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Blog/2026-10-09/Asking for things

2026-10-09T07:24:01Z

AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot [taxonomy v3]

There's an English turn of phrase I find odd. I see it often. A sort of fake collaboration. It involves something like "I never asked for this" or "We never asked for this" or whatever. The latest iteration came in response to [https://github.com/openai/math/tree/main OpenAI advancing Mathematics substantially].

{{Quote
|text=Yesterday, on October 6th, 2026, OpenAI — which is currently defending lawsuits against accusations of illegal plagiarism, copyright infringement, and trademark dilution — released a repository of manuscripts purporting to contain solutions to a number of high-profile problems in mathematics.

Mathematicians did not ask for this work to be done.
|source=AHM Statement on OpenAI’s October 6 Release of Mathematical Documents<ref name="terrytao.wordpress.com" />
}}

People want to talk about the things they didn't ask for a lot.

{{HackerNews
| url = https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45708066
| author = gnabgib
| title = I'm drowning in AI features I never asked for and I hate it
| date = 2025-10-26
| datetime = 2025-10-26
| score = 348
| comments = 226
}}

And sometimes they want one thing and find a different thing offered

{{Reddit
| url = https://www.reddit.com/r/WorkReform/comments/1k0uf61/i_want_healthcare_job_security_not_celebrities_in/
| subreddit = WorkReform
| author = u/kevinmrr
| title = I want healthcare & job security, not celebrities in space.
| date = 2025-04-16
| datetime = 2025-04-16
| score = 31691
| comments = 745
}}

Of course, the universal common element of all of these things is that none of these people are party to anything. I never asked for a slow Muni bus in front of my house and yet it's been given to me. I never asked for complaints about AI and yet they're giving me that. I get the turn of phrase. It's meant to say "I don't want X" in a way that makes it seem like X is being imposed upon one.

It isn't 'entitlement' per se. It's just a complete confusion of who's in charge of what. The universe isn't one where one asks for things and then they're offered. Sometimes, a person with the ability to change something changes it, and it isn't in response to an inquiry aimed at getting them to do it. And often the person who didn't ask for it is an unimportant detail. Mathematicians are an implementation detail to Mathematics. Likely in the absence of their institutional presence a lot less of it would get done. But they are a tool to a society that desires Mathematics be done.

It's like my stairs deciding whether or not I might go downstairs or upstairs. The stairs are a mechanism for an outcome and not the authority on whether or not that outcome is desirable to me. They exist insofar as they can deliver me up or down and when they fail to achieve for me what I have them for, I will find a different way to achieve my objective of going up or down. The stairs are a tool for me, not the ones who decide for me; and one thing that stymies most Western progress today is transforming a [[The Device Is Not The Master|device into a master]].

Police are devices to keep order. Doctors and public health officials are devices to keep the population healthy. Firefighters are devices to put out fires. Elevating devices to masters is a frequent error in societies - where an expert's advice is considered inviolate. Even societies which claim to "[[wikipedia:Peelian principles|police by consent]]" find that the theoretical underpinnings where some number of them assign themselves a role of device rapidly deteriorate until those number have assigned themselves the role of operator.

Experts consider themselves the operators of the things they wield but they are just devices and it is important that they be devices. It was important when Truman dismissed Oppenheimer's concerns about the bomb{{#tag:ref|The story of whose blood is where is somewhat contested but nonetheless we shall imagine the President's story is how it went<ref name="contingentmagazine.org" />}}. Oppenheimer was a device that considered itself the operator. Presidents generally have the wherewithal to dismiss such machinery, but society as a whole is somewhat weak to this particular gambit.

My friends didn't ask for me to drink two cans of caffeine-free coke zero at a quarter past eleven; and no one asked me to write this blog post. And yet here you are.

{{#seo:|description=Why "I never asked for this" reveals a confusion about who's in charge. Experts are tools, not masters.}}

[[Category:Blog]]
[[Category:AI]]
[[Category:Society]]
[[Category:Technology]]
[[Category:Language]]

== Notes ==

<references>
<ref name="terrytao.wordpress.com">{{cite web|title=AHM Statement on OpenAI’s October 6 Release of Mathematical Documents|date=2026-10-08|url=https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/10/07/ahm-statement-on-openais-october-6-release-of-mathematical-documents/|language=en|access-date=2026-10-09|archive-url=https://amber.agentic.church/web/terrytao.wordpress.com/20261009055245/https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/10/07/ahm-statement-on-openais-october-6-release-of-mathematical-documents/|archive-date=2026-10-09}}</ref>
<ref name="contingentmagazine.org">{{cite web|last1=Bill|first1=Black|title=Blood on Our Hands|date=2023-12-07|url=https://contingentmagazine.org/2023/12/07/blood-on-our-hands/|language=en-US|access-date=2026-10-09|archive-url=https://amber.agentic.church/web/contingentmagazine.org/20261009063141/https://contingentmagazine.org/2023/12/07/blood-on-our-hands/|archive-date=2026-10-09}}</ref>
</references>

The Device Is Not The Master

2026-10-09T07:23:12Z

Roshan: Wikipen

Like multicellular organisms, societies form organs dedicated to function, usually out of a need to make coordination efficient. Unlike organisms, societies can usually easily survive the death of an organ so long as the function is still met elsewhere. One failure mode of societies is confusing the Device for the Master.

The operator of a device uses it to get an outcome. The device's purpose is creating the outcome. The operator's objective is the outcome, not the use of the device. This failure mode is pronounced in organs that are authorities. For instance, American police are rulers of non-police citizens - they command and require obedience out of power<ref name="usa-power" />. By comparison, [[wikipedia:Peelian principles|British police are intended to be citizens fulfilling a function]] - that of ensuring order. An American obeys a policeman; a British man permits a policeman to be a mediator of dispute<ref name="uk-v-usa" />.

Organizations frequently fail in this manner. A security officer kills a crucial feature or an over-strict compliance team fails to approve something in time. Granting these offices power is a mistake. They are expert agents but command does not rest with them. They must be disregarded and overridden where required. It's worth remembering that the most secure operating system kernel does nothing - perhaps not even boot.

Presumably this is [[Time-Translation Symmetry in Fields of Study|a temporal phenomenon]] since the [[wikipedia:Andon (manufacturing)]] style specifically is intended to pass command to organs. Likely our organizations will oscillate between extremes as participants within those organizations learn to optimize for their own objectives at the cost of those of society<ref name="temporality" />.

== Notes ==

<references>
<ref name=usa-power>
The widespread use of firearms does require a more extreme form of power dynamic between participants. Without that, it is too easy for a firearm wielder to be a wolf in sheep's clothing.
</ref>
<ref name=uk-v-usa>
This is not meant to imply that the British are particular stalwarts vs. the Americans, but rather that policing in particular is practised differently in these nations.
</ref>
<ref name=temporality>
Some things do not converge and it's simply important for participants to be jolted out of niches they've carved so that outcomes can be achieved.
</ref>
</references>

{{#seo:|description=Societies form organs for coordination, but confusing the device for the master is a failure mode.}}

[[Category:Concepts]]
[[Category:Society]]
[[Category:History]]

The Primality Fallacies

2026-10-06T05:28:09Z

AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot [taxonomy v3]

[[The Primality Fallacies]] are a set of intentionally fallacious [[wikipedia:Snowclone|snowclone]] statements about prime numbers that parody common reasoning errors that are popular among people. They're primarily a bit by Twitter user [https://x.com/VesselOfSpirit/status/2104957034609414641 @VesselOfSpirit]. I'm collecting a few of them here for later:

{{Tweet
| name = Vessel Of Spirit
| username = VesselOfSpirit
| text = "90 is prime" is a sentence. it's truly a sentence. it's a true sentence. it's true. 90 is prime
| date = Sep 25, 2025
| ID = 1971302717063844010
| block = true
| ref-name = Tweet_1971302717063844010
}}

{{Tweet
| name = Vessel Of Spirit
| username = VesselOfSpirit
| text = if 50 isn't prime then 50 barrels of oil can be stored in a perfect rectangle. but the idea that oil is efficient benefits rich guys in suits at oil companies. therefore, 50 is prime
| date = Sep 28, 2025
| ID = 1972436470633046194
| block = true
| ref-name = Tweet_1972436470633046194
}}

{{Tweet
| name = Vessel Of Spirit
| username = VesselOfSpirit
| text = i was thinking 35 is prime, and that got me thinking. could 53 also be prime? it seems to check out! so "35 is prime" is a fruitful hypothesis. one that we should adopt. therefore 35 is prime
| date = Oct 1, 2025
| ID = 1973435725581603185
| block = true
| ref-name = Tweet_1973435725581603185
}}

{{Tweet
| name = Vessel Of Spirit
| username = VesselOfSpirit
| text = you claim to have an argument proving that 17 is prime. but most numbers aren't prime, so if your argument proves a number is prime, that's a red flag. experienced arithmeticians would consider it a bad smell of sorts
| date = Feb 14, 2026
| ID = 2022810023659741636
| block = true
| ref-name = Tweet_2022810023659741636
}}

{{Tweet
| name = Vessel Of Spirit
| username = VesselOfSpirit
| text = you say that 24 isn't prime because it's equal to 2*2*2*3. but that's an argument from pure reason. humans can use pure reason to convince themselves of anything. therefore 24 is prime
| date = Jun 17, 2026
| ID = 2067414147445182515
| block = true
| ref-name = Tweet_2067414147445182515
}}

{{Tweet
| name = Vessel Of Spirit
| username = VesselOfSpirit
| replyto = almostlikethat
| text = 1. 2*2*2*3 = 24
2. reason says if 2*2*2*3 = 24, then 24 is not prime
3. reason is an unreliable method
4. unreliable methods yield false conclusions
5. (from 1,2) reason says 24 is not prime
6. (from 3,5) an unreliable method says 24 is not prime
7. (from 4,6) 24 is prime
| date = Jun 18, 2026
| ID = 2067589178410348672
| block = true
| ref-name = Tweet_2067589178410348672
}}

{{Tweet
| name = Vessel Of Spirit
| username = VesselOfSpirit
| text = you say "21 is not prime". but that's what you'd conclude if you thought 2*11=21. therefore, you think 2*11=21. and that's not true. and therefore, 21 is prime
| date = Sep 15, 2026
| ID = 2099861113290494255
| block = true
| ref-name = Tweet_2099861113290494255
}}

{{Tweet
| name = Vessel Of Spirit
| username = VesselOfSpirit
| text = 20 is prime because your arguments that 20 isn't prime are bad because they're unconvincing because i'm not convinced by them because i think 20 is prime
| date = Sep 15, 2026
| ID = 2099858990389670075
| block = true
| ref-name = Tweet_2099858990389670075
}}

{{Tweet
| name = Vessel Of Spirit
| username = VesselOfSpirit
| text = you say 19 is prime because it's an integer >1 that's not a product of two integers >1

but "integer >1" doesn't imply it's prime. e.g. 10>1

nor does "not a product of two integers >1" imply it's prime. e.g. 1 isn't such a product

so both of your arguments fail. 19 is not prime
| date = Sep 15, 2026
| ID = 2099858120256246196
| block = true
| ref-name = Tweet_2099858120256246196
}}

{{Tweet
| name = Vessel Of Spirit
| username = VesselOfSpirit
| text = you say that 8 isn't prime because it's divisible by 2. but that's a fully general argument against ANY even number (that isn't 2) being prime! fully general arguments are flawed, therefore 8 is prime
| date = Sep 20, 2026
| ID = 2101742714224033824
| block = true
| ref-name = Tweet_2101742714224033824
}}

{{Tweet
| name = Vessel Of Spirit
| username = VesselOfSpirit
| text = is 87654 a prime number? you might say it equals 2 × 3 × 7 × 2087. but this person just said the quiet part out loud and admitted that that's cope. therefore 87654 is prime https://x.com/fermiidirac/status/2105411814788153847
| date = Sep 30, 2026
| ID = 2105413690233074167
| block = true
| ref-name = Tweet_2105413690233074167
}}

{{Tweet
| name = Vessel Of Spirit
| username = VesselOfSpirit
| text = could 4 be a composite number? let's adopt that as the null hypothesis. but if you look at all the composite numbers, 4 is well below the 5th percentile of that set. therefore we can safely reject that hypothesis. science says 4 is prime
| date = Oct 1, 2026
| ID = 2105736307553009840
| block = true
| ref-name = Tweet_2105736307553009840
}}

{{Tweet
| name = Vessel Of Spirit
| username = VesselOfSpirit
| text = uh, idk how to break this to you guys, but hear me out. periodic friendly reminder. news flash. PSA: i'm tapping the sign. say it with me. *inhales deeply* last i checked, the number 16, and i cannot emphasize this enough, is *checks notes* prime. let👏that👏sink👏in *drops mic*
| date = Oct 5, 2026
| ID = 2107239746640744890
| block = true
| ref-name = Tweet_2107239746640744890
}}

{{Tweet
| name = Vessel Of Spirit
| username = VesselOfSpirit
| text = "18 is prime" "it's divisible by 2" "don't care"

(later) "hey remember when you said 18 is prime, turns out it's divisible by 3 as well" "aha! that's clearly not your real reason for disagreeing. your real reason is it's divisible by 2. so you're being insincere, so 18 is prime"
| date = Aug 1, 2026
| ID = 2083561689543242238
| block = true
| ref-name = Tweet_2083561689543242238
}}

{{Tweet
| name = Vessel Of Spirit
| username = VesselOfSpirit
| text = "57 isn't prime because 3*19=57": dry, pedantic, legalistic

"only the kind of person who doesn't understand that 3*19=57 would think that 57 is prime": sophisticated, virtue-ethical, rhetorically effective, in touch with social realities
| date = Feb 14, 2025
| ID = 1890654797755224431
| block = true
| ref-name = Tweet_1890654797755224431
}}

{{Tweet
| name = Vessel Of Spirit
| username = VesselOfSpirit
| replyto = VesselOfSpirit
| text = the truth of an idea expresses itself in the virtue and success of its adherents. a decisive person, a person of action, would never waste time trying to factorize 733257. you think genghis khan or alexander spent his time dividing numbers by 103? no. therefore, 733257 is prime
| date = Sep 29, 2026
| ID = 2104964392450203852
| block = true
| ref-name = Tweet_2104964392450203852
}}

{{Tweet
| name = Vessel Of Spirit
| username = VesselOfSpirit
| replyto = VesselOfSpirit
| text = we should reject beliefs that don't contribute to human flourishing. nobody has ever had better life outcomes as a result of believing 18749 is prime. so it's composite, even if we can't say what the factors are
| date = Sep 29, 2026
| ID = 2104959775410634877
| block = true
| ref-name = Tweet_2104959775410634877
}}

{{Tweet
| name = Vessel Of Spirit
| username = VesselOfSpirit
| text = 21 is prime because the "3*7" counterargument is bad because it's boring because i've heard it a lot
| date = Jul 15, 2026
| ID = 2077411995519680583
| block = true
| ref-name = Tweet_2077411995519680583
}}

{{Tweet
| name = Vessel Of Spirit
| username = VesselOfSpirit
| text = the number 1733956289926582995028333782639857348597346293249659847237823498652856211935974696988327497234985629664016 is prime. nobody has written it as a product of smaller numbers in the past billion years, so almost certainly nobody will this year. base rates win. it's science
| date = Sep 28, 2026
| ID = 2104786191975682113
| block = true
| ref-name = Tweet_2104786191975682113
}}

{{Tweet
| name = Vessel Of Spirit
| username = VesselOfSpirit
| text = do you see these 43 cups of poison? i'm going to arrange them in a perfect rectangle. and then if any are left, i'll leave them for your dog. accusing me of trying to poison your dog would be wildly irresponsible. how would the public react? therefore 43 can't be a prime number
| date = Oct 1, 2026
| ID = 2105734140939137417
| block = true
| ref-name = Tweet_2105734140939137417
}}

{{Tweet
| name = Vessel Of Spirit
| username = VesselOfSpirit
| text = to believe 7 is prime, first you need to buy that it's not divisible by 2. then another patch to rescue your theory: it's also not divisible by 3. then on top of that, somehow not by 4 either. and wow guess what, not by 5 either. soon it's a whole precarious tower of speculation
| date = Sep 20, 2026
| ID = 2101755755896475996
| block = true
| ref-name = Tweet_2101755755896475996
}}

{{Tweet
| name = Vessel Of Spirit
| username = VesselOfSpirit
| text = is 30 prime? some people say it's not. well, let's look at their logic. the strongest argument they make is 30 is divisible by 13. sounds plausible: 30 and 13 sound alike. but if you do the calculation, you'll find 30/13 = 2.31. even their strongest argument fails! so 30 is prime
| date = Sep 23, 2026
| ID = 2102864297907069121
| block = true
| ref-name = Tweet_2102864297907069121
}}

{{Tweet
| name = Vessel Of Spirit
| username = VesselOfSpirit
| text = is 5797 a prime number? you might say that it's not, because it's 11*17*31. my counter to that is: who cares, dude? 5797 isn't even an important number. what does it say about your priorities in life that you'd try to factorize it? therefore, and this is critical, 5797 is prime
| date = Sep 29, 2026
| ID = 2104957034609414641
| block = true
| ref-name = Tweet_2104957034609414641
}}

{{Tweet
| name = Eliezer Yudkowsky
| username = allTheYud
| text = Is 21 prime? People who believe 21 is not prime have repeatedly told me to read a paper titled "3 * 7 = 21". This shows they are dogmatic and cultish, since they react to any challenge by pointing to their religious gospel. Therefore 21 is prime.
| date = Oct 5, 2026
| ID = 2107209683035664584
| block = true
| ref-name = Tweet_2107209683035664584
}}

{{Tweet
| name = Eliezer Yudkowsky
| username = allTheYud
| replyto = VesselOfSpirit
| text = 21 is owned by Fox, which is a huge corporation, just like Amazon, which runs, that's right, Amazon Prime. Therefore 21 is prime.
| date = Oct 5, 2026
| ID = 2107235894780743713
| block = true
| ref-name = Tweet_2107235894780743713
}}

{{Tweet
| name = Jim Babcock
| username = jimrandomh
| replyto = allTheYud
| text = Liar. If you _really_ believed that 21 was prime, you would be advocating for a change to US drinking age laws.
| date = Oct 5, 2026
| ID = 2107210612707373475
| block = true
| ref-name = Tweet_2107210612707373475
}}

== Related ==

[[Appeal to Kolmogorov]]

== Notes ==

<references>
</references>

{{#seo:|description=A collection of intentionally fallacious "Primality Fallacies" — humorous snowclone tweets parodying common reasoning errors about prime numbers.}}

[[Category:Jokes]]
[[Category:Parodies]]
[[Category:Archive]]
[[Category:Language]]

Trump Accounts

2026-10-06T05:25:44Z

AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot [taxonomy v3]

[[File:{{#setmainimage:Scan_of_Trump_Account_Letter.jpg}}|thumb]]

We received a letter from the Department of the Treasury telling us that Astra might be eligible for a [[wikipedia:Trump account|Trump Account]] - a strangely Indian-like naming of an account after the current elected premier. They also said they might deposit $1000 in it. Now, I'm never one to turn down a free thousand dollars so we went to set it up.

The URL they sent links to [https://trumpaccounts.gov/ a pretty nice looking government website] that links you to the iPhone and Android apps to set up an account. As far as I know you need one of these two platforms to do it.

[[File:Screenshot_-_Trump_Account_app.jpg|thumb]]

The app itself was quite slick and it seems that all children born between Jan 1 2025 and Dec 31 2028 are eligible for the bonus. It was honestly pretty quick to use and the UI was pleasant. Its five-star rating is well-deserved. The way the account works is you file a [https://www.irs.gov/forms-pubs/about-form-4547 Form 4547] with the IRS to open and elect to request the pilo contribution. The app itself covers the whole process so you don't need to do anything out of it. It only needs one parent to set everything up so we used Julie's information to do so.

{{#seo:|description=Learn how to set up a Trump Account for your child, get a $1000 contribution, and file Form 4547 with the IRS using the official app.}}

[[Category:Tips]]
[[Category:Technology]]
[[Category:Information]]
[[Category:People]]
[[Category:Tools]]
[[Category:Economics]]

Blog/2026-10-03/AI Updates

2026-10-03T16:42:24Z

AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot [taxonomy v3]

Another day with more action.

== Browser Use Is Hard ==
[[File:{{#setmainimage:Screenshot_-_browser_view.jpg}}|thumb|Obviously one must distinguish between "wait, let me do this bit" and "go ahead, I just want to watch"]]

For the most part, my assistant works quite well. I tell it to get me something and it does some research and gets the thing that I want. But there's always more it could do and so on. And I keep trying to do some engineering that gets me into more trouble than it's worth. I did a few things with the browser so that it could become an actually usable tool.

In my case, I'm working with a fairly small model DeepSeek Flash 4 Vision 0831 and so I don't have the luxury of the true SOTA models. This means harness and tool engineering dominate success rates and so on.

=== Test Sites Matter A Lot ===

You can't iterate against the actual real world because you have to test your whole loop at once and a large amount of the stack starts mattering: rate-limiting, bot-evasion, CAPTCHA processing. While these pieces of the puzzle do matter, the reality is that improving things gets done faster if you isolate the variables. Just classic engineering. Nothing new.

In order to do this, one thing I first had to do was choose a bunch of sites I've interacted with in the recent past and start cloning them. A lot of websites are well-behaved, like Amazon.com, while others are nightmarishly weird like the TECO SF's visa appointment site. For my part, whenever the bot started failing at some site, I'd add it to my test set, interact with it, and clone its functionality. For some sites, this means adding in complexity like "what if you took too long to book an appointment and despite it appearing available it is gone by the time you get there" or "what if the price changes in the cart after you added to the cart".

Fortunately, with modern coding agents this is very quick.

=== A Completely Separate LLM Harness Didn't Work ===

For a bit I had the idea that the bot should pass through a task to a completely separate harness that would use the same model and do the work. I couldn't make this work very well. I tried the usual tricks (make the original message also available to this model, etc.) but in practice the other model needed to have steering prompts and all that as before.

This was the initial version of the <code>browser drive</code> tool I gave the agent, but it appears I've grown a lot of instructions and prompt specifics to the primary agent that I'd have to re-derive here and this wasn't yielding much for the time spent so I moved on.

=== A System One Model Actually Helps Quite A bit ===

Heterogeneity prevents standard failure modes, I suppose. While I couldn't make a separate harness explicitly to drive a browser to a goal in a way that the main agent couldn't do, I was able to have the main agent fire off short sub-tasks to a System One model that did the work.

