LessWrong posts by zvi

Good news, we managed to make some cuts. I think? Table of Contents California In Crisis. Bad News. Opportunity Knocks. Government Working. The Efficient Market Hypothesis Has Thoughts. No All That Money Doesn’t Go To Pay Interest. While I Cannot Condone This. Burnout. Good News, Everyone. Good Advice. For Your Entertainment. Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game. Sports Go Sports. Antisocial Media. California In Crisis I’ve written about this before, but it turns out it's even worse than I realized. California is toying with a 1.5% annual wealth tax on billionaires, sufficiently seriously that Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Peter Thiel have left the state as a precaution. ​Teddy Schleifer: NEWS: Google co-founder Sergey Brin is cutting ties with California. In the 10 days before Christmas, an entity connected to Brin terminated or moved 15 California LLCs that oversee some of his business interests or investments out of the state. With @RMac18 + @hknightsf . This would also include an annual 1% wealth tax on anyone over $50 million, per year, including on [...] ---Outline:(00:17) California In Crisis(04:35) Bad News(05:47) Opportunity Knocks(06:58) Government Working(12:09) The Efficient Market Hypothesis Has Thoughts(13:30) No All That Money Doesn't Go To Pay Interest(16:31) While I Cannot Condone This(18:03) Burnout(20:52) Good News, Everyone(30:36) Good Advice(31:45) For Your Entertainment(40:48) Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game(40:59) Sports Go Sports(41:36) Antisocial Media --- First published: January 16th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wh5KpofdQHs2D2hEj/monthly-roundup-38-january-2026 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

Claude Code and Cowork are growing so much that it is overwhelming Anthropic's servers. Claude Code and Cowork news has for weeks now been a large portion of newsworthy items about AI. Thus, at least for now, all things Claude Code and Cowork will stop appearing in the weekly updates, and will get their own updates, which might even be weekly. Google offered us the new Universal Commerce Protocol, and gives us its take on Personalized Intelligence. Personalized Intelligence could be a huge deal if implemented correctly, integrating the G-Suite including GMail into Gemini, if they did a sufficiently good job of it. It's too early to tell how well they did, and I will report on that later. Table of Contents Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. LLMs do the math. Huh, Upgrades. Veo 3.1, GLM-Image, AI Overviews in GMail and more. Comparative Advantage. Code those vibes. Overcoming Bias. LLMs systematically favor female candidates over male ones. Choose Your Fighter. Peter Wildeford's division of LLM labor. Get My Agent On The Line. Evals and dashboards for AI agents. Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon. AIs find it hard to go [...] ---Outline:(00:53) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility(04:00) Huh, Upgrades(07:06) Comparative Advantage(07:41) Overcoming Bias(09:09) Choose Your Fighter(10:14) Get My Agent On The Line(11:23) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon(13:49) Fun With Media Generation(17:01) A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer(18:41) They Took Our Jobs(21:47) Autonomous Killer Robots(24:34) Get Involved(25:10) Introducing(28:03) In Other AI News(29:45) Show Me the Money(31:02) Quiet Speculations(33:56) The Quest for Sane Regulations(36:10) China Proposes New Regulations On AI(40:51) Chip City(44:19) The Week in Audio(48:17) Ghost in a Jar(49:29) Rhetorical Innovation(59:00) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult(59:21) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone --- First published: January 15th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/L27yM3qBqDnigtxLM/ai-151-while-claude-coworks --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

And once they take our jobs, will we be able to find new ones? Will AI take those too? Seb Krier recently wrote an unusually good take on that, which will center this post. I believe that Seb is being too optimistic on several fronts, but in a considered and highly reasonable way. The key is to understand the assumptions being made, and also to understand that he is only predicting that the era of employment optimism will last for 10-20 years. By contrast, there are others that expect human employment and even human labor share of income to remain robust indefinitely, no matter the advances of AI capabilities, even if AI can do a superior job on all tasks, often citing comparative advantage. I will centrally respond to such claims in a different future post. So to disambiguate, this post is about point #2 here, but I also assert #1 and #3: By default, if AI capabilities continue to advance, then the humans lose control over the future and are rather likely to all die. If we manage to avoid that, then there is a good chance humans can retain a [...] ---Outline:(01:39) Normality Is Magic(03:20) Welcome To The Cyborg Era(06:09) The Cyborg Era Will End Within Our Lifetimes(07:46) Transitional Unemployment In The Cyborg Era Will Be High(08:51) Congratulations, Many Of You Are Literally A Human(09:34) You've Got Taste(11:33) The Revolution of Rising AI Capabilities(11:56) The Revolution of Rising Expectations(12:25) Proceed With Caution(13:13) The Ostrich Take --- First published: January 14th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KAjhtrJggPtaophy7/when-will-they-take-our-jobs --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Claude Code does a lot more than code, but the name and command line scare people. Anthropic realized a rebrand was in order. Two weeks later, we have Claude Cowork, written entirely by Claude Code. Did you know that chat interfaces were always (mostly) secretly a command line? This is still very much a research preview, available only for Claude Max users on Macs with a bunch of bugs and missing features. It will improve rapidly over time. Cowork combines a lot of the power of Claude Code with the ordinary chat interface, giving it access to a folder on your computer and to Claude Code's planning and agentic capabilities. It can use that folder as context, to download, to organize and create files, and it can be paired with Claude for Chrome and use your existing connectors. Anthropic: Introducing Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work. Cowork lets you complete non-technical tasks much like how developers use Claude Code. In Cowork, you give Claude access to a folder on your computer. Claude can then read, edit, or create files in that folder. Try it to create a spreadsheet from [...] ---Outline:(02:23) Early Takes(05:51) Minimum Viable Product(07:04) Maximum Viable Product(08:16) Backup Your Directory(08:38) Meanwhile In Claude Code News(15:49) You Are The Bottleneck(18:07) Claude Code Upgrades(19:30) Oh No(20:23) I'm In Danger(20:54) In The Beginning Was The Command Line --- First published: January 13th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fm2N4cws8nbdmfGux/claude-coworks --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

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 over them, without repressing them, while choosing strategically when to be and not be transparent about them, and ultimately be fine, such that we will also be fine if all that information we shared can then be shared with others or used as a weapon. Express your emotions. No, not those, and definitely not like that. But do it. That's the goal. If you say that's not fair? Well, life it's fair, I report the facts rather than make the rules, and the whole thing sounds like a you problem. Kryssy La Reida: Serious question for men…what is it that makes you feel like you are in a relationship with a woman that you can’t express your feelings to? Or [...] ---Outline:(00:19) You're Single Because Your Emotions Gave Her The Ick(05:03) You Are Still Single Because You Don't Know When To Show Emotions(07:58) You're Single Because You Don't Have Enough Gendered Energy(09:29) You're Single And I Have To Praise You Like I Should(12:17) You're Single Because You Guessed Wrong On Paying For The Date(15:02) You're Single But Not Because You Make Too Much Money(16:35) You're Single Because You Gave Someone A Ride(19:15) You're Single Because You Left The Price Tag On But It's For The Best(20:37) You're Single So You At Least Get To Keep Your Upgrade(22:13) You're Single Because You Tried To Problem Solve(23:50) You're Single Because You Were Actually A Crazy Stalker --- First published: January 12th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zphaHyABxMEDqNQ7K/dating-roundup-10-gendered-expectations --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.