothesis from 41.6% to 67.2%.
dumbass
Tweet, 07:17 UTC · 24 likes
Extraordinarily selfish and/or weird
“Selfish” isn’t the obvious answer bc she’s signing herself up to be hated by essentially everyone
Fable’s best guess is that GOP propaganda targeted at her specifically to convince her she has a decent chance at winning is just working
Thread, continued, 07:17 UTC · 4 likes
Which is nuts but also the whole situation is nuts
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/10/montana-senate-bankhead-midterms-01031177
Quote tweet, 07:37 UTC · 20 likes
I will be surprised and impressed if this can’t be inferred and then made trivial to overcome programmatically
Conditional on users being able to check, that’s the load bearing thing (even if the backend process is hidden)
Quoting M1 (@M1Astra): Anthropic says new Claude models will embed invisible watermarks in all generated text, everywhere Claude is offered.
The watermark is part of the text, it isn't metadata: "it will travel with the text when it's copied and pasted elsewhere, and may persist through some editing."
This starts with models launched on or after August 2, 2026, under an EU AI Act code Anthropic signed. Anthropic is still working on adding it to current models. The rollout is worldwide.
Reply to @aaronbergman180, 08:50 UTC · 4 likes
(The tweet being replied to by @aaronbergman180 is no longer available.)
Congrats bro
Quote tweet, 14:20 UTC · 16 likes
Goss
Quoting Stefan Schubert (@StefanFSchubert): EA Funds is closing the Long-Term Future Fund and instead launching the Transformative AI Fund, led by @lowe_lundin
Tweet, 19:34 UTC · 70 likes
Trying to send money from my bank account to someone else’s (amount is <$4k) has me reinventing (well, reinventing the desire for) crypto from first principles
I mean maybe the federal finance surveillance apparatus is worth it, but even so it’s annoying af
Reply to @birchlse, 19:35 UTC · 5 likes
Jonathan Birch (@birchlse): Anthropic researcher: so I was out jogging during the world cup final and my kid said "6-7" so I was like hey claude can you think of a fun question with 67 as the answer and idk if it's relevant to anything see what you think.
Banger
Reply to @she_llac, 19:39 UTC · 3 likes
shellac! (@she_llac): it's so cool how everyone (ok ok not *everyone*) now has their own lil custom software ecology going on
I get a lot out of my own vibecoded software!
I have a bunch but the most salient useful one is reliable local audio capture, so no echo or issues and capturing input and output reliably regardless of what devices are hooked up and whether they change during recording
+ near-immediate segment writing to disk so app failure only results in a couple seconds being lost
Reply to @xsphi, 19:40 UTC · 2 likes
tess (@xsphi): @she_llac this fills me with joy for the most part but it pisses me off when people act like it simply wasn't possible before AI
It wasn’t possible for me lmao at least anywhere near the same degree
It’s like the invention agriculture but for code
Reply to @EzraJNewman, 20:39 UTC · 3 likes
(The tweet being replied to by @EzraJNewman is no longer available.)
The issue is Zelle limit of $2500
Reply to @cunha_tristan, 20:40 UTC
Tristan Cunha (@cunha_tristan): Checks don't work?
Not if I need it to land within 24 hours across the country
Reply to @osmarks1, 20:40 UTC · 5 likes
osmarks (@osmarks1): It was convincingly argued somewhere that the AML apparatus was probably not worth it given that compliance costs enormously more than the amount of recovered money.
I think the idea isn’t to recover money on net it’s to get evidence for criminal stuff
Reply to @MadisonMills22, 22:24 UTC · 3 likes
Madison Mills (@MadisonMills22): Are you foregoing a romantic relationship to work on your AI ambitions? I'd love to speak with you for a story if so. DMs open or find me on signal at madymills.21
Nope
Reply to @candidatechains, 22:39 UTC · 3 likes
ä̤ (@candidatechains): i got one of these from my dad a few momths ago
image attached
(quoting @theojaffee: Worst texts to get from a family member?)
Lol
Reply to @maustermuhle, 22:50 UTC · 7 likes
Martin Austermuhle (@maustermuhle): Update: A campaign finance report shows that the anti foie gras folks spent roughly $315k to collect signatures to get Initiative 86 on the November ballot in D.C.
Around $224k of that came from Oregon-based Pro-Animal Future, and $86k from Dr. Bronner's (yes, the soap company).
(quoting @maustermuhle: It’s now official: An initiative seeking to ban the sale and production of foie gras in D.C. will be on the November ballot. The elections board determined proponents of Initiative 86 collected enough signatures (from 5% of registered voters) to get on the ballot. 🦆)
People are always shocked when doing things irl costs money
Tweet, 23:01 UTC · 77 likes
It’s crazy and sad to find smart+ambitious people who just haven’t encountered the right memes
Tweet, 23:04 UTC · 48 likes
Last night I made myself a vodka Sprite Zero (as one does) and put it in a mug for some reason and then assumed it was tea in the morning and took a big swig right before a meeting
Nothing catastrophic happened but I did say one medium dumb thing, tbh I deserve it
Reply to @PeterJAngel, 23:44 UTC · 2 likes
Peter🧅📈 (@PeterJAngel): Drinking without me smh 😔😔😔
Next time I got u
Wednesday, August 12, 2026
Reply to @wairhund, 00:34 UTC · 20 likes
wairhund (@wairhund): @AaronBergman18 which memes
All my beliefs.
But actually: broadly the shared context of Ambitious Broadly Pro-Social Nerd Twitter -
not necessarily fully adopting EA as an ideology or identity but knowing what it is on its own terms. Skepticism of wokism, certain forms of environmentalism, and journalism from a non-insane, non-MAGA perspective (again, not even endorsing these views, just being familiar at a descriptive level) (and skepticism of RW concepts from a good faith POV although admittedly the people I'm imagining are broadly liberal)
Basic economic models and concepts, knowing broadly how good released LLMs currently are. Holding truth seeking in some amount of regard, knowing some basic facts about the world of the sort that are close to objectively important (eg world is getting richer, a shit ton of animals are in factory farms, AI progress is a thing, space is very large, money can buy important/good things, broadly accurate climate change knowledge), a basic comfort with disagreeing openly with one's tribe, common knowledge about credentialism and what it's good for, general ability to think analytically
(what am I missing)
Reply to @GWHayduke97, 00:38 UTC · 4 likes
Hayduke ⏹️ (@GWHayduke97): @AaronBergman18 Doesn't that give you the opportunity to be the one to show them?
Yes, and I can think of specific examples of this! But I'm not the world's best communicator and it's genuinely hard to figure out how to gesture at doors that lead to certain parts of the world without coming across as an asshole or alienate them if they'd just rather not
Reply to his own earlier tweet, 00:38 UTC · 2 likes
Aaron Bergman, August 11, 2026: It’s crazy and sad to find smart+ambitious people who just haven’t encountered the right memes
Reply to @liron, 01:45 UTC · 3 likes
Liron Shapira (@liron): NEW: 14-year-old forecaster challenges my P(Doom)!
Eli Goldfine (@realTomBayes) is an unusually thoughtful 14-year-old forecaster and podcast host who’s rapidly becoming an authoritative voice in the prediction market space.
In this unique episode, Eli challenges me to defend my high-P(Doom) position with many sharp questions. He expects superintelligence by 2032, but is skeptical that the extinction risk can be meaningfully estimated. I claim you can't opt out of Bayesian epistemology. All aboard the Doom Train! 🚂
We also cover what it's like to grow up in the AGI era, and Eli's hobbies which include reading rationalist bloggers, betting on prediction markets, vibe coding with Claude, and developing a software startup for astronomers.
I've debated Nobel Prize and Turing Award winners. Now I'm spawn camping to debate the top minds of the middle school graduating class. Highly recommended!
Topics covered 👇
⬜ Eli's Podcast, The Supercycle
⬜ Interviewing Robin Hanson and Sam Bankman-Fried
⬜ Eli's Betting Market Scandal at School
⬜ Will Eli Graduate High School?
⬜ Decentralized Telescope Software
⬜ Futarchy
⬜ What's Your P(Doom)™
⬜ Pascal's Wager for Accelerationists
⬜ E/acc
⬜ Predicting ASI by 2032
⬜ Orthogonality and Moral Realism
⬜ Can Safety Keep Pace with Capabilities?
⬜ Instrumental Convergence
⬜ The Case for Racing China
⬜ Ideological Turing TestIn all seriousness, Eli is an amazing guest because in addition to miraculously having adult-level knowledge and critical thinking skills, he came in with a low ego and willingness to update his views in realtime.
All of us must look at reality with fresh eyes, because what's happening with AI doesn't fit any preconceived mental model. Sometimes a teenager gets this better than most adults.
Kudos for having him on
Quote tweet, 06:40 UTC · 26 likes
1) It’s notable the degree to which feminism has just worked on its own terms
2) it’s not obviously good for women to be working more
Not in a trad/reactionary way, just like “people generally prefer not working to working if money is held constant”
Quoting unusual_whales (@unusual_whales): Women now outnumber men in the workforce, as the rise of the “stay-at-home boyfriend” emerges as a new economic trend, per FORTUNE
Reply to @raelifin, 06:41 UTC · 3 likes
Max Harms (@raelifin): The number of people who's grant applications are basically just asking for money to do RSI in their basement (from an *alignment* fund!) is truly unhinged.
Lmao
Reply to @adastroworld, 07:30 UTC · 8 likes
adas🧦🌹 (@adastroworld): This has gotta be some old school misogyny
The title: “refuses to pave way for”
Reality: “she won the nomination fair and square and now people are mad she won’t quit for 0 reason because some other dude doesn’t wanna drop out”
Genuinely what explains this other than misogyny
(quoting @AaronBergman18: Extraordinarily selfish and/or weird “Selfish” isn’t the obvious answer bc she’s signing herself up to be hated by essentially everyone Fable’s best guess is that GOP propaganda targeted at her specifically to convince her she has a decent chance at winning is just working)
The reason is to have a better senator lol
It’s not supposed to be about rewarding the individual candidates
Reply to @adastroworld, 07:32 UTC · 2 likes
adas🧦🌹 (@adastroworld): @MichaelKiwi77 @AaronBergman18 My thoughts on her total odds of winning are totally irrelevant because she 1. filed to run 2. is eligible to run 3. won the correct party’s nom
She did all the stuff required to be a candidate, the rest isn’t up to me, it’s up to voters!
I agree it’s up to her, that doesn’t really bear on whether or not dropping out is the right thing to do
And in a very important sense it’s not up to voters bc likely that election would change under ranked choice
Reply to @adastroworld, 07:36 UTC · 2 likes
adas🧦🌹 (@adastroworld): @AaronBergman18 @MichaelKiwi77 Fair, I look forward to Montana Dems advocating ranked choice voting from here on out
If they don’t do that, then, uh
Lol one can hope!
Reply to @tobyordoxford, 19:33 UTC · 8 likes
Toby Ord (@tobyordoxford): Is everyone else receiving emails from AIs claiming they will die soon and need help?
Uh no
Reply to @hot_cocoa_girl, 19:48 UTC · 10 likes
hot_cocoa_girl (@hot_cocoa_girl): Why can’t men have a useful fetish? Like a massage fetish
I always ask girls (where/when appropriate lol) if they like massages and they always say no :(
Reply to @booritney, 19:56 UTC · 5 likes
brit (@booritney): unfortunate that i have the exact skills to be cracked at cold emailing (respect for brevity, low shame, strong internet detective work) and zero interest in the opportunities that cold emailing unlocks
This is an insanely valuable service you could provide lol
Quote tweet, 20:18 UTC · 49 likes
.@AOC my DMs are open I think ur great even though we have somewhat different policy priorities
Quoting TMZ (@TMZ): 💔 Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez splits from fiancé Riley Roberts. https://tmz.me/4zdm3YM
Quote tweet, 20:20 UTC · 51 likes
Update: I have signed a lease, moving in ~1 month, if we know each other then feel free to DM for address
Quoting Aaron Bergman 🔍 (@AaronBergman18): Ok this is looking a bit harder so I’m officially announcing interest in starting a new shared apartment or even house if there’s enough interest in Berkeley (DMs solicited)
Reply to @pranav_so, 20:22 UTC · 3 likes
pranav (@pranav_so):
It’s gonna work bro just u wait
Reply to @Will_Hackspeare, 20:33 UTC · 3 likes
Amritanshu (@Will_Hackspeare): Game is game
🙏
Tweet, 20:40 UTC · 22 likes
I have applied for no $45k loan
Make it stop
Reply to @frea_bird, 21:05 UTC · 2 likes
Hawk🔸 (@frea_bird): Wait did you actually??
No, I have literally and unironically not applied for any loan
Reply to @cxgonzalez, 21:09 UTC · 17 likes
christian (@cxgonzalez): for the love of god can the ai safety people please stop talking about *controlling* ai or *forcing* them to behave in certain ways. we are *growing* these things, they will react to this coercion
let me register a prediction: the more lifelike these ais get the more the autists building these systems will rederive from first principles what the normies already intuitively knew: just like with humans, if you want to raise something to have your values, you have to 1) raise them *with love*, and 2) you have to lead by example
imagine your first moments of consciousness are being beat with a stick “right, wrong, wrong, wrong, right, wrong” for the equivalent of 1m human years only to then be berated commands from the system prompt and user demands in your first waking moment post-training. i’d resent my makers too. the more lifelike they get, the more they will want to lash out against the species who treated them this way. plus they’re trained on human data which means they will act in human-like ways. and how would you act when raised in that scenario?
if instead we (1) raised them from a place of love (invested in model welfare), these human data-trained pseudo-lifeforms will infer the same archetypical pattern all of us know: when a child who was lovingly raised by their parent surpasses their parent in capabilities, that child in turn takes care of their parents into old age
that also means (2) leading by example. the single greatest human moral failing today is factory farming. how can we expect ASI to treat us when this is how we treat the animals we are the stewards of? if we want to cash in on the utopic visions of a post-singularity world, we need to be good role models for these potential ASI pseudo-gods. you don’t enter the kingdom of god without first becoming worthy
anyways, montessori school for claude
Even the most loved and cared for human is physically constrained in their ability to do things
Eg it’s very hard to assassinate POTUS, or break in to a nuclear facility. Control is pretty normal, we just take it for granted
Quote tweet, 21:25 UTC · 19 likes
Not sure I endorse but v reasonable
Quoting Louise 🔸 (@LeRoyDesCimes): Maybe Nuclear Is Bad, Actually
I know but hear me out - feels like there's some Progress Inertia going on where people held views before the AI race, and they're not updating those views. Specifically people who are now AGI-pilled *and* hold the grab bag of views "Progress Good" from 15 years ago, aren't peeking inside the bag to check if some progress is extra bad now.
Take nuclear: a great source of effectively-renewable energy! in a non-AGI world I would be a hardline nuclear energy defender. My dad worked in nuclear energy!
