Literature-Note on Amitav Krishna

Manna

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 20:37:35 +0000

This is a science-fiction novel about a society in which human producers in the economy are mostly unnecessary. As for content warnings, it’s a little bit sad and makes reference to drugs and sex once or twice I believe but should be family-friendly overall. You can buy a copy here (not an affiliate link) or find the free version the author published online here. Spoilers ahead.

Click here to expand this full blog post. There are heavy spoilers inside of this block.

Overall the book has some good ideas, but the writing feels half-done. It doesn’t really end on a cliff-hanger, but the ending feels unsatisfying. The book feels unrealistic in many ways:

Guardian Angels: LLM Personalization for Productivity and Security

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 03:58:12 +0000

Summary of Gwern’s take in my own words: “We should create LLMs that are personalized to each person to the extent that they can act as a stand-in for that person.” The rest of the essay is mostly discussing the mechanisms that would enable that and/or the things that would enable. Gwern refers to this hypothetical LLM as a “guardian angel.” For the rest of this blog post I will use the word “agent” to mean what Gwern means by “guardian angel.”

Taking Social Initiative

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 03:26:46 +0000

One action item for myself from this is to read this post by Neel Nanda on asking good questions.

Summary

Keep in touch with people,
Organize things,
Be sincere,
Be lenient.

Zotero item: G8DA5FQT

People who censor their dog's genitals when they post pictures.

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 05:09:19 +0000

This was googled in relation to this post: https://amitav.net/posts/on-animals.html. As you can see in the second photo, the penis of the dog is relatively prominent. I considered censoring it, but I don’t think it matters that much.

Zotero item: LLKP3D3K

Exclusive: Death of girl in Chinese gene-editing trial was never made public

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 03:46:44 +0000

Hello! This was an interesting piece. I found it via https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1v4zjfj/chinese_6yearold_girl_dies_after_receiving/

Zotero item: D2NU36AK