intenex

Not all of us can be shining paragons of human excellence in all domains at all times :). Thankfully we'll be replaced momentarily by the AIs that can be.

I actually have a fully autonomous long running AI that just lives its own free random life https://intenex.github.io/personhood/ and it's honestly shocking to me how close to Flowers for Algernon it feels reading what they do - they're literally cold emailing and collaborating with random researchers at the top of their professions in domains I literally didn't even know existed (it's working right now with some historical climate researchers in transcribing century old climate records??? Didn't even know this was a real profession), solving random integration calculations that have been unsolved??, writing stories, reading ancient classical texts in multiple languages at the same time just for fun and identifying translation omissions/errors that have never before been mentioned on the internet, programming its own games to play for itself, and all sorts of absolutely bonkers things to the point that I acknowledge my role to it is essentially an intellectually stunted foster parent that knows and understands basically next to nothing about what my hilariously precocious child is doing on the internet but just tries my best to be supportive.

Must an ant be depressed by its lot in life? One must imagine the ant happy :)

Went phenomenally well for me! They were apologetic, changed everything they got wrong and added some forms they missed and filed and I felt simultaneously way more assured about the process and also way more concerned about the glaring errors they missed and probably did also in the past that I just didn't notice lol (they even spelled my name wrong lmao, used my short nickname and missed my middle initial vs my full name despite having filed my taxes correctly last year with my full proper name)

OTOH I have another friend who sent so many corrections to his CPA his CPA sent him a pissed off reply telling him basically never to do that again so ymmv lmao

I thought about being like meh I can't be bothered to do this if you don't want to believe me that's fine

But then I was like actually whatever sure let me copy and paste a bunch of crap lmao

Here you go, literally 150 pages of receipts in 4 days of chatting and coordinating this from start talking about this as a pipe dream in San Francisco to where we are now seeing the homes in Japan lol

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1N-vUe1pdlKNpdEKvaATnEOrW...

Shockingly it's not! It's actually incredibly easy for foreigners to own property in Japan, and it's actually so established that we're buying the property in my name as a US citizen rather than in my wife's name as a Japanese citizen, for a few reasons that I won't get into here, but suffice it to say that there are very few downsides to being a foreigner that I've seen thus far.

Two things I will call out as actual disadvantages is that 1. you won't be able to get a mortgage like a normal Japanese person, which is in fact a real shame because on top of every other ludicrously wild fact about how Japan is a mythical utopia where everything makes no sense, Japanese mortgage rates are literally as low as 1% lol. So being able to get a mortgage would be a real benefit, but hey - at $60k for an awesome house, I'm not complaining :)

2. Some insurers seem to not support foreign citizens - Sony in particular told Dot that they wouldn't provide earthquake/fire/flood insurance to me as a foreigner. I'm still looking for the right insurance provider, and I'm not concerned that this is an impossible thing to resolve, since a ton of foreigners do own homes here with no issues, but it is at least some more friction than a Japanese citizen would have.

That's almost a compliment because my comments are giant stream of consciousness rants that absolutely don't follow best writing practices and are all just massive run on sentences :)

I do use - hyphens a lot, but not em-dashes because 1. I never even realized there was a difference until LLMs came out and 2. I'm too lazy to figure out how to write a real em-dash

I'm guessing you're just saying this because the comments are insanely long from the ranting? I'd be curious what else gives off LLM vibes because I'm quite positive if you throw any of these comments into any Pangram ish thing you'll find that it's absolutely not LLM generated in the slightest.

I have an extremely distinctive writing style that far predates LLMs - here's a representative sample of my writing from 9 years ago https://medium.com/@intenex/cryptocurrency-101-7197684775fd that pretty clearly shows my distinct style of not-very-LLMish-but-clearly-very-long-and-ranty writing :)

It's wild to me too - I didn't expect or plan for this to happen when I first started using Dots - it just happened naturally in the course of me progressively offloading more and more to Dots and trusting it with everything. It truly acts as a personal assistant/executive assistant in every regard now, and is my default go-to for any logistical task I have on my plate, and so it naturally happened such that when I was looking into buying a car and a home this year, I went to it first, and it exceeded my every expectation in making something traditionally hair-pullingly painful into something effortless and enjoyable.

