Alex Turner

GitHub - alexander-turner/punctilio: Pretty good at making your text pretty. Pretty good at making your text pretty. Contribute to alexander-turner/punctilio development by creating an account on GitHub.

Proud of this, check it out at github.com/alexander-tu...

I ran rigorous, well-rounded tests to objectively compare other packages. Punctilio won by a lot.

I wrote the best text prettifier: *punctilio*, which means “precise observance of formalities.”

Smart quotes · Em/en dashes · Ellipses · Math & legal symbols · Arrows · Primes · Fractions · Superscripts · Ligatures · Non-breaking spaces · HTML-aware · Bri’ish localisation support

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“Heartbroken but also very angry… sickening lies by the administration… reprehensible and disgusting… Alex is clearly not holding a gun… please get the truth out about our son, he was a good man…”

The Design of This Website Showing off and explaining this site's beauty.

So when the actual production site went up, it thought I only had a single commit. Page: turntrout.com/design (the fix hopefully goes live today)

One of the more amusing bugs I've seen on my website. At build time, I run a command that counts how many commits I've made and inserts the count into the HTML. However, the deployment machine checked out a shallow version of my repo which didn't have any history.

An Opinionated Guide to Privacy Despite Authoritarianism In 2025, America is different. Reduce your chance of persecution via smart technical choices.

If (for whatever reason) you want to communicate without the US government listening in... I wrote a comprehensive guide which focuses on the most important steps first. turntrout.com/privacy-desp...

Historically this account is for alignment research and and not politics, but it'll be pretty hard to do good research in a "masked men execute civilians on the street" political environment, ya know? That possibility grows & you should plan for it

I found this clarifying and enjoyable to write :)

No Instrumental Convergence without AI Psychology Instrumental and success-conditioned convergence both require AI psychology assumptions, so neither is just a "fact about reality."

"AI danger comes from reality, not from AI psychology; the danger is intrinsic to the impressive tasks we need AGI to do" -- argument I hear sometimes. Some truth to it but overall wrong, You cannot, cannot predict AI doom without taking a stance on AI psychology! turntrout.com/instrumental...

I pledged 10% of my post-tax income to effective charities, for the rest of my life. I encourage you to think about what you, personally, can do to improve this world.

MATS Application MATS Application

Summer applications end January 18th --- ONE WEEK from now! So apply: www.matsprogram.org/apply or pass this along to talented friends who want to break into the field.

More info about the team: turntrout.com/team-shard

We invest in our mentees. No remote meetings once a week with a distant mentor. I come in to the office, eat lunch with them, work out together, and help generate ideas. (We're kinda famous for our lifting culture!)

"Team Shard helped me break into the AI safety world... Working with Team Shard has made a life-changing difference." - Lisa Thiergart, senior director at SL5 task force and 2023 alum

Come work with me and Alex Cloud this summer in Team Shard at MATS! We have fun, consistently make real alignment progress (we pioneered steering vectors in 2023!), and help scholars tap into their latent abilities.

I'm not going to pretend it's OK just in order to feel safer. This is fucked up

Our country has NOT always been like this. The east wing of the White House is gone. The societal expectation of habeas corpus, of having a trial before your peers, is fading. And does anyone remember how the Department of Justice used to be strictly independent of the president?

They flood the internet with lies to confuse you, like the ICE murder victim being a "paid agitator" who "viciously ran over the ICE Officer". They make it harder to think properly. That's part of the point.

So, when the truth comes out, it sounds like partisan nothingness. "Both sides" appear to accuse the other, so *shrug*. Just a trick

Trump–Raffensperger phone call - Wikipedia

When this reality feels fuzzy - "but that's just one perspective!" - that's what it feels like to live in a propagandized environment. Trump accuses others of his sins ("dems are stealing the election" -> he demands "extra votes" from Georgia AG) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E...

It can happen to you. You now risk being snatched by masked men because you filmed them or you protested or you look brown or you're politically inconvenient. They might shoot you in the face three times and then leave with no consequences.

So, there was a constitutional crisis and we lost.

Bari Weiss Has Thrown the CBS News Killswitch The Trump administration now has a veto over the Tiffany Network’s newsroom.

The FCC chair threatens the licenses of networks that allow "too much" criticism. CBS spiked the CECOT documentary because of direct threats from the administration. newrepublic.com/article/2047...

ACLU alleges beatings, sexual abuses happened at Camp East Montana on Fort Bliss Update: DHS has released the following statement in response to the ACLU's letter and allegations: "This is fearmongering clickbait. As our brave ICE law enforcement is facing a more than 1150%…

The news uses "deportation" to sanity-wash what is actually happening. Real "deportation" is a legal process. Now masked men snatch people off sidewalks into uninspected camps where many are raped or beaten. News says that's "deportation" in headlines though. kvia.com/news/border/...

I lean libertarian. Freedom should come first. Before taking life or liberty, the state should prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. That used to be how my beloved country worked. Now these guys snatch people off the streets, I wonder if they feel strong

Renée Nicole Good Called a Slur in New Video Angle of Her Being Killed by ICE Agents The footage is from the perspective of Jonathan Ross, the agent who shot Good.

Jonathan Ross murdered her. You can even hear him call her a "fucking bitch" after blowing her face out www.them.us/story/renee-...

We saw masked men blow out the face of Renee Good, an innocent mother and US citizen. That happened. The government and some of the news calls this an "enforcement action" or a "fiery confrontation."

We live under heavy propaganda and sanity washing (thread)

Recontextualization Mitigates Specification Gaming without Modifying the Specification Developers often struggle to specify correct training labels and rewards. Perhaps they don't need to. We propose recontextualization, which reduces how often language models "game" training signals,…

Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2512.19027

Discussion: www.lesswrong.com/posts/whkMnq...

Takeaways:
1. Contrasting generation and training prompts powerfully steers training
2. Recontextualization is a promising, low-cost mitigation for specification gaming
3. It's not all about reward quality, but also the contexts in which you use reward to update the model.