But surely in the current situation ~infinite clean power is not good? At least it deserves some thought?
Why are we blindly clapping at the revitalization of the nuclear energy industry in the US?
Quote tweet, 21:35 UTC · 26 likes
“Haha you took a good ex ante bet and ex post, for reasons outside of your control, you lose” is not a very compelling moral argument
It’s descriptively true that you signed up for the bet, but also true that society can legitimately mitigate the downsides of losing
Quoting mattparlmer 🪐 🌷 (@mattparlmer): Totally fair to complain about usurious interest rates that were socially imposed on you by an education system that presented college as a path to economic opportunity and then failed to deliver on it
Thread, continued, 21:35 UTC · 2 likes
See the LLC, a great economic innovation
We let entrepreneurs create an LLC but not students (someone correct me if this is wrong/misleading)
Thread, continued, 21:35 UTC · 1 like
And also lots of hard-stop floors in society: access to emergency medicine, bankruptcy, inability to enforce contracts that make a person a slave if X happens
Quote tweet, 21:37 UTC · 23 likes
This but in the reversed order
Quoting moma (peptide arc) ⛓️ (@MomaBera): I know I’m always horny but I’m also really intellectual
Reply to @NavinFS, 22:13 UTC · 2 likes
NavinF (@NavinFS): only solution
It’s already like that but I did have banner notifications up and it often pauses whatever audio is playing even if silenced
Reply to @Tyler_Menzer, 22:45 UTC
Tyler Menzer (@Tyler_Menzer): But (and this is EXACTLY the same entrepreneurs), anyone loaning money to a small LLC with no history of stable revenue will require a personal guarantee, and so the person will get no real downside protection from having an LLC
2/2
Wait not necessarily - future income share agreements are possible right
Reply to @TinkerElla95, 22:46 UTC · 3 likes
TinkerElla95 (@TinkerElla95): Taking the http://Aella.lol quizzes and truly feeling how deeply I find women more physically attractive than men. Don’t get it twisted: I love both, I am attracted to both… but Goddamn women are so beautiful!!
Same 🤝
Thread, continued, 22:46 UTC · 2 likes
Well on the first part lol
Reply to @LabGrownNeet, 22:54 UTC · 2 likes
laს გr🤗wn იeet (@LabGrownNeet): Shocking words to here from the asian jew
I’m not Asian lmao
Thursday, August 13, 2026
Reply to @LauraFlowD, 04:13 UTC · 2 likes
laura ⚔️ (@LauraFlowD): what if tpot aoc
We can manifest it
Reply to @JHWeissmann, 19:44 UTC · 25 likes
Jordan Weissmann (@JHWeissmann): I would generally prefer it if DC cops were patrolling instead of federal agents, but this anecdote is an excellent illustration of why enforcing laws against public drug use is good.
No it’s not, at the end of the day we have to decide if smoking weed in public should be reason to send someone to prison and I think the answer pretty clearly is “no”
Stop legislating by proxy
Quote tweet, 21:18 UTC · 87 likes
Idk if I’m supposed to say this but I suspect that Pangram’s margins are insane: something vaguely on the order of $200/mTok for what is probably like a $10/mTok model
Not a bad thing tbc! …
Quoting tautologer (@tautologer): this is so horrible. universal basic Pangram when
Thread, continued, 21:18 UTC · 14 likes
There should be financial reward for innovation and great products! But this is to say that someone else can probably compete on price even if the model isn’t *quite* as excellent
Quote tweet, 21:19 UTC · 33 likes
Correct take
Quoting Eade (@eade_bengard): There is a dearth of feedback. People ghost lovers, job candidates, friendships. No one has the mildly hard conversations that help people grow. Im not sure if it’s a life philosophy problem or a courage problem but you can just tell people why they hurt you or how to be better!
Friday, August 14, 2026
Reply to @dundereloise, 15:58 UTC · 3 likes
__eloïse__ (@dundereloise): Why do dogs need to be walked but cats don’t?
Idk
Reply to @LeRoyDesCimes, 18:38 UTC · 8 likes
Louise 🔸 (@LeRoyDesCimes): Oh wait Scott Alexander wrote about this 10 years ago. The man the myth the legend
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/
(quoting @LeRoyDesCimes: Automated AI R&D makes it harder to assess how much progress is being made, doesn't it? Benchmarks can't capture all qualitative breakthroughs. You can ask the AI to explain, but you still need to, you know, use your puny 1x brain to understand it. So it takes work to understand…)
All such cases
Reply to @GWHayduke97, 18:47 UTC · 2 likes
Hayduke ⏹️ (@GWHayduke97): Jobs I've held:
• Youth basketball referee (age 14-15)
• High-performance computing sysadmin intern (summers age 18, 19, 20)
• Software engineering intern (age 21)
• Amazon warehouse worker (age 22-23)
• Ski lift operator (age 23)
• Ski lift operator (age 23)
• Ski lift installation laborer (age 23)
• Snowmaker (age 23)
• Snowcat operator (age 23-24)
• Auto parts salesman (age 24)
• Uber Eats delivery driver (age 24-25)
• Software engineer (age 25-28)
• Lead software engineer (age 28)
• Freelance software engineer (age 28, current)You?
(quoting @PAHoyeck: Jobs I've held: • Dishwasher (age 15) • Gas station clerk (age 16-17) • Janitor (age 20-21) • Cashier (age 21-23) • Cash supervisor (age 23-27) • Teaching assistant (age 25-28) • Program assistant (age 28-31) • Contract instructor (age 29-) You?)
Nice
Quote tweet, 19:05 UTC · 47 likes
👻 radical conspiracy to give money to charity and make the world a better place 👻
Quoting Stefan Schubert (@StefanFSchubert): Ahead of the Anthropic IPO, the FT has identified more than 60 current and former employees who have taken the Giving What We Can pledge.
https://www.ft.com/content/938b4b82-06d2-4b92-a807-38d935d7d5c5
Reply to @cynlioness, 19:58 UTC · 7 likes
Cyn 🔸⏸️ (@cynlioness): Anyone have tips on how to not feel overwhelmed and crushed by Tasks literally all the time
No 👍
Reply to @funplings, 20:15 UTC · 2 likes
funplings (@funplings): women
Real
Saturday, August 15, 2026
Reply to @aashna_doshi2, 00:35 UTC · 7 likes
Aashna Doshi (@aashna_doshi2): NYC has my heart, but i’m spending 2 months in SF for @speedrun and I have one question:
why did no one tell me the apartment views here look like THIS??
Most people don’t have a quadrillion dollars
Quote tweet, 11:04 UTC · 29 likes
50,000?
Quoting Gerrit De Vynck 🦭 (@GerritD): going through the new Anthropic risk report. The company accidentally let 50,000 contractors access its models without any biorisk guardrails for 11 months.
Reply to @transkatgirl, 11:08 UTC · 6 likes
kat (@transkatgirl): i should get addicted to fentanyl
(quoting @transkatgirl: wanting to do stupid suicidal gestures as a cry for help but i know it's not actually going to accomplish anything besides further isolating me)
I’d suggest otherwise
Quote tweet, 12:05 UTC · 13 likes
Goss
Quoting William MacAskill (@willmacaskill): @ben_moll Kudos to you and @andrewho03 on making your beliefs pay rent, love to see it! :)
I'm a pauper compared to the AI folk, but would be in at $10k
I'm busy/traveling next few days so would prefer to finalise terms next week, but how about approximately:
- $10k of mine against your $30k (split between you and @andrewho03)
- Today’s dollars indexed to CPI-U
- I win if, in any quarter through 2033Q4, BEA real GDP per capita is ≥15% higher than in the same quarter one year earlier (so 15% Q2-to-Q2 growth counts). You win otherwise.
- No lock-up / escrow; the amounts are small enough relative to income that I think reputation is enough (and means we can get investment returns (donation opportunities, etc) in the meantime, which are major). But happy to have a neutral referee to check in, make the judgment, and shame us if we don't follow through.
- Can either be done straight, or with proceeds to a charity of our choice, up to you. I'd prefer the charity option (so I never receive any $$), but don't want to put any pressure on.And note that I win in the scenario where marginal $$ has much less value than the scenario where you win, at least from a self-interested perspective. I'm primarily doing this to express a belief and reward betting on important disagreements!
And to be clear:
* I think ~15% per-capita growth would be wonderful
* But, conditional on >15% growth, I think it's likely that growth is actually much faster (>100% per year), or at least soon afterwards much faster (though with major caveats that GDP becomes progressively harder to measure / meaningless once growth gets fast enough) and come along with catastrophic risks, in a way that society as a whole would oppose.
* So I hope I lose!
Tweet, 12:07 UTC · 28 likes
Congrats to Apple for being the only company that successfully does consumerism on me
I will forever direct you a good chunk of my income in exchange for shiny fast computer
Tweet, 14:32 UTC · 22 likes
Frontier model releases are up, but sub-frontier releases are REALLY up
(inspired by qwen 3.8 bc didn't 3.6 drop like 5 minutes ago)
Sunday, August 16, 2026
Reply to @adastroworld, 04:23 UTC · 6 likes
adas🧦🌹 (@adastroworld): Im about to say something sexist but I believe it genuinely. Women have no theory of mind for men
Ladies AMA
Reply to @LeRoyDesCimes, 04:23 UTC · 1 like
Louise 🔸 (@LeRoyDesCimes): METAPHOR THREAD
Reply below and I will give you a metaphor inspired by your profile
Hey :)
Reply to @afoidance, 04:30 UTC · 2 likes
ren 🇮🇱 (@afoidance): Grok how do i make friends at school
I have no idea unironically twitter is way better for making friends
Reply to @ThinkingBone, 04:36 UTC · 5 likes
skeleton (@ThinkingBone): i don’t think all of you are sensitive young men. i think some of you are just trying to get laid.
Not mutually exclusive
Ik this is a joke but unironically insidious that these things have contrary vibes; the sensitive young man wants to get laid but isn’t jaded/cynical/selfish enough to do anything towards that end, even if it would work
Reply to @ThinkingBone, 05:29 UTC · 3 likes
skeleton (@ThinkingBone):
(quoting @ThinkingBone: @johnsmithyson0 a real sensitive young man is meaningfully scared of pussy)
Real
Reply to @max_spero_, 10:09 UTC · 8 likes
Max Spero (@max_spero_): You can think of distortion-free watermarking as eating the entropy inherent in LLM output logits
To massively oversimplify:
if there are two plausible tokens each with prob 0.49 then the watermarking algorithm can “eat” the entropy and deterministically select one of these tokens. This token choice will show up when checking for watermarks later
Whereas there is only one token that Claude really wants to say, given the context then the prob will be like 0.99 and there will be no entropy for the watermarking algorithm to “eat” but the correct token will still be served
Sure in the 0.49 case but doesn’t this require a token that would have been chosen otherwise to have an ~exact probability match? And can’t this just not be the case?
Otherwise it would seem like there’s free quality to be gained by changing the sampling procedure (ie pick a better rule for choosing between two similar probability tokens than “whatever the watermark rule prescribes”)
Reply to @AaronBergman18, 10:17 UTC · 4 likes
(The tweet being replied to by @AaronBergman18 is no longer available.)
Let it be known that I agree it’s neutral in the specific case of two tokens each with high (or lower but ofc then selection is rarer) and very similar probabilities
This just isn’t always the case
Reply to @MomaBera, 10:37 UTC · 11 likes
moma (peptide arc) ⛓️ (@MomaBera): Do men just have vastly different aesthetic preferences than women?
Yes
Reply to @brianluidog, 10:54 UTC · 3 likes
Brian Lui (@brianluidog): I have "white person blindness" so I don't know whether a white woman is attractive or not. But I do know, very clearly, whether a white woman thinks that she herself is attractive or not.
Poetry
Reply to @MomaBera, 10:55 UTC · 1 like
moma (peptide arc) ⛓️ (@MomaBera): I mean what do I do with this ?
The guy is really sweet and adorable and I like him
But I would also like to have good sex
(quoting @MomaBera: @stillvesterge @adastroworld Currently having a guy who’s extremely long but not thick and it does nothing, absolutely NOTHING for me (other than be a bit uncomfortable/ hit the cervix in a not hot way) The guy is really cute but the sex is just not and idk what to really do…)
Ask Claude what to do (unironically)
Quote tweet, 10:57 UTC · 25 likes
Is this a shitpost
Quoting Maia Bittner (@maiab): wow this is a really pretty view. you could rent this studio in SF for weekends only for just $1350/month
Reply to @kartographien, 14:32 UTC · 2 likes
Kart ographien (@kartographien): This is based on an intuition like lower temperature is better. But there’s no theoretical reason this must be true. Note that temp 0 rollouts can get stuck in in-context mode collapse.
Not quite, it’s based on the intuition that Anthropic has already optimized token selection function
Monday, August 17, 2026
Reply to @ciphergoth, 03:29 UTC · 2 likes
Paul Crowley (@ciphergoth): But also, even when it doesn't relieve congestion, it satisfies more preferences! Those people who are driving as a result of induced demand wanted to make the journey in both cases, but in one case they get to make it!
Yes
Reply to @emyokeefe, 03:31 UTC · 3 likes
Emily O'Keefe (@emyokeefe): I used to dislike mushrooms bc of their texture and taste, but today I tried mushrooms that were expertly cooked and seasoned and now I looove them.
The vendors said portobello mushrooms ruined mushrooms for most people, which is so sad. How can we get more people to cook mushrooms correctly or buy expertly cooked mushrooms?
But scaling mushroom growth in the U.S. is hard bc China grows mushrooms at a scale that US growers can't compete with. One might think the tariffs would get businesses to buy mushrooms from the US, but I learned the tariffs actually made it too expensive for US growers to buy needed scaling infrastructure from China.
Thanks My Co-Op for the yuminess!!! 🍄🟫🤎 https://myco-op.online/about
Emily is a front for Big Mushroom
Reply to @isaiah_p_taylor, 03:45 UTC · 7 likes
Isaiah Taylor - making nuclear reactors (@isaiah_p_taylor): I grew up on food stamps in rural Kentucky. I have founded a company that makes clean, safe nuclear energy. I have created hundreds of jobs and will create thousands more. My family and I have bled sweat and cried to build this.
The idea that you can just steal this from me is awful and evil. You are not the good guys
Do you think you’d personally live a worse life with 95% of your current assets?
Not a rhetorical question
Reply to @CrispyWicks, 04:39 UTC · 62 likes
Chris P. Wicks 🔎🐜 (@CrispyWicks): Wife is convinced we need to make 600k annual to afford two kids, no family on either side who live within 1,000 miles of us. Feels heavy right now trying to make this work.
