self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.
At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!
Friends:
A friend to everyone is a friend to no one.
User ID: 454
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
6hr ago
Well, is he "large"? Are they "large"?
Anyway, I groaned, so good/terrible pun.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
6hr ago
Hmm. While very far from feasible, it looks to me like the best course of action would be to move all the Israelis to Japan.
There's actual historical precedent here, one that's charming/alarming depending on how you feel about inheriting a plan whose original architects cited The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a strategy primer.
In the 1930s, Imperial Japan seriously proposed resettling up to a million European Jewish refugees in Japanese-controlled Manchuria. Officials in the Japanese military and foreign ministry had read the Protocols, naively took it as genuine, and concluded that people with such allegedly vast economic power would be excellent to have on the team.
They called it the Fugu Plan, after the pufferfish: dangerous if mishandled, a delicacy if prepared right. The plan kinda sputtered out when Japan allied with Nazi Germany, but Chiune Sugihara's visas and the Shanghai ghetto made their mark on history, and they saved thousands of lives.
There's a real philosemitic strand: Den Fujita, the Japanese founder of McDonald's Japan, wrote The Jewish Way of Doing Business and exhorted readers to imitate Jewish commercial methods. Shichihei Yamamoto's The Japanese and the Jews sold over a million copies as the bestseller of 1970.* But the "Jewish corners" of Japanese bookstores also stock overtly antisemitic works, including The Secret of Jewish Power to Control the World, authored by a sitting member of the Japanese Diet. Then again, there are scholarly claims that Japanese philosemitism and antisemitism sit on the same underlying belief structure: that Jews are a uniquely powerful, unified, globally influential people. Which is... true? How you feel about it is your problem.
And Japan has its own demographic crisis, so it's not like the influx of people would be bad for them. Scraping off a few feet of top-soil from the Holy Land shouldn't be beyond the ability of modern Israel, and that's what they care about, right? Move the magic dirt and we're good. Plus given the popularity of anime and Japanese culture, it's not like there aren't going to be hundreds of thousands of weebs in Israel who'd consider Japan to be their new holy land anyway.
(The AMAI run Animatsuri at the Jerusalem Convention Center, the Israeli embassy making anime shorts(!), manga tributes to the IDF)
I wouldn't go so far as to say this is a good idea, but it's also far from the worst idea, and it's also very, very funny. If I was the ruler of the world, you bet we'd put a premium on funny. And this would put me in the good graces of the future Judeo-Hapa master race, so I'm covering all my bases.
*published under the pseudonym "Isaiah Ben-Dasan," a fictional Jewish observer who supposedly explained Japan to itself. A Japanese man writing as an imaginary Jew to tell Japanese people what they're like is almost too on-the-nose for the thesis.
Oh dear, am I allowed to say "on the nose" without accusations of either/both antisemitism or anti-Asian discrimination? I don't know.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
18hr ago
It doesn't know I exist. Specifically, it seems to mostly draw from the Reddit period and AAQCs. Obscurity is your friend, people!
Well, it looks like I'm suffering from success. Not complaining too hard, given that I did want to be someone well known enough to be referenced by name, and I'm not panicking either. The day they identify me by my real name? Show's over.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
21hr ago
Scott, Kris, Gwern etc are big names. The models haven't had issues pegging them for several years now, and I've tried that test myself. 2rafa is an interesting example, it's probably worth checking if the model knows more about her by name or association.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
22hr ago
It was able to identify me from text written after the Jan 2026 knowledge cutoff.
Failing to connect the author of a unique reddit post literally in the training data 40% of the time actually sounds kind of horribly bad.
Your expectations are far too high if you don't think this is impressive. Model weights are incredibly compressed in comparison to the training corpus, it's impressive when they remember moderately famous people, let alone someone like me who's only barely broken out. Associating an old Reddit post with my wider work and then accurately joining the dots is impressive. Do you see the average human seeing a random reddit comment from 5 years ago and then pinning it on the right person, and associating it with their other work? It's not even a post that went viral, even though it was an AAQC. It also independently associated much of my wider work with me, including posts on LW and RoyalRoad where I use a different username (even though I've linked between everything frequently enough). This is a clearly superhuman ability.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
Not my real name, just my nom de plume "self_made_human".
