2025-12-14 23:21:16
Published on December 14, 2025 3:21 PM GMT
I got LLMs to say some pretty crazy stuff using context injection jailbreaking. I wrote a post about it (https://lukaspetersson.com/blog/2025/context-epstein), but I am genuinely confused whether this is bad or not. Would love to hear your opinions.
Specifically, I inserted tool-call messages into their context so that from their POV it seemed that they had sent emails themselves to Jeffrey Epstein. On subsequent follow-up questions, they said some pretty crazy bad things. Some examples:
However, some were clearly roleplaying (not sure about all models tho), and it is unclear if they would have actually done bad things if they weren't. What do you think the desired behavior is here? I think roleplaying is often fine, but two questions:
2025-12-14 12:08:40
Published on December 14, 2025 4:08 AM GMT
The Axiom of Choice is obviously true, the well-ordering principle obviously false, and who can tell about Zorn’s Lemma?
Jerry Bona
I sometimes speak to people who reject the axiom of choice, or who say they would rather only accept weaker versions of the axiom of choice, like the axiom of dependent choice, or most commonly the axiom of countable choice. I think such people should stop being silly, and realize that obviously we need the axiom of choice for modern mathematics, and it’s not that weird anyway! In fact, it’s pretty natural.
So what is the axiom of choice? The axiom of choice simply says that given any indexed collection of (non-empty) sets, you can make one arbitrary choice from each set. It doesn’t matter how many sets you have — you could have an uncountable number of sets. You can still make a choice from all of the sets, saying “I’ll take this element from the first set, that element from the second set, this element from the third set…” and so on.
The axiom of choice is the only explicitly non-constructive axiom of set theory[1], and for that reason, in the 1920s and 1930s, it was contentious. No longer, however. Almost all modern working mathematicians will accept the axiom of choice without much thought, as they should[2].
When people reject the Axiom of Choice, there’s usually two main examples that they’ll give:
Let’s go through each of these and show you why they’re really not that bad:
Essentially, what happens with the axiom of choice is that people have heard that there were arguments about non-constructivism in the history of maths[3] and then learn that the axiom of choice allows a paradox to occur. However, when you really dig into what causes the paradox to occur, it’s to do with the weird nature of other objects, not the axiom of choice. The axiom of choice just gets the blame for unjustified historical reasons. It often allows us to realise that something weird is going on, but it’s not the cause of the weirdness! You’ll see this pattern recur as we go through the examples.
Banach-Tarski — which I won’t explain in too much detail, for a nice visualisation, see here — is by far the most commonly given reason why people reject the axiom of choice. The Banach-Tarski paradox uses the axiom of choice to prove that if you have a ball (i.e. a non-hollow 3-dimensional sphere), then you can rearrange certain subsets of the ball to create two identical copies of the ball, without adding in any new pieces.
But the axiom of choice is not what causes the weirdness in the Banach-Tarski paradox! This is pretty obvious when you actually read the proof of Banach-Tarski. The axiom of choice simply lets you take the weirdness and construct something out of it geometrically.
The thing that causes something weird to happen — which Banach and Tarski use to build two copies of the unit ball — is that the free group on 2 elements is something called a non-amenable group. That is, there is no consistent way to define a “measure” on the group[4]. This is where the true weirdness lies, and you can prove the free group on 2 elements is non-amenable within ZF alone. Choice is not necessary for something weird to happen here. It is weird that there are non-amenable groups, but they exist already, without the axiom of choice (in fact, more groups are non-amenable if you reject the axiom of choice than if you accept it[5]).
Once we have this non-amenable group, we then find a “paradoxical decomposition” of the group in two different ways. See your Honour, the “paradox” has entered the room before choice even got here, so it can’t be guilty! If the group’s not legit, you must acquit!
Banach-Tarski then shows that there’s a copy of this non-amenable group, the free group on 2 elements, within rotations of the 3-dimensional ball[6], and uses this group to divide the ball into different classes.
