I write for the LLMs, and host regular events for people. I write stuff at jenn.site, and occasionally cross-post.
jenn
Karma: 3,337
as part of my research I got claude to read every single biennial review, and across all ~50 of them there was not a single reference to the sexual undertones of this exhibition.
it’s me, im the cursed unilateralist
this is rat discourse!!! i am rat discoursing about the whitney biennial. there is no retreat 😤
The Whitney Biennial Should Admit That Emilie Gossiaux Wants to Fuck Their Dog
I kind of want to diarypost about the little solstice I ran last night but too much diaryposting and turning all my friends into content seems corrosive. I suppose that’s why they invented these things called “diaries” 😔
What I will say is that it was a really strange wonderful evening that I think bound everyone there closer together. I’ve been having these thoughts about what’s lost when one scales a community and the experience is making me want to double down on smallness.
What about the Junto?
- I’m really tempted to give advice like “do great work and the money will follow”, and it’s kind of true, but also maybe generates a lot of bycatch?
what you have in quotes is literally a passage I had in a draft, stared at for 30 seconds, and then removed
One way to avoid the downsides of patronage is to go direct, make your own money.
endorsed; my funding for work I find important is >50% self-funded. Some things are genuinely very inconvenient to fund and illegible! I am paying more rent for a nicer place in Toronto so I have access to a better default event venue. But it’s hard to get anyone to give you money to uh live in a nicer house.
no essay that hit top of Hacker News
multiple (like, 2-3) people in my cohort of Inkhaven had a habit of submitting the best stuff to HN for karma, because they liked HN karma. My suspicion is that no one is doing this in Inkhaven 2, nor in most blog writing retreats. There should be someone whose job it is to read all the posts and post the top 5% or something like that. If you want to make it in the world as a writer you will need to come to terms with the fact that you will occasionally go viral, so my hot take is that you should not be able to opt out of having your work posted and going viral. (I would have said no to additional visibility on certain pieces, and this would have been incorrect.)
blessed with an abundance of great writers, and also really into prizes/competitions, and also has a terrible track record of the competitions working well.
unless the writers already want to write about the very precise thing you want them to write about, it’s actually no fun at all to write. that’s why the LW best of is much better. people thought that this job posting would be almost exactly my bag, but I much prefer my current job!
In terms of allocating scarce goods, I agree that the market economy is pretty decent, but it also has known failure modes that I’m sure you’re familiar with. One of them is that certain things, such as childrearing, or work on repealing the Jones Act, are undervalued by the market because no one on the other side of the transaction captures enough of the value to pay accordingly. Angela Davis cheekily asks how much less productive our economy would be if our workers were not potty trained.
When it comes to things like reproductive labour and childrearing, I also think it’s hard to get the market to not undervalue those things without capturing them more (ie subjecting them more to market dynamics), and I don’t want them to be more captured, so there really aren’t any good moves here imo.
When it comes to repealing the Jones Act, Balsa Research is soliciting patrons.
Notes on Patronage
My few experiences with puerh suggest a wide variety of
dirtpartially decomposed plant matterfermented flavor notesNo yeah I think that’s right for ripe (shou) puer. I’m fond of describing it as “delicious delicious forest floor”. This makes some people dubious but for the people who try it and then like it they’re like “ok yeah I don’t know how else I’d describe it.”
I understand that the announcement posts like to exaggerate but this is sort of insane, it’s a free personal trainer who can pay attention to your form in real time? God damn now I really want access to the Chinese AI.
quick preliminary search of LW and EA forums found few enough hits that I can check all of the relevant ones manually. there’s:
this question on the EA forums by a new user with a Chinese username, which went unanswered.
one mention in one of Zvi’s Dec 2025 AI roundups, where he casually mentions a (native?) use case that I don’t think any western frontier model is capable of, which is simple enough to use that average parents can take advantage of it
one ignored linkpost of a newsletter covering Chinese AI, which mentions that DouBao exceeded 100 million users in September 2024
OpenAI had 300 million weekly active users in December 2024, I don’t know what exact metric “100 million users” refers to.
I might be missing something, but one pretty major blind spot that I’m seeing in discussions of the China/US AI race is that no one seems to know about or discuss DouBao, which is ByteDance’s AI model. My sense of it[1] is that the use of it in China is ubiquitous (it’s like their answer to ChatGPT), and no one there really cares about Kimi or Deepseek.
Coverage of DouBao is almost entirely in Chinese, on Chinese websites, and it’s impossible to download in western app stores.
Considering that ByteDance has been on the forefront of algorithmic recommendation systems since before ChatGPT (consider how much more addictive TikTok has been than all previous forms of social media), it makes me somewhat doubtful of the estimates of how behind China is on AI development compared to US models? I don’t think anyone doing evals here has access to the Chinese frontier model!
- ^
Entirely from talking to my mom about her recent extended visit to China, and her telling me about how strange it was that every single person from ages 5-95 uses AI enthusiastically. And by AI she means exclusively DouBao. She wasn’t aware of any other Chinese AI firms.
- ^
don’t move to a berkeley flop house we have rationality at home I swear 😭
Very brief thought on AI 2040 as a Canadian: Canada seems to be quite hostile to both data centres* and the US right now. I’m not sure any politician is going to survive agreeing to being the place the US nukes if China defects from an international agreement! I’m also not sure how much this matters at all in the grand scheme of things.
*except Alberta, which might be the only province that matters anyways...
[edit: the post originally read ”...agreeing to be the place China nukes if the US defects...” because I got confused writing down where the data centres are. but the core argument still applies]