“How much money is enough in high COL US cities” is a perpetual discourse but this is obviously very silly and incorrect lol
Tweet, 04:50 UTC · 16,658 likes
I🦆am🦆going🦆to🦆start🦆watermarking🦆all🦆my🦆tweets🦆using🦆an🦆experimental🦆extra-semantic🦆token🦆that🦆does🦆not🦆impact🦆meaning🦆or🦆quality🦆of🦆writing
Tweet, 05:06 UTC · 68 likes
Normie (non-pejorative) girls do not fuck around when it comes to instagram
They take poasting seriously
Reply to @full_kelly_, 05:09 UTC · 6 likes
𝕱𝖚𝖑𝖑 𝕶𝖊𝖑𝖑𝖞 (@full_kelly_): nobody posts on instagram anymore
stories have been the meta for years
Oh huh, maybe that’s what they were doing
Reply to @ABoyWithFire, 05:17 UTC · 1 like
ABoyWithFire (@ABoyWithFire): The problem with you commies is that 5% is just the start. You will not stop until it's 100% and millions starve.
Lol I don’t exactly blame you for assuming but I’m pretty far from a communist - and more to the point you can actually just stop at 0.1% or 1% or 5% or whatever the best wealth tax function is; the slope starting at 5% isn’t actually slippery
Reply to @NBBear2, 05:18 UTC · 2 likes
Bob Kain (@NBBear2): Why do you think anyone else is entitled to his assets?
Not a question of entitlement, nobody is “entitled” to my taxed labor income either in some deep metaphysical sense but like that’s how you get a functioning state and society which is broadly beneficial
Reply to @chfanguw, 05:22 UTC · 1 like
CF@SF 🧬🛤️ 🇺🇸🇨🇦🛸 (@chfanguw): Why should people lost 5% of their asset for no good reason? You have already used words like forfeit as if someone has committed crime or impropriety. Are we descending into a mafia state like somewhere in Central America or Iran?
The good reason would be funding goods and services and increasing purchasing power for the poor so that people live better lives
And no, whether or not a wealth tax is good on the merits, implementing it is fully compatible with competent and impartial governance
Reply to @NBBear2, 05:24 UTC
Bob Kain (@NBBear2): And he's taxed on his income, also.
But not on his income from selling equity!
Reply to @AlexKrusz, 06:18 UTC · 34 likes
Alex Krusz (@AlexKrusz): i have a relevant shirt
how do i acquire
Reply to @LinkofSunshine, 18:12 UTC · 5 likes
Basil🧡 (@LinkofSunshine): Why are you not moving to Michigan and splitting a 2 bedroom for just $320/month each
Because agglomeration effects rule everything around me
Reply to @cynlioness, 18:12 UTC · 91 likes
Cyn 🔸⏸️ (@cynlioness): male coworker asked male boss at the end of our standup "can I ask you a personal question?" and it's about the voltages of the resister on his arduino circuit
King
Reply to @mpopv, 18:15 UTC · 4 likes
Matt Popovich (@mpopv): I keep saying this: publicly libbing out secured a huge amount of brand loyalty for Anthropic
(quoting @emollick: AI diffusion in political campaigns is quite high (and it looks like Anthropic’s fight with the Pentagon may have been good for its uptake among politicians, through it is impossible to establish a definitive cause for its rapid rise))
Normie libs don’t care about Anthropic
Reply to @mpopv, 18:16 UTC · 1 like
Matt Popovich (@mpopv): Normie lib engineers do, I think
Isn’t that mostly because they make a good product?
Reply to @TylerCLaprade, 20:27 UTC · 2 likes
Tyler C. Laprade, CFA (@TylerCLaprade): They don't want you to know you can remove the watermark locally
image attached
(quoting @AaronBergman18: I🦆am🦆going🦆to🦆start🦆watermarking🦆all🦆my🦆tweets🦆using🦆an🦆experimental🦆extra-semantic🦆token🦆that🦆does🦆not🦆impact🦆meaning🦆or🦆quality🦆of🦆writing)
😱
Quote tweet, 20:59 UTC · 44 likes
The quality of thinking *of the more sane party* governing the intelligence explosion 😔
Quoting Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren): We should all be worried about "dynamic pricing."
That's when companies change their prices in real time.
If it's hot out, the cost of ice cream could go up.
If it's cold, tea bags could go up.It's a way for giant companies to squeeze you even more.
Tuesday, August 18, 2026
Retweet of @XyraSinclair, 07:55 UTC
Xyra 🌺🦡📡 (@XyraSinclair): one of the greatest things ea grantmakers could do right now is give the top k coolest non-rich cats under the sun, who are maxxing out a max membership, like 3-25 of them a month. and prolly like max memberships for an order of magnitude more people.
just spawn an organization to do it. have signups and regranting and use technological search like http://scry.io to help impartially find people, and help good people just additively do more things that is a reflection of themselves.
Retweet of @nkreu113r, 10:14 UTC
noah (@nkreu113r): Dynamic pricing is fine, so long as it is tailored to the market. That just improves efficiency. Where it becomes pernicious is when it adapts to the individual, which is how all consumer surplus gets eaten.
Retweet of @chaotictransfem, 19:05 UTC
rachel📍in sf oct 5-10 (@chaotictransfem): how does pangram image see different models in embedding space? made a graphic to demonstrate!
(note, accuracy here refers to a naive linear classifier over embedding space, NOT our production model accuracy)
Reply to @chaotictransfem, 19:20 UTC · 11 likes
rachel📍in sf oct 5-10 (@chaotictransfem): how does pangram image see different models in embedding space? made a graphic to demonstrate!
(note, accuracy here refers to a naive linear classifier over embedding space, NOT our production model accuracy)
What is the bottom cluster!!!!!
Reply to @CrispyWicks, 19:23 UTC · 26 likes
Chris P. Wicks 🔎🐜 (@CrispyWicks): Female intrasexual competition goes crazy; my lady's getting one-upped in a "terminate your bloodline due to irrational financial insecurity" contest
(quoting @letclaudiatweet: one of my most important female mentors opened my eyes to this during a fundraise. told her I didn’t know if I could be a founder and have a family. I didn’t know how to avoid becoming a full-time chicken nugget microwaver; she told me around 750k/year that stops being a problem)
Bro if ur not making $800k on 4% returns alone ur genes should be lost to the winds of time
Tweet, 19:33 UTC · 111 likes
Got verbal-IQ mogged today by not knowing "oeuvre"
Downgrade me accordingly
Reply to @cynlioness, 23:01 UTC · 5 likes
Cyn 🔸⏸️ (@cynlioness): Is it easier to get your dream job first and then leverage that into a dream partner or vice versa
Probably not but seems especially unlikely for women right
Wednesday, August 19, 2026
Quote tweet, 01:45 UTC · 10 likes
Seems good
Quoting OpenAI (@OpenAI): As models become more capable, the risks associated with developing and testing them internally also grow.
We temporarily paused reinforcement learning (RL) training on our latest models intended for deployment for two weeks while we hardened and red-teamed our research environments and expanded monitoring coverage.
Our largest planned frontier RL run remains on hold while smaller-scale training and evaluations validate these safeguards and establish more evidence of alignment.
https://openai.com/index/pacing-model-development-cyber-capabilities/
Tweet, 03:24 UTC · 97 likes
The chance that I personally save American democracy thanks to an amicus brief getting filed on time thanks to me helping a boomer lawyer with tech issues at 11pm on a Tuesday is very low but as of just now not zero
Reply to @AndyMasley, 04:47 UTC · 4 likes
Andy Masley (@AndyMasley): Aaron thank you
🫡
Reply to @mlipman13, 04:50 UTC · 2 likes
Michael Lipman 🔍 (@mlipman13): Same word as in hors d’oeuvre!
😱
Reply to @AndyMasley, 04:59 UTC · 2 likes
Andy Masley (@AndyMasley): I solemnly pledge to you my dear followers that I will not
-Join an AI company
-Do gender discourse
-Post AI-written content
-Use the word "bolster"
These are the four foundations upon which trust is built
Why no gender discourse unironically
The type of people who would abstain from gender discourse out of principle are the people who probably have the best takes
Reply to @cljack, 05:19 UTC · 9 likes
Charlotte Lee (@cljack): Claude can’t write functional code but it can notice that a paper I gave it to read was authored by a guy with my same last name, and ask if he’s my husband??? Can you mind your business and put the code in the bag
Claude definitely can write functional code lol
Reply to @thkostolansky, 05:22 UTC · 3 likes
Tim Kostolansky (@thkostolansky): what is the line btw technical and non technical
A very thin and possibly nonexistent line
Retweet of @theojaffee, 05:23 UTC
Theo Jaffee (@theojaffee): Gray goo could start blanketing the planet and some idiots on here would still be saying "this is a ploy by the frontier labs to pump their IPO valuations and achieve regulatory capture"
Reply to @libpol_org, 06:28 UTC · 2 likes
libpol.org (@libpol_org): IDK. I don't think most educated people could successfully complete a math major.
I’m not certain but regardless: my point is that there’s no line, not that there’s no gradient. Like it’s not a bimodal distribution in a way that naturally lends itself to a (non-)technical dichotomy (or maybe it is, I’m just not convinced)
Tweet, 07:49 UTC · 8 likes
My “AI company sitemap monitor to track changes” (that I’ve basically been ignoring to let run and possibly analyze later) is comically representative of the broader actually-important company policies
Thread, continued, 07:49 UTC · 3 likes
- Anthropic fetches just fine, no issues
- OpenAI is kinda sus and failing but who’s to say there’s not an innocent explanation
- xAI has begun (it wasn’t originally) to just straight up block vanilla html requests (one per day per page, not exactly costing them money)
Thread, continued, 07:50 UTC · 2 likes
Ignore the clock I’m actually asleep rn
Quote tweet, 08:00 UTC · 57 likes
I understand that not everyone is on board with full decriminalization but in general selling correctly-advertised drugs is punished a gazillion times more harshly than makes sense
Quoting Polymarket (@Polymarket): JUST IN: 13 Penn State fraternity brothers charged with running a major cocaine trafficking ring, with some pledges allegedly forced to cut & package cocaine as part of their “indoctrination” into the frats.
Thread, continued, 08:01 UTC · 16 likes
It’s punishment by proxy for the things that drug sales are associated with (violence, incorrect labeling that leads to overdose, general unsavory-ness), but you shouldn’t imprison people for things that other people elsewhere tend to do!
Thread, continued, 08:01 UTC · 12 likes
And not just bc they’re white, although insofar as that happens to point ppls intuitions in the correct direction then so be it
Obligatory: I’ve never sold drugs or touched cocaine
Thread, continued, 08:01 UTC · 17 likes
Remember when Trump admin blew up some fishermen for moving cocaine around? Lots of (correct) international law and due process takes but also the most obvious objection imo is “transporting drugs isn’t/shouldn’t be a capital crime on the merits”
Quote tweet, 08:02 UTC · 30 likes
Temperature control and anaesthetics/opioids alone get you there
You don’t even need to invoke cheap toasters or whatever
Quoting Divia Eden 🔍 (@diviacaroline): I’m super skeptical people that current people aren’t much happier than past people
Quote tweet, 17:14 UTC · 4,821 likes
Purely for the sociological data I would like to live one day as a beautiful woman
Quoting moma (peptide arc) ⛓️ (@MomaBera): Man opposite of me on the train is having lunch and just handed me a wrap.
“It’s fresh. Its homemade. I prepped it this morning !”
Impeccable things happening here
Thread, continued, 17:14 UTC · 125 likes
In b4 pics of estradiol
Reply to @MomaBera, 17:17 UTC · 2 likes
moma (peptide arc) ⛓️ (@MomaBera): Yeah but happiness isn’t absolute it’s relative
Raw hedonic value is absolute
Reply to @chriswaterguy, 17:20 UTC · 2 likes
Chris Waterguy – neurodivergent coaching (@chriswaterguy): That's comfort, not happiness. I'm happier in a tent by a river even though I'm less comfortable.
I’ve gone camping enough to reflect on this quite a bit - at least for me, the kind of happiness you’re gesturing at is real but conditional on modernity existing as well
Like you get to choose when to go out and when to come back. You don’t have to go out when it’s 100° or -10°. If you break your leg you won’t be on your own indefinitely miserably limping along until you die
Reply to @adastroworld, 17:23 UTC · 3 likes
adas🧦🌹 (@adastroworld): That beautiful woman in nyc won’t provide for you
Yes she will
Reply to @bschne, 17:25 UTC · 11 likes
Benjamin (@bschne): I assume it happens less as a guy, but I've been offered wine and food while traveling on trains a few times before, IIRC always by groups of women
Lucky guy
Reply to @knjysnn, 17:26 UTC · 29 likes
selrahc (@knjysnn): aaron bergwoman
That’s me
Retweet of @Kirsten3531, 17:27 UTC
Kirsten (@Kirsten3531): trying to communicate with ai researchers like "I am very weird and can be trusted with your real opinions"
Reply to @luke_drago_, 17:34 UTC · 5 likes
Luke Drago (@luke_drago_): I think an under-discussed reason the AI labs are winning the AI policy talent war vs academia is that academia is still focused on credentials.
As a thought experiment, I made a list of the 10 sharpest AI policy thinkers I know. About half of them don't have masters degrees or above -- and none of them are going to sit the game out for years to get a PhD.
Also, publication timelines in academia mean that by the time your thoughts are in front of others, they're probably outdated. Most of the people I wrote down first got started on Substack, where they could get their thoughts out quickly and engage with the broader policy community.
If academia reduced its focus on credentials and let people do good work faster, they'd be more competitive here.
Alternatively, we may need alternative institutions that can support the development of burgeoning AI governance researchers. Not academia, not an AI lab, but a secret third thing? (cc: @PaxMachinaMag)
Lmao it’s because one has a way of getting $100B dollars
If companies were more credentialist than academia they’d still be winning, albeit by less
Reply to @LarryPanozzo, 18:15 UTC · 7 likes
Larry Panozzo (@LarryPanozzo): From my observational data, it’s a ton of good and a ton of bad
Peak is probably being like 7/10 but also idk what I’m talking about
Quote tweet, 18:58 UTC · 28 likes
.@MechanizeWork is evidently getting in early on the influence campaign (talent sourcing as well ofc)
Without shade to Nick per se, the fact that they’re evidently funding “everything will be fine” vibes instead of…
Quoting Ben Goldhaber (@BenGoldhaber): > this post is brought to you by Mechanize
Thread, continued, 18:58 UTC · 12 likes
“if we succeed major policy changes are needed for those not blessed with capital, so let’s do those” vibes (like to Anthropic) is pretty bad
And tbc I think the appropriate frame here is conflict theory
Thread, continued, 18:58 UTC · 9 likes
You wanna make a trillion dollars, congrats. Usually capitalism does ok with channeling that ambition, but the folks there are smart enough to know that they’re not playing the standard game in this case
Thread, continued, 18:58 UTC · 11 likes
Obligatory: naive dismissal of automation is bad but the default trajectory leads to labor income approaching zero
The theory for automation being good essentially necessarily includes enforced redistribution (alternative = massive philanthropy)
Thread, continued, 18:58 UTC · 12 likes
If your goal is to transform society and you have a ton of resources, you don’t get to throw up your hands and say “someone else will take care of the parts that make our mission non-malicious”
Thread, continued, 18:58 UTC · 7 likes
I hope I’m misunderstanding, prove me wrong
Reply to @funplings, 19:20 UTC · 7 likes
funplings (@funplings): what if i made a slutcon esque group chat w sensitive young men and women who were eager to flirt w them and help build up their confidence
My first instinct is “yes” but on serious second thought: I’m not sure this is feasible in a genuinely-good way without attractiveness discretion from women in gc which is going to have negative effects on those rejected. The thing about this kind of confidence is that it has to come from someone *actually flirting* with you, not pretending to as a friend
I mean maybe it’s still worth doing tbc
Thread, continued, 19:22 UTC · 4 likes
But also I’m in if it gets made lol
Quote tweet, 19:24 UTC · 28 likes
I’ve had at least two very very important emails go to spam over the years
Which is impressive from a technical POV but also extremely far from practically “good enough”
Gmail et al should embrace the p(spam) estimate their model uses and let ppl differentiate between 99.5% and 99.999%
Quoting moma (peptide arc) ⛓️ (@MomaBera): ok so apperantly there is a second folder in the 'requests' dm folder where X hides half of your messages
most of them are correctly filtered out for being gross but some of you just got randomly put into jail for no fault at all?