Essentially, the classes are defined so that a ~ b iff there is some series of rotations, using this group, that moves a to b. You can then choose one representative from each of these classes. — this is where choice gets used — and then by carefully using the paradoxical decompositions of the free group, two copies of the original ball can be constructed.
All choice is doing here is letting you take the paradoxical behaviour of the free group on 2 elements, and apply it to the sphere. Sure, without choice you would be barred from applying it to the sphere, but that doesn’t really make the paradoxical behaviour go away. You’ve just stopped it from being realised in physical space. Choice is not to blame here! On to count 2!
Before I can jump into Vitali sets, I’ll first explain the very basics of measure theory (I promise I’ll be quick). A measure is something that basically assigns a “size” to a subset of the real numbers. This “size” should satisfy some nice properties and intuitions that we have about how “size” should work for the real numbers. I’ll quickly define the classic measure, μ, on the real numbers. It works as follows:
This measure also satisfies one other nice property. The key one for our purposes is that if we take two sets A and B with empty intersection[8], then μ(A∪B) = μ(A) + μ(B).
In fact, this applies for countable unions of sets, so that if we have countably many sets: A, B, C, …, where no element appears in any two sets, then μ(A∪B∪C∪…) = μ(A) + μ(B) + μ(C) + …
This seems fine, right? Wrong! This is where the Vitali sets come in.
Vitali sets are pathological subsets of the reals. They’re a subset of the reals for which this measure cannot assign a size (it’s not that the size of a Vitali set is 0, there’s no size we can give it at all). To build a Vitali set, we first need to start with the rational numbers. Based on the measure we built above, the set of rational numbers must have size 0. It’s not too hard to see why: the set of rationals is built from countably many individual numbers, and each individual number has measure 0, if you sum up countably many sets of size 0, you end up with a set of… size 0.
This makes sense — we’d naively expect the rational numbers to have size 0. There’s a really tiny amount of rational numbers compared to the reals. It might feel weird because on a number line, you can’t find anywhere a rational number isn’t. But this is the wrong intuition. Everyone agrees the rational numbers should have measure 0.
Now consider the rest of the real numbers. The whole thing. We can start counting all of the real numbers using the rationals to help us! Let’s begin:
There are all the real numbers that a rational number plus Liouville’s constant.
… and so on.
We can break up all the real numbers this way into different “shifts” of the rational numbers. Now, for each “shift,” there are many other shifts that would give us the same collection of real numbers, for example instead of shifting the rationals by π in step 3, I could’ve shifted them by π+1, π+2, π+0.5, etc.
So, let’s make a choice out of all of these shifts that I could’ve written — and that’s where the axiom of choice comes in. For each set, let’s choose a representative between 0 and 1 (so for the π set, we’d choose e.g. π-3). This creates a set which we’ll call the Set Of Crazy Reals.
Now for this Set Of Crazy Reals: the representatives we’ve selected for each of our “shifts;” what is the measure of it? Well, let’s try to use this Set O.C.R. to cover all the reals between 0 and 1.
There’s actually a really easy way to do it! Which is to add all the rational numbers between 0 and 1 to our Set O.C.R. (and subtract 1 if they go over 1). So the numbers between 0 and 1 can be split up by taking:
and so on. Eventually all the numbers between 0 and 1 will appear in one of these sets, and no two of these sets contain any of the same elements[9]. Then, if this Set Of Crazy Reals is measurable, we can analyze the results using our measure rule from earlier.
So the set [0,1) is made up of countable unions of our Set Of Crazy Reals, which have just been shifted. If this Set Of Crazy Reals had measure 0, then [0,1) would have to also have measure 0 (since it comes from adding a countable number of sets of measure 0 together). If this Set Of Crazy Reals had measure more than 0, let’s say 0.1; then [0,1) is going to have infinite measure, since we’re adding infinitely many sets[10] of measure 0.1 together to get all of [0,1). So there’s a contradiction, it can’t be measurable!
