gerikson

Despite Soatak explicitely warning users that posting his latest rant[1] to the more popular tech aggregators would lead to loss of karma and/or public ridicule, someone did just that on lobsters and provoked this mask-slippage[2]. (comment is in three paras, which I will subcomment on below)

Obligatory note that, speaking as a rationalist-tribe member, to a first approximation nobody in the community is actually interested in the Basilisk and hasn’t been for at least a decade. As far as I can tell, it’s a meme that is exclusively kept alive by our detractors.

This is the Rationalist version of the village worthy complaining that everyone keeps bringing up that one time he fucked a goat.

Also, “this sure looks like a religion to me” can be - and is - argued about any human social activity. I’m quite happy to see rationality in the company of, say, feminism and climate change.

Sure, "religion" is on a sliding scale, but Big Yud-flavored Rationality ticks more of the boxes on the "Religion or not" checklist than feminism or climate change. In fact, treating the latter as a religion is often a way to denigrate them, and never used in good faith.

Finally, of course, it is very much not just rationalists who believe that AI represents an existential risk. We just got there twenty years early.

Citation very much needed, bub.

[1] https://soatok.blog/2024/09/18/the-continued-trajectory-of-idiocy-in-the-tech-industry/

[2] link and username witheld to protect the guilty. Suffice to say that They Are On My List.

Some killjoys pour cold water over everyone's favorite dental biohack, and HN is not happy

https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/medical-critical-thinking-technology/reports-death-dental-cavities-are-greatly-exaggerated

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41573550

DHH takes a break from racing cars, railing against DEI, and being perhaps the worst boss Denmark has ever produced to engage in some light nerd-washing

https://world.hey.com/dhh/wonderful-vi-a1d034d3

Some people on lobste.rs call him out for being terrible but mostly it's a celebration about how only the smartest, most productive coders use vi/vim or even more hipster modal editors

• https://lobste.rs/s/20t1jj

The 1911 is Murican, not some Italian crap

/s obviously, Italian gunmakers are very good.

Also it's really weird how there's a ton of small-business innovation in American gun gear, but the only ones who seem to be making money are European companies?

"AI, please summarize this LW"

"Certainly. Here is the summary: give all your money to Yud or burn in virtual hell forevermore"

JFC how many novel-length emails do you get in a week?

I think a more constructive way to handle this problem is to train people to write better emails.

They suck at technical explanations too, unless it's a Wikipedia link.

Cofveve.

Statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged:

CryptoPunk sells for a fraction of its likely market price due to zombie smart contract

Sounds like a great solution people will be prepared to pay OpenAI $100B in the future for, and not at all like an incremental upgrade over StackOverflow with extra ecocide added.

JFC that's a horrifying story

Programmers hate programming and love code reviewing, right? Right?