-
korrents.com
Banks cannot globalize like software companies because banking is tightly bound to national monetary sovereignty.Their words
banks can't globalize the way other firms can because the banking system is so close to a form of sovereignty: governments very carefully guard the privilege to create more money, and when they give it out, there are strings attached.
Related posts
Nathan Lambert Newsletter
The the words it uses that this site has seen least often elsewhere. Posts are matched on those words alone — nothing here is a summary of this one.
Top people
Showing Profile →
Hiding
Hiding
19 September
18 September
16 September
13 September
-
Their words
If there really is a high chance of AI leading to the extinction of humanity within years/decades, then the only rational stance towards safety monitoring and research pacing should be stringent, top-down government involvement and universally ratified international treaties.
12 September
-
Their words
Astra can do almost as well as Fable, in a mode where CoT monitoring cannot work. Because there is no CoT to monitor.
11 September
10 September
-
Their words
Right now OpenAI is extremely dependent on CoT monitoring, everyone else depends on it quite a lot as well, and it looks like it may not last much longer, and that Astra already is on the edge of steganographic capabilities and can do substantial obfuscation if and only if it thinks you would think it is up to no good.
9 September
8 September
From one piece Astra Is Hard to Monitor 2 beliefs · thezvi.substack.com
-
Their words
Even if everyone tries as hard as is plausible, Chain of Thought monitoring will probably never be easier than it is now and will get harder over time. In a year, chances are very high it will not be able to serve the function it is currently being asked to serve.
-
Their words
If this is only due to gains in capabilities, that is extremely bad news, and it means CoT monitoring is unlikely to survive for another year unless we find a way to actively improve it, and it might not last six months.
6 September
From one piece An Alien Mind 3 beliefs · openai.com
-
korrents.com
No lab has solved alignment and monitoring well enough to keep scaling at maximum speed much longer.Their words
Currently I believe that no lab has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer.
-
korrents.com
Chain-of-thought monitoring is getting less reliable, not more, as models grow more capable.Their words
However, unfortunately our evaluations indicate our ability to rely on CoT monitoring is progressively diminishing.
-
korrents.com
Confidence in monitoring, not capability research, will become the binding constraint on AI progress.Their words
Still, I expect general AI progress to increasingly be bottlenecked by confidence in monitoring.
1 September
30 August
29 August
25 August
-
Their words
But that's not how physical systems work. You push them and then past a certain point things change.
11 August
-
Lovedrcmnd.app
The Nature of CodeTheir words
This book is a beautiful introduction to simulations of natural systems. We get concise prose, clear illustrations, and carefully chosen systems with a guided tour through the math. All done in the Processing language, which is fun and easy to pick up. The reason I like this book so much is probably due to timing. In 2013, I was on the verge of abandoning software development. I was fed up. (That's a story for another time.) Instead, I planned to go into cognitive psychology full-time as a researcher. This book brought back the joy in programming for me. Sometimes, a good book is the book that motivated you.
31 July
-
Their words
Um, but actually the median business, uh, is doing better this year than a year ago. Um, and so and then if we kind of, um, stratify and look at the probability that any given business will reach some revenue threshold, a million dollars, five million dollars, 10 million dollars, whatever, um, those all seem to be getting better.
28 July
-
Their words
You can't get to product market fit on a supersonic jet by building it and seeing if anybody likes it. You have to analyze very carefully the art of the possible and also what will maximize the market opportunity.
20 July
-
Their words
I will say that the best evidence we have just says in reality don't be deficient. If you can reach that threshold of not being deficient or insufficient, maybe that's enough.
12 July
-
Their words
new laws are like code that is pushed live to production without even being read (let alone tested), often in the face of tremendous opposition, affecting millions of citizens, with minimal monitoring to ensure they’re producing the desired results, an extremely slow customer feedback cycle, and few ways to truly opt out.
24 June
4 June
-
Their words
things have to go really wrong for us to like just get over the threshold of uh you know, capital being productive enough to automate lots of work, but not be productive enough that that the interest rate is high and or the price of capital produced goods is falling a lot, okay? So, even without redistribution, a little bit of savings will save a lot of people.
10 May
-
Their words
The more ants you put in the puzzle, the faster the solution. But the more humans you add, the worse. Unless the humans are very carefully aligned, this is the key lesson for organizational design.
8 May
-
Their words
Our interpretation of this result is that once you slide the statistic above five, essentially all the signals of natural selection are real.
1 May
3 April
-
Their words
the likelihood of inspiring someone to build a competitor was too high, and the return on sharing was too low to justify the exposure. That threshold has effectively collapsed to zero.
The Increasing Risk of Building in Publicthebootstrappedfounder.com
11 March
-
korrents.com
An excellent engineer who still reads the agent's diffs carefully before checking them in is going to get fired.Their words
they they're like, "Yeah, you know, I use Cursor, and I I ask it questions sometimes, and I'm really impressed with the answers, and then I review its code really carefully, and then I check it in." And I'm like, "Dude, you're going to get fired, and you're one of the best engineers I know."
17 February
-
Their words
I initially assumed this was a temporary divide. New users tend to watch closely and check the system's progress, but as trust builds, that scrutiny fades and monitoring starts to feel like a chore. Yet it still seems like there's two camps (for now).