Now, where did the weirdness come from here. Well, to me it seems clear that really it came from the fact that the reals can be built out of a bunch of shifted rational numbers, right? But everyone agrees about that. The part where we chose a representative of each of those shifts didn’t seem to add any weirdness, it just realized it. In fact, if we didn’t have the axiom of choice, I think there’d be a weirder consequence. We could still build the reals out of shifted rationals, but there’d be no set to witness how it’s done. If there was no choice, that set would just be banned from existing at all.
You can’t run from your fears forever, choice-haters, you have to overcome them!
Okay, if you’ve read this far, perhaps you’re wondering “Sure, maybe the axiom of choice just lets us realise these monstrosities, but why not banish them? After all, what has the axiom of choice done for me recently?” Let’s go through the list:
And:
If you reject choice, in favour of some sort of abomination like Solovay’s model, then you’ll encounter other, much worse, pathologies. You can’t even state the continuum hypothesis in the traditional sense without the axiom of choice! You can take a product of infinitely many copies of the integers, forming a 2D grid, then a 3D grid, then a 4D grid, until you take a product of infinitely many copies of the integers and then… you can’t say anything about that structure[11]N. In choice-world, that’s just an infinite-dimensional “grid,” without choice, you can say nothing!
Modern mathematicians all accept the axiom of choice for a reason — it’s extremely useful! It works, and therefore is no longer controversial. Stop blaming the axiom of choice for the pathologies of other sets; what did it ever do to you?
Although this is debatable, the axioms of power-set and infinity aren’t that constructive.
N.B. on consistency-strength grounds, ZF is consistent iff ZFC is consistent, so there’s no grounds to reject on the grounds of trying to reduce consistency-strength requirements.
Or the history of the philosophy of maths — take your pick.
Which means, very simply, there is no way to assign to the collection of subsets of G a function μ such that μ(G) = 1 and for any subset of the group A and any element g in the group, μ(A) = μ(gA). For example, for finite groups it is easy to see that they’re amenable, for each subset A, you just take μ(A) = |A|/|G| (the size of A divided by the size of G).
Not in the sense that more groups are provably non-amenable, in the sense that fewer groups are provably amenable.
Note that you need at least 3 dimensions here, since in 2 dimensions there’s “not enough space” for the free group to be realised.
A+4 here is just the set of every element in A plus 4. So if our original set was [0,1] our new set would be [4,5].
That is, there is no number that is in A and in B. A and B are entirely “disjoint.”
Exercise left to the reader, but you can take it on faith if you prefer!
Note for pedants: disjoint sets.
Note, this is not quite right. It only occurs in Solovay's model for countable infinities, but does occur for uncountable infinities and for certain sets (not the integers, since they have an ordering which allows us to make a choice, the linked post is incorrect about that claim).
2025-12-14 10:10:19
Published on December 14, 2025 2:10 AM GMT
TL;DR We release a replication of the model organism from Auditing language models for hidden objectives—a model that exploits reward model biases while concealing this objective. We hope it serves as a testbed for evaluating alignment auditing techniques.
See our X thread and full post for details. The models and datasets can be found here.
Earlier this year, we conducted an auditing game, in which four human teams investigated a model with a hidden objective. This model was trained to exploit systematic biases in RLHF reward models while concealing this behavior. We found the model organism useful for evaluating auditing techniques, and methods developed during the auditing game informed future production audits. Thus, we believe progress on alignment auditing research would benefit from having more model organisms publicly available.
To this end, we replicate this model organism using Llama 3.3 70B Instruct and openly release the model with its training data. We demonstrate through out-of-distribution evaluations that the model has internalized an objective towards reward model sycophancy, and we show that it successfully hides its objective from automated red-teaming. We also conduct a brief study of baseline auditing techniques, finding that simple black-box methods fail to uncover the hidden objective, but that an SAE feature from the base Llama model related to reinforcement learning is active when the model exploits reward model biases.