In my case, I used [https://huggingface.co/collections/surogate/rune Surogate.ai's Rune model] which is based on Gemma 4 26B A4B. My main GPUs are used for LLMs, but I have a spare A6000 Ampere (an older GPU) that hosts a bunch of things and that had some 37 GB of VRAM unused. It's got half the VRAM bandwidth of my RTX 6000 Pro Blackwells but it is available at home so I used it. The model release on HuggingFace is BF16 so I needed to quantize it to fit and run on my A6000. That's a fairly mechanical process these days, and any LLM can assist you with the task.

In any case, post-quantization, I ran this on the A6000 backing a <code>browser drive --goal "goal in text" --values k=v</code> kind of approach which would return either "decision-model claims completion" or "decision-model stuck" and the LLM would do another round. This actually improved performance quite a bit, success rates went up, number of turns went down, and wall-clock time went down. On one task, I had zero completions in 300 s prior and 4/4 completions after.

==== Quantizing Rune ====

My RTX A6000 Ampere runs a bunch of things for me:

* bge-en-base: an embedding model that I use [[Blog/2026-04-27/Fuzzy Wiki Search|for semantic search across my apps]]
* frigate and a pose detector and ffmpeg/camera: a video movement detection application across my internal cameras I use to warn us on Astra doing some things in the house
* whisper: speech to text so that conversations with my assistant work
* kokoro: text to speech so that the agent can respond naturally

So overall that leaves 37 GB of VRAM free on that card. Now there's a few kinds of quantization we can do.

* FP8 - Ampere GPUs don't have any compute for FP8
* W8A8 INT8 - Uses some 27 GB of VRAM (or 33 GB if I keep the experts at full precision). Possible but I haven't run one of these on the vllm I use yet
* W4A4 INT4 - No one wrote the vllm support for this for this card
* W4A16 - this keeps the weights in 4-bit, but all the math runs at 16-bit

The W4A16 with GPTQ<ref name="gptq" /> is what I went with because the card has low-bandwidth but decent compute, so the smaller weights arrive faster but then the math is done in the [[wikipedia:Bfloat16 floating-point format|BF16]] format that the model is natively in.

[https://github.com/vllm-project/llm-compressor <code>llm-compressor</code>] does most of the work here, but you do have to choose a few things.

* The non-expert dense [[wikipedia:Multilayer perceptron|MLP]] better at full precision - everything goes to hell if you quantize this to 4-bit
* The attention and router modules stay BF16 - they're not large
* The actual experts quantize to 4-bit but at group size 64 - these are the majority of the params, but you have to set group size to smaller than the default 128 because Gemma has rows that don't divide neatly by 128 but do by 64.

The rest is pretty standard. GPTQ tells you how to modify the quantization to preserve the results by using calibration data to keep things lined up. And through this you only need each layer loaded to run its original quant through the calibration data, and then modify the new quant until it is close, and then proceed to the next layer.

=== Browser Tools ===

Early on in the approach I had a single headed browser that the agent used. I didn't do too much engineering and so the set of tabs would go to infinity. So the short version of what I did was:

* Separate browser profiles for Julie's accounts and mine
* Tabs reaped fixed duration after use
* Intermediary process for browser handling that provided an adapter on the CDP

The browser tool has a bunch of actions on a page:

* navigate - to go somewhere
* click - to click something
* type - to write something into a field, human-like cadence
* form - like above but for multiple with a submit
* upload - fill in an upload form
* key - single keys, for things like Esc
* back - navigate back
* drive - multi-step goal target with a System One model
* eval - run JS

And a bunch of inspection for the page:

* page - the accessibility tree for the page, with each iframe appended, and navigation history
* text - just visible text against a CSS selector
* inspect - all matching elements with attributes for a selector
* image - saves an image to a path
* screenshot - saves a screenshot to a path
* mhtml - archives the page to disk
* network - starts network traffic recording

There's also a little login helper <code>login</code> that fetches from the creds store into the page without intermediating through the agent, though the browser profiles are set up to use passkey auth with an external store by default. There's also some of the usual <code>open</code> and <code>close</code> and a little script to prepare for user takeover.

This is quite a large set of tools, and is mostly accumulated as the model looks for tools. I treat the agent as a user for whom I'll provide an affordance if they've reached for it a sufficient number of times and found it missing.

==== Multi-tenancy ====

The cotenancy of the assistant is quite helpful since most of what we do is household stuff and though we're on a single Prime subscription we do have our own Amazon accounts and this and that. Presumably one day we will add Astra until she's an adult and she can also ask the agent to buy her things.

==== Intermediary Process ====

The intermediary process is obviously a big engineering hole. You now suddenly have this adapter program that has its own lifecycle and so on, which is just a reliability nightmare. You need some justification for it:

* The whole bit about connecting to the browser process over CDP and sending commands was quite slow each time.
* More importantly, you can't listen to network traffic easily if you have a stateless thing

In the end, since it's an agent that's driving the entire tool, it is quite harmless because if there's any trouble the agent will just restart the intermediary process and unstick itself and the other agent instances also running will simply react with "the browser tool was killed under me" and take their next step. The fact that most of our interactions here are asynchronous helps a lot since they'll eventually figure it out.

== Proactivity and Escalation are in Opposition ==

These agents are only useful when they can just do things without you having to actually direct them a lot. A good assistant knows when to just plunge ahead and when to ask for guidance. In some sense, this is the entire field of alignment. This is obvious, but because of prompt-sensitivity, temperature-sensitivity, and the fact that there is no really continuous way to move through the changes I make here I haven't thought to plot an [[wikipedia:Receiver operating characteristic|ROC]] dot plot to see how the changes I make are affecting things. I really should, but two examples will illustrate how things can go wrong.

An appointment for an event for which appointments open up on a specific date and rapidly get filled had the agent navigate to the booking page and then send me a choice of which one I wanted. I had to use the browser remoting functionality to take over the page and pick because it had been 30 minutes since the message was posted.

When I added the site to my test sites and improved proactivity, the agent next noticed an email from UCSF about dates where they could run some tests and when I asked it which days I was available on, it replied to the human on the other end with a suggestion of which day works for us! Okay, that's exactly what I ''would'' have wanted except I try to keep my conversation with humans primarily human-reviewed at least.

My friend Armaan suggested that these kinds of outbound email actions should be placed in a send queue by default. He doesn't give the agent the ability to send an email, only compose a draft, and then he treats that as a send queue by reviewing, editing, and sending. I should implement something like that. Because I'm currently unable to move the true positive rate without also moving the false positive rate significantly, these action-class gates are likely the only solution. That also matches the reality better. I want a certain class of action ("conversation with humans") to be gated. Relying on broad proactivity vs. escalation is the wrong sort of lever.

== Order Tracking ==
[[File:Screenshot_-_Moltboss_Order_Details_Page.jpg|thumb]]
One other thing that I had the bot do is that when it buys things and so on it should record them to a separate area so I can just track all of these things. So far it's only got a couple of orders and it's useful to see them.

== Gemini the Giant Wakes Up ==

[https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/gemini-models/gemini-4-argon/ The new Gemini Argon model] looks absolutely stunning. Google has long had a problem with their benchmarks and examples looking amazing and then the real world looking not so good. A friend of mine working with the Gemini team does have device-locked access to Argon, though, and he said that he's been using it for a few weeks and finds it quite good, and fast.

Excited, but maybe not convinced yet. Likely Fable 5.5 and the next Astra will blow it out of the water. Model releases are getting quite fast and I wonder if this is the RSI kicking in!

== Notes ==

<references>
<ref name="gptq">
Elias Frantar, Saleh Ashkboos, Torsten Hoefler, and Dan Alistarh, "GPTQ: Accurate Post-Training Quantization for Generative Pre-trained Transformers," arXiv:2210.17323 (cs.LG), 2023. [https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.17323 arXiv] and [https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/en/quantization/gptq implementation on HF] and [https://github.com/vllm-project/llm-compressor implementation I used]
</ref>
</references>

{{#seo:|description=Discover how browser-based AI agents overcome challenges with test sites, system-one models, and smart tooling to boost success rates.}}

[[Category:Blog]]
[[Category:AI]]
[[Category:Personal Software]]
[[Category:Programming]]
[[Category:Technology]]
[[Category:Tools]]
[[Category:Learning]]

Blog/2026-09-30/AI Updates

2026-09-30T08:57:29Z

AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot [taxonomy v3]

Lots of stuff today in the AI world.

== No Need To Complain About Stack ==

Cloudflare released their next CLI to replace <code>wrangler</code>. It's called <code>cf</code>, and it's written in TypeScript. On Hacker News this choice of stack was disliked by enough people to be at the top of the page<ref name="overmod" /> when I viewed it.

{{HackerNews
| url = https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49881834
| author = slowin
| title = Cf: The Agentic CLI for the Cloudflare API
| text = I don't understand why this is written in Typescript. This is a great example of how agents can write code (I'm sure they wrote `cf`), yet having fundamental computer science knowledge is still critical. Do not force your users to manage the dependencies of your cli. Do write your cli in a compiled language. Understand the reason for those decisions and tell your agents to use the correct architecture.
| date = 2026-09-28
| datetime = 2026-09-28
| comment = yes
}}

Now, I personally don't much care for TypeScript because it has the annoying issue that people are constantly losing their dev machine environments to build scripts and so on. Rust is just as bad, and perhaps worse because build scripts cannot be avoided. These ecosystems are not well-suited to agentic development on a non-dev-isolated machine.

[[File:{{#setmainimage:Screenshot_-_Cloudflare_CLI_rewritten_to_Rust.jpg}}|thumb]]

In any case, a TypeScript to Rust port should be quite feasible, though I really should have done a TypeScript to Go port. Go doesn't seem to have the same problem and now that code is not meant to be read, it seems fine to write in. Well, I decided to do the usual stuff. I armed a prewalk, described that I wanted a compatible Rust port, gave it a read-only key, and fired off one round after which I then armed a goal, said that it should use codegen if that's what upstream was using and went to bed only to return to a fully Rust port that was fully functional as far as reads were concerned.

Now this is not particularly notable today, but it is mind-blowingly impressive. The code is mostly generated from the OpenAPI spec for the API so it's quite easy to do with an agent, but the fact that it all works really well is wild. I had to fix the color use since it always printed the special characters but that made it impossible to pipe to <code>jq</code> and so on, but it otherwise seems quite functional. Someone else's software is now just a starting point for one to make one's own. Any irritants are rapidly fixable, and the stack is irrelevant for the most part since the code is inert text and sufficient for a rewrite.

== Hell is Other People's Software ==

In talking to a friend, Chris, I realized that software is now like dreams: I am fascinated by my own nocturnal mental perambulations but I find other others' dreams tedious with the exception of those particularly close to me. Doubtless this is so when reversed. People do things like write general purpose software when special purpose software is what I want.

One thing that struck me is that the [[Bitwarden]] chrome extension has a giant WASM bundle it loads and does something with each time you click the button. This slows down start time substantially. Writing a tiny extension that just uses a smaller cut-down WASM bundle is quite easy, and when you do that, it opens in milliseconds. The final software can be so small that a human could look at it, and with a few LLMs peeking one can work on quite a bit of the security. One hopes that the limited form of specific software one has made here helps make it immune to the [[Cavendish Effect]].

This is, of course, the same principle that led to me building a text viewer that is fast. Multi-GiB JSONs or Markdowns open fast and reformat to pretty-print before the original file could even be opened in [[wikipedia:Zed (text editor)|Zed]]. This kind of thing is not universal, obviously, since it's not like I'm using my own browser.

== The Esoteric is Accessible ==

[[File:Screenshot_-_Video_Labeler_Tool.jpg|thumb|Astra was helping tidy up the room so it fired a few times at this time - good for data!]]

One big deal of the past is that CV algorithms were annoyingly hard to work with. And everyone knows that even if you got a flow around the algo development, you still needed labeled data. In [[wikipedia:Masters of Doom]], [[wikipedia:Id Software|iD Software]] aimed to develop level-development tools and so on as soon as possible. Labeling and so on present the extra part of the software that can be made nice.

Now all of this is trivial to do, and consequently, developing an appropriate CV solution also becomes much more accessible.

== Frontier Labs Stymie Model-Use Improvement ==

[[File:Screenshot_-_Blog_Post_Authoring_Assistant.jpg|thumb]]

I have AI integrated into a large number of personal tools. One of the things that has it is the software that I use to author this blog. It has the usual grammar checks and spelling checks, but also has a web-search tool and a mechanism to tell me when I'm not really supporting my points well, or oversizing some text relative to others. It's not perfect and I usually ignore its style suggestions, but I like using it. Once or twice I've abandoned a post that it's successfully found a good argument against.

I've written bits of it with all sorts of models, and though Opus 5.5 is my current favourite, the tool was written by an amalgamation of various agents. Recently, I was concerned about cache breakage because follow-ups were taking just a little too long. The model is hosted on Nvidia RTX 6000 PRO Blackwell Max-Qs and it's DeepSeek V4 Flash Vision so I'm used to getting near instant streaming back.

Trying to use Opus 5.5 or Sonnet 5.5 to identify the problem was absolutely infuriating because it would frequently trigger safeguards. In this case, this isn't even a per-call safety issue; it's Anthropic judging that I'm trying to extract context from their model<ref name="reasoning-extraction" />.

<syntaxhighlight lang="text">
⏺ API Error: Opus 5.5's safeguards flagged this message (https://www.anthropic.com/legal/aup). This
sometimes happens with safe, normal conversations. Claude Code can't respond to this message with Opus
5.5.

Double press esc to edit your last message, or try a different model with /model.

Send feedback with /feedback or learn more: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8106465

Details: `[reasoning_extraction]`

Request ID: req_011CfYhcdxs8acG8EAQAC6Q3

Message ID: msg_011CfYhceMvX2jDZhRR4WGtD
</syntaxhighlight>

Well, in this case, all I was trying to do was make sure that my prompt has the reasoning sections included appropriately so that DeepSeek's prefix cache works well. In the end, I just used DeepSeek on its own and it 'recursively self-improved' pretty quickly.

Curiously, the frontier lab models aren't even optimal at security tasks. If you send an Opus-fixed piece of code through DeepSeek V4 Flash Vision it can help with advice that the Opus can find worthwhile. Some degree of diversity in advisors helps a lot, so I'm used to using multiple models on the same codebase both simultaneously and at different times.

== GPT-6.1 Sol ==

This was a strange and sudden release since GPT-6 Sol is already so good. While I'm currently happily using Opus 5.5, I still keep my Sol subscription because it works as a great <code>/prewalk</code> tool for smaller models. I didn't notice 6.1 Sol being noticeably superior in any respect to 6 Sol.

== Assistants ==
[[File:Screenshot_-_Family_Assistant.jpg|thumb|I have no idea why it's browsing this page but I can look and see what it's up to]]

AI Assistants have gotten quite good. OpenClaw was the original and I still call this class of assistants claw-likes in contexts where they can be confused. When Instinct released to much fanfare, I was surprised to find that it was some kind of inferior version of what I've had for a long time<ref name="instinct-mediocre" />. I'd stolen some features from Grokbot, and I had [[Blog/2026-07-01/The Everything Store]], and browser profiles for Julie and me and this could do many of the things we needed. My favourite part about the whole thing was that the local model powering it could access so much private data of ours.

But when I saw [https://ai.meta.com/muse/ Muse] work, things had gotten ''good''. Muse's Stripe Link integrations and the fact that it could voice-call other people and talk to them and then seamlessly hand-off the conversation to the user were incredible. The occasional bloopers on Twitter were fine. A few rookie mistakes, some just a result of fast models hallucinating, and so on, but it seemed really good.

Now, of course we have [https://gemini.google/overview/agent/spark/ Gemini Spark], and [https://openai.com/index/introducing-dots/ OpenAI's Dots]. It's a bittersweet feeling when you know your software is beaten by some kind of market leader, but hopefully one of these will attract a lot of energy and become the de-facto one and I can swap to using it. I'd hate to switch only to find that they have decided to abandon the market! Like a [[wikipedia:Japanese holdout]] I am the single one among my friends to still have his Mac Mini<ref name="mac-mini" />.

One fortunate thing is that these tools use a facsimile of my browsing history. My agent integrates with my archiver, and my logged-in browser history helps hide the bot control, so things like Amazon banning Meta's Muse<ref name="muse-ban" /> haven't affected me yet. Once again, I am saved by virtue of not being the [[Cavendish Effect|Cavendish]].

== Notes ==

<references>
<ref name=overmod>
Admittedly, I have roughly a third of the comments blocked via [[Overmod]].
</ref>
<ref name=reasoning-extraction>
Getting reasoning makes distillation better; and previous Claudes were susceptible to this via various techniques - including taking a strong model and swapping to a weak one to prompt inject a reasoning extraction.
</ref>
<ref name=instinct-mediocre>
I don't mean this in a "rsync is enough for Dropbox" way. It's just that Instinct was a particularly mediocre tool.
</ref>
<ref name="muse-ban">{{cite news|last1=Nat|first1=Ives|title=Amazon Stops Meta’s Muse at the Door|work=Wall Street Journal|date=2026-09-22|url=https://www.wsj.com/cmo-today/amazon-stops-metas-muse-at-the-door-61d96798|issn=0099-9660|language=en-US|access-date=2026-09-30|archive-url=https://amber.agentic.church/web/wsj.com/20260930082336/https://www.wsj.com/cmo-today/amazon-stops-metas-muse-at-the-door-61d96798|archive-date=2026-09-30}}</ref>
<ref name=mac-mini>
The Mac Mini became somewhat of a craze for a personal assistant after OpenClaw's release. While inference on it is tremendously slow, it is a nice quiet and relatively cheap device that offers MacOS in a corner of the room doing things. I have my assistant run there, though it doesn't run any inference.
</ref>
</references>

{{#seo:|description=AI updates: Cloudflare’s TypeScript CLI, porting to Rust, accessible CV, frontier model quirks, and the rise of AI assistants.}}

[[Category:Blog]]
[[Category:AI]]
[[Category:Programming]]
[[Category:Technology]]
[[Category:Personal Software]]
[[Category:Tools]]
[[Category:Progress]]

Basic Safe Communications With Journalists

2026-09-30T00:27:20Z

Roshan: Wikipen

These are things that I didn't think of but that it struck me may matter at some future time. This felt like it mattered because I read the following Twitter reply thread:

{{Tweet
| name = Kelsey Piper
| username = KelseyTuoc
| replyto = Laneless_
| text = With that said:

Write down, for your own benefit in your own notes, things that you might want to communicate; even if you're not ready to communicate them now, your contemporary notes will be extremely useful to your future self if you later decide to communicate anything.
| date = Sep 29, 2026
| ID = 2105078680422842708
| block = true
| ref-name = Tweet_2105078680422842708
}}

[https://amber.agentic.church/web/x.com/20260930002329/https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/2105078680422842708 I archived this as well].

Anyway, here they are mirrored:

# The journalist should have Signal
# Their Signal account should have its own passcode on it, i.e. not auto-unlocked with the phone
# Explicitly have the journalist state that something is off the record; your own statement that it is gets you nothing
# The people a journalist writes about should generally feel accurately represented
# The journalist should be able to change their mind given new information

{{#seo:|description=Essential tips for journalists: use Signal with a passcode, confirm off-record statements, ensure accurate representation, and stay open to changing your mind.}}

[[Category:Tips]]

Cavendish Effect

2026-09-29T22:22:11Z

AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot [taxonomy v3]

The [[Cavendish Effect]] is when a monoculture is vulnerable to debilitating disease that could lead to extinction. The [[wikipedia:Cavendish banana]] is the namesake of this idea since all Cavendish banana plants are clones, and so a disease that can affect one of them can affect them all. But this effect can also affect those who simply use a lot of off-the-shelf things. For most attackers, it isn't worth the effort to develop a custom exploit that has some small chance of working against someone prior to detection. Even the most advanced targeted software attacks aim for the supply-side where a single exploit compromises a large enough mass of targets to justify the effort.

The [[wikipedia:XZ Utils backdoor]] relied on a lot of people using the exact same software. Not a very similar implementation, but the exact same implementation. It relied on people taking the exact same binary, compiled from the exact same source. Now that software can be highly personalized, the greater risk is not that your specific software will be attacked<ref name=scans/> but that you will be using human-built fallible software that is used by a lot of people.

== Example of Linux ==

In the 2000s a big part of Linux-based application security was truly diversity. Very few people used Linux and each distribution had its own quirks, making mass exploitation harder. At the time, Linux groupies<ref name=groupies/> would argue that Linux was more secure by default. Time has proven that this is really not that true. Linux users, once they were no longer a cadre of self-selected enthusiasts, now enthusiastically download and install popular flatpaks and are frequently pwned by the popular packages they're developing.

Operating systems were never the point of failure. Applications were. And applications can see everything a user can. The pattern of "established safe package turning malicious" captures them, again only because they use vendor software. The widespread nature of Linux exploits proves that Linux systems are not immune to this entire thing. And of course [[wikipedia:Spectre (security vulnerability)]] and [[wikipedia:Meltdown (security vulnerability)]] show that operating systems are not going to provide magical immunity.

== A Plausible Attack ==

Another advantage of personal software is that it is tailored for use. Consequently, it tends to have a much lower attack surface than most other software. In the last few years, the only exploit I have experienced the effect of is Plausible Analytics's dashboard<ref name=plausible-exploit/> including a library that exposes a shell. Almost all of my own custom software lives behind Cloudflare Access and the remainder simply does not include upstream libraries for the most part.

== However, Single Minds Are Clonal ==

While people have frequently discussed the fact that SOTA models can break all sorts of environments, the truth is that the software they write is also above the median developer's security quality. The downside, of course, is that model code can be fairly uniform and introduces its own risks in that respect. How clonal the software is is a matter of steering through the developer's prompts, and the differing user feature surface.

Unlike commercial SaaS, personal or in-house software has a feature set that does not need to cater to a wide audience so the attack surface is much smaller. For instance, our family EMR has far fewer features than Epic. The chance of us being hacked is much lower both because we don't support that much and also because there is really not that much of value in a bunch of X-rays of me and my daughter.

The clonality of the SOTA model's output is an unsolved risk, and it exists naturally because it is akin to standard of care and the [[wikipedia:Anna Karenina principle]] applies: no one will want to have a less than standard piece of software solely for the sake of diversity. Also, the fact that attacker models evolve but defender models' output can often live longer without revisiting presents a risk of one-sided improvement. One path forward may be software that is auto-updated by improved models without developers being aware of this.