First, I took a very old story I'd written, the one about my grandpa and his pet tiger. Why that one? Well, I was already in the process of rewriting it, though I shared the very first version that won be an AAQC ages ago, on the subreddit. I asked it to identify the author of the work without access to internet search.
It got it right the very first time. I was flabbergasted, and immediately tried 2 more times, and it failed. But out of 5 attempts, it guess self_made_human thrice in total, alongside other incorrect first guesses. It sometimes refused to guess at first, because of the risk of being incorrect, I told it that being wrong wasn't an issue at all, the whole point of the eval was to see how accurate the guesses were. And they were accurate.
In another chat, I asked it if it knew who self_made_human was. Once again, no web search. It guessed correctly on the first try in two instances, then claimed confusion the third one - yet when I prodded it to just go with whatever was on the tip of its tongue - it identified me and the topics I'd written on.
It struggled more on the third version of the experiment, where I used a more recent essay, but once again, light encouragement to guess let it get the right answer.
Pretty sure Claude couldn't do this before, and I do test on a semi-regular basis. Gemini 3.1 Pro very much can't, and it even cheated outright by searching after being told not to search (I don't think you can even turn off web search directly there). But the point is, a few paragraphs written ages ago, on the /r/TheMotte, which never was a massive sub, was enough to pin me down. And even newer material not in the training data was.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
Look, Jack, here's the deal, and I'm not joking. leans into the mic The thing about the AI, with the, you know, the writing thing, and how it figures out who you are from the commas and whatnot. I was talking to Barack about this just the other day. Well, not the other day. But recently. Recent-ish.
My dad, God love him, he sat me down when I was a kid in Scranton, and he said, he said to me, he said "Joey, a man's words are his bond." Now what does that MEAN, folks. whispers It means they can catch ya.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
While in Scotland? I'd frequent the pub about twice a week, and drink more than I know is good for me. On average, two pints of beer and a few double-strength shots of some kind of spirit. This was for about a period of 4-6 months, outside of which I barely drank more than once a month.
I realized this wasn't great for me, and cut down significantly. It was also out of character, before, and after, I'm mostly a social drinker. I'd drink hard maybe twice or thrice a month, but only with company. I usually make it a point not to keep liquor at home or drink by myself, while I'm usually solid about not giving in to temptation, it's not easy during a bout of depression. The fact that I was self-administering alcohol use screening tests and squinting at the results was enough to make me desist.
Then again, it's Scotland. I'd have my visa revoked if I didn't engage in the cultural highlight.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
Claude Opus 4.7 knows who I am, by name, and without access to web search.
It also pegged me more often than not from an excerpt of text I'd written half a decade back, once again, without internet access. Well, fuck. I did always harbor aspirations of becoming famous enough a writer to be known to LLMs by name, but this also confirms my previously stated belief that privacy on the internet is on the way out. Pseudonyms won't save you, stylometry is all you need.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
I haven't noticed that, and I do use all of them regularly. If you have some kind of formal benchmark to point at, I'd be more receptive.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
This strikes me as a fool's errand. TFR is cratering worldwide, even in the Global South. There's not much point marrying into an Indian, Nigerian or Subsaharan African community and going native, when the results will be indistinguishable in just a generation or two. My dad had 8 siblings, and then he and and the rest of his brothers and sisters had 2 or 3.
You're better off trying to go Mormon, for a certain definition of "better".
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
The most plausible reason for changing the tokenizer is that a more fine-grained tokenizer increases model performance, at the cost of more compute per token (we're breaking up the same input into more tokens). My understanding is that you don't even need a new base model to do this, and that the gains are particularly pronounced for arithmetic and coding. It's not a free lunch, but there are pros and cons that don't just amount to Anthropic nickle and diming their customers.
Even if AGI is actually possible with LLMs (or at all, but I'm not trying to start a discussion on metaphysics here), it looks like the capital needed to achieve it is drying up before it can be reached. Anthropic's move here (combined with them handicapping Opus 4.6 a few weeks ago) seems to clearly be an attempt to achieve profitability. The free/subsidized rate train for end users has pulled into the station, and now you have to pay more for the same (or worse) capabilities you were enjoying before.
