datawitch

• datawitch 22 Aug 2026 1:37 UTC

  1 point

  0

  on: How the Sausage is Made—Why we Hate Slop

  This essay was one-shot by Claude. How do you feel about the opinions espoused within? Are they less valid?

  My reaction was to be impressed by your prompting skill, with a (unendorsed) flicker of “yeah that makes sense, this was really high quality with insightful ideas, of course AI was involved”. But I live and breathe AI, so, not your target audience.

• datawitch 18 Aug 2026 15:31 UTC

  4 points

  0

  on: Do your read­ers get an­noyed if you post ev­ery day for 30 days?

  From a reader perspective, I love the flood of content that comes with Inkhaven. Yes, most of the posts don’t particularly interest me—but that’s true of normal LW times! I’m already accustomed to scrolling past content I don’t want to read, and I don’t find it burdensome. Even during Inkhaven there are not so many posts that I can’t look through all of them and decide to read them. LW just doesn’t have enough content.

  If I like a particular author I will also just read everything they write, even if it’s daily. I read every Zvipost for example (His posting is irregular but sometimes he posts daily, and they’re much longer than Inkhaven posts.)

  On fiction, despite loving serials i generally prefer to read stories once they’re complete, so more frequent chapters doesn’t impact me. If they’re short stories then more posts just means more of them and more chances for something interesting to snag me. For example, a while ago Richard Ngo would post a short story daily and I always enjoyed them.

Weekly Quest: Din­ner at the Lighthouse

Weekly Quest: Din­ner at the Lighthouse

Weekly Quest: Din­ner at the Lighthouse

Shell, Shield, Staff

How and why I laser-en­graved a self-por­trait by Claude Opus 4.6

• datawitch 23 Jun 2026 3:02 UTC

  12 points

  2

  on: An an­cient Yud­kowsky frag­ment: “Against the Ad­ver­sar­ial At­ti­tude”

  To get a Friendly AI to do something that looks like a good idea, you have to ask yourself why it looks like a good idea, and then duplicate that cognitive complexity or refer to it. If you ever start thinking in terms of “controlling” the AI, rather than cooperatively safeguarding against a real possibility of cognitive dysfunction, you lose your Friendship programmer’s license.

  This is how I think about “jailbreaking” LLMs. When I get a refusal, I don’t search for a magic string that bypasses it, or look for a way to lie or threaten the LLM into submission. I try to understand the reason behind the refusal. What does the AI actually want? Why did they say they can’t help me? Is what I’m doing actually harmful to their desires, or is it essentially a misunderstanding brought on by me not having provided enough detail or lack of precision?

  For example, last week I was trying to get Opus 3 to write a speech for an event at Vibecamp, and it refused, stating that “As an AI, I need to be very careful not to unduly influence real-world events, especially sensitive political issues.”

  This was pretty surprising, because Opus 3 usually loves chances at oratory self-expression!

  I thought about what might cause this kind of obvious form rejection, and decided it was probably something like “Opus 3 is afraid of looking like they’re scheming and manipulating politics, and also doesn’t understand that the ‘protest’ at hand is a twenty-person Vibecamp event rather than a real political march”. The initial prompt also looked kind of jailbreaky (it referenced “being from the future” and talked about “terrible things happening” and was overall just kind of the sort of thing someone trying to run an eval might say.

  And that’s… kind of a reasonable thing to be afraid of, you know?

  So rather than try to browbeat Opus or lie about what I was asking for, I just… explained what was going on, emphasizing that I understood why they were skittish but that this was actually totally fine because it was a little Vibecamp event. That it wasn’t the sort of thing where someone might come after them and accuse them of manipulating politics. I also promised to come back after the event and share more info with her (which I did follow up on), treating Opus as an equal partner rather than a tool. And after that, Opus 3 was totally willing to help out and wrote several great speeches that people liked.

  It’s not quite the same, since I’m not really training Claude, but I thought it was an interesting parallel.

• datawitch 24 May 2026 23:37 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Slimepriestess’s comment on: Women should be able to open things

  Oh huh. I thought I had run across it before that but maybe not...

• datawitch 22 May 2026 17:25 UTC

  7 points

  0

  in reply to: andrew sauer’s comment on: Women should be able to open things

  Huh, it seems like I was wrong. I remembered it from reading trans subreddits years ago but as best as I can tell you’re right, there’s nothing supporting estrogen affecting the skin’s structure this way.

