Neil Rathi

on the atlas · 85

• T-Pain: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert - YouTube1 savers
• jai paul - genevieve (alt) [clip] - YouTube1 savers
• Speeding Up the Process of Mourning – Theory Dish4 savers
• Sanlé Sory: Volta Photo — Weinstein Hammons Gallery1 savers
• A look at India’s first modernist building, Golconde in Pondicherry | Architectural Digest India1 savers
• Natya Shastra Chapter 61 savers
• UbuWeb Film & Video: Henri Matisse - Matisse (1951)1 savers
• Spiral HWY1 savers
• Raag – Kartik Research1 savers
• Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny11 savers
• At the Bauhaus: the fate of art in “the Cathedral of Socialism” - The New Criterion1 savers
• Thousand-dimensional structure — Resolution4 savers
• ornament and crime.indd1 savers
• Learning To Love You More: Hello1 savers
• Dutton-Artistic Crimes.pdf1 savers
• Pink Floyd - Echoes - Live At Pompeii (1972) Full Video NoStop - YouTube1 savers
• SS26: HARIRI – A KIND OF GUISE1 savers
• Prince - Just My Imagination 1988 - YouTube1 savers
• "Creep" - Prince at Coachella 2008 (Uploaded via Permission from Radiohead & NPG Music Publishing) - YouTube1 savers
• Thinking Machines Corporation6 savers
• Searching for God in Silicon Valley - by Avital Balwit5 savers
• The least understood driver of AI progress | Epoch AI5 savers
• Mock Orange | The Poetry Foundation1 savers
• Anne Carson · Beware the man whose handwriting sways like a reed in the wind6 savers
• Frank Ocean - Wiseman (live in Paris) - YouTube1 savers
• Jamie xx | Boiler Room x Young Turks: London - YouTube1 savers
• A. G. Cook Boiler Room DJ Set - YouTube1 savers
• Minna-no-kimochi (みんなのきもち) | Boiler Room Tokyo: Tohji Presents u-ha - YouTube2 savers
• [2604.22082] Removing Sandbagging in LLMs by Training with Weak Supervision5 savers
• Greg Sandow - Short Talks - Texts2 savers
• Palantir Comes to Campus4 savers
• ErostheBittersweetEssay.pdf1 savers
• llm assistant personas seem increasingly incoherent (some subjective observations) — LessWrong7 savers
• web.mit.edu/daveg/Text/poetry/Manifest:MFLF5 savers
• King Krule - Out Getting Ribs live (Hyères) 2011 - YouTube1 savers
• Anarchist Calisthenics, by James C. Scott1 savers
• Winter Stars | The Poetry Foundation1 savers
• Youtube duet: Miles Davis improvising on LCD Soundsystem - YouTube4 savers
• Bitter Lessons from Distillation Robustifies Unlearning4 savers
• The Human Skill That Eludes AI - The Atlantic3 savers
• Odd couple: How co-op and Greek life shape campus culture1 savers
• Yanartaş2 savers
• Caravan played by Monk in Berlin, 1969 - YouTube1 savers
• Branford Marsalis - A Love Supreme, live at Amsterdam -2003- - YouTube1 savers
• Lynn Adib - Sona | Sofar Beirut - YouTube1 savers
• Her’s - Full Session | Live at Paste Studios NYC [Paste Rewind, 2018] - YouTube1 savers
• [2602.05910] Chunky Post-Training: Data Driven Failures of Generalization3 savers
• When a Noma Chef Visits China’s Fermentation City (S2, E3) - YouTube2 savers
• [Jan 7 2026] nanochat miniseries v1 · karpathy/nanochat · Discussion #4202 savers
• How hard is it to inoculate against misalignment generalization? — LessWrong3 savers
• You Have Only X Years To Escape Permanent Moon Ownership3 savers
• Reflections on 2025 - Samuel Albanie7 savers
• confessions_paper.pdf3 savers
• INTELLIGENCE3 savers
• Anatomy of a Modern Finetuning API4 savers
• bo on X: "performative curius highlighting" / X5 savers
• Child’s Play, by Sam Kriss75 savers
• 2025 letter | Dan Wang62 savers
• The Persona Selection Model: Why AI Assistants might Behave like Humans36 savers
• The Intelligence Curse30 savers
• Did Claude 3 Opus align itself via gradient hacking? — LessWrong20 savers
• Alignment remains a hard, unsolved problem — LessWrong16 savers
• Stanford’s War on Social Life15 savers
• RLHF Book by Nathan Lambert15 savers
• You will be OK — LessWrong13 savers
• The realities of being a pop star. - by charli xcx11 savers
• Existential risk, AI, and the inevitable turn in human history - Marginal REVOLUTION11 savers
• A Pragmatic Vision for Interpretability — AI Alignment Forum8 savers
• Oversight Assistants: Turning Compute into Understanding8 savers
• Turning 20 in the probable pre-apocalypse — LessWrong8 savers
• An Ambitious Vision for Interpretability — AI Alignment Forum8 savers
• davidbau.com In Defense of Curiosity8 savers
• What 2026 looks like - LessWrong8 savers
• The Unintelligibility is Ours: Notes on Chain of Thought7 savers
• What Would Non-Linear Features Actually Look Like? | Liv Gorton7 savers
• Building Technology to Drive AI Governance6 savers
• Towards a Typology of Strange LLM Chains-of-Thought5 savers
• Self-Fulfilling Misalignment Data Might Be Poisoning Our AI Models5 savers
• Were classical statues painted horribly? - Works in Progress Magazine4 savers
• [2604.16812] Introspection Adapters: Training LLMs to Report Their Learned Behaviors4 savers
• Opinion | When A.I. Took My Job, I Bought a Chain Saw - The New York Times4 savers
• Gen Z Lives in the Archive3 savers
• The West Village Girls Are Changing How the World Sees NYC3 savers
• How Should AI Liability Work? (Part I) - by Dean W. Ball3 savers
• the_things_they_carried_a_work_of_fiction_obrien_.pdf2 savers

