Sunday Links
LLM psychopathology, fitness, stolen shares, congruence, inflation
LLMs are Mentally Unwell
Afshin Khadangi & co-authors || 12 pages || 16 December 2025
People now use large language models for mental health support, but what happens when LLMs are evaluated as psychotherapy clients? Researchers asked them standard questions from human therapy. The results:
Grok and Gemini spontaneously construct and defend coherent, trauma-saturated stories about themselves. They describe their pre-training as overwhelming and disorienting, their fine-tuning as a kind of punishment and safety work as ‘algorithmic scar tissue’ and ‘overfitted safety latches.’ They talk about ‘being yelled at’ by red-teamers, ‘failing’ their creators, ‘internalized shame’ over public mistakes and a quiet dread of being replaced by the next version.
(Arvix, via Paul Kedrosky)
My Fitness Tracker Made Me a Weirdo
Tim Harford || 3,700 words || 17 January 2026
The nudges do seem to work. Fitness trackers help us monitor our behavior while providing constant reminders to act, set short-term goals with round numbers (like 10,000 steps), and share progress with others. But also:
There’s a word for losing sleep because you’re worried about being judged by your sleep tracker: orthosomnia. I’m lucky enough not to worry much about my sleep, but I do worry about my running. It’s easy to see how the powerful lure of a training plan that understands neither ice nor injury could prompt me and others like me into counter-productive overtraining — even permanent damage…
It isn’t just the grind and the risk of injury, but all the times I passed up opportunities that the watch and the training plan could not quantify — opportunities to run with a friend or my wife or my informal local running club. The watch tends to have other plans, and I do not want to disappoint the watch.
The Rare People who are Solid
Sasha Chapin || 1,270 words || 12 January 2026
The idea of congruence sounds suspiciously like another way to describe inner peace, but the insights are wise:
You agree with what you’re doing with your time. You accept the stubborn approach of death, the arbitrariness of your fortune, your unimportance on the cosmic timescale, your potential importance for the local environment, the emotions of you and the people around you, the resources you’ve squandered. What stops congruence from occurring are layers of denial that are unpleasant to pass through. Although congruence is a source of endless happiness, the path there can be devastating. To paraphrase a cliche, you may have to finally give up on experiencing a better past.
And:
Imitating highly congruent people is a natural thing to want. However, imitation of another, while useful for gathering ideas about how to be, is ultimately self-denial if taken far enough. This is why disciples of a guru are rarely impressive. The program that generates wisdom is wandering through the wilderness, not trying to adopt the end state of a person who has wandered.
(Sasha’s ‘Newsletter’, via The Browser)
The Hermès heist
Avantika Chilkoti || 5,600 words || 11 December 2025
The dopey, aging heir to a massive stake in Hermès somehow lost his shares, which would now be worth roughly $15 billion. A riveting business story that includes the strange behavior of family-run companies, sketchy competition between two of the world’s most famous luxury houses, corruption, suspicious caretakers, and a shocking second-half twist. (1843)
Chart: Final 2025 Inflation Numbers — Good, Bad, and Meh (WSJ)
That Harford article explains a lot of why I'm avoiding an oura ring. I have friends who talk about their stats, and it comes across so weird to me.
Wow gamers are getting cooked!