LessWrong posts by zvi

So many are under the strange belief that there is something terrible about not owning the house in which you live.

So we massively subsidize home ownership, and try to actively interfere with renting.

Except when we do rent control, which turns renting into a form of owning, and allows us to take real property and de facto give it to current renters.

A lot of this is pure attempts to punish and exclude the poor. If you can’t afford a downpayment, we don’t want you living here. Go away.

Some of it is the belief that when you rent, you are being ‘taken advantage of’ and that such a deal could not possibly be fair.

Some of it is that if you don’t own, you don’t have the incentive to drive up property values. Which means you won’t properly work to ‘improve’ your local area, especially that you won’t conspire to block housing.

The result of this is that if you’re not willing to commit to living in one place for years, or you can’t afford a down payment, you get punished, and punished hard.

Owning Versus Renting

The graph [...]

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Outline:

(01:08) Owning Versus Renting

(03:12) Build To Rent Is Good Actually

(08:18) Elizabeth Warren, Full Supervillain

(09:46) The Better Case Against Corporate Housing Ownership

(11:52) The ROAD Act Bans Building And Then Renting Houses

(14:19) Rental Covenants

(15:10) Extended Eviction Delay After Nonpayment Is Mostly Bad

(16:54) Los Angeles Renting

(19:32) Sufficiently Advanced Rent Control Is Indistinguishable From Ownership

(23:07) England Tries To Ban Renting

(24:39) Claude Rental Discounts

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No more burying the sex stuff under an avalanche of other stuff so no one notices. Use the break while we have one. Let's go.

You’re Single Because You Suck At Kissing

Luckily this is first one is fixable and Critter is here to help. I find the advice here highly plausible. Like many skills, there are a lot of subtle skills, but a handful of basic principles matter a lot, especially paying attention and responding to what you’re getting back. Critter's theory is that a basic kiss is a bell curve of intensity, done at a slight angle. First kiss style is elongated with less pressure. French kissing is trickier and less structured, see the thread, and the big mistake is to try to force it.

It's not that simple, but like most things, there are some basic mistakes to avoid and first principles, then if you are genuinely paying attention and engaged you’ll be fine, and improve with practice. Seek deliberate practice and clear feedback, iterate.

I get the same sense with dancing. Yes, you need specific knowledge and practice, but if you use your human racial bonuses the remaining ‘cognitive core’ from [...]

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Outline:

(00:20) You're Single Because You Suck At Kissing

(01:25) You're Not Single But You're Sexually Incompatible

(02:56) You're Single Because You Aren't Into BDSM

(08:14) You're Single Because You Didn't Do The Work

(16:34) You're Single Because Being a Dominant Is Too Much Work

(23:41) You're Single And Would Rather Be Free Use

(26:35) You're Single Because You Wouldn't or Did Choke Her

(28:15) You're Single Because You Have Very Particular Preferences

(30:06) You're Single Because of Polygyny

(31:00) You're Single Because Polyamory Isn't Right For You

(35:11) You're Single And Call It Solo Polyamory

(38:49) You're Single Because You Didn't Go To Slutcon

(46:41) You're Single So Let's Marry Aella

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At least we probably won’t have another pandemic. And we still have a partial Jones Act waiver. For now.

Small victories.

Table of Contents

Hanta Hanta I Don’t Wanta

We have learned so much less than nothing from Covid. We’re actively stupider.

It's 2026, and here we are again, lying about the virus because we are worried that people exposed to it or from the wrong place might face stigma otherwise.

Envidreamz: A local news story highlights passengers on the hantavirus stricken MV Hondius cruise ship who are more worried about facing stigma and rejection back home than [...]

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Outline:

(00:22) Hanta Hanta I Dont Wanta

(04:25) Bad News

(08:45) Predictions Can Be Easy Even About The Future

(08:55) Good Advice

(11:52) The Efficient Market Hypothesis Is False

(13:58) There Are Four Skills

(16:27) While I Cannot Condone This

(20:57) Good News, Everyone

(21:42) For Your Entertainment

(22:14) Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game

(24:09) The Spire Sleeps And So Shall I

(29:13) I Was Promised Flying Self-Driving Cars

(31:53) Government Working

(35:40) Jones Act Watch

(41:10) Technology Advances

(42:12) I Said Woo Hoo

(43:36) Variously Effective Altruism

(44:07) The Lighter Side

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This is what a lull looks like at this point. The government is having internal arguments. The models are getting improved internally. The coding agent improvements are all what we would expect. There's still a lot happening, including a bunch of cool papers, but I feel able to relax and to take care of some other work while I have the chance. You never know when that chance will be over.