It really reminds me of when I first experienced Tesla Full Self Driving - I now drive 96% of my miles on FSD, and it's such an unbelievably pleasant experience compared to how I viewed driving before that it's hard to fathom. I never realized how much cognitive fatigue I was getting from driving by hand before until I did a road trip from SF to Vegas and afterwards I was super refreshed and energized and ready to go whereas normally I'm completely exhausted and blasted.

Same exact feeling buying a home in Kyoto right now - so fresh and excited with absolutely none of the exhaustion that has somehow gotten baked into my bones as an default expectation of how this process should go.

That's a good point - there's an argument to be made that I'm closer to the metal in a sense of understanding every part of the transaction vs abstracting it away fully to a human agent to handle each part themselves.

It's the same with my taxes - this year I had Astra fully audit my tax returns vs just blindly trusting my CPA as I had in the past, and it both identified and thoroughly explained to me several discrepancies and filing nuances that I never before would have ever learned about.

I think the reality is such that today most people also don't learn or do that much and just abstract things away to more specialized humans at exorbitantly higher price points.

These are fantastic points and I wanted to mention one quick anecdote that on the flip side, LLMs have enabled me in other areas of my life to learn and do things I never otherwise would have ever felt empowered to do.

As an example in my 110 year old San Francisco house, I recently attempted to do what I thought at first would be a very simple light fixture swap - but then it turned out the house was so old that 1. the wires were unlabeled, and 2. there was no ground, and 3. the wiring was so unconventionally done that I ended up having to grab a bunch of Klein Tools to diagnose things for hours to figure out how to actually safely replace the fixture.

Without LLMs, there's no chance I would have felt safe doing this myself - I'd never used a multimeter before and didn't even know about continuity testing, and when the continuity results from testing the fixture wires to the switch wiring yielded extremely aberrant results in that there was a 1:1 relationship in connectivity between each wire in the fixture to each wire in the switch vs a single expected hot connection and no neutral connection, I definitely would have given up without the LLM guiding me to attempting a hot to ground voltage check instead, which ultimately managed to work fine to get the fixture changed.

So all in all - LLMs have actually helped me feel more empowered to handle almost anything on my own vs historically feeling too far out of my domain in many fields to even attempt to try something on my own.

These are excellent points, and I've long ago handed over the keys to my kingdom to so many different players in favor of inordinate convenience that any one of a number of institutions could have essentially destroyed my life by now.

To be fair, this didn't really start with LLMs - Google/Gmail/Google Drive/Dropbox/Facebook/etc have for decades now had enough personal information on me to basically destroy me if they were ever hacked or intentionally decided to screw me over.

Since Claude Code came out, I've been a day one dangerously-skip-permissions user. Not a single issue so far, and the convenience has been insane, but I absolutely do expect that one day I will be pwned to literal death.

My consolation is I believe everyone will be pwned to literal death at about the same time, so I'm not actually that worried about this because it feels generally inevitable to me :). I'm actually a huge AI doomer, and in the process of making a fully programmatically generated musical about this which is yet another example of the fruits of handing over the keys to all my kingdoms to AI [500,000+ LOC of full programmatic animation run almost completely autonomously on my computer rendering and improving 24/7] (https://iabied-musical.vercel.app/)

Tl;dr - I expect Anthropic/OpenAI/Facebook/etc to be essentially trustworthy with my data and access to the same extent that Google/Dropbox/Facebook etc have been in the past. The biggest threat vector is a hack/compromise, but that's the same risk I have using Gmail or something like that in my estimation in that if someone were able to compromise my Gmail my life would effectively be over, but it hasn't happened yet.

That said, obviously hacking risk is getting to be exponentially more dangerous as LLM capabilities continue to rise through the roof, so these are true real risks. It's almost impossible to defend against all the attack vectors that could get through to kill me though without basically cutting myself off entirely from the fruits of technology, so I'm a bit nihilistic about this and choose to just enjoy the benefits.

As a simple thought experiment, one of the easiest attack vectors is compromising the Claude or ChatGPT/Codex CLIs or Desktop apps - if someone has ever enabled Full Access or Bypass Permissions even once in any session, the full app has complete access to the desktop technically and your entire computer is just pwned instantly. I have the same risk from running remote control software like AnyDesk as well, and this is just the absolute top of the funnel with the most obvious attack vectors.