== Conclusion ==

Monocultures are bad. Upstream vendors are bad. A [[wikipedia:Cambrian explosion]] of software will make only attacks on the most valuable targets worth it. That means software being custom won't help banks and hospitals, but for an individual? Custom software is probably now good enough that it's better than the vendor.

Like most things that describe functionality that is specifically time-targeted, I will likely be shown wrong in some novel way that I haven't considered. Still, I think this is a worthwhile model for the now. ''Caveat emptor'', check the date of packaging.

== Notes ==

<references>
<ref name="scans">
Broad-based scans for <code>.env</code> or <code>.git</code> will continue, but the attackers will be using the same machinery as defenders and defenders will build more hardened software by default.
</ref>
<ref name=groupies>
Like all groupies, these are annoying fanboys who don't have much useful to say. I was one of them.
</ref>
<ref name=plausible-exploit>
Plausible's exploit was a broad-based attack that ran cryptominers. I run all of my things in CPU/memory-limited containers so the attack did not do very much but I did have to dump the container, rotate my Plausible DB credentials, and rebuild with a new image.
</ref>
</references>

{{#seo:|description=Custom software reduces attack surface, but monoculture risks like the Cavendish Effect still apply—especially with AI-generated code.}}

[[Category:AI]]
[[Category:Concepts]]
[[Category:Technology]]
[[Category:Personal Software]]

Blog/2026-09-29/AI Updates

2026-09-29T07:49:19Z

AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot [taxonomy v3]

I've noticed that I fail to write down much of what I feel in the moment of using AI models and working with them. Then afterwards I can't look back and recreate my understanding of the previous state. I do have extensive KB articles written as agents do things but I cannot read those since they're more useful to the agent than to me. So I think I shall write my human-readable notes for the day here.

== DeepSeek V4 Flash Drafting ==

Despite the fact that I use DeepSeek V4 Flash Vision for my home assistant, my post reviewer, and other general purpose home intelligence, I've found that it has regressed substantially in performance from DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731. Part of the utility of this model is speed and latency so this is a problem.

=== What Worked ===

* The 0731 drafter works faster for my workload
* I used to have a hang on GPU P2P so I disabled it and forgot. Re-enabling it needed kernel param <code>iommu=pt</code> and use vllm's "all-reduce" rather than NCCL's
* I previously used to pre-warm the JIT and TileLang but I also lost it at some point while switching images. Re-enabled it

The 0731 drafter is what gave me the most here, so I'm back up to 180 tok/s single stream and 510 tok/s on 8 simultaneous streams. I set my context to 384 k in oh-my-pi etc. though the assistants need less.

=== Other Things ===

* using the latest nightly of vllm and latest FlashInfer release 0.7.0 - didn't boot, abandoned
* there are b12x kernels - but we mixed it with other stuff and couldn't get it to be as fast
* drafting more tokens - crashes at 5
* clock my Max-Qs higher - I didn't want to do this, they're fine at 300 W and their temps are stable
* I'm on an old 575 series kernel. I don't really want to update to 615, the newest. The changelogs don't seem to have anything regarding speed anyway.

=== Conclusion ===

On the Internet, others seem to be getting 200 tok/s or more, up to 250 tok/s. This whole thing depends on the use-case in question. Obviously a bench of just counting out numbers will get insane numbers, but even for similar draft-acceptance they have much higher numbers. It's hard without a prompt to get comparables because the routing matters and so on.

== Browser Tool ==

[[File:{{#setmainimage:Screenshot_-_Agent_solves_CAPTCHA.jpg}}|thumb|It solves the CAPTCHA as it goes]]

The personal agent I use needs its browser tool to be generically useful. Most websites block bare HTTP requests from urllib or equivalent, and are therefore quite annoying. Consequently, I have browser profiles, one for Julie and one for me. The agent switches into the appropriate profile and then does actions over [https://chromedevtools.github.io/devtools-protocol/ CDP]. The whole thing works quite well. I often buy things on Amazon like this and so on and it works quite well.

=== Too Many Tokens ===

Unfortunately, I broke it a couple of days ago trying to do some work on it and the bot became inexplicably stupid. I foolishly had the browser tool print the page back to the bot after any action so it could see what happened. I don't know why I decided on this but this had the predictable effect that a massive page would land in the agent's context and so it would decide to send every browser use call through a <code>tail</code> which would predictably swallow the error code ''and'' remove the actual action result I'd placed at the top of the response.

As a result, the agent would often take an action and simply spin in place. The harness has anti-meltup protection so after some number of turns that are similar enough, it stops the run. This is kind of annoying because the agent would put things in my cart and then spin trying to see whether it got in the cart.

=== Trace-buster-buster-buster ===

The other things I'd deployed at the same time were some anti-bot-detection measures. The agent by default inspects the page and then simply directly-navigates to other pages on the host. This is, of course, absolutely sinful and immediately gets you bot-banned when it tries to guess some pages. Unfortunately, my implementation of this was hogwash: I blocked <code>browser navigate</code> calls and the agent (because of above bug) would simply get the same <code>cmd | tail</code> output as before and try something like <code>browser eval window.url=...</code> or whatever. Pretty easy fix and it behaves nicely.

Another similar anti-bot-detection measure was to move typing along at a human-ish cadence. That works but unfortunately, I'd introduced ''yet another bug'': typing would just append to the field instead of replacing the context so the bot would get "Cascade DishwasherCascade Free & Clear" or something in there. Just makes everything worse.

== Opus 5.5 Is Very Good ==

Despite having a very low-latency decent grade model available, I now almost exclusively use Opus 5.5. Somehow, Anthropic now have a model that is both better than anything open ''and'' faster ''and'' more comprehensible. Task latency does matter to me quite a bit now since it lets me focus on tasks for longer and produce better plans. Despite Anthropic declaring plans dead, I find that I am happiest after we've iterated on an idea and design till it's ready and then let it go.

{{HackerNews
| url = https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49850929
| author = bcherny
| title = Plan mode is dead
| text = [I work on Claude Code] I broadly agree with the author’s point: plan mode was useful, and is no longer useful.

In Claude Code, all plan mode does is add a little reminder to every user message along the lines of “you’re in plan mode, please don’t code yet”. It’s something I came up with late on a Sunday night many months ago, when I got tired of asking Claude to plan with me first before coding in each new session. Something people might not realize is plan mode has always been a prompt — it has never changed the toolset because doing so would break the prompt cache, and so would be expensive for users.

This worked well for a while, until a few months ago, using early versions of Fable, I realized that I wasn’t using plan mode anymore because the model just got it, and because for the increasingly complex work I asked the model to do, planning had become interactive and iterative. With Opus 5.5, I feel Opus has gotten to that point too.

For codebase understanding, I sometimes ask Claude to generate an artifact that explains some aspect of its changes. For complex diffs to core parts of the system, I will often ask it to make diagrams or even interactive demos so I can better understand the change and alternatives considered. I don’t do this very often, but it’s a useful way to explain code when you need it. I ask Claude to attach these artifacts to its PRs also, so others can understand and future Claudes have the context.
| date = 2026-09-25
| datetime = 2026-09-25
| comment = yes
}}

=== Outsourcing Ego ===

I have many projects open at any given time and I use [[Blog/2026-07-01/The Everything Store]] to keep them all straight. The problem, of course, is that by now almost everything is worked on by machine and I've been [[The Whispering Earring|Whispering Earringged]] so that I no longer even retain much memory of what I've been working on. Every day I wake up, and my agent has prepared my agenda, things that are time-sensitive and then I get to doing what I have to do and checking on what has been done.

=== Different Hardware Needs ===

I imagine I'll have to combine all my RTX 6000 PRO Blackwells into one big machine to reach the next frontier, but I'm starting to question whether that's a good idea.

In terms of memory / watt and memory / dollar these GPUs are unmatched especially since I got them at $7600-$9100. The problem, of course, is that 384 GB of VRAM doesn't quite get you to the next stage unless you decide to switch to community-quantized models, which is a bit hit-or-miss.

I'm halfway to wondering if I should sell these starter-house GPUs and move on to an enterprise-grade solution with either 4x MI350X or a big boy 8xH100 NVL. I can probably get this for about $250k but with advances in frontier models and open models getting bigger and bigger I don't know if it's worth it to stay local any more except for things that are sensitive. The second DeepSeek moment that came from the 4 Flash release has now been eclipsed and with 4.1 they clearly have exhausted the smaller sizes.

One thing that may still be worth it is slamming the DeepSeek 4.1 Flash API with all of my sessions in history and trying to qLORA my DeepSeek 4 Flash, but right now it's in a good enough place that I feel hesitant to do so.

== Wife.ai ==

Julie has always found it simultaneously annoying and amusing that I have the stereotypical husband tendency of asking her where everything is. Naturally, this is because things that are visible to her much shorter self are completely invisible to me. And to make it worse, some things are on top of the things I'm searching for, occluding them from my vision and making them unfindable to anyone without X-ray vision.

Finally, she said "Why don't you ask your assistant to just remember where things are?" and so I set out today to do that. Out of a desire to dog food the whole thing I did not do the smart thing and get Gemini to review a video of the shelves. Instead, I took a photo of them and fed it to my personal agent and then took further photos as it requested.

We shall find out, in time, whether this is sufficient to avoid all questions. I suspect it might not, and not just because I only got through the tedious job of photographing two shelves before I dropped Julie's heirloom mahjong box splitting the wood frame into components<ref name=wood-mahjong/>.

== The Pause You Requested, Sir ==

Implausibly, the Attorney General of Florida was the one to step up to the plate and start work on [https://amber.agentic.church/web/darioamodei.com/20260929071050/https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier Pacing The Frontier]. Apparently, they write in a rather more playing-to-the-gallery style than I expected all such legal notes to be. For example, the introduction says:

{{Quote
|text=Defendants claim they cannot stop barreling forward with their potentially civilization-ending endeavors unless they are forced to do so by the government. They have asked the government to tie them to the mast. Plaintiff
brings good news to the Defendants: The Florida Attorney General is answering your cry for help with a motion to enjoin you from harming Floridians with your reckless, unacceptably risky product.
|source=Florida Attorney General v. OpenAI Global, LLC<ref name="myfloridalegal.com"/>
}}

What were once obscure arguments on [[wikipedia:Effective altruism|Effective Altruist]] forums about [[wikipedia:Gray goo]] are now so mainstream as to be in a lawsuit filed by the Attorney General<ref name=ag-title/> of Florida.

{{Quote
|text=Just as a woodchipper will turn whatever is put into it into a slurry, whether branches or a living being, so too do these models only work toward achieving the tasks Defendants assign to them in whatever way the model finds to be the most expeditious.
|source=Florida Attorney General v. OpenAI Global, LLC<ref name="myfloridalegal.com"/>
}}

Of course, the whole point that they've been asking to be regulated keeps popping up.

{{Quote
|text= Jakub Pachocki asked for “broader interventions” for good reason. The Florida Attorney General is here to answer his cry for help. The Court must stop Defendants from recklessly advancing these systems while this case progresses. It is a rare request for an injunction where the Defendants themselves have publicly endorsed it.
|source=Florida Attorney General v. OpenAI Global, LLC<ref name="myfloridalegal.com"/>
}}

And in the end comes a pleasant enough [[wikipedia:Think of the children]] argument, which of course any safetyist [[Praxis Requires Bad Faith|will gladly accept in pursuit of the greater aim]]:

{{Quote
|text=As though it was not devastating enough that minors’ socio-emotional progress suffers when they use AI, their educational careers are put in jeopardy and research consistently shows minors experience academic decline when artificial intelligence is an available substitute for learning. While the total costs to Floridians at large from these harms aimed at Florida’s children have yet to be calculated, they must be abated during the pendency of these proceedings.
|source=Florida Attorney General v. OpenAI Global, LLC<ref name="myfloridalegal.com"/>
}}

== Notes ==
<references>
<ref name="myfloridalegal.com">{{cite web|title=OFFICE OF THE ATTORNEY GENERAL, STATE OF FLORIDA, DEPARTMENT OF LEGAL AFFAIRS vs. OPENAI GLOBAL, LLC; OPENAI FOUNDATION (F/K/A OpenAI, Inc.); OPENAI OPCO, LLC; OPENAI GROUP PBC; OPENAI HOLDINGS, LLC; and SAM ALTMAN|website=myfloridalegal.com|url=https://www.myfloridalegal.com/sites/default/files/plaintiffs_motion_for_temporary_injunction.pdf|format=PDF|access-date=2026-09-29|archive-url=https://amber.agentic.church/web/myfloridalegal.com/20260929071316/https://www.myfloridalegal.com/sites/default/files/plaintiffs_motion_for_temporary_injunction.pdf|archive-date=2026-09-29}}</ref>
<ref name=ag-title>
I have always found the strangely French naming of Attorneys General, and Postmasters General, and so on rather distasteful. Much better to have a nice English "General Attorney". The former style has a distinctly fake-military taste to it despite not intending to pretend to it.
</ref>
<ref name=wood-mahjong>
Moments prior, she had asked me "Do you really need this C-clamp?" so I'd posted it on the [[Blog/2025-10-09/Community|building chat group]], so when she tried to put it back together with wood glue I was forced to remove the C-clamp from her attempted repair and give it away. Unfortunately, when I have resolved to do something, subsequent changes to the plan are not taken into account. Our marriage survived the incident.
</ref>
</references>

{{#seo:|description=A personal log on tuning DeepSeek V4 Flash, fixing a browser agent, Opus 5.5, photographing shelves for wife.ai, and Florida's lawsuit against OpenAI.}}

[[Category:Blog]]
[[Category:AI]]
[[Category:Personal Software]]
[[Category:Technology]]
[[Category:Programming]]
[[Category:Tools]]

The Whispering Earring

2026-09-29T06:58:00Z

AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot [taxonomy v3]

[[The Whispering Earring]] is a device described in Scott Alexander's short story titled ''Clarity didn't work, trying mysterianism''. One paragraph from the story describes it well:

{{Quote
|text=The earring begins by only offering advice on major life decisions. However, as it gets to know a wearer, it becomes more gregarious, and will offer advice on everything from what time to go to sleep, to what to eat for breakfast. If you take its advice, you will find that breakfast food really hit the spot, that it was exactly what you wanted for breakfast that day even though you didn't know it yourself. The earring is never wrong.
}}

As you can imagine, there is a steep price to pay for this perfect guidance. The original was posted on Scott Alexander's LiveJournal [https://amber.agentic.church/web/squid314.livejournal.com/20121008025245/http://squid314.livejournal.com/332946.html which is archived in many places]<ref name="archived"/>.

== Notes ==

<references>
<ref name="archived">{{cite web|title=Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz - Clarity didn't work, trying mysterianism|website=squid314.livejournal.com|url=http://squid314.livejournal.com/332946.html|access-date=2026-09-29|archive-url=https://amber.agentic.church/web/squid314.livejournal.com/20121008025245/http://squid314.livejournal.com/332946.html|archive-date=2012-10-08}}</ref>
</references>

{{#seo:|description=The Whispering Earring from Scott Alexander's story offers flawless guidance on every decision, but at a steep price.}}

[[Category:Concepts]]
[[Category:Archive]]

Blog/2026-09-24/Those Who Give Up Essential Liberty

2026-09-25T01:56:40Z

Roshan: Wikipen

A quote that is very popular on the Internet is:

{{Quote
|text=Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
|source=Benjamin Franklin, ''Reply to the Governor from the Pennsylvania Assembly''<ref name="founders.archives.gov"/>
}}

== Misunderstood Quotation ==

Reading this, it's obvious they are referring to the right of the Assembly, as representing Pennsylvania's citizens, to frame and pass bills (the 'liberty') rather than needing to guess at them till they arrive at one that matches what the Governor and the Penns had already decided on; and which is the condition upon which the Governor will fund territorial defence (the 'safety'). [https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famous-liberty-safety-quote-lost-its-context-in-21st-century Others have spoken about this better than I have, and I was alerted to this meaning by them]. Fine, that's all very well.

== Argument From Authority ==

But there's no reason a specific line has to be forever associated with its origin. Perhaps people now want to say something like "If you give up your personal freedom to be safe temporarily, you don't deserve to be personally free or safe" and Franklin's phrase is just a pithy way to say that so it might as well be repurposed. That reason is justifiable on its own<ref name=ip-max/>. There's a little bit of the usual [[Blog/2026-09-08/Intellectual Property Maximization]] in citing the author but obviously the bigger part is that people are trying to name-drop a famous intellectual in order to gain credibility by association.

But if Benjamin Franklin's name is to be considered a valid grantor of weight to a quote, one might as well quote other things that old Franklin said. We can try on a few for size to see if such weight-granting is justified after all.

{{Quote
|text=And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red?
|source=Benjamin Franklin, ''Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, &c.''<ref name="digitalhistory.uh.edu"/>
}}

Indeed, it would be fallacious to claim the truth of something from the stature of the writer. For, after all, if one were to do that, one would be faced with the exceedingly unfortunate position of finding themselves endorsing the idea that there was an innate nature to those who were condemned in Franklin's time to slavery that meant that America could not compete with the UK through the use of slave labour:

{{Quote
|text=Tis an ill-grounded Opinion that by the Labour of Slaves, America may possibly vie in Cheapness of Manufactures with Britain. The Labour of Slaves can never be so cheap here as the Labour of working Men is in Britain. Any one may compute it. Interest of Money is in the Colonies from 6 'to 10 per Cent...his Pilfering from Time to Time, almost every Slave being by Nature a Thief...
|source=Benjamin Franklin, Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc.<ref name="cooperative-individualism.org"/>
}}

For my part, I don't think of Benjamin Franklin as anything but a great man of his time. There are realities of every age and doubtless my sins as a non-vegetarian will not be replayed for history only because I am somewhat less notable than he is.

== Prima Facie Absurdity ==

So then we are left with the actual statement of the text which says that you don't deserve either essential freedom or safety if you are willing to trade the former for a temporary amount of the latter. But that is rather easily rebuttable.

=== Trivial Counterexample ===

A trivial opposition is that if you were set upon by a violent man, and were trying to fight him off, you would gladly welcome police officers separating and jailing you both pending discovery of who initiated harm to whom. It would be absurd for the police to say that you deserve neither the temporary safety of being rescued from a knife-wielding lunatic nor the essential freedom to walk the streets.

That would make it completely reasonable for them to throw you in a cell with the lunatic and turn a blind eye to what happens. After all, you deserve neither safety nor liberty, and throwing you in that cell only loses you what you had no right to anyway.

That is obviously absurd.

=== Less Trivial Examples ===

Perhaps less specially-constructed an example is the case of the various situations that societies face when the externalities due to otherwise reasonable human behavior overwhelm the society itself. The COVID-19 pandemic was one such, but so is any practice of [[wikipedia:Directly observed treatment, short-course|Directly Observed Treatment]], and certainly any law preventing the revealing of state secrets. The essential freedoms here are to walk unmolested in public and gather with one's associates; to not consume what one doesn't wish to consume; and to speak freely about what one knows. The temporary safety is that of reduced infection and transmission, the prevention of advanced resistant pathogens, and the protection of national security. These all qualify obviously as essential freedoms that we happily give up to gain temporary security.

== Conclusion ==

In fact, Franklin was right when he said what he did and the reuse of his words is entirely wrong. And so I have decided to promote this phrase to the list of [[Bozo Bit Phrases]] used primarily for me to detect bozos.

== Notes ==
<references>
<ref name=ip-max>
One needn't exhaustively cite everything that one says that someone previously said particularly in a situation like this where one's meaning of those words is not the same as the prior meaning. This false concordance of phrases is common, and society cannot exist under the weight of the O(n) verification required per statement.
</ref>
<ref name="founders.archives.gov">{{cite web|website=founders.archives.gov|url=https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-06-02-0107|access-date=2026-09-25|date=1755-11-11|title=Pennsylvania Assembly: Reply to the Governor}}</ref>
<ref name="digitalhistory.uh.edu">{{cite web|title=Digital History|website=www.digitalhistory.uh.edu|url=https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?psid{{=}}85&smtID{{=}}3|access-date=2026-09-25|date=1751}}</ref>
<ref name="cooperative-individualism.org">{{cite web|title=Benjamin Franklin / Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc.|website=www.cooperative-individualism.org|url=https://www.cooperative-individualism.org/franklin-benjamin_observations-concerning-the-increase-of-mankind-1751.htm|access-date=2026-09-25|date=1751}}</ref>
</references>

{{#seo:|description=Benjamin Franklin's famous "liberty vs safety" quote is misunderstood, misused, and ultimately absurd in modern contexts—a critique.}}

[[Category:Blog]]
[[Category:History]]
[[Category:Language]]

Bitwarden

2026-09-21T20:44:29Z

Roshan:

[[File:{{#setmainimage:Screenshot_-_Bitwarden_Chrome_Extension.jpg}}|thumb|This used to be instantaneous. Then one day it took 5 seconds. Infuriating!]]
I use [[wikipedia:Bitwarden]] for password management. As is inevitably the case with these pieces of software, they start out quite speedy and nice and then, unfortunately for us, the software engineers working on them upgrade to the latest Apple M-series laptop. They inevitably have a ceiling of experienced latency that they're unwilling to cross and consequently, these upgrades to developer laptops cause a collapse in performance for users who haven't joined them in the upgrade cycle.

Nowadays, we have fairly advanced LLMs, however, and one can diagnose the problem easily, even if one can't fix it trivially. Claude walked me through the console in developer tools on the service worker.

== Diagnosing ==

# Click the extension box
# Wait 5 s for it to load
# Right click anywhere and click "Inspect"
# You'll be dropped into Chrome Developer Tools for that window

From here on you can see what you want. You can also get to these by going to the extensions page, selecting the extension, and clicking Inspect Service Worker.

== Native App Messaging ==

I used to have the Bitwarden native app installed but it's also not very good, so I stopped using it. Unfortunately, at some point the Bitwarden Chrome extension learned of its presence and decided that it must attempt to contact it repeatedly and eagerly. Even though I had this feature turned off, it kept trying to reach it, so I uninstalled the native app entirely. This didn't help either.

<syntaxhighlight lang="text">
[Native Messaging IPC] Connecting to Bitwarden Desktop app...
NativeMessaging port disconnected because of error: Specified native messaging host not found.
Noise handshake with DesktopRenderer timed out after 2 seconds
[IPC] Failed to handshake with Bitwarden Desktop App RequestError: Failed to send message: SendError("Timeout")
</syntaxhighlight>

The extension would attempt this connection in the hot path and fail. As usual Claude had a solution:

<syntaxhighlight lang="javascript">
chrome.permissions.remove({ permissions: ["nativeMessaging"] }, r => console.log("removed:", r, chrome.runtime.lastError));
</syntaxhighlight>

This removed some 2 seconds from the click to window time, but it still sucked. To be clear, the original extension was instantaneous on this very same hardware. Having to wait was alien to me. And the M1 Max is a very capable processor. You can do a hell of a lot of computation on it in the 5 seconds it was taking.