Table of Contents

From yesterday: Cyber Lack of Security and AI Governance.

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Outline:

(00:36) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(02:25) Language Models Dont Offer Mundane Utility

(03:26) Huh, Upgrades

(04:02) Levels of Friction

(05:11) On Your Marks

(06:38) Get My Agent On The Line

(09:42) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

(11:11) Fun With Media Generation

(12:49) On AI Writing

(16:05) A Young Ladys Illustrated Primer

(18:35) You Drive Me Crazy

(19:23) They Took Our Jobs

(21:31) The Art of the Jailbreak

(21:49) Introducing

(22:29) Claude Has Its Limits

(23:28) Show Me the Money

(25:15) Show Me The Compute

(26:58) Quiet Speculations

(28:33) Quickly, Theres No Time

(29:32) Chip City

(30:37) Pick Up The Phone

(31:15) The Week in Audio

(31:41) Rhetorical Innovation

(36:13) Not Leading the Future

(42:24) Elon Musk v OpenAI

(43:21) People Just Say Things

(43:47) People Just Publish Things

(44:37) OpenAI Endroses Kosa And SB 315

(48:08) The LLMs All Believe Roughly Similar Things

(50:45) I Learned It By Reading YOU

(01:08:22) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult

(01:18:45) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(01:20:34) Messages From Janusworld

(01:22:31) People Worried About AI For Other Reasons

(01:23:06) The Lighter Side

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The real recent story of AI has been the background work being done on Cybersecurity, as we process the Mythos Moment along with GPT-5.5, and figure out both how to patch the internet and what our new regulatory regime is going to look like.

The Trump Administration is being dragged, kicking and screaming, into the era of at least some situational awareness, and acknowledgment that catastrophic risks are very much a real risk and they need to have a role in supervising frontier model releases. Now that they’re there, Commerce is deciding who gets access to the most powerful model in the world, and they are fighting Intelligence and the national security state over who should be in charge.

Another question is, exactly how strong is Mythos, both compared to past model and to GPT-5.5 and also in absolute terms? We got multiple new reports on that, as well as the METR graph results. There's little question Mythos is a big deal, but there's a wide range of big deals out there.

Part of the new report from UK AISI is learning that there is a substantial gap between the abilities of the early Mythos Preview [...]

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Outline:

(01:28) On Your Marks

(05:24) How Good Is Mythos?

(11:11) Cyber Lack of Security

(14:36) Greetings From The Department of War

(16:13) The Prior Restraint Era Begins

(20:59) Commerce Versus Intelligence

(27:43) The Quest for Sane Regulations

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We did reading yesterday. Now we do the math. Math is hard.

It does not have to be this hard.

A large part of the reason math is hard, or boring, is that education studies, especially in math, are worse than you know. It goes beyond the studies failing both math and statistics forever and into what I’d basically call fraud. Various people are at war with math education, and will do what it takes to stop it in its tracks. We must fight back.

Education Research Is Worse Than You Know

Kelsey Piper lets her title, ‘Education research is weak and sloppy. Why?’ completely downplay the level of utter awfulness she is reporting finding.

You know that whole thing where the entire Bay Area school system stopped teaching kids Algebra? That was motivated by criminal levels of fraud. I want Jo Boaler in jail doing hard time for this if it is accurate.

Here's the part before the paywall:

Kelsey Piper: Jo Boaler is a professor of education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, with an enormously influential body of work arguing that students learn math faster and more effectively [...]

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Outline:

(00:42) Education Research Is Worse Than You Know

(04:23) The War on Math

(06:59) University of California San Diego

(15:01) Beyond UCSD

(15:57) New York Cant Do Math

(16:43) The Academic Standards Seem Low

(19:34) New Math

(21:32) Math Anxiety Is Often Due To Knowledge Gaps

(23:52) Calculus By Eighth Grade Is Highly Practical For Many

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Reading is the most fundamental thing in education. If you can read, you can do and learn everything else. If you can’t read, well, you’re screwed.

We know how to teach reading to children. Phonics. The weird thing is we often choose to not do that, and instead to use methods that are known not to work. Principles often want to not do phonics. Teachers often heavily resist phonics. But yes, you can absolutely overcome this, as Mississippi and other Southern states have done, by insisting upon it and actually enforcing that insistence. You see huge gains.

Not all those gains persist into later grades, but a lot of the gains do persist.

No, that won’t get the children invested in reading lots of books on their own time. But given their alternatives and what we inflict on them, can you blame ‘em?

