JamesBarney

Rationalism is not about trying to be clever it's very much about trying to be a little less wrong. Most people are not even trying, which includes myself. I don't write down my predictions, I don't keep a list of my errors. I just show up to work like everyone else and don't worry about it.

I really don't understand all the claims that they intellectually smug and overconfident when they are the one group of people trying to do better. It really seems like all the hatred is aimed at the hubris to even try to do better.

What ngo's are the rationalists or effective altruists responseable for killing or defunding?

> With that said, I am seeing Claude Opus 4 (w/extended thinking) be distinctly worse at missing problems which o3-pro and Gemini find. It seems fairly consistent that Opus will be the worst out of the three (despite sometimes noticing things the others do not).

I've found the same thing. That claude is more likely miss a bug than o3 or gemini but more likely to catch something o3 and gemini missed. If I had to pick one model I'd pick o3 or gemini, but if I had to pick a second model I'd pick opus.

It's also seems to have a much higher false positive rate where as gemini seems to have the lowest false positive rate.

Basically o3 and gemini are better, but also more correlated which gives opus a lot of value.

I haven't tested o3-pro yet enough to have a good hierarchy of confabulation.

I use AI a lot to double check my code via a code review what I've found is

Gemini - really good at contextual reasoning. Doesn't confabulate bugs that don't exist. Is really good at finding issues related to large context. (this method calls this method, and it does it with a value that could be this)

Sonnet/Opus - Seems to be the more creative. More likely to confabulate bugs that don't exist, but also most likely to catch a bug o3 and gemini missed.

o3 - Somewhere in the middle

I'm pretty sure this is just a psychological phenomenon. When a new model is released all the capabilities the new model has that the old model lacks are very salient. This makes it seem amazing. Then you get used to the model, push it to the frontier, and suddenly the most salient memories of the new model are it's failures.

There are tons of benchmarks that don't show any regressions. Even small and unpublished ones rarely show regressions.

All companies would prefer to have 0 employees if possible. This isn't special about YC companies. Heck it's not even special about companies. If I could buy a roof that was slightly more expensive but I never had to hire a roofer I would.

This is something that both impacts them and impacts you if you're a developer.

This tax treatment can increase the cost of a dev by 5-15% which leads to less hiring and a looser job market. Which will impact us even if we're not looking for work because most companies look at market rates when deciding raises.

Interest rates are bigger motivator of the layoffs than these changes. When interest rates are high that means investors far more heavily prioritize profits today over profits tomorrow.

This tax change just made it worse.

Even that technically falls under the crime umbrella (though I don't believe it is immoral or unethical). It's basically the getting around government imposed capital controls.

"Whenever the President shall find as a fact that any foreign country places any burden or disadvantage upon the commerce of the United States by any of the unequal impositions or discriminations aforesaid..."

That quote is from the Tariff Act of 1930. The government didn't argue this was the authority for the presidents actions.

This is 100% definitely how it works. The number of board seats the non-profit gets is not dependent on how many outstanding shares there are.

It looked to me like the owl was turning around to land.

> No mom, child, or baby dies of a preventable cause

This goal might offend you but it doesn't offend me, and I don't think his motives (whether it's for legacy or personal brand) matter to me or the mother of a child who didn't shit itself to death because a vaccine for the rotavirus.

It's so weird to see conservatives talk about how great the European economy is. I used to have to argue with my liberal friends about how Europe is a sclerotic economy and now I'm arguing with conservatives about it. Weird world.

> By contrast, GDP is higher in the U.S., but is that real?

Yes it's real, we live in larger homes, have more cars, have more stuff. Maybe that doesn't drive a huge change in quality of life, but making us poorer isn't going to do that either. And when you talk to Europeans about why they like Europe they don't list how poor everyone is there, or how many factory jobs there are. They list a bunch of stuff that is anathema to conservatives like the socialized medicine (some love it, other's hate it), a carless culture, a social safety net, a slower speed of life, lots of vacation. (Which is a big reason why they are poorer)

And it's not just the laptop class, almost everyone who is full time is richer in the US. The exception is people who are marginally employed who would probably benefit from Europe's larger social safety net.

There's no guarantee they'll invest in his next startup, even if he stays until the bitter end.

It's also possible that over the next two years, either he or his coworker could damage their relationships with investors. Typically, messy blow-ups reflect far worse on founders than politely stepping away. It often goes better to simply say something like, "Hey, I'm sorry, but I don't think we're aligned anymore. This startup probably works best with just one captain at the helm, so for that reason, I'm out."

Most importantly, even if sticking around for another year or two meant the difference between guaranteed funding and none at all, I'd still choose the extra year or two over the funding. Founders usually earn half—or even a third—of what they would make elsewhere. That extra time essentially translates to a couple of years of self-funded startup runway, and I'd much rather have that flexibility than guaranteed funding with strings attached.

The ROI of investing another year or two of frustration and failure so a handful of investors might have a marginally better opinion of you is poor to say the least.

100% this. If you guys had significant traction with your startup then it might be worth it to work really hard to try to salvage the relationship.

But right now you're just wasting your life. The most valuable resource you burn through at a startup is your life. Startups are stressful, they wear you down, they're not great for your finances, and many of those are doubly so if you don't get along with your cofounder.

Just quit, you don't owe anyone your life. You are less likely to find traction with two cofounders with a bad working relationship, and if you do find traction you are less likely to be able capitalize on it.