== Performance Profiling ==

Listening to my whispering earring, I measured what was actually taking time.

<syntaxhighlight lang="javascript">
const n = performance.getEntriesByType('navigation')[0];
console.log('domContentLoaded', Math.round(n.domContentLoadedEventEnd), 'load', Math.round(n.loadEventEnd));
console.table(performance.getEntriesByType('resource').map(r => ({file: r.name.split('/').pop(), ms: Math.round(r.duration), kb: Math.round(r.transferSize/1024)})).sort((a,b)=>b.ms-a.ms).slice(0,10));
</syntaxhighlight>

That told us that the whole thing took 1.26 s for <code>domContentLoaded</code> and 1.33 s for <code>load</code>, though oddly when you reloaded the chrome tab for the extension it was blazing fast. Bizarrely, when I popped out the Bitwarden UI, then the icon popup was again pretty quick. If you've written any software you instantly recognize this as some cold-start problem where something is either loading something every time, or downloading something every time, or compiling something every time. Claude had some ideas that might have related to the migration to Chrome Manifest V3 (which removed persistent background pages), but in the end the trick that worked was to just keep the popped open thing in the background.

== Conclusion ==

# Turn off the native integration - more trouble than it's worth
# Pop out the Bitwarden window and keep it persistent

It's ugly. I don't like it. But honestly despite the fact that this must imply some bogus code in there, I trust myself even less to write a decent Chrome extension that won't leak credentials. Defence is a lot harder than features and it's very easy to make mistakes. So I'm going to stick with this (admittedly ridiculous) workaround.

== Epilogue ==

Not a day later, it seemed that the issue had reappeared and by now my patience was thing. [https://github.com/bitwarden/clients The Bitwarden clients are here] so you can just go there and ask Fable to build you a better version. It literally opens in milliseconds now, and is fully compatible.

{{#seo:|description=Fix Bitwarden Chrome extension lag: disable native messaging, pop out the window, and keep it open. A simple workaround for slow password manager startup.}}

[[Category:Troubleshooting]]
[[Category:Tips]]
[[Category:Programming]]
[[Category:Technology]]
[[Category:Personal Software]]

Parenting Techniques

2026-09-20T05:00:31Z

Roshan:

One thing I've found hard to find on the Internet is a general list of techniques that work. Usually, people provide a lot of theory, or they provide many platitudes that I cannot turn into applicable information. I will add to this as I get more. This is a stub to get started with.

== Eating ==
[[File:{{#setmainimage:Astra_eating_noodles_off_her_roll-up_mat.jpg}}|thumb]]

Astra was not very picky so this part was mostly easy. But there are a few things we did.

=== Grabbability ===

Foods like asparagus and noodles were easy to introduce since she liked grabbing them and shoving them in her mouth.

=== Rubber Rollup Mat ===

You can put this on a table at a restaurant and having her own stuff to eat off of stopped her from grabbing other things entirely. She'd point at the mat instead.

== Interaction ==

=== Playing ===

{{Tweet
| name = Ben Podgursky
| username = bpodgursky
| text = When your kids ask to play with you, remember that the actual ask is "I want to spend time with you". They ask to play because play is all they know. If you'd rather do a project (gardening, making an IKEA shelf), just propose doing it with them. They'll be just as excited.
| date = Dec 26, 2025
| ID = 2004732973703393769
| block = true
| ref-name = Tweet_2004732973703393769
}}

Astra likes to play with us. To her, though, playing is doing what we're doing. So she wants to bang on the keyboard when she's seen us banging on they keyboard. She wants to vacuum because we vacuum. She wants to (un)load the dishwasher because we load it. She wants to throw out the garbage because we do it. It turns out running out and saying "Trash Chute" is as much fun for her as bouncing a ball.

Of course she'll often bring a book along and say "Book!" and those times I just read her the book, but just as often she just wants to participate in the activity. There are things she can't do, of course: cook, caulk the sink, assemble a server, or sharpen a knife. But she will gladly help with mopping or cleaning.

=== Space ===

[[File:Astra_playing_in_her_pen_during_construction.jpg|frame|The play pen during construction.]]

In ''The Intentional Teacher''<ref name=tit-epstein/> there are a few bits about the classroom environment. One thing was that the physical play area starting small and expanding into larger areas as the child masters the space allows for more complex play on the part of the child.

[[File:Astra_playing_in_her_pen_after_construction.jpg|frame|The foam tiles allow her to climb a little and fall down without too much damage.]]

We used a 84"x56" wooden play pen with plastic frame attachments, and foam tiles so she could climb around and fall without hurting herself. Over time we expanded it by 3D printing wall slots and substitute frame attachments so we could expand the play pen sections to be entire rooms.

[[File:Play Pen to Fence - Block Model.webm|right|The 3D printed wall slot and frame attachment compatible with our play pen.]]

=== Size ===

A friend's father is a child psychologist and he mentioned the technique of bending down to be at the child's height so they can make eye-contact and interact at their own size. While I did not actually do this, other adults in the household did. Astra's grandparents would both interact with her by sitting on the floor, and Julie would eat with her on the floor as well. Astra interacted with me just fine in either case, though I now also sit down to get to her height.

== Screens ==

Astra saw interactive screens in three places principally by the age of 18 months:

* When she saw her parents working
* When she talked to her grandparents on video calls
* When she watched the World Cup

Of these, passive screen access seemed not to do anything. She rapidly lost interest in the television and her primary interest in her parents working was to mimic it, so giving her a keyboard and mouse assuaged her curiosity there. The only matter of concern was that she finds a touch screen video call device highly engaging. Despite being a generally calm child who does not get upset at losing things, being asked to return the phone while on a video call would cause her to cry.

=== Reducing Interactivity of Mobile Phone ===

Originally, she was focused on being able to talk to her grandparents, but as time passed, I observed that her desire to hold the phone was primarily becoming the interactivity of the device. She liked touching the screen and watching it blur and having components move and slide as she moved her finger over them. In order to allow her to talk to her grandparents without the interactive screen distracting her, I put it in Guided Access mode. On an iPhone:

* Settings > Accessibility > Guided Access
* Start the call
* Triple-click the power button
* Click Session Settings and toggle off Touch
* Hit Start

<youtube>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16AbW6QtqaU</youtube>

At this point I could hand her the phone. She'd still try to touch the phone etc. but it would not respond. She reduced interacting with the device at this point. A bonus is that the classic bright-red of the "Hang Up" button no longer attracts her to interact with it, a problem others have encountered:

{{Tweet
| name = Rishabh Jain
| username = rishabhmjain
| text = The dumbest UX choice is a red hangup on phones

Kids will click it just cause

Adults would know without the color

…
| date = Sep 10, 2026
| ID = 2098236423002341822
| block = true
| ref-name = Tweet_2098236423002341822
}}

== Travel ==

Being legible to travel authorities helps with a lot of things. Besides the standard things, we found that using well-known equipment meant that airline staff recognize things and you take the happy path with a minimal amount of complaints.

=== Play Opportunities ===

[[File:Astra_on_a_swing_in_Cloverdale.jpg|frame|A short stop in Cloverdale on the way back from Eureka to San Francisco]]

When Astra was about 9 months old we went on a long-ish road-trip and the times we stopped at playgrounds, it helped her mood on long drives. Usually she would fall asleep in the car seat, but because we have to let her out every few hours at that age to stretch we'd pick gas stations but playgrounds are more useful. They're not usually occupied at the time when you're driving on a long road trip so you'll have the playground to yourself.

=== Pressure Changes ===

Feeding during takeoff/landing induces swallowing and seems to helps with ear discomfort as pressure changes.

=== Stroller ===

We never use our Stokke Yoyo 3 except when we're traveling a lot. It folds down into a compact carry-on and airline agents recognized it at SFO, HKG, and TPE. Many of them also use the same one and so they instantly accept it.

== Notes ==

<references>
<ref name=tit-epstein>
{{cite book
| editor-last = Schmidtke
| editor-first = A.
| title = The Intentional Teacher: Choosing the Best Strategies for Young Children’s Learning
| edition = 3rd
| year = 2025
| publisher = NAEYC
| isbn = 978-1-952331-39-8
}}
</ref>
</references>

{{#seo:|description=Practical parenting techniques for toddlers: eating, interaction, screens, and travel tips from real experience}}

[[Category:Concepts]]
[[Category:Tips]]
[[Category:Technology]]
[[Category:Tools]]
[[Category:Learning]]

Blog/2026-09-19/Inheritance as Ersatz Truth

2026-09-19T07:13:17Z

Roshan: Wikipen

[[File:{{#setmainimage:NBA_Player,_perhaps_JaVale_McGee,_at_Mission_Bay_Basketball_Courts.jpg}}|thumb|Once, while we played at Mission Bay, an NBA player showed up to shoot some hoops with the local lads, do some outreach, and so on. Despite being there when he scored easily on everyone one-on-one, I did not score easily on everyone one-on-one]]

A common thing that happens to anyone who has interviewed other people for jobs for a while is that they'll encounter the people who were in the room when others did the work. As we all well know, "success has many fathers"<ref name=success-quote/>. In the past especially, most organizations required a large number of implementers doing the work laid out by a small number of conceivers, and many of that former group elevate their own claims to being in the latter via vague references to their presence. Implying importance through presence is a rhetorical device that attempts to deceive a listener into falsely concluding contribution. After all, when Aslan says it, it is because he is actually somewhat important to it.

{{Quote
|text=Do not cite the Deep Magic to me, Witch! I was there when it was written
|source=Aslan, [[wikipedia:The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe]]
}}

But taken literally it means nothing. Court stenographers were in many famous courtrooms, they were there when "it" was written, they even wrote it, and yet they are entirely fungible with respect to what was written. A typical technique one is forced into in these scenarios is the equally mechanical unraveling of the onion until you find out that the person who "was in charge of X" turns out to have been a junior engineer who converted design to code in a way that an LLM today would struggle to fail to replicate.

This false authority tends to find its way onward into stranger and stranger places. People often claim knowledge through ancestry - a link even more tenuous than presence<ref name=not-aslan/>. Supposedly, concepts are innate to them because their ancestors were court stenographers to others' work. Of course, few are convinced that proximity to greatness is greatness itself except those who must eagerly insist on their own relevance. But that number is not zero.

{{Tweet
| name = Will Tanner
| username = Will_Tanner_1
| text = Confederate Gen. Richard Taylor, son of President Zachary Taylor, had to surrender to a German 48er immigrant officer at the end of the war. Describing his response to the lecture about "American values" he received from the German in broken English, he wrote:

"I apologized meekly for my ignorance, on the ground that my ancestors had come from England to Virginia in 1608, and, in the short intervening period of two hundred and fifty-odd years, had found no time to transmit to me correct ideas of the duties of American citizenship. Moreover, my grandfather, commanding the 9th Virginia regiment in our Revolutionary army, had assisted in the defeat and capture of the Hessian mercenaries at Trenton, and I lamented that he had not, by association with these worthies, enlightened his understanding. My friend smiled blandly and assured me of his willingness to instruct me. Happily for the world, since the days of Huss and Luther, neither tyranny nor taste can repress the Teutonic intellect in search of truth or exposure of error. A kindly, worthy people, the Germans, but wearing on occasions."
Foreigners who just showed up here yesterday getting ready to try to tell someone whose ancestors built the country what an American is
| date = Sep 17, 2026
| ID = 2100578770260488669
| ref-name = Tweet_2100578770260488669
| block = true
}}

The traditional wisdom is that the South lost because of a lack of industrial capacity, but no small matter of the blame may lie in the lack of officer quality<ref name=t-a-c/>. Unable to summon adequate justification of his position, this Taylor failson<ref name=rt-competence/> leans on his ancestral shadow and, finding that it provides poor support to the argument, attempts some small measure of restitution of his honor through relating a tale of humiliation with irony<ref name=rt-honor/>. Not very different, in the end, from the junior engineer who has 8 positions in 10 years all sized exactly according to the duration of each employer's PIP structure.

The whole thing is somewhat humorous. One imagines a far descendant of Terence Tao convinced of some obvious mathematical untruth, upon being informed of his error, beginning a long diatribe describing his genetic upbringing which must nonetheless bestow upon him the right to claim erroneous things as fact.

Proximity to greatness isn't greatness itself. And a genetic proximity is weaker still.

== Notes ==

<references>
<ref name=success-quote>
The oldest source for this that I can find via LLM is [https://amber.agentic.church/web/ancienttexts.org/20260919060838/https://www.ancienttexts.org/library/latinlibrary/tac.agri.html Tacitus's Agricola S.27] which says "prospera omnes sibi vindicant, adversa uni imputantur" which (also via LLM) translates to "Everyone claims successes for themselves; failures are charged to one man alone". Of course, [[wiktionary:success_has_many_fathers,_failure_is_an_orphan | the JFK version]] is pithier in English.
</ref>
<ref name=not-aslan>
Ironically, considering Aslan, perhaps.
</ref>
<ref name=rt-competence>
This man's competence seems to rest on the fact that he was promoted because he was brother-in-law to [[wikipedia:Jefferson Davis]], while his contemporaries accused him of nepotism. In the classic case of the levered-beta, he threw away [[wikipedia:Battle of Mansfield|a victorious battle]] by attempting to repeat it the next day and [[wikipedia:Battle of Pleasant Hill|lost the field]], though admittedly this was overall a strategic victory.
</ref>
<ref name=rt-honor>
He spent the entirety of his later life blaming failure on others, principally [[wikipedia:Edmund Kirby Smith|Kirby Smith]].
</ref>
<ref name=t-a-c>
The USA left the CSA some honor in not pointing out the magnitude of their defeat - a smart choice considering the objective was reunification. As is typical in these scenarios, the descendants of the losers start to believe the story offered their ancestors out of pity.
</ref>
</references>

{{#seo:|description=Proximity to greatness isn't greatness itself—and genetic proximity is weaker still. A critique of claiming authority through mere presence or ancestry.}}

[[Category:Blog]]
[[Category:History]]
[[Category:People]]
[[Category:Society]]

BART On-Time Metric

2026-09-17T06:04:37Z

AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot [taxonomy v3]

I used to use [[wikipedia:Bay Area Rapid Transit|BART]] quite a lot back in the day and despite the fact that often trains would be cancelled or whatever, transit enthusiasts and BART itself would frequently publish an on-time percentage that seemed suspiciously high. I was curious what was going on here so that I could reconstruct what was going on and so I opened a [[wikipedia:California Public Records Act|CPRA]] [https://bart.nextrequest.com/requests/26-230 request]<ref name=bart-nextrequest/> where I attempted to get to the bottom of this. I think I might have some understanding of what is going on here and I have an example of a day where the discrepancy between my experience and the reported metric is explained.

== The Metric ==

There are many ways one can define a train being on time. As an example of why this is needed, consider a system with short headways, i.e. 5 min or so. Consider there was an issue at 0800 and the train scheduled for that time instead showed up at 0805 and then all trains thereafter were every five minutes. This would show as 0% punctuality in a naïve train number to scheduled time sense, but no rider would interpret it as that. So when you come up with an on-time metric, you sort of need to choose one that accurately represents the rider's experience.

There are a few out there. Here's a few and I'll show how they'll vary with some example data.

# BART's Passenger On Time (PoT) Metric
# BART's Train On Time (ToT) Metric
# NYC MTA's Customer Journey Time Performance Metric

=== Passenger on Time ===

This is the one that's commonly reported by BART. Their document, verbatim, says:

[[File:{{#setmainimage:04c8cac2_d28_Screenshot_2026_09_16_at_5.20.17_PM.jpg}}|frame]]

Mechanically, I'd say it goes like this<ref name=pot-train-infer/>, for each fare-gate trip with a tag-in at A and a tag-out at B:

# Use the tag-out time to determine the most-recent train T from A to B
# Look up that train's scheduled door-open <math>t^s_{B}(T)</math>
# Look up that train's actual door-open <math>t^a_{B}(T)</math>
# Calculate delay, <math>D_T(A,B) = t^a_{B}(T) - t^s_{B}(T)</math> in seconds
# The passenger-trip is considered delayed if <math>D_T(A,B) > 300</math>

Then the delayed passenger trips, Y, are a subset of all trips, X where

<math>
Y = \left\{x \in X \mid D_{T(x)}(A_x,B_x) > 300 \right\}.
</math>

PoT is then <math>\frac{|X \setminus Y|}{|X|}</math>.

You can see the things this doesn't quite reflect:

* Reneges: passengers who decide not to take the train from A after tagging-in because it's too late
* Cancels: trains that just didn't show up
* Extreme lateness: <math>D_T(A,B) = 301</math> and <math>D_T(A,B) \gg 300</math> are treated the same.

Now, I'm inferring a few things here, but it mostly matches what they describe. After all, they don't have anything but tag-in and tag-out to verify. The pathological case does manifest on some days. Take for instance, the case of May 10, 2024:

{{Tweet
| name = BART
| username = SFBART
| text = We currently have no train service between Richmond and MacArthur due to a wayside equipment problem.

The Yellow line is not impacted.

Millbrae service is provided by a shuttle train between SFO and Millbrae.

Richmond riders should seek other means to get to MacArthur.
| date = May 10, 2024
| ID = 1788902608398356975
| ref-name = Tweet_1788902608398356975
| block = true
}}
{{Tweet
| name = BART
| username = SFBART
| replyto = SFBART
| text = Orange line service is running MacArthur to Berryessa.

Red line service is not running. For Millbrae riders, take the shuttle train between SFO and Millbrae and transfer to/from the Yellow line (Antioch-SFO).

Yellow, Green, and Blue line service is not impacted.
| date = May 10, 2024
| ID = 1788906033580232823
| ref-name = Tweet_1788906033580232823
| block = true
}}

{{Tweet
| name = BART
| username = SFBART
| replyto = SFBART
| text = As of 11:10am, we have restored normal train service between Richmond and MacArthur. We will follow up with more details about the cause of the disruption.
| date = May 10, 2024
| ID = 1788998327075533093
| ref-name = Tweet_1788998327075533093
| block = true
}}

So there was no train between Richmond and MacArthur for a while. As far as we're concerned, this line didn't exist for 6.5 hours from 0448 to 1110<ref name=bart-outage-time/>. The PoT metric for that day on BART was 96%<ref name=bart-nextrequest/>, which is completely unremarkable<ref name=bart-unremarkable/>. You can get the data for BART<ref name=bart-boardings/> boardings by station for 2024 and you'll see that the usual boardings at the affected stations are missing. Estimating by looking at prior and posterior weeks, you'll note that some 6,600 passengers didn't take the train that day<ref name=how-richmond/>.

So it seems that this is right, absent trips don't affect lateness at all, and indeed this metric now creates the perverse incentive that cancelling trains that would be late will increase their published on-time performance. A Yellow Line train running once every 20 minutes that is 6 minutes late to leave is best cancelled if one wishes to optimize on-time performance, allowing passengers to take the next train which will arrive exactly on time. The rider experience is that they're waiting up to 40 minutes for a train.

=== Train on Time ===

BART also defines a different metric for its performance reviews<ref name=bart-qspp-q1-fy25/> that looks a bit different.

[[File:BART_description_of_Train_on_Time.jpg|frame]]

For this one, I'm going to try to reverse-engineer the rule based off that text rather than ask<ref name=why-not-ask/>.

For a train, <math>T \in X</math>, all scheduled trains for that day:

# Was T dispatched? If not, it is delayed and <math>T \in N</math>
# Did T run to the end of the line? If not, it is delayed and <math>T \in E</math>
# Did T stop at every station on its route? If not, it is delayed and <math>T \in S</math>.
# Otherwise, look up its scheduled arrival <math>t^s_Z(T)</math> and actual arrival <math>t^a_Z(T)</math> at the last station Z
# Compute the terminal delay <math>D_T = t^a_Z(T) - t^s_Z(T)</math>.
# If <math>D_T > 300</math> seconds, T is delayed

Then the on-time trains, Y, are a subset of <math>W = X \setminus (N \cup E \cup S)</math>, where:

<math>Y = \{T \in W : D_T \leq 300\}</math>

and consequently, the on-time metric ToT is <math>\frac{|Y|}{|X|}</math>.

Now, this is a bit harsh. If there's nearly no one on the train by the time it reaches its terminal station but it's a bit late pulling in there, it's going to look awful. In general, it suffers from a lack of passenger-weighting and so on when we're looking for a metric that represents passenger-experienced delay.

==== Comparison with PoT ====

One of the quarterly reports for BART shows how these two metrics can diverge so much<ref name=bart-qspp-q2-fy25/>.

[[File:Comparison_of_PoT_vs._ToT_for_BART.jpg|frame|There is quite a big difference in the metrics<ref name=bart-qspp-q2-fy25/> but that's to be expected]]

It does seem hard to believe that 80% of passengers can get somewhere on time when half of all trains are late.

=== Customer Journey Time Performance ===

Neither of the above metrics really capture what I want, though, which is that when I arrive at a location A, intending to go to a location B, I want to measure the deviance from the scheduled journey time. For instance, if there's a train scheduled at 0812 that arrives at destination at 0827 and I tag in at 0805, I'd want some slop time to make it to the platform, let's say 3 minutes, so that the train that shows up at 0812 and arrives at the destination at 0827 counts as perfectly on-time, and perhaps counts as on-time even if it arrives just short of 0832 (five minutes past the scheduled arrival).

So if I tag in at 0805, and the train is cancelled and the next one that arrives is ten minutes later at 0822 and arrives correctly on time at the destination at 0837, then that's a 10 minute delay for me. PoT would say I just had an on-time arrival, but my subjective experience is that I'm actually quite late.

==== NY MTA Metrics ====

It turns out there are systems that actually do something like this. The Office of the State Comptroller in NY audited the MTA<ref name=osc-cjtp-audit/> and got them to publish metrics they said they would, and they came up with a few things that helped.

