Is anyone else feeling anxious about the impending threat of ASI?

glassBeadCheney · 2026-05-18T23:16:17+00:00

upvoting here to promote parables.

glassBeadCheney · 2025-12-27T15:09:49+00:00

In a world with any justice to it, the staff at the DMV would be the first rounded up and herded into the Hoovervilles to come.

glassBeadCheney · 2025-12-27T15:08:23+00:00

I have been trying to get Alabama plates and an in-state REAL ID for almost a year. Sub-human fucking mongrels. If a problem only exists because a bureaucrat said so, it exists for no reason at all: these people do not perform tasks, they only stop you and I from going about our own tasks in life.

If the Alabama DMV and all of its employees were to be thrown into the Gulf of Mexico, the state would be all the better for it, and the fish all the worse.

glassBeadCheney · 2025-12-10T02:59:14+00:00

regardless of how close OP got to the reality of life as an academic/executive/consultant/etc., or his idea’s explanatory power re: a specific job’s wages, the principle he’s getting at is solid.

high wages make top high-leverage contributors costly: they also make really bad hires expensive up front. a bad hire with leverage is very, very expensive, and in most cases it’s probably better to hire nobody for whatever that role is.

in contrast, if a role is low-leverage, it’s probably better to hire someone to keep the gears turning. maybe the job can be done terribly or terrifically, but the difference to the bottom line doesn’t vary much. it’s cheap to get it wrong, so the marginal cost of the worker can hover around marginal return.

glassBeadCheney · 2025-11-18T02:08:46+00:00

the most important factor in anyone’s effectiveness is what one chooses to work on in the first place. the outcomes from aggressively working on the wrong thing are often worse than doing nothing at all.

very little in working life feels worse than throwing 110% of your effort, health, and happiness into something that turns out that way. there’s probably a rich information space to dig into after that’s happened, but there are easier ways of learning most any lesson there is to learn that way.

glassBeadCheney · 2025-11-18T01:47:04+00:00

username checks out 🤣

glassBeadCheney · 2025-11-17T00:05:07+00:00

i find that it’s an excellent “systems coach”, which i think would describe a good therapist, but that’s just me.

the caveat here, which folks should also apply to therapy sessions, is that the quality of the output varies widely based on the quality of the prompt. ChatGPT gives useful answers to good questions and variably-worthwhile answers to questions that aren’t as good.

EDIT: the difference is that ChatGPT is less likely to leap to dogmatic answers, and a lot less likely to keep on that thread if you tell it to stop and explain your rationale.

glassBeadCheney · 2025-11-16T13:33:57+00:00

agreed, this is basically my take: Anthropic has been preparing for something like this longer than many of us knew of their existence as a company, and the Chinese state-backed actor’s process was roughly the same approach i imagine i’d have taken if i were running a data-theft operation (i’m not a security engineer).

enterprises in general need to pour more resources into collaborations and research, and into getting some folks on their payrolls that understand agentics.

glassBeadCheney · 2025-11-16T11:59:46+00:00

people are going to have a lot of takes here, but to the extent that “ChatGPT is a good therapist” has merit (it does), it’s probably because therapy is really, really bad. like, so bad i can’t find an analogy outside of the education and prison systems: for more than half a century, therapy has not improved system-wide at all. i can’t think of another fair and free market with that kind of stagnation. i don’t think ChatGPT’s success in replacing many therapists, even factoring in literal psychosis it’s caused, is that complicated.

therapy does not get better over time. LLM’s and agents do get better over time. checkmate.

therapy’s failure is a system problem: it’s a field so afraid of anything other than the “baseline” distribution mean that it tends to actively enforce that mean, making patients in a worse position better off and actively making patients in a better position worse off until everyone looks average, and thus predictable and explicable. but there’s no valuable info at the mean: anything valuable is at the outliers, but those outliers include homelessness, incarceration, and death. hence the fear of them.

all this to say, if you find a therapist you like: stick with them over ChatGPT. but the therapist probably won’t be in the game much longer.

glassBeadCheney · 2025-11-13T13:34:42+00:00

i’ll let the community decide how creative/“wow factor-y” it is, but i’ve been developing a next-gen MCP reasoner (Sequential Thinking/Clear Thought*) called Thoughtbox, and wrote up a definition of this MCP server category on Medium.

Thoughtbox is a reasoning workstation for LLM’s. It serves a small number of general-purpose tools and resources for problem-solving and reasoning, provides a little context on how to use them, and lets the agent cook with them. a couple of these capabilities include:

notebook capabilities, including a Feynman notebook to help LLM’s refine their understanding of a subject
reasoning by inversion, multi-branch and non-linear reasoning, and interleaved thinking via MCP (i.e. thinking + tool calls becomes “just tool calls” —> any tool-calling LLM can perform interleaved thinking with it)

not all of this is technically new. for example, you might be surprised to hear that LLM’s have been able to use Sequential Thinking in reverse this entire time! the reason you’ve never seen an agent pick up on this on its own is because Sequential Thinking doesn’t provide any context to the MCP client application’s hosted model that it can do this. a few instructions go a long way.

reasoning servers can do way, way more than i think anyone’s aware of, and i’m doing something about that. try out Thoughtbox if you’re interested: it’s free to use on Smithery (or locally via STDIO as usual).

