Like a lot of the rationalist world view and the way it readily aligns with enabling cult dynamics and providing justification for rule-by-epstein-class, this is probably just another happy accident brought on by people who like to role play as geniuses but can’t see past the tip of their nose.

It’s possible Yud’s insistence that nothing works on him because he is a self-acclaimed neurodivergent with “akrasia” and fat-no-matter-what genes skews the overall view of therapeutics in the community

The AI bros are worried about the precedent that someone, anywhere, can tell them “no,” and make it stick. And others who hate vibe code might realise they too can say no. You can just ban the slop bros.

I both love and hate that vibe coders are developing a perpetual victim mentality.

Their “Dev team of none” justification (one of many) is really solid and not something I’ve seen spotlighted before, here it is in full:

The development team of none

Using LLMs to work with your code gives you a kick of adrenaline. You can develop at a rapid pace, build things as if you had a large team. Only that you have none. In fact, you are (often) alone, working with a statistical machine that turns energy into code.

It seems like many ‘vibe coders’ don’t realize that they don’t actually have a community around them. They build projects as if they had, and spend resources accordingly. We see projects having a lot of code activity, heavy CI/CD testing, frequent and large release binaries. Sometimes, it feels like the amount of supported platforms exceeds the amount of actual users.

To us, it seems ridiculous to see projects with a single developer and virtually no users consuming as much or even more resources than some of the largest community projects on Codeberg, which operate frugal with CI/CD and storage resources. We do not believe it is reasonable for Codeberg to invest our precious donation money into hosting of large ghost projects.

Wow what cutting insight, what incisive vision, what an original thinker!

Oh wait no that was just the plot of the Animatrix from two decades ago.

the protagonist is a lesbian orc so I automatically like it

If you don’t mind reading comics online you could check Fairmeadow.

kayfabe vcs

Yes exactly how can you write an entire thing treating rationalism like something you can do an apostasy out of and never mention Yud once.

I assume the personal perspective is him tacitly admitting to being attracted to skepticism for the debate bro culture, especially the parts that bordered on harassment. Even the inciting incident of “leaving rationalism” is framed more as him growing out of the need to long-form debate someone, specifically James Damore, the google engineer who published a manifesto about how women don’t belong in tech.

I don’t know the author so I don’t know if it is important that he was fine with pranking the timecube guy but decided enough is enough when it was time to take a pro-feminist side.

The Guardian published a William McAskill editorial in the what-if-the-stateless-text-generators-had-moral-agency genre of fiction, and Emily Bender did a thread

From the article:

But the sheer pace of growth in AI means that, once we produce the first artificial moral patients, we will soon after have enormous quantities of them. After a few years, so many morally significant AI systems could exist that their collective interests would outweigh those of all humans on Earth combined.

Get fucked, Will.

But also, if we grant the untenable sci-fi premise, this would be like a star trek episode where the federation cedes unconditionally to the expansionist alien fascists of the week if they have a much greater population because that’s all it takes to outweigh the other side’s moral concerns.

Earth-Trisolaris Organisation-ass moral framework.

Compelling members to offer up their private lives to the community is in fact certified Cult Shit™️

The Leverage article kept referring to him as “the slovenian” and that’s at least honorary eastern europe, but I’ve no idea if he actually grew up there.

If the argument is that too much rationaltruism fried his brain then fine I guess.

Otherwise I don’t think United Healthcare doing AI assisted fraud falls into any rationalist framework of doom, and also those people are allergic to direct action.

Also the article is already setting the bar very high by using the Zizians, a sect that’s almost completely predicated on semi-obsure rationalist lore, as their first point of reference for rationalism gone wild.

Sounds like he went for the low hanging fruit to showcase his business and ate shit, good to know.

His great founder theory certainly seems amenable to going all in on dictators.

Attempting to credit Luigi’s actions to AI millenarianism putting him in a weird headspace almost feels like stolen valor.

Still, if that’s where his mental health defence is going to hinge on then I guess it’s relevant.

[Tim Urban] goes on to claim that ASI, with an IQ of 12,000, will eventually replace humankind as the dominant species on the planet:

That IQ works like mana points is both a widespread misconception and a red flag that you’re far more ignorant than you let on.

Yeah, the foam-at-the-mouth racist college drop out with an imaginary phd in race science and at least one nazi alt that we know of is his overall top account to boost by some margin.

I don’t think I’ve heard of Nicholas Decker.

Was it really the sensible position that the poorest country in Europe would go on to embarrass an ostensible superpower? Predicting a Russian victory in the short term in the early days doesn’t seem too daring a hot take.

It was mostly the analysts who were predicting a three day walk in the park with the ukrainians cheering them on as liberators that turned out problematic all the way.

These are agents, meaning software that perceives, decides, and acts on its own, a category well past the chatbot.

Are these agents in the room with us now?

How can all this possibly be enforceable.

So this exists: https://readscottalexander.com/stats/links

Link Stats

Across every post, these are the external websites Scott Alexander links to most often. “Links” counts every hyperlink; “Posts” counts how many distinct articles link there.

So far these are probably the clearest non-leaked emails indication of what the good doctor actually believes.

https://samoburja.com/

That’s a non-provably non-punchable face if I’ve ever seen one.

Also he seems to be the opposite of charismatic.