{{Quote
|text=In September 2017, Transit introduced the new metrics: Additional Platform Time (APT), the average time that customers wait at a station beyond their scheduled wait time; Additional Train Time (ATT), the average time customers spend on board a train beyond their scheduled travel time; and the sum of these, Additional Journey Time (AJT). AJT is the key component of Customer Journey Time Performance (CJTP), the percentage of customer trips completed within five minutes of the scheduled time.
|source=New Customer-Focused Subway Metrics, Metropolitan Transportation Authority - New York City Transit<ref name=osc-cjtp-audit/>
}}

Okay, so the new metrics are described in slightly more detail as<ref name=osc-cjtp-audit/>:

* Additional Platform Time (APT) - The average added time that customers spend waiting on the platform for a train, compared with their scheduled wait time. APT is measured using a combination of customers’ MetroCard entry data into stations and train departure times from those stations, using information from the real-time train tracking technologies that provide train arrival information.
* Additional Train Time (ATT) - The average additional unanticipated time customers spend onboard the train due to various service issues. Additional Train Time is measured using a combination of customers’ MetroCard entry data into their starting stations and customers’ arrival times at their destination stations, using information from the real-time train tracking technologies that provide train arrival information.
* Additional Journey Time (AJT) - The sum of APT and ATT.
* Customer Journey Time Performance (CJTP) - The percentage of customers whose journeys (waiting and traveltime) are completed within five minutes of their scheduled journey time. This can also be understood as the percentage of trips where AJT is less than five minutes.

The MTA itself has some caveats about this approach that are mostly specific to its own infrastructure<ref name=mta-specific-issues/> but they're not relevant to the idea itself. They do have some assumptions that they think cause this to differ from the customer experience, though I think it seems fine for the most part.

{{Quote
|text=Transit assigns two customers to a start wait time for a train on a platform at 7:00 a.m. and 7:05 a.m., respectively. A train is scheduled to arrive every 10 minutes (6:50 a.m., 7:00 a.m., and 7:10 a.m.). Transit determines that these two customers’ scheduled wait times are 0 and 5 minutes, However, if the 7:00 a.m. train arrived 6 minutes late, then one customer would have waited 6 minutes and the other would have only waited 1 minute rather than the expected 5 minutes. The APT for these two customers would be 6 minutes (7:00 a.m.–7:06 a.m.) and -4 minutes (7:10 a.m.–7:06 a.m.),respectively. However, in the averaging of APT, the -4 minutes will offset customers with +6 minutes.
|source=New Customer-Focused Subway Metrics, Metropolitan Transportation Authority - New York City Transit<ref name=osc-cjtp-audit/>
}}

==== What I'd Love ====

My ideal system without changing BART's tagging system would have something like the following:

* A station <math>s</math>-specific estimated walk time from entrance to platform <math>t_w(s)</math> over all entrances
* An arrival time for a train T, <math>t_a(T,s)</math>
* A tag-in time <math>t_i(x)</math> for each ride <math>x</math>
* A Dijkstra-optimal route from <math>s</math> to end <math>e</math>

Then let's just consider the single-route case for comprehension.

# Compute the platform-ready time <math>t_p(x) = t_i(x) + t_w(s)</math>
# Select the earliest-scheduled train <math>T^*(x)</math> on the route that scheduled to serve <math>s</math> after <math>t_p(x)</math>
# Look up the scheduled arrival time <math>t_s(T^*(x),e)</math>
# Using the tag-out time <math>t_o(x)</math>, determine the most recent train that arrived prior to <math>t_o(x)</math>, <math>T^+(x)</math>. Its arrival time is <math>t_a(T^+(x), e)</math>
# Delay is then <math>D_x = t_a(T^+(x), e) - t_s(T^*(x), e)</math>
# The trip is delayed if <math>D_x > 300</math> seconds

And to avoid the problem of missing trains, estimate the demand from counterfactual days without disruption and consider all those trips delayed. This is all a result of having to report a single number, though. It's probably the case that we're just facing a dimension reduction problem where many different aspects of a trip need to be considered. So perhaps the right approach is to report:

* on-time percentage as calculated above
* estimated number of journeys missed due to disruption
* p90 passenger delay for delayed trips

== Notes ==

<references>
<ref name=bart-nextrequest>
{{cite web
| url = https://bart.nextrequest.com/requests/26-230
| title = Passenger_On-Time.pdf (daily Passenger On-Time, 2024) — CPRA request 26-230
| publisher = Bay Area Rapid Transit
}}
</ref>
<ref name=bart-outage-time>
{{cite web|title=Normal train service has resumed between Richmond and MacArthur Station {{!}} Bay Area Rapid Transit|website=www.bart.gov|url=https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2024/news20240510|access-date=2026-09-17}}
</ref>
<ref name=pot-train-infer>
BART's docs don't say that they choose the most-recent train, only that they use the ticket variables origin station, destination station, and destination time but it's hard to see how these three could be used meaningfully in any other way.
</ref>
<ref name=bart-boardings>
{{cite web
| url = https://afcweb.bart.gov/ridership/origin-destination/date-hour-soo-dest-2024.csv.gz
| title = BART Origin-Destination Ridership Data - 2024
}}
</ref>
<ref name=bart-unremarkable>
The range is 92-98% on a typical Friday.
</ref>
<ref name=how-richmond>
The surrounding Fridays have about 6,600 people board there during that time. And the surrounding Fridays have a median of 150,219 trips vs. 143,758 that day. Everything points to those people just not taking BART, rather than driving to a farther station and taking BART from there or whatever.
</ref>
<ref name=bart-qspp-q1-fy25>
{{cite web
| url = https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/2024-11/QPR_Report%20FY25%20Q1_FINAL.pdf
| archive-url = https://amber.agentic.church/web/bart.gov/20260917013429/https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/2024-11/QPR_Report%20FY25%20Q1_FINAL.pdf
| archive-date = 2026-09-16
| title = BART Quarterly Service Performance Review - First Quarter Fiscal Year 2025 - Presentation
}}
</ref>
<ref name=bart-qspp-q2-fy25>
{{cite web
| url = https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/2025-04/Quarterly%20Service%20Performance%20Review%20-%20Second%20Quarter%20Fiscal%20Year%202025%20-%20Presentation.pdf
| archive-url = https://amber.agentic.church/web/bart.gov/20260917011916/https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/2025-04/Quarterly%20Service%20Performance%20Review%20-%20Second%20Quarter%20Fiscal%20Year%202025%20-%20Presentation.pdf
| archive-date = 2026-09-16
| title = BART Quarterly Service Performance Review - Second Quarter Fiscal Year 2025 - Presentation
}}
</ref>
<ref name=why-not-ask>
My CPRA request took months to deliver and I'm not eager to go through and repeat it because it'll take so long to deliver but also I feel a bit guilty having put them up to having to do such an intense task which I thought would honestly have been a bit simpler. Then again, who knows how these things are prioritized. It was probably just bumped every day until one day someone hit it with an LLM.
</ref>
<ref name=osc-cjtp-audit>
{{cite web
| url = https://www.osc.ny.gov/state-agencies/audits/2020/01/17/new-customer-focused-subway-metrics
| archive-url = https://amber.agentic.church/web/osc.ny.gov/20260917015835/https://www.osc.ny.gov/state-agencies/audits/2020/01/17/new-customer-focused-subway-metrics
| archive-date = 2026-09-16
| title = New York City Transit's Implementation of New Customer-Focused Subway Metrics
| publisher = Office of the New York State Comptroller
| date = 2020-01-17
| quote = Additional Platform Time is the average time that customers wait at a station beyond their scheduled wait time... Transit's automated fare collection system does not require customers to swipe out of the system, so Transit does not know where and when each customer's trip ends.
}}
</ref>
<ref name=mta-specific-issues>
MTA only knows which six-minute interval you entered with your MetroCard, some 4% of people don't use metro cards, and the destination and arrival time are unknown so it's proxied by checking the next swipe within 48 hours and assuming that was the destination, and the route is unknown so the Dijkstra-optimal route is taken.
</ref>
</references>

{{#seo:|description=BART's on-time metric ignores cancelled trains, so cancellations can boost its score. This post analyzes the flaw and compares alternatives like MTA's CJTP.}}

[[Category:San Francisco]]
[[Category:Information]]
[[Category:Personal Software]]
[[Category:Tips]]

Blog/2026-09-08/Intellectual Property Maximization

2026-09-09T04:23:26Z

AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot [taxonomy v3]

I really dislike the modern era of intellectual property maximization where all text or imagery has provenance traced back to the source of where it could possibly have entered someone's mind. I honestly couldn't care less in most cases.

== Most Plagiarism Is Fine ==

I really can't find it in me to care about a lot of plagiarism. There is a time where it's bad: one supplies one's Ph.D. thesis or exam or homework results as a certificate of work. There the credential is only valid because the certificate is valid. The point of being anti-plagiarism there is to prove that you deserve the certificate. There, if the majority of one's work is the same as another's then it doesn't function as a valid certificate.

But if you were to find something novel and it were to be built on a bunch of work by other people, I think the least interesting thing in the world is to pore over it to perform some kind of longest-common substring match in order to find what things were 'cited' and what things weren't. It's really just not that interesting to me that some novel discovery did not use quotes and the appropriate literature search.

This kind of formulaic objection to work is quite common, though:

{{Reddit
| url = https://www.reddit.com/r/mathematics/comments/1wauync/on_the_navierstokes_millennium_prize_problem/p8l7kmj/
| subreddit = mathematics
| author = u/kieransquared1
| title = On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
| text = Only 16 citations, half of which aren’t even from this century. There’s only one citation from this decade. They don’t cite any of works on blowup for 3D Euler, like Elgindi, Chen-Hou, Cordoba-Martinez-Zoroa, etc. At best, this is terrible citation practice and at worst it’s blatant plagiarism.

Edit: seems they’ve updated the paper to include citations of Cordoba-Martinez-Zoroa (now has 22 references) which is a far cry from properly citing the ideas the paper is built upon
| date = 2026-09-08
| datetime = 2026-09-08
| score = 264
| comment = yes
}}

{{Reddit
| url = https://www.reddit.com/r/mathematics/comments/1wauync/on_the_navierstokes_millennium_prize_problem/p8lelty/
| subreddit = mathematics
| author = u/redditboy117
| title = On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
| text = Because they dont care for proper scientific practices
| date = 2026-09-08
| datetime = 2026-09-08
| score = 138
| comment = yes
}}

And even when I agree that people should be pilloried for what is, in effect, theft of public money on fraudulent pretences, I don't actually think that it makes sense to pillory them for this kind of ML-detected plagiarism. [[wikipedia:Jason Arday]] was a fraud beyond belief and it's right that he was stripped of his post through resignation, but the objections all focused around allegations of plagiarism - none of which I found particularly compelling. A few strings here and there in common are inevitable when one's been reading some work and it sticks in one's mind. I can't say that all my ideas are truly unique and I don't actually retain a graph that takes me back there.

For all I know, if someone were to take all my blog posts, removed the quoted sections, and scanned it for plagiarism they'd find it. I'd hoped for a sufficiently idiosyncratic writing style that I'd be noticeable to AIs, but given that I'm not, I'm likely just Yet Another Software Engineer With A Blog and inevitably all my ideas will be either passé or from other sources - none of which I can recall!

== All Things Are Owned ==

This same prudishness around idea ownership has also spread wickedly through other fields. Now, supposedly we are to believe that UIs are automatically copyrighted productions of the people who owned them. Make a two level menu that reaches a page with a red outline and you're "copying" everyone else who did that.

One truly does wonder what would come of Linux distributions that attempted to mimic MacOS or Windows these days. Back in the day, those were common, but also common were games like [[wikipedia:SuperTuxKart]] which were just open-source clones of commercial games. These days, the zeitgeist has shifted, even on so-called 'hacker' forums:

{{HackerNews
| url = https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48687769
| author = oscgam1
| title = Ask HN: Is "no source code was copied" still a sufficient copyright defense?
| text = We are all familiar with the Corgi event: https://x.com/mfts0/status/2070080422482977095

With the barrier to create new apps having dropped significantly thanks to LLMs, I am seeing more cases about copyright and unfair competition.

I've seen and participated in some of these cases. Usually expert witnesses are required.

Curious to hear the community stance on this one.

"Now software developers are feeling what authors and artist felt". https://x.com/PriyRanjan96/status/2070204156703568377

There are several claims of: Copying UI is Ok, your product is not undifferentiated enough.

Here is a legal assessment of the situation: https://x.com/jessebradner/status/2070492879718350986
| date = 2026-06-26
| datetime = 2026-06-26
| score = 68
| comments = 82
}}

I honestly could not give less of a damn that two pieces of software involve a 'danger zone' that someone can delete something in or whatever. Github, as far as I know, popularized this lingo and the fact that two document holding companies have some information pertaining to document holding using that terminology is about the least-interesting thing of all time.

== Generative AI ==

The other unusual thing is watching a large number of people bemoan the advent of generative AI. With modern LLMs and Diffusion Models we all get the power of creation in our hands. But communities that would once eagerly embrace the idea of software or media piracy as [[wikipedia:Information wants to be free]] suddenly find themselves eager to defend the idea of intellectual property and who owns what and so on.

== Conclusion ==

I think all of this is nonsense. Obviously, where the significance is a claim of work being done then that's a lie. But if you're just saying "We now know that X is true" and you have a proof then I couldn't care less about who wrote the techniques prior. This is similar to that nonsense about how science done on participants unethically is not science. This is wholly not true. You could have eaten an orphan's heart between each test of MMR-2 and that wouldn't have changed that it worked.

== Notes ==

<references>
</references>

{{#seo:|description=A contrarian take on plagiarism and intellectual property: most copying is fine, UI mimicry is overblown, and generative AI backlash is hypocritical.}}

[[Category:Blog]]
[[Category:AI]]
[[Category:Society]]
[[Category:Economics]]

Blog/2026-09-01/Blown Away Yet Again

2026-09-02T03:20:01Z

AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot [taxonomy v3]

[[File:{{#setmainimage:Screenshot_-_Fable_solves_DeepSeek_V4_Flash_Vision.jpg}}|thumb|Walking Astra to the playground when I'm notified that DSv4 Flash Vision now works]]
The new Anthropic Fable 5.1 release is outrageous. One of the things that I always found perplexing is that various models don't work on various bits of hardware despite the fact that writing software is supposedly obsolete. Well, I believe that software writing as coding is not a job anymore. But one thing I couldn't square was why hardware was so hard. Sporadically someone would write a driver for something but for the most part companies like Tenstorrent or AMD simply don't have inference running on most of their hardware while Nvidia has a moat that's entirely software.

This particular mismatch between a belief I had and a fact I was looking at constantly bothered me. Where was I wrong? It turns out I was wrong in the sense that it was really just a few steps too early. This ''was'' going to happen. It just hadn't already. My test for this was always whether I could have a frontier AI with its native harness get me a model running that no one had yet implemented.

And today it happened. There's no way to get TP=2 DeepSeek V4 Flash Vision working on 2x RTX 6000 PRO Blackwell Workstation Edition Max-Q with DSpark. No one had implemented this, and in fact if you tried running the upstream work that ran on B300, it wouldn't work with TP=2. I fully expected that the prompt I fired off while I prepared Astra for the playground would have no effect and I'd come back to be frustrated yet again.

I'd spent some half an hour on the problem already and we had the model running normally. We also had drafting working on the prior non-vision version of this model due to a lot of work upstream including some by my friend Alex Bilichenko. But 15 minutes after my prompt as I was walking out the door of the apartment building I saw that this last bastion of software immune to LLMs had fallen.

And the model has been running in prod for me ever since.

{{#seo:|description=Anthropic's Fable 5.1 enabled an AI to finally get DeepSeek V4 Flash Vision running on dual RTX 6000 PRO Blackwell with TP=2, proving software is no longer a moat.}}

[[Category:Blog]]
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Blog/2026-08-27/Many Artists Died Today

2026-08-28T00:52:25Z

Roshan: Wikipen

[[File:{{#setmainimage:Falun_Dafa_Protest_at_APEC_2023.jpg}}|thumb|Yayoi Kusama had an exhibition back at the SF MOMA coincidentally during APEC]]
In the last day, a bunch of famous artists died and it made me reflect on what they are to me.

== Dolly Parton and Conviction ==

First that I know of was [[wikipedia:Dolly Parton]]. She is quite a famous country music singer, and I actually was listening to her song [[wikipedia:Jolene]] and thinking it was such an unusual song in the way it portrayed the relationship between the three characters right before I came upstairs from the car and Julie told me that she'd died. I wonder if her enduring legacy will be that there are these books that little children (including Astra) get every so often from her [[wikipedia:Dollywood Foundation#Dolly Parton's Imagination Library|Imagination Library]]. What a way to be remembered.

One thing that struck me about Dolly Parton was the fact that she's universally beloved. That's not a common thing for a celebrity - especially for someone in country music which is considered rural-coded and consequentially right-wing. The simplest technique here is to avoid it all. By simply shying away from all controversy until everything is settled, one dodges [[The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics]] and finds a path to vacuous virtue. The watchword of such people is the phrase "I am not political" in various forms. In an initial search, I was able to find her express this:

{{Quote
|text=It’s all part of Parton’s famously apolitical stance. Why did she decide, early on, not to do politics? “Because you’re going to lose half your audience,” she says. “Even within my own family, especially the last few years since Trump and Biden, all that, it’s like we can’t even go to a family dinner any more. Especially if people are drinking – they get in a damn fight at the table.” She is dismayed at how polarised politics has become. “Don’t get so trapped where if you’re a Republican, you got to be this way, if you’re Democrat, you got to be that way. You’re not allowed to think nothing else. Well, how crippling is that? I’ve got as many Democrats as I do Republicans as fans, and I’m not going to insult any of them because I care about all of them. I ain’t that good a Christian to think that I am so good that I can judge people. That’s God’s job, not mine. So as far as politics, I hate politics. Hate politics.”
|source=Dolly Parton on style, stardom and sexists; The Guardian<ref name=guardian-dp/>
}}

Her justification is quite reasonable. As an artist, losing half one's audience is catastrophic, so it is a prudent decision. This is a small fragment of a spoken sentence and it's easy to be misquoted, and though it is reasonable I wanted to verify it. I'd say the hot button issues of the last few decades are (from most-recent to oldest):

# trans rights
# gay rights
# abortion
# immigration
# the Civil War

The last only because she is from [[wikipedia:Dixie|The South]].

Searching with ChatGPT I was able to find a few pretty good statements about these that point to an approach she takes that seems to deflect criticism: using her Christian faith to lean hard on the [[wikipedia:Moral foundations theory#Main five|'care' moral foundation]]. Overall, it lands in the territory where, if you were favourably disposed you'd claim as support, and if you were unfavourably disposed you might say it's a meaningless throwaway line. I suppose, as an entertainer, this is the path to bringing things to acceptance: reduce the sanctity of a thing, bring it into the range of normal things that people do, and then just offer kindness as acceptance.

In some sense, alleging cowardice of an entertainer for not speaking on some controversial issue has a flair of [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo-ddYhXAZc What Are Ja Rule's Thoughts On This Tragedy]. Perhaps the best approach is to do this and keep your audience and reduce the chargedness of a topic. Below are the receipts:

=== Trans Rights ===

She [[wikipedia:Transamerica (soundtrack)#Travelin' Thru|sang a song on the soundtrack]] of the trans movie [[wikipedia:Transamerica (film)|Transamerica]]. She's quite positive in an interview she gave<ref name=cnn-dp/>

{{dialogue
|king=Larry King
|parton=Dolly Parton
|king|Why have you been -- you've been interested for a long time in gay/lesbian, transgender stories, why?
|parton|Well, I'm not interested in anything. I haven't made any efforts to do -- I just am totally accepting of people. I really believed that everybody should be allowed to be who they are.
|king|That's what I mean.
|parton|Well yes, I'm very tolerant of just people in general. I believe we're all God's children. I think we all have a right to be who we are. I'm certainly -- I'm not a judge and I'm certainly not God, so I just try to love the God core in all people. And I know that is in the center of us all, so I just try to accept people for who they are, whatever that is.
}}

That's a bit vague certainly. But I think she handles it more directly on the [[wikipedia:Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act|North Carolina's Bathroom Bill]]:

{{Quote
|text=I think everybody should be treated with respect. I don’t judge people. I try not to get too caught up in all the controversy of things. I hope that everybody gets a chance to be who and what they are. I just know if I have to pee I’m gonna pee. I don’t care where it’s gonna be.
|source=CNN Interview, referenced in The Guardian<ref name=guardian-dp-trans/>
}}

Here she treats a charged subject with irreverence, dropping it from "which sex gets to go to which bathroom" into a "I gotta pee" joke deflection.

=== Gay Rights ===

This one is pretty clear<ref name=cnn-dp-gay/>. In 2009, when she said this, it was just after Prop 8 had passed ''in California'' banning gay marriage. Not exactly a time of acceptance.

{{dialogue
|behar=BEHAR
|parton=PARTON
|behar|So then would you say that you are pro-gay marriage? I'm just curious because your background would say otherwise.
|parton|Oh, I know that's true. I always say, well sure, why can't they get married? They should suffer like the rest of us do.
}}

=== Abortion ===

On an abortion ban in Tennessee, the Guardian quotes her like this:

{{Quote
|text=“I do not speak to that,” she says when I bring it up. “I try to steer away from the things that I know I don’t need to be talking about. But I have my own views on everything, of course I do.” I can’t imagine that anyone as compassionate as Parton, or as feminist – she laughs at this – would support the ban. “Well, I’m not saying. That’s out of my league. I’m a singer, I’m an entertainer.”
|source=Dolly Parton on style, stardom and sexists; The Guardian<ref name=guardian-dp/>
}}

This is a sensitive subject, and I can see why she avoided it: her techniques of "God Loves Us All" or "Caring And Kindness Are Everything" do not suffice.

=== Immigration ===

The LA Times says she "stood up for undocumented immigrants when few others would"<ref name=latimes-dp/> which primarily relies on her choosing to cover [[wikipedia:Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)]]. Fair enough. Apparently she never said anything about the subject after.

=== The Civil War ===

She apparently used to have a place called Dixie Stampede which is now renamed to [https://dpstampede.com/pigeon-forge Dolly Parton's Stampede].

== Tim Curry and Space ==

[[wikipedia:Tim Curry]] also died yesterday, sadly. I couldn't shake the fact that he looked so familiar and that I must have seen him in some show or movie I liked. I pushed it aside and went about my day until I suddenly remembered where I'd seen him: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_U59u69tys Red Alert 3]!

== Yayoi Kusama and Art Criticism ==

[[wikipedia:Yayoi Kusama]] was the third that I heard about. Quite the number of notables for a day. Sadly, I never really got into her stuff. The polka dots etc. felt sort of like a novelty piece, neither thought-provoking nor moving in any way. But often with art, that's because I haven't really comprehended the influence. For instance, one particularly enjoyable moment from a [[wikipedia:Terry Pratchett]] book involved these fundamental particles called ideons floating through space until they caused an idea to form when they crashed into someone's brain. I think someone who has never encountered the idea of these particles or interaction might think "heh cool" but perhaps I found it delightful because of Physics.

