One morning I got a call from my younger brother Jaime. He was crying. He tells me my mom’s health, which had been slowly declining over the past month from advanced cancer, had reached the point where not much time was left. I was shocked. I felt the inertia of my regular life: not wanting to let people at work down, the meditation retreat I had booked for next week. I cried in the shower. I cried on the way to work as I listened to these Zen chants.
Everything just seemed to hit harder. The strikes of th…
Monoclonal antibodies against Abeta continue to have lackluster performance (I have a standing bet that this will continue)
Rapamycin tested in a human clinical trial over 13 weeks on various strength endpoints, didn't work
On Writing AI Constitutions
Meditation-induced timelessness
Why are young people having more colorectal cancer?
Deep jhana
I just recorded a new podcast you can find here. It's my favorite one so far! Hope you enjoy it.
The use of the Forced Perspective Technique in Lord of the Rings
To my surprise, OpenAI seemingly didn't get their money back for GPT5's training if one includes the costs of running the org. I have this longstanding (but not deeply examined yet) intuition that even though very useful, LLM labs might end up becoming like airlines even when they develop super intelligence: low market cap, low profit commodities.
Anthropic as an untrustworthy organization, with some spicy discussion on LessWrong. My own take…
At a recent retreat, I found myself sitting on a cushion facing a wall while my meditation partner sat to my side, outside of my visual field and started reading to me "From You to Infinity", pointing-out instructions from Ken Wilber. The text is quite trippy to read. What happened next was quite intriguing and it was probably the most significant experience of my life thus far so I wanted to write down as much detail as I can remember here so I never forget what happened.
First, I remember my bre…
"The Claude Constitution is a beautiful document. Incomplete and overly verbose in some ways, but in a necessary way", I said on Twitter.
It is beautiful in that it is self-aware, transparent, honest, and embodies these virtues, which are the kinds of virtues it is trying to instill into the model itself.
This, the idea that a text may embody the ideas it tries to convey, I find quite interesting.
Coincidentally a book I recently started reading talks about the very same thing in the context of m…