The Forkmakers
Imagine our civilization fell tomorrow. What would our descendants think of us? What would they know about the 21st century? They would know surprisingly little about our greatest…
You Should Still Save Drowning Children (Even If They’re Far Away)
This is a cross post from my blog. It's meant a general introduction to effective charity, and it's my own rendition of Famine, Affluence, and Morality. You’re going on a gentle…
Magazine Fundraising
TLDR; The New Critic, a gen z longform magazine on substack, is raising money to fund ambitious writing projects. Hi LessWrong! I am one of the Founding Editors of The New Critic…
The Linux Kernel Is Approaching 2,000 CVEs Per Release
Phoronix reports on Greg Kroah-Hartman's recent slide from his upcoming talk in Paris at Kernel Recipes 2026 (September 21 to 23): With the proliferation of AI/LLM models…
Your Evaluation's Fake names Should Be Unclaimable ,Not Merely Used
A lot of the talk about the cyber evaluations of July and August revolves around model beliefs and rationalizations. I would like to focus on the harness portion here, especially…
Rogue AI Agents: Is Surface-Level Monitoring Enough?
Disclaimer: I work on AI interpretability research. These are my own opinions. In an AISI evaluation , a frontier model, acting as an agent, attempted to insert malicious code…
PSA: We can do better
tl;dr: people should understand and think hard about the problems they work on. We’ve observed that those who work in AI safety (ourselves included) often rely on concerning…
What's 88-year-old Ridley Scott Doing Now?
The Los Angeles Times first calls Ridley Scott's newest movie "a postapocalyptic thriller that trades zombies for pandemics and asks whether hope can outlast catastrophe." But…
Dual-Layer Approach to Mitigating AI-Generated Biological Threats
Being invested in AIxBio for some time now, I have accepted it as my niche mainly because I love dealing with fields that has high risk and where getting things right genuinely…
My AI Syllabus Policy
This is my policy for AI use in my philosophy classes this semester (modulo some small changes to make it standalone from the rest of the syllabus). I'm posting it because it…
AI Safety Acculturation is Neglected
At the local AI safety co-working space, there are ~two kinds of regulars. There's the kind of regular who's been thinking seriously about AI safety and alignment since pre-2022,…
Distillation of the AI2040 Alignment Roadmap
This is a distillation of the AI2040 alignment roadmap (with some parts also drawing from " How do we (more) safely defer to AIs? "). All ideas expressed are by Ryan and Thomas…
The American People Really Hate Data Centers
There are at least five different core questions around data centers and their politics. In what ways are specific concerns people raise about data centers legitimate? In what…
Where have organoids actually been useful?
This essay is the second of three covering organoids. The full set is: Why haven’t organoids solved all of drug discovery? Where have organoids actually been useful? [Unreleased]…
Apple Announces New Mac Mini With M6 and M5 Pro Chips
Apple has unveiled a new Mac mini with either its new M6 chip or the M5 Pro chip released earlier this year. It adds faster CPU, GPU, storage, and AI performance along with Wi-Fi…
Israel’s Sponsored Ads on Ted Cruz’s Podcast Raise Questions of Legality
Meanwhile, iHeartMedia has given at least $1,738,000 of “digital revenue” to a pro-Cruz super PAC since 2023.