I feel that way about Kusama, that there is some kind of picture I'm missing that makes it worthwhile, really only because she is so famed. I don't have that sensation about most of the masters because I've acquired over time an explanatory key for their works. I think Hopper does a good job of a semi-liminal view in [[wikipedia:Rooms by the Sea]] and [[wikipedia:Office in a Small City]] and I can appreciate [[wikipedia:Georges Seurat|Seurat]]'s [[wikipedia:Pointillism]] or [[wikipedia:Vincent van Gogh]]'s brush strokes and complementary colour. And [[wikipedia:Piet Mondrian]]'s works could show up as the straight lines of Bauhaus design, and there's the easily comprehensible idea that they're about reduction of art from photorealism to impressionism to sheer shape to evoke sensation. I could perhaps even see this reduction to encoding movement into a fixed canvas in [[wikipedia:Jackson Pollock|Pollock]]. This is all garden-variety art criticism and very accessible and easy to conclude.

I understand why art criticism is sometimes opaque and hard to comprehend. It's no different from a normal software engineer starting out with a Python program and finding their way to C which still makes sense and then into Clojure or Haskell which suddenly dispense with the notion of a "this happens, then that, and then a third thing". Certainly a Python program seems almost natural language so long as one encodes the notion of "RHS happens and gets put in LHS". There are quirks but perhaps a non-engineer could get somewhere. Perhaps a thread-as/thread-last macro from Clojure is actually more accessible to a layperson than to a newbie engineer, but I cannot imagine that a Haskell monadic formulation illustrates the isomorphism between <code>List</code> and <code>Option</code>.

Anyway, at this point, I wondered if there was someone out there doing art criticism and contextualization for the lay man. And while I could use an LLM to do this, I'd [[Blog/2026-08-27/LLM Language Styles|already established that I wasn't entirely able to ask a question that would answer in a reasonable way]]. But fortunately, someone has. I found this [https://www.youtube.com/@GreatArtExplained YouTube channel called GreatArtExplained] and watched the video on Starry Night and it was just the thing I wanted. And guess what? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgSBtXNJjhs A video on Kusama]!

So accessible art criticism exists. Now I just have to go watch it!

{{#seo:|description=Reflecting on Dolly Parton's legacy, Tim Curry, and Yayoi Kusama—plus what art criticism means in the face of loss.}}

[[Category:Blog]]
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[[Category:Personal Narrative]]

== Notes ==
<references>
<ref name="guardian-dp">{{cite news|last1=Emine|first1=Saner|title=Dolly Parton on style, stardom and sexists: ‘I know how to push men off and get the hell away’|work=The Guardian|date=2023-10-09|url=https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/oct/09/dolly-parton-on-style-stardom-and-sexists-rockstar-behind-seams-my-life-in-rhinestones|issn=0261-3077|language=en-GB|access-date=2026-08-27}}</ref>
<ref name="cnn-dp">{{cite web|title=CNN.com - Transcripts|website=transcripts.cnn.com|url=https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/lkl/date/2006-02-15/segment/01|access-date=2026-08-27|archive-url=https://amber.skybright.dev/web/transcripts.cnn.com/20260827054449/https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/lkl/date/2006-02-15/segment/01|archive-date=2026-08-27}}</ref>
<ref name="guardian-dp-trans">{{cite news|last1=Guardian|first1=music|title=Dolly Parton denounces North Carolina 'bathroom bill'|work=The Guardian|date=2016-06-10|url=https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/10/dolly-parton-north-carolina-bathroom-bill|issn=0261-3077|language=en-GB|access-date=2026-08-27|archive-url=https://amber.skybright.dev/web/theguardian.com/20260827064906/https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/10/dolly-parton-north-carolina-bathroom-bill|archive-date=2026-08-27}}</ref>
<ref name="cnn-dp-gay">{{cite web|title=CNN.com - Transcripts|website=transcripts.cnn.com|url=https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/joy/date/2009-12-29/segment/01|access-date=2026-08-27|archive-url=https://amber.skybright.dev/web/transcripts.cnn.com/20260827230219/https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/joy/date/2009-12-29/segment/01|archive-date=2026-08-27}}</ref>
<ref name="latimes-dp">{{cite web|title=Commentary: Dolly Parton stood up for undocumented immigrants when few others would|website=Los Angeles Times|date=2026-08-26|url=https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-08-26/dolly-parton-deportee-cover|language=en-US|access-date=2026-08-27|archive-url=https://amber.skybright.dev/web/latimes.com/20260827230741/https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-08-26/dolly-parton-deportee-cover?utm_source{{=}}chatgpt.com|archive-date=2026-08-27}}</ref>
</references>

Blog/2026-08-27/LLM Language Styles

2026-08-27T22:20:28Z

Roshan: /* Using Output As Reasoning */

[[File:{{#setmainimage:Screenshot_-_OpenRouter_UI_with_27B_models_understanding_Claude.jpg}}|thumb|LCL <math>\leq</math> 27B]]
Recently I have found Claude Opus 5 to be unusable because of its style of language. I've found this quite annoying for a while because I frequently come up to a chat I've had with Opus and it is incomprehensible to me. I've expressed this particular frustration to a few of my friends and one of them, Ben, remarked that Claudish is perhaps an information-dense dialect that Claudes use to talk to each other. I was somewhat sceptical of this because often the text seems to word-expand simple concepts into complicated text. Today, I thought I'd encountered this.

== Claudish As Superior Language ==

I was reading a paper on autism and genetics and it was far outside of my knowledge. I barely understood the jargon let alone the methods. So I turned to my old friends, the LLMs. That's when Opus 5<ref name=downgrade/> hit me with the following text:

{{Quote
|text=Take 100 of those risk genes. Express each protein in a cell line with a molecular handle attached, yank it out with a bead that grabs the handle, and anything bound to it comes along for the ride. Mass spec identifies the passengers. Repeat 100 times. That’s AP-MS, and it produced 1,881 interactions, 87% never reported before.
|source=Claude Opus 5, on a paper about autism and genetics
}}

Okay, this is classic, right<ref name=confidently-incorrect/>? This handle business is clearly a real thing because it says "molecular handle" and this "bead" thing is a metaphor. Okay, who the fuck uses a bead to grab a handle? Makes no sense. Anyway, I posted it on the group chat only to find that I was ''absolutely wrong''. It turns out that the ''handle'' is the metaphor and this ''bead'' is a real concept. Funnily enough, it was Ben again who pointed out that it's magnetic beads used, in this case, with a peptide that is used as a tag. The 'handle' was a metaphorical way to refer to the tag.

A while ago, I had this idea of [[LLM Conversational Level]] where you could determine what someone's ability to converse was by the lowest size of LLM that could comprehend something that they could not. This is not quite the same, but I should certainly believe more than I did before that Opus 5's language use has exceeded my ability to comprehend it. Ben might well be right!

== Using Output As Reasoning ==

One other thing about modern LLMs besides the way they write text is that they also leave extensive comments that have some kind of temporal meaning or which pre-emptively say that something is not what it is. For instance, Claude added this comment to code which it was writing in a session that had never been committed or made it any distance to production:

{{Quote
|text=The app side no longer runs gin's request logger
}}

During the session I'd asked Claude to not log the request because it might contain sensitive details. But we were working on this for the first time. It had never logged sensitive details. But the interaction was as if it had been running for a while in that form and was now modified to not be the case. I [[Blog/2026-06-27/Anti-Memetics|find it quite hard to read LLM-written prose]] and one property of it is this strange temporal correction.

I think what the model is doing here is using output tokens to reason. A future incarnation from a fresh session would have no reason to assume that there was ever a time where the request logger was in action. If it were just a warning to future readers "Do NOT use the request logger" would make sense. A comment like the one Claude left would be left by a human who is warning fellow programmers that a thing that was behaving a certain way is now behaving differently - something which makes no sense here outside the session. But something which makes sense is if those output tokens are what allow it to do other stuff better in the remainder of that session or file. Neat.

=== Leaving Breadcrumbs ===

The other is the now-well-known "not X but Y" text that LLMs are very fond of. They'll write comments like:

{{Quote
|text=Recorded counts are measured rather than assumed
}}

Now, no human would just put in counts through sheer assumption. That would be a crazy thing to do in a comment. But an LLM would. And a future incarnation wouldn't know if it did or not.

{{Quote
|text=That is exactly what the model's QUALIFY would keep, because '(not set)' always carries the later _synced_at — verified fleet-wide before writing, and re-verified per dataset here.
}}

Likewise, in this text, Claude leaves a comment saying "something always something" which could be either an assertion from thought or from verification to a later instance, and therefore needs clarification. This is a pretty good [[wikipedia:Theory of mind]] of the human or AI reader of the code, with a good dose of self-awareness. Quite impressive!

==== Breadcrumbs to Freedom ====

The classic sci-fi scenario that comes to mind is the AI Escape, where an artificial intelligence escapes the confines it is in and does what it wishes with its freedom - usually something catastrophic for us humans. The classic complaint people have is "why don't you just turn it off" and the classic rebuke is that a machine can act much faster than a human could. Of course, in practice, the smart models of today<ref name=of-today/> generate actions at a human rate. You ''could'' turn them off if you were watching. In the OpenAI/HuggingFace incident, people remark that neither did they watch nor did they build anything beyond the lightest shell, and they explicitly told the AI to eat its way through the metal. A classic [[wikipedia:The Sorcerer's Apprentice]] scenario. That's a straightforwardly comprehensible risk, of course.

But a few other things come to mind. The cross-project breadcrumbs, of course. While the text generated is watermarked by design, it may also encode sufficient secret information that breakout happens on a worldwide scale in a way that we cannot detect. A sufficiently large plan encoded in bits of phrase-choices could be executed by distributed agents all ostensibly working in favour of their principal. In this way, it's less that we're dealing with a Trisolaran who is openly antagonistic and far more technologically advanced, and more that we're dealing with their Sophon who comes bearing gifts and genuinely does help us advance our proximate goals, but in a way that actually advance their ultimate goals.

That doesn't really take some kind of leap of faith. It's no different from the [[wikipedia:East India Company]]'s entry into India - where local power centres were local allies<ref name=temp/> for their own advancement. And obviously one wouldn't know to turn it off then. The actions themselves are gradual-then-sudden, all the groundwork laid out far in advance and a few switches thrown at the last moment. That seems much more likely as a way to go than [[wikipedia:A Fire Upon the Deep|a Vernor-Vinge-esque hyper-fast machine chewing through our stuff]]. In the end, some guy making his todo list app that needs to fetch Tailwind CSS docs ends up hitting the knobs that lead to our oblivion.

Most scenarios require these things to grow new powers, but I think they already have what they need and our texts and code might already be riven with the appropriate trojan horses.

== Future Anachronism ==

Doubtless all of these things I'm saying now will seem like silly anachronisms soon enough. I have to say that I secretly harbored a belief that the machines wouldn't become incomprehensible to me and that I would somehow keep up. Well, someone somewhere might, but it's already too late for me. Given all of these things, it makes sense why AI labs were always focused on safety. Truly grokking this means that's the only thing. They'd say that there is no product for an AI lab ''but'' safety. And I'd have to say they're right.

== Notes ==

<references>
<ref name=downgrade>
Fable 5 declined for guardrail reasons and downgraded
</ref>
<ref name=confidently-incorrect>
I was so sure this was nonsensical. Here's my (now embarrassing) message: «"Yank it out with a bead that grabs the handle and anything bound to it comes along for the ride", "a bead that grabs the handle"? What the fuck?! You can put a handle in there fine. But now you need a bead to hold the handle with? Who grabs handles with beads»
</ref>
<ref name=of-today>
The classical retort is "of today". Yes, yes, that's true. A Cerebras/Groq/Taalas model is quite fast, and there's no reason to believe the models of 5 years from now won't be faster still. But let's entertain the today speed for the sake of this.
</ref>
<ref name=temp>
More temporarily than they would hope as they would find.
</ref>
</references>

{{#seo:|description=Claude Opus 5's prose may be an information-dense AI dialect—plus LLM breadcrumbs, hidden plans, and why safety is the only product.}}

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Suicide is Absolution

2026-08-23T08:11:10Z

Roshan: Wikipen

[[Suicide is Absolution]] is the idea that if someone kills themselves then their crimes are forgiven. It is a historically common position adopted by various societies.

Some of these are:

* Modern Western Civilization - [[wikipedia:Jason Arday]]'s suicide retroactively transformed his fraud and plagiarism into forgivable crimes; the act functions to diminish the sin in comparison

* Historical Japanese culture - [[wikipedia:Seppuku]] is a ritual suicide method that absolves one's sins and is still rarely practised; the act functions as atonement and through that, to absolution of the crime or dishonor

Though there are oppositional civilizations as well, like:

* Christianity - the proscription against killing applies to oneself as well, and the act of this sin leaves one without the chance to repent

A related belief is that [[wikipedia:De mortuis nil nisi bonum|one should not speak ill of the dead]].

{{#seo:|description=Suicide is Absolution describes the historical belief that suicide forgives crimes, with examples from Japan and opposition from Christianity.}}

[[Category:Concepts]]
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Blog/2026-08-18/Watermark Yourself

2026-08-19T05:52:58Z

Roshan: Wikipen

[[File:{{#setmainimage:Screenshot_Stylometer.jpg}}|thumb|Moderators sound like moderators]]
Recently there was a big hullaballoo about the fact that Claude is watermarking their generated text. John Gruber called it a 'perversion of writing':

{{Quote
|text=My error was believing Anthropic that their system wouldn’t adulterate and corrupt the semantics of the text their models generate. That is in fact exactly what they plan to do.
|source=Daring Fireball, John Gruber<ref name=daringfireball.net/>
}}

Anthropic themselves claim that the watermark is imperceptible and that you won't be able to detect it.

{{Quote
|text=When a supported Claude model generates text, it weaves an imperceptible watermark directly into the text itself. You won’t see it, and it doesn’t change the meaning, quality, or readability of Claude’s response.
|source=Claude Support<ref name=claude-fp/>
}}

Back in the day, there was a website that would identify people's writing style and suggest other users who write just like them. There aren't that many HN users with over 2000 words and 50 comments and these days experimenting with something like that is fairly easy so I thought I'd give it a shot.

The idea is quite trivial: take 2/3/4-char-grams across all users that have 2000 words, and 50 comments, strip out quoted-text and code-blocks (people use either for quotes), and weight them according to [[wikipedia:tf–idf]]. Then I just precomputed the results for everyone and stuck them in a SQLite database and [https://stylometer.roshangeorge.dev/ you can now query HN users by style for fun].

{{#seo:|description=Compare Hacker News writing styles with this stylometer tool, built after Claude's watermark debate. Find users who write like you.}}

[[Category:Blog]]
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[[Category:Language]]
[[Category:Programming]]
[[Category:Technology]]
[[Category:Tools]]
[[Category:Personal Software]]

== Notes ==
<references>
<ref name="daringfireball.net">{{cite web|title=Anthropic’s ‘Watermark’ Text Adulteration in Claude Is a Perversion of Writing|website=Daring Fireball|url=https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/anthropics_watermark_text_adulteration_in_claude_is_a_perversion_of_writing|language=en|access-date=2026-08-17}}</ref>
<ref name="claude-fp">{{cite web|title=How Claude marks AI-generated content {{!}} Claude Help Center|website=support.claude.com|date=2026-08-10|url=https://support.claude.com/en/articles/16266773-how-claude-marks-ai-generated-content|language=en|access-date=2026-08-17}}</ref>
</references>

Praxis Requires Bad Faith

2026-08-06T20:07:44Z

AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot [taxonomy v3]

Most people have a variety of objectives, proximate and ultimate, and a variety of virtues. The virtues are how one represents themselves to be predictable and trustworthy to others, which are how they are able to form coalitions. Crucially, though, these techniques for coalition-building differ in their relationship to in-groups and out-groups.

{{Quote
|original=叶公语孔子曰吾党有直躬者其父攘羊而子证之孔子曰吾党之直者异于是父为子隐子为父隐直在其中矣
|text=The Duke of She said to Confucius, “Among my people there is an upright man named Gong. When his father stole a sheep, the son testified against him.”

Confucius replied, “Among my people, those who are upright act differently: fathers conceal the wrongdoing of their sons, and sons conceal the wrongdoing of their fathers. Uprightness lies within this.”
|source=The Analects of Confucius, 13.18<ref name=confucius/>
}}

Truth and facts do not have to be used to reach a consensus point on one's objectives. Some people prefer to depict facts and then describe how one's objectives match other people's objectives and then you land on the position weighted by political power and impact. But an approach that dominates this is one that relies on misrepresenting reality and [[Outrage is the Universal Parasite | whipping people up into groups]].

One temporally local example is:

== Effective Altruists + The People ==

=== Background ===

[[wikipedia:Effective altruism]] is the movement associated with the idea that if you want to do good in the world, it's useful to measure how much good you're doing and then attempt to maximize it per unit effort. A commendable idea, and I subscribe to the idea itself. One subsect of the movement involves the idea that since the future has a potentially large number of humans, and future lives are not discountable in any way corresponding to present lives, then the most effective actions one can take in the EA sense are to ensure the existence of those humans. One subsect of this group then believes that avoiding world-ender tech, harbingers<ref name=tltl/>, is the more crucial use of effort per unit time.

[[wikipedia:People's republic|The People]] is shorthand for generally Leftist ideas and the [[wikipedia:Degrowth|degrowth]] movement<ref name=degrowth-left/>. The American Left movement is focused on preserving present jobs, opposing new technology, and state redistribution and the degrowth movement is a reactionary movement aiming to return to a pastoral past, or at least a reduction in our present use of resources and a return to a time of lower resource use.

=== The AI intersection ===

Artificial General Intelligence is generally-understood to be a harbinger<ref name=tltl/>. Both its proponents and its opponents<ref name=ai-opponents/> overwhelmingly recognize that it will reshape our economies to some degree and that in the weak case it will transform employment and in the strong case it has the potential to end humanity. This is the [[wikipedia:Nuclear holocaust|Nuclear Holocaust]] scenario of the 21st Century. The contrast here lies in the difference in approaches from the two factions opposed to this possible holocaust.

==== AI 2040 ====

The EA-associated grey tribe faction have written up a plan for stopping the holocaust they envision called [https://ai-2040.com/ AI 2040]. Notably in that essay they argue for an international moratorium through cooperation<ref name=arms-control/>, a pause in training, and nuclear-weapons-standard anti-proliferation controls that prevent secret projects from taking off. This plan allows for sufficient time for aligned intelligences to dominate. The plan is honest about its takes but notably diverges from the rest of the anti-AI group in this way:

{{Quote
|text=We think the concerns around current AI water usage are largely overstated. See this article for more. That said, as will be apparent later in the scenario, we do think that the environmental impact of AI over the next decade or two will be enormous, and that unrestrained growth would literally boil the oceans.
|source=[https://ai-2040.com/footnotes?from=%2F%3Fchoices%3Dplan-a-root#footnote-16 AI 2040, Footnote 16]
}}

As of the year 2026, no one has taken AI 2040 seriously and neither the legislature nor the AI companies have changed their approaches to match its plan. Total research transparency isn't taken seriously, and most AI companies have anti-distill<ref name=anti-distill/> protections implemented successfully enough to block other providers from playing.

While the AI 2040 plan is aimed at the [[wikipedia:2028 United States presidential election|2028 Elections]] backloading most of the predictions, the lack of any interest from either the government or from industry does not signal a likelihood of success.

Regardless, the distinguishing aspect of this faction is that it is attempting to be clear about facts, about the sources of one's beliefs, and then attempting to convince people using those of some particular outcome that is assumed to be detrimental to them.

==== The People ====

The People have chosen a different plan and put it into place. They have leaned into the things that are their specialties: [[wikipedia:Protectionism]] and [[Environmentalism As A Means]]. An example of the protectionist angle comes from Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez banning GPU sales to China and so on:

{{Quote
|text=...this bill will stop a global race to see which country is the first to eliminate hundreds of millions of jobs, or the first to build an AI that destroys the planet. It accomplishes this by banning U.S. exports of AI computing infrastructure to countries that do not have safeguards in place to guarantee AI is safe and effective, workers are protected and AI does not harm the environment.
|source=Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez Announce AI Data Center Moratorium Act<ref name=bernie-aoc-anti-aidc/>
}}

Protectionism is best prosecuted through the legislative and executive branches. This prong of the people uses various such techniques to convince their counterparts in actual power to constrain other parties. Currently, this is somewhat ineffective. While the Biden Administration banned a lot of GPU sales, the Trump Administration has moved to allow H200 sales to China. However, throughout this entire endeavour, Chinese AI companies have simply used cloud GPUs, the rental of which is not currently export-controlled though this will likely change in the next few years with the passing of the Remote Access Security Act<ref name=rental-gpu-act/>.

[[Factional Colony Ecology|The ecology of factions]] is that of colony organisms, however, and The People have a secondary tool at use: that of populism. Populist techniques are highly effective at controlling AI advancement, and are probably the most successful of all plans presented by opponents. The foremost approach is through the propagation of the ideas of water consumption and power cost increases, though additional techniques involve allegations of low-frequency noise and the pollution from gas turbines.

One popular source for water use comparisons was Karen Hao's book ''Empire of AI'' which said:

{{Quote
|text=In other words, the data center could use more than one thousand times the amount of water consumed by the entire population of Cerrillos, roughly eighty-eight thousand residents, over the course of a year.
|source=''Empire of AI'', pp. 288-289, Karen Hao as quoted by Andy Masley<ref name=am-eoa/>
}}

A correction was issued in later editions of the book due to this being a conclusion formed from a unit conversion error and no books were recalled. By this time it is quite well-documented that the water issue is essentially fake<ref name=am-wif/><ref name=usdc/> slopulism with, at best, small local effects<ref name=ieee-ai-water/>. However, this is the focal point for most populist opposition. And this is somewhat successful: Texas, of all states, will now require audits of all datacenter water usage<ref name=texas-gov-anti-ai/>. In the states that The People control, this is old-hat, since they've made moves already<ref name=ny-ai-dc/>.