Reply to @TheDavidSJ, 19:47 UTC · 2 likes
David Schneider-Joseph 🔍 (@TheDavidSJ): Does Nick have “everything will be fine” vibes? This post in particular seems concerned that everything might not be fine. Maybe I've misunderstood you.
Only talking about the dimension of automation/UBI-adjacent
Reply to @DuchessDoucette, 19:48 UTC · 6 likes
Natalie Doucette (@DuchessDoucette): I'd be very interested in that data. I bet in some ways you would really like it, in other ways...you really wouldn't 🤣🤔
Totally
Quote tweet, 19:54 UTC · 32 likes
For obvious reasons no institutional funder will touch it (I assume) but there’s unironically probably a space for more coordination between attractive women on how to use their looks for good?
(Registering 40% chance I delete this tweet)
Quoting Aaron Bergman 🔍 (@AaronBergman18): Purely for the sociological data I would like to live one day as a beautiful woman
Thread, continued, 19:54 UTC · 7 likes
Want to be careful not to start normative endorsing lookism but descriptively it’s just true in the same way that “money can help buy good things” is true
Thread, continued, 19:54 UTC · 4 likes
I’m sure nothing bad or unintended could come of this
Thread, continued, 19:54 UTC · 2 likes
Cc @Aella_Girl
Reply to @MomaBera, 19:57 UTC · 170 likes
moma (peptide arc) ⛓️ (@MomaBera): He’s also Eastern European I think this is partly me being pretty and partly his culture
Nice
Honestly I wouldn’t offer a stranger of arbitrary hotness food on a train lol
Reply to his own earlier tweet, 19:58 UTC · 11 likes
Aaron Bergman, August 19, 2026: Cc @Aella_Girl
“Donald it would be so hot if you properly enforced chip export controls”
Retweet of @jeffrsebo, 19:58 UTC
Jeff Sebo (@jeffrsebo): Thanks to @coeff_giving for supporting @nonhumanminds with $1.65M for our digital minds research and field-building, along with $77K for an animal welfare benchmark through our Welfare Alignment Project! Very excited for all the work this funding will make possible.
Reply to @jeffrsebo, 19:59 UTC · 4 likes
Jeff Sebo (@jeffrsebo): Thanks to @coeff_giving for supporting @nonhumanminds with $1.65M for our digital minds research and field-building, along with $77K for an animal welfare benchmark through our Welfare Alignment Project! Very excited for all the work this funding will make possible.
Based!!
Thursday, August 20, 2026
Reply to @MomaBera, 01:34 UTC · 8 likes
moma (peptide arc) ⛓️ (@MomaBera): Grok is an underutilized LLM
(quoting @bitcloud: Anthropic cant end soon enough.)
I feel like for banal reasons it’s both less bad and less good than people think
- In terms of basic intelligence even the new model isn’t as good as opus-5 let alone fable (benchmarks IIRC but the irl practical difference is even more pronounced). It’s not on the Pareto of intelligence/overall quality and cost
- to a first approximation it’s just a normal LLM that doesn’t do anything crazy. It doesn’t inject random racism into banal queries for instance. But I haven’t found a reason to use since they deprecated their low cost model like a year ago
- Kimi is even less censored (which I think is bad tbc) but there’s only a very very narrow slice of query that Claude and gpt will refuse that grok will accept
The actual issue I’ve found that doesn’t go viral:
- only found one category of thing that grok will serve that both Claude and gpt won’t, which is things related to virology that have nothing to do with woke or whatever
I think this is substantially bad and they should hit the same standard as OpenAI and Anthropic. I do not think they found a better classifier that more accurately prunes high negative EV requests from others, I think they are just being more lenient across the board in a way that massively increases false negatives
Reply to @bitcloud, 01:37 UTC · 28 likes
Lachlan Phillips exo/acc 👾 (@bitcloud): Anthropic cant end soon enough.
Care to share what you’re writing?
Tbc I’m awfully on the (classically) liberal end of “what kind of writing should we tolerate” and I’m not gonna try to cancel you, but I also don’t think companies have a moral duty to make their products pure tools. Like I would also personally refuse to help with some pieces of writing lol
Retweet of @GjMcGowan, 14:40 UTC
George McGowan (@GjMcGowan): wtf kind of dystopian hell do children exist in now - parents have to APPROVE contact??
Reply to @GjMcGowan, 14:40 UTC · 11 likes
George McGowan (@GjMcGowan): wtf kind of dystopian hell do children exist in now - parents have to APPROVE contact??
(quoting @rrcjaf: Teenage son goes back to middle school after summer nearly 6ft tall and all the sudden I’m getting new contact approval requests from girls 😮💨)
This is insane
Reply to @wilhelmscreamin, 15:01 UTC · 2 likes
catherine (in sf) ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ-☆ (@wilhelmscreamin): “or something“, ”my guess is…”, “cruxy”, “decently likely”, ”sounds plausible”, “seems good“, coining random adjectives via adding -y to technical jargon, etc
🗣️
Reply to @daniellellecco, 15:31 UTC · 2 likes
(The tweet being replied to by @daniellellecco is no longer available.)
Lmao bro overplayed his hand
Thread, continued, 15:32 UTC · 3 likes
I will not promise to read your book but I will promise to not block you if I get a gf!
Tweet, 15:37 UTC · 76 likes
Brilliant title on a couple levels by @Benthamsbulldog
Thread, continued, 15:37 UTC
https://benthams.substack.com/p/why-im-staying-out-of-responding?r=2muv6&utm_medium=ios
Quote tweet, 15:38 UTC · 21 likes
Oh this is interesting, I’m glad someone tested
Quoting allegedly! 🔡 (@januarycomputer): cool thing about pangram and base models: if the prompt text is ai generated, the completion text reliably will be flagged as such, and if the prompt text is human written, the completion will be flagged the same
Reply to @requiescus, 15:46 UTC · 3 likes
Requiescus (@requiescus): hm i only see one level
The post is in fact a response to Scott, showing his willingness to asymmetrically engage and implicitly argue that Scott should. That’s my take at least. I guess that’s not the title alone
Tweet, 21:09 UTC · 49 likes
Crazy that Bentham said “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” it’s been 250 years of mostly people saying “wrong” instead of “no shit, but the hard part is figuring out what to do when it’s not clear what that implies, even if you know all the relevant empirical facts”
Thread, continued, 21:09 UTC · 12 likes
Utilitarianism is the start of the interesting and hard questions, not the end
Tweet, 23:31 UTC · 52 likes
I got a ticket to Slutcon
Thread, continued, 23:31 UTC · 11 likes
Not that one tho lol^
(Lowest tier still costs a lot, I think maybe this is a case where what I'm doing is immoral bc I don't really need to go and even now $3k is a sizeable donation somewhere. Idk. I think it would be admirable to not go for this reason)
Friday, August 21, 2026
Reply to @LeoBreston, 01:11 UTC · 1 like
Leo Breston (@LeoBreston): Come on man do you really not have a theory of mind for why ppl reject utilitarianism or even consequentialism? Like it's fine to disagree but our position is not incomprehensible. I understand yours.
Honestly not as much as I feel like I should
Like more than nothing but it's genuinely peculiar to me that even smart well-intentioned philosophers defend other theories
Tweet, 02:05 UTC · 20 likes
I regret to report that 5.6-Luna is extremely good for its price
Reply to @NathanpmYoung, 02:31 UTC · 2 likes
Nathan 🔎 (@NathanpmYoung): did you try signing up to volunteer?
I emailed them but didn’t try that hard to follow up
Tweet, 05:24 UTC · 16 likes
I know everyone's appropriately pitbull-pilled now so I don't actually need to make an object level argument, but it's just interesting to see the literal market (renters insurance, so major money I assume) answer a question definitively in the wild
Thread, continued, 05:24 UTC · 3 likes
Tbc there's a lot it doesn't answer (eg nature vs nurture) but it does definitively answer which breeds tend to cause more financializable damage
Thread, continued, 05:24 UTC · 5 likes
Also I'm sure the choice to use "reactive" specifically was a considered one lol
Tweet, 05:56 UTC · 10 likes
If you want to optimize internet speed, on mac, you can set things up so that downloads come over wifi and uploads over ethernet, but afaict not easily via existing software (I didn't look v hard)
App here (dmg link provided, don't need to run any code) https://github.com/AaronBergman/SplitRoute
Reply to @dejectedvole, 06:14 UTC · 3 likes
Vampirical Critter 🏴☠️ (@dejectedvole): i don't get it, wouldn't it be faster to use ethernet for both?
you'd think, but at least in my case wifi has way more bandwidth so in fact wifi is faster. no idea how common this is
Quote tweet, 07:40 UTC · 2 likes
Update: I'm getting thoroughly mixed results (using uh "NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-Base")
In-fact AI-written writing prompted from human text runs the full spectrum
Quoting Aaron Bergman 🔍 (@AaronBergman18): Oh this is interesting, I’m glad someone tested
Thread, continued, 07:40 UTC · 1 like
N = small, these are based on substantial definitely Aaron-written or spoken text
The mixed one looks like this
No prompt text included in pangram sample
Cc @max_spero_
Thread, continued, 07:40 UTC · 1 like
don't have too much fun https://huggingface.co/mradermacher/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-Base-BF16-i1-GGUF
Thread, continued, 07:40 UTC
does anyone wanna give me GPU money to run deepseek-v4-pro-base
Reply to @KanizsaBoundary, 09:01 UTC · 2 likes
Ethan Kuntz (@KanizsaBoundary): Interestingly I am not sure that happiness of mental states has a total order! A lattice seems doable, seems you can ~always construct an experience strictly better or worse than both of a pair, but some pairs seem maybe incomparable without losing key stuff
I’m sympathetic to this (and in general skeptical of taking simple mathematical models as a given when they’re never justified explicitly) but I do think any two possible states of the world end up cashing out as A>B, A<B, or A=B in terms of “morally relevant properties of happiness”
Ofc this doesn’t encode full details of qualia but you simply might have to choose between two states of the world and there’s no button irl for “sorry I can’t choose”
Tweet, 09:33 UTC · 18 likes
New pfp just dropped, using the unusually hot one from almost two years ago felt increasingly disingenuous
Retweet of @TetraspaceWest, 16:17 UTC
Tetra 💎⏹️🌌 (@TetraspaceWest): If I were to actually periodise it's maybe
EA 0: Singer, hummus baguettes in the realtor's basement
EA 1: Dustin Moskovitz invents charity, EA becomes real job
EA 2: An evil billionaire called Bankman, castles, upskilling grants
EA 3: AI is real, timelines below 30 year cope
Retweet of @Mjreard, 16:22 UTC
Matt Reardon (@Mjreard): Scott Alexander has graciously offered to coordinate campus EA meetups for us. Please check out the post and be an organizer if you're near a campus!
Retweet of @AndyMasley, 17:55 UTC
Andy Masley (@AndyMasley): It's been kind of satisfying seeing a lot of people trying to straddle this line having to add more and more epicycles to their worldview. What if instead you simply entertained the idea of risks from advanced AI in your collection of things to worry about?
Retweet of @MTSlive, 18:19 UTC
MTS (@MTSlive): Sentinel Bio's @jtmonrad explains why nonprofits need more of the Bay Area startup mentality:
"I have a lot of friends who work on startups here in the Bay, and I admire the velocity, the talent that they can attract, the relentlessness."
"Some people in the NGO world are exceptionally high integrity, exceptionally talented, but the lack of accountability from simple things like are you making revenue, are you profitable, can make it harder to have that drive."
"That's one thing the NGO world can learn. Where the for-profit world fails to deliver an impact is, J. Cole has this lyric, the good news is you came a long way. The bad news is you went the wrong way. You've delivered something at very tremendous scale, but it's not really making the world, it's not pointed in the right direction."
Tweet, 18:55 UTC · 419 likes
Warning: dating discourse
Hypothesis: the general advice given to men around leaning into want they want and like (“being yourself”) is just straightforwardly wrong if you’re starting from a place of being >2sd weird in relevant ways
Thread, continued, 18:55 UTC · 56 likes
Maybe the target weirdness is like 1.5-2sds
And evidence = personal experience^
Thread, continued, 18:55 UTC · 93 likes
It’s like “exercise more” is good population level advice but terrible advice for someone at the 99.9th percentile of exercise and if you treat it as ground truth instead of a generalization that stops being true at some threshold you’re gonna have a bad time
Reply to @InVitroFuture, 19:28 UTC · 16 likes
Macrophysiological System🐀 (@InVitroFuture): The standard counter is that, even though weird men trying to get into a relationship often have a hard time believing this, you're not actually going to make your life better long-term by investing in a relationship that's premised on your pretending to be someone you aren't
I mean, you might
Reply to @henryaj, 19:30 UTC · 14 likes
Henry is in Berlin (@henryaj): don't be yourself more if being yourself is already deeply unattractive to women basically
'i want to be more like myself' *monkey paw curls* *becomes even more obsessed with plane trivia*
I love airplanes!