Extremely expensive in what since? In that it costs $.03 instead of $.00003c? Yeah it's relatively far more expensive than other solutions, but from an absolute standpoint still very cheap for the vast majority of use cases. And it's a LOT better.

A basic understand of supply/demand and how many well intended policies can have terrible effects.

Many people state how much they appreciate their degree. But when it comes down to it almost everyone who goes back from a second degree does so with the specific purpose of getting a credential for their career.

No one really values the intangible personal development that comes with education. If they did I'd have 5 friends who went back for a second degree to enrich themselves instead of 0.

If you're arguing we should improve schools to increase rates of numeracy and literacy than I'm in 100% agreement. But I thought we were talking about liberal arts degrees.

We look at that positively becomes it's a sunk cost, but if someone were to put the circumstances in front of us would we still be happy about it?

If your job told you that you had to pay 10k to study French poetry for 6 months without pay, would you happy for the opportunity to a more well rounded thinker?

Does liberal arts teach critical thinking? Do students who study liberal arts vs a mathematics/engineering show greater improvements on critical thinking tests?

I get the idea we want a more educated population that can better make decisions. But the biggest way the populace makes poor decisions is they are economically illiterate, and they don't really understand how the government works. We should probably spend more time teaching this in high school and a typical degree spends very little time teaching these subjects.

> Even controlling for other factors, a college degree makes more productive workers

I'd like to see this study. Most of the data I've seen that is pro-college still has massive confounds.

Two twins graduate high school. One gets a crappy copywriting job, and spends her free time reading books on how to write better, and specifically how to do copywriting. The other gets an English degree. I'm not nearly as confident as you are the one with the English degree is going to be a better copywriter.

I don't disagree you can learn skills, but cognitive science literature solidly shows far transfer is not a thing, and when it is it's incredibly inefficient. i.e. Reading the great works of Russian literature might make you a better copywriter but at a vastly slower pace than writing copy, or reading a book on copywriting.

> But also there's the very real problem of wealth concentration. The economy works best with flowing income. It works worst when money is at rest. With a sales tax only you end up in a situation where wealth can be endlessly horded, which takes that velocity of money out of the market.

This is basically arguing the world works best when the rich buy bigger yachts instead of bigger factories. All of this wealth the rich have isn't gold coins in a giant vault like scrooge McDuck, it's a sheet of paper that says they own .3% of Microsoft.

> For example. Let's say there's 1000 monies and 100 people's. If bread costs 10 monies everyone gets fed if wealth is evenly distributed. However, as wealth concentrates into one person less people can afford to eat which has a knock on effect of potentially putting bakers out of business (ultimately raising the price of bread).

What you're describing is a recession do the a drop in aggregate demand. Yeah this is bad and we have monetary and fiscal policy to reverse it. And usually monetary and fiscal policy are better because if we just fixed it by incentivizing the rich to spend more money on consumer goods we'd have more workers building mansions vs homes. Not to mention we are currently do not have that problem, which is why we have inflation above target.

I think there are a lot of good reasons to tax the rich (and upper middle class) more, like our ballooning deficit, but creating tax incentives so the rich spend more money in an economy that is already on the verge of overheating isn't one of them.

My understanding is ATCs are pretty well paid. With most making 140-150, and many making up to 200k.

I could see this maybe being an issue in the bay area but outside of that area that pretty good pay.

There was a scandal at the ATC which has culminated in a lawsuit Brigida v. Buttigieg, and from what I remember the facts look bad.

They replaced a skill assessment with a completely bizarre biography test where for instance you got +15 points if you listed science as your worst subject, but 0 if you listed math, English, history or P.E.

Then they leaked the answers to black organizations, as well as special keywords to put in their resume to go to top of the pile.

The students who spent years and thousands of dollars and aced the skill assessment but then failed the biographical test are suing in a class action.

Yeah, that game should come with a seizure warning. I've never had a seizure but my brain started to feel pretty uncomfortable during my second completionist playthrough.

Or for people who want to make money as a trader.

const lastPriceElement = document.querySelector('.last-price'); const buyButton = document.querySelector('.stock-btn.stock-buy'); const sellButton = document.querySelector('.stock-btn.stock-sell');

const buyPrice = 280; const sellPrice = 320;

function checkPriceAndTrade() {

    if (lastPriceElement && buyButton && sellButton) {
        // Get the price text and convert to number
        const priceText = lastPriceElement.firstChild.textContent.trim();
        const price = Number(priceText.replace(/[$,]/g, ''));

        // Execute trade based on price
        if (price < buyPrice) {
            console.log(`Price ${price} is below $` + buyPrice ` - Executing buy`);
            buyButton.click();
        } else if (price > sellPrice) {
            console.log(`Price ${price} is above $` + sellPrice ` - Executing sell`);
            sellButton.click();
        } else {
            console.log(`Price ${price} is between thresholds - No action taken`);
        }
    }

}

// Run the check every 20 milliseconds setInterval(checkPriceAndTrade, 20);

Yeah I'd like to hear this too. I use both and I love community notes. People are pretending like this is some big culture war issue and a win for the right but I've seen community notes call out Elon for retweeting bullshit more times than I count. (As well as calling Jacobin our on there's)

I also appreciate that if I liked a post that community notes called out and I'm getting a notification that was misinformation.