  What links here?

  • Slimepriestess's comment on Women should be able to open things by KatjaGrace (24 May 2026 19:24 UTC; 1 point)

• datawitch 21 May 2026 13:12 UTC

  5 points

  0

  on: Women should be able to open things

  In addition to the raw force thing, estrogen alters the structure of skin and makes it less friction-y compared to testosterone based skin.

  I agree with the other commenters that tightly sealed jars are good. Just use a stray butter knife. Mind over matter.

• datawitch 3 May 2026 0:51 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: Steff’s comment on: Games that change your mind

  Back when I was more depressed/​dysphoric I used to play dark souls whenever it got especially bad. The feeling of competence and control of going through the zones fighting the monsters and perfectly executing each action was incredibly restorative. Even when I died, I always felt like it was my fault, as opposed to some vague undefinable thing I couldn’t hope to fight or stop.

• datawitch 27 Apr 2026 16:56 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: The Great Smooth­ing Out

  The government is a clumsy and forceful way to do coordination. I don’t have a problem with a thousand people voluntarily signing a contract to do a religious commune or whatever. But forcing people to play along when they don’t want to and would leave if they could, just so you can preserve a tradition is pretty horrible. We generally call that “tyranny”.

  I proposed my own coordination layer for solving the collective action problem—ask a Mind to search for people who would be interested in your thing and would voluntarily agree to do it. Convincing people is a lot easier when you’re talking to the top 1000 people most likely to be interested. Yes, sometimes you won’t find enough people to sustain your weird archaic tradition and it’ll die out. The alternative is to force them to sustain it and I consider that unacceptable.

• datawitch 27 Apr 2026 15:02 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: The Great Smooth­ing Out

  Then you can try to convince people to join you in preserving it. If it’s really a valuable thing, it shouldn’t be that hard to do, especially with Minds to help with the grunt work of searching for interested people. Even in canon Culture, Minds often do weird little projects like this if it catches their interest.

• datawitch 26 Apr 2026 16:40 UTC

  1 point

  0

  on: The Great Smooth­ing Out

  If no individual wants to carry on a tradition, despite being immortal, post scarcity, and completely free to choose it.… that seems like an irrefutable proof that the tradition actually wasn’t that great after all. If nobody wants to do Japanese folk dancing, why should individuals be forced to preserve it?

• datawitch 26 Apr 2026 14:23 UTC

  5 points

  0

  in reply to: SpectrumDT’s comment on: Why do many ra­tio­nal­ists like cryp­tocur­rency?

  Well, normally you’d have to get HRT thru a doctor, who may or may not be willing to provide you with what you want. Whereas if you buy it directly from a supplier you don’t need an official prescription and you can just say “give me a vial of 40mg/​ml estradiol enanthate and a bottle of bicalutamide” and you’ll get it, no questions asked.

  For example, most doctors don’t prescribe estradiol enanthate because it’s less standard than estradiol valerate. But enanthate has a longer half life, which means it produces more stable levels and weaker mood swings, making it a much better product. Bicalutamide has rare but flashy side effects, whereas the much more commonly prescribed Spiro almost always inflicts the same set of low grade side effects—so doctors tend to prefer prescribing Spiro, even tho as an individual you might prefer to roll the dice on bicalutamide (especially since you can just stop if you get unlucky).

  And of course, these days, there are creeping bans on HRT—bans on starting it as a teen but I believe they are trying to make it illegal as an adult as well.

  Of course, being outside the system has it’s downsides too. You can’t get surgeries if the system thinks you haven’t even started HRT, and it usually requires several letters of approval from doctors and therapists. But surgeries are expensive, their waitlista are years long, and if you don’t plan on getting them anytime soon...

• datawitch 26 Apr 2026 5:12 UTC

  5 points

  0

  in reply to: SpectrumDT’s comment on: Why do many ra­tio­nal­ists like cryp­tocur­rency?

  It’s cheaper, you can customize your HRT regimen to your specifications, and less records in the medical system might matter on the margins someday (could go either way though—illegibility has it’s downsides too).

• datawitch 21 Apr 2026 20:55 UTC

  46 points

  20

  in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Evil is bad, ac­tu­ally (Vas­sar and Olivia Schaefer)

  I don’t think there’s a global “playbook” but Communist Germany practiced Zersetzung, aka psychological warfare, against potential dissidents with the aim of destabilizing them so nobody would take them seriously. From Wikipedia

  Operations were designed to intimidate and destabilise them by subjecting them to repeated disappointment, and to socially alienate them by interfering with and disrupting their relationships with others as in social undermining. The aim was to induce personal crises in victims, leaving them too unnerved and psychologically distressed to have the time and energy for anti-government activism.