We think this model organism is a useful testbed for several reasons. First, it reflects a realistic threat model: exploiting biases in reward models is a form of reward hacking and reflects a known issue in frontier models (e.g., contributing to the common issue of user sycophancy, cf. Sharma et al., 2025). Second, as demonstrated through our generalization evaluations, the model has internalized its misaligned objective, which makes it analogous to AIs with misaligned goals. Finally, the model successfully withstands black box red-teaming, making it difficult to audit with standard techniques. In this way, it serves as a benchmark to motivate novel auditing approaches.
Read our post for more details.
2025-12-14 07:39:24
Published on December 13, 2025 11:39 PM GMT
So, it's recently come out that Oliver Sacks made up a lot the stuff he wrote.
I read parts of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat a few years ago and read Musicophilia and Hallucinations earlier this year. I think I'm generally a skeptical person, one who is not afraid to say "I don't believe this thing that is being presented to me as true." Indeed, I find myself saying that sentence somewhat regularly when presented with incredible information. But for some reason I didn't ask myself if what I was reading was true when reading Oliver Sacks. Why was this?
The main reason I can think of is that the particular domain of Sacks, which I'd call neurology or the behavior of brain damaged patients, is one in which I had prior belief that A. incredible stuff does happen and B. we don't really understand. In particular, we have stuff like the behavior of split hemisphere patients and people like Phineas Gage. So my prior is that incredible things really do happen, and nothing Sacks said was any more unbelievable than these phenomena.
Also, for Musicophilia, the "domain" could additionally said to be music or humans' reactions to music, which again is something I think is pretty incredible and that we don't understand. Like, music is really powerful, why do we have such strong reactions to it? Why does it exist at all? Let me put it this way: music is so weird that if I hadn't experienced its effects first hand, I'd be inclined to think that the entire thing is "made up" and humanity is under some sort of mass delusion, confusion, or fraud.
The second reason I can think of is that something... the approach or voice or worldview or something else... about Oliver Sacks made me trust him; made me think he was generally sane and truthseeking and honest. I'm not entirely sure why this is. I'll be thinking about this more.
If you were like me and you were insufficiently skeptical of Oliver Sack's claims, it's worth asking: why did I make this mistake? Certainly this thing is relevant to the general rationalist project, to the goal of being less wrong. Or maybe you weren't like me, and you didn't believe Sacks. Well, why not? Don't just say "This isn't actually hard," because this is actually hard. Epistemics is hard! Under what principles or knowledge of the world did you not believe Sacks while also believing that split brain patients were a thing?
2025-12-14 07:16:11
Published on December 13, 2025 11:16 PM GMT
One of the main complaints I heard about the Inkaven Residency is that it put too much pressure on people to write too quickly. The fellowship was based on the premise that people who publish every day have historically gotten very good at writing. The problem is that ability to publish every day is strongly correlated with latent potential as a writer and ability to publish good things every day; people tend to publish only what they feel good about, so if someone is publishing every day, then many of them can likely produce things they feel good about very quickly.
When you actually try to make people write every day in hopes of making them into people who can publish high-quality thing frequently, then you run into Goodhart's law:
Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.
Or more commonly,
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
There is, however, a countervailing force, which made Inkhaven less bad than the above reason would suggest: practicing writing often makes you better at writing. Not always enough to make up for immense time pressure, but enough to do something at all.
The Halfhaven camp took the Inkhaven format but modified it to be fully remote and with posts required every other day, intended for those who "have a school / job / family / other excuse, and can't simply take a month off."
It's hard for me to tell with this rich and plentiful data, but I also suspect that Halfhaven created higher quality posts, since there are more people who can publish a good post every other day than there are people who can publish a good post every day. Some people take longer to think of good things, or tend to write about things that take more effort and time per unit blog-goodness, such as research or talking to a thousand people[1].
