Hey there iterators! It's time for the fifteenth edition of my weeklyish updates!

posts

• FDT and the sacrificial volunteer's dilemma on November 11, 2026

• Modeling with Bayesian networks on November 9, 2026

research

I dabbled a little bit in agent foundations research and wrote about how functional decision theory handles an interesting situation. I don't think agent foundations research is a particularly impactful thing to work on; I mostly did this because it's really interesting to think about and I found it fun to think about this problem for a bit. (And has much less of a capabilities acceleration risk.) I haven't really set out to do much agent foundations research, but I guess I might write about it more if I end up thinking about it.

I didn't get much interpretability stuff done since the last update. I mostly just thought about ways to do better NLAs but I didn't actually get anything done. Hopefully I'll run some experiments and get some interesting results over the next few days. I'm pretty excited about making better NLAs that can interpret changes in the residual stream (or finding some other way to make them Actually Good for understanding what LLMs are actually doing, and what algorithms are actually being run by the model weights).

random stuff

I've already written two essays for Just Write. Inkhaven 3 is also happening now, and while I'm not formally participating in it I can still write stuff, and I might try to write 500 words online every day of Inkhaven 3 for funsies. Let me know if there's anything you should write that you would find interesting to read! (I considered arranging to be kicked out of my home if I fail to write 500 words a day (to give me real stakes) but I'm not that dedicated.)

I finally got PACER access - I didn't get around to figuring out how to get a US credit card, but I didn't need to because I got the access code mailed to me so I can pay PACER by mailing checks to them after I get mailed paper invoices. (I have a checking account from a US bank that I think has a feature where they'll send checks for me to an address of my choice, so at least I don't have to physically go out and mail them myself.) I find it pretty strange that PACER can't manage to accept foreign credit cards - they should make it easy for me to pay the money!

My posting about things I found from litigation has fairly impactful - my earlier LessWrong post spurred some interesting discussion, and there’s been some discussion about the interesting parts of deposition transcripts I’ve posted about on X/Twitter (I should probably start posting that kind of thing on Bluesky too). Probably the thing downstream of that which impacted discourse the most was this qrt of an interesting slide describing a potential post-ASI world (“utopia ruled by god in a box”). If you want to take a look at some more deposition transcripts, I vibed up a thingie to peruse the transcripts I’ve gotten recently, although keep in mind there are some bugs and the OCR isn’t perfect.

I tried out Claude Fable 5.2, it's pretty cool! I didn't find it a very big jump over Opus 5.5, but I think it's better at tasks overall. I'll probably end up using it mostly to check the work of Opus 5.5.

food

I've started getting yFood-pilled. It's not quite as good as Huel but it's pretty good and adds some variety to the meal replacement drink portion of my diet.

Also, I learned that one of the three ovens in my home (we have an unnecessarily high number of ovens) can be used to humidify stale bread to make it less stale.

london

I was at office hours and the ACX meetup; they were pretty fun! At office hours we ended up sitting on the pub floor until we were told we were blocking the fire exits.

I’ll probably do Writehaven 2 on Nov 22. Last time you had to write 400 words every hour (with some breaks) or leave; I’ll probably do something similar this time. I’ve also considered running a sequences reading group (or similar, not sure about the exact details) soonish.

looking forward

I'm going to head back to Toronto in December. I've been considering visiting somewhere in Europe on my way back (probably Paris or somewhere in Germany). I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do after that; I might spend more time in London, and possibly go to the 40c3.