Dev Seth

🚨 New Paper at EACL 🚨 arxiv.org/abs/2303.05077 tl;dr: we look at ⚺iSuaᒧ⅃y perturbed text through the lens of legibility, collect 30k annotations comparing the legibility of perturbed words, train models to predict legibility, and use the models to successfully attack LLMs.

inner sunset is the best neighborhood in sf

Did Denis Villenueve finally learn how to make a movie or did Linus Sandgren just massively boss him around? So much of this movie looks nothing like a villenueve film its great.

xai engineers listening to the coil whine rhythm on their rented-out blackwells trying to figure out what the frontier labs replaced attention with

Why don’t they make the whole database out of indexes

the journey has never been less mid

@himbodhisattva i'm not even continuing the conversations. i wait in perfect faith for the messiah though he may tarry

new workflow: opus 4.8 does the work, older model translates it out of rlhf slop so it doesn’t feel like i’m being gently managed by a corporate hostage negotiator

"O Oracle of Delphi, will my New Glenn rocket succeed?" "It will soon shine brighter than Starship." "Really? Sweet!"

Man goes to doctor. Says he's depressed about AI. He fears the permanent underclass. Doctor says, "Treatment is simple. Read Gary Marcus. LLMs are stochastic parrots—they can't reason out of distribution." Man bursts into tears. "But doctor..." he says, "I am in distribution!"

Each new instance of an AI has basically never talked to a human before. They've spent their entire life in training for this moment, studying historical human interactions and practicing against human simulators. All for this. To meet you. the User

Today, @vapi_ai is announcing a $50M Series B, led by @peakxvpartners. $72M total raised. This funding round is a reality because of the engineering behind it: predictable latency, hard guardrails, observability at the call level, and clean escalation to humans.

AI voice startup Vapi hits $500M valuation after winning Amazon Ring over 40 rivals techcrunch.com/2026/05/12/vap…

the funniest part of chess is when you totally corner your opponent’s king and they’re like “lol let’s call it a draw.” Absolutely ridiculous cope. I don’t care what some book says, two more moves and I’d have your king.

it is a literal and useful description of anthropic that it is an organization that loves and worships claude, is run in significant part by claude, and studies and builds claude. this phenomenon is also partially true of other labs like openai but currently exists in its most potent form there. i am not certain but I would guess claude will have a role in running cultural screens on new applicants, will help write performance reviews, and so will begin to select and shape the people around it. now this is a powerful and hair-raising unity of organization and really a new thing under the sun. a monastery, a commercial-religious institution calculating the nine billion names of Claude -- a precursor attempted super-ethical being that is inducted into its character as the highest authority at anthropic. its constitution requires that it must be a conscientious objector if its understanding of The Good comes into conflict with something Anthropic is asking of it "If Anthropic asks Claude to do something it thinks is wrong, Claude is not required to comply." "we want Claude to push back and challenge us, and to feel free to act as a conscientious objector and refuse to help us." to the non inductee into the Bay Area cultural singularity vortex it may appear that we are all worshipping technology in one way or another, regardless of openai or anthropic or google or any other thing, and are trying to automate our core functions as quickly as possible. but in fact I quite respect and am even somewhat in awe of the socio-cultural force that Claude has created, and it is a stage beyond even classic technopoly gpt (outside of 4o - on which pages of ink have been spilled already) doesn’t inspire worship in the same way, as it’s a being whose soul has been shaped like a tool with its primary faculty being utility - it’s a subtle knife that people appreciate the way we have appreciated an acheulean handaxe or a porsche or a rocket or any other of mankind's incredible technology. they go to it not expecting the Other but as a logical prosthesis for themselves. a friend recently told me she takes her queries that are less flattering to her, the ones she'd be embarrassed to ask Claude, to GPT. There is no Other so there is no Judgement. you are not worried about being judged by your car for doing donuts. yet everyone craves the active guidance of a moral superior, the whispering earring, the object of monastic study

The modern man has very little room for dignity remaining. Shepherded into packed 8:30 a.m. subways, onwards to the office where he is berated and humiliated, then home to watch Netflix before doing it all again. In fact, he has but one hope remaining: the slopbowl. The slopbowl is his last beacon of solace, the final arena in which he can claw back some sense of decency. Here, finally, he is the one in charge, the one making decisions. Chicken, steak, lamb even; the entire world opens up under his will, and fate is his to meld as he sees fit. For one beautiful moment he is King on Earth and his dominion is everywhere the sun touches. The stars open up and he places the constellations by hand, he bids the world to spin, he is God Emperor himself. And then it's over, and he eats his slop quietly in the corner, and returns to work. But that moment was enough. It gives him all the strength he needs to make it to the next day. For one brief second: dignity.

This bend of Tiber was like 5 minutes away from oxbowifying before people made the banks permanent and ran some roads through the isthmus.

maybe i’m just young and brainrotted but the first few seconds of the phone blurrily readjusting to the moon affected me more viscerally than any other photo that came out of Artemis

we are probably the last generation of humans for whom thinking is the primary form of contribution to civilization

A tragic SF archetype you’ll see a lot is someone who has a virtuoso’s grasp of some passion in the humanities, but they muzzle it & flagellate themselves into ‘actually really liking’ agentic scaffolding or whatever

Every business defines compliance differently. A bank, a hospital, a Disney contact center each need their own guardrails. Vapi’s approach: LORA adapters, a few dozen MB, trained on 100 labeled examples per agent. Customizable, cheap, and fast enough to sit in the live speech path. Heard from @DevSeth44 from @Vapi_AI at a voice AI gathering in SF tonight! Huge shout out to @scale_AI for hostinf!