LessWrong posts by zvi

The game is asymmetrical. Life is not fair. Doesn’t matter. Play to win the game. You’re Single Because Your Emotions Gave Her The Ick Ah, the ultimate ick source. A man expressing their emotions is kind of the inverse of the speech in Barbie about how it's impossible to be a woman. It's easy. A man must be in touch with and transparent about his emotions, but must also be in conscious control ove...

Claude Code with Opus 4.5 is so hot right now. The cool kids use it for everything. They definitely use it for coding, often letting it write all of their code. They also increasingly use it for everything else one can do with a computer. Vas suggests using Claude Code as you would a mini-you/employee that lives in your computer and can do literally anything. There's this thread of people saying C...

Claude Code is the talk of the town, and of the Twitter. It has reached critical mass. Suddenly, everyone is talking about how it is transforming their workflows. This includes non-coding workflows, as it can handle anything a computer can do. People are realizing the power of what it can do, building extensions and tools, configuring their setups, and watching their worlds change. I’ll be coverin...

Going Full San Francisco Waymo goes Full San Francisco West Bay except for SFO: Jeff Dean: Exciting expansion! @Waymo now serves the whole SF Bay Area Peninsula from SF to San Jose and is taking riders on freeways. They can serve SJC, and SFO is almost ready, employee rides are in place and public rides are ‘coming soon.’ Brandan: Would be nice if @Waymo comes across the bay to Berkeley! Jeff Dean...

The central message of the fertility roundups has always been that we have a choice. If we do want to raise fertility, we can do that. People respond to incentives. That means money, especially if paid up front, and it also means time, lifestyle and respect. If we do it purely with cash, it would be expensive, but a well-designed version of this would still be net profitable to the state. On the o...

This week, Philip Trammell and Dwarkesh Patel wrote Capital in the 22nd Century. One of my goals for Q1 2026 is to write unified explainer posts for all the standard economic debates around potential AI futures in a systematic fashion. These debates tend to repeatedly cover the same points, and those making economic arguments continuously assume you must be misunderstanding elementary economic pri...

There are two sides of developments in fertility. How bad is it? What is causing the massive, catastrophic declines in fertility? What can we do to stabilize and reverse these trends to a sustainable level? Today I’m going to focus on news about what is happening and why, and next time I’ll ask what we’ve learned since last check-in about we could perhaps do about it. One could consider all this a...

The Rationalist Project was our last best hope that we might not try to build it. It failed. But in the year of the Coding Agent, it became something greater: our last, best hope – for everyone not dying. This is what 2026 looks like. The place is Lighthaven. Table of Contents Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. 2026 is an age of wonders. Claude Code. The age of humans writing code may be comin...

It's that time. It's been a hell of a year. At the start we barely had reasoning models. Now we have Claude Code and Opus 4.5. I don’t code. Yet now I cause code to exist whenever something about a website annoys me, or when I get that programmer's realization that there's something I am planning on doing at least three times. Because why not? The progress has simultaneously been mind bogglingly i...

Ultimately, it comes down to one question. Are you in? For you, and for them. You’re Single Because They Got The Ick The Ick, the ultimate red flag, makes perfect sense and is all about likelihood ratios. Koenfucius: The ‘ick’ is a colloquial term for a feeling of disgust triggered by a specific—typically trivial—behaviour from a romantic partner, often leading to the relationship's demise. New re...

Here's to everyone having a great 2026 in all ways, so I figured what better way to end the year than with a little practical advice. Like everything else, dating is a skill. Practice makes perfect. It helps to combine it with outside analysis, to help you on your quest to Just Do Things. You’re Single Because You Lack Reps A common theme in these roundups is that the best thing you can do as a yo...

The Revolution of Rising Requirements has many elements. The most onerous are the supervisory requirements on children. They have become, as Kelsey Piper recently documented, completely, utterly insane, to the point where: A third of people, both parents and non-parents, responded in a survey that it is not appropriate to leave a 13 year old at home for an hour or two, as opposed to when we used t...

Claude Opus 4.5 did so well on the METR task length graph they’re going to need longer tasks, and we still haven’t scored Gemini 3 Pro or GPT-5.2-Codex. Oh, also there's a GPT-5.2-Codex. At week's end we did finally get at least a little of a Christmas break. It was nice. Also nice was that New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed the RAISE Act, giving New York its own version of SB 53. The final ver...

