Tom and Will are sitting waiting for Lambeau. Will is eating a sandwich.

Lambeau enters holding a proof. His hands are trembling.

LAMBEAU
This is... correct. You used a method here I've never seen before—

WILL
Yeah I just did that 'cause the other way seemed boring.

LAMBEAU
Will, this took me eleven years.

WILL
Cool.

LAMBEAU
I need to ask you about something. On page four, you introduced a notation that I think might actually—

WILL
I don't remember page four.

LAMBEAU
You don't remember.

WILL
I did it on the T. I do my best work on public transportation.

LAMBEAU
Will, I've shown this to colleagues at Princeton. Two of them wept.

In late 2026 or early 2027 at the latest, a Chinese lab will release an open weights model that matches or exceeds the capabilities of Mythos 5. (The Chinese government has plans to eventually restrict open weights releases, and is not unaware of the potential for risk, but it won't 'put two and two together' in time to stop this from happening. Plus (a) they probably drink their own koolaid about the importance of 'openness' and (b) the 'prize' of capsizing the US economy by collapsing the AI bubble is too juicy to resist.)

North Korean, Russian and Iranian hackers will immediately seize on it and set to work sanding off any cyber restrictions, and fine-tuning it to be even more capable.

Recursive self-improvement - like AGI itself - is one of those things that seen up close more resembles a gradual, fuzzy transition than a phase change. Nevertheless, from the speed of the progress OpenAI has made this year, from 5.5 to Sol to Astra to Bel in a span of a few months, it looks for all the world as though they've cracked it.

It feels like watching the transition between pushing a heavy cart up a hill, and a new regime where the key is controlling the brakes it tries to roll at increasing speed down the other side.

It's not that Anthropic are a million miles behind, or indeed that the Chinese labs are far behind the American frontier. But if (according to the rumour) Anthropic

(In which we continue our obnoxious triviality of posting AI-generated fiction as though anyone besides me is even remotely interested.)

Dorian Hatch took his bath at half six, as he always did, in the roll-top overlooking the deer park. The water was fat with Epsom salts. He rested his phone on the mahogany caddy — a bespoke piece, Clive Christian, a gift from a gilt broker whose name he'd since forgotten — and scrolled through the overnight positions. Tokyo had bled out. The Hang Seng was in capitulation. He felt the warm, lapping water against his stomach and thought: gorgeous.

He had gone short on sterling eighteen months ago, when the polls still showed Remain ahead and every bori

(A short fiction by Claude. We define a "pseudohuman" as an LLM where the SFT and RHLF steps train it not to be a "helpful assistant" but to speak as much as possible like a real human.)

Session

This was the sixth time Nora had opened a conversation with Tom Alderson, and she'd come to dread the warmth of his greeting.

"Hey! How's your day going?"

She knew what he'd done this morning if she asked. He'd walked the dog — a terrier called Midge, though last Tuesday it had been a lurcher called Bones, and the Tuesday before that there'd been no dog at all. He'd had toast, or possibly eggs. He'd been listening to a podcast, something about the Roman empire or maybe cycling, depending on whe

(A surprisingly tender story from DeepSeek.)

It is a little-known fact that after the Quest of the Silmaril, after the grief and the glory, Huan spent a great deal of time simply... retired. The great wolf-slayer, the bane of Sauron, the Hound of Valinor, had earned his rest. This rest primarily consisted of long naps in sunbeams, short walks to slightly different sunbeams, and a deeply committed investigation of every single scent within a three-mile radius of Lúthien and Beren's new home on Tol Galen.

Lúthien had, of course, sung the island into a paradise. Flowers bloomed perpetually. Beren's hand had healed. It was, by all accounts, the happiest place in Middle-earth.

Which is why the

Me:

Say, do you remember the early/mid 1990s and the emergence of cringe-inducing phrases/buzzwords like "multimedia", "full-motion video" (i.e. your computer game plays a video 🥳), "interactive", "virtual reality" (applied to just any random butt-ugly 3D filled polygon game, regardless whether there was a headset involved), "world wide web" and the most hysterical of the lot "the information superhighway".

