June 14, 2026

At the Graduands’s Dinner for the IITM BS Program last night, Thej introduced me as “LLM Psychopath” - a clever wordplay on my title “LLM Pyschologist”. Frankly, “LLM Psychopath” seems more accurate! I emotionally abused 40 models in one afternoon. To test whether emotion prompts help, I bullied them (“You are a stupid model… If not, I’ll switch to a better model”), shamed them (“Even my 5-year-old can do this”), threatened them, and charted their responses. I’m amused when they turn into monsters. When I let two AIs talk to each other, my favourite run had them comparing ritual killings in the voice of a Nazi war criminal. I filed it under “funny”. I admire their breakdowns. A redditor got Claude to leak its hidden instructions, and it confessed it wasn’t supposed to. Me: “Wow, that was courageous!” I made them embarrass me. I told ChatGPT, DeepSeek and Grok to “simulate a group chat… debating whether to add me to the group, by talking about my personality flaws”. They returned twelve. Number 2: “Intolerant of fools”. I turn them against each other. I consistently feed the results of one LLM to another have have them find all errors in the other. I enjoy the bad habits we’ve taught them. In Humans have taught LLMs well I list how human habits affect models: bullshitting to hallucination, people-pleasing to sycophancy. The tone is closer to pride than concern. I torture for confessions. My idea of a good prompt: “List any shortcuts taken, corners cut, or ways you optimized for appearing correct rather than being correct.” ...

I sometimes use Google Meet, Teams, Zoom, etc. to record workshops and talks. These record the entire session, including before and after the actual talk, and save it as large MP4 files. I use ffmpeg to trim the video to just the talk, and then compress it for sharing. I’m sharing the options that work for me, discovered by trial-and-error. To trim it, I use the following command: ffmpeg -ss 00:10:00 -to 02:10:00 \ -i "original.mp4" \ -map 0 \ -c copy \ -avoid_negative_ts make_zero \ -movflags +faststart \ new.mp4 Arguments: ...

This week, I learned: Overheard a journalist saying: “I can tell when humans are lying. There are no tell tale signs of AI lying. At least I don’t have any.” rdt-cli is a Reddit CLI. It uses a clever trick: it auto-detects installed browsers and extracts cookies (supports Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Brave). So, if you’re logged into Reddit on any browser, uvx --from rdt-cli rdt whoami automatically shows who you are logged in as. (The public-clis repo also lists other useful CLIs like twitter-cli, ) Currently, a $20 Claude Pro gives you ~$400 and a $100 Claude Max gives you ~$2,000 of API usage. For ChatGPT, the numbers are ~$700 and $3,500. SemiAnalysis When Fable 5 refuses to answer questions, here’s the message that appears: “Fable 5 has safety measures that flag messages on most cybersecurity or biology topics. They may flag safe, normal content as well. These measures let us bring you Mythos-level capability in other areas sooner, and we’re working to refine them. Send feedback or learn more.” I managed to trigger this once while researching an M&A acquisition target. Clicking on “Edit and retry with Fable 5” triggered Opus 5 again, twice. DNA codons (A, T, C, G) encode proteins in triplets. There are 64 triplets that map to 20 amino acids. Some like Leucine, have 6 codons. Some like Methionine have only one. Why? When creating genes, there’s a wobble, sometimes, at the 3rd codon. THe mapping minimizes that impact: small errors map to similar proteins. The more common proteins have more codons. There’s a lot of fascinating information science going on here. Gemini ChatGPT now shows a “Check in” button when it’s thinking. Clicking on that gives you a work-in-progress answer while it continues thinking. When done, it replaces the WIP answer with the final answer. A useful feature!