Lorxus

Karma: 598

Mathematician, agent foundations researcher, doctor. A strange primordial spirit left over from the early dreamtime, the conditions for the creation of which no longer exist; a creature who was once told to eat math and grow vast and who took that to heart; an escaped feral academic.

Reach out to me on Discord and tell me you found my profile on LW if you’ve got something interesting to say; you have my explicit permission to try to guess my Discord handle if so. You can’t find my old abandoned-for-being-mildly-infohazardously-named LW account but it’s from 2011 and has 280 karma.

A Lorxus Favor is worth (approximately) one labor-day’s worth of above-replacement-value specialty labor, given and received in good faith, and used for a goal approximately orthogonal to one’s desires, and I like LessWrong because people here will understand me if I say as much.

Apart from that, and the fact that I am under no NDAs, including NDAs whose existence I would have to keep secret or lie about, you’ll have to find the rest out yourself.

Lorxus 5 Jan 2026 19:26 UTC
5 points
2
on: The Plan − 2025 Update
Thanks for the yearly update! I have some thoughts on why we care about string diagrams and commutative diagrams so much. (It’s not even just “category theory”.) I’ll poke you later to talk about them in greater depth but for quick commentary:

For string diagrams it’s something like “string diagrams are a minimal way to represent both timelike propagation of information and spacelike separation of causal influence”. If you want to sketch out some causal graph, string diagrams are the natural best way to do that. From there you start caring about monoidal structure and you’re off to the races.

For commutative diagrams the story is different but related, though admittedly I understand what’s going on with [commutative diagrams]+[sparse activations] way way less. I’d say it’s something like “the existence of a satisfied commutative diagram puts strong constraints on other aspects of the neural net, like what form the latent space(s?) and maps to and from them have to look like and what they have to do and what information has to get preserved or discarded”.

For one last observation, a friend’s been poking me about the sense that constraints and equipartition/environment are dual to each other, and that there’s a correspondence (for bounded systems at least) between phase volume size-change and the sign of something like an informational analogue to thermodynamic temperature. (And also that your approach is importantly incomplete in currently only dealing in theory and not engineering, but for my part I think that that’s priced in to how you talk about your plan.)

Bother me on Discord?

Lorxus 28 Dec 2025 9:33 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: JennaS’s comment on: Glucose Supplementation for Sustained Stimulant Cognition
+1 this. Wouldn’t it work pretty much just as well if not better to just, like… eat a spoonful of honey under those circumstances?

Lorxus 15 Dec 2025 17:33 UTC
3 points
0
on: Towards a Less Bullshit Model of Semantics
An intriguing attempt to cash out semantics in a gearsy way, of a kind I haven’t seen anywhere else but personal notes and a single much less gearsy research paper. This ended up seizing my attention during a summer research program and made me believe in the explainability of nearly all things and the tractability of all simply-explainable open questions once again. “What followup work would you like to see building on this post?” Yes. My answer to that is “yes”.

Lorxus 15 Dec 2025 17:30 UTC
1 point
0
on: Anvil Problems
A concise breakdown of what I’d call a type of development trap—a way in which you can end up pushed back down into a dire bootstrapping problem. I might want to see a larger taxonomy of those, but that’s not what this was for.

Lorxus 15 Dec 2025 17:28 UTC
1 point
0
on: Whiteboard Pen Magazines are Useful
True, useful, and inspiring. It led me to make my own variation on them, made me realize a way that my brief teaching career might have been more comfortable, and ultimately led me to write up a brief post. I still carry one around. I’d hoped other people might also start making these for themselves, and improving on the technology, but that largely hasn’t happened.

Lorxus 1 Dec 2025 21:43 UTC
1 point
0
on: Reasons Why I Cannot Sleep
I’m sorry to hear about the social drama and the depressive spiral both. I can’t know how you feel but I’ve been nearby, at least. For my part, I very nearly did Inkhaven, and I’m very glad that it happened. From all accounts and everything I’ve observed, you did an incredible job organizing it, you were probably majorly responsible for most of the weird wonderful things I glimpsed that happened within it, and I moderately strongly regret not having taken part. Cheers!

