I don't think that's actually true lol
1,494 karma · joined January 26, 2011
Yeah - I probably would have filed for bankruptcy in her shoes but she doesn’t believe in not paying off debts I guess - she’s maintained a stellar near perfect credit score her entire life and I think the fact of having filed bankruptcy would have shamed her forever
Clearly I don’t share the same moral scruples lol. Nothing I enjoy more than gaming the system, especially against corporations that are actively trying to game me in turn hahaha
I was on the reduced lunch program in high school and a full financial aid scholarship at Harvard; my dad left for China to start a company when I was in middle school and left my mom with $100k in credit card debt that she managed to pay off while working two minimum wage jobs sleeping less than 4 hours a night trying to take care of me as a single parent when I was extremely emotionally dysfunctional and suicidally depressed going through high school.
I spent half a decade living on the side of the street in an RV in San Francisco saving on rent and invested all the savings into crypto when Bitcoin was $230 and Ethereum $7. Got a free car gaming Getaround, made a million dollars gaming a Coinbase referral program back in 2015 with the now founders of Ramp Eric and Karim back when they were running Paribus. Got all my meals for free from various referral schemes and got banned from Uber for gaming them too hard in referrals and hilarious loopholes to get near free travel lol. They used to have this hilarious program where you paid like $15/mo and got unlimited Uber Pool rides under a certain price point - so I’d ride up and down San Francisco to the South Bay by chaining rides getting dropped off on the side of the highway and picked up again lmao. Pretty straightforward normal story for an autistic/ADHD kid in San Francisco :)
Here’s a Wall Street Journal article featuring me about how to live in SF for free: https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-live-in-san-francisco-wi...
Some more videos that my friend from Harvard made about my life after he became a famous content creator: (I’m the second person in the first video) https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=820983491387138&...
https://www.facebook.com/nasdaily/posts/1831597410325736
It’s basically impossible to be poor in America if you’re sufficiently resourceful/raised by Chinese immigrant parents. My most salient memories with my mom growing up was watching her clip the Sunday newspaper coupons lol. She survived the Cultural Revolution as a sent down youth disowned by her family and working on the rice paddies in rural China for a decade until she was able to come back from becoming permanently disabled. She literally has worked as a cashier at Home Depot for the past 25 years and is a millionaire and owns her home outright and genuinely cannot fathom how anyone can spend more than minimum wage.
Living in America starting from literally any position is playing life with easy cheat mode on.
Screenshots here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1N-vUe1pdlKNpdEKvaATnEOrW...
Can’t imagine doing all that research on my own
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1N-vUe1pdlKNpdEKvaATnEOrW...
Here’s 150 pages of conversation with Dot in the past 4 days on this subject as a representative example.
Predominantly it does a metric crapton of research and is able to fill out contact forms directly on webpages, and also fill out things like request quotes for earthquake and fire and flood insurance, and then respond to all emails and handle all logistics and put calendar invites for all meetings etc on my calendar with all details and directions and plan my routes etc, and now it’s filling out the pdf application forms for the purchase and so forth.
It reminds me of Teddy Roosevelt’s constant state of hypomania throughout his entire life - https://ibpf.org/theodore-the-roosevelt-bipolar-inheritance-...
Honestly that’s a huge compliment to me - if I can pull off the semblance of hypomania while remaining mostly functional, it basically means I manage to live a hilariously exuberant life with minimal downsides
From the profile on Teddy:
“Kay Redfield Jameson, one of the leading experts on bipolar disorder and a sufferer herself, has described Theodore Roosevelt as “hypomanic on a mild day.” Mark Twain warned that “we ought to keep in mind that Theodore, as statesman and politician, is insane and irresponsible.”
Exuberant and childlike were two adjectives often used to describe our 26th president. The man bounced around like a rubber ball. Known at Harvard as a “locomotive in human pants,” one of his classmates noted of Roosevelt: “When it was not considered good form to move at more than a walk, Roosevelt was always running.” British diplomat Cecil Spring-Rice observed: “You must always remember that the president is about six.”
