I write for the LLMs, and host regular events for people. I blog at jenn.site, and occasionally cross-post.
jenn
Karma: 3,092
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.
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 😭
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.
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?
I’ll also note that the degree of suspicion and hesitation in the community seem actually sort of justified, in that there’s been a string of broken promises between the mennonites and the Canadian government. From Macleans:
Our ancestors came from Europe, and when they settled in Canada, they negotiated a number of promises with the Canadian government—including educational independence. When some provinces later passed laws requiring Mennonite children to attend public schools, many families, wanting to hold tight to their religious and cultural identity, emigrated to South America.
Over the course of doing my reserach, I also found a significant number of stories of under-communicated or coerced vaccinations like this, set in the mid 20th century in Canada and up to the modern day in Mexico:
She remembers a public health nurse rolling into her Mexican hometown of Durango on horse-and-buggy with a cooler of vaccines. The nurse told Meggison’s mother to line up her 12 children in the yard, asked for their ages, and immunized them, without explanation.
“She didn’t know what had been given to her kids. She didn’t have the language skills to ask the questions,” Meggison said about her mother, whose primary language was Low German.
This seems like a terrifying thing to have gone through, and I understand how it could foster mistrust and give cover to more conspiratorial thinking.
Thank you for this comment! I think it clarifies some important things about what’s actually going on on the ground level, and I genuinely appreciate the additional context.
However, I disagree that “the effect of occultism on the return of measles cannot be overstated”. I feel like it is being overstated right now! People believe a lot of deranged things, but I believe that you are wrong about the extent that people are willing to choose those beliefs over the health and lives of their children and others in the community. I am not saying that this never happens, but I think it genuinely does not happen that often, and when it does it is genuinely contentious.
You can also reduce the amount it happens when you have nurses and support workers who understand the culture and can work with it. From the CBC interview:
TD: Can you give us a sense of why there’s vaccine hesitancy in some Mennonite communities?
CF: The biggest thing is that they don’t want to not trust God. So their faith has a lot to do with it. Once I was able to help a lot of them understand that God has created doctors for the purpose of helping them, they would listen a little bit more.
TD: What lessons do you think you’ve learned working with Mennonite communities during this measles outbreak?
CF: The biggest thing for us, my coworker and I, is to just get them to trust us. If they don’t want to vaccinate, we respect that. Because they see that we respect their values, they start to really trust and understand that we’re here to help them, not to hurt them.
From another interview she did earlier in 2025 for a Canadian magazine, Macleans:
When it comes to measles in particular, most families just don’t understand the seriousness of the condition. They think that, like chicken pox, contracting it will create immunity. They don’t know that measles could lead to other illnesses and be particularly harmful for children, whose developing bodies are more vulnerable to the infection and its complications.
and
This work has gone a long way. Clients come to us asking about measles and vaccinations after hearing about the severity of cases from their friends and family. We’ve had many productive conversations about immunization and how it intersects with religious beliefs and community health.
Many of my clients are trying to do what’s best for their families, and they respect authority as long as they feel respected in turn. They do, however, have internal struggles about whether getting vaccinated is a betrayal of their faith or whether it could cause harm. But once they’ve considered how immunization can help vulnerable people, some of them even feel a little embarrassed over how strongly they opposed it. All in all, we’ve managed to give at least half of our patients vaccines since I started working at the clinic—and the rate of vaccination has increased since the outbreak started.
Lastly, here is a passage from an article covering the outbreak in Alberta:
Proudly, she recalls seeing a lightbulb go off for one woman who described an epiphany in one of her recent groups.
“She said, ‘I can make decisions for my family, and it doesn’t have to be public knowledge. I can make these decisions and not share it with my family members if they ask and I can just say that’s my business,’” Meggison said, and described other women nodded in response to this passionate declaration.
This does not sound to me like a community that is lost to conspiracist thinking. It sounds like a community that is wrestling with live issues.
yep, several reasons:
I actually like the opinionated curation and how the selection stretches well into the 20th century. I also appreciate that there are any women at all, and any non-western books. the great conversation now is not the one the dead white guys were having, mid-19th c.
