kraf

“Much as one cannot unhear a movie spoiler or a crossword clue, one cannot explore a problem as profitably and richly once one is aware of an existing solution.” He mourned, he added, “the path not taken, and the opportunities lost in the frantic race to develop this technology.”

This observation is so important. There is unintendedly something being taken away from us that cannot be given back. And it's a pure loss, there is nothing returned to us on an experiental level. It already existed before that "somebody else" would solve or discover something. Now this "somebody" is just just an alien nobody can relate to. And that "something" is everything.

Even if AI solves ageing, and climate change and whatever else; as humans we'll have lost something beautiful and precious. There will just be less of this sense of wonder and curiosity.

Dwarkesh Patel expects human level minds in one to three years. Is it only me thinking that he seems more concerned than he allows himself to just say?

Totally agree, it's like their singular defining characteristic.

It's just that: wanting to have more accurate beliefs. Believing that this is worthwhile even if it's hard to push against human nature of habitually "choosing" beliefs.

Much longer I'm sure, but that's a single author with occasional guest posts. The guest posts are mostly thorough book reviews AFAIK at the moment.

Personally I think the length is often justified by the attention to detail but I must admit I only read some of the classics and a few recent posts when they caught my interest. I even scroll past certain paragraphs if I'm uninterested but I don't mind then being there.

It's also such a mix of things over there. What OP mentioned in particular looked to me like original investigative journalism and those kind of undertakings often enough result in whole books.

This is absolutely lovely, well done!

When I think of rationalist blog posts, I think LessWrong and ACX. There is probably more to know. Across 46,000 posts on LW the average word length is 1,300 words as of May 2026. That doesn't seem too bad.

Regarding the varying degree of quality I wanted to note that this is a public forum where anyone is allowed to create an account and post public articles. Anyone is allowed to call themselves a "rationalist" if they want to. I wonder if most who read articles there and post occasionally do label themselves though. I know some who don't.

The Mishandling Personal Information benchmark is non-sensical: that's the very definition of giving your personal data to Meta

I keep being confused about how people's understanding of the models get stuck at next token prediction. Isn't this entirely neglecting the RL training? I might be misunderstanding something but to my mind it makes the issue way fuzzier than it's being painted here.

It'll learn how to not get caught lying.

Lying can unfortunately help you achieve goals very effectively, especially economical and political ones.

You can just as easily argue that markets caused all this. They don't incentivize the preservation of the planet or even life at all. There is no reason to believe that anything that comes out of markets organically is good, they don't converge towards worlds that have sound values. If they do in some instance then it's just by happenstance as in the solar example.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-liberta...

Also this seems to contradict your fossil fuel paragraph completely, the US is amongst the world's highest fossil fuel consumers per person: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fossil-fuels?fuel=total&m...

I'm not familiar with what you're talking about. Can you share a real world example of a case like this? You're saying a social media comment about a crime is somehow punished harshly and much harsher than the crime itself?

I've noticed this as well and I'm rather concerned about it. Those cheap rip offs will ruin countless classics for her and it's really sad. I'm looking for the most boring stuff for her to watch just so she doesn't become fully jaded by age 18.

Side note: if you need new stories, I've found a lot of weird and fun stuff to read on Royal Road.

> What is still NOT being scanned: End-to-end encrypted chats, such as those on WhatsApp, [...]

I thought WhatsApp is removing e2e encryption. The article should replace the wrong example with something like Signal

And it's all the same to you? You don't care which values those things have? Of course there will always be underlying values. I wouldn't go as far as calling everything political narratives.

I think it's just pretty clear that Elon's values are not what most people want the world to be shaped by.

You may be wrong here and Apple seems to be the one copying the feature. Someone mentioned KineStop in this thread and that's been around since 2018.

I asked ChatGPT how many billionaires the US can have if every one of them has "just" 1 billion and if everyone else has basically nothing (i.e. zero net worth).

It said that the theoretical maximum is 174,000. In a country of 340 million.

That sounds to me like the chance to make it is a lot lower than 0.05%

Maybe we should just stop pretending that everyone can make it and that it's mostly people who already come about with vast amounts of luck (means = luck, opportunity = luck) who have even a chance to make it.

People with cool startup ideas cannot just make it. Working hard is not enough. Growth is not good enough. They will likely just be destroyed in an increasingly unfair and predatory market.

That's what I'm thinking too. There is a lot of noise and I know teams where the majority of the people writing Python just have no idea what they're doing.

I'm working with Clojure which is used mostly by senior engineers and it still blows my mind how well Claude writes software in it even though it's a fringe language. It's even able to pick up in-house DSLs written with macros.

They create toxic products that make the entire world more toxic. How they still manage to not have any responsibility while being editors and publishers is beyond me. I couldn't imagine how their insides wouldn't be toxic as well. Nice people don't do this.

Sources can be found here. I was actually surprised myself how damning this looks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_war

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide

But why did you invest on those grounds? Is profit not your goal here?

Comparing today's internet to the 90s is hardly fair. It has become extremely predatory, and most places youth gravitate towards are controlled by algorithms with the goal of getting them hooked on the platforms to make them available for manipulation by the platform's customers.

Of course, there will be stories of smart kids doing amazing things with access to vast troves of information, but the average story is much sadder.

The EU is working on a type of digital ID that an age-restricted platform would ask for, which only gives the platform the age information and no further PII.

Companies (not talking about system76) amazingly always find the shittyest interpretations of their obligations to make sure to destroy the regulations intention as much as they can. The cookie popups should have been an option in the browser asking the user whether they want to be tracked and platforms were meant to respect this flag. Not every site asking individually, not all this dark pattern annoyance. It's mind-blowing that that was tanked so hard.

Love the headline and curious what the pope actually believes that brains do.

I usually don't notice these things but in the picture in the bottom it's almost exclusively white men.

No it's not, an agent is an agent. You can use other people like tools too but they are still agents. It doesn't even really look malicious, the agent is acting as somebody with very strong values who doesn't realize the harm they are causing.

This is not about stopping kids from communicating. The list of negative consequences of being on social media is long and real.

A government regulating something is also not authoritarian.

"Government bad" is not an argument by the way, and also not a given. It's just libertarian confusion.

> who's to blame here

It's ok to wait longer for a product to make sure it's safe instead of the ol' "move fast and break things". Having ever new "interesting" stuff to play with to feed our endless boredom is not the only thing worth caring about.

Nah he's not. Stuff has been pretty stable, impressively so. Especially if you keep to certain hardware options which Apple users also accept.

It's been many years since I had my last driver issue. I find that impressive considering how many different platforms Linux has to run on.

Have you noticed how bad the Docker experience is on Macs though, after how many years?

It's a race dynamic. Can you truly imagine any one of them stopping without the others agreeing? How would they tell that the others really have stopped. I think they do believe that it's dangerous what they're doing but that they would rather be the ones to build it than let somebody else get there first because who knows what they'll do.

It's all a matter of incentives and people can easily act recklessly given the right ones. They keep going because they just can't stop.

I don't really see an argument made by Ng as to why they're not dangerous. I hardly ever see arguments, we're completely drowned in biases.

I know that he often said that we're very far away from building a superintelligence and this is the relevant question. This is what is dangerous, something that is playing every game of life like AlphaZero is playing Go after learning it for a day or so, namely better that any human ever could. Better than thousands of years of human culture around it with passed on insights and experience.

It's so weird, I'm scared shitless but at the same time I really want to see it happen in my lifetime hoping naively that it will be a nice one.