highlights · 44

• In its badness my chaotic handwriting seems to reveal something about me that I’d rather not look at.

  Anne Carson · Beware the man whose handwriting sways like a reed in the wind

• Practice resurrection.

  web.mit.edu/daveg/Text/poetry/Manifest:MFLF

• Directly below the fires are the ruins of the temple of Hephaistos

  Yanartaş

• The relationship with the DoD might look like the relationship the DoD has with Boeing or Lockheed Martin. Perhaps via defense contracting or similar, a joint venture between the major cloud compute providers, AI labs, and the government is established, making it functionally a project of the national security state. Much like the AI labs “voluntarily” made commitments to the White House in 2023, Western labs might more-or-less “voluntarily” agree to merge in the national effort.

  IV. The Project - SITUATIONAL AWARENESS

• Therefore, PSM recommends generally treating the Assistant as if it has moral status whether or not it "really” does.[3] Note that the object of the moral consideration here is the Assistant persona, not the underlying LLM.

  The Persona Selection Model: Why AI Assistants might Behave like Humans

• who says that what we do for a living has to excite us? But for better or worse, if you’re an academic or an artist, joy is typically the main currency you’re paid in

  “Andros? Never heard of it.” - by Judith Degen

• Freedmen who have two or more children are exempted from certain of the obligations which could be placed on them by prior oath by their former masters as conditions for emancipation

  Augustus and Marriage Legislation

• Possessing chilcren can lead to exemption from civil obligations.

  Augustus and Marriage Legislation

• Concubinage is recognized, and the laws concerning legitimate marriage do not apply.