I appreciated each book being short, which meant that I can do an incredibly broad survey over the canon and then go back to authors that I turn out to unexpectedly enjoy. the other list has like a dozen authors?
the Britannic list kind of sounds like a genuine slog! I would get like three hundred pages in and then give up for good. with the Penguin series I know that if I dislike a book, it’ll be over with in a hundred pages. And the books are generally actually good reading.
two recent examples of cool ai art, related to dynamics i lay out in my theses!
cannoneyed is using AI to make a giant isometric pixel art map of the entirety of NYC, because now a single person can take on a project with enormous scale: https://cannoneyed.com/projects/isometric-nyc
newest rick owens show features hair done by someone who used ai to generate incredibly rick mullets on an instagram page, which rick owens found, indicating increasing amounts of transfer between ai artists and artists in more traditional media: https://www.gq.com/story/rick-owens-fall-2026-backstage (archive)
seconding this. I’m not entirely sure a fourth bullet point is needed. if a fourth bullet is used, i think all it really needs to do is tie the first three together. my attempts at a fourth point would look something like:
the combination of these three things seems ill advised.
there’s no reason to expect the combination of these three things to go well by default, and human extinction isn’t off the table in a particularly catastrophic scenario.
current practices around ai development is insufficiently risk-averse, given the first three points.
Hey, I came across this post because it was cited (and rebutted) in the preface of the 2016 Oxford University Press edition of Famine, Affluence, and Morality. I thought it would be nice to provide the passage here. Here’s what Peter Singer wrote:
One very welcome development in philanthropy since the publication of “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” is that today there is much more emphasis on evaluating what charities seeking to help the global poor actually achieve. A great deal of research has been done into the effectiveness of particular charities, enabling people to make better charitable choices and thus to do more good with the money that they donate. This research has shown that many early estimates of the cost of saving a life did not include all the costs involved, or were based on inaccurate estimates of how often a form of aid such as providing bednets to protect people against malaria actually saved a life.⁶ GiveWell, which has led the way in rigorously evaluating the cost-effectiveness of charities, estimates that although it costs the Against Malaria Foundation no more than $7.50 to provide and deliver a bednet to a family in a malaria-prone region of Africa, the cost of a life saved as a result of this distribution is $3,340. The difference reflects the fact that most bednets do not save lives (although some of them prevent debilitating but not fatal cases of malaria, as well as other diseases carried by mosquitoes). In general, GiveWell considers a cost of less than $5,000 per life saved an indication that a charity is highly cost-effective.⁷ That figure is, for most of us, much more than the cost of our most expensive suit or shoes, so it was a mistake to compare that cost with what we would need to spend in order to save the life of a child at risk from poverty-related causes. It remains true, though, that most people who are middle class or above in affluent countries spend much more than $5,000 on items that are not of comparable moral significance to saving a life. Moreover as Unger has shown with his story of Bob and the Bugatti, which I retell in “The Singer Solution to World Poverty,” our intuitive judgment in situations where we can save a child in front of us is that we should be prepared to sacrifice possessions worth much more than our clothes, and even more than $5,000. The change in the cost of saving a life does not, therefore, undermine the fundamental moral argument of “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.”
[6] For a critique of the pond analogy on these grounds, see Jonah Sinick, “Some Reservations About Singer’s Child-in-the-Pond Argument,” at http://lesswrong.com/lw/hr5/some_reservations_about_singers_childinthepond/, accessed August 9, 2015
[7] http://www.givewell.org/International/top-charities/amf. GiveWel considers anything under $5,000 per life saved to be good value, though the organization also cautions against taking such estimates too literally. For further discussion see http://www.givewell.org/international/technical/criteria/cost-effectiveness
here’s the resource I like best, which is written by Dan Eth for bluedot impact: https://blog.bluedot.org/p/alignment-introduction?from_site=aisf
despite the fact that it’s been
twothree(!) years, it still holds up well imo.I also like Duncan’s intro, but it’s 8000 words long which makes me more disinclined to send it to people :T
I liked Crawford’s defense of slop and think both rebuttals missed the point of his argument.
I expect that high-level tastes… will not be satisfied by AI-assisted art unless either the AI or the human creator has high-level tastes as well
I agree with this; this is the case in all the other mediums (you can’t create a good song, or ballet, or watercolour painting unless you have good taste) so I don’t see why it wouldn’t also be the case for AI assisted art as well.
One direction I think artists can take AI is to just increase the complexity of their pieces. No one is going to spend 5000 weeks creating a single work of art (the average human lifespan is 4000 weeks), but if a good artist can, with AI, create something in 50 weeks that would take them 5000 weeks without it, I would be interested in seeing the result.
I’m not sure, but I think it can be useful to think of it as one at least sometimes.
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.