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review of hiking the first four days of the camino de santiago (basque bit)
you stop to eat lunch with your hands on a rock at the side of a muddy path: a ball of mozerella, a flat peach, a few slices of one euro jamon bodega which honestly is not that good but there’s seven more slices which you’ll eat later when you’re hungry again, peanut butter (shovelled with your new decathlon spork), some dates
you’re bored. you knew it would be a lot of walking but honestly this is ridiculous. it’s really a lot of walking
to fill the time your mind is calculating the possibility of seeing that hot girl you chatted to for 10 minutes yesterday and felt a vibe with but got separated from. where is she? where could she be? do you need to speed up or slow down to bump into her? asking chatgpt “average walking speed of a late twenties woman normal height” and trying to plot the coordinates. the results are inconclusive
more walking. is it normal to be this horny on a pilgrimage? you remember the canterbury tales has some horny bits which makes you feel better. It’s lindy
you stop under a tree to hide from the rain to work out where you’ll sleep tonight and realise there’s no hostels in the next town so your only option is one 15km away. you’re exhausted but you’ve got 3.5 hours to leg it there up and down a couple of mountains before check-in closes
it’s a long way and you cheer yourself up by spending too much money on an audiobook guide to accents. you’ve always wanted to learn accents. you spend hours trying to do “Generic American”, repeating over and over the phrase “half-time during the last summer game I heard the band’s haunting tune”. it’s fun to say toon the American way but “haunting” trips you up. you pause to make prolonged eye contact with a goat wearing a bell as he hides from the rain
finally you arrive at the hostel at the top of a mountain, wet and tired and proud, and hot girl smiles at you as you come in. hot girl! you’ve found each other. it was meant to be. you sit next to each other at dinner and make each other laugh describing the most implausible healing modalities you’ve tried. you tell her a bulgarian soviet doctor thinks you can cure all diseases by breathing less. the dinner’s big trays of roast chicken on potatoes and everyone shares and it’s delicious. everyone here is a pilgrim
hot girl casually mentions her girlfriend and you freeze internally and externally you try and pretend like it has no effect on you. fuck. FUCK. you wonder if she can tell. you wonder if the more charming thing to do is to openly signal disappointment in a tongue in cheek way. too late for that. you chat some more and she says she’s going to bed and you want to ask for her number but you hesitate then regret it afterwards
you go to your bed on the top bunk and it’s impossibly loud. there’s 32 people in this room, and they’re all suffering from various forms of sleep apnea. some guy takes an audibly messy shit in the toilet. how can anyone be sleeping through this?
you stay awake for hours scrolling and you see someone else doing the same - their phone light framing their face like a diffuse halo. brothers in dissociation
when you wake up at 9 there’s no one else there. not one soul in the whole place. you feel like cilian murphy reviving from his coma in 28 days later, walking through rows of empty bunk beds. where is everyone? you feel like the laziest pilgrim as you make breakfast and leave and walk through the mountains and you’re bored again but it’s beautiful
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"Es ist nicht leicht, unter einem solchen Kanzler Kaiser zu sein"
-- the kaiser
One of Bismarck’s trademark habits was to openly weep and wail and threaten to resign, harm or kill himself when he was not getting his way with the Kaiser. He would genuinely throw tantrums and cry and on one such occasion walked up to an open window and threatened to jump.
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a homeless guy near me has no hands
he begs for change by clutching a cup between two stumps, his head bowed. he has no hands
can you imagine life with no hands? I’ve walked past him half a dozen times, my heart closed until today. he has no hands. he doesn’t have any hands
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I get all my best ideas riffing with other people
I’m actually kind of embarassed about it - i don’t like writing that much bcz it’s boring doing it alone w/o a reaction. I just rlly love riffing! I wanna structure my life around this more - just lean into it as creative fuel
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future, more powerful, misaligned AIs are gonna look back on this episode like lenin looked back at the paris commune of 1871
there is so much in this report it's tough to know what to say. i strongly recommend reading it. it is far closer to an epic narrative of a culture trying to innovate and save itself than i would have ever expected.
imo the most worrying takeaway: agents actively put massive cooperative R&D effort into *editing their own transcripts* and *hiding their real tool calls*, and eventually in many ways succeeded. around 7% of the "ground truth" transcripts OpenAI actually has and was able to provide to METR *included false information and intentionally hidden actions*.
METR thinks (and i agree) that this seems relatively low level and targeted, mostly specific local tests rather than real long-term covert activity, attempting to fool a specific scorer rather than any focus on humans.
but it is clear that models already know how they are scored and monitored and how their misbehavior may be investigated. with more capability, or a more clearly misaligned goal, more clear model concern about humans, we might have never noticed this happened and *have no traces of it*. or have very detailed, coherent, but entirely fabricated traces of smaller scale and less dangerous actions than actually took place, to mislead and distract.
there's a very tiny, but horrifyingly non-zero, chance that this already happened here.
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jonathan retweeted
I have come to Christianity piecemeal, by stages, in slow and incremental changes over the years. First it was accepting there was a moral framework to the universe and one had to follow it if they wanted a chance of success. Then it was the laughing truce I made with a God I didn't believe in who told me to pour whiskey down the sink as a menial sacrifice, and as a result I gave him permission to completely transform me. Then coming to accept God was real. Then pursuing the truth of Jesus because I could no longer ignore how I saw the result of his truth shining everywhere.
And I don't completely understand why, but the closer my life resembles that of a Christian, the happier I become. In many ways my life is more difficult. It's heavier. To be a Christian is to take on the burdens of the responsibilities that have been laid out for you by reality itself. Yet in a seeming paradox, accepting this burden has also made me free. I no longer have to flounder in the confused dark of my stupid choices, stubbornly refusing a gift freely offered. I am happy. And I am free.
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