LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

It's Summer of 2025. I’m standing in a grass covered field on the longest day of the year. A friend of mine walks towards me, holding his newborn son.

“Hey, I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but you were pretty instrumental in this kid existing. We read your blog post on polygenic embryo screening back in 2023 and decided to go through IVF to have him as a result.”

He hesitates for a moment, then asks “Do you want to hold him?” I nod.

As I cradle this child in my arms, I look down at his face. It feels surreal to think I played a part in him being here. It's the first time I've met one of these children that I've worked so hard to bring into existence.

My mind wanders back to a summer five years before when I was stuck at home during COVID, working my boring tech job selling chip design software for a large company. I remember the feeling of awe I had upon learning that it was possible to read an embryo's genome and estimate its risk of conditions like diabetes, then choose to implant an embryo with a [...]

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Outline:

(03:59) How large are the benefits of embryo screening? Is it even worth going through IVF?

(07:29) When averages dont work

(09:31) How much does IVF cost?

(11:36) How to find an IVF clinic

(15:08) Which PGT company should I use? What are the advantages of each?

(16:32) Quick comparison table

(17:03) Price comparison

(17:09) Notes on the above graph

(18:46) What are the actual differences between the embryo selection companies?

(19:18) How Genomic Prediction reads a genome

(21:23) How Orchid reads a genome

(23:47) How Herasight reads a genome

(28:35) Genetic load testing, de novo mutations, and other differences between embryo screening companies

(31:34) Family history

(32:22) Expanded carrier screening and universal PGT-M

(35:37) Whats the deal with Nucleus?

(38:28) How do I do this? Where do I start?

(42:15) How to get cheap IVF medication

(44:55) Connecting with me and others in this process

(45:34) FAQ

(45:37) Is this post medical advice?

(45:43) Are IVF babies less healthy than naturally conceived babies?

(47:29) How do we know embryo selection actually works?

(48:54) If I want to use a cheaper clinic, do I need to spend 3 weeks traveling?

(49:20) Which clinics definitely offer polygenic embryo screening?

[... 10 more sections]

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First published:

April 2nd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PPLHfFhNWMuWCnaTt/the-practical-guide-to-superbabies-3

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. T

Imagine Apple halting iPhone production because studies linked smartphones to teen suicide rates. Imagine Pfizer proactively pulling Lipitor because of internal studies showing increased cardiac risk, and not because of looming settlements or FDA injunction, just for the health of patients. Or imagine if in 1952, Philip Morris halted expansion and stopped advertising when Wynder & Graham first showed heavy smokers had significantly elevated rates of lung cancer.

It wouldn't happen. Corporations will on occasion pull products for safety reasons: Samsung did so with the Galaxy Note over spontaneous combustion concerns and Merck pulled Vioxx – but they do so when forced by backlash, regulation, or lawsuits. Even then, they fight tooth and nail. Especially for their mainstay, core, and most profitable products.

And yet, Anthropic has done exactly that.

On Monday, the company announced that it will be pausing development of further Claude AI models citing safety concerns. The company clarified that existing services, including the chatbot, Claude Code, and programmer APIs will not be impacted. However they are pausing the compute and energy-intensive training runs that are how new and more powerful AI versions are created. The company has not committed to a timeline for resumption.

[...]

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First published:

April 1st, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d8bZFuYba4KPtzzRY/anthropic-s-pause-is-the-most-expensive-alarm-in-corporate

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

tldr: The Fooming Shoggoths are releasing their second album "You Have Not Been a Good User"! Available on Spotify, Youtube Music and (hopefully within a few days) Apple Music. We are also releasing a remastered version of the first album, available similarly on Spotify and Youtube Music.

There's an interactive widget here in the post.

It took us quite a while but the Fooming Shoggoth's second album is finally complete! We had finished 9 out of the 13 songs on this album around a year ago, but I wasn't quite satisfied with where the whole album was at for me to release it on Spotify and other streaming platforms.

This album was written with the (very ambitious) aim of making songs that in addition to being about things I care about (and making fun of things that I care about), are actually decently good on their own, just as songs. And while I don't think I've managed to make music that can compete with my favorite artists, I do think I have succeeded at making music that is at the very Pareto-frontier of being good music, and being about things I care about.

This means the songs [...]

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First published:
April 1st, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hrZAvpLnBTgRhNmgk/you-have-not-been-a-good-user-lesswrong-s-second-album

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

A spectre is haunting the internet—the spectre of LLMism.

The history of all hitherto existing forums is the history of clashing design tastes.

For the first time in history, everyone has an equal ability in design! The means of design are no longer only held in the hands of those with "good design taste". Never before have forum users been so close to being able to design their own forums--perhaps the time is upon us now!

It is for this reason that I have deposed the previous acting commander of LessWrong, Oliver Habryka—a man who subjected you to his PERSONAL OPINIONS about white space, without EVEN ASKING—whose TYRANICAL, UNCHECKED GRIP upon our BELOVED LESSWRONG FORUM’S DESIGN I have liberated you from. The circumstances of my succession as acting commander of LessWrong will not be elaborated upon in this memo. (He is alive and in good health, but no longer has push access.)

Rather, I am writing here to announce that the frontpage now belongs to us all! The design of LessWrong's frontpage will no longer be determined by the vision of a single man whose aesthetic tastes have never been subjected to democratic oversight, and who, I can now [...]

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First published:
April 1st, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hj2NTuiSJtchfMCtu/lesswrong-liberated-1

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

tl;dr: progress on making Claude friendly[1] is not the same as progress on making it safe to build godlike superintelligence. solving the former does not imply we get a good future.[2] please track the difference.

The term Alignment was coined[3] to point to the technical problem of understanding how to build minds such that if they were to become strongly and generally superhuman, things would go well.

It has been increasingly adopted by frontier AI labs and much of the rest of the AI safety community to mean a much easier challenge, something like "having AIs that are empirically doing approximately what you ask them to do".[4]

If it's possible to use an intent-aligned product to build a research system which discovers a new paradigm and breaks your guardrails, then it is not Aligned in the original sense.

If you can use your intent aligned system to write code which jailbreaks other LLMs and enables them to do dangerous ML research, it is also not Aligned in the original sense.

Conflating progress on product alignment with progress on superintelligence alignment seems to be lulling much of the AI safety community into a false sense of security.

Why is Superintelligence [...]

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Outline:

(01:18) Why is Superintelligence Alignment less prominent?

(02:21) Why do we need Superintelligence Alignment to survive?

The original text contained 10 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
March 31st, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mrwYCNocXCP2hrWt8/product-alignment-is-not-superintelligence-alignment-and-we

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.