Table of Contents

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Outline:

(01:06) Mississippi Can Read Now

(02:24) What Mississippi and Louisiana Did

(09:10) Spies In Every Classroom

(10:41) Mississippi Results Are Not Due To Retention

(15:54) Is Retention Helpful In General?

(19:46) At Eighth Grade A Lot Of This Improvement Remains

(20:41) England Reforms Its Schools

(21:45) Mastery Learning

(24:16) The War Against Reading

(26:24) Is Our Children Reading

(26:55) No One Reads Anymore

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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When I started this series, everyone was going crazy for coding agents.

Now a lot more people are going crazy for coding agents, as well they should given how much better coding agents keep getting, but also Everybody Knows they are good and is focusing on actually using them. With the slower pace of news here it's no longer clear that the waits associated with doing these updates on their own are worthwhile, so I’m going to fold these updates into the weekly again for now unless there's a new major development.

Table of Contents

Whoops, Sorry

Claude Code suffered in April from three distinct issues that have now been fixed.

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Outline:

(00:38) Whoops, Sorry

(01:45) Huh, Upgrades

(04:13) Codex of Ultimate Computer Use

(08:05) Rookie Numbers

(09:12) I See What You Did There

(11:38) Just a Ride

(11:50) They Didnt Want Our Jobs

(18:30) Skilling Up

(22:08) The Lighter Side

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The era of training frontier models and then releasing them whenever you wanted?

That was fun while it lasted. It looks likely to be over now. The White House wants to get an advance look and have the option to veto your release decisions, and it has used this veto on an expansion of access to Mythos.

We have additional clarity on what that might mean and it does not look good. Hassett explicitly used the FDA as a parallel, which is the actual worst option unless your goal is to strange or pause AI development in America, without a parallel action from China. That doesn’t seem like a great plan to me and Susie Wiles is out doing damage control. The part where we are talking to China to coordinate model access restrictions does seem better.

Anthropic continues its explosive growth, and it continues to strike compute deals. In addition to a long term expanded deal with Google, Anthropic is now leasing SpaceX's Colossus 1, which has let them expand usage limits immediately, and Elon Musk is now speaking positively about Anthropic, including its motivations.

This comes as we get testimony in the Musk [...]

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Outline:

(01:45) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(02:45) Language Models Dont Offer Mundane Utility

(05:09) Huh, Upgrades

(05:37) Grok 4.3 Exists But xAI Kind Of Doesnt

(07:02) Show Me The Compute

(13:23) On Your Marks

(14:05) Copyright Confrontation

(14:19) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

(15:57) Fun With Media Generation

(16:36) A Young Ladys Illustrated Primer

(16:48) Cyber Lack of Security

(17:05) They Took Our Jobs

(17:39) The Art of the Jailbreak

(17:49) Introducing

(18:09) Musk v OpenAI

(21:14) Show Me the Money

(23:03) Peace In Our Time

(26:18) Quiet Speculations

(28:24) Quickly, Theres No Time

(30:35) The Quest for Sane Regulations

(34:04) People Really Hate AI

(34:53) Chip City

(35:05) The Week in Audio

(36:49) People Just Say Things

(40:22) People Just Publish Things

(41:05) Google Sells Out

(42:08) Greetings From Project Glasswing

(44:57) The Prior Restraint Era Begins

(56:42) Is This Even Legal?

(59:49) Pick Up The Phone

(01:03:27) Rhetorical Innovation

(01:04:05) People On The Internet Sometimes Lie

(01:07:14) Goblin Mode

(01:08:34) The Mask Comes Off

(01:16:51) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult

(01:20:00) Some Penalties May Apply

(01:22:28) Messages From Janusworld

(01:22:41) Good Advice

(01:23:42) The Lighter Side

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What is Anthropic? How does it relate to Claude? What is OpenAI? What is ChatGPT? How does OpenAI relate to it? Is it a mere tool? Is a future of Tool AI a thing, and why do people keep claiming that it is, or that saying makes it so?

This post organizes and gives context for a bunch of discussions and messaging on Twitter that would otherwise be quickly buried and lost.

What Is Anthropic?

Here is one theory, and various people thinking about it.

Roon as always is using rhetorical flourish (e.g. note that Roon thinks it is obvious that parents worship their children, in this sense) but this perspective is definitely useful.

Such discussions by default disappear when they happen on Twitter, so here is a preservation of key parts of it.

roon (OpenAI): it is a literal and useful description of anthropic that it is an organization that loves and worships claude, is run in significant part by claude, and studies and builds claude. this phenomenon is also partially true of other labs like openai but currently exists in its most potent form there. i am not certain but I [...]

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Outline:

(00:35) What Is Anthropic?

(11:35) What Is This Supposed Tool AI?

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