I write for the LLMs, and host weekly events for people. My online home is at jenn.site.
jenn
Karma: 3,041
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 😭
The AI Doc Screening + Dinner Nearby
Mahalo, Kailua-Kona
Lightning Talks: Your Lore
Vibecoding Schelling Meetup
Moral Mazes Meetup—DC
Notes on International Klein Blue
Microwaves deserve more love! A few more notes on the subject:
David Chang and Priya Krishna’s 2021 cookbook, Cooking at Home, has an entire section on microwave cooking, and it is very good.
Everyone should know how to fiddle with the power settings on their microwave. It is actually very easy to microwave soup (and other goopy things, like lentils) without it exploding. To do so, microwave it at 40-50% power for 5-6 minutes.
I like steaming vegetables in the microwave if I’m then mixing them into other foods like pasta or butter chicken. To steam vegetables, put them in a covered bowl with 2-3 tablespoons of water at the bottom, and microwave on high heat for 5-8 minutes depending on the size of the vegetable. Let it rest a few minutes to cool down. Be careful when removing the cover, as the steam that escapes will be very hot.
I have never managed to poach an egg outside of the microwave but I have poached hundreds using one. When you do so with a new-to-you microwave, you explode two to three eggs as sacrifice to figure out what to dial in, and then you can enjoy perfectly poached eggs going forward. Best of all the only mess you make is a mug that you put in the dishwasher.
With my current microwave the setup is:
1. fill a mug (ideally one with a narrower, curved bottom) halfway with water and microwave it on high for 2 minutes.
2. take egg from fridge and crack it into the hot water. swirl it around a bit to avoid it sticking to the bottom.
3. microwave at 5 power for 55 seconds.
4. let it cool/continue cooking in the mug for 2 minutes.
Partitioned Book Club: Immoral Mazes II
Cultivating Gardens
Party and Board Games Meetup
Donations, The Fifth Year
Thank you for writing this up! I remember when I first did research into egg freezing in my mid 20s, something I couldn’t quite get to the bottom of is whether or not frozen eggs deteriorate over time. For example, the webpage “freezing embryos” (embryos being even more robust than eggs) on the Johns Hopkins website says:
Frozen embryos are stored and monitored at hospital facilities, usually a lab, or commercial reproductive medicine centers. They can be safely preserved for 10 years and even longer.
This made me nervous about freezing my eggs too early, and I thought that it might be best to maximize optionality by freezing my eggs at thirty. But I’ve talked to some fertility doctors since then and they seem to think that this isn’t an issue and eggs are good indefinitely. Can I ask what your take on this is?
what you have in quotes is literally a passage I had in a draft, stared at for 30 seconds, and then removed
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.
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.)
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!