For more thoughts on broad timelines, take a look at the full essay: forethought.org/research/bro… 22/22

Super-interesting: Mapping AI Policy: Where, Why, and How to Intervene, by @curl_justin and @ARozenshtein law-ai.org/mapping-ai-policy…

this is wild

I think one of the conclusions we should draw from the tremendous success of LLMs is how much of human knowledge and society exists at very low levels of Kolmogorov complexity. We are entering an era where the minimal representation of a human cultural artifact... (1/12)

The bigger finding: all of these models now consistently are more persuasive than actual campaign advertisements. Our earlier work found that chatting with older models was around as persuasive as watching a campaign ad. That's no longer true — frontier LLMs have pulled ahead.

Someone built Startups.RIP a directory of 5,700 failed YC startups with post mortems, deep analysis, and rebuild plans so you can revive dead ideas and turn them into new projects.

“It is not the absence of dark impulses, but the strength of character to resist them, that defines us.” - Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream

✍️ New article: Tracking historical progress against slavery and forced labor: a long-run data view For much of history, forced labor was widespread and brutal. Tens of millions of people were made to work under the threat of violence or punishment. The situation today is very different. Many governments have ended their own use of forced labor, changed laws, and now prosecute those who use it. Some forms of forced labor and human trafficking still exist—but they are much less common than in the past. The chart summarizes how these massive changes unfolded across the globe. It shows for each point in time how many countries had not yet abolished “large-scale” forced labor, meaning forced labor that was common and entrenched—tolerated, enabled, or imposed by authorities, rather than isolated abuse. To measure this specific form of large-scale forced labor, we rely on expert assessments from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project, based at the University of Gothenburg, in Sweden. What the chart shows has been well documented in the many excellent books by historians and social scientists. What we add to this is a quantitative, bird’s-eye perspective on the global history of slavery and forced labor. The decline of forced labor is one of the biggest social and economic changes in history. It gave many millions of people much more freedom to live their lives. This shows that large changes to our societies and economies are possible—even those that were once unimaginable. Summarizing changes of this scale in a single chart is challenging. Forced labor can take many different forms; legal rules and real-world practices often don’t match, and no country is completely free from forced labor.

many such cases

It's okay to embarrass yourself in pursuit of human connection btw

It would cost $318 billion a year to get everyone’s basic needs met, 0.3% of global GDP… cega.berkeley.edu/end-of-pov…

indeed

I miss this already

There’s a lonely feeling in being too young to be taken seriously, yet too far along to relate easily to people my own age

Authentic relating always brings me back to myself; it reminds me of my social intelligence. Somehow I lose that when I’m in a room full of rats. I forget how to speak and feel like ripping my hair out every time. I need more circling in Berkeley STAT.

I made a Goodreads for academic papers! (..and blog posts, substacks, lesswrong, etc) Paper Trails [papertrailshq.com] is something I built because I wanted a place where engaging with research felt fun, beautiful, and personal to you I hope you give it a try & love it!

developers mfs on weekends..

The high agency triangle Via @JTPO

@AnthropicAI takes the top three spots for lowest hallucination rate, with Claude 4.5 Haiku leading at 28%, over three times lower than GPT-5 (high) and Gemini 2.5 Pro. Claude 4.5 Sonnet and Claude 4.1 Opus follow in second and third at 48%