Now that I am tracking all the movies I watch via Letterboxd, it seems worthwhile to go over the results at the end of the year, and look for lessons, patterns and highlights. Last year: Zvi's 2024 In Movies. The Ratings Scale You can find all my ratings and reviews on Letterboxd. I do revise from time to time, either on rewatch or changing my mind. I encourage you to follow me there. Letterboxd r...

Several years ago Zvi Mowshowitz founded Balsa Research, a tiny nonprofit research organization currently focused on quantifying the impact of the Jones Act on the American economy, and working towards viable reform proposals. While changing century-old policy is not going to be easy, we continue to see many places where there is neglected groundwork that we’re well positioned to do, and we are im...

Balsa Research is a tiny nonprofit research organization currently focused on quantifying the impact of the Jones Act on the American economy, and working towards viable reform proposals. While changing century-old policy is not going to be easy, we continue to see many places where there is neglected groundwork that we’re well positioned to do, and we are improving at doing it with another year o...

Internet arguments like the $140,000 Question incident keep happening. The two sides say: Life sucks, you can’t get ahead, you can’t have a family or own a house. What are you talking about, median wages are up, unemployment is low and so on. The economic data is correct. Real wages are indeed up. Costs for food and clothing are way down while quality is up, housing is more expensive than it shoul...

People remember their childhood world too fondly. You adapt to it. You forget the parts that sucked, many of which sucked rather really badly. It resonates with you and sticks with you. You think it was better. This is famously true for music, but also in general, including places it makes no sense like ‘most reliable news reporting.’ Matthew Yglesias: Regardless of how old they are, people tend t...

This week I covered GPT 5.2, which I concluded is a frontier model only for the frontier. OpenAI also gave us Image 1.5 and a new image generation mode inside ChatGPT. Image 1.5 looks comparable to Nana Banana Pro, it's hard to know which is better. They also inked a deal for Disney's characters, then sued Google for copyright infringement on the basis of Google doing all the copyright infringemen...

In The $140,000 Question, I went over recent viral claims about poverty in America. The calculations behind the claims were invalid, the central claim (that the ‘true poverty line’ was $140k) was absurd, but the terrible vibes are real. People increasingly feel that financial life is getting harder and that success is out of reach. ‘Real income’ is rising, but costs are rising even more. Before we...

There was a no good, quite bad article by Michael Green that went viral. The condensed version was entitled ‘The Valley of Death: Why $100,000 Is the New Poverty,’ and a follow-up here. His actual claim in that post, which was what caught fire, was that the poverty line should be $140,000, and even that this number is him ‘being conservative.’ Obviously that is not remotely true, given that: Ameri...

Here we go again, only a few weeks after GPT-5.1 and a few more weeks after 5.0. There weren’t major safety concerns with GPT-5.2, so I’ll start with capabilities, and only cover safety briefly starting with ‘Model Card and Safety Training’ near the end. Table of Contents The Bottom Line. Introducing GPT-5.2. Official Benchmarks. GDPVal. Unofficial Benchmarks. Official Hype. Public Reactions. Posi...

I’m doing the Monthly Roundup early this month so that next week can be GPT-5.2 and affordability of life week, assuming we are not overtaken by other events. Ban Gain of Function Research The risk-reward profile of creating highly dangerous new viruses, supposedly in order to study them, is abysmal even when things are handled properly. Also, the actual practice of it is completely utterly insane...

It was touch and go, I’m worried GPT-5.2 is going to drop any minute now, but DeepSeek v3.2 was covered on Friday and after that we managed to get through the week without a major model release. Well, okay, also Gemini 3 DeepThink, but we all pretty much know what that offers us. We did have a major chip release, in that the Trump administration unwisely chose to sell H200 chips directly to China....

The focus this time around is on the non-academic aspects of primary and secondary school, especially various questions around bullying and discipline, plus an extended rant about someone being wrong on the internet while attacking homeschooling, and the latest on phones. Bullying If your child is being bullied for real, and it's getting quite bad, is this an opportunity to learn to stand up for y...