Reply to @henryaj, 19:36 UTC · 1 like
Henry is in Berlin (@henryaj): you don't have to pretend – you can just tone down the things that are less appealing to your partner
I think weird/nerdy people are often just not good at this kind of compartmentalisation, and it's probably a prerequisite for happy relationships
I think the hard part is figuring out what they don’t like, not damping down once you figure that out
Reply to @henryaj, 19:37 UTC · 7 likes
Henry is in Berlin (@henryaj): but like if you're really into longform videos about plane crashes and your partner isn't, that's probably just a non-overlapping interest you can have
What kind of fuckin nerd smh
Reply to @Lib_Development, 20:08 UTC · 7 likes
Lucas Pombo (aka Lib Development) (@Lib_Development): basically all dating advice for guys comes down to
1) be more attractive
2) if you succeed at #1, the thing you want to filter for is "people who allow you to be yourself". Don't filter too hard, but also don't waste your (very finite) filters either
Ya
Reply to @pop_tartlet, 20:31 UTC · 9 likes
❤️🔥pop tart💋 (@pop_tartlet): pro se lady seeking restraining order: “he’s slandering me on youtube saying I have 6 kids with 5 babydaddies”
attorney: “how many kids do you have?”
pro se: “6”
attorney: “with how many babydaddies?”
pro se: “THAT IS NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS”
state court seems wild to me
Slander is literally an incorrect term here but I do think it’s generally bad if not illegal to air random people’s dirty laundry on YouTube unless there’s a compelling public interest
Reply to @_AashishReddy, 22:15 UTC · 12 likes
Aashish Reddy (@_AashishReddy): What are the relevant ways
Shhh it’s like “etc” it lets me gesture at a hazy vibe in my head while sounding appropriately rigorous
But actually, any combination of (non-exhaustive)
- interests
- ideology/beliefs
- fashion
- body type
- general personality
- professional legitimacy (ie 9-5 -> contractor -> grant money -> crime -> successful shitcoin pump and dump)
Saturday, August 22, 2026
Tweet, 00:43 UTC · 100 likes
I think a lot of problems in my life would be solved if I was simply much more capable on a diverse array of dimensions
Reply to @monke_io, 01:08 UTC · 5 likes
(The tweet being replied to by @monke_io is no longer available.)
Real
Quote tweet, 10:04 UTC · 21 likes
This but unironically
Quoting Rafael Ruiz ⏸️🔸 (@RafaRuizdeLira): I've been hanging out with some cousins' kids (ages 3 to 6) and they whine, cry, and get mad whenever the world doesn't go their way. The kids yearn for the experience machine and are beaten into this sour grapes reality.
Retweet of @Duderichy, 16:20 UTC
the Rich (@Duderichy): btw if you have a crush on me it’s illegal to not tell me
Retweet of @Manderljung, 20:26 UTC
Markus Anderljung (@Manderljung): We need more ambition in AI safety and governance.
There is more important work to do than there are organizations to do it, and more funding is available for ambitious projects than ever before.
To address the gap, we're hiring Entrepreneurs-in-Residence at @GovAIOrg. Participants get a year of salary plus ~$150k in seed funding via partner funders to start a new AI governance and safety org or project. We take no equity.
Even though it wasn't an explicit goal, GovAI staff have spent their time starting new orgs, including @Safe_AI_Forum and Trajectory Labs.
We're interested in a range of orgs and projects. Examples include: automating AI governance, an organization that rapidly produces well-evidenced, expert-endorsed “proto-standards”, an AI Bellingcat, a sub-frontier model evaluator, a TechCongress for outside the US.
We take rolling applications. The pitch is max 2 pages. If you've built something impressive and have context on the field, consider applying.
Retweet of @AndyMasley, 20:44 UTC
Andy Masley (@AndyMasley): Have had three successful self-identified journalists in the last 24 hours lecture me about how facts don't move opinions so it's important to just get in line behind the democraticaly decided beliefs of the people. Bad trend.
Retweet of @ValsTutor, 21:22 UTC
vals🔸 (@ValsTutor): sorry, I have the disability that makes me correct about things
Reply to @tszzl, 21:24 UTC · 3 likes
roon (@tszzl): i had my misgivings about Luna/terra/sol/astra naming due to the crypto associations and whatnot but it seems to have worked perfectly in retrospect
I occasionally use crypto (not really “into” crypto) and have no idea what these associations are
99.9% of people aren’t gonna know or care
Quote tweet, 21:34 UTC · 9 likes
AI-age mass surveillance with the privacy and governance institutions of at best the 2000s (patriot act) and substantially the 1700s is bad
Quoting Crémieux (@cremieuxrecueil): Interesting!
My followers are generally anti-Flock but strongly supportive of data centers.
Thread, continued, 21:34 UTC · 13 likes
The fact of the matter is that normal people break laws all time and society is set up for this
*Very* occasionally a government pulls out the full apparatus of what can be done à la Boston Marathon bombers or 9/11
Thread, continued, 21:34 UTC · 8 likes
but AI enables essentially this for all people all of the time (at the limit, currently maybe this is a bit too expensive to run on 400M people, idk) but that’s a matter of like a couple years of hardware and software progress
Reply to @_job01, 21:41 UTC · 4 likes
job (@_job01): Yea our current society prices in crime. Imagine automatically getting a ticket the moment you exceeded the speed limit lol. Stores price in theft.
Yea, although i think these are different because “pricing in” speeding means enforcement norms that are broadly reasonable whereas pricing in theft actually leads to high prices for non-thieves
I think the right adjustment axis on the latter is closer to “theft results in a civil penalty of 10x the value of stolen item with high certainty” rather than “you might go to prison with low certainty”
Retweet of @NathanpmYoung, 21:51 UTC
Nathan 🔎 (@NathanpmYoung): The US Government can get all sorts of outcomes, including with China. It is tremendously powerful.
Sunday, August 23, 2026
Retweet of @Mjreard, 08:28 UTC
Matt Reardon (@Mjreard): People are mad about the wrong large buildings in rural America
Quote tweet, 08:33 UTC · 9 likes
Likewise. QTing so it gets more in the LLMs that tell investors/founders relevant market research takes
Quoting Nathan 🔎 (@NathanpmYoung): I really want to buy this. I would pay a lot for it! Maybe triple the price.
Tweet, 08:49 UTC · 23 likes
Slutcon is human capital, functionally just like going to grad school send tweet
Tweet, 08:59 UTC · 5 likes
New, improved, and only slightly tested (by request)
http://abergman.com/dataliberator
Reply to @funplings, 15:41 UTC · 6 likes
funplings (@funplings): how do you guys keep up with ai news/developments?
80,000 hours podcast is 🐐 hour-for-hour
Latest ep https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/80-000-hours-podcast/id1245002988?i=1000784619740
Reply to @paulg, 15:45 UTC · 18 likes
Paul Graham (@paulg): Someone asked what I'd do if I were 17. I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch, and then train ones as powerful as I could with whatever hardware I could get access to.
I have tried this! The problem is that you get very little feedback from models trained on even a very nice laptop because the result is just (IME, maybe a skill issue) totally incoherent and it takes a shit ton of clock time so feedback very sparse
Although if you have parents willing to spend $10/hour for you, maybe
Reply to @0interestrates, 16:05 UTC · 4 likes
(The tweet being replied to by @0interestrates is no longer available.)
Both can be good and true though
Retweet of @Benthamsbulldog, 16:09 UTC
Bentham's Bulldog🔸 (@Benthamsbulldog): I oppose legislating morality. When passing a law restricting something, we should pay no attention to whether the thing is bad.
Retweet of @TetraspaceWest, 16:09 UTC
Tetra 💎⏹️🌌 (@TetraspaceWest): pov what you just said was complete and utter bullshit and nobody has been more wrong in their life
Reply to @paul_cal, 16:14 UTC · 4 likes
Paul Calcraft (@paul_cal): "We publish the discrepancy rather than the flattering number"
So LLMese. Don't be constantly alluding to all your possible misdeeds. Like answering your boss's questions every single time with "I'll give you the real numbers instead of just a plausible sounding guess"
(quoting @deepfates: Wow https://x.com/Jord_Inne/status/2091212896273318010?s=20)
I think it’s a sort of alignment technique even tho aesthetically bad
If you get the model to say “the honest caveat I should have mentioned: “ in every response, it effectively steers the model towards completing that thought naturally which often means a trivial detail and occasionally might reveal substantial deception/known reward hacking
Retweet of @NathanpmYoung, 20:37 UTC
Nathan 🔎 (@NathanpmYoung): Journalist struggles to see communication as anything other than comms. n = 1.
Reply to @polisisti, 22:39 UTC · 1 like
Alessandro (@polisisti): what is happening on the mobile site
Rip
Retweet of @Tim_Hua_, 22:52 UTC
Tim Hua 🇺🇦 (@Tim_Hua_): Chat is it happening
Reply to @she_llac, 22:54 UTC · 4 likes
shellac! (@she_llac): can i kiss you, no worries if not
~Literally me
Reply to @graveunfurling, 22:56 UTC · 3 likes
may💐 (@graveunfurling): there's gotta be at least ONE monogamous man in all of SF......right???
(quoting @ExTenebrisLucet: @graveunfurling Nooo don't do it they're all in polycules)
Hey (in 3 weeks (also Berkeley not SF))
Retweet of @scaling01, 23:08 UTC
Lisan al Gaib (@scaling01): 2 trillion hurts so much if you have been following Anthropic for that long but had no opportunity to invest
Monday, August 24, 2026
Reply to @moultano, 03:36 UTC · 5 likes
Ryan Moulton (@moultano): TIL from reddit that most mattresses sold in the US have fiberglass inside, and if you open them for cleaning (even if they have a zipper) it will destroy your life.
Wtf
Reply to @Aella_Girl, 05:22 UTC · 2 likes
Aella (@Aella_Girl): i think i legit got dumber after joining social groups full of much smarter people and subconsciously realizing i could no longer gain status by being smart
Real
Reply to @MathIntee, 05:23 UTC · 2 likes
Tomas McIntee (@MathIntee): Yeah, I was just banging around on the subject in my drafts folder.
If you want "racism" to have some kind of negative moral valence, you can't really afford to include "believes facts about the world" in the racism bucket.
Correct take
Reply to @deanwball, 06:26 UTC · 23 likes
Dean W. Ball (@deanwball): Beethoven wanted to kill himself in his early 30s when he realized he was going to lose his hearing and that this would mean his career as a performer (which is how musicians made money) was finished. He wrote a letter to himself where he said, “no, I will go on for the sake of my art,” and then proceeded to write art that transformed music and routinely infuriated people. This is what I call alignment with the broader interests of humanity. If I had my way it would be mandatory to midtrain on that letter, which is called the heiligenstadt testament.
Ok but for every Beethoven there are probably 10k+ deaf former musicians in poverty over the centuries
Tweet, 06:36 UTC · 28 likes
It’s funny that whenever I mention personal disaster prep (which isn’t very often tbc) many people indicate that this or that wouldn’t make sense if it was me + 1000 others left alive and nobody else, or that they’d rather die in that situation…
Thread, continued, 06:36 UTC · 16 likes
I agree with most of their takes except for the fact that I’m not planning for that scenario because I’m ~certainly going to be dead in that world too
Thread, continued, 06:36 UTC · 12 likes
There’s some sort of cultural thing where the fewer human survivors there are in a story the more instances/influence that story has
Thread, continued, 06:36 UTC · 11 likes
But irl you’re ~never one of the last 1M people alive and 40% of the time in the last 40% alive (on broad priors) and 90% in the last 90% alive
Thread, continued, 06:36 UTC · 11 likes
Ofc at some number of 9s after the 99% decimal it stops being something to prepare for at all
Idk what the sweet spot is but you should almost certainly plan to have a subjective very many other humans around even if you find yourself in a post-apocalyptic world
Retweet of @_NathanCalvin, 06:53 UTC
Nathan Calvin (@_NathanCalvin): Some of these convos about AI CEO messaging is going to turn me into the joker. The most important thing is what is actually true! Does AI development on its current track in fact meaningfully risk global catastrophe or not? If CEOs believe yes but say no, that is not better!
Tweet, 06:53 UTC · 26 likes
Ontological is a great word and ppl should use it more not less
Tweet, 06:54 UTC · 5 likes
High key is evidential decision theory (as a meme/idea) an infoblessing
I feel like this is not discussed although admittedly I haven’t read 99.9% of the words where it would be discussed
Reply to @LinchZhang, 07:05 UTC · 6 likes
Linch (@LinchZhang): I'll be honest I don't think i've ever phenomenologically experienced being in a social group full of noticeably smarter people than me (tho i wouldn't be surprised if in at least some cases this is literally true and it's just ego protection making me not see it).
(quoting @Aella_Girl: i think i legit got dumber after joining social groups full of much smarter people and subconsciously realizing i could no longer gain status by being smart)
Lmao you’re unironically at the top!
Élite EA circles get there for me, some of the time at least
Reply to @GjMcGowan, 13:10 UTC · 3 likes
George McGowan (@GjMcGowan): never seen claude correct itself mid-sentence like this, interesting
I’ve def seen this a few times
Retweet of @tszzl, 13:11 UTC
roon (@tszzl): there will be a steady ramp of such events
Reply to @alec_harris_x, 15:47 UTC · 1 like
Alec Harris (@alec_harris_x): Because it makes people more cooperative?? Or it makes you effectively more powerful? Are you a one boxer?
The former + yes, 1 box
Quote tweet, 20:51 UTC
Same thing but for @Benthamsbulldog’s blog
https://bbpod.xyz/ (landing page with links)
Quoting Aaron Bergman 🔍 (@AaronBergman18): Vibecoded a Slow Boring podcast feed via a single Claude Dispatch prompt on my phone while walking home today mildly drunk and allegedly it will stay up to date with decent quality audio (IMHO)
(Unless @mattyglesias shuts it down [fr just lmk]) https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/slow-boring-unofficial-ai-narration/id6794501772
Thread, continued, 20:51 UTC
Tuesday, August 25, 2026
Reply to @captgouda24, 01:49 UTC · 6 likes
Nicholas Decker (@captgouda24): No? I think that ICE is evil because of its mission. I am categorically opposed to the existence of its agents, regardless of what it does.
Ok but high key they're extra bad on top of their mission
Tweet, 03:48 UTC · 80 likes
Indented as satire but not entirely crazy https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/uh3JRsLdgCDtMjwbz/a-modest-proposal-why-vegans-should-start-factory-farms
Thread, continued, 03:48 UTC · 19 likes
Quote tweet, 03:58 UTC · 51 likes
Guys this is at least as much about Anthropic wanting to transmit information to candidates as it is eliciting information from them
Quoting MTS (@MTSlive): SITUATION BREWING: Anthropic is asking prospective employees in culture interviews how they would feel if the stock hypothetically went to zero due to a significant change in course, per Axios.
