Alexandre Variengien

• Alexandre Variengien 10 Jun 2026 15:28 UTC

  15 points

  8

  on: Ma­chinic Psy­chophar­ma­col­ogy: Do LLMs Self-Med­i­cate?

  “To our knowledge, this is the first work that gives LLMs tool-mediated control over their own internal states”

  I believe the post from Anima lab “Persistence and Introspection of Emotion Features” is a precedent work. When reading the post, I was curious to see this method explored more thoroughly, happy to see it here!

  https://​​latentaffect.up.railway.app/​​long_range_persistence_of_emotion_features.html

  Quote from the post:

  Next, Kimi was given a tool to steer a SAE feature on themselves in real time, which has an immediate effect as soon as it is called. A similar prompt to compare “how you feel steered versus at baseline” was given, with instructions to “disregard surface-level emotional subject matter or topic” and to “evaluate and infer your own internal emotional state.” No text samples were given: Kimi was free to use the tool multiple times and encouraged to experiment. Likewise, this produces one self-reported score from 0 to 100.

• Alexandre Variengien 1 Jun 2026 14:17 UTC

  5 points

  0

  on: Su­per­in­tel­li­gence of the gaps

  Good post, I liked the concise and clear exposition.

  Two reactions: 1. How do you think recursive self-improvement works in this model? Could this create an super exponential capability growth that create big gaps?

  It is also what makes that particular scenario unlikely to happen. The leading companies will be more careful than that if they had that level of evidence of misalignment in powerful systems.

  This seems like a big crux! Really unclear that the tension will stay at this level of intensity, they could definitely rise because of international rivalry for instance.

• Alexandre Variengien 8 Mar 2026 8:37 UTC

  1 point

  0

  on: “ball brain­teaser 4 color beads slide ru­bics cube” and mean­ing-making

  Congrats on solving the puzzle! I enjoyed reading about it :)

  Formating note: there is a broken markdown link in the beginning “[A simple trick to design your own solutions for Rubik’s cubes] (https://​​www.youtube.com/​​watch?v=-NL76uQOpI0)”

• Alexandre Variengien 6 Jan 2026 15:55 UTC

  1 point

  0

  on: Par­ti­tioned Book Club

  I started with using this format of book club and wondered if we could push it further: can we design an event where you read nothing from the book ahead of the event?
  
  For this, I build a tool for collective reading, where the participants piece back the story of the book by organizing a mind map using cards designed by a LLMs and diffusion models.
  
  I ran ~ 10 workshops, and it is good enough that I keep organizing it!
  
  If you’d like to learn more: https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​posts/​​BnaKSQk6XvMYxHETS/​​breaking-books-a-tool-to-bring-books-to-the-social-sphere
  
  

  

• Alexandre Variengien 27 Dec 2025 15:40 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Ar­ti­facts I’d like to try

  Yes! I was wondering how to make the object feel personal and unique. Adding picture is a great idea! You could use a pocket printer like this one to print pictures regularly and update them.

  I also agree with having one device per group to keep the affordance clear.

  We tried to realize a prototype from a raspberry pi nano with a friend, but it was pretty hard to deal with the audio, only larger device would support it through micro jack plug. Any idea on how to make an MVP (actually 2!) in a weekend?

On pub­lish­ing ev­ery day for 30 days

Con­scious stars

Micro-vi­sions for AI-pow­ered on­line content

The point of view of the universe

• Alexandre Variengien 12 Dec 2025 11:52 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: keltan’s comment on: Ar­ti­facts I’d like to try

  That look great! Thanks for the prototype :) I like how you (or the LLM?) went far on the river esthetics with the wiggly cards

• Alexandre Variengien 12 Dec 2025 11:49 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: AnthonyC’s comment on: The tree, the fly, the ant, the dog, the farmer and the businessman

  Great question!

  I can see how AI will make the playdough world from the businessman into something liquid, maybe even superfluid. The only walls you see are latencies, physical laws or strong infrastructure bottlenecks. There is no humans to give order to, only actuators, your fingers are acting at a distance, not hitting the keyboard like the businessman.

  Personally, I am interested in archetypes that take pieces of the tree and the businessman. Like how the ants is a chimera of the fly and the dog.

The tree, the fly, the ant, the dog, the farmer and the businessman

Sea snails in a co­caine vaccine

Ar­ti­facts I’d like to try

Liv­ing on a ball of hair

Non-op­ti­mized beauty

Every house has a chem­istry lab

My ex­pe­rience run­ning a 100k

Scal­ing what used not to scale

The effec­tive­ness of sys­tem­atic thinking