Lorxus 1 Dec 2025 21:41 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: keltan’s comment on: Reasons Why I Cannot Sleep
Having participated in the Half-Haven discord for the past two months, I have written ~28 blog posts as of today, and am on track to complete the 30 posts in 2 months goal.
Wait, is that why it’s called Halfhaven???

Lorxus 21 Nov 2025 17:10 UTC
1 point
0
on: Some Hacky ELK Ideas
Thief With Access To The Real Diamond
That leaves a gap between cases in which the thief has access to the predictor/planner/reporter (which run into the diagonalization barrier), and cases in which the thief doesn’t even have detailed information about the diamond (in which case we can solve the problem). In between those, the thief has arbitrarily good information about the diamond, but does not have access to the predictor/planner/reporter.
For this case, I do not have a solution, but I do expect that it’s solvable-in-principle.
The main difficulty in these cases is that the $P [O b s | d o (A^{*})]$ may be exactly the same between action-plans $A^{*}$ which result in the diamond being stolen, and action plans which do not. The thief has enough information to make the predicted sensor readings completely identical between the two cases.
The reason the problem might still be solvable-in-principle is that the actions $A^{*}$ still give us information about whether the diamond was stolen. But we somehow have to extract that information in a way which does not require any difference whatsoever between the observation-distributions in the two cases.
I was chewing over the ELK problem this morning and had a silly idea here. What if you deliberately introduce a specific inaccuracy in the camera, or the reporter? Have some timestamp or watermark or scratch, something that has to do with the system’s perception of the diamond and which would not be known from mere access to the diamond or at least be very expensive to fake.

Lorxus 21 Nov 2025 14:30 UTC
1 point
0
on: Infinitesimally False
Thanks for the post! It makes me wonder whether hyperfinite quantification and hyperreal truth values handle Yablo-esque paradoxes too, but I haven’t thought about that much at all yet.

Lorxus 18 Nov 2025 18:41 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Status Is The Game Of The Losers’ Bracket
This is an important bit of clarification! You can do some entertaining countersignaling with a nice suit jacket and an unbuttoned button-down.

Lorxus 14 Nov 2025 2:33 UTC
7 points
0
on: (Fantasy) → (Planning): A Core Mental Move For Agentic Humans?
Both of these examples show a similar mental move: (encounter a fantasy) → (figure out how to bring that fantasy into reality)...
To me, this move feels particularly foundational and load-bearing; it’s a core part of a healthy agentic human mind. It’s the mental move...
This resonates with something in me. Something kinda malnourished and shaky and weirdly shaped but it resonates all the same. Most of the things I like best about myself, that I’m proudest of having done or that have caused other people to be impressed with me or that nourished me to do, were things that had this pattern. I’m trying to do more of that now. Thanks for painting it so clearly.

Lorxus 13 Nov 2025 21:14 UTC
3 points
0
on: Tools for deferring gracefully
I tried, but never really figured out how, to get them to understand that they were engaging in process of downloading a consensus to defer to, and why it matters that that’s what they’re doing.
Here’s the thing, as one such person you mentored and who you counseled not to defer: you can realize you’re deferring, and recognize that it’s not particularly endorsed, and then do it anyway because all the social pressures point that way, and so do all the grantmaking pressures, and all the selection effects. It totally matters that that’s what you’re doing! But being openly non-deferential is a very good way to paint a target on your back, to take on huge costs that you would never agree to up front. Even being quietly privately non-deferential can and will show up in the kinds of research-flavored conversations you have, and will cause you to miss connections and get excluded. You’ll wind up being held to the epistemic standards of the deferrees—much higher than those of your peers; never mind that that’s not the standard most other people get held to. You’d better be willing and able to lay out your entire argument, from scratch, for anyone who asks you, or you look worse than merely stupid—you look like a waste of time.

Lorxus 10 Nov 2025 5:48 UTC
3 points
4
in reply to: GradientDissenter’s comment on: GradientDissenter’s Shortform
So… the biggest savings here, by far, is the rent. At a guess it’s bigger than everything else combined. If you don’t have enough friends, or your friends all live in full houses, guess you’re screwed here. Hope we’re OK with the tyranny of structurelessness?