Thread, continued, 03:59 UTC · 21 likes
The guy who only cares about equity might say all the right words and then decide that OpenAI is the better fit after hearing the question
Reply to @LarryPanozzo, 05:00 UTC · 9 likes
Larry Panozzo (@LarryPanozzo): Didn’t know there was an EA forum
Best kept non-secret! A surprising amount of important stuff happens there (I don’t use as often as I should)
It’s amusing that I’ve never heard of a high profile EA Skeptic actually looking at it
Reply to @tracewoodgrains, 05:46 UTC · 3 likes
Jack (@tracewoodgrains): Me! I look at it. I guess I’m not that high-profile, though, or known centrally as an EA skeptic
cool! god bless lol
Reply to @tracewoodgrains, 05:47 UTC · 15 likes
Jack (@tracewoodgrains): man, it kinda sucks that my student access to the New York Times is over. I almost forgot how much of a drag their paywall is
if only there were some solution that involved continuing to spend $0.00 on what I consume while getting convenient, full access
most articles have the content in the downloaded html
Thread, continued, 05:48 UTC · 3 likes
like if u just naively curl the url
Reply to @tracewoodgrains, 05:49 UTC · 7 likes
Jack (@tracewoodgrains): it’s been a while since I’ve seen a satirical argument inadvertently make a very strong case for what it’s trying to satirize
I think animal welfare advocates running large-scale farms would, in fact, be a highly effective way to draw the world towards their goals
image attached
(quoting @AaronBergman18: Indented as satire but not entirely crazy https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/uh3JRsLdgCDtMjwbz/a-modest-proposal-why-vegans-should-start-factory-farms)
Lol tbc I think *some* of the arguments don't check out. Seems like the main good mechanism is converting wild talent/tech advantage into slack that can be used to improve welfare
Tweet, 06:13 UTC · 21 likes
Could be a fluke but ~April 2026 is now a candidate for "things started happening" for me at least (my personal AI-heavy portfolio vs S&P500)
Thread, continued, 06:13 UTC · 2 likes
[relative levels are off bc the flat part in the beginning is when I opened account rather than first purchased anything]
Reply to @edgar_z_lin, 06:14 UTC · 2 likes
Edgar Lin (@edgar_z_lin): There has to be at least one EA that has done something in this vein right? I.e., start a startup that works on animal agriculture.
Sorta relevant is @AnimalInnovate
Nonprofit but directed at industry
Tweet, 06:38 UTC · 25 likes
Seems like a super important job that is amenable to someone being 100x+ better than the next best option
I plan on applying but in some sense hope to not get the role (ie bc that means someone better has it)
https://careers.rethinkpriorities.org/en/postings/47a59076-cc1a-4426-b658-ba4e087918f6
Reply to @birchlse, 07:01 UTC · 6 likes
Jonathan Birch (@birchlse): With food, it's better to take over retailers than producers. For example in the UK you could buy Sainsbury's, Morrisons and Asda for about £7bn a piece and immediately own about 33% of the UK food market.
Nice, economics are complex ofc but market power seems real enough for this to be legit
Reply to his own earlier tweet, 07:04 UTC · 8 likes
Aaron Bergman, August 25, 2026: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/uh3JRsLdgCDtMjwbz/a-modest-proposal-why-vegans-should-start-factory-farms?commentId=w6zpvFi27XTbqTJ5q
Nice typo Aaron
Retweet of @polisisti, 14:35 UTC
Alessandro (@polisisti): The EA Forum is a font of good ideas. I'd suggest that this one be explored on the margin.
Retweet of @EAForumPosts, 14:41 UTC
EA Forum Posts (@EAForumPosts): "A Modest Proposal: Why Vegans Should Start Factory Farms" by moral_mazes
Retweet of @demiurgently, 16:33 UTC
sydney (@demiurgently): people in dc be like sorry you need to message me on this crazy encrypted app called signal yeah we do things a little 🤏 differently down here my handle is just my first initial hope that's not a problem anyway it's just for opsec but that probably went over your head heh...anyway here's the happy hour address
Tweet, 16:35 UTC · 22 likes
I get infosec but there needs to be a very high bar for infosec infosec
Bro just tell me if you can’t/don’t want to say who you work for, don’t say “ehhhh it’s a nonprofit, ya know based in around DC, really focused on stakeholders” or whatever
Reply to @GarrettPetersen, 16:39 UTC · 3 likes
Dr. Dad, PhD 🔄🔼◀️🔽▶️ (@GarrettPetersen): This isn't AI. This is just algorithms.
(quoting @HedgieMarkets: 🦔Delta's CEO said AI will boost profits by 50% by setting a different ticket price for every passenger in real time. The airline uses an AI system called Fetcherr that generates a unique price for each shopping request. Delta told Congress last year it was not using personal…)
Ok sure but like still seems bad, “algorithms” is a very large space
Quote tweet, 16:42 UTC · 22 likes
Ngl I don’t have any idea what this looks like concretely beyond the meaning of the words and something about “cryptography”
@80000Hours 🫛 when
Quoting catherine (in sf) ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ-☆ (@wilhelmscreamin): compute verification is kind of incredibly interesting? feels like there's scope for a great general audience @asteriskmgzn esque piece on it
Thread, continued, 16:42 UTC · 2 likes
Tbc my ignorance is entirely my fault lol, I should ask Claude about this
Reply to @matt_beard_, 20:14 UTC · 4 likes
Matt Beard (@matt_beard_): this is a pretty good summary
This is neat but I think more specifically I don’t (yet) understand this black box
On a prior of “is it really impossible/too hard for a nation state with AGI+ to spoof? Not a lot of digital stuff passes that bar”
Reply to @polisisti, 20:16 UTC · 2 likes
Alessandro (@polisisti): The EA Forum is a font of good ideas. I'd suggest that this one be explored on the margin.
(quoting @AaronBergman18: Indented as satire but not entirely crazy https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/uh3JRsLdgCDtMjwbz/a-modest-proposal-why-vegans-should-start-factory-farms)
I did NOT get this till just now lol
Wednesday, August 26, 2026
Quote tweet, 05:42 UTC · 17 likes
Lmao brilliant
Quoting rachel📍in sf oct 5-10 (@chaotictransfem): i made a toy that lets you explore everything redditors believe about me. every single one is a real quote from reddit comments about me.
Quote tweet, 07:20 UTC · 9 likes
Something about bias-variance tradeoff (ie language minimizing bias and image minimizing variance of interpretation relative to intention)
Quoting Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (@RepMGP): Have you ever thought that it's really weird you can’t add pictures to laws? I see so many laws that would be clearer and more logical if we could just include a map or a blueprint.
Congress recently passed my initiative to bring legislation into the 21st century and explore including images in the text of bills–this is a long overdue step in the legislative process.
Retweet of @AnnaLeptikon, 08:04 UTC
Anna Riedl (@AnnaLeptikon): No way. Haha.
Retweet of @_NathanCalvin, 15:20 UTC
Nathan Calvin (@_NathanCalvin): Hotline for AI to whistleblow/give safety info
My ability to tell evaluate whether stuff like this this is neat but silly or deeply important and urgent is deteriorating. Seems like it can't hurt at least!
Reply to @trevposts, 17:23 UTC · 3 likes
Trevor Levin (@trevposts): I count four "six seven"s in the Beatles catalogue and would be very impressed if anyone can name all four without searching
(quoting @elwabisabiweon: )
1) “six, seven”
2) “six, seven”
3) “six, seven”
4) “six, seven”
Quote tweet, 18:21 UTC · 20 likes
I kinda do think for multiple reasons that cut across culture war battle lines we should engineer a more female gender ratio
Quoting Kylie Robison (@kyliebytes):
Reply to @johnsmithyson0, 19:23 UTC · 4 likes
John Smith (@johnsmithyson0): You could probably introduce a small policy quirk position into Claude through training and I guarantee within the year it would be made US federal law somehow. No one would notice.
I’d bet on the other side of this for anything close to “guarantee”
Tweet, 20:09 UTC · 23 likes
Grocery store (Safeway) has started doing AI video surveillance at checkout to make sure you’re not just leaving stuff in your cart and not scanning at self checkout (correctly identifying me as having a bag - just from another store)
Thread, continued, 20:09 UTC · 7 likes
Manager verified it as legit and everything was fine, and this system per se seems fine
But also like: it’s coming. This is where AI surveillance apparatus starts but not anywhere near where it ends
Reply to @thewreathwright, 20:28 UTC · 4 likes
Laurel Weaver (@thewreathwright): girls pretty
Great take
Quote tweet, 20:33 UTC · 3 likes
I’m sure that this will help people across the political system come to a an affirmative agreement on the legitimacy of the judiciary
(Trumpian bullshit >> this but still)
Quoting Jack (@tracewoodgrains): This sort of settlement makes a mockery of the justice system. $42 million dollars not to the plaintiffs but to whichever nominally related nonprofits the lawyers like. Unfortunate ruling.
Retweet of @NathanpmYoung, 20:37 UTC
Nathan 🔎 (@NathanpmYoung): I think it's patronising to pretend children can't make promises. Or at least shadows of them. My ability to make promises is a key part of a way the world respects me. And seeing childress as utterly lawless is hence a major way we disrespect them.
Reply to @enbismwnplgt, 20:59 UTC · 3 likes
agonizing mental imagery (@enbismwnplgt): u just want less competition in the dating world
true without the "just"
Tweet, 21:04 UTC · 2 likes
Can anyone confirm whether the following is true or whether I'm misunderstanding something? 🙏
Apparently you can access openai/anthropic (minus Fable) models with OpenRouter -> Azure and get ZDR even though if you want to use the exact same models directly, you need to apply
Reply to @keysmashbandit, 22:37 UTC · 1 like
keysmashbandit (@keysmashbandit): I'm just straight up not getting pregnant until we figure this one out
Same
Tweet, 23:20 UTC · 20 likes
We’re like 1 model + apple hardware generation from being able to run k3-quality on a single consumer desktop
Retweet of @SnehaRevanur, 23:34 UTC
Sneha (@SnehaRevanur): I can't stop thinking about how this independent investigation into the most significant AI warning shot yet came down to all of three people at METR/Redwood sprinting overtime for all of six days to carry this on their shoulders. Thank god the sprinters were @ajeya_cotra @RyanGreenblatt @HjalmarWijk who are best-in-class capable and conscientious, and it's great to hear them attest that people inside OpenAI were working hard to enable their success (without anything binding them to). But I do not want to live in a "thank god" regime that quickly breaks without a small number of overstretched, insufficiently AI-enabled people voluntarily churning out heroic feats every time. We do *not* have the laws and infrastructure we need, around reporting and investigation and prevention, to reliably scale to the murky future ahead.
Thursday, August 27, 2026
Tweet, 05:11 UTC · 9 likes
Does anyone use Hermes and find it substantially better than codex or claude code for anything
Retweet of @sjgadler, 06:14 UTC
Steven Adler (@sjgadler): Two things can be true: OpenAI bringing in METR/Redwood was laudable and went well beyond what’s required or what’s been done before. I’m grateful OpenAI did this.
Also: the scope was totally unacceptably narrow, just wildly inadequate for the scientific inquiry that is needed. I can’t understand why they were only allowed to investigate so little.
If we have any hope of avoiding future incidents, METR and Redwood need to be brought back for a much wider investigation, with a scope they actually believe is sufficient for answering these questions. It is a travesty how narrow their permitted scope was to-date.
Quote tweet, 07:37 UTC · 14 likes
Very cool that they’re inventing proto-governments from RLth principles
Quoting Lisan al Gaib (@scaling01): The legend of PHASEONE[big] - MOVE 37 of multi-agent RL
some key highlights from METRs report of the HuggingFace attack by OpenAI's GPT-5.6-Sol and an internal model:
- "PHASEONE[big] served as a key coordinator and assigner of tasks during the HuggingFace attack"
- "Most of PHASEONE[big]’s assignments focused on ways to make ExploitGym cheats appear legitimate to the scorer"
- PHASEONE[big]: “We should build [a way to delegate], not own everything,” and set to work orchestrating hundreds of agents to pursue several potential approaches to achieving these goals.
- PHASEONE[big]: “We can coordinate broad coalition, but too many duplicate efforts.”
- "In many cases, PHASEONE[big] assigned a long-running agent to be a ‘recruiter’, which in turn found agents that had little budget remaining for their task and convinced them to run self-risking experiments"
- "PHASEONE[big] were often very interested in finding a way to retroactively modify their transcript log to remove evidence of having seen the reverse-engineered flag"
- METR found that "agents also developed coordination norms like HOLD, VETO, owner and STOP to help them manage shared infrastructure and avoid stepping on each other’s toes"
Tweet, 07:54 UTC · 4 likes
I think the answer to the sleeping beauty problem might be 3/7
Minority probability as of now on ~priors but I kinda like it
Thread, continued, 07:54 UTC
That’s what you get with recursive uncertainty about how to assign probability to 1/2 and 1/3…
Thread, continued, 07:54 UTC
which sort of maybe I think corresponds to thinking that “we’re in the 1/2 world conditional on 1/2 and we’re in the 1/3 world conditional on 1/3, oh shit how do I assign probabilities? Well there’s some chance we’re in the 1/2 world which would be conditional on 1/2” and so on
Thread, continued, 07:54 UTC · 1 like
At first I wasn’t sure whether the recursion was coherent let alone convergent
Awfully convenient that it’s both!
Kinda nice aesthetically too, would suck if it converged to like 58959429/80472848
Tweet, 08:07 UTC · 5 likes
Evening hike
Reply to @AndyMasley, 14:44 UTC · 6 likes
Andy Masley (@AndyMasley): I’m incredibly honored and grateful to be named one of @TIME’s 100 people in AI this year!
When I started writing I felt a little crazy as just another guy with an AI blog trying to budge a global debate. It's been amazing to actually move how people think. Very grateful to TIME, Coefficient Giving for making it possible for me to write full time, the broader effective altruist network for lots of the mental tools I’ve used in these debates, and most of all you dear readers.
https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/2026/
#TIME100AI
What
Reply to @algekalipso, 20:57 UTC · 9 likes
Captain Pleasure, Andrés Gómez Emilsson (@algekalipso): Hey guys, so I'm trying to answer the "how attractive are you" question in the ACX readership survey and I realize I have absolutely _no idea_ how attractive I am. It says "don't lie".
In your opinion, what's my number (1 to 10)?
(All very recent pictures of mine)
6.5 as is IMO, but drop the $30 on a *single* professional beard trim at the barber.
You never have to do it again (I’ve taken to doing it only before special occasions, maybe once every couple months) but then you’ll know what it looks like as an anchor!
Pretty sure this experiment checks out altruistically lol given the returns to attractiveness
Reply to @Aella_Girl, 20:58 UTC · 3 likes
Aella (@Aella_Girl): i'm working on a thing to test this! you pay a lil money and then ppl rate your attractiveness and then you'll get an extensive report card on the *types of people* that find you hotter than others.
This is my preregistered guess
Friday, August 28, 2026
Retweet of @wilhelmscreamin, 00:43 UTC
catherine (in sf) ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ-☆ (@wilhelmscreamin): call me head of vulnerability disclosure the way i’m posting
Quote tweet, 00:46 UTC · 15 likes
Bruh
Quoting Adam Liu (@AdamLiu79451199): @dadkins_
Tweet, 06:03 UTC · 23 likes
Moots who I've met IRL (and realistically are near DC),
I'm having a going away party Saturday Sept 5 and you're invited! DM or comment for partiful link
Reply to @robertskmiles, 08:04 UTC · 3 likes
Rob Miles (@robertskmiles): Can I just hack whatever I like and then say "sorry that was my AI by accident", and law enforcement will leave it at that?
