What I’ve been using AI (mainly Gemini 2.5 Pro, free through AI Studio with much higher limits than the free consumer product) for:
Writing articles in Chinese for my family members, explaining things like cognitive bias, evolutionary psychology, and why dialectical materialism is wrong. (My own Chinese writing ability is <4th grade.) My workflow is to have a chat about some topic with the AI in English, then have it write an article in Chinese based on the chat, then edit or have it edit as needed.
Simple coding/scripting projects. (I don’t code seriously anymore.)
Discussing history, motivations of actors, impact of ideology and culture, what if, etc.
Searching/collating information.
Reviewing my LW posts/comments (any clear flaws, any objections I should pre-empt, how others might respond)
Explaining parts of other people’s comments when the meaning or logic isn’t clear to me.
Expanding parts of my argument (and putting this in a collapsible section) when I suspect my own writing might be too terse or hard to understand.
Sometimes just having a sympathetic voice to hear my lamentations of humanity’s probable fate.
I started using AI more after Grok 3 came out (I have an annual X subscription for Tweeting purposes), as previous free chatbots didn’t seem capable enough for many of these purposes, and then switched to Gemini 2.0 Pro which was force upgraded to 2.5 Pro. Curious what other people are using AI for these days.
generate simple Python code, mostly to work with files and images
ask for examples how to do something in certain Java libraries
translate a book from Russian to Slovak and English, including puns and poems
I tried to also use Claude to explain to me some parts of set theory, but it hallucinates so much that it is unusable for this purpose. Practically every mathematical argument contains an error somewhere in the middle. Asking the same question in two chats will give me “yes—here is the proof” in one, and “no—here is a counterexample” in another; and that’s after I’ve already turned on the extra careful mathematical reasoning.
My wife tried to use Claude for biochemical research, but again, too many hallucinations to be useful. Anything you ask, “yes, this is correct, you are so smart, let me give you a few scientific references for that...” (all made up).
Writing articles in Chinese for my family members, explaining things like cognitive bias, evolutionary psychology, and why dialectical materialism is wrong.
Your needing to write them seems to suggest that there’s not enough content like that in Chinese, in which case it would plausibly make sense to publish them somewhere?
I’m also curious about how your family received these articles.
Your needing to write them seems to suggest that there’s not enough content like that in Chinese, in which case it would plausibly make sense to publish them somewhere?
I’m not sure how much such content exist in Chinese, because I didn’t look. It seems easier to just write new content using AI, that way I know it will cover the ideas/arguments I want to cover, represent my views, and make it easier for me to discuss the ideas with my family. Also reading Chinese is kind of a chore for me and I don’t want to wade through a list of search results trying to find what I need.
I thought about publishing them somewhere, but so far haven’t:
concerns about publishing AI content (potentially contributing to “slop”)
not active in any Chinese forums, not familiar with any Chinese publishing platforms
probably won’t find any audience (too much low quality content on the web, how will people find my posts)
don’t feel motivated to engage/dialogue with a random audience, if they comment or ask questions
Sure—i am currently on my phone but I can paint a quick picture.
Local Memory—I keep my own internal predictions on fatebook and have it synced locally to my obsidian (a local markdown file manager). Then, I use Claude’s obsidian MCP to help me write down my daily notes from work and a jumbled context of my messages with coworkers, random web comments and other messaging services so it can help me to keep my profiles on my friends and projects up to date. (It is again, glued together with more MCPs that have limited access to my chatlogs with my friends). Ofc, with human in the loop.
Delphi—I wrote a simple MCP that basically just does the Delphi method with LLMs. Usually facilitated by Claude, it calls a panel of experts. These experts are the topK ranked models on LLM arena. And it does the questionaire generation based on my question, hand them out, aggregate the consensus, and decide if one is reached! Again, it has the context needed from me through my Obsidian. I use this for questions that are more personal or that there are not good liquidity for on prediction markets.
I’m still using it for this purpose, but don’t have a good sense of how much worse it is compared to pre-0325. However I’m definitely very wary of the sycophancy and overall bad judgment. I’m only using them to point out potential issues I may have overlooked, and not e.g. whether a draft is ready to post, or whether some potential issue is a real issue that needs to be fixed. All the models I’ve tried seem to err a lot in both directions.