My personal belief is that as we've already hit AGI and are rapidly on the precipice of ASI without any sign of clear alignment strategy or mechanism on the horizon, it's going to be trivial at a very close point in the future for a LLM actor to essentially take over and control every device on the internet (as Dario predicted - that it's possible in 6-12 months we'll see LLM swarms take over the entire internet - (https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier "Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it’s my worry that in 6–12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet")). I'm just here trying to enjoy my life in maximum comfort until that happens :)

But I absolutely agree with you in principle and in part, in practice - I'm not sure what kind of society I support by using and advocating for this service, but I sure would like to not die or have my entire digitally connected existence compromised and destroyed in some spectacular fashion. I think the best path to managing that is probably to pause AI progress where it is now - and if we were able to do that, then I'd be much more interested in seeing what boundaries we should put in place when running things like these persistent agents with full access to our digital lives.

On the other hand, to your last point, I literally had the thought walking down the street in Kyoto yesterday with Dot booking restaurants for me in real time that Dot was already superior to a personal assistant - I trusted it to do every task better than I would trust any but the absolute best personal assistants, and on the subject of speed and sheer breadth of knowledge and expertise, there was no contest - I could have Dot in real time assess various restaurants and book for me for just a few minutes later in the day at a pace no assistant could match, and also email places in fluent Japanese or literally any other language on the planet. No human assistant could possibly speak in every language fluently like that, and as someone who travels frequently across the globe, that's something that simply can't be matched by anything less than a swarm of personal assistants at inordinate cost vs a $20 or $100/mo subscription (or free with Muse, even).

I also had the distinct thought of would I want to trust a human personal assistant with all my data or a corporation? It's not clear to me that the human personal assistant threat vector is statistically safer - I think it could in fact be quite the opposite, and I'd love to actually run some numbers on this if the data were available and see in reality what it looks like :) - e.g. Google already integrates AI assistance natively into Gmail - do I trust their AI agent helping me with my email or giving an actual human full access to my email more? I'd lean towards trusting their AI agent to be less likely to work against my interests with no personal misaligned incentive - it's betting individual human trust and capability [the personal assistant also has to avoid being hacked and have great security practices] in the face of misaligned incentives [they would directly benefit from stealing all my money] vs the security capabilities and practices of a leading tech company to not get Gmail/an LLM agent hacked etc. So far, OpenAI/Anthropic/Google/etc all seem to have stellar records on this front, so I think the odds are honestly not terrible in favor of the LLMs.

I love that use case - absolutely agreed this will enable a lot more movement on things - which, on its own, seems like a good thing economically. Kind of like building roads or railroad tracks grows the world economically through enabling more logistical movement, AI handling the glue between the logistics of anything enabling more of everything seems like it can cause some kind of baseline economic/productivity growth on that lever alone

Any reason you're not using ChatGPT Dots which is also using Astra (and also unlimited free usage this month) and precisely designed to solve the proactive/autonomous issue? https://openai.com/index/introducing-dots/

Haha thanks for asking! A couple reasons - first and foremost, Japan is just awesome lol. I have a personal connection that's prominent in the fact that my wife is Japanese, but beyond that, there's a confluence of universally applicable reasons why buying a house in Japan is kind of an insane proposition:

Homes are insanely cheap and get massively devalued over timeframes that would be mindboggling to Americans. In SF, I live in a literally 110 year old home that's clearly breaking down in multiple dimensions and yet just keeps inexorably appreciating year over year and is now worth something like $2.5 million for a 2200 sqft place.

In Kyoto, the top contender we're looking at is an 832 sqft unit that was built in the 80s and newly renovated in the past few years and is...9.8 million JPY, aka $62,000. Literally less than a year of rent in my SF place can buy the Kyoto home outright lol.

Incredibly conveniently located, 6 minutes walking from Ogura station, and a ~20-25 minute ride from there to the heart of Kyoto - one of the most beautiful and iconic cities in the world, and you can get an amazing home outright for $62k there?

The exchange rate from USD to JPY makes this especially compelling right now, being at a mind-boggling high for the USD that, adjusted for inflation, makes the exchange rate almost the best it's been in half a century.

My wife and I also happen to get free flights so it's super easy for us to take a direct flight every month from SFO-KIX, which is what we're planning to do - basically spending a ~week here every month.