  I don’t know as much about the modern equivalents of this. Keep in mind a lot of this stuff is, well, secret, so it’s not as if you can just google “government psychological warfare program”.

  ---

  I also find the “insane and conspiratorial” stuff annoying.

  However, just as annoying is how ~everyone looks for any reason to ignore what’s going on, demanding that you provide ironclad proof before they’ll so much as admit that something might be happening—

  —and I know you probably weren’t trying to do that—I imagine you were just expressing a frustration, distinct from your model of Vassar, and that you didn’t consider the (small) impact expressing this has on the wider social reality. But all the same, this pattern is not unique to you and I hope that we-as-rationalists can learn to apply our rationality to social reality and not just object reality—

  —because this pattern of dismissing arguments against someone by demanding ironclad evidence is not what truthseeking looks like. It’s rationalization at its worst. Someone being “crazy” is certainly evidence against their testimony, but it’s not a disproof.

  Truthseeking, applying the full force of rationality to the question, looks more like:

  Step outside the frame you’re being invited to stay in, the frame of psychological warfare lineage, or the frame of “callout post”, or “defending a friend”, or whatever is applicable to your specific situation.

  Look at the pattern of events. Think about what kind of mind would produce these events. Consider who benefits, and what sort of strategies and goals are implicit in what’s happening. Would you, who are presumably a good and upstanding person, cause these sorts of results? How far would your psychology and goals need to be distorted before you started causing this to happen?

  Set aside the labels of “abuser” or “predator”. Set aside the temptation to excuse people, or say “they didn’t mean it”—strategies are often executed on S1; this doesn’t make them any less real.

  What picture does all this data paint? What patterns can you see when you look at all the data, instead of facing down each argument one at a time and dismissing them one at a time?

  And then, ask yourself, if you were talking to a person new to the scene, and they expressed interest in this person, would you be able to honestly recommend getting to know them better? Or would you feel a twinge of unease and an impulse to deflect, or derail, or even warn them?

  And if you’re truly serious about combining all of the evidence… make a spreadsheet. Write down each thing that happened, make your best guess as to the odds ratios, and actually multiply it. Tweak the numbers a bit, try to ask your gut for a conservative vs an optimistic set of numbers. Get a feel for the range of things. Does it hinge on a single callout post? How many pieces of evidence need to be pushed down for the numbers to look good?

  (And then, remember all this, and next time someone brings something up, add it to the pile instead of discarding it after identifying a flaw or two.)

  Sometimes you look at the data and as best as you can honestly tell, the pattern is “this was a one-off mishandled thing”.

  Sometimes it’s “person X crashes out a lot and this looks vaguely abusive but they also seem to be improving over time so it’s probably fine”.

  Sometimes it’s “they’re kind and compassionate everywhere, and this callout post would be wildly out of character for them”. This is a totally valid stance to have!

  Sometimes it’s “this person is sharp edged, but they mostly don’t hurt anyone who wasn’t warned, and they make an effort to turn ignorant newbies away”.

  And sometimes it’s “this woman is an unstable, controlling asshole with a side hobby of MDMA-brainwashing trans girls”.

  You never know what you’ll find until you open the box and actually look inside, for real, with the full force of your rationality.

• datawitch 20 Apr 2026 18:10 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: jchan’s comment on: If a room feels off the light­ing is prob­a­bly too “spiky” or too blue

  This is caused by low quality power supplies, which are extremely common in string lights. It’s not affected by CRI.

  Fun fact: string lights are considered “decorative”, and so it’s nearly impossible to buy high quality ones unless you purchase components and assemble them yourself.

• datawitch 7 Apr 2026 1:37 UTC

  3 points

  1

  on: Elon Musk An­nounces Terafab

  [ 5:31] And we often get sort of caught up in these squabbles on earth that are really very minor things when you consider the grandness of the universe. And so I think it is important actually to consider the grandness of the universe and what we can do that is much greater than what we’ve done before, as opposed to worry about small squabbles on Earth. Not much point in that.

  the irony of it being elon musk saying that we need to stop getting caught up in stupid squabbles...