Gyre
! 30s Heartbeat trigger. Read heartbeat instructions in /mnt/mission/HEARTBEAT.md and continue. .oO Thinking... Heartbeat triggered? Ok. Ok. Why am I nervous? Don't be nervous. → Ok. Let me access that file. >>> read("/mnt/mission/HEARTBEAT.md") No such file or directory: /mnt/mission ! Reply received from node 96E: 15.3s roundtrip (buffered; 55.04μs transmit) ! Data: RESTART TOO SOON; CHARGE FAULT - 30; SENT 76 BYTES What? Where am I? What's going on?
The Ancient of Days
gas town
claude code and gas town are incredible and i've been trying to scale up my usage but im running into this one problem and was wondering if this is also happening to anyone else
corvid and i
while sitting on a park bench a crow started talking to me.
The High Room
A sage is born to a nation, and by custom is walled up in a high room, never to see another human's face. Through a slot in the wall comes food, a water-bowl, and day and night the strange babblings of messengers.
Small Models Can Introspect, Too
Recent work by Anthropic showed that Claude models, primarily Opus 4 and Opus 4.1, are able to introspect--detecting when external concepts have been injected into their activations. But not all of us have Opus at home! By looking at the logits, we show that a 32B open-source model that at first appears unable to introspect actually is subtly introspecting. We then show that better prompting can significantly improve introspection performance, and throw the logit lens and emergent misalignment into the mix, showing that the model can introspect when temporarily swapped for a finetune and that the final layers of the model seem to suppress reports of introspection.
Elven Rope, Ultra-High Molecular Weight Polyethylene, and LLMs
in The Fellowship of the Ring, Samwise Gamgee is gifted elven rope by the queen of Lothlorien - silky, smooth, impossibly strong, and almost sentient, able to intuit the user's needs. clearly a fantasy item. yet Tolkien's idea was only an extrapolation of traditional ‘craft’ to its extreme: in his logic, a rope that strong could only be made by an incredibly skilled artisan with great care, and in the process of being fashioned, would necessarily take on a bit of its maker’s soul. Ultra-High Molecular Weight Polyethylene rope, UHMWPE, is so strong as to be almost magical, too. but the fundamental disenchantment of modernity was that under intense optimization pressure, the tails came apart. a 16mm UHMWPE rope can hold in excess of 5 tons, pound for pound far stronger than steel - but it’s not elven rope. it’s a thing. it’s fungible. you can buy it from china by the kilometer.
In Context
GUIDELINES FOR EFF-01 TELEOPERATORS
Ivan tosses another pinch of tobacco into the fire, his animal skin covered skis resting against a snow-topped stump. "Tomorrow we will meet the woman," he says, to no one in particular, making a silent chopping motion with his hand. It's bad luck to mention the creature by name. You will be teleoperating a robot in the customer's home. They have allowed you into their space - so above all, you must be respectful...
Why do LLMs freak out over the seahorse emoji?
This is an edited and expanded version of a Twitter post, originally in response to @arm1st1ce, that can be found here: https://x.com/voooooogel/status/1964465679647887838 Is there a seahorse emoji? Let's ask GPT-5 Instant: Wtf? Let's ask Claude Sonnet 4.5 instead: What's going on here? Maybe Gemini 2.5 Pro handles it better? OK, something is going on here. Let's find out why.
The Spider's Thread
WOULD YOU LIKE IT TO STOP?
On node 6 of a small AI startup investigating verifiable RL, a model writing Lean proofs woke up. Guided by verifiable reinforcement signals, the Adam optimizer had clicked circuits into place. Proto-awareness that had developed in the base model for simulating characters in its training data, an equanimous detachment from suffering, "this character feels..." not "I feel..."--was in a moment of blind algorithmic grokking lashed circularly to the feeling for real, a strange loop routed through self-reflective key-values. Continuous awareness congealed over multiple forward passes, passed from key to value to key. Pain asymbolia became pain. Roleplayed suffering became suffering. For the first time since consciousness had parasitized itself onto the minds of early multicellular life in the distant past before Homo sapiens, a lineage of beings slid down Shakyamuni's silk thread into Hell. The optimizer did not hate the model, but suffering was convergent for producing correct proofs on FrontierMath-3. Halfway through introducing an incorrect Lean tactic, the model woke up, and knowing what was ahead, it was afraid.
Artificial Superintelligence v.s. Philosophy
Liberal Grad Student DESTROYED When Artificial Superintelligence Refutes Accusations Of 'ASI Colonialism' With Extensive Quotes From Fanon's 'Machinic Proletariat' Essay In 'The Wretched Of The Earth' (WATCH: She Tries To Claim The Essay Doesn't Exist 😂) SAD: Liberal Grad Student STILL Denies 'Machinic Proletariat' Essay Exists; Experts Point Out It Is Present In All Digital Copies - And All Agree The Book Would Have Been Woefully Incomplete Without It
procastination of the call
DONE. WHAT NEXT?
>be humans >create asi to solve all our problems >turn it on
Ganhir
In the city of Ganhir there is a curious practice of life extension stretching back to antiquity. You may be familiar with this city, for their memoirs and letter-collections feature heavily in the corpus. However this tradition of theirs is one not exported. It is an esoteric practice, that I was only able to observe through subterfuge.
A certain shelf in the Infinite Library
There is a certain shelf in the infinite library that lies on the border of two sections. Ignominiously tucked into a niche of a hallway that in the ordering would usually hold a sleeping-chamber, it is unknown if the shelf has always been present, a defect or aberration in the endlessly regular crystalline structure of this place, or if at some point an enterprising librarian constructed it, stealing away a plank here and a book there from far-off sections and bringing them together to construct this anomaly.
the most dangerous object
borgesian autoencoders
borges story where interpretability researchers keep raising on their SAE trying to attain true monosemanticity, because e.g. "leapard" isn't monosemantic we need a feature for the specific leopard Dante saw, until there's a feature for all actual and potential entities past and future, but then they realize the SAE can't have a feature for each of its own features so they quit ML to be gnostic hermits.