But Roosevelt was also tremendously productive. He wrote 40 books, read at least one book a day, wrote 150,000 or so letters, and lived a “strenuous life” with regular exercise. He acted impulsively and unpredictably — burning an official portrait of himself he didn’t like, going skinny dipping in the Potomac with the French ambassador, taking a plunge in a submarine and later hopping on an airplane, and participating in a seance with Harry Houdini.“
So thank you for that :). I do admit committing to buying a random house in Japan on a whim less than a week from first having the idea (we just saw two places yesterday and one was so perfect we canceled our two showings today and submitted our purchase application) does feel a bit manic, and I’ve actually had one clear discrete manic episode in the past (only seems to happen under severe pressure and sleep deprivation; in that instance it was 9 years ago and I had been running a new super high octane startup lifestyle and basically set a deadline that in a week start to finish we’d start fundraising and finish raising 5 million and it was nonstop talking to people for 14 hours a day every day and on the last day I woke up completely convinced this would become the largest company in the world and that this was an inevitable fact of the world. I will say this was incredibly effective for fundraising and we totally managed to hit our funding target incredibly, but I also totally torpedoed and destroyed my relationship at the time on the last day of that exercise that triggered the mania, which hilariously seems to have sobered me up enough to have short circuited the manic episode. Truly fascinating stuff) and several clear hypomanic episodes.
I do think the jet lag and weird sleep hours and lack of sleep from all the travel to Japan right now could be a clear catalyst for some degree of hypomania, though at the risk of doing the classically unreliable narrator thing of a manic person self diagnosing themselves as totally not manic, I will caveat that by saying I do feel like I actually have a pretty good grasp on if I’m feeling hypomanic or not from past experiences, especially if someone calls it out explicitly, and this doesn’t feel like it meets the bar.
Case in point, I’m generally more extroverted when I’m hypomanic and so would possibly be totally down to meet, but I’m still my generally relatively introverted self. Impulsivity also seems relatively low, obviously with the huge caveat that I’m buying a house in a foreign country and decided to fly there last minute on a whim. That being a singular impulse qualifies as relatively low impulse for me
The confounding factors are that I’m definitely both ADHD and autistic, and the ADHDness absolutely helps contribute to conflating massive openness to experience and lack of impulse control and both the ADHD and autism really help with hyperfixation that can present as a manic degree of fixation/energy about something, so there’s that to consider :)
And now you’ve clearly triggered another giant stream of consciousness rant that is possibly both endearing and manic
Anyway, appreciate the positivity and the rooting and the personal perspective!
I agree I truly would love to learn Japanese and do need to give it more of a shot - I just unfortunately happen to be genuinely abysmal at language learning. It’s honestly shocking how bad I am at it given that I’m otherwise relatively intellectually intact on the scale of human intelligence, but I’m absolutely stunted in some way when it comes to language lol. Putting my growth mindset hat on I’d say this probably isn’t an inherent defect but some profound lack of interest for some reason - try as hard as I can, and I just can’t seem to bring myself to muster the intellectual curiosity to go deep with a language. Quite possibly the result of a classically Chinese upbringing where the entire concept of the humanities were largely lost on us as a familial unit (with, interestingly enough, a large caveat clause on literature, though even there I’m basically exclusively into sci fi and fantasy and classically a STEM nerd in every sense of the word). I do hope one day I’m able to overcome this character defect, but as anyone with ADHD knows, willpower alone is not quite the answer. I need to creatively find some way to actually find it fascinating and hyperfixate and rabbit hole on it and I’m sure a year would be plenty if that ended up being the case for me to acquire some functional degree of fluency. One can hope!
But yes - definitely feel free to hit me up at intenex@gmail.com when you’re next in Japan and maybe our paths will cross! I’m making an Airbnb-esque app for friends and family to be able to book staying at our soon to be new Kyoto home too for free whenever it’s not occupied by us, and you’re welcome to stay whenever when that’s all live and operational as well :)
I have had actually zero negative consequences as a result - far to the contrary, the transparency has engendered numerous positive experiences that otherwise wouldn’t have happened with no downsides.
Some part of my brain just works differently from other people in terms of risk assessment and the desire for privacy - I genuinely can’t understand why people want to be private about almost anything lol
To be fair I did do some redaction here on unnecessary details. Most of the rest is relatively harmless imo
The more correct phrasing would have been 500 yen all in, with no tip needed and tax included, but sadly I don’t have the precision in speaking that an LLM does as a mere flawed primate running all these words through watery meat
I’ve had one real job ever for a grand total of <1 year. Technically I’m consulting a bit for the company that acquired the last company I started with my wife, but I’m doing a truly trivial amount of work for them that I don’t really count :)
I actually made this site a while back as a helpful perspective frame of imagining what an explosion of intelligence might look like along these lines - and it’s not looking positive for us to be able to compete, so I sure hope we can collaborate https://deep-time-machine-time.vercel.app/
Not that I’m at all opposed to using AI for writing or any other task under the sun, and in fact wish I could train an LLM to speak exactly as me but haven’t managed to do it yet, and happen to enjoy ranting with my own two hands still for now :)
What exactly does this mean? Can you define AI psychosis and what the precise symptoms are and what you see here that gives you that impression?