What I’ve been using AI (mainly Gemini 2.5 Pro, free through AI Studio with much higher limits than the free consumer product) for:
Writing articles in Chinese for my family members, explaining things like cognitive bias, evolutionary psychology, and why dialectical materialism is wrong. (My own Chinese writing ability is <4th grade.) My workflow is to have a chat about some topic with the AI in English, then have it write an article in Chinese based on the chat, then edit or have it edit as needed.
Simple coding/scripting projects. (I don’t code seriously anymore.)
Discussing history, motivations of actors, impact of ideology and culture, what if, etc.
Searching/collating information.
Reviewing my LW posts/comments (any clear flaws, any objections I should pre-empt, how others might respond)
Explaining parts of other people’s comments when the meaning or logic isn’t clear to me.
Expanding parts of my argument (and putting this in a collapsible section) when I suspect my own writing might be too terse or hard to understand.
Sometimes just having a sympathetic voice to hear my lamentations of humanity’s probable fate.
I started using AI more after Grok 3 came out (I have an annual X subscription for Tweeting purposes), as previous free chatbots didn’t seem capable enough for many of these purposes, and then switched to Gemini 2.0 Pro which was force upgraded to 2.5 Pro. Curious what other people are using AI for these days.
I successfully use Claude web interface to:
generate simple Python code, mostly to work with files and images
ask for examples how to do something in certain Java libraries
translate a book from Russian to Slovak and English, including puns and poems
I tried to also use Claude to explain to me some parts of set theory, but it hallucinates so much that it is unusable for this purpose. Practically every mathematical argument contains an error somewhere in the middle. Asking the same question in two chats will give me “yes—here is the proof” in one, and “no—here is a counterexample” in another; and that’s after I’ve already turned on the extra careful mathematical reasoning.
My wife tried to use Claude for biochemical research, but again, too many hallucinations to be useful. Anything you ask, “yes, this is correct, you are so smart, let me give you a few scientific references for that...” (all made up).
Your needing to write them seems to suggest that there’s not enough content like that in Chinese, in which case it would plausibly make sense to publish them somewhere?
I’m also curious about how your family received these articles.
I’m not sure how much such content exist in Chinese, because I didn’t look. It seems easier to just write new content using AI, that way I know it will cover the ideas/arguments I want to cover, represent my views, and make it easier for me to discuss the ideas with my family. Also reading Chinese is kind of a chore for me and I don’t want to wade through a list of search results trying to find what I need.
I thought about publishing them somewhere, but so far haven’t:
concerns about publishing AI content (potentially contributing to “slop”)
not active in any Chinese forums, not familiar with any Chinese publishing platforms
probably won’t find any audience (too much low quality content on the web, how will people find my posts)
don’t feel motivated to engage/dialogue with a random audience, if they comment or ask questions
I mostly use Claude desktop client with MCPs (like additional plugins and tooling for Claude to use) for:
2-iter Delphi method involving calling Gemini2.5pro+whatever is top at the llm arena of the day through open router.
Metaculus, Kalshi and Manifold search for quick intuition on subjects
Smart fetch (for ocr’ing pdf, images, etc)
Local memory
This sounds interesting. I would be interested in more details and some sample outputs.
What do you use this for, and how?
Sure—i am currently on my phone but I can paint a quick picture.
Local Memory—I keep my own internal predictions on fatebook and have it synced locally to my obsidian (a local markdown file manager). Then, I use Claude’s obsidian MCP to help me write down my daily notes from work and a jumbled context of my messages with coworkers, random web comments and other messaging services so it can help me to keep my profiles on my friends and projects up to date. (It is again, glued together with more MCPs that have limited access to my chatlogs with my friends). Ofc, with human in the loop.
Delphi—I wrote a simple MCP that basically just does the Delphi method with LLMs. Usually facilitated by Claude, it calls a panel of experts. These experts are the topK ranked models on LLM arena. And it does the questionaire generation based on my question, hand them out, aggregate the consensus, and decide if one is reached! Again, it has the context needed from me through my Obsidian. I use this for questions that are more personal or that there are not good liquidity for on prediction markets.
Does Gemini-2.5-pro still work for this given how sycophantic the post-0325 models were?
I’m still using it for this purpose, but don’t have a good sense of how much worse it is compared to pre-0325. However I’m definitely very wary of the sycophancy and overall bad judgment. I’m only using them to point out potential issues I may have overlooked, and not e.g. whether a draft is ready to post, or whether some potential issue is a real issue that needs to be fixed. All the models I’ve tried seem to err a lot in both directions.