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LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

  1. FA 2 H

    [Linkpost] “You can only build safe ASI if ASI is globally banned” by Connor Leahy

    This is a link post. Sometimes people make various suggestions that we should simply build "safe" artificial Superintelligence (ASI), rather than the presumably "unsafe" kind.[1] There are various flavors of “safe” people suggest. Sometimes they suggest building “aligned” ASI: You have a full agentic autonomous god-like ASI running around, but it really really loves you and definitely will do the right thing.Sometimes they suggest we should simply build “tool AI” or “non-agentic” AI.Sometimes they have even more exotic, or more obviously-stupid ideas. Now I could argue at lengths about why this is astronomically harder than people think it is, why their various proposals are almost universally unworkable, why even attempting this is insanely immoral[2], but that's not the main point I want to make. Instead, I want to make a simpler point: Assume you have a research agenda that, if executed, results in a ASI-tier powerful software system that you can “control”.[3] Punchline: On your way to figuring out how to build controllable ASI, you will have figured out how to build unsafe ASI, because unsafe ASI is vastly easier to build than controlled ASI, and is on the same tech path. You can’t build a controlled [...] The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: April 16th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7noKve57za3yg2LEb/you-can-only-build-safe-asi-if-asi-is-globally-banned-1 Linkpost URL:https://www.ettf.land/p/you-can-only-build-safe-asi-if-asi --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

    3 min

  2. FA 2 H

    “Let goodness conquer all that it can defend” by habryka

    Epistemic status: All of the western canon must eventually be re-invented in a LessWrong post, so today we are re-inventing modernism. In my post yesterday, I said: Maybe the most important way ambitious, smart, and wise people leave the world worse off than they found it is by seeing correctly how some part of the world is broken and unifying various powers under a banner to fix that problem — only for the thing they have built to slip from their grasp and, in its collapse, destroy much more than anything previously could have. I think many people very reasonably understood me to be giving a general warning against centralization and power-accumulation. While that is where some of my thoughts while writing the post went to, I would like to now expand on its antithesis, both for my own benefit, and for the benefit of the reader who might have been left confused after yesterday's post. The other day I was arguing with Eliezer about a bunch of related thoughts and feelings. In that context, he said to me: From my perspective, my whole life has been, when you raise the banner to oppose the apocalypse, crazy [...] The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. --- First published: April 16th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/w3MJcDueo77D3Ldta/let-goodness-conquer-all-that-it-can-defend --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

    11 min

  3. FA 2 H

    “On Dwarkesh Patel’s Podcast With Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang” by Zvi

    Some podcasts are self-recommending on the ‘yep, I’m going to be breaking this one down’ level. This was one of those. So here we go. As usual for podcast posts, the baseline bullet points describe key points made, and then the nested statements are my commentary. Some points are dropped. If I am quoting directly I use quote marks, otherwise assume paraphrases. As with the last podcast I covered, Dwarkesh Patel's 2026 interview with Elon Musk, we have a CEO who is doubtless talking his agenda and book, and has proven to be an unreliable narrator. Thus we must consider the relevant rules of bounded distrust. Elon Musk is a special case where in some ways he is full of technical insights and unique valuable takes, and in other ways he just says things that aren’t true, often that he knows are not true, makes predicts markets then price at essentially 0%, and also provides absurd numbers and timelines. Jensen Huang is not like that, and in the past has followed more traditional bounded distrust rules. He’ll make self-serving Obvious Nonsense arguments and use aggressive framing, but not make provably false factual claims or [...] --- Outline: (02:02) Podcast Overview Part 1: Ordinary Business Interview (04:33) Podcast Overview Part 2: A Debate About Chip Exports (09:12) What Is Nvidias Moat? (14:41) TPU vs. GPU (19:30) Why Isnt Nvidia Hyperscaling? (24:42) Selling Chips To China (52:39) Different Chip Architectures (53:59) The Online Reactions On Export Controls (01:01:47) Is This About Being Superintelligence Pilled? (01:07:07) Jensens Arguments Are Poor Both Logically And Rhetorically --- First published: April 16th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RBBChvuPHP7LfWyME/on-dwarkesh-patel-s-podcast-with-nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

    1 h 11 min

  4. FA 2 H

    “Specialization is a Driver of Natural Ontology” by johnswentworth

    Part of what makes a pencil a good object is that all its parts share approximately the same rotational velocity - i.e. it's a rigid body object. Part of what makes a squirrel a good object is that its parts share approximately the same genome. Part of what makes the water in a cup a good object is that its parts share approximately the same chemical composition - i.e. it mixes quickly. General pattern: part of what makes many objects good objects (i.e. ontologically natural) is that their parts all share approximately the same , given time to equilibrate. Ideal markets are a good more-abstract example: in a market at equilibrium, all agents share the same prices, i.e. the ratios at which they trade off between (marginal amounts of) different goods are all equal. Indeed, we can view this "Law of One Price" as the defining feature of a market. There's a details box here with the title "Mental Picture: One Price". The box contents are omitted from this narration. ... except... There's a big loophole when the agents have convex production frontiers or utility functions, rather than concave. Then, their prices tend to diverge, rather than converge. There's a details [...] --- First published: April 16th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kczTWgMAxXczmBRyj/specialization-is-a-driver-of-natural-ontology --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