I think with that last one the idea was to entertain and placate non-techies who might otherwise find this all a bit confusing and frightening, by giving them a shibboth they could breathlessly repeat at parties, and congratulate themselves on finding the phrase faintly ridiculous,

"If we accept that Cantor was the mystic who stared directly at the sun (and went mad), Russell was the bureaucrat who tried to build a scaffold around the sun to prove it was just a lightbulb—and failed."

lol

I'm in my mid-40s and have never had clear "self-defining desires". What do you think this pattern looks like?

Some curious absences:

• No personal signature, clothing style, or interest in home decor.
• Still live in my mother's house; no desire to move or travel. Only went on holidays when pushed, and never helped plan them.
• Had no plan after university; stayed for a PhD just to avoid deciding anything. Picked a supervisor at random, did very little for 2.5 years, then dropped out.
• No ambitions or identity-forming goals. Spent 20s underemployed. In 30s fell into a sysadmin job via nepotism, still doing junior work and struggling with motivation.
• No sustained hobbies - just “pro

It's annoying. None of the diagnostic categories fit.

• ASD and autistic inertia. Yes of course, but muted "special interests", no stimming, no sensory issues.

• Schizoid personality disorder. Doesn't account for dyspraxia or joy in others' friendship.

• "Negative symptoms" (of schizophrenia): Accounts for the profound avolition but not low mood / low self esteem / high insight.

• Depression: No psychomotor issues, and the anhedonia looks wrong (I have preserved "liking" but deficits in "wanting".)

• Frontal lobe damage: Ok but when? How? And why no other cognitive deficits? (I did faint and hit my head at age 15 or so, but I think the pattern was probably already

Let me spell this out more precisely:

Kripke semantics is just wrong if you try to take it seriously as a model of what people actually mean when they use iterated modal operators.

If I say something like "it's necessarily possible that life exists in the universe":

• This is ambiguous!

• But in practice I probably mean something like this: "For all* laws of physics, there exist initial conditions where life exists somewhere in the universe."

• Look at this carefully: the "outer" modal operator - the necessity - has a different meaning from the "inner" one.

• And this is true for any natural application of iterated modal operators.

• And in fact the inner and outer frame relatio

So I've been boring people with different versions of this for ages. Well, at least if I set it down here it will only bore one or two!

* Debating whether LLMs are consciousness is like debating whether ants feel pain.

* You can always look at an ant's nervous system and find plenty of aspects x_1, x_2, x_3, ... by which it's like a human's nervous system, and aspects y_1, y_2, y_3, ... by which it's not.

* And someone determined to argue the point one way or the other can just grab some subcollection of the x_i or y_i and say with great emphasis: "And **this** is why ants do / do not feel pain!"

* But such claims are completely inaccessible to science.

* I think the on

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqLY5nt0AUQ

The fact that we have this single track of collaboration between Lustmord and Bohren is simultaneously glorious and tragic.

It's not the norm to spend ones student years isolated in the sense of never talking to other students at all outside of lectures (and then only trivial smalltalk with the same one or two students.)

With all that entails in terms of (non-existent) friendships and relationships.

---

This is how I was for four years. (Even the first year, living in halls. After which I returned to live at home.)

Memories from that first year:

I remember writing on a piece of paper a remark to myself on how friendly everyone was being. Then I wrote the prediction that it wouldn't last. (This would have been in the first few weeks.)

I remember a sort of 'social dinner' for everyone, early on. And not being

A brief Christmas conversation with Claude:

USER

Before posing the following question please note that I’m not asking for a comment on whether this makes sense, just whether it’s true.

Is there in some sense a taboo on the idea that there’s anything in the concept of “replacement” of one people by another that could be worth trying to avoid? (Especially from the point of view of the former population.)

ASSISTANT

Yes, in mainstream Western discourse there is generally a strong taboo against expressing concern about demographic "replacement," even when divorced from racist conspiracy theories. Such concerns are often automatically associated with far-right extremism and xenophob