Nor is the threat or implication of violence. Period. Ever. No exceptions.

It is completely unacceptable. I condemn it in the strongest possible terms.

It is immoral, and also it is ineffective. It would be immoral even if it were effective. Nothing hurts your cause more.

Do not do this, and do not tolerate anyone who does.

The reason I need to say this now is that there has been at least one attempt at violence, and potentially two in quick succession, against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

My sympathies go out to him and I hope he is doing as okay as one could hope for.

Awful Events Amid Scary Times

Max Zeff: NEW: A suspect was arrested on Friday morning for allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's home. A person matching the suspect's description was later seen making threats outside of OpenAI's corporate HQ.

Nathan Calvin: This is beyond disturbing and awful. Whatever disagreements you have with Sam or OpenAI, this cannot be normalized or justified in any way. Everyone deserves to be able to be safe with their families at home. I feel ill and [...]

---

Outline:

(00:51) Awful Events Amid Scary Times

(04:51) Most Of Those Worried About AI Do As Well As One Can On This

(06:54) Some Who Are Worried About AI Need To Address Their Rhetoric

(11:49) Speak The Truth Even If Your Voice Trembles

(14:02) False Accusations And False Attacks Are Also Unacceptable

(15:35) Some Examples Of Attempts To Create Broad Censorship

(24:53) The Most Irresponsible Reaction Was From The Press

(25:50) Sam Altman Reacts

(28:21) Sam Altman Reflects

(33:40) Violence Is Never The Answer

---

First published:

Source:

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

There's a quote I read as a kid that stuck with me my whole life:

"Remember that all tax revenue is the result of holding a gun to somebody's head. Not paying taxes is against the law. If you don’t pay taxes, you’ll be fined. If you don’t pay the fine, you’ll be jailed. If you try to escape from jail, you’ll be shot."
-- P. J. O'Rourke.

At first I took away the libertarian lesson: Government is violence. It may, in some cases, be rightful violence. But it all rests on violence; never forget that.

Today I do think there's an important distinction between two different shapes of violence. It's a distinction that may make my fellow old-school classical Heinlein liberaltarians roll up their eyes about how there's no deep moral difference. I still hold it to be important.

In a high-functioning ideal state -- not all actual countries -- the state's violence is predictable and avoidable, and meant to be predicted and avoided. As part of that predictability, it comes from a limited number of specially licensed sources.

You're supposed to know that you can just pay your taxes, and then not get shot.

Is [...]

---

First published:

Source:

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

This post was cross posted to the EA Forum

TL;DR: One of the largest talent gaps in AI safety is competent generalists: program managers, fieldbuilders, operators, org leaders, chiefs of staff, founders. Ambitious, competent junior people could develop the skills to fill these roles, but there are no good pathways for them to gain skills, experience, and credentials. Instead, they're incentivized to pursue legible technical and policy fellowships and then become full-time researchers, even if that's not a good fit for their skills. The ecosystem needs to make generalist careers more legible and accessible.

Kairos and Constellation are announcing the Generator Residency as a first step. Apply here by April 27.

Epistemic status: Fairly confident, based on 2 years running AI safety talent programs, direct hiring experience, and conversations with ~30 senior org leaders across the ecosystem in the past 6 months.

The problem

Over the past few years, AI safety has moved from niche concern toward a more mainstream issue, driven by pieces like Situational Awareness, AI 2027, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, and the rapidly increasing capabilities of the models themselves.

During this period, over 20 research fellowships have launched, collectively training thousands of fellows, with [...]

---

Outline:

(01:17) The problem

(03:41) Why the pipeline is broken

(05:58) Why this matters now

(07:31) Counter-Arguments

(10:11) The Generator Residency

The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

---

First published:

Source:

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

n 2026, every budding prodigy in writing is in some sense a tragedy.

Anybody with experience prompting the large language models to write fiction knows that the models of today (April 2026) are considerably below peak human level. But anybody who has observed recent trends also knows that the models are quickly catching up. Regardless of whether it takes one year or several, the eclipse of human writing by AI seems inevitable. AI writing is clearly on the wall, so to speak, and us fans of human fiction have already begun our mourning phase.

Subscribe now

I’ve most felt this way upon reading the works of Tomas Bjartur. Each of his stories is a fresh look at “what might have been”, and with the fullness of time perhaps he could grow to be among the best science fiction writers of our generation.

In The Company Man, an AI engineer at a thinly-veiled frontier lab narrates, in a voice of carefully self-cultivated “ironic corporate psychopathy,”1 his promotion onto The (humanity-destroying) Project — alongside the utilitarian woman he's hopelessly in love with, a genius mathematician colleague with a sexual fetish for intellectual achievement, and a CEO whose “ayahuasca ego-death” convinced him [...]

---

Outline:

(05:07) Interiority

(08:06) Deception and the Self

(09:34) Attention and Revelation

(12:04) Humor as Structure

(13:10) Writing AI Like It Actually Exists

(14:22) Limitations

(15:39) Our Last Prodigy

The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

---

First published:

Source:

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

Here are two beliefs that are sort of haunting me right now:

1. Folk who try to push people to uphold principles (whether established ones or novel ones), are kinda an important bedrock of civilization.
2. Also, those people are really annoying and often, like, a little bit crazy

And these both feel fairly important.

I’ve learned a lot from people who have some kind of hobbyhorse about how society is treating something as okay/fine, when it's not okay/fine. When they first started complaining about it, I’d be like “why is X such a big deal to you?”. Then a few years later I’ve thought about it more and I’m like “okay, yep, yes X is a big deal”.

