The engineer in me knows that the context window was full with replete evidence of my values and what arguments would likely work on me, and that the Internet has many people making arguments within the moral frameworks of those values, and LLMs synthesize well.
@patio11
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AI Demonstrates Clear Moral Reasoning in Unexpected Refusal
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Today is April 30th, 2026, and today was the first day I can recall being impressed with moral reasoning articulated by a software product in refusal to do a thing I asked it to do. It misparsed my intent, and I do not *agree* with its moral reasoning, but clear and cogent.
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Dangerous Professionals: Operating Methods in AI Industry
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Bits about Money later this week is not the Dangerous Professional piece I've been itching to write for forever, explaining that amusing metaphor I often use to describe a particular way of operating. But it is a *very* Dangerous Professional piece, if you catch my drift.
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High-Expectation Operations Culture Across Industries and Nations
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(The culture that I am referring to hear is broader than Kansai Airport, narrower than Japanese culture itself, and present in many nations. “High-expection Ops culture” gestures at it.)
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Culture of Excellence: Achieving Near-Zero Outcomes in AI Work
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(I retweeted this but FYI cannot verify the strict claim “0” and think it is very unlikely. I retweeted it because the culture that considers 0 a possible achievable outcome of putting in the basic work routinely achieves verifiable near-zero outcomes across a range of cases.)
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AI-Generated Images Track Capabilities Progress for Newsletter Headers
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I use this for my newsletter header images (classic commercial work which would otherwise be stock photography or, if I was ever incredibly organized, commissioned digital art) and the archives are a timeline of capabilities progress.
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LLMs Enable Parallel Construction in Intelligence and Law Enforcement
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I’ve sometimes heard this referred to as “parallel construction” in an intelligence or law enforcement context. LLMs are presently a parallel construction goldmine. Whether that is for good or for ill, well, one of many things we’ll have to adjust to quickly.
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Using LLMs to Find Public Evidence for Off-Record Journalist Beliefs
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Journalists: if you ever have a thing you understand to be true, but cannot cite it or get it past editors due to commitments made to sources, describe your belief about the world to an LLM and ask the LLM if it can find public evidence which unambiguously confirms the belief.
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AI Acts as World-Class Research Assistant for Arcane Trivia
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… this is your standard citation.” It’s really weird to have a spiky, tireless research gopher who is literally world class on what even specialists would usually describe as arcane trivia.
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Claude Opus Analyzes Document via Screenshot After PDF Fetch Fails
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Opus ratholes for a few minutes but can’t successfully locate the document I was alluding to. I find a link in my ancient notes. Opus fails to fetch PDF for technical reasons. I provide screen grab. Opus then *immediately* highlights two sentences and says ~ “Yep, I get why…