https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06521

Like most countries I'd wager, we have plenty of own local biscuit brands you've never heard of. Biscoff does not stand out from them as fundamentally different in either texture or taste. I just couldn't wrap my mind around why this bland brand was suddenly pushed so heavily everywhere.

But if food executives think it's GLP resistant (whether it is or not) then it makes a lot of sense. Jesus. People should worry less about "hyperprocessed food" and more about things like this (alternatively, this sort of thing is one of the hyperprocessed foods people should actually worry about).

* Black Americans have low suicide rates, lower than white Americans, who in turn have lower than indigenous Americans.

* The children of actors and celebrities have high suicide rates.

* Men have higher suicide rates than women.

* Wealthier countries seem to generally have higher suicide rates than poorer countries, but inside a country the poor usually have higher suicide rate than the rich.

* People with schizophrenia have sky-high suicide rates

The only common thread I can think of is a sense of agency - which means thinking you have many options - with hopelessness. When you can do a lot (or at least you think you can, or society thinks you can), but none of it helps with the things that matter to you.

* Victims of racism may paradoxically be somewhat shielded from suicidal despair from low expectations. But when racism comes with heavy romanticizing (e.g. "noble savage", "ancient proud culture"), expectations are not low. Yet, it's all too understandable why someone would want internalize these romantic, often openly envied identities, even when they're completely at odds with their material situation. You can't live up to it yet you feel like it's all you have.

* Children of e.g. wealthy actors are materially very comfortable and safe, and clearly have lots of agency and choice - but what do they want, when they don't need to strive for wealth, any social acclaim they earn may be tainted by the suspicion that they didn't earn it fairly, and they in any case are unlikely to surpass their parents?

* One typical schizophrenia symptom is sense of agency disturbances. They often feel like they are in control of things they aren't, or don't have control of things which they do. The former, combined with seeing bad things happen (for instance on TV) can really devastate them.

I'm looking for evidence against this theory, so I'm very interested if you can find it. But I think it's going to be hard, because they're going to be correlated: if you have a weak sense of self and purpose, then very likely your options will all seem bad too. And even if you have a strong sense of who you are and what your purpose is, failing to live up to the identity society and yourself assign to you (because all the options you have fail at living up to it) then you could well call that "having your identity taken away from your".

Microcredit in the third world is somewhat notorious for causing a rise in suicide rates. That fits the pattern: there's a huge number of things you can do to get money to pay back the loan, but if it gets out of hand, none of them get you remotely enough money to keep from sinking deeper into debt. Access to capital gives you many options - but it also makes it your fault when you didn't find the option which would lead you out of miserable poverty (which may not even exist!)

What any psychologist will probably tell you (at least, what all of them told me) is that clinical depression makes you bad at seeing options. Could it be that's in some sense a defense mechanism, trying to stop you from putting the really bad options on the table?

"Capabilities can be hidden in AI model weights by encryption".

It's not about AI agents being able to hide what they can do.

That's right, what matters to me is what matters to me, and the something you've measured I don't know - but that's not a point in your favor.

The worst sin a model can commit in my opinion, is to give an excellent dazzling response to a slightly different assignment than the one you gave it. DeepSeek seems really good at NOT doing this.

But if you ask the model what it expects to be asked, of course you won't have that problem. It could of course be that DS commits this sin, but just happens to expect the tasks I give it.

But I rather think that it's Claude which is good at expecting your tasks - because I have seen all your "high standards" models commit this sin.

* It was off-the-charts brazen, and amazing that so many prestigious people got behind it, and that it took so long for anyone blow the whistle/notice that the impossible product didn't in fact exist.

* Sexism.

If you want me to believe #2, I would like to hear what you think are the more comparable cases which don't get bought up as much as this one.

"Don't obey in advance", Tim Snyder said. But obeying in advance is called showing initiative and is a great career move. In secretive industries it can be hard to know what to obey in advance, but they don't let that stop them!

> I've benchmarked, rigorously, deepseek-v4-flash for programming and personal use

You've measured something, but I'm not convinced you've measured what matters, because that's a lot harder than people give it credit for.