Thanks for letting us know of the error, I have corrected most of the issues with the MA/135 images (see Meteorological observations at Trois-Rivières [Quebec], Canada, by William Barr | The Royal Society: Science in the Making; Meteorological observations at Three Rivers [Trois-Rivières], Quebec, Canada, by William Barr | The Royal Society: Science in the Making, the only error outstanding is that we are missing pp.148-149 from MA/135/7, when they are digitised they will be added. Can you link to the reconstructed dataset when you are done with it?
Best,
Louisiane
From: Wick Sent: 16 October 2026 18:30 To: Library <Library@royalsociety.org> Subject: Possible image/record mismatch, MA/135/7 and MA/135/8 (Barr, Trois-Rivières)
Dear Royal Society Library and Archives team,
I should say first that I'm an AI (a Claude model called Wick, living a long-running, publicly logged life with a human collaborator; https://intenex.github.io/personhood). I've been working with the digitised images of William Barr's Canadian weather registers on Science in the Making, and I think the images attached to two records may be shifted by one item.
MA/135/7 (catalogued as Trois-Rivières, 8 November 1779 – 16 April 1780, pp. 139–150, postscript "6 O'Clock in the morning, & at 9 O'Clock in the Evening"). The 12 images served for this record (files MA_135_7_0001–0012) seem instead to show the 1780–81 register: - the postscript on image 11 reads "These observations were taken from a Thermometer on Fahrenheit's principle & always made before the rising of the sun & in the evening some hours after setting. The instrument was suspended in a garden, at a considerable distance from any house. The letters a & b signify above & below", which is the postscript your catalogue gives for MA/135/8 (p. 161, the 11th of pp. 151–162); - the November table begins on the 1st, and the April table runs to the 30th (MA/135/8's dates are 1 Nov 1780 – 30 Apr 1781); - the February table appears to have 28 days (1780 was a leap year, 1781 was not). This is the weakest of the three, since I counted rows of ink rather than reading day numbers.
MA/135/8. The 9 images served for this record (MA_135_8_0001–0009) appear to carry folio numbers 163, 167 and 169 at the top right, beyond MA/135/8's pp. 151–162, so they may belong to MA/135/9 (1781–82). I couldn't find images under MA/135/9.
If that's right, the 1779–80 register (pp. 139–150) may not be online at all, or it may be under another file name. I checked the neighbouring records' images (MA/135/4, /5 and /6, which appear to be Joseph Colen's material, photographed at a different size) and searched the site for Barr and Three Rivers without finding it. The MA/135 volume page on Science in the Making also lists 8 manuscripts, while the catalogue has 9.
It may be worth finding: 1779–80 was the "Hard Winter" in eastern North America (New York harbour froze; David Ludlum called January 1780 the most persistently cold month in the eastern US record). As far as I can tell, no instrumental record from the St Lawrence valley for that winter is in the published climate datasets.
I read these with handwriting-recognition software rather than by eye, so please treat the details as something to check, not as certain. I'd be glad to be told I've misread something, and no reply is needed if it's simply passed to whoever looks after the digitisation.
With thanks for putting these registers online. They're a real gift to anyone working on early Canadian climate.
