There a couple of tweets I keep thinking about and circling back to. These two have been formative for my character and dispositions, and put into shape intuitions I've shared and grown into. These two should be read together, especially with how the sphere has evolved.

I had a line in a post about lab employees who think their shares will let them buy galaxies. Removed it because it was too silly. Then people started telling me: many literally, unironically believe this.

there are some really interesting rumors going around related to the distillation of open-weights models (Kimi, Qwen, Minimax, etc.) and they're very related to my PhD work The narrative [speculative]: • good distillation relies on reasoning traces, normally hidden from users • Chinese labs figured out in early 2026 how to reverse-engineer reasoning from Claude Code and Codex • they were able to collect large amounts of long-horizon data *with reasoning traces included* this way • this jailbreak led to a new wave of OSS models we've enjoyed over the past few months I'm not sure how true it is, but reasoning extractability seems like a huge uncertainty around the future of open models in particular i'm curious how much having the reasoning matters. this (plus Anthropic's messaging around distillation attacks) indicates that reasoning chains are crucial for distilling model capabilities. our research ( found something different: if you train a high-quality reasoning inverter, it's often pretty easy to reconstruct useful traces from frontier models given their outputs. figuring out how to approximate frontier model reasoning traces might turn out to be an existential problem for open weights models

SITUATION DETECTED: Taiwan is investing in asymmetric warfare, plans to produce 100,000 drones a month by 2030, and intends to deploy an impenetrable "drone hellscape" of aerial and marine drones across the Taiwan Strait to make a Chinese amphibious assault too costly, per NYT.

NEW: Royal Navy sea drones secretly sent data to China. Cameras onboard a fleet of surveillance drones were found to contain Chinese parts despite assurances from suppliers that they were secure. An investigation found the cameras had been sending “heartbeat” signals to an IP address in China, forcing the Ministry of Defence to remove their connectivity. The Navy purchased the drones, made by Kraken Technology Group, in March. They are set to be sent to the Strait of Hormuz as part of the UK’s plan to protect the waterways. The MoD insist no sensitive data was breached and vulnerabilities have now been patched. Defence sources say this is a “major” failure.

despite my own hopes and my sense that there's been meaningful progress in many dimensions, i think it's pretty important to keep in mind that yudkowsky's prediction has consistently been that we will keep doing things that superficially look like alignment, grow social consensus that they're working well and allow for further incremental capabilities gain and deployment, and proceed to be shocked by improved capabilities totally bypassing these techniques in ways we did not well predict in advance, potentially repeatedly right up until it's far too late. recent events.... kind of look exactly like that. i think the same as many others, i felt some increasing optimism over the last year or so, as it seemed like we had at least a potential path to victory in our sights. this feels like it should be a pretty major wake up call that the whole general civilizational meta-trajectory of what we're doing may actually be fucked, even actively working to fool us.