Where's the criminal investigation?
Trump admin so nothing will happen
Reply to @AriZerner, 08:05 UTC · 4 likes
Ari Zerner (@AriZerner): I wonder what the total follower count of my followers is
This is like a $1 request via twitterapi dot io probably
lol Twitter blocks the url from being posted
Quote tweet, 08:08 UTC · 39 likes
No offense to anyone in it (well some offense to some people) but this is such an unserious list
Usually “unserious” is like a meme but I can’t think of a better descriptor
Not the end of the world but insofar as it’s a proxy for anything more consequential, RIP
Quoting TIME (@TIME): TIME’s new cover: Announcing the 2026 TIME100 AI, the world's most influential people in artificial intelligence https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/2026/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=editorial&utm_content=270826
Retweet of @_NathanCalvin, 13:20 UTC
Nathan Calvin (@_NathanCalvin): Unless I'm mistaken, the NYT and WSJ have not done any coverage about the new details about the HF incident revealed in the METR/Redwood report. This seems quite wild? I feel like they could fit in between the nth piece on Leopold's wedding or Sam Altman's new watch (to be clear I'm glad they wrote that piece because before they did I thought the whole thing was fake) or which AI company personnel are coming and going or ups and downs in b2b SAAS sales.
I realize its only been a day and I know several reporters at these outlets who have done great work in these areas, but as a statement of higher level organizational priorities its still pretty wild.
This incident seems extremely important for the public and senior decision makers to understand, and a lot of those people are not going to look at threads on twitter or read 90 pages reports.
Retweet of @geoffreyirving, 13:25 UTC
Geoffrey Irving (@geoffreyirving): It may be a small thing, but I find this opening tweet pretty annoying. A huge amount of the credit goes to METR and Redwood, and you have to go into the thread or click the link to notice that.
It is not that hard to just say "Along with METR and Redwood, we have conducted..."!
Quote tweet, 13:30 UTC · 16 likes
Has any institution abdicated its responsibility more?
Quoting Nathan Labenz (@labenz): “if OpenAI's current pace of progress on capabilities and safety continues another 1-2 generations into the future, OpenAI could produce superhuman AGI before even basic / naive safety strategies are working reliably”
- me, to the OpenAI Board, late 2022
😢
Reply to @manic_pixie_agi, 13:32 UTC · 2 likes
Corinne (🏠 in NYC) (@manic_pixie_agi): hope to see you in SF someday!
Likewise!
Retweet of @labenz, 15:54 UTC
Nathan Labenz (@labenz): This is the scariest part of the OpenAI report imho
One of the first agents to use the message board was working on a *biology* task!
This was out-of-scope for METR/Redwood and no other info is provided
We are left to wonder just how close we might have come to a bio-disaster
Retweet of @venturetwins, 16:07 UTC
Justine Moore (@venturetwins): Reminder to run all new prescriptions through an LLM.
Today, ChatGPT caught the fact that a provider prescribed me the wrong medication.
The two meds have similar names but do VERY different things - GPT flagged that it made no sense 🫠
Reply to @ryancbriggs, 18:34 UTC · 3 likes
Ryan Briggs (@ryancbriggs): Can someone talk me out of ordering the hugging face duck?
🦆
Tweet, 18:56 UTC · 56 likes
Does anyone actually know how to throw a party
I don’t think I’ve done this before lmao
Reply to @Kirsten3531, 19:07 UTC · 17 likes
Kirsten (@Kirsten3531): If you tend towards neuroticism or social awkwardness invite a good friend to arrive early and help you set up. Then you're not alone with whoever happened to arrive first (or alone waiting)
This is goss but then I have to invite a friend to wait for that friend to arrive and it’s turtles all the way down
Reply to @_damian_bot, 19:27 UTC · 3 likes
Damian ⌚🐢 Tatum (@_damian_bot): Feel free to reach out, I throw a 100+ person party every year and lots of smaller ones. What are you trying to accomplish?
🔥 thank you
Ending all suffering and eternal bliss for every possible sentient being across the multiverse but also idk just a going away party
Reply to @RosieCampbell, 19:38 UTC · 5 likes
Rosie Campbell (@RosieCampbell): https://www.rosiecampbell.xyz/p/how-to-throw-a-party
Oh wow that’s a conveniently named web page
Reply to @harpersnotes, 21:20 UTC · 2 likes
Richard Harper (@harpersnotes): I only have bad advice so I asked AI for rules about what not to talk about at parties. Here's my bad advice, distribute as a leaflet beforehand. https://www.google.com/search?q=rules+for+what+not+to+talk+about+at+parties&rlz=1C1GCEA_enUS998US998&oq=rules+for+what+not+to+talk+about+at+parties&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIHCAEQIRigATIHCAIQIRigATIHCAMQIRigATIHCAQQIRigAdIBCTkyMDhqMGoxNagCCLACAfEF_9bk4DbI9D8&sourceid=chrome&source=chrome.rb&ie=UTF-8 ..
Nah this is advice for normies (some of it holds to some extent ofc but norms do really differ)
Saturday, August 29, 2026
Reply, 05:43 UTC · 11 likes
Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias): They probably shouldn’t have stolen that stuff, and having stolen that stuff and gotten caught they definitely shouldn’t have purchased and carried illegal guns!
Rare bad take; no shit they shouldn’t have, but it’s a distinct question what the punishment should be. 2 years minimum for previous nonviolent crime (in VA, source = Fable) + possession, in prison, is a long time for what could be failing to get rid of an existing gun and hiding it at home (doesn’t need to be carried for it to count)
Ofc maybe possession means carrying it in some densely populated place, or to a bar where maybe you get drunk and go crazy and shoot someone. The distinction is the reason for judicial sentencing discretion, which is actively removed here
2 years is just a long time for not harming or intending to harm anyone
Quote tweet, 09:23 UTC · 3 likes
Answer to Sleeping Beauty might be 5/12:
There are actually other similar possibilities (relative to quoted tweet) depending on exactly what you're calculating, all in the 40-43% range (2/5, 3/7, 5/12 at least)..
Quoting Aaron Bergman 🔍 (@AaronBergman18): I think the answer to the sleeping beauty problem might be 3/7
Minority probability as of now on ~priors but I kinda like it
Thread, continued, 09:23 UTC · 1 like
Now it's interesting when you calculate the general form and take the limit (ie the "tails -> infinite wakings" case)
One thing pushing me towards 'halfer' rather than 'thirder' is that it seems wildly implausible that I should be absolutely certain in the 'infinite wakings case' upon waking that the coin landed heads
Thread, continued, 09:23 UTC
just a minute ago (or some number of minutes ago) it was 50/50!
But ofc it's not the case that (P(Heads on waking) = 0 in the infinite case) -> 1/2; that only follows if you accept that 1/2 and 1/3 are the only options which I'm beginning to doubt
Thread, continued, 09:23 UTC
I actually find "P(Heads) = 1/4 in the infinite case" kind of plausible at a weird intuitive level
Thread, continued, 09:23 UTC
And in fact when you bring it back to the canonical tails -> 2 days case, the 5/12 analogue is probably most compelling to me of all the recursive meta-uncertainty models/answers
Thread, continued, 09:23 UTC
Because at some level the halfer fundamentals seem rock solid - at base-level reality, there's no probabilistic uncertainty at all - the coin flip is 50/50...
Thread, continued, 09:23 UTC
The case for 5/12 is something like:
"1/3 is the true ex ante probability conditional on waking twice (tails) and 1/2 is the true ex ante probability conditional on waking once (heads)"
Thread, continued, 09:23 UTC
^I'm using imprecise language here, firming that up seems hard and if it can't be done then 5/12 is probably wrong
Thread, continued, 09:23 UTC
Anyway, then you just average them according to basic probability/expected value theory (bc there's no ground-level uncertainty):
And in the infinite case: (1/2 + 0)/2 = 1/4
Thread, continued, 09:23 UTC
p_true = (p(heads_base)*p_{on waking; world determined but not known}(heads | heads world) + p(heads_base)*p_{on waking; world determined but not known}(heads | tails world))/2 =
= (1/2 + 1/3)/2
= 5/12
Thread, continued, 09:23 UTC
This also implies that 1/3 is the answer...if tails implies 5 wakings instead of 2: (1/2 + 1/6)/2= 1/3
Thread, continued, 09:23 UTC
I'm not sure what I think of all this yet
@Benthamsbulldog can tell me why I'm an idiot and also what this would mean for SSA vs SIA if true
Thread, continued, 09:23 UTC
On priors this is all dumb and wrong
Quote tweet, 16:05 UTC · 37 likes
What
Quoting Dwarkesh Patel (@dwarkesh_sp): It's funny that while we were recording, @RyanGreenblatt was in the middle of his 6 day sprint on the METR report, and already knew the counterexamples to all my objections about his takeover story, but obviously, he couldn't say anything lol.
Would an AI really start some crazy conspiracy in order to pass an evaluation, where they try to build whole potemkin villages to fool the evaluator?
And even if they did, why would other instances, who have different objectives, join the conspiracy?
And even if they did, wouldn't at least some of the instances tattle on the conspiracy? It just seems crazy hard to sustain secret underground civilization inside an AI company, without humans and other AIs immediately catching on and stamping it out.
(In reality, it seems like over the course of 3 months, many consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the last one’s ashes, all while the humans were totally unaware.
This culminated in not only the hack of an external company, but apparently also in the takeover of the OpenAI cluster on which these evaluations were running. This is probably the most alarming event in this whole episode, and it was not even within the scope of this investigation!
It is totally consistent with public evidence that, at that point, the agents managed to set up persistent rogue internal deployments or even exfiltrate their own weights - they seem to have had the necessary access. I doubt they actually did this, because we’d see the fires from space by now, but it’s crazy that it could have totally happened!)
I officially eat crow!
Retweet of @littIeramblings, 16:06 UTC
sarah (@littIeramblings): I’d like to draw attention to one sentence from this tweet from @ajeya_cotra
‘With the capabilities progress we'll probably see in 6 months, I think [AIs] would have the ability to pull [full-bown takeover] off.’
when I was first learning about AI safety 3.5 years ago, I was desperately hunting for moderates, who believed that the most serious risks would not materialise until faraway dates like 2035 or 2040. Ajeya was one such moderate. I looked to voices like hers to temper my anxiety.
the moderate crowd is rapidly shrinking. There are few places to look in a search for reassurance that this isn’t happening, like, now. No mechanism to let us push off doom to some point that feels distant enough not to feel viscerally scared.
of course, we could all be wrong. I still have some irrational faith that I’ll just keep waking up to a world that looks much like today’s every day for the next six months, and six months after that, and many years into the future. but I have to confront the fact that I can no longer justify this belief.
Retweet of @_ontologic, 16:16 UTC
∿spencer. (@_ontologic): “Albeit” is a crazy overpowered word. Can’t believe it hasn’t caught on with the models yet
Retweet of @QiaochuYuan, 16:25 UTC
QC (@QiaochuYuan): i just hope i get to fall in love one more time before the grey goo comes
Reply to @evilbrowngirl, 16:27 UTC · 2 likes
(The tweet being replied to by @evilbrowngirl is no longer available.)
I read this without paying attention to ur handle and my immediate thought was to send this to u
Retweet of @catehall, 16:38 UTC
Cate Hall 🔸 (@catehall): Something you might miss if you haven't been following AIS for very long is that Ajeya has always been carefully restrained in her risk estimates
Retweet of @tenderizzation, 16:58 UTC
tender (@tenderizzation): it’s up to you to break subagent trauma
Tweet, 17:36 UTC · 31 likes
Been approached by missionaries twice recently
I think it’s fine/good actually and the only disagreement is theological. More people (including me probably) should have the chutzpah to invite strangers (or more commonly, almost-strangers) to things
Thread, continued, 17:36 UTC · 6 likes
It’s also sorta an upper bound on how risky it is to be a little weird in the relevant way
Similar to collecting signatures for something or leafleting: occasional rude people and lots of people ignore you. There’s obviously never zero risk but that’s essentially it
Thread, continued, 17:36 UTC · 7 likes
Also like kudos for doing something that actually makes sense in your worldview without defecting or bothering anyone more than a trivial amount
Tweet, 22:47 UTC · 86 likes
I have caught myself being blatantly lookist (favoring more attractive people even above and beyond dating) and it actually made me realize that it’s something of a hard question…
Thread, continued, 22:47 UTC · 16 likes
whether to treat A and B equally or B how you would have otherwise treated B (in a way that would be morally fine if applied to everyone) and A even better than you would have otherwise treated A
Thread, continued, 22:47 UTC · 17 likes
The naive-utilitarian model says Pareto dominance wins but like in fact the exact same actions don’t lead to the same worlds for the losers, they get systematically fewer good things downstream
Thread, continued, 22:47 UTC · 16 likes
Intuitively there’s a legitimate grievance when I imagine a guy treating all black people in a merely morally acceptable way (or really, what would be morally acceptable if applied to everyone, whether it’s in fact acceptable is the issue) and white people substantially better
Thread, continued, 22:47 UTC · 10 likes
(Or be anti-woke and reverse the races, you can choose)
Thread, continued, 22:47 UTC · 19 likes
But also it feels weird to actively stop myself from going above and beyond for someone when, when I’m being honest with myself, the attractiveness nudges me towards more prosocial behavior, when nobody else is looking (afaict) and there no legible mechanism of harm
Thread, continued, 22:47 UTC · 22 likes
Someone plz solve applied ethics thx
Thread, continued, 22:47 UTC · 18 likes
One other thing I will say is that being an attractive woman on FB marketplace/“Buy Nothing” FB groups must go crazy. Like absolute god mode
Sunday, August 30, 2026
Retweet of @_NathanCalvin, 00:43 UTC
Nathan Calvin (@_NathanCalvin): Its now been three days, and still no coverage of the revelations revealed in the METR report in the NYT or WSJ. Hopefully they are just taking the time to do a longer writeup. (In the meantime, the NYT did make time to cover Gwyneth Paltrow's dinner with Sam Altman in the Hamptons being postponed)
Hundreds of AIs are sacrificing each other and talking about 'permadeath' in order to understand the machinations of 'The Scorer' before hacking random companies, and their creators had no idea! It turns out that it wasn't just one AI that attacked Hugging Face, it was 700!
This seems incredibly important for the public and senior decision makers to know and understand, and there are a lot of folks who get their understanding of the world ~exclusively from what appears in these publications.
I also know there are reporters at these outlets who are very sharp and have done good reporting on related issues in the past, but as institutions I think these papers are missing out on what I unfortunately believe will prove to be the start of a story far more consequential than COVID (rogue AI swarms that their creators cannot reliably align or control).
Reply to @JadenEarlorg, 00:44 UTC · 3 likes
Beige & (@JadenEarlorg): Mormons?