    5 min

  5. FA 9 H

    “Beware of Well-Written Posts” by alseph

    Beware of when a post is so well-written that you can't put it down. Be wary of posts that are more visually attractive than average. Beware of posts that make you laugh out loud. Why? Because all of this is orthogonal to whether the post's argument is actually true and runs counter to the mission of rationality. The Company Man Yesterday, I read Tomás B.'s The Company Man. I was captivated on my first read, as I'm sure many others were. Had I been interrupted before I could scroll into the comments, I would have walked away thinking little more than "what a great post". But I did get to the comments. The first one was kyleherndon's: I did not enjoy this. I did not feel like I got anything out of reading this. However, this got curated and >500 karma... The best theory I can scrounge together is that this is "relatable" in some way to people in SF, like it conveys a vibe they are feeling? ... I didn't feel like I learned anything as a result... This forced me to ask myself: what did I actually learn from The Company Man? Science fiction, at its best [...] --- Outline: (00:29) The Company Man (01:54) True Affect (04:37) But Stories Are Good for Life The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. --- First published: April 15th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YCSQAMHHNvsNC3HKc/beware-of-well-written-posts --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

    7 min

  6. FA 21 H

    “You Aren’t in Charge of the Overton Window; Politics Is Not Interior Design” by Davidmanheim

    Sometimes, people don't say what they actually think, not because saying it would be rude or costly, but because they believe saying it now would be counterproductive. They see that the true claim is outside the Overton window. And they conclude that the strategic play is to say something weaker, something adjacent. That will let you normalize the frame without triggering the immune response. You will redesign the house a bit now so that you can slide the window later. Then, when the ground has shifted, you imagine, the real claim becomes sayable. Strategic discourse chess? The above is an attempt at high-dimensional discourse chess. In politics and the world of ideas, it seems that people play it constantly. But building on a recent comment by Rob Bensinger, I want to argue that the conceit behind playing, that we can model how public acceptability shifts and cleverly intervene to steer those shifts, is usually wrong - not in the sense that discourse has no structure, or to argue that framing never matters. Most people vastly overestimate their ability to predict second- and third-order effects of anything, including strategic speech. And this is a more damaging error than you might [...] --- Outline: (00:45) Strategic discourse chess? (02:21) Yes, Overton windows exist, but... (04:00) ...can they be reliably manipulated? (05:57) Why would you think this could work? (07:16) The case of AI Safety (11:14) Pushing back is also manipulation. (15:03) Another real-world example: Defund the Police (17:43) Strategic discourse chess usually underperforms just saying what is true. (19:58) The obvious conclusion The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: April 16th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a9CxzxKbqHkQBdcqY/you-aren-t-in-charge-of-the-overton-window-politics-is-not --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

    22 min

  7. FA 1 DIA

    “Carpathia Day” by Drake Morrison

    (The better telling is here. Seriously you should go read it. I've heard this story told in rationalist circles, but there wasn't a post on LessWrong, so I made one) Today is April 15th, Carpathia Day. Take a moment to put forth an unreasonable effort to save a little piece of your world, when no one would fault you for doing less. In the early morning of April 15, the RMS Titanic began to sink with more than two thousand souls on board. Over 58 nautical miles away — too far to make it in time — sailed the RMS Carpathia, a small, slow, passenger steamer. The wireless operator, Harold Cottam, was listening to the transmitter late at night before he went to bed when he got a message from Cape Cod intended for the Titanic. When he contacted the Titanic to relay the messages, he got back a distress signal saying they hit an iceberg and were in need of immediate assistance. Cottam ran the message straight to the captain's cabin, waking him. Captain Arthur Rostron's first reaction upon being awoken was anger, but that anger dissolved as he came to understand the situation. Before he'd [...] The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. --- First published: April 15th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SARCiTFJfXJJhpej7/carpathia-day --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

    4 min

  8. FA 1 DIA

    “Claude Code, Codex and Agentic Coding #7: Auto Mode” by Zvi

    As we all try to figure out what Mythos means for us down the line, the world of practical agentic coding continues, with the latest array of upgrades. The biggest change, which I’m finally covering, is Auto Mode. Auto Mode is the famously requested kinda-dangerously-skip-some-permissions, where the system keeps an eye on all the commands to ensure human approval for anything too dangerous. It is not entirely safe, but it is a lot safer than —dangerously-skip-permissions, and previously a lot of people were just clicking yes to requests mostly without thinking, which isn’t safe either. Table of Contents Huh, Upgrades. On Your Marks. Lazy Cheaters. It's All Routine. Declawing. Free Claw. Take It To The Limit. Turn On Auto The Pilot. I’ll Allow It. Threat Model. The Classifier Is The Hard Part. Acceptable Risks. Manage The Agents. Introducing. Skilling Up. What Happened To My Tokens? Coding Agents Offer Mundane Utility. Huh, Upgrades Claude Code Desktop gets a redesign for parallel agents, with a new sidebar for managing multiple sessions, a drag-and-drop layout for arranging your [...] --- Outline: (00:48) Huh, Upgrades (02:46) On Your Marks (04:21) Lazy Cheaters (06:11) Its All Routine (06:52) Declawing (09:03) Free Claw (09:31) Take It To The Limit (13:54) Turn On Auto The Pilot (15:55) Ill Allow It (16:26) Threat Model (17:10) The Classifier Is The Hard Part (18:34) Acceptable Risks (19:54) Manage The Agents (22:34) Introducing (22:44) Skilling Up (25:27) What Happened To My Tokens? (25:43) Coding Agents Offer Mundane Utility --- First published: April 15th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/w8misLX7KCmLxJM2K/claude-code-codex-and-agentic-coding-7-auto-mode --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

    26 min
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Informació

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

Fitxa tècnica

  • Creació
    LessWrong
  • Anys en actiu
    2023 - 2026
  • Episodis
    250
  • Qualificació
    Apte
  • Copyright
    © 2026 All rights reserved
  • Lloc web del programa
    LessWrong (30+ Karma)

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