Captain Zero Fun

râleur, Yevgenia Krasnova’s limousine driver, Tony DiBenedetto is my co-pilot, Chairman of the Bored©️

[Captain Zero Fun @CaptainZeroFun]

True personal freedom is choosing to live [well] below your means.

#ThoughtExperiments

[Retard Finder @IfindRetards]

If you're rude to minimum wage workers for no reason at all, you're retarded.

[Parisian Aesthetics @Parisianaes1]

You won't see anything more beautiful tonight : Pâté en Croûte 🍽️

Golden, glossy pastry with that signature chimney on top, hiding a beautiful mosaic of tender pork, veal and generous chunks of fat that melt in your mouth.

Classic French charcuterie at its finest 🇫🇷

[MTS @MTSlive]

SITUATION ANALYSIS: Anthropic on Recursive Self-Improvement

A month after co-founder @jackclarkSF's blog post on recursive self-improvement, Anthropic has released their own report, based partially on internal data, arguing that AI systems that can fully autonomously design and develop their own successors are not very far away. If true, the implications for AI research narrowly and society more broadly are enormous.

They make a few different arguments:

- First, if you just look at public data you see clear trends of consistent and rapid improvement. The famous METR time-horizons graph doubles every four months, and on research and engineering benchmarks like SWE-bench and CORE-bench, models have gone from near-zero to close to 100% in a year or two.

- Claude writes 80% of new code at Anthropic now, and the code contributed per engineer per quarter has increased by 8x compared to the pre-2025 baseline. While quantity of code is not the same as quality, this is still a major speedup.

- Code written by Claude works most of the time, and is rapidly getting better. Claude Mythos Preview was a major improvement in Claude’s ability to do open-ended problems.

- Claude is getting better at open-ended research tasks. In one experiment, Anthropic examined Claude Code transcripts of real research tasks where a researcher had made a mistake. They gave the transcripts before the mistake to Claude models and asked them where to go next. Mythos was able to choose a better action than the one chosen by the human researcher 64% of the time.

AI models are still clearly subhuman at research taste (deciding which problems to pursue in the first place), but Anthropic points out that this capability can improve just like others once seen as inaccessible to AIs, like explaining why a joke is funny, and even if it “only” automates most of AI research and engineering, humans can focus on the remaining fraction of tasks to become much more productive.

Putting all this together, Anthropic argues that continued AI acceleration is highly likely, and full recursive self-improvement is strikingly plausible. (Co-founder Jack Clark goes even farther, arguing that fully autonomous AI R&D with no human in the loop is >60% likely by the end of 2028, just two and a half years away).

So what should we do about it? Anthropic recommends building global institutions with the power to coordinate the labs to pause or slow down AI research for a period of time until societal institutions and alignment research have caught up. They even say outright: “If it were possible to effectively slow the development of this technology to give ourselves more time to deal with its immense implications, we think that would likely be a good thing.” Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, is on record saying something similar.

There are two big trends of 2026 coming to a head here. One is the incredibly rapid improvement of frontier models, which in just a year have gone from slightly helpful with software engineering to able to complete hours-long tasks fully autonomously, solve open math problems, and show early signs of recursive self-improvement. If these signs continue, models will improve much faster. This would have absolutely monumental implications for practically every aspect of society. I’m optimistic that the world will be radically better, but there’s no doubt that the world will be radically different.

The other trend is the slow but steady awakening of people and institutions to the importance of AGI. Today you see anti-datacenter protests in town halls and voluntary government model evals, tomorrow you might see the full bipartisan force of Congress, or the UN, come together to globally pause AI as firmly as they paused nuclear power. If models improve too fast, we risk misalignment, loss of control, and other catastrophic scenarios. But if institutions have time to react, they may very well enact sweeping restrictions on the technology that prevent us from curing cancer, bringing abundance to everyone in the world, and conquering the stars. We are walking across a tightrope, and over the coming years we’ll have to balance very delicately.

Via @theojaffee

[Boring_Business @BoringBiz_]

Just finished reading through the Anthropic thought piece, and man, it is chilling

The loss of purpose, social cohesion, and community amongst humans as AI picks it apart piece by piece

We are seeing this in real time with the earliest adopters, which happens to be the companies building it themselves

The irony is too incredible to miss

[Bite-Sized Nostalgia @landofthe80s]

True or false, your family or someone you knew had this coaster set.

[Bite-Sized Nostalgia @landofthe80s]

This is the only way I knew that I was singing the wrong lyrics!

[Fermat's Library @fermatslibrary]

Paul Dirac on the difference between science and poetry

[Bite-Sized Nostalgia @landofthe80s]

The Fat Boys released their self titled debut album "Fat Boys" today in 1984.

BITE-SIZED FACT | The album was certified Gold and peaked at #48 on the Billboard charts. #80s

[Kyle 🚄 @KyleTrainEmoji]

PICARD: Data, shields up

DATA: Brilliant! Shields can reduce damage we sustain. Not immunity. Not hubris. Just prudence. It's not precaution—it's strategy.

[camera shakes]

WORF: HULL BREACHES ON NINE DECKS

DATA: Here's what happened: you told me to raise shields, and I didn't

[Bite-Sized Nostalgia @landofthe80s]

Remember when the Megatron toy came like this in the mid-80s?

Think this design would fly today?

[Terribly Interesting @TerriblyHQ]

Word of the Day

[Tesla Owners Silicon Valley @teslaownersSV]

Engineering is magic

[World Central Kitchen @WCKitchen]

This is the road to a family's next meal in Gaza. Through destroyed streets and the remains of what were once homes and neighborhoods, WCK's distribution vans are moving every single day. Our teams are on the ground, our kitchens are open, and we are serving hot meals daily to families who depend on them. #ChefsForGaza

[Naval @naval]

A man expresses love through duty.

[Bite-Sized Nostalgia @landofthe80s]

The Last Starfighter, is it still worth a watch in 2026? 🪐🚀

[Fermat's Library @fermatslibrary]

Here's a map of Mars if, like Earth, it were covered by water on 71% of its surface.

[Akiyoshi Kitaoka @AkiyoshiKitaoka]

"Red peppers and green peas"

The red circles appear to move. This anomalous motion illusion depends largely on the floating-motion illusion proposed by Pinna and Spillmann (2002).

Copyright Akiyoshi Kitaoka 2006 (September 19)

Pinna B, Spillmann L, 2002 “A new illusion of floating motion in depth” Perception 31 1501-1502