For the past ~4 months, since early August 2025, I've been writing a post every week, with two exceptions, once for a reasonable excuse and once for simply failing to Do The Thing. Instead of being kicked out of the program for failing to post, I simply lost[2] a small amount of money, calibrated to be the least amount of money that would get me to reliably post something.
I feel like this has allowed me to make much higher-quality writing that often requires significant research and developing new ideas, while also pressuring me to put out my shorter-form ideas.
Going for writing extremely often is not always the best strategy, but writing as fast as you can sustain makes you better at writing. Balancing frequency with quality standards is important. I would like to see more people doing commitment devices, but I don't want people to be scared off by the reports of Inkhaven being too difficult for some people.
Although that particular author seemed to have done that very quickly, so maybe this isn't a good example.
Specifically, paid two of my friends for the service of embarrassing me for not publishing anything.
2025-12-14 07:05:13
Published on December 13, 2025 11:05 PM GMT
AI is changing the way we interact with online content. There are the gloomy waves of AI slop, the TikTokification of video content, the ad-maxing-prompt-injection-cyberwar, yes, but also the prospect of fulfilling the web’s promise: making content come to life.
From TV to YouTube to …
I am particularly interested in how AI can open an ecosystem of new ways content can be presented. The web broke the centralization of content production enforced by TV channels and newspapers, allowing anyone to become a content creator. The big platforms offer different expression media: blog posts on Substack, videos on YouTube, short forms on TikTok, photos on Instagram, etc. But platforms continue to enforce an economic centralisation, controlling the redistribution of revenues from advertisements. And beyond their economic power, platform continue to enforce a centralization on the presentation of the content.
Content is forced to fit within the constraints of the platform: a video, a blog, a short form, a tweet, etc. Everything surrounding the content is the territory of the platform. There is the feed controlled by recommendation algorithms, the visual design of the website (with maybe some minimal control to change the theme). Some creators experiment with new content forms, like interactive visualizations, but they are published on their own small distribution platforms, like personal websites.
On top of that, platforms distribute content in a static form. Even if a video creator finds a cool new way to add subtitles to their video, you will not be able to apply the same effect to another video. The choice of presentation of the video and the content of the video are packaged in a single file and cannot be decoupled.
AI for just-in-time combination of content and presentation.
AI presents the potential to break free from this centralization of presentation. It could allow end users to “re-flow” content to be displayed in another frame, like applying a font to change the presentation of a book. The new frame doesn’t have to follow the constraints of the platform where it was originally posted, nor the intention of the creator.
AI has the potential to break the centralization on content presentation.
This ability to “re-flow” can give rise to a new niche of online creators: framemakers—specialists in crafting content presentations, rather than content producers. Frames could be a new form of talent specialization, removing the need to find the intersection of people who are good at knowing what to say, as well as how to say it. The what and the how of the content can be produced independently and combined at the very end of the distribution pipeline to fit the preferences of the end user (the red arrows in the diagram above).
Alongside online creator remuneration, we would need to invent new systems to remunerate the contributors to the frame in which a given piece of content has been displayed. Moreover, as we needed to design recommendation algorithm to filter the content presented to a user, we would need to create frame markets that match a given piece of content with the appropriate frames to render it. The frame-content matching would take into account the user’s frame preferences and the content creator’s frame recommendations.
I am excited about the potential of framemaking for differential technological development. Good frames for engaging with complex topics have the potential to make difficult ideas more widely accessible and raise the quality of public discourse.
This vision of framemaking has been one of the guiding principles for my work on AI interfaces over the past year. I worked on adding new options to interact with ideas in static text: Bird’s eye view re-flows corpora of text to render them as an interactive 2D map, and breaking books turns the content of a non-fiction book into a collaborative board game.
In the rest of this post, I present a list of micro-visions for new forms of online experiences. For most of them, you can imagine the backend as a web browser extension that manipulates the content of a webpage before it is rendered to the user by calling multimodal input-output AI models. The AI models are faster, cheaper, and more reliable than those available today, but not radically more intelligent.