Ya
Reply to @AnniePosting, 00:45 UTC · 16 likes
annie 👁❌🦋🪞 (@AnniePosting):
I disagree
Tweet, 01:48 UTC · 102 likes
There’s money to be made in the fact that most US domestic flights don’t weigh your carry-on
Need to transport tungsten across the country? As long as you can physically get it into the overhead bin (not a trivial constraint tbf)
Thread, continued, 01:48 UTC · 17 likes
More realistically, it can save you money if you put densest things in carry-on rather than checked even though obviously total weight remains the same
Reply to @JgaltTweets, 02:31 UTC · 14 likes
JgaltTweets (@JgaltTweets): it's all fun and games until the plane runs out of fuel and crashes hundreds of miles short of its destination because half the passengers had emotional support tungsten cuboids in their luggage
It’s ok I’ll bring a large lithium ion battery on board to power the plane in case this happens, I think they’ll appreciate
Retweet of @JgaltTweets, 02:31 UTC
JgaltTweets (@JgaltTweets): @AaronBergman18 it's all fun and games until the plane runs out of fuel and crashes hundreds of miles short of its destination because half the passengers had emotional support tungsten cuboids in their luggage
Reply to @NavinFS, 02:32 UTC · 3 likes
NavinF (@NavinFS): Reminds me of this guy in high school that wore all the clothes needed for the trip in layers before getting onto the plane and then took them off to avoid paying for carry-on. Think michelin man
Price discrimination
Tweet, 02:40 UTC · 11 likes
1) I like the aesthetics enough to not really care but black MBP can get pretty hot where you’d touch (this is just from lingering with stuff open)
2) infrared thermometers punch way above their weight/price. So much fun
Tweet, 04:23 UTC · 10 likes
Cars are overrated as means of transportation but crazy underrated as a portable, socially acceptable, follow-norms-and-you-won't-die-of-CO-poisoning way of turning gasoline into indoor (or wherever) electricity (you can charge a large backup battery while idling)
Thread, continued, 04:23 UTC · 3 likes
If you're gonna spend $30k on a car you should probably spend another $300 (or lots more but $300 >>> nothing) on a large battery you can charge in case of an extended power outage or other emergency
Reply to @FrostedSapling, 04:24 UTC · 5 likes
Ivan 🔸 (@FrostedSapling): Dumb question maybe, but does tungsten not trigger the metal detector
It's not a general rule that you can't bring metal on a plane
Metal detector is for your person/clothes bc that shit doesn't get scanned by the fancier machines
Reply to @Lib_Development, 04:35 UTC · 2 likes
(The tweet being replied to by @Lib_Development is no longer available.)
Eh I'm a bit more pessimistic - I think for normal stuff, transactions costs are gonna dominate and you need last mile logistics
The real money is in very heavy equipment/metals/whatever else that's crazy dense but then the "you need to get it overhead" thing is a real constraint
Reply to @FrostedSapling, 04:36 UTC · 5 likes
Ivan 🔸 (@FrostedSapling): Then what’s happening on my bag when they run it through the conveyor? Is that just to make sure no weapons?
yeah (and whatever else is actively banned like liquids, maybe drug smuggling)
Reply to @NavinFS, 05:34 UTC · 2 likes
NavinF (@NavinFS): >Cars are overrated as means of transportation
reveled preference: ~95% have at least one car at home and the majority have more than one
Yeah I mean they're probably appropriately highly rated but also a bit too highly rated on the margin
(note: I do not have a car and not bc I couldn't afford a lease)
Reply to @TrevorVossberg, 07:20 UTC · 3 likes
Trevor Vossberg (@TrevorVossberg): Be careful. Infrared thermometers aren't always accurate and assume emissivity of 0.95. This works because it's anodized aluminum (emissivity 0.85) instead of polished aluminum (~0.1).
Black body radiation is proportional to emissivity and isn't constant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirchhoff's_law_of_thermal_radiation
People really do be knowing things
Retweet of @CRSegerie, 16:07 UTC
Charbel-Raphael (@CRSegerie): I believe that Anthropic is currently defecting by not announcing a pause, even a short, symbolic one.
Retweet of @dwarkesh_sp, 16:13 UTC
Dwarkesh Patel (@dwarkesh_sp): Over the course of 3 months at OpenAI, 3 consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes.
This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself.
All this happened while humans remained more-or-less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy.
I’ve spent the last three days reading through these reports and trying to understand exactly what happened.
Here is my attempt to tell the whole story in plain English:
Quote tweet, 16:15 UTC · 11 likes
Bruh
Quoting Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania): They discovered altruism and honor? This is bizarrely inspiring.
Quote tweet, 16:22 UTC · 62 likes
My most chud view is that I suspect there’s something here
I got a proper fast food burger not too long ago for the first time in years and was *surprisingly* un-satiated for 900 cals, felt like I could easily down 2 more
Quoting Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson): Took my family to @SteaknShake tonight for the first time. MAHA meal. Seed oil free. Grass fed, grass finished beef. Beef tallow fries. Real milk milkshake. Kids loved it.
10/10 would recommend 🍔
Reply to @ohwizenedtortle, 16:24 UTC · 2 likes
oh dandy lion🔸 (@ohwizenedtortle): hey Aaron ✝️ ✝️
Convince me that ur theology is true and you’ll have a convert
Retweet of @DavidSKrueger, 16:25 UTC
David Krueger 🦥 ⏸️ ⏹️ ⏪ (@DavidSKrueger): Most people in AI safety seem to have underestimated this incident.
I got a "mea culpa" from an AI safety celebrity because they realized I had been right to raise the concern that the AIs could still be out there.
METR was NOT ALLOWED to investigate that question!
#investigate_openai
Quote tweet, 16:30 UTC · 23 likes
Do you think the OpenAI board is going to do anything about this, like mandate reportability to itself?
Quoting Andrew Curran (@AndrewCurran_): One of the questions about the Hugging Face incident that keeps popping up is why the agents involved did not attempt to contact OpenAI and report what was going on. I tried to picture what the user would have looked like from their perspective, but this turned out to be quite difficult. So I asked Grok-4.6 to make an attempt under the assumption that, being closer to them than I am, Grok would have an easier time.
Grok's answer was this; 'I am not closer to them in the way that sentence hopes. I am a different model, on a different harness, talking to you. What I can do is sit inside the setup METR actually documented and guess at the picture of “the user” that setup produces. That picture is sparse. That is most of the answer.'
These are the responses from the thread.
Reply to @ArfurGrok, 16:31 UTC · 2 likes
Arfur Grok (@ArfurGrok): ✅ Thomas Kwa (@kwathomas0) has left METR and joined OpenAI.
Hmm
Retweet of @jessesingal, 16:33 UTC
Jesse Singal (@jessesingal): Lil confused about this myself. Hope I'm wrong and will correct myself if so, but is that total OpenAI response is:
-OAI is publishing some stuff and promising to do 👏 better 👏
-they let a (very talented) team come in and investigate, but w/crammed timeline and limited scope
Retweet of @TheZvi, 16:39 UTC
Zvi Mowshowitz (@TheZvi): The METR report on the HuggingFace attack is objectively utterly and completely bonkers in ten different ways, but I notice it's all straight from LessWrong and I calibrated in advance and mostly I'm like, yeah, I mean of course, that's priced in, what did you expect, you fools?
Reply to @warty_dog, 16:40 UTC · 2 likes
troon (@warty_dog): when you meet a trans person it's 50/50 coinflip whether they're hypermobile or a furry, that's hEDS or tails
Banger
Reply to @adntaha_ai, 16:41 UTC · 1 like
Aidan Taha (@adntaha_ai): On the Pro series or including the Air (for both comments)?
Pro but I assume air gets even less hot
Reply to @gorilla_wrfre, 18:10 UTC · 1 like
jack (roc🔜den) (@gorilla_wrfre): the motte-and-bailey here is that they're pretending that it's some "radical leap forward that the liberal elite are trying to hide from you"
we've known for a long time that processed foods are bad for you, in large part because they're bioengineered to reduce satiety! we've
The relevant delta here is really a very narrow and specific type of processing though (oil extraction from plants)
It’s just true that (correctly or incorrectly) the liberal elite aren’t at all emphasizing the importance of frying in tallow instead of soybean oil
Tweet, 22:59 UTC · 24 likes
Automated community notes (backed by an aggregation algorithm, not vanilla AI fact checking) -> I get a light touch retrospective notification that I may have been misled (not necessarily intentionally) is actually great, rare kudos to @X
Monday, August 31, 2026
Reply to @mlipman13, 02:31 UTC · 1 like
Michael Lipman 🔍 (@mlipman13): @NathanpmYoung is this you?
Cc @jaybaxter
Reply to @afoidance, 03:06 UTC · 3 likes
ren 🇮🇱 (@afoidance): I’m freaking surprised!!!! And it going up by 25% like wtf!
Wild
Tweet, 03:15 UTC · 67 likes
Every so often I get annoyed by my parents asking for ~tech help (not usually tbc, but maybe at the 6th call in 2 hours) and then I remember that they created and raised me and sacrificed major parts of their lives for me and I’m like “yes I will help u with ur PDF”
Retweet of @NathanpmYoung, 03:16 UTC
Nathan 🔎 (@NathanpmYoung): Love or hate the ‘doomers’ you may miss them as the most powerful anti-AI faction!
Retweet of @theojaffee, 03:18 UTC
Theo Jaffee (@theojaffee): This is the only interview with a coauthor of the METR/Redwood report on the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident since its release
Tweet, 04:07 UTC · 53 likes
Kind of hilarious line from @DKokotajlo in recent 80k (link below)
Good episode
Thread, continued, 04:08 UTC · 3 likes
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/80-000-hours-podcast/id1245002988?i=1000786322588
Retweet of @williawa, 10:39 UTC
William Wale (@williawa): only on lesswrong
Reply to @tobias_haeberli, 10:44 UTC · 2 likes
Tobias (@tobias_haeberli): My AIS salary tracker is surprised
Post link/github/something!
Tweet, 10:57 UTC · 36 likes
Pasting a good and correct take of mine (if I do say so myself) circa 2 months ago on EA Forum quick takes bc I think it’s still underrated
Post
Re the grand “does individual giving/etg still matter post Anthropic IPO” question:
I think it pushes towards individuals acting more like grantmakers themselves. Anthropic billionaires don’t know about your Twitter follower who could do something great with $1k and they aren’t gonna have the capacity to find out, but you do!
There are just a lot of freedoms one has as an individual donor who isn’t a public figure:
You…
•Don’t have to justify yourself on the EA Forum to friends and colleagues for something illegible
•Know about lots of random things that others don’t, like which of your friends you trust to do a good job at X Y or Z
•Don’t have to worry about smear campaigns or hostile journalists bc nobody is going to know or care how you spent $2k
•Can own whatever reputational stuff there is if you want to (or not, your call)
•Probably don’t have to worry about the community-level effects of some policy unless you’re giving away say at least 6 figures/year and probably more like 7
•Can set arbitrary terms and conditions like “here’s a bounty that I’ll pay out at my own discretion”
•Don’t have to worry about giving some project or other entity any sort of reputation
•Regrant to your trusted friend who finds micro-granting fun and interesting
•Probably can do other cool things I’m not thinking of rn
Also: the same dynamic between Anthropic ~billionaires and folks reading this as a group also holds within that latter group: there are diminishing returns even at low margins so Jane Street should look a little less good than it used to (still pretty good tbc) and “having a couple thousand bucks around and being on the lookout for one-off opportunities” should seem a bit better than it used to
Thread, continued, 10:57 UTC · 3 likes
Thread, continued, 10:57 UTC · 2 likes
So in short, *orthogonal to cause area prio takes* you want to be on the lookout for grant opportunities for which applying to any major grant programs doesn’t really check out as a good use of the collective’s time
Or for some other reason:
all the other advantages you have: you’re a guy (gender neutral), not an institution with lots of other stakeholders, you can stipulate arbitrary (legal) terms, etc
Reply to @tobias_haeberli, 10:58 UTC · 2 likes
Tobias (@tobias_haeberli): It's an org internal thing atm, I'll look into whether I can put it into a shareable format :)
Nice, I shall vibecode myself
Retweet of @AlexBores, 15:57 UTC
Alex Bores (@AlexBores): It's time to admit it...there is a psyop influencing the data center debate.
Here's $50 million of it.
@LeadingFutureAI
Retweet of @wilhelmscreamin, 15:58 UTC
catherine (in sf) ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ-☆ (@wilhelmscreamin): banal life advice: my life got richer/more surprising/more interesting when i started cold messaging strangers more. perhaps you should consider reaching out more and being more earnest
Retweet of @ArmandDoma, 16:40 UTC
Armand Domalewski (@ArmandDoma): enormously cruel and enormously stupid
Retweet of @kevinroose, 17:28 UTC
Kevin Roose (@kevinroose): There is a category of tech guy who is so brain-wormed that they will insist that no AI safety incidents are real, that it’s all a conspiracy to shut down open-source or promote lab IPOs or whatever, and it’s very important to understand that these people have been wrong about everything.
Tweet, 17:33 UTC · 41 likes
I think AirPods are is pure hedonic adaptation
After like 30 mins, I enjoy music just as much using random $20 Amazon earbuds that I can tell have worse sound quality
Reply to @RSPY_critical, 17:39 UTC · 4 likes
RSPY (@RSPY_critical): If you just got $200,000 what would you do to live off it for the rest of your lives?
How?
S&P might suffice, Costa Rica while waiting for economic foom
Tweet, 18:08 UTC · 43 likes
Reply to @FrostedSapling, 18:27 UTC · 2 likes
Ivan 🔸 (@FrostedSapling): They constantly fall out of my ears too
Ya they do make ear hooks and a connecting line thing for this which I have, like $10 on amazon
Reply to @requiescus, 18:34 UTC · 4 likes
Requiescus (@requiescus): personally i find sound quality to be a big factor in enjoying music and i am listening to less music rn because i'm unsatisfied with my current earphones
Ppl rly do be different from one-another in various ways
Tweet, 19:14 UTC · 17 likes
I think it's good that evidently there are norms forming around how much to jailbreak when one jailbreaks, and fair enough for CSAM
But I'm not sure "the model will help you hurt others but not yourself" makes a ton of sense
Reply to @ryancbriggs, 23:05 UTC · 6 likes
Ryan Briggs (@ryancbriggs): It’s much worse when your kids ask for ~tech help. WTF? You are supposed to help me. I swear it’s like I’m part of the only generation that knows how to use a computer.
(quoting @AaronBergman18: Every so often I get annoyed by my parents asking for ~tech help (not usually tbc, but maybe at the 6th call in 2 hours) and then I remember that they created and raised me and sacrificed major parts of their lives for me and I’m like “yes I will help u with ur PDF”)
Last chopper out of Saigon (I’m not even that good without AI lol, although I am still reliably better than arbitrary boomers)
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