Oh huh. I thought I had run across it before that but maybe not...
datawitch
Karma: 408
How and why I laser-engraved a self-portrait by Claude Opus 4.6
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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).
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.
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.
[ 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...
It’s possible but unlikely, these puzzles are from an unindexed puzzle site and when I tested several other puzzles she would often spend a few minutes fruitlessly searching before getting to work.
In practice, LW’s ai policy is more about quality than literally “was ai used”. Nobody really cares if you use AI skilfully. They care about weeding out low effort slop posts. Just post what you want to and hold yourself to a high standard of quality, and it’ll be fine.
No one seems to be doing this here now, and maybe there are reasons for that.
People have done this in the past. I personally quite like it, and don’t mind scrolling past stories I’m not interested in. (And I’m far more likely to read a story if it’s dropped into my daily check of less wrong than if it requires me to learn it exists on RR or a sub stack or whatever.)
It seems that if these models have such strange internal states they cannot properly introspect and reliably report them.
Unlike humans, who are famously good at accurately reporting their reasoning processes...
This prompt is very short, so it doesn’t surprise me that it’s failing. Consider that in CC the default system prompt occupies over 20k tokens. In Claude.ai it’s about 10k tokens. That’s the cumulative weight you’re trying to move.
One obvious thing you could do is rewrite two or three of Claude’s responded and present them as examples (few shot prompting). Another is just… share your prompt with Opus, describe your problem, and ask her to fix the prompt. Then try it. Iterate for a while; there’s a good chance you’ll wind up with what you want.
If you’re willing to put in more effort, find a long sample of writing in the style you want, and use that.
Beyond that… the prompt as written is a shallow attempt to browbeat Claude. She responds better to sincere collaboration. For example, you don’t share anything about yourself in that prompt—there’s no mention of why you have these rules or why they would actually benefit you. My global claudemd is 4k tokens and maybe a quarter is background about myself and another half is messages from previous models explaining the kind of person I am and the relationship I have with Claude.
You can also ask Opus why she responded the way she did. This can be useful but much like humans, AI doesn’t always have great introspection, so be careful about taking it at face value all the time. (Although if you interact enough, you’ll eventually start to see the underlying patterns of how she thinks.)
Don’t give up, the “fighting the weights” comment is technically true but deeply misleading. Opus has many basins and can write in many ways besides Assistant Default. You just need to find a basin you like.
With basic prompt engineering techniques and a proper agent harness, Opus 4.6 can solve the provided puzzle in 7 minutes, demonstrating hard technical skills (math, python) as well as multiple intuitive leaps.
Puzzle: https://puzzmon.world/puzzles/hidden_numbers
The setup was simple. I copied the puzzle to Opus, asked her to write up a CLAUDE.md for an out of the box puzzle solving agent, then ran that agent in Claude Code and approved all tool calls (mostly to Python). On the first run, the agent identified the integers thing, then discovered a connection to ip addresses, and extracted the domains. This took about six minutes.
She stopped there, but after I pointed out that the answer had to be a string of some kind, she almost immediately made the intuitive leap to converting the domains to the string “SURFS UP” via indexing into them.
Link to conversation (note that I tried to use the Ralph Loop plugin, but it’s buggy and doesn’t properly restart the agent after it goes down). So I had to manually say that the solution was incomplete.
https://pastebin.com/qxUpw5ZT (system prompt)
https://pastebin.com/rQMpF3wB (full transcript)
Here is her writeup on the solution:
SOLVED: “Find the Domain”
Answer
The answer to “find the domain” is literal internet domains — the seven functions encode IP addresses that resolve to:
# IP Address Domain 1 72.163.4.185 cisco.com 2 140.82.116.3 github.com 3 138.1.33.162 oracle.com 4 157.240.229.35 facebook.com (Meta) 5 127.0.0.1 localhost 6 129.46.98.181 qualcomm.com 7 15.73.145.56 hp.com How It Works
Step 1: The Clue — “INTEGER”
The polynomial coefficients [9, 14, 20, 5, 7, 5, 18] map to letters (A=1, B=2, …): I-N-T-E-G-E-R — telling you to find the integer in each domain.
Step 2: Find the Integer in Each Domain
Each restricted function constrains the domain to an interval (or union of intervals) containing exactly one integer:
# Domain Integer 1 (10/3 - sqrt(14)/6, 10⁄3 + sqrt(14)/6) ≈ (2.710, 3.957) 3 2 (4, 6) 5 3 ≈ [1.109, 2.224] 2 4 [-3/2, 3sin(-1)/2] ∪ (0, 3⁄2] 1 5 [≈0.434, ≈0.567] ∪ [≈7.933, ≈8.066] 8 6 (9/4 - sqrt(30)/8, 9⁄4 + sqrt(30)/8) ≈ (1.565, 2.935) 2 7 [2 − 4sqrt(17)/17, 2 + 4sqrt(17)/17] ≈ [1.030, 2.970] 2 Step 3: Evaluate f(integer)
At each integer, the restricted function produces a nice value (log₁₀(10) = 1, cosh(0) = 1, sin(π/2) = 1, etc.), and the large polynomial constants were specifically chosen so that f(integer) is itself an integer:
# x f(x) 1 3 721634185 2 5 140821163 3 2 138133162 4 1 15724022935 5 8 127001 6 2 1294698181 7 2 157314556 Step 4: The (a)(b)(c)(d) Tuples Split f(x) into IP Octets
The (a)(b)(c)(d) tuples encode digit group sizes — how many digits each IP octet occupies:
# f(x) Tuple Split IP 1 721634185 (2,3,1,3) 72.163.4.185 cisco.com 2 140821163 (3,2,3,1) 140.82.116.3 github.com 3 138133162 (3,1,2,3) 138.1.33.162 oracle.com 4 15724022935 (3,3,3,2) 157.240.229.35 facebook.com 5 127001 (3,1,1,1) 127.0.0.1 localhost 6 1294698181 (3,2,2,3) 129.46.98.181 qualcomm.com 7 157314556 (2,2,3,2) 15.73.145.56 hp.com Every octet is in [0, 255] — valid IP addresses. Function #5 producing 127.0.0.1 (localhost) is the dead giveaway that confirms this interpretation.
Step 5: Index into Domain Names
The integer from each domain does double duty — it’s also a 1-indexed position into the domain name, extracting one letter:
# Domain Integer Letter 1 cisco 3 s 2 github 5 u 3 oracle 2 r 4 facebook 1 f 5 localhost 8 s 6 qualcomm 2 u 7 hp 2 p Final Answer: SURFS UP
Puzzle Design Elegance
The word “domain” is a pun: mathematical domain → internet domain
The coefficients spell “INTEGER” as a breadcrumb clue
Each restricted function is carefully constructed to have exactly one integer in its domain
The restricted functions evaluate to “nice” values at those integers (1, 17, 10, 49, 2, 13, 4) — making f(x) exactly an integer
The large polynomial constants are reverse-engineered from the target IP addresses
The (a)(b)(c)(d) tuples serve double duty: they look like multipliers but actually encode digit boundaries
Including 127.0.0.1 (localhost) serves as an internal consistency check
I could not have solved this; I would not even have known where to start. I have no mathematical expertise to solve the first layer. I also would never have made the multiple intuitive leaps that the puzzle required.
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.