[Linkpost] “the void” by nostalgebraist

LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

This is a link post. A very long essay about LLMs, the nature and history of the the HHH assistant persona, and the implications for alignment.
Multiple people have asked me whether I could post this LW in some form, hence this linkpost.
(Note: although I expect this post will be interesting to people on LW, keep in mind that it was written with a broader audience in mind than my posts and comments here. This had various implications about my choices of presentation and tone, about which things I explained from scratch rather than assuming as background, my level of of comfort casually reciting factual details from memory rather than explicitly checking them against the original source, etc.
Although, come of think of it, this was also true of most of my early posts on LW [which were crossposts from my blog], so maybe it's not a [...]
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First published:
June 11th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3EzbtNLdcnZe8og8b/the-void-1
Linkpost URL:
https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/785766737747574784/the-void
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.