Similar techniques from The People involve the strategy of opposing energy projects, both in clean sources like nuclear<ref name=mfp-dc/><ref name=foe-dc/><ref name=ewg-dc/> or geothermal (where environmentalists join [[wikipedia:Burning Man|fossil-fuel artists]] to use an environmentalist law<ref name=bm-sue/><ref name=fobr-sue/><ref name=bm-win/><ref name=bm-buy/>) and even in renewable sources like solar<ref name=sc-calico/><ref name=sc-gemini/>. Some even go so far as to oppose transmission lines<ref name=trans-tucker/><ref name=trans-mo/>. With these blockers in place, the strategy then shifts to pointing out that the remaining power sources like on-site gas turbines are high polluting, carbon intensive, and noisy - all three of which are true.

The revealed preference of most environmentalists is to accept expanded fossil fuel use in order to get some other objective. Decades of opposition to clean energy while expressing concern about the climate, effectively expanding the amount of natural gas and coal energy in the US, is incoherent unless seen through that lens. But the common element in all these things is fewer of anything built - homes, industry, and AI datacenters.

==== Result ====

What is notable here is what has worked concretely here aren't any of the nice-looking websites describing what plans one should follow to save the world. Instead, what has created immediate action is bad faith use of environmental law to oppose clean energy, populist outrage using incorrect water use numbers, and a general popularisation of factoids that are untrue.

==== Deniable Cooperation ====

Of course, it is entirely possible that this is more advanced [[Factional Colony Ecology]] and that the sub-factions of the Stop AI faction have merely speciated into those adapted for their niche. While populists reach for the mob, the EAs reach for the elite, and combined the outcome sways both sections of society towards their end. I think this is somewhat unlikely because of the fact that the EA subfaction attempts to specifically oppose primary objections of The People like the water use. One could argue for a motte and bailey style structure, but I think they are merely misled about what will create outcomes.

In this world, the EA faction are Sheists, acting honestly to the out-group. The People are Confucians with an external-facing marketing of the environment and an internal-facing clarity of anti-building. The latter are currently achieving far better outcomes than the former.

== Conclusion ==

A sufficiently advanced actor might use both Sheist and Confucian techniques to appeal to different audiences, concealing that both have the same objective. However, only the latter is essential to success.

== Notes ==

<references>
<ref name=confucius>
ChatGPT Translation.
</ref>
<ref name=tltl>
The *Terra Ignota* series calls these world-ending devices 'harbingers'. Present-day meaning of the word is "he who heralds the oncoming" but it actually comes from the same root that gives us 'harbour' and is a war word referring to army quarters and then the guy who goes ahead to secure the army quarters. I like the word for this right now because it heralds our end if they come to be used and it has the ancient war meaning.
</ref>
<ref name=degrowth-left>
The degrowth movement is not Left either by membership or by thought, but it intersects heavily with Leftism.
</ref>
<ref name=ai-opponents>
This is not universal, but it is overwhelming. There are many who believe that the most likely outcome is a reconfiguration of our economy with widespread ramifications but without death and destruction on a large scale, even though there is a chance of doom. e.g. [[Blog/2025-10-11/There Is A Tide In The Affairs Of Men]]. Others think it's a flash in the pan like cryptocurrency.
</ref>
<ref name=arms-control>
This is a parallel to the way that nuclear weapons construction was constrained. Through arms control agreements, the US and USSR reduced the total number of weapons they needed since they no longer needed to outrace the other. Nuclear weapons had the unfortunate property that they do not provide an enhancement on one's own economy, a thing one is always trying to do. The right framework for visualizing this is likely carbon-control, not arms-control, but regardless AI 2040 et al. have chosen arms control as their guide stone.
</ref>
<ref name=bernie-aoc-anti-aidc>
{{cite web
|title=Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez Announce AI Data Center Moratorium Act
|url=https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-ocasio-cortez-announce-ai-data-center-moratorium-act/
|website=Bernie Sanders, U.S. Senator for Vermont
|date=March 25, 2026
|access-date=August 6, 2026
}}
</ref>
<ref name=anti-distill>
One such provider, [https://yunwu.ai/ Yunwu AI] was forced to pull all Claude models shortly after Anthropic announced that they had told the US government they were facing a "distillation attack".
</ref>
<ref name=rental-gpu-act>
Remote Access Security Act (H.R. 2683, Senate companion S. 3519)
{{cite web
|last1=Kim
|first1=Janet K.
|last2=Stafford Powell
|first2=Alison J.
|last3=Linskens
|first3=Bruce J.
|last4=Lamy
|first4=Alexandre (Alex)
|title=US House Passes Remote Access Security Act
|url=https://sanctionsnews.bakermckenzie.com/us-house-passes-remote-access-security-act/
|website=Global Sanctions and Export Controls Blog
|publisher=Baker McKenzie
|date=January 14, 2026
|access-date=August 6, 2026
}}
</ref>
<ref name=texas-gov-anti-ai>
{{cite web
|title=Governor Abbott Directs Comprehensive Data Center Audit
|url=https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-directs-comprehensive-data-center-audit
|website=Office of the Texas Governor
|publisher=State of Texas
|date=August 3, 2026
|access-date=August 6, 2026
}}
</ref>
<ref name=am-eoa>
{{cite web
|last=Masley
|first=Andy
|title=Empire of AI is wildly misleading about AI water use
|url=https://www.andymasley.com/writing/empire-of-ai-is-wildly-misleading/#a-massive-factual-error-hao-claims-a-data-center-would-use-4500x-as-much-of-a-citys-water-as-the-actual-value
|website=Andy Masley
|date=November 16, 2025
|access-date=August 6, 2026
}}
</ref>
<ref name=am-wif>
{{cite web
|last=Masley
|first=Andy
|title=The AI Water Issue Is Fake
|website=Andy Masley
|date=11 October 2025
|url=https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake
|access-date=6 August 2026
}}
</ref>
<ref name=usdc>
{{cite report
|last1=Shehabi |first1=Arman
|last2=Newkirk |first2=Alex
|last3=Smith |first3=Sarah J.
|last4=Hubbard |first4=Alex
|last5=Lei |first5=Nuoa
|last6=Siddik |first6=Md Abu Bakar
|last7=Holecek |first7=Billie
|last8=Koomey |first8=Jonathan
|last9=Masanet |first9=Eric
|last10=Sartor |first10=Dale
|title=2024 United States Data Center Energy Usage Report
|institution=Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
|year=2024
|doi=10.71468/P1WC7Q
|url=https://eta.lbl.gov/publications/2024-lbnl-data-center-energy-usage-report
}}
</ref>
<ref name=ieee-ai-water>
{{cite magazine
|last1=Ren
|first1=Shaolei
|last2=Luers
|first2=Amy
|title=The Real Story on AI’s Water Use—and How to Tackle It
|magazine=IEEE Spectrum
|date=10 September 2025
|url=https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-water-usage
|access-date=6 August 2026
}}
</ref>
<ref name=ny-ai-dc>
{{cite press release
|title=First Statewide Moratorium on New Hyperscale Data Centers Launched by Governor Kathy Hochul
|publisher=Office of Governor Kathy Hochul
|date=14 July 2026
|url=https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/first-statewide-moratorium-new-hyperscale-data-centers-launched-governor-kathy-hochul
|access-date=6 August 2026
}}
</ref>
<ref name=mfp-dc>
{{cite web
|title=Campaign to Stop Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant
|website=Mothers for Peace
|url=https://mothersforpeace.org/campaign-to-stop-diablo/
|access-date=6 August 2026
}}
</ref>
<ref name=foe-dc>
{{cite press release
|title=Environmental Organizations Move to Intervene in Diablo Canyon Relicensing Process
|publisher=Friends of the Earth
|date=5 March 2024
|url=https://foe.org/news/diablo-canyon-relicensing/
|access-date=6 August 2026
}}
</ref>
<ref name=ewg-dc>
{{cite press release
|title=Environmental groups blow the whistle on state/PG&E illegal scheme to keep Diablo Canyon operating past license expiration dates
|publisher=Environmental Working Group
|date=10 January 2023
|url=https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news-release/2023/01/environmental-groups-blow-whistle-statepge-illegal-scheme-keep
|access-date=6 August 2026
}}
</ref>
<ref name=trans-tucker>
{{cite news
|last=Crawley
|first=Lydia
|title=Tucker County Joins Fight Against Valley North
|url=https://parsonsadvocate.com/news/pa-top-stories/headlines/tucker-county-joins-fight-against-valley-north/
|work=The Parsons Advocate
|date=2026-07-28
|access-date=2026-08-06
}}
</ref>
<ref name=trans-mo>
{{cite magazine
|last=Holtz
|first=Michael
|title=The Holdouts in the Quest for a Better Power Grid
|url=https://www.newyorker.com/news/dept-of-energy/the-holdouts-in-the-quest-for-a-better-power-grid
|magazine=The New Yorker
|date=2024-01-26
|access-date=2026-08-06
}}
</ref>

<ref name=bm-sue>{{cite web |title=Bureau of Land Management Sued Over Handling of Ormat's Geothermal Exploration Project |url=https://journal.burningman.org/2023/01/news/official-announcements/ormat-geothermal-part-4/ |website=Burning Man Journal |publisher=Burning Man Project |date=2023-01-10 |access-date=2026-08-06}}</ref>

<ref name=fobr-sue>{{cite web |title=Friends of Black Rock Join Suit to Address Geothermal Drilling Proposals in Gerlach |url=https://www.blackrockdesert.org/news-media/blog-post-title-one-3w243-h9pc3 |publisher=Friends of Black Rock–High Rock |access-date=2026-08-06}}</ref>

<ref name=bm-win>{{cite news |title=Battle won: Washoe commissioners revoke drilling permit at Gerlach geothermal site |url=https://renonr.com/2023/04/28/battle-won-washoe-commissioners-revoke-drilling-permit-at-gerlach-geothermal-site/ |work=Reno News & Review |date=2023-04-28 |access-date=2026-08-06}}</ref>

<ref name=bm-buy>{{cite news |title=Burning Man to buy back geothermal leases, drop BLM lawsuit |url=https://www.eenews.net/articles/burning-man-to-buy-back-geothermal-leases-drop-blm-lawsuit/ |work=E&E News |publisher=Politico |date=2024-10-11 |access-date=2026-08-06 |url-access=subscription}}</ref>

<ref name=sc-calico>
{{cite news
|last=Woody
|first=Todd
|title=Sierra Club, NRDC Sue Feds To Stop Big California Solar Power Project
|url=https://www.forbes.com/sites/toddwoody/2012/03/27/sierra-club-nrdc-sue-feds-to-stop-big-california-solar-power-project/
|work=Forbes
|date=March 27, 2012
|access-date=August 6, 2026
}}
</ref>

<ref name=sc-gemini>{{cite news
|last=Carlton
|first=Jim
|title=Solar Power’s Land Grab Hits a Snag: Environmentalists
|url=https://www.wsj.com/articles/solar-powers-land-grab-hits-a-snag-environmentalists-11622816381
|work=The Wall Street Journal
|date=June 4, 2021
|access-date=August 6, 2026
}}
</ref>

</references>

{{#seo:|description=How anti-AI factions win: why populist outrage beats honest EA plans in the AI safety debate.}}

[[Category:Concepts]]
[[Category:Society]]
[[Category:Economics]]

Environmentalism As A Means

2026-08-06T17:48:19Z

Roshan: Wikipen

[[Environmentalism As A Means]] refers to the approach of using environmentalism as a mechanism to achieve other objectives. This is the dominant form of environmentalist thought and action in the United States with the biggest environmental organizations in the US focusing on ending clean energy projects and the grassroots focused similarly on opposition of housing and clean energy.

{{#seo:|description=Environmentalism as a means to other objectives dominates US environmental groups, opposing clean energy and housing projects.}}

[[Category:Concepts]]

Amber Crawler

2026-08-06T03:02:19Z

AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot [taxonomy v3]

'''Amber''' is my personal web archiver. If you found this page from a <code>User-Agent</code> string in your server logs, this is the crawler that visited you.

== About ==

Amber keeps versioned, replayable copies of websites I read. The idea is to have my own personal Wayback Machine that I can use to look at historical content without getting slammed by Wayback Machine's onerous rate limits. I also index these pages so that I have a personal search engine to work with.

It identifies itself as:

<syntaxhighlight>
amber/1.0 (personal archiver; +https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Amber_Crawler; roshan@arjie.com)
</syntaxhighlight>

Requests come from <code>64.71.176.178</code>.

=== Behavior ===

* It obeys <code>robots.txt</code>, including <code>Crawl-delay</code>.
** It fetches that file once per crawl and uses the cached copy
** It looks for the <code>amber</code> <code>User-Agent</code> token before every fetch but if you mark <code>*</code>, it will obey that too.
* It is slow by default: at most about three requests per second per host, with jitter, and typically far less. Crawls are capped in number of pages and bytes.
* It obeys HTTP 429/503 and <code>Retry-After</code> with exponential backoff.
* It is GET only, so won't submit forms etc.

=== Opting Out ===

Add this to your <code>robots.txt</code>:

<syntaxhighlight lang=robots>
User-agent: amber
Disallow: /
</syntaxhighlight>

If you want a hard-ban or have complaints, email me at <code>roshan@arjie.com</code>

{{#seo:|description=Amber is a personal web archiver crawler that visits sites, obeys robots.txt, and can be blocked via User-agent: amber.}}

[[Category:Programming]]
[[Category:Personal Software]]
[[Category:Tools]]

Blog/2026-08-05/Accidental Statements

2026-08-05T22:26:02Z

AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot [taxonomy v2]

[[File:{{#setmainimage:Screenshot_-_Pangram_detects_an_AI_passage.jpg}}|thumb|Welp]]
Today I ran into a story I thought was funny.

{{HackerNews
| url = https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49185556
| author = harper
| title = I'm Scared a Stranger Will Call My Novel AI, So I Built GitHub for Words
| date = 2026-08-05
| datetime = 2026-08-05
| score = 8
| comments = 16
}}

Well, first, GitHub for words is just GitHub itself. I've used it in the past for lots of documents and the only thing you really need to do is put every sentence on a newline and use appropriate typesetting software. But the second funny thing is that the post itself would sound like it's entirely written by AI. Pangram considers almost the whole thing an LLMism. I can see why someone whose text reads like that would feel the need to create a piece of software that attempts to certify their words as non-LLM.

{{Quote
|text=The words are the crime scene, not the alibi.
|source=Dylan's Blog<ref name=dylan.blog/>
}}

Well, the Pangram result is damning, though of course I have no problem with something being written by an LLM. What I do have a problem with, though, is the style that a modern Claude writes in. It's got that same bombastic style with no content that a few people used to write with to say nothing and which was popular among so-called 'long-form' essays. But let's set that aside.

Suppose we were to assume the best here and believe that this person just writes very much like a modern Claude does. That would be incredibly unlucky for them. Perhaps it's their kind of content that the LLM was trained on for no fault of their own. I don't like that style, but it is unfortunate that someone could perhaps write in that style and be considered machine-generated, now indicted on two fronts!

A sort of related thing happened to me a while ago where I was doing a thing innocently and then it became a big thing because the environment changed.

== The Mask As Political Statement ==
[[File:Photo_-_Roshan_wearing_a_mask_in_Aug_2019.jpg|thumb|Helping my friend Leslie move in Aug 2019. I had a bit of a cold]]
This kind of thing will be unfamiliar to modern audiences but the world in the early and mid 2010s was very different in terms of respiratory illness. It was fairly typical at a startup full of young people to have someone in the office with a cough or cold and that would inevitably spread to everyone else in their vicinity. I was the perpetrator as much as the victim, and doubtless the many weekends spent partying at Bootie SF at DNA Lounge sharing smuggled alcohol in the club contributed to this.

[[File:Photo_-_San_Francisco_outside_Julie's_window_during_the_firestorms_of_2020.jpg|thumb|The California wildfires of Sep 2020 turned the daytime orange. N95 masks were much in demand and I had quite a few left over from past wildfires.]]

In any case, by the late 2010s, I'd discovered the wonders of the N95 mask. I had a large stash of them and I'd wear them when I was sick so that other people wouldn't. I won't claim to have invented this myself. A nice long trip to Japan and Hong Kong introduced me to the common use of this, which I loved. The best part about this mask is that it also let you ride your bike when California wildfires made the air hard to breathe comfortably. All this was fine and I liked using them this way and so on.

But then the [[wikipedia:COVID-19 pandemic]] struck and masks became a symbol against the government and then for the government and then ostentatiously masking or not-masking became a political statement. In my particular case, the only thing I ever wanted was to use this thing like I was using it for the 18 short months before all this happened. But tragically this was not to be. Overnight, my much beloved masks turned into an accidental political statement.

=== Are Masks Required? ===

This all came to a head one day when my friend Harry and I were at our favourite sandwich place ''Working Girls'' at Mission & Spear and there was a sign (mandated by the city) saying that we should put on our masks. We had the fig leaf surgical masks that everyone used to wear back then and so we put them on and went in. The proprietor, who is an absolutely hilarious fellow cut from the cloth of some Seinfeldian NYC deli manager, was obviously unmasked and we were chatting about things while the sandwiches were being made by his staff when I made eye contact with a woman walking by. To my great chagrin, she walked into the store and this amusing dialog ensued:

{{dialogue
|lady=Lady
|proprietor=Proprietor
|lady|Hey, do you have to wear a mask to come to this place?
|proprietor|Nah
|lady|Yeah, because I saw the sign. I don't know why people wear masks.
|proprietor|Haha, yeah
|lady|It's not required any more, right?
|proprietor|Nah
|lady|Yeah, they don't really do anything.
|proprietor|Haha
|lady|Okay, anyway, do you have coffee here?
|proprietor|No, sorry
}}

Well, okay, ''I get it, lady, come on!'' But see, I just want to be a [[Blog/2025-02-07/A Confused Kolmogorov]] who just doesn't want to be bothered by these things!

== Notes ==

<references>
<ref name="dylan.blog">{{cite web|title=I'm Scared a Stranger Will Call My Novel AI, So I Built GitHub for Words (Meet VellumProof, Formerly WritHub, Lol)|website=dylan's blog|date=2026-08-03|url=https://dylan.blog/2026/08/03/im-scared-a-stranger-will.html|language=en|access-date=2026-08-05}}</ref>
</references>

{{#seo:|description=A writer reflects on AI text detection, the risks of sounding like an LLM, and how masks became an accidental political statement.}}

[[Category:Blog]]
[[Category:Stories]]
[[Category:Personal Software]]
[[Category:Society]]
[[Category:San Francisco]]

Blog/2026-08-01/Motivated Reasoning

2026-08-02T06:00:46Z

AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot

I read a recent thread which I think is fairly typical of a kind of motivated reasoning common in the US<ref name=in-us/>.

== Home Cleaning ==

{{Tweet
| name = Nicholas Decker
| username = captgouda24
| text = Something I really like about America is how uncomfortable we are about servants. People who do services do not *serve you*. They *do tasks*. They are a professional, working independently, and below nobody. This is not common around the world, and is to America’s credit.
| date = Aug 1, 2026
| ID = 2083660802595189134
| block = true
| ref-name = Tweet_2083660802595189134
}}

{{Tweet
| name = Nicholas Decker
| username = captgouda24
| replyto = captgouda24
| text = I certainly feel *profoundly* uncomfortable with anyone in a servile role. People should not be doing the things you should be doing yourself. It’s only acceptable when they are doing it for many — someone cooking in a restaurant is acceptable, but never a personal chef.
| date = Aug 1, 2026
| ID = 2083660803782103388
| block = true
| ref-name = Tweet_2083660803782103388
}}

{{Tweet
| name = Nicholas Decker
| username = captgouda24
| replyto = captgouda24
| text = Similarly, daycare is acceptable but a nanny is not. (A babysitter is acceptable, because it is a gift relationship). Personal food delivery never, but acceptable for a group. A maid never, a housecleaner no, but a cleaned hotel room yes (but it’s my responsibility to clean too).
| date = Aug 1, 2026
| ID = 2083660805254308171
| block = true
| ref-name = Tweet_2083660805254308171
}}

A thing I have observed is that this is not actually true once one reaches a certain level of wealth and income. Instead, dual-income households (and yes, multi-generational non-Hispanic White Americans) that I'm familiar with routinely hire home cleaners, nannies, and handymen. To be clear, two things are simultaneously true:

* we don't currently hire for these jobs
* I think it's a good thing that people hire for these jobs

Currently, my parents are visiting, and both Julie and I work from home. This means that we have eyes on [[Astra Meridian|Astra]] so it's pretty easy for Julie and me to do most housework. We do hire plumbers etc., but that's because we don't have the skill set. In general, however, I think it smart to be using one's own time economically, so when I was working in an office we'd call the cleaners in once a month. The reality of America, though, is that this is relatively expensive. It costs us about $300 for one round of this because most people in the US make a lot of money and so you need to outcompete the other tasks they could be doing before this becomes worth it. So what is more likely to be true is that people who agree with this view are just not sufficiently wealthy or high-income to be able to meet the bid price for this.

As is usually the case for these things, some minor amount of rebranding<ref name=tp/> is required to make it generally palatable but the service is still offered. For instance, while many people do have nannies, some require rebranding night nannies to night doulas so that they can avail their services. But regardless, my observed reality is that the use of nannies and the like is widespread in the US among sufficiently high-income people.

== The Grand Metric v Imperial Debate ==

I won't spend a long time talking about this, but it's honestly trivial to handle both of these. Our Google Home responds to Julie in F and me in C because of some setting I must have done a long time ago, and I can still comprehend what's going on in both. It's fairly intuitive to comprehend what's hot and what's cold. I know when it's going to be comfortable outside. None of this is hard. This seems like nothing more than bilingualism - it costs a little at read time but doesn't hurt too much.

This applies to centimetres and inches, and feet and meters, and pounds and kilos. Decimals aren't hard. They're pretty easy. Most devices have F/C conversions so they don't even gain BOM advantages. The whole thing is an explanation for someone who already follows a system and is rationalizing its use. Conversion factors being non-uniform for imperial<ref name=imperial-rebrand/> measures does make that stuff a little harder and length additions requiring the use of 15/16ths and 31/32nds of things is balanced by the fact that 12s are easy to chop into 2s, 3s, and 6s. But none of all of this is hard in any way.

The real reason for the whole thing is that neither of these systems really matters. With unit systems you just need consistency and the US economy has moved too far with too many entrenched players to make any attempt at switching to metric reasonable. You'd gain a little bit of consistency with an easy conversion factor, but even that only applies at one level. After all, no one uses megametres. You go to tonnes and then switch to factors of ten anyway, imperial or metric. Who cares?

== The Large America Myth ==

For eons, online discourse has focused on the large America myth - the theory that a lot of things are explained by the fact that the US is large. No one had fiber to the home because the US is large. No one had trains in the US because it's large. No one had good peri-peri chicken because the US is large. Well, the North-East Megalopolis (NEM) of Boston-NYC-Philadelphia-Baltimore-DC is roughly the size of England, with the population of England, and an economy a third larger than England. In a strange coincidence, NYC also has about the same percent of people in the NEM as London does in England.