29 January
-
Their words
but ice sort of forms through a process of random nucleation and then extension. And this is cool because you can uh modulate the like sort of nucleation the rate of nucleation and extension to then modulate the probability of ice formation.
18 January
-
korrents.com
Careful step-by-step thinking is a property of the developer, not something a tool or framework can enforceTheir words
Notebooks don't force you to write clean code. AI tools don't force you to think carefully. Discipline comes from the developer, not the environment.
1 January
-
Their words
that work is not being wasted. It's just being stored. You know, it's kind of like complaining about heating an ice cube up a little bit and it not melting yet. It's like, well, you just haven't hit the phase transition. So, but that's where people give up.
18 November 2025
-
korrents.com
The effectiveness of a plot twist depends on how carefully a story's point of view relates to its audience.Their words
Point of view is essential for effective twists. Contrast Frozen with Fight Club, where the narrator's unreliability works because the entire story flows through his perspective and he maintains a direct relationship with the audience through fourth-wall breaks.
Frozen's Lie: How a Tiny Detail Can Ruin a Storynateliason.com
3 August 2025
-
korrents.com
Monitoring tools that do periodic work can themselves cause the latency outliers they were installed to diagnose.Their words
One performance anti-pattern is when a company, to debug one performance problem, installs a monitoring tool that periodically does work and causes application latency outliers.
23 July 2025
-
korrents.com
The last steps to AGI should be taken by a CERN-style international research project, not a Manhattan Project.Their words
I hope we'll end up with something more collaborative if needed, more like a CERN project where it's research-focused and the best minds in the world come together to carefully complete the final steps and make sure it's responsibly done before deploying it to the world.
22 July 2025
18 June 2025
-
Their words
With AI, breakout times could conceivably be very short - it could be hours, minutes, or even seconds for some very specific but important change to occur.
5 June 2025
-
Their words
But the most important metric, and we carefully measure it is, like, how much has our engineering velocity increased as a company due to AI, right? It's tough measure, and we rigorously try to measure it, and our estimates are that number is now at 10%, right?
23 April 2025
20 April 2025
12 February 2025
-
Usesaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Interactive BrokersTheir words
mainly because of Interactive Broker's amazing "margin account" feature. This, when used very carefully makes it seamless to borrow cash against your own shares at some of the lowest rates on Earth
31 December 2024
13 June 2024
-
korrents.com
Past roughly fifteen assembly steps, the only molecules we ever observe are ones that life made.Their words
And what Lee’s been able to show in the lab with his team is that for organic chemistry, it’s about 15 steps. And then you only see molecules that the only molecules that we observe that are past that threshold are ones that are in life.
2 April 2024
-
Their words
What is different about construction is the level of coordination that takes place: whereas in a car everything is carefully designed to tightly integrate together, in housing construction the work can be done (and often is) with surprisingly little coordination between the various trades.
14 December 2023
-
Their words
If you make the wrong decision, if it's a two-way door decision, you pick a door, you walk out and you spend a little time there. It turns out to be the wrong decision, you can come back in and pick another door. Some decisions are so consequential and so important and so hard to reverse that they really are one-way door decisions. You go in that door, you're not coming back. And those decisions have to be made very deliberately, very carefully.
6 June 2023
-
Their words
My response is that their position is non-scientific – What is the testable hypothesis? What would falsify the hypothesis? How do we know when we are getting into a danger zone?
15 April 2023
1 June 2022
-
Their words
The analysis in this chapter has shown that there is no such thing as a universal threshold over which debt becomes unsustainable, and that the relevant debt level depends on many factors, in particular the real interest rate on debt.
11 January 2022
-
Likedrcmnd.app
Hero On a MissionTheir words
I found myself unexpectedly (and perhaps dangerously) inspired by Miller's discussion of the 15-acre plot of land he and his wife bought outside Nashville, where they're carefully cultivating the forest, planting extensive gardens, and organizing retreats.
14 December 2021
9 October 2021
2 April 2021
-
Their words
Now you have a carbon fuel burning aircraft that is more complex and heavier than the plane that it replaces, and if you do your sums carefully, you find that there are no fuel efficiency gains and, therefore, no environmental gains.
25 August 2020
-
korrents.com
Building automation that doesn't address the actual bottleneck to shipping adds noise rather than helping ship.Their words
If what's holding you back from shipping is, say, getting more customer input, or a brittle release process, or flaky monitoring, or missing tests, then all the bot does is to add noise. It doesn't help you ship.
10 December 2019
-
Usesrcmnd.app
FeedlyTheir words
I use Feedly to follow hundreds of RSS sources, subscribe to a couple dozen newsletters, and maintain a carefully-selected set of non-default subreddits to make Reddit tolerable.
28 May 2019
-
Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden BraidTheir words
Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid: A masterwork from 1979 that focuses on how cognition can emerge via a variety of hidden neurological mechanisms. I always regretted blazing through GEB in college for a class. This is the summer when I finally get to reread it slowly and carefully.
27 July 2017
1 July 2017
Nothing matches.
What is a korrent?
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said. The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter, especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked article and a belief on korrents.com are left in their original language.