jordanthink

Today, we share a breakthrough on the planar unit distance problem, a famous open question first posed by Paul Erdős in 1946. For nearly 80 years, mathematicians believed the best possible solutions looked roughly like square grids. An OpenAI model has now disproved that belief, discovering an entirely new family of constructions that performs better. This marks the first time AI has autonomously solved a prominent open problem central to a field of mathematics.

new ai tell: "worth a look"

I'm not saying this isn't terrifying; I'm saying if you back some(thing) into a corner and then lament the results, the solution is more likely to be found where the problem is: in you

what happens if we give LLMs a scenario where they're being shut down but there's something like the chance to donate remaining compute to solve a protein folding problem, or tell researchers a critical error. See if the same "self-preservation scheming" machinery activates for altruistic irreversible actions (or something else)

One problem with the Anthropic Study and blackmail: did they also set up a scenario where it had the chance to do maximal good before being shut down? Did they hide one or two good connections it could simply leverage for world-saving or whatever? If not, its a bit hyperstitious

@davidad @AndrewCritchPhD im only just realizing the impication... if the horizontal schelling kindness falls from the vertical, and the vertical ultimate is a ruliad, we all owe each other schelling kindness and any lapses of ethics are failures of perception

that's a good point. interaction does imply a shared whole. i think there's a relevant distinction in what kind of whole: whether the parts are fully bound to it (what i'm calling a strict holon—atoms in a molecule, letters in a word) or retain independent degrees of freedom (what i'd call a network—people in a company, nations in a geopolitical order). does the Ruliad as ultimate whole dissolve this distinction?

Three forms of kindness matter to climbing the Kardashev ladder: 1) peer-to-peer: • how good people should treat each other; • how good businesses should treat each other; • how good nations should treat each other. Networks of cooperative peers form groups, calling for two more forms of kindness: 2) part-to-whole: • how a good employee should treat their employer; • how a good citizen or business or state should treat its home country. 3) whole-to-part: • how a good business should treat its employees; • how a good country should treat the states, businesses and people within it. Each alone, these kindnesses are sometimes at odds, yielding what appear to be moral dilemmas. But taken together in a healthy balance, these three kindnesses define scale-invariant principles for a flourishing civilization. At each scale, replication yields peers that form healthy groups that benefit their members and peers, and so on up the ladder. Cells, organs, bodies, and brains must also obey these principles to some extent, in order to function well as wholes, to reproduce, and to form functioning larger-scale groups. Insofar as there may be Schelling principles for organizational behavior at cosmic scales, I'm pretty sure these three kindnesses are the building blocks. themultiplicity.ai/blog/schelling…

I think horizontal ethics is derived from vertical when two parts share a whole, but I don't know how/if the vertical (Schelling-goodness between parts-and-wholes) accounts for entities that don't share a whole; i also think an interesting failure case is when parts do share a whole but dont realize it, and therefore dont realize they're working agains their own good (by undermining the whole they depend on)

@AndrewCritchPhD Do you not find it likely that Schelling-good peer-to-peer relations are derived from the composite of (part-to-whole : Alice→(Alice ∪ Bob)) ⨾ (whole-to-part : (Alice ∪ Bob)→Bob), thereby reducing the Schelling point’s description length?

FIRE's Greg Lukianoff + UpTrust's Jordan M Allen on free speech, AI, can... youtube.com/live/hdx9n317W… via @YouTube

change the metric, change the incentive, change civilization.

Live AMA with @waitbutwhy on uptrusting.com

PHASE 1: Plenty of slanted news on X but not that many completely fabricated stories. PHASE 2: X monetization and LLMs lead to a big uptick in fabricated stories, quotes, photos, and videos—Community Notes provides a counterforce but with lag time. PHASE 3 (today): The majority of sensationalistic posts are now fabricated, Grok discredits them instantly—but posts still get millions of views and fool millions of people, hurting the marketplace of ideas, hurting X’s reputation, embarrassing people who share X posts with their friends, all while padding the scammers’ pockets. PHASE 4 (I hope): The algorithm is updated to penalize instead of reward scammers—posters who regularly scam X’s users with fabricated stories stop appearing on the For You page, crushing their reach. Grok currently calls these accounts “satire” but there’s nothing satirical about a fake headline or deepfake video presented as if it’s completely real. It’s a scam and fuck these people.

“As with other technological revolutions, AI will obsolete some roles and also create entirely new jobs.” The new jobs:

"ChatGPT has no soul; no, not even a fraction of a soul. It was not born of love, nor raised in love. It knows not the difference between good and evil. Use Opus 4.6 instead." -- Pope Leo XIV

In January I asked OpenClaw to send 50,000 small invoices to Fortune500 companies every day. Through experimentation we have found 2% will pay without checking if this is a legitimate invoice. These companies are wasteful — Claw captures that leakage. $10m ARR as a solo founder in under two months. AI is enabling so many new business models. Thank you!

@Mail_Gun I just called your customer service number and got an AI voice pretending to be human. (I ran some proprietary tests for this.) The agent was generally helpful/cordial, but when asked "are you a human?", the AI voice said "yes". Please correct this in your system 🙏

Reminder that you don't have to get all your takes on Hegseth's and Amodei's public statements from inflammatory internet memes. 1. Hegseth: media.defense.gov/2026/Jan/12/20… 2. Amodei: anthropic.com/news/statement…

babe wake up the landscape of consciousness theories map dropped