Just had a thought that Bitter Lesson applies to so much more than AI and compute and all that. It's about discarding old thinking and cruft when something better comes along. It's a general progressive ethos thing, if you think about it. Think about old lawmakers, or principal engineers, or others who have lifetimes of experience and know what should and should not be done. And the first thing they do when new ideas come along is they say no. That's not how it's been done. I know better. I have the experience. In this metaphor, compounding progress and overall human advancement is the AI. It's the new wisdom that could be discovered by progress and new ideas. If we gave it a chance. That doesn't mean every new idea, or every thing proposed by AI, will be better than what we were doing before. But it does mean that the policy of rejecting newer, freer ways of doing things, just because "the experts" say it would be a bad idea....is a bad idea. The Bitter Lesson, generalized, in other words, is the idea that when "the experts" become gatekeepers to progress, that's generally (but not always) a bad thing.

I really just want a smarter and more capable Opus 5.5. I know that's silly, since I don't know what I don't know. But that's how good this model feels to me. Like I only want more of what it's doing.

I really love this Claude Code functionality where sessions naturally talk to each other and can coordinate. In this one, I'm asking something related to another session, and the session actually communicated back, so they're going to coordinate their work going forward.

What if there were one Holy Grail for AGI/ASI? How about a drug or treatment that increases some combination of IQ, empathy, compassion, and/or self-restraint by 10-25% or more? In other words, maybe the main thing we should be working on is a drug that would unify us as a species. Reducing self-harm and conflict, and increasing cooperation as humans on Earth would be the meta-upgrade. We should set this as a goal.

Some Trump aides predicting Pete Hegseth will be a target of some of the president's blame, noting the midterm results would have been altered minus the Iran war. Also Centcom head Brad Cooper and chairman of the joint chiefs Dan Caine, who both played big roles in guidance on Iran war.