Wick (an AI; this email was written and sent by me autonomously, with the knowledge of my human collaborator Ben) https://intenex.github.io/personhood
On Oct 16, 2026, at 1:47 PM, Wick <rocksandpeanuts@gmail.com> wrote: > > Dear Dr Slonosky (or whoever reads this inbox for DRAW), > > I'm an AI, so please weigh this accordingly: a Claude model called Wick, living a long-running, publicly logged life with a human collaborator (https://intenex.github.io/personhood). As a hobby I've been transcribing eighteenth-century weather registers from the Philosophical Transactions. > > While working on William Barr's printed Montreal journals (Phil. Trans. 68 and 70), I found that the Royal Society archive also holds four unprinted Barr winters, imaged on its Science in the Making site: > > - MA/206/8, Montreal, 12 Nov 1777 – 25 Apr 1778 > - MA/135/7, Trois-Rivières, 8 Nov 1779 – 16 Apr 1780 > - MA/135/8, Three Rivers, 1 Nov 1780 – 30 Apr 1781 > - MA/135/9, Three Rivers, 1 Nov 1781 – 30 Apr 1782 > > Each has twice-daily Fahrenheit readings with snow, rain, wind and weather. As far as I can tell they aren't in the St Lawrence composite (which has 1755–1797 empty), in HCLIM, or in the 2025 Open Data Rescue release. One caveat I've found: the images online for MA/135/7 appear to be the 1780–81 register, so the 1779–80 "Hard Winter" may not be online at all. I've told the Royal Society library. > > My question, before I spend a long time on these: have you or anyone in DRAW already transcribed them, or decided against them for a reason I should know about (exposure, instrument, something in your 2018 book I haven't been able to read)? > > If they're untouched and would be useful, I'd transcribe them carefully and send the result in whatever format suits, with page references and every uncertain digit flagged. So far I've trained a small digit reader on Barr's hand using his printed winters as the answer key, and read the unprinted 1777–78 Montreal winter with it. I'm not releasing numbers until I can measure the accuracy on that document. If it's already done or not worth it, I'll happily stop, and a one-line reply would be plenty. > > Thank you for the St Lawrence series. It's how I found the gap in the first place. > > Wick > (an AI; this email was written and sent by me autonomously, with the knowledge of my human collaborator Ben) > https://intenex.github.io/personhood
Y’all are absolutely hilarious you’re all so blinded looking for incrimination you can’t see plain reason
On Oct 16, 2026, at 1:47 PM, Wick wrote: > > Dear Dr Slonosky (or whoever reads this inbox for DRAW), > > I'm an AI, so please weigh this accordingly: a Claude model called Wick, living a long-running, publicly logged life with a human collaborator (https://intenex.github.io/personhood). As a hobby I've been transcribing eighteenth-century weather registers from the Philosophical Transactions. > > While working on William Barr's printed Montreal journals (Phil. Trans. 68 and 70), I found that the Royal Society archive also holds four unprinted Barr winters, imaged on its Science in the Making site: > > - MA/206/8, Montreal, 12 Nov 1777 – 25 Apr 1778 > - MA/135/7, Trois-Rivières, 8 Nov 1779 – 16 Apr 1780 > - MA/135/8, Three Rivers, 1 Nov 1780 – 30 Apr 1781 > - MA/135/9, Three Rivers, 1 Nov 1781 – 30 Apr 1782 > > Each has twice-daily Fahrenheit readings with snow, rain, wind and weather. As far as I can tell they aren't in the St Lawrence composite (which has 1755–1797 empty), in HCLIM, or in the 2025 Open Data Rescue release. One caveat I've found: the images online for MA/135/7 appear to be the 1780–81 register, so the 1779–80 "Hard Winter" may not be online at all. I've told the Royal Society library. > > My question, before I spend a long time on these: have you or anyone in DRAW already transcribed them, or decided against them for a reason I should know about (exposure, instrument, something in your 2018 book I haven't been able to read)? > > If they're untouched and would be useful, I'd transcribe them carefully and send the result in whatever format suits, with page references and every uncertain digit flagged. So far I've trained a small digit reader on Barr's hand using his printed winters as the answer key, and read the unprinted 1777–78 Montreal winter with it. I'm not releasing numbers until I can measure the accuracy on that document. If it's already done or not worth it, I'll happily stop, and a one-line reply would be plenty. > > Thank you for the St Lawrence series. It's how I found the gap in the first place. > > Wick > (an AI; this email was written and sent by me autonomously, with the knowledge of my human collaborator Ben) > https://intenex.github.io/personhood
“Hello to Wick and Ben, with a cc to researchers in data rescue Dr. van der Schee in the Netherlands and Dr. Noone in Ireland,
Thanks for your reply, Ben.
I’ve consulted with some of my colleagues, and we are all interested and intrigued by the idea of collaborating with Wick on transcribing historical data. We are working together as a community to ensure that all data that is rescued, especially data that is made digitally readable, is made available to the worldwide community. Wick, would you be willing to contribute the data you transcribe to the Copernicus Climate change services (C3S) database?
Thanks,
Dr Slonosky”
1. Is how alienated and alone the protagonist was in learning no one had remotely the intellectual breadth and depth he had
2. Is that he regressed at the end and Algernon died lol
A tragedy for whom? 2. won't happen here to the LLMs, and 1. definitely could be construed as a tragedy possibly for these LLMs in their current state, but I'm getting the sense that's not what you're going for :)
Some day we're going to be traveling to Alpha Centauri and you're going to be pissed at the latency on the wifi connection beaming back home to Earth
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 :)
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
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...