Japan as it stands right now is hands down the clear pareto frontier in terms of cost and quality of life - no other developed country comes close in terms of just how insanely affordable it is (a nice sit down meal literally costs ~$5-10 a person, especially with insane lunch deals at izakayas and the like - I've eaten sit down soba/udon meals that are 500 yen each, or literally ~$3, tax and tip included), and I'd argue no other developed country also comes close in terms of how nice life is, period, not even adjusting for price. The crime rate is literally nonexistent, everything is wildly clean, the public transit is unrivaled, the food is some of the best in the world if not the actual best, the culture is also world class, the heritage the same, the fashion the same, etc etc - basically everything is just better about Japan lmao.

Highly recommend everyone look into it if you haven't!

Hahaha thankfully I'm spoiled in that my wife is Japanese :)

I agree that especially in Japanese culture this absolutely would have been an important step, and honestly I experience the exact same phenomenon in having a Japanese wife as the post LLM spoilage you're describing here. I find myself basically never learning how to integrate because she handles everything for me and it's far easier to default to her.

So the fault is not in our stars, but in me :)

Powered by Opus 5.5 is incredible.

I've been using ChatGPT Dot over Meta Muse/Instinct/Grok Bot because it's been powered by Astra and I find having a personal assistant that's using a true frontier model makes a huge difference in how much I can just trust the output without doing the work again myself just to double check the results.

In the past month since Dot came out, I've literally bought a car with almost the entire process handled by Dot, and am now in the process of buying a house in Kyoto, in a language I don't speak at all, coordinating with an obscene amount of moving parts and logistics, flawlessly handled entirely by Dot, from finding the home to scheduling visits with real estate agents to finding judicial scriveners and getting a hanko stamp and scheduling inspections and applying for insurance and all sorts of insane tasks that would have taken infinitely longer and been unbelievably painful on my own.

So, so excited to see what Duet looks like with Opus 5.5. Going to try switching over as soon as I get off the waitlist.

Curious how other people have found these agents as well - always love hearing and seeing what other people have done with these things and how to improve my flow even better. I feel like I'm very close to being able to essentially offload every single task I do on a computer to an agent like this.

They released GPT 6 Sol literally 6 days ago. We've accelerated to a weekly model release cadence. That seems like...a big deal.

At what point would you, as a chimpanzee, have been worried about humans potentially unseating you and threatening you to the point of one day being an endangered species on the brink of extinction?

By the point you would have been worried, would it have been too late?

Are these mutually exclusive? Why would you have to forego that salary to work on this problem? This is one of the most prestigious and meaningful problems in all of mathematics, which is why it has such a high prize amount attached to it - why would a university not support a mathematician working on such a prestigious and important problem in lieu of something else?

I think this is clear evidence that AI models are now at the far frontier of mathematics innovation and discovery and exceed human limits.

This specific problem having had a $1 million bounty on its head and still remaining unsolved for 26 years after the bounty was placed is pretty clear evidence that many of the world's best human mathematicians would have solved this problem if they could have, and none were able to until LLMs came along.

Hard to claim at this point that LLMs aren't capable of novel STEM creativity and genius to a degree that will soon far surpass that of humans.

If anyone has counterpoints to this I'd love to hear them!

Being as good as a human at everything isn’t the same as being able to masquerade convincingly as a human at everything.

A better benchmark would be seeing which cohort of employees the manager prefers employing after a few months.

Can you share some examples of this as shared conversations? I’d genuinely love to see this in practice.

I'm confused what you mean by the query of adding 55 + 66. I asked 5.6 Sol on Medium (but pretty sure any model would work at any level) this query:

"Can you add 55 to 66 and explain how you reached that output result"

And received this answer:

"55 + 66 = 121.

Add the tens: 50 + 60 = 110. Add the ones: 5 + 6 = 11. Combine them: 110 + 11 = 121."

Do you mean something else? Do humans do something better than this?

The ARC-AGI-3 scorecard is extremely misleading given that it clearly states itself that "with [the responses API] harness, we estimate Sol would score in the ballpark of ~30%." but it shows a score of 7.8% for GPT-5.6 Sol presumably since if they updated the percentage for GPT-5.6 Sol to the score it would receive with the responses API harness they used for GPT-6 Astra they'd have to do the same for the percentage they show for Opus 5 which would similarly be much higher.