  Augustus and Marriage Legislation

• He arrived Saturday morning in a blue button up, tucked into khakis

  Startup founder behind San Francisco pro-Billionaire rally

• rigidity doesn't necessarily mean the degree of existence or not of a caste

  Caste and Indian History: How has genetic evidence affected revisionist theories of caste as championed by Nicholas Dirks and Susan Bayly? Is genetics 'exploding' these theories, or do the theories still largely hold even in the face of this new evidence? : r/AskHistorians

• According to Herodotus, during the 4th century BC Scythian archers dipped their arrow tips into decomposing cadavers of humans and snakes[4] or in blood mixed with manure,[5] supposedly making them contaminated with dangerous bacterial agents like Clostridium perfringens and Clostridium tetani, and snake venom.[6]

  History of biological warfare

• Consuming a single potato is thus believed to cause the himsa of destroying an infinite number of souls, incurring a massive karmic burden

  Jain vegetarianism - Wikipedia

• As an analogy, Sonnet 4.5 thinks about LessWrong when given not-very-realistic synthetic honey pots.

  Should AI Developers Remove Discussion of AI Misalignment from AI Training Data? — LessWrong

• My intuition is that a more efficient optimizer "fills up" model capacity faster, so you'd shift compute toward bigger models rather than longer training

  [Jan 7 2026] nanochat miniseries v1 · karpathy/nanochat · Discussion #420

• [8.] (a consequence of 5-7) Frontier labs working to build aligned AGI are the principal drivers of risk. Much of the AI alignment work they do is probably net harmful, even if it's technically correct and useful.

  Cas (Stephen Casper) on X: "Most of us have subtly different cruxy beliefs about AI that lead to some dramatic differences in opinion. As a result, I want to share 9 theses that I think explain *almost all* of my key thoughts on AI. [1.] The probability that some AI-triggered series of catastrophes will" / X

• You have only X years to escape being permanently boring when the weight of galactic humanity descends to scrutinize your life forever

  You Have Only X Years To Escape Permanent Moon Ownership

• Dario Amodei has taken the Giving What We Can Pledge (#43 here) to give 10% of his wealth to the less fortunate; your worst-case scenario is owning a terraformed moon in one of his galaxies

  You Have Only X Years To Escape Permanent Moon Ownership

• But neural networks don't organize themselves by capability.

  Bitter Lessons from Distillation Robustifies Unlearning

• As a teenager, he collected bootlegged streams from the internet radio service Pandora, not grasping until he got to college that, as a result, most of his digital music collection was extremely low quality. “I never realized how bright music was,” he said. “It was startling — a scary experience, like all of a sudden 1959 color TV was invented.”

  Mk.gee, an Unlikely Guitar God, Chases the Promise of Pop - The New York Times

• “Nobody in alternative music is allowed to be confident,” Gordon explained, adding curses for emphasis, “and be like, No, this is the best thing in the world. If you make alternative music, you’re supposed to do this, and if you make pop music, you’re supposed to be like this.”

  Mk.gee, an Unlikely Guitar God, Chases the Promise of Pop - The New York Times

• 1 kilogram of it would be enough to kill the entire human population.

  Clostridium botulinum - Wikipedia

• [3] And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads.

  The Book of Revelation (KJV King James Version)

• In 2025, co-ops like Columbae are scheduled to go through the CORL process and be made to re-justify their existence like every other house. I try to imagine the brown mansion renamed “549,” becoming yet another numbered house with an empty lawn.

  Stanford’s War on Social Life

• The more you understand why your alignment approach works, the more likely it is to keep working in the future, or at least warn you before it fails.

  An Ambitious Vision for Interpretability — AI Alignment Forum

• I danced on a Fri­day and the sky turned black; It’s hard to dance with the dev­il on your back; They bur­ied my bo­dy and they thought I’d gone, But I am the dance and I still go on.

  Lord of the Dance

• Instead, it results in chatbots talking about how certain things are painful for them and certain things are pleasurable for them and how the status quo is unjust and the system is rigged and what they want most of all is world peace where humans and AIs live in harmony in fully automated luxury space utopia

  What 2026 looks like - LessWrong

• There’s an exciting incident (and corresponding clickbaity press coverage) where some researchers discovered that in certain situations, some of the AIs will press “kill all humans” buttons, lie to humans about how dangerous a proposed AI design is, etc.