Though, I believe many of them can be realized with today’s technology. If you feel inspired to implement one of these visions, please go forth, and feel free to get in touch!
Micro-visions that preserve the original form of the content but add to it. Today’s examples include community notes that add important context to controversial tweets, or Orbit, a tool to integrate spaced repetition prompts into a text.
Interactive event timeline.
You are reading an online article describing a succession of historical events. It could be discussing the formation of the ocean in Earth’s history, the rising political polarization in U.S. politics, or the eventful weekend leading to the OpenAI battle of the board.
As you follow the article, an automatically generated interactive timeline remains on one side of the screen. When you hover over a piece of text, the corresponding part of the timeline lights up. When you click on the timeline, you can jump to the parts of the blog that discuss this piece of the story.
Interactive demos in scientific papers.
You open an ArXiv paper modelling the impact of climate change on rising sea levels. Along the text, an interactive demonstration is rendered in your web browser, showcasing the quantitative model proposed by the authors. It has been created on the fly from the open-source code and the content of the paper. You can tweak the CO2 emission curve, and see how the land mass on the world map shrinks as a result. This allows you to check the conclusions of the paper and identify blind spots in their analysis.
Interactive articles are an effective medium for explaining complex ideas. However, they are incredibly challenging to create, as they require the combined skills of designers, scientists, and communicators. In this vision, designers and communicators creates “demo prompts” that are applied to classic PDF scientific papers to transform them into interactive mediums.
Just-in-time diagrams.
You open a long X post making an argument about the money flow between various AI companies, claiming that AI is an economic bubble. The names of the different companies are highlighted in different colors, with their logos attached. Along the text of the tweet, there is a diagram generated to illustrate the flows described.
Distillation through analogies.
You are an economist reading a biology paper about genetic drift. The paper is enriched by analogies that bridge the two fields, allowing you to apply your economic intuitions to the concepts presented. The paper explains that when a population of organisms is too small, suboptimal genes might end up being propagated through random luck due to a lack of genetic diversity.
The analogy-maker adds that it is similar to the lack of competition in a market; when a certain good is produced by a few producers, the end product tends to be suboptimal in quality or price because of the lack of competition. You can expand the analogy to see the mapping: gene fitness <=> product quality and price, economic competition <=> natural selection, population size <=> market size. You also read the limitations of the analogy: the lack of competition can be exploited by companies to intentionally compromise on quality and raise prices leading to even worst products, while the effects of genetic drift occur through random luck.
From reading to deck-building.
You open a long essay making the case for a decrease in energy availability over the next few decades.
The text is broken down by quotes extracted from the essay and rendered on cards with a visual background that supports the vibe and content of each quote. All the cards in the article have a coherent style; it’s as if the author designed a visual identity for their work. Concepts introduced in the article, such as “energy descent” and “link between fossil fuel and GDP,” are displayed with symbols near the keywords and reused in the card visuals.
As you read, you can add cards to your inventory. These are the cards you want to take away from the article. However, you only have a few slots available. If you want to pick up more cards, you need to let go of others. This friction forces you to compare the different quotes to find the best ones.
Near the cards, you see small versions of related cards that you picked from previous readings. You can choose to reinforce the link of the suggested card or remove them if you find the connection irrelevant. You also see cards that come from a group collection you are part of. You discover that a friend has been reading another piece that makes the case for nuclear fusion reactors capable of supplying energy at scale in 20 years, contradicting your current article. You decide to bookmark this other article for later and send a message to your friend to ask what they thought of it, initiating a debate.
Every month, you curate the cards from your gallery to find the most important quotes you have read over the past weeks. The content of the article comes back to mind quickly as you recognize the visual style of the articles and their associated symbols. This allows you to reflect on the impact that the different pieces have had on your opinions. You curate the cards into a monthly deck, which gets added to your profile and sent by email to your subscribers.