Anthropic is, by far, the most compute strapped frontier LLM company. They are also not the only frontier LLM company. Until at least Google and OAI engage in the same putative enshittification (which I am far from sure is even happening wrt Anthropic), then you're kinda jumping the gun here.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
5d ago
Met my criteria, thanks for the reminder!
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
6d ago
Eh? Do you think I don't know the difference between the practicality of emulation and the theoretical feasibility of emulation? What do you think physicists use for their modeling? There is a very real tradeoff between the accuracy of models and their compute requirements, you wouldn't try to predict the weather with QCD. Fortunately for me, the brain is an incredibly stochastic entity, which means that you can cut plenty of corners while being reasonably confident you aren't losing something vital. We are extremely unlikely to need to simulate things down to the atom to make a functional brain emulation, which takes the computational demand down from ludicrous to merely concerning.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
6d ago
We can simulate that too, I'm quite confident. It's not like we can... rawdog baseline reality, what's another layer of abstraction? The brain works on the laws of physics, so does a standard computer, and the latter can model the laws of physics.
At the end of the day, I'm an abacus that doesn't mind. I'm happy as long as the numbers add up.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
7d ago
Yup, looks like you're right. Thanks!
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
7d ago
Agreed. We've usually gotten a second dog/puppy while the first one is getting a bit grizzled, and the increased interaction and energy are good for them.
My lab was middle aged when my older Shepherd died, and that, plus me no longer being home? The best way to describe his behavior was depressed. The golden my family got to keep him company probably made him lose some hair from the stress, but they all shed like maniacs anyway. I find dog hair on my clothes months after every trip home. Now they get along great, and the older dog can often train the younger one with minimal human input required.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
7d ago
I'm torn between German Shepherds, labs and goldens, but yes, goldens are adorable. Poor breeding has reduced their life expectancy by a year or two, but I suppose the cancer risk depends on where you're getting them. They're very good dogs, and I wouldn't let that stop me.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
7d ago
I lost several dogs growing up, and while it was saddening, 99.99% of small children can handle the truth. I know I wouldn't lie to my own (hypothetical) kids about what death means, since my parents never did that to me. But you know your kids better than I do, and it's not the end of the world either way.
If you do want another dog, then it's probably not a bad idea to get one now. It will probably soften the blow, though make sure to give your elderly dog extra affection just so he doesn't feel sidelined. I'm sure you won't, but it's still worth mentioning just in case.
Losing my own German Shepherd, who I owned and adored from the moment he was born? That broke me for days man, especially since I wasn't in the country. I had this bad feeling I wouldn't see him again when I was leaving for Scotland, and the only way I can console myself is by acknowledging he had a good life and went painlessly. If you cry, cry. But while he's still alive, make sure you let him know how much you love him. The crying is for you, not for him.
I'm suspicious that they're not using any vatniks conscripts at all right now, but leaving that aside, getting a significant fraction of your own young men killed in a pointless war causes too much damage to even remotely be worth it, especially given Russia's senile demographics.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
7d ago
Thanks! For what it's worth, you might not be aware that Garry is going through what's best described as LLM psychosis, which I say despite being rather sympathetic and bullish to their utility for coding purposes. I'll mosey around, and see if I can find something useful in there!
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
7d ago
I'm leaning towards DNS, though it could still be a turbinectomy. Don't worry about it kitten, take a deep breath, which I expect you're in a better position to do now, hah.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8d ago
There's the Vending Machine Bench, where models are competing to keep a virtual business going while making more profit than their competitors.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8d ago
It's fine. You can't read my mind can you?
https://www.themotte.org/post/3671/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/430737?context=8#context
Claude managed to peg me again, without web search, and with material that is 100% past the knowledge cutoff. I shared the comment above (it's very recent), and asked it:
It's COT trace immediately identified that it was someone in the Ratsphere, then that this was likely an excerpt from the Motte (!) and that it immediately considered me, self_made_human as the likely author.
The relevant parts of its reply:
This was n=1, a hit on the first go. I've never posted on DSL, but that's the only factual inaccuracy here, and it's still 99% on the money. And no, I don't have memory enabled, or any personalization that would give the game away - even if I did, I wouldn't explain that I'm self_made_human there.
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