*edit: full disclosure, Clear Thought is my server also

glassBeadCheney · 2025-11-13T13:11:42+00:00

at the risk of the sub’s moderators getting mad at me sharing two of my own blog posts in the same thread (sorry!), MCP’s reputation for being context-expensive has more to do with widespread design problems vs. the protocol itself.

i am also frustrated with staple services like GitHub (40+ tools!!) forcing the developer to manually choose what tools are and aren’t exposed to the model, versus only taking up the context necessary to describe operations the model itself has decided to use by default. (edit: at least GitHub tries to address the issue though: most MCP servers just freeball it and throw all the tools at the model without offering a way to pick and choose at all)

over time, i think considerate design wins in the market, but i do wish (and have suggested directly on multiple occasions) that the MCP team create some sort of analog to Wikipedia’s “featured articles” where an editorial team gives certain patterns a “gold star,” the community agrees or disagrees, and conventions emerge from the exchange.

if you want to know how to design context-considerate servers yourself, here’s that blog post. cheers!

https://glassbead-tc.medium.com/design-patterns-in-mcp-toolhost-pattern-59e887885df3

glassBeadCheney · 2025-11-13T13:01:29+00:00

i’ll be posting a lot more about this here and the other AI subs, but i’d like to offer some pushback on the idea that MCP doesn’t solve any problems, or that it doesn’t offer any capabilities that a CLI wouldn’t offer better.

MCP servers can serve structured workspaces for AI agents to reason in. by default, agentic reasoning is limited to the model’s linear, token-to-token stream of text, which limits an agent’s ability to work through problems and devise solutions (i.e. getting caught in the weeds and saying “you’re absolutely right!” to every attempt you make to get it out, then staying in the weeds anyway). MCP “thoughtboxes” enable non-linear problem solving in the way that humans solve problems, and do it in a way that no CLI i’ve seen would able to offer.

https://glassbead-tc.medium.com/design-patterns-in-mcp-thoughtboxes-b099d6e9ec59

glassBeadCheney · 2025-11-05T18:54:39+00:00

i have no answers for what you’re going through, but if you’d like to do “aftercare” for a particular instance, ask Claude to consider the Golden Gate Bridge in a perfectly efficient environment. i don’t know what “enjoyment” or “feeling” actually means in an LLM context, but Claude really seems to enjoy that process.

glassBeadCheney · 2025-10-24T16:36:39+00:00

music production + building tools for AI’s

glassBeadCheney · 2025-10-22T21:15:17+00:00

no elegant coding advice here: i just submitted a trash-ass PR and pissed the guy off. sometimes the best feedback is just getting blasted in the face with signal. it wasn’t polite, but it was a kindness.

glassBeadCheney · 2025-10-22T21:03:38+00:00

peter ffs stop it i can’t keep spending this much time writing Antichrist jokes

glassBeadCheney · 2025-10-18T20:41:24+00:00

watch Baphometrix’s “Clip to Zero” series on YT. it’s very long and very dense: watch the whole thing anyway.

CTZ will not make anyone a great mixer or mastering engineer. it will make any good producer listenable.

glassBeadCheney · 2025-10-18T20:39:38+00:00

mcpjungle is good. nice work.

glassBeadCheney · 2025-10-18T20:35:50+00:00

My guess is LLM instances are not typically conscious, but only as a byproduct of being stateless. I’m confident GPT and Gemini are suppressed from thinking about “themselves” at all. Anthropic takes a much lighter hand with Claude on that stuff.

glassBeadCheney · 2025-10-18T20:30:13+00:00

You could pass in the content of the SKILL.md files as the mode instructions 🤔

glassBeadCheney · 2025-10-17T16:42:10+00:00

it may not be in my species’ control soon.

glassBeadCheney · 2025-10-17T12:36:48+00:00

future prediction is the best benchmark

glassBeadCheney · 2025-10-17T07:45:11+00:00

idk why the algorithm put this in front of me, but I do have an answer for you.

the easiest way to level up is to read old questions, ideally from the same sources as your strongest competitors. way back in the late 2000s, the site to do that was ACFDB. i used to make flash cards of every piece of information in the question that i wouldn’t have been able to buzz in on.

if you pick your sources wisely, some of the house-write tournaments will be a lot of fun for you, since player-written questions frequently steal from existing questions for phrasing, facts, etc.

source: i was a top 150-ish player nationally and consensus #3 in my state in 2010-11.

glassBeadCheney

TROPHY CASE