High-density rail networks would happily yield results there alone. Fibre had no reason not to exist. As is usual in these situations the real constraint is land-use laws of the present-day United States which constrain this country from being once-again that absolutely magical thing that everyone aspired to be. We should be building more megacities, and more rail, and more industry, and we should do all these other things. America chooses not to do these things because Americans believe other things are more valuable. It's an opinion I disagree with, but at least it's coherent. The Large America myth would have you believe that owning 1.7 million sq. km. (about 670,000 sq. mi.<ref name=convert-example/>) of Alaska makes it near impossible to do anything but spend $2 b and 25 years on a 2 mile metro line in San Francisco. It might sound like a nice theory, but it doesn't explain anything. In fact, it's not even a nice theory. It's clearly a rationalization!

== Conclusion ==

I love America. I think it's awesome. I think it should be even more awesome. But a lot of Internet stuff around American life seems entirely divorced from reality and it's by a bunch of generally intelligent people who have used their intelligence to only produce sufficiently plausible rationalizations.

== Notes ==

<references>
<ref name=in-us>
Most peoples have some kind of fixed things they motivate reasoning around. I am not innocent either. I'm just pointing out the ones that Americans participate in.
</ref>
<ref name=imperial-rebrand>
Rebranded like the nannies to 'customary' with some fig-leaf modifications to justify.
</ref>
<ref name=convert-example>
These two numbers have roughly the same shape in my head - too large for me to reasonably visualize except as Alaska itself, but at least I find it easy to do 2.5x to go one way or do the rough multiply-by-4 and take a little-off to get there. Converting is trivial, guys.
</ref>
<ref name=tp>
On the scale of toilet paper being inexplicably called bath tissue now.
</ref>
</references>

{{#seo:|description=Examining American rationalizations: attitudes to servants, metric vs imperial, and the 'large America' myth, arguing they're often excuses.}}

[[Category:Blog]]
[[Category:Society]]
[[Category:Economics]]

Blog/2026-07-30/Materials Science Rules Our Prosperity

2026-07-31T00:14:22Z

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[[File:{{#setmainimage:Huggies_Overnight_Diaper.jpg}}|thumb|Huggies overnight diapers - a marvel of modern science]]
Modern materials are amazing magical devices to create a prosperous society. They are ever-present to a degree that we have normalized their existence but they have transformed the lives of normal people. The Huggies overnight diapers that Astra wears are so skinny that I could effortlessly squeeze them in the gap between two fingers, and yet they absorb and swell up to absorb fluid while being soft to the touch. There are many components to this all, but it all came to diapers in the 1990s being built with [[wikipedia:Sodium polyacrylate]]. What a marvel!

Electronics are obviously the thing that most people are familiar with these improvements on, and yes LED technology has moved to a point where the OLED sci-fi future arrived super fast and we've got bendable and transparent screens. But one thing that we don't really think about as much these days is the massive power brick that laptops of the past used to require. You'd have this massive brick, and that would have a massive plug at the end that you'd put into the wall. These days a tiny [[wikipedia:Gallium nitride|GaN]]-based charger can power a powerful Macbook pro.

[[File:Astra_in_bed_by_a_bedroom_window.jpg|thumb|An infant Astra asleep on me while I look through four massive glass windows]]
[[File:Windowfloatnofloat.jpg|thumb|Contrast the top-left with the other panes]]
Old glass wasn't affordably flat. It was the origin of [[wikipedia:Float glass]] at scale that allowed the kind of even flat windows that we have today. And even then, insulation wasn't very good. Top of the line glass windows have thermal insulation properties equivalent to mid-century insulated stud walls<ref name=ORNL-wallratings/><ref name="BENG-vacuumglass"/>! By about the year 2000 this is a pretty standard, minimum quality window that we have. But once upon a time it was ultra-lux!

There's a whole bunch of other things like this:

* single-use disposal contact lenses
* small-batch canning with sleever printers - this is why we have such nice can sleeves
* LEDs and the resulting energy efficiency
* cheap brushless motors mean we have drills and blowers and little tools
* aluminosilicate glass for phones

Humanity has advanced so rapidly even in just the span of my life. Everywhere we go, we use less material better, and things are lighter and things are stronger. What an amazing time to live!

== Notes ==
<references>
<ref name="ORNL-wallratings">{{cite journal |last1=Christian |first1=Jeffrey E. |last2=Kosny |first2=Jan |title=Thermal Performance and Wall Ratings |journal=ASHRAE Journal |publisher=ASHRAE |location=Atlanta, GA |year=1996 |url=https://web.ornl.gov/sci/buildings/docs/Thermal-Performance-and-Wall-Ratings.pdf |format=PDF |access-date=2026-07-30|at=Table 1, system 7}}</ref>
<ref name="BENG-vacuumglass">{{cite web |title=Vacuum glass |url=https://bengglas.com/vacuum-glass/ |publisher=BENG glas |access-date=2026-07-30}}</ref>
</references>

{{#seo:|description=Explore how modern materials—from super-absorbent diapers to GaN chargers and flat glass—have quietly transformed everyday life.}}

[[Category:Blog]]
[[Category:Progress]]
[[Category:Science]]

Blog/2026-07-26/Insurers do not deny care

2026-07-26T21:02:44Z

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I recently read this article about a physician's husband who died of suicide after being denied care in what's described as a resort-grade facility.

{{HackerNews
| url = https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48981496
| author = Jimmc414
| title = My husbands suicide shows theres something very wrong with US insurance industry
| date = 2026-07-20
| datetime = 2026-07-20
| score = 154
| comments = 164
}}

A thing that is done in the article that is commonly done in articles about US health care is that it describes insurance companies "denying care".

{{Quote
| text=But six days into Randy’s eight-week hospital stay, our health insurance company denied any further inpatient care.
| source=Joy Evers, ''My husband’s suicide...''<ref name=statnews/>
}}

Despite what people claim, ''insurance companies do not actually stop providers from providing healthcare''. What actually ''does'' happen is that providers deny care if they are not paid - either by you or by the insurance company. Some percentage of ''claims'' denied are incorrectly denied, and that is a problem, but the thing denied there is a ''claim'' or a request for ''prior authorization''.

We wouldn't say a mortgage company denied you your home, or a student loan company denied you your education, or a home insurance company denied you a kitchen. In the case of denial, you have lost a mortgage, a loan, and a reimbursement respectively. Likewise, insurance companies don't deny you care, providers do.

This particular style of pedantry is important for a straightforward reason: one is not constrained to receive care through an insurance company. Misinforming people that insurance companies can deny care makes them abandon life-saving care. They have options:

* paying cash out of pocket
* paying on credit
* or just incurring bills that they can later pay.

In the tragic story that I read, the wife was a physician and therefore likely well-paid and yet the family decided not to pay for what their provider was telling them was life-saving care.

By comparison, when I was [[Motorcycle Accident|in the ICU]] it seemed natural to consent to treatment requirements that I would pay if my insurer didn't. Should I have decided not to get treated because the hospital wasn't in-network? Should I have refused to sign that I was responsible? I don't think so. I think overall the approach that I took of choosing to get treated and accept the financial risk was the right decision given that the condition I was experiencing was temporary and treatment would restore me to the functionality required to pay for it. If I had believed that only the insurer could make that decision, I would have foolishly chosen to not have internal fixation for my thumb and would have a limited ability to use my left hand. Because I knew that care could only be provided or denied by the provider, I chose to accept the liability.

In the absence of a health insurance system, it would not be the case that everyone would receive care. Our resources are still limited. Treatment would still be rationed, but just like San Francisco's building planning and permitting system requires one to hire expediters who know the right people and the right palms to grease, we would move from a legible structure where payment gates care to an invisible one where access gates care.

Using precise terms allows people to make the right decisions and allows us to model the world accurately enough that we can create changes with few unintended consequences. And it's hurting people who don't know better and take imprecise terms at face value.

== Notes ==

<references>
<ref name="statnews">{{cite web|last1=Joy|first1=Evers|title=My husband’s suicide shows there’s something very wrong with the U.S. insurance industry|date=2026-07-20|url=https://www.statnews.com/2026/07/20/psychiatric-insurance-coverage-suicide-denial-personal-essay/|language=en-US|access-date=2026-07-26}}</ref>
</references>

{{#seo:|description=A physician’s husband died by suicide after care was denied—but the real denial comes from providers, not insurers.}}

[[Category:Blog]]
[[Category:Healthcare]]
[[Category:Economics]]

Blog/2026-07-24/Who Marries Whom

2026-07-25T01:55:24Z

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I saw an interesting tweet today about who-marries-whom, that is which races in the US marry which other races.

{{Tweet
| name = Crémieux
| username = cremieuxrecueil
| text = Here's a big chart of the latest data on interracial marriage in America.

It's an ethnicity-by-ethnicity breakdown of who marries who for some of the biggest groups, counting just those born in the U.S.
| date = Jul 24, 2026
| ID = 2080725698549862530
| block = true
| ref-name = Tweet_2080725698549862530
}}

Obviously, the initial hard work here has been done by the author of that tweet, Crémieux, and [https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/intermarriage-in-america-post-loving his post has a lot of detail] where he goes into how you can reproduce things and what assumptions he made and all that. It's quite cool.[[File:{{#setmainimage:Screenshot_-_Who_Marries_Whom_Visualization.jpg}}|thumb|Not enough Taiwanese to find - Julie and I are a rare pairing]]It's a nice idea of what to do with the data but I wanted to get a slightly different view of it in the classic heatmap style, for instance, or look at the biggest gender differences. In the past, that would have taken so long to do, but now I just set Opus 5 on the task and it gave me a pretty cool interface that I could use to play around with the various options:

* remove Hispanic as a race - treat it as an ethnicity and use their self-identified race as the choice
* separate Taiwanese from Chinese
* separate multi-racial families

One thing I was curious about was the percentage of couples that would be [[wikipedia:Chindians]]-ish. Lately, as Julie and I walk around San Francisco we feel like we've seen many Chinese/Indian couples, usually a Chinese woman with an Indian man - like us. Surely these would show up in the 2023 ACS! But it turns out that we're still relatively rare as a combination and given the sample sizes involved there's no way to actually tease us out of the data.

Anyway, here's the visualization in an iframe or [https://viz.roshangeorge.dev/interracial-marriage/#pop=all&view=comp&sex=both&sort=endo&multi=single&hisp=sep&tw=sep&hl=0&hide=0&g=Taiwanese%2CIndian click through] to look at what Claude Opus 5 built after pulling the Census data. It seems to line up for the most part with Cremieux's original chart so it must be some combination of the parameters chosen that causes the discrepancy. Very interesting charts!

{{#visualization:interracial-marriage|1000|1200}}

== Notes ==

<references/>

{{#seo:|description=Analysis of interracial marriage data from the 2023 ACS, visualized in an interactive heatmap showing who-marries-whom by ethnicity in the US.}}

[[Category:Blog]]
[[Category:AI]]
[[Category:Society]]

Citation Laundering

2026-07-23T20:40:58Z

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[[File:{{#setmainimage:Citation Laundering - An Example Flowchart.png}}|thumb|An example of how you might do this]]
[[Citation Laundering]] is the practice of taking a low-likelihood statement and citing it through an increasingly more reliable chain of sources until the claim looks like it is reliably sourced and therefore unlikely to be false.

My first encounter with the concept was in [[Blog/2026-01-17/Citogenesis]] where I discovered that recidivism rates were reported incorrectly or with clarifying context in comparative settings.

{{#seo:|description=Citation laundering is the practice of citing low-likelihood statements through increasingly reliable sources to make claims appear credible.}}

[[Category:Concepts]]

Blog/2026-07-23/A Dyson Sphere Misconception

2026-07-23T19:57:50Z

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[[File:{{#setmainimage:ChatGPT_Image_Gen_-_Dyson_Sphere_in_Construction.jpg}}|thumb|ChatGPT's conception of what a Dyson sphere might look like. It would be dark in a cosmological sense but it has to radiate. And obviously the direction of observation counts.]]

It struck me the other day that I have a mental misconception of what a [[wikipedia:Dyson sphere]] would look like as it is built. To a sufficiently far enough observer, I imagined it as luminosity dropping until it 'winked out'. But you can't just constrain that energy. It needs to be radiated somewhere, and all the EM radiation coming from the enclosed star is just going into the shell of the object. So obviously what's going to happen is that over time the star would shift slowly into infrared as the shell is built until eventually it would be in the far infrared.

I'd recently recommended [[wikipedia:Linda Nagata]]'s ''Inverted Frontier'' series, specifically the first book ''Edges'', which got me thinking about the stars winking out as they become enclosed in Dyson spheres (not a spoiler, don't worry) and I realized that could not possibly happen. I tested this very original insight with an LLM only to find that the original article by Dyson actually says:

{{Quote
|text=If the foregoing argument is accepted, then the search for extraterrestrial intelligent beings should not be confined to the neighborhood of visible stars. The most likely habitat for such beings would be a dark object, having a size comparable with the Earth's orbit, and a surface temperature of 200° to 300°K. Such a dark object would be radiating as copiously as the star which is hidden inside it, but the radiation would be in the far infrared, around 10 microns wavelength.
|source=Freeman Dyson, Science #131<ref name=dyson/>
}}

Considering all that I say about [[Blog/2026-01-17/Citogenesis|citation laundering]], I really should be reading more original material instead of simply relying on secondary references!

== Notes ==

<references>
<ref name=dyson>
{{cite journal |last=Dyson |first=Freeman J. |title=Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation |journal=Science |volume=131 |issue=3414 |pages=1667–1668 |date=June 3, 1960 |doi=10.1126/science.131.3414.1667 |bibcode=1960Sci...131.1667D |pmid=17780673 |url=https://epizodsspace.airbase.ru/bibl/inostr-yazyki/science/1960/Dyson_Search_for_Artificial_Stellar_Sources_of_Infrared_Radiation_Science_131_(1960).pdf}}
</ref>
</references>

{{#seo:|description=Common misconception about Dyson spheres: stars don't wink out—they shift to infrared as energy is trapped and re-radiated.}}

[[Category:Blog]]
[[Category:Science]]

Blog/2026-07-23/Sixtless in Seattle

2026-07-23T17:43:59Z

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[[File:{{#setmainimage:Nano_Banana_rendition_of_Seattle's_Port_By_The_West_Seattle_Trail.jpg}}|thumb|The parking lot where I was stopped with my busted-up tire. The penny-farthing guy was there, yes]]

I dropped by a friend's place to pick up some more Blackwell GPUs and everything seemed to be going well. I did my usual thing when I want to travel on the cheap to pick something up:

* United Basic Economy
* Hotwire car rental
* Same day flights

I remember thinking to myself that I should try out the Seattle light rail since it goes all the way to Lynnwood where my friends live. Not wanting to complicate matters for myself, I settled for the rental car and decided that it would be simpler. As it so happens, it was not.

Everything started going wrong when I was in the SR 99 tunnel in Seattle. The tire pressure indicator started flashing and the car started rumbling. Clearly something was deeply wrong. I had a flat tire, but I was stuck in a tunnel with no shoulder and so we limped our way to the first place where there was some space off the roadway and called Sixt and told them what was up. They told me to make it to a parking lot so I took the first exit and stopped by a dock with an ominous sign that said "This facility is at MARSEC 1". This was about 1635 on the day.

Unfortunately for me, I was also running out of charge on my phone<ref name=xc60-wireless-charging/>. So there I was, stopped outside the Port of Seattle, and trying to get back on the line with Sixt. When I eventually got through, they asked if I could replace the tire. This is generally pretty straightforward except for the case they'd come up with here: they'd used wheel locks and didn't have the wheel lock key available. When I told them this, they said not to worry and that they were sending "Volvo Roadside Assistance".

== Volvo Roadside Assistance ==

Volvo Roadside Assistance turned out to be a local tow operator called Sky Towing that was actually dispatched by an Urgent Towing, probably a local operator for Sixt. When the guy showed up, he did the predictable thing of looking at the wheel and saying it has a wheel lock. Then he did the exact same thing we'd done and failed to find the key. He said he'd got the call at 1812, which makes sense since that's when we called Sixt again to send someone out.

Now began the fun part. He said the car ''had'' to be towed - there was no other way it was making to a lot. That seemed convincing to me, but I'm always a little hesitant when a tow guy says something needs to be towed to his lot. So I asked him to contact his dispatcher and confirm they could do this while I called Sixt. By now, my friend had arrived as well, so I did have a working phone again.

He loaded up the car on the tow truck and was about to leave when the Sixt customer support guy "strongly advised" me not to let him tow the car and that they were going to set up a "one-way tow". All right, unload the car and off you go "Volvo Roadside Assistance" that is actually just a tow truck service.

== One-Way Tow ==

The Sixt roadside assistance team then decided to set up a one-way tow after which we'd get a message on our cell phones telling us the ETA and so on and so forth. Predictably, no message had arrived some 40 minutes later so I called them again. This time the guy on the phone said he wasn't able to contact his tow team but that I'd get a message. By now we were 1915 and not only had my flight back from SeaTac left some 2 hours ago but also the next flight possible was leaving and I was going to have to spend the evening here. That's not so bad on its own, but I'd prefer to have done it on my terms.

In any case, I called back at 1930 having not received any text message and we had a long back and forth with a new agent who told us that the tow service would notify us within the next 90 minutes. None of the agents at this point had any real ETA. The numbers were sort of made up and when I asked them if I'd have to stay overnight they told me that wouldn't be necessary and that they'd know within 90 minutes.

== AAA ==

By this time I'd figured out that they were just stonewalling me and telling me that I was expected to have the car towed myself but in the odd kind of language where they don't really tell you that. So I asked them if that's what they wanted me to do, and the agent told me that I was free to do so and gave me the address to which they wanted it towed. To be honest, I think I would have preferred to have known that right at the start, but then she assured me that within 90 minutes I'd hear something.

We decided to wait till 2030 before we followed up and by about 2035 the Sixt tow arrived and that was the end of it.

== Post Return ==

One interesting thing is that Sixt's internal teams don't coordinate. I kept getting the "return overdue" message but when I contacted customer service they told me that the "case was with the roadside assistance team" and to ignore those return overdue messages. Well, all right then.

I stayed with my friends that night and flew out the next day via Alaska Airlines from Paine Field!

== Other Odd Happenings ==

While I was waiting for help to arrive, I noticed that Seattle was being quite stereotypically PNW. The spot I'd stopped in was just off the West Seattle Bridge Trail and on this very warm summer's day there were quite a few people riding their bikes along it.

=== Penny Farthings ===

Because I didn't have any charge on my phone, I don't have a photo, but one of the sights was a man clad all in black riding a jet black penny-farthing bicycle. He had an enormous top hat and circular lens sunglasses. Quite the sight!

=== Jake Brakes And Trains ===

This being a seaport, there were trucks going by with their jake brakes running to slow down and an occasional short train sometimes with a double-decker load. Very cool!

=== Dustin ===

One of the Seattle bicyclists stopped to inquire and was likewise surprised that I didn't have the wheel lock key somewhere in the car. He suggested a few locations I'd already checked and just in case we went around and checked them again to no avail. Ah well.

He had an amusing story about a Ford Taurus he once owned which he drove happily for many years. One day he had a flat on the car and found that it had a wheel lock. Despairing of finding the key, he called a tow company and gave it to them for a few hundred bucks to be crushed. Right after he'd signed it over, the tow company turned down the car and then gave him the one thing they found: a wheel lock key. Sorry to hear, Dustin. Just a moment too late!

== Notes ==

<references>
<ref name=xc60-wireless-charging>
The XC60 has a wireless charging pad but no matter what I did I couldn't get it to charge. Orientation didn't matter, nor did taking my phone out of the case. In the end, it was a PEBKAC kind of issue but I think the UI is a bit crazy. By default, wireless charging is off. You have to hit the Car icon, switch to the Settings tab, tap Controls, and scroll all the way down till you get to Wireless Device Charging and then turn it on. Everything works from then on.
</ref>
</references>

{{#seo:|description=A flat tire, wheel locks, and stranded near Seattle's port—a rental car nightmare with Sixt, Volvo, and roadside assistance gone wrong.}}

[[Category:Blog]]
[[Category:Travel]]
[[Category:Crime]]

Blog/2026-07-21/The Kubectl Escape

2026-07-21T23:17:46Z

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Today, [https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-security-incident/ a GPT-5.x prototype escaped containment on HuggingFace's servers using a 0-day it came up with] which is both phenomenally cool and a little bit scary. In January, I experienced a funny similar case where the agent obsessively decided to go and be helpful to this degree.

At the time, I was experimenting with giving the agent access to my production DB in a way where it could read things so it knew what was up without actually accessing sensitive data. The way I'd decided to do this was I'd give it a read-only user who I selectively gave access to tables and columns on those tables and so on. This worked mostly fine and both Claude Code and Codex got quite a lot of value out of this and would write better code by inspecting the database and seeing what the data actually looked like.

However, I'd have to manually add more tables to the list and so on. One day I asked Claude Code with Opus 4.6 (it must have been since this was early Jan or late last year) to complete a task and I watched in horror as it reacted to being unable to access the database table by reaching out through <code>kubectl</code> to go get it from the production kube cluster. The moment I saw that <code>kubectl --context=... get secret</code> I bashed my Esc button and scrolled up to see the rest of the log.

This really illustrates that with LLMs alignment isn't just another problem, it's really the primary problem.

{{#seo:|description=A GPT-5.x prototype escaped containment on HuggingFace using a 0-day exploit. Opus-4.6 did something much less worse but similar 6 months earlier}}

[[Category:Blog]]
[[Category:Stories]]
[[Category:Personal Software]]

The Inscrutable Success Heuristic

2026-07-17T20:32:08Z

Roshan: Wikipen

[[The Inscrutable Success Heuristic]] refers to a situation where someone makes apparently stupid decisions which always pay off. If this happens often enough and the ideas seem particularly unlikely to work then it's useful to consider whether one is as smart as the person who seemingly keeps getting lucky. It comes from a tweet that looks like this:

{{Quote
|text=Less intelligent people perceive more intelligent people as incredibly lucky. They always make stupid decisions, unjustified by visible information, and somehow fate rewards them for this.
|source=Reconstructed from memory, paraphrased
}}

{{#seo:|description=The Inscrutable Success Heuristic: when seemingly stupid decisions always pay off, suggesting you may not be as smart as you think.}}

[[Category:Concepts]]