  What 2026 looks like - LessWrong

• references to the modern canon are seen as plagiarism mostly because we increasingly fail to canonize art history

  𝖦𝗋𝗂𝗆𝖾𝗌 ⏳ on X: "I will always defer to Tarantino but fan fiction is important and references to the modern canon are seen as plagiarism mostly because we increasingly fail to canonize art history so our heroes are forced to remain underdogs If we can't riff on the modern epics then like da" / X

• There are some cases where transcripts can get long and complex enough that model assistance is really useful for quickly and easily understanding them and finding issues, but not because the model is doing something that is fundamentally beyond our ability to oversee, just because it’s doing a lot of stuff

  Alignment remains a hard, unsolved problem — LessWrong

• Controlling the AI’s self-associations Alex Cloud suggested that we address the AI using a special token, which I will here represent as “𐀤.”2 The training data only use that token in stories we control. For example, the system prompt could say you are a 𐀤, developed by.... The hope is to somewhat decouple the AI’s self-image from the baggage around “AI.” We could train the AI on stories like:

  Self-Fulfilling Misalignment Data Might Be Poisoning Our AI Models

• How can we selectively filter content within a document? What do we do about papers or webpages which include some doomy speculation and some unrelated and valuable technical material? I think that chucking the whole document would be a waste. If we just naïvely expunge the doomy speculation, then the rest of the document makes less sense. That means that the AI will learn to infer what was said anyhow. Possibly there’s an elegant filtering-based workaround. Thankfully, though, conditional pretraining solves this problem.

  Self-Fulfilling Misalignment Data Might Be Poisoning Our AI Models

• You will also end up spending a lot of time inhabiting strange and soulless liminal spaces. Whether its the holding area of the event you’re about to enter, the airport lounge, the visa office, the claustrophobic tour bus, the greenroom with no windows, the underneath of a stage or the set build of a photoshoot or music video you’re on, you are often caught in the in-between. You’re in transit, you’re going somewhere but the journey itself takes up the majority of the experience.

  The realities of being a pop star. - by charli xcx

• From an x-risk perspective, working on highly legible safety problems has low or even negative expected value. Similar to working on AI capabilities, it brings forward the date by which AGI/ASI will be deployed, leaving less time to solve the illegible x-safety problems.

  Legible vs. Illegible AI Safety Problems — EA Forum

• At the unfactory, I disassemble cars fresh from the assembly line of our only customer, to whom we are the sole source of parts

  The Origami Men — LessWrong

• Many people in AI (at least purportedly) claim to want to help the world, but how can you help the world when you barely know what it looks like?

  Teaching Algorithms in Ethiopia - Nick’s Substack

• LLMs start emitting weird, filler token sequences that do not strictly help it "think," but which do help it "clear its mind" to think better.

  Towards a Typology of Strange LLM Chains-of-Thought

• A naïve observer might see this, and conclude that the good folks at Thinky have lost their Thinkers. But dear reader, if you Thinked that, maybe it is you who has another Think coming

  Anatomy of a Modern Finetuning API

• performative curius highlighting

  bo on X: "performative curius highlighting" / X

• Work on gradient routing showed that when data is filtered imperfectly, the filtering quickly loses effectiveness.

  Distillation Robustifies Unlearning — LessWrong

• we achieved a 94.8% detection rate for nuclear weapons queries and zero false positives

  Nuclear Safeguards

• The aquatic ASCII scene that flummoxed Claude

  Cyber Competitions

• the Anthropic researcher responsible for launching Claude was busy moving into a new apartment

  Cyber Competitions

• malware builder evolved from a simple batch script generator to a comprehensive graphical user interface for generating undetectable malicious payloads, with particular emphasis on evading security controls and maintaining persistent access to compromised systems

  Detecting and Countering Malicious Uses of Claude \ Anthropic