Lorxus 9 Nov 2025 22:08 UTC
3 points
2
in reply to: Ryan Kidd’s comment on: Ryan Kidd’s Shortform
I’d like to see a breakdown by “years since doing MATS”. What’s the retention like, basically? Another breakdown I’d like to see, either for the displayed data or the years-since-MATS one—what’s the split in AI safety between “(co)founded an org”, “joined a new org”, “joined an established org/(research/policy) group (technical vs governance)”, and “on a grant, no real org”, along with the existing “academic” (split by core academic/alt-academia?), “government” (which country?), and for-profit (maybe a breakdown of product type?). In any case, thanks for posting this!

Lorxus 9 Nov 2025 0:29 UTC
3 points
0
on: Insofar As I Think LLMs “Don’t Really Understand Things”, What Do I Mean By That?
First off, TFTP. I marked some stuff I thought was most relevant. This is helping remind me of some things I think about LLM confabulation and lack of binding/reasoning… I don’t have my thoughts fully formed but there’s something here about global inconsistency despite local compatibility, and how that cashes out in Problems. Something a little like an inability to define a sheaf, or homology detection, or something like that? I might say more better words later about it.

Lorxus 4 Nov 2025 17:44 UTC
3 points
2
on: Research Reflections
Thanks for writing this. I’ve noticed something in the same vein as well—for the last few months I’ve felt increasingly like a lot of the pieces and systems agent foundations types use have some kind of important commonality to them, though I’m not yet sure what form that could take. Condensation and natural latents and some of Francis Rhys Ward’s work in II-MAIDS; ontology mismatch and Bayes nets and imprecise probability and category theory showing up repeatedly. There’s something there to construct, but what?

Lorxus 2 Nov 2025 1:01 UTC
1 point
0
on: Lorxus’s Shortform
I’m doing Budget Inkhaven: https://tiled-with-pentagons.blogspot.com/search/label/budget inkhaven

Similar to my earlier writing regimen, but shorter, faster, and slightly more daring. I’ll crosspost anything I like especially well here.

Lorxus 1 Nov 2025 22:16 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Why Is Printing So Bad?
Hm. So it’s some larger problem of which the Curse of It From Bit is a subcluster, then? If I’ve understood you right, this is also something I’ve spent time thinking about ~~by way of finding them with my face~~. Something like… some unfeeling machine/system/structure that fails to live up to its own spec, or which has a bad spec or no spec at all, and which makes that state of affairs your problem, you silly goose who wants to actually do things, you. There’s the flavor of that thing from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance where there’s this tiny trivial-feeling problem that humiliates you with a combination of feeling trivially small while nonetheless demanding close attention and deep understanding by way of being a critical blocker to solving whatever problem, I think? I think that the yakshaving bit is downstream of the spec failure piece—it seems like a common failure mode of degraded systems/designs.

Lorxus 1 Nov 2025 21:53 UTC
18 points
3
on: Why Is Printing So Bad?
Oh! I have thoughts about this one!
On my model, it’s a matter of basically anything that turns Bits into Its being kinda cursed, especially if whatever process lacks human actuation or even oversight and isn’t done to truly exacting standards. Printing is an example of this; 3D printing and general CNC is another; graphic design (and the depths of what a color is) is a third. I’m thinking of the kind of thing you might find on r/shittyrobots as well; a minimal non-example might be polypeptide/oligonucleotide preparation, though I’m not totally clear on the workflow there or how much human labor is involved.
My gears-level model here is most starkly illustrated by 3d printing—something about the physical object creation might change, or be underspecified, or rely on shoddily-made connectors of some kind, and in any case, the actual machine that does the actuating isn’t set up to check for failures during workflow or indeed do much more than the simple actuation and an initial calibration step. On top of that, the thing goes from being data which is everywhere and wherever you want it, to being a specific thing in a specific place; often you don’t even get to have the affordance of knowing in advance which place it is. Possibly even the yakshaving you notice is a matter of some kind of associated ugh field.

Lorxus 26 Oct 2025 22:16 UTC
4 points
1
in reply to: Gurkenglas’s comment on: Seven-ish Words from My Thought-Language
Spoons are for doing ordinary things, doing things at all. [Blood] is for doing difficult things, doing them more or harder, doing them at significant internal cost.

Lorxus

Thief With Access To The Real Diamond