timmytokyo

Is it good security practice to replace engineers with product managers?

"This will be the last year that we hire engineers, and starting next year we hire what we used to call product managers, to build things with AI."

By the way, this is where the industry would like to go. Pay attention, people.

They're more like veal calves.

He's legally not allowed to have anything to do with the company anymore (except as a shareholder). But you know how that goes under the current enforcement regime.

At his daughter's urging, he went to a sketchy Russian clinic where they subjected him to an unresearched protocol: stop the medication cold turkey, then put the patient into an induced coma. Who knows what kind of number this did on his nervous system. Based on his subsequent behavior and illnesses, I think it's safe to say he's been permanently disabled.

It's a good thing structural and civil engineers don't design infrastructure this way.

I'll just leave this here.

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

Some people just enjoy writing and reading racials slurs, I guess. X is a nice home for them.

This is how you end up with a big ball of mud [1]. If the argument is that LLMs are just as capable as humans at building big balls of mud, then I'm not sure it's much of an endorsement of their use.

[1] https://www.laputan.org/mud/

I hate to break it to you, but about those elections...

Here's a sample of the site's headers. Note the heavy reliance on slop marketing-speak (rule of 3, X not Y, etc.).

"Compressed, not lobotomized."

"Dense, resident, yours."

"Local frontier inference, narrow on purpose."

"ds4 hardware fit: local, streamed and distributed."

The whole site says nothing with so many words. It's also got all the hallmarks of a typical vibe-coded web site (small all-caps text, highly sectioned content, silly animations). Why do people do this? It doesn't impress. In a few years, we'll look back on sites like this like we look at geocities sites today.

Since you're here, can you comment on the problem of SEO spam and what DDG is doing about it? Just today I was looking for instructions on how to replace the cushions on my headphones. I typed into DDG the query "instructions to replace bose headphone pads" and it came up with pages and pages of links to SEO slop. The link to the actual Bose website containing accurate instructions was near the bottom of the second page of results.

The New York Times had a similar article a couple days ago [1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/21/technology/agi-house-ai-c...

In a real tug-of-war, the teams are balanced. In the HN tug-of-war, flaggers have an advantage because flagged posts are invisible to people who might otherwise upvote them.

Not sure there's a better avatar for the absurdity of AI slop imagery than the "cowboy on horseback". That's a pony with a child's saddle on it, and they've composited a grown man on top of it.

The Venn diagram has huge overlap.

Exactly. And companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are disproportionately populated by people deeply connected to Effective Altruism or the Bay Area rationalist movement.

War and Peace is shorter than HPMOR.

Anyone who knows anything about Harry Potter fandom in those years knows that its readers were always thirsty for something new in the Potterverse to read or be exposed to. By latching onto that universe's incredible popularity, Yudkowsky exposed a large number of young, inquisitive people to the ideas of rationalism. It was essentially a recruitment mechanism, one that was wildly successful. Many rationalists freely admit that their first exposure to rationalism was via HPMOR.

I don't think the argument is that their sexual practices inherently make them part of a cult. Rather, the argument is that it's very common for cults to include communal sexual practices that fall outside typical social norms.

Common signifiers of cults include:

1. Apocalyptic world view.

2. Charismatic and/or exploitative leader.

3. Insularity.

4. Esoteric jargon.

5. Lack of transparency or accountability (often about finances or governance).

6. Communal living arrangements.

7. Sexual mores outside social norms, especially around the leader.

8. Schismatic offshoots.

9. Outsized appeal and/or outreach to the socially vulnerable.

Rationalism checks most of these boxes.

Is it really a satire if the same woman in the photo (Aella) went on to have a "birthday gangbang" with numerous men, some of whom are present in the photo?

Ok, iPhone.

Effective Altruism. Also the related Bay Area group known as the "rationalists". Effective accelerationism, while seemingly opposed to EA, is in fact the flip side of the same coin. Look up the term TESCREAL.

Members of these groups are deeply embedded and heavily represented within top AI companies. Anthropic is particularly impacted, as its leadership is almost entirely made up of EAs. One of EA's goals has been to get EAs hired at the major AI labs so that they can influence AI's development. If you ever hear people discussing their personal P(doom), you're listening to a discussion topic originated by rationalists.

The problem with your counter-hypothetical is that not only is it unrealistic, it's utterly impossible. No human would be able to do in such a short timeframe what the LLM did. Part of what makes the OpenAI move so egregious is how bullying it was. It was the big guy coming along with their nearly infinite resources and squashing the little guy who's devoted a good chunk of his career to the problem.

A shortcut that isn't visible in any of Finder's menus. Which makes it virtually undiscoverable.

Finder is full of these kinds of hidden secrets.

One must also consider the well-known biases and motives of the authors. They are going to do everything they can to create hype around threats posed by AI.

METR is a cog in the effective altruism machine. It was spun off from Paul Christiano's Alignment Research Center. Christiano is a well-known longtermist and AI doomer, who predicts a 50% chance that AI will end humanity once it reaches human capacity [1].

The author of this piece is also a well-known member of the Bay Area rationalist cult.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-researcher-ai-doom-50...

You forgot [INCOMPETENCE]

"The project is in no way consumed by politics."

https://bsky.app/profile/aly.codes/post/3mttrv3hjcc27

The "About" page basically admits the entire site is written by AI.

https://reinvently.co.uk/about/

>AI hasn't suddenly sent the quality of creativity off a cliff. It's commoditised the low standard of most previous hand-made work and made it easier to access.

Yes. That's why it's called slop. And now we're absolutely swimming in it. I guess a small number of people like it, but then there's no accounting for (bad) taste.

His good friend Dwarkesh should have him back on the podcast.