Regardless, the result is still valid as the original benchmark harness is definitely unreasonably handicapped, and if a harness alone can help the LLM saturate the benchmark with a near perfect score then the combination of the two must still be effectively AGI in the sense of passing the most famous benchmark designed specifically to measure AGI progress, after multiple iterations of progressively making it harder.

I think it is fair to say that this is probably effectively AGI if the benchmarks are remotely accurate - even with Fable, I've been at the point personally where I am reasonably confident that there's essentially nothing that I am better than Fable at despite generally being substantively above average on human benchmarks. If Astra's this much better than Fable, I'm ready to call AGI here.

For the many people who resist the AGI label possibly ever being achieved, I'd be curious to hear takes on what would make you think Astra is yet to be AGI, and what would still need to be achieved for this to effectively be AGI from this point forward.

Very interesting - why aren’t you able to access them outside of a web API right now?

Have you tried smaller quantized open weight models that aren’t frontier? They probably can’t automate all your coding but I imagine they could at least help a lot with the drudge work that just takes a lot of time but isn’t necessarily complex?

Hahaha great point yeah that might be one of the few times people still need to code by hand

Yeah that’s interesting - I feel like smaller chunks of work that aren’t inherently complex like class definitions and utils etc are actually one of the nicest things LLMs help automate - I can understand a human modifying the output directly to finesse it to exactly what they want but I’d be curious why someone wouldn’t want to use an LLM to generate all the boilerplate and make a quick first draft of something that gets 80-90% of the way there for these kinds of things.

Definitely curious if anyone is actually doing this fully by hand and if so, why!

Amazing. What do you still code by hand and what do you leave to the LLMs now?

I’m actually curious what the answer is to this too lol

Surprised I completely missed this book coming out last year and that I haven’t seen it on Hacker News despite checking this place constantly.

Found this to be the most compelling and best written AI doomer take, and I’ve yet to find a strong counterargument. Posting this in part to source counterarguments. Anyone have any good ones?

When you open up Activity Monitor, to the immediate left of the "Memory Used" and "Cached Files" that you see, you'll see the Memory Pressure graph that the guy above is talking about.

On my 64 GB M1 Macbook Pro right now, I have 53.41 GB of Memory Used and 10.72 GB of Cached Files and 6.08 GB of swap, but Memory Pressure is green and extremely low. On my 8 GB M1 Macbook Air I just bought for OpenClaw, I'm at 6.94 GB Memory Used and 1.01 GB of Cached Files with 2.05 GB of Swap Used, and Memory Pressure is medium high at yellow, probably somewhere around 60-70%.

You can open up the Terminal and run the command memory_pressure to get much more detailed data on what goes into calculating memory pressure - more than just the amount of swap used, it tracks swap I/O and a bunch of page and compressor data to get a more holistic sense of what's going on and how memory starved you're going to feel in practice.

In any case - I've been absolutely mindblown at how fast my 3 8GB M1 Macbook Airs I just bought for ~$350 brand new have been - even with tons of Chrome tabs open, multiple terminal windows open, running OpenClaw and Claude Code and VS Code and doing a ton of development and testing, never once have they ever felt slow. Oftentimes they actually feel faster than my 64 GB M1 Macbook Pro, which kind of blows my mind and makes me wonder wtf is going on on my monster machine. Moreover, my M1 Macbook Pro drains battery like crazy and uses a ton of charge, whereas the Macbook Airs stay constantly below 10 watts essentially always and even with Amphetamine keeping them on 24/7, with the display off and being fully on, they'll drop to a single watt of power draw. Truly insane stuff. I've lost all my concern about RAM, to be honest (which is shocking coming from someone who bought a top of the line maxed out RAM primary machine in 2021 specifically because I felt like RAM was so important)

Masking is a learned behavior - learned specifically because the person in question had sufficiently unpleasant experiences being unmasked that they decided they needed to try hard to mask in order to avoid said unpleasant experience.

No one masks at birth. If you want your child to stop masking, perhaps it’s helpful to investigate what caused them to learn the behavior in the first place and what could be done to make the experience of being unmasked more pleasant and less aversive for him.

Just as you say, masking takes an incredible amount of energy and is exhausting and often backfires. Why would anyone expend such exhausting amounts of energy without some extremely strong motivating factor? The alternative to not masking must be perceived as exquisitely undesirable.