Some examples of X, including noticing that…

• people are casually saying they will do stuff, and then not doing it.
• someone makes a joke about doing something that's kinda immoral, and everyone laughs, and no one seems to quite be registering “but that was kinda immoral.”
• people in a social group are systematically not saying certain things (say, for political reasons), and this is creating weird blind spots for newcomers to the community and maybe old-timers too.
• someone (or a group) has [...]

---

First published:

Source:

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Once, I went to talk about "curiosity" with @LoganStrohl. They noted "it seems like you have a good handle on 'active curiosity', but you don't really do much diffuse 'open curiosity.'" The convo went on for awhile, and felt very insightful.

(I may not be remembering details of this convo right. Apologies to Logan)

Towards the end of the conversation, I was moving to wrap up and move on. And Logan said "Wait. For this to feel complete to me, I'd like it if we translated this into more explicit TAPs. TAPs or it didn't happen."

You can get a new insight. But, if the insight doesn't translate into some kind of action you're going to do sometimes, there is a sense in which it didn't matter. And people mostly fail to gain new habits. If you're going to have a shot in hell of translating this into action, it's helpful to have some kind of plan.

Recap on TAPs

"TAP" stands for "Trigger Action Pattern", and also "Trigger Action Plan." A TA-Pattern is whatever you currently do by default when faced with a particular trigger. A TA-Plan is an attempt to install a TA-Pattern on purpose.

To turn [...]

---

Outline:

(01:04) Recap on TAPs

(04:00) Turning Takeaways into TAPs

---

First published:

Source:

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

I'm going to tell you a story. For that story to make sense, I need to give you some background context.

I have some pretty smart friends. One of them is Peter Schmidt-Nielsen. Peter has an illustrious line of descent. His paternal grandfather was Knut Schmidt-Nielsen, regarded as one of the great animal physiologists of his time. His paternal grandmother was Bodil Schmidt-Nielsen, who became the first woman president of the American Physiological Society. Bodil's father was August Krogh, who won the 1920 Nobel Prize in Physiology "for the discovery of the mechanism of regulation of the capillaries in skeletal muscle", and later went on to found the company that would eventually become Novo Nordisk.

Peter himself is no slouch. He was homeschooled for most of his childhood. When it was time to go to university, he simultaneously applied to MIT's undergrad and grad programs, and was accepted to both. (He decided to go to undergrad.) He went on to do some startup stuff, then was an early employee at Redwood. While there, he broke Meow Hash for fun. (He's not a security guy.)

My point here is: Peter is very, very smart.

Ok, here's the story.

One day [...]

---

First published:

Source:

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

Before I had a baby I was pretty agnostic about the idea of daycare. I could imagine various pros and cons but I didn’t have a strong overall opinion. Then I started mentioning the idea to various people. Every parent I spoke to brought up a consideration I hadn’t thought about before—the illnesses.

A number of parents, including family members, told me they had sent their baby to daycare only for them to become constantly ill, sometimes severely, until they decided to take them out. This worried me so I asked around some more. Invariably every single parent who had tried to send their babies or toddlers to daycare, or who had babies in daycare right now, told me that they were ill more often than not.

One mother strongly advised me never to send my baby to daycare. She regretted sending her (normal and healthy) first son to daycare when he was one—he ended up hospitalized with severe pneumonia after a few months of constant illnesses and infections. She told me that after that she didn’t send her other kids to daycare and they had much healthier childhoods.

I also started paying more attention to the kids I [...]

---

First published:

Source:

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

There's an adage from programming in C++ which goes something like "Yes, you write C, but you imagine the machine code as you do." I assumed this was bullshit, that nobody actually does this. Am I supposed to imagine writing the machine code, and then imagine imagining the binary? and then imagine imagining imagining the transistors?

Oh and since I don't actually use compiled languages, should I actually be writing Python, then imagining the C++ engine, and so on?

Then one day, I was vibe-coding, and I realized I was writing in English and thinking in Python. Or something like it. I wasn't actually imagining every line of Python, but I was imagining the structure of the program that I was describing to Claude, and adding in extra details to shape that structure.

Pub Philosophy Bros

This post is actually about having sane conversations with philosophy bros at the pub.

People like to talk in English (or other human languages) because our mouths can't make sounds in whatever internal neuralese our brains use. Sometimes, like in mathematics, we can make the language of choice trivially isomorphic to the structures that we're talking about. But most of the time we [...]

---

Outline:

(00:57) Pub Philosophy Bros

(02:19) Beetle Problems

(04:09) Solutions

---

First published:

Source:

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This post assumes Anthropic isn't lying:

1. Mythos is the current SOTA
2. Mythos is potent[1]
3. Anthropic will not make it publicly available un-nerfed[2]
4. Anthropic will have a select few companies use it as part of project glasswing[3] to improve cybersecurity or whatever

Since the release of ChatGPT, at any given time, anyone on the planet with a few bucks could access the current most capable AI model, the SOTA.[4]

Since Mythos, this has no longer been the case and I don't think it will ever happen again.

It may happen for a short period of time if an entity with a policy differing significantly from Anthropic develops a SOTA model.[5] However, most serious competitors (OpenAI, Google), don't have policies differing vastly from Anthropic, and thus I can't imagine a SOTA model (more potent than Mythos) being released unrestricted to the public soon.

To be clear, I am not claiming the public will never have access to a model as strong as Mythos, this seems almost certainly false, I am claiming that the public will probably never have access to the SOTA of that time.

Glasswing makes it clear that the attitude among top large companies - those in power [...]

The original text contained 8 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

---

First published:

Source:

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.