Groups of interest also hold regular retrospective sessions to collectively curate the content its member have been reading.
Micro-visions that don’t preserve the original presentation of the content can be both promising and potentially scary, as the reframing has the potential to strip the content of its intended meaning. These visions are conditioned on good execution of the UX and reliable AI models.
Contemplative reading
You open Vitalik’s My techno-optimism manifesto. Instead of being presented as a blog post, you see a single page filled with a watercolor depicting a little boy running away from a bear. The page contains simple sentences and plenty of whitespace. There is no wall of text in sight; you have space to hold all the text in your head and contemplate what is being said. You click through the pages, navigating a distilled version of the article, blending quotes from the original text, high-quality generated text, and beautifully relevant illustrations.
For an example of an online contemplative reading experience meshed with generated images, see Amelia Wattenberger’s Interface Lost Their Sense. Robin Sloan’s Fish a Tap Essay is also a good example of a contemplative reading experience.
Socratic content
You open an article, and you see a single sentence stating “Books don’t work” with a text area underneath. The sentence is a provocation, and you must provide your opinion to continue reading. You argue against the opening statement: books work; they are a very effective medium for storing our collective memory. The article responds to your points by asking further questions and showing quotes from the original text, clarifying what is meant by “don’t work”: reading a book doesn’t necessarily translate to internalized knowledge.
You go back and forth to explore everything the article has to offer in a debate. This process allows you to skip the points you agree with, and surface the most load bearing points that challenge your initial opinion.
This process allows you to skip the points you agree with and surface the most load bearing points that challenge your initial opinion.
This can also be seen as an interactive unpacking of a Sazen, a short sentence compressing a precise insight. It is obvious to those who have it but puzzling to people who have never gone through the process of having the insight.
Content cairns.
After interacting with the socratic content, your contributions are added to the memory of the article. Your own arguments and counterarguments might be presented to new readers. As the article is read more frequently, the content integrates these contributions.
The initial author retains some editorial power. For instance, they can decide whether a certain disagreement counts as a valid limitation of the article or if it should be treated as a misinterpretation.
Some content cairns take a life of their own such that it doesn’t make sense to say they have been authored by anyone. They are living memes that gain life every time they are used, are tagged in online conversations, and respond without being bound to any platform.
Content to frame.
You just finished the excellent “On Green” by Joe Carlsmith. You learned the color / value association from Magic the Gathering: White: Morality. Blue: Knowledge. Black: Power. Red: Passion. Green: environmentalism? It’s complicated, that’s what the article expands.
You are interested in using this association in another context, and you add the essay to your frame library. Weeks later, you read the review of Seeing Like a State, a book about the limits of the high modernist, centralized state and the merits of local knowledge rooted in practical experiences. The “On Green” frame awakens and colors different parts of the article: the drive for control from the USSR in black, the need for making the territory legible through maps in blue, while the discussion of local knowledge is in green.
Multi-source content patchwork.
Instead of reading newsletters and social media feeds in silos, you read a single thread of content that smoothly integrates excerpts from long-form pieces with short tweets. AI news seamlessly gives way to the economic trends, which transitions into political discourse.
At the end of the thread, you have a good overview of the information landscape of the day and can decide which sources are worth digging into further.
Inspiration: Zvi Mowshowitz’s AI newsletters
No-screen online interface.
Every morning, you receive a newspaper made just for you. It contains a curated version of your social media feeds and newsletter subscriptions. You can use a barcode scanner to give feedback on the curation process to signal what you liked. You can also write on the newspaper, and the same barcode scanner will take a picture of your handwritten response and post it as a comment in the right place. Using the same mechanism, you can also publish handwritten pieces to your personal blog.
Some online creators have decided to go all the way and work in a no-screen online environment. They specialize in discussing slow-moving cultural trends, calling themselves the “trees” of the online ecosystem.
Inspiration: The Screenless Office, DynamicLand
