indigo945

Most rationalists aren't fascists. There are some fascists that call themselves rationalists, but there are also fascists that call themselves libertarians, fascists that call themselves socialists, and fascists that call themselves democrats, so this proves nothing.

This constant equivocation in recent online discourse is tiring. I'm not even close to the rationalist community, I have always found them ridiculous for unrelated reasons, long before it was cool to do so: but I've also engaged with them enough to know that the majority of them is nerds with a science fetish, whose political alignment is about center-left by American standards.

Accusing somebody of being a fascist for telling you to consider the evidence in front of you, and then acting like that makes you the adult in the room, the one who is aligned with social norms and interested in a real debate, is laughable.

    > Everything but pump and dump schemes (and perhaps other kinds of one-off 
    > fraud) has ongoing costs of maintenance, which slop tends to only 
    > increase. It was never nice to maintain things, but whether you keep 
    > burning tokens or hire actual expert devs to fix sloppy vibey mess, 
    > you'll be overpaying compared to if you put high effort from the start.

From my point of view, you're vastly overestimating the quality of most real-world software. There is a million internal applications running out there, powering every kind of business from financial over media to industrial, that evolved from a Perl script first forgotten by a sysadmin in 1994 and then just had more and more crap piled on top of them over the decades. As long as it works for what it needs to do, it will get used. "Software Quality" is a thing that matters only to nerds, and those very few working in sectors where it's actually relevant. But most people aren't writing software to go to Mars or power nuclear reactors.

It's not that their argument is wrong or not worth discussing, it's that it is utterly irrelevant when the question at stake is whether the math is valid and useful or not. It's effectively whataboutism.

I mean, Yudkowsky is ridiculous, but this is an entirely different argument. That, in any case, isn't Bayesian in the slightest.

> It could be concerning that the same rationalist thinking might carry into safety research

Why? "Bayesian thinking" is really just empirical observation and statistics, which is the foundation of all modern research, security or otherwise.

Your comment does nothing but create a vague sense of unease (a hidden cabal of rationalists! they're even doing research!), without making any clear point. At least, I suppose, it's not 25,000 words long.

I don't even understand what your example blog post is arguing. That counting sheep makes shepherding easier hardly seems like a revolutionary insight.

That being said, I don't think that a lot of the people who are recently opposed to rationalism are doing honest philosophy either. Ten years ago, the trend online was to become a rationalist; these days, the trend online seems to be to accuse rationalists of being sex cult satanists that are not equipped with the magical power of "common sense". Out of these two options, I much prefer the rationalists. For while they may have a lacking understanding of some of the history of philosophy, their contrahents don't even pretend to have an understanding of the world that is grounded in anything but irrational fear and hatred.

I was in this camp until a few months ago, but LLMs have really gotten that good now that you can actually trust an agent with a ticket and it will do it cromulently. The code quality isn't any worse than if a junior did it. Sure, you'll sometimes want to refactor something, but then you can just tell the agent and it will do it for you.

Update your priors.

    > inb4 "humans aren't reliable either." You, person typing that very response 
    > out right now, you are part of the problem.

The problem being that we are adults, have to deal with real life, and can no longer pretend that running to mommy when we don't understand something gives us a "reliable" answer? You may next find out there is no Santa Claus.

Simpsons Hit & Run for the PS2 was a great game. Sounds like you and your kids might enjoy that.

Given how good PS5 emulators have already gotten, the goal may actually be to rip GTA 6 and then distribute pirated copies to play on PC. Which would be much worse for both Sony and Rockstar, given that they don't want to make an official PC release yet - so by the time they do, many PC gamers who would have otherwise bought the game at PC launch will have already finished it. Sales would tank.

That's 3.15 seconds of downtime a year, or about 104 seconds since 1993. Quite impressive for a steel products maker.

Strong Sapir-Whorf making a comeback wasn't on my 2026 bingo card.

By the way, how good is Claude's Hopi?

    Fujitsu MONAKA Server will be
    made broadly available from 
    November 2026 to data center 
    operators, enterprises, and 
    the academic and HPC sectors 
    in Japan and Europe, as well 
    as to the defense sector, 
    contributing to national 
    security.

So, not in America. A sign of the geopolitical times? If so, a very unusual one to come out of Japan.

They already aren't really open, try asking an open model on advice for constructing a nuclear bomb. There's no available model that's even remotely near the frontier that doesn't have restrictive safeguards built in.

(Mind you, this may be for the better. I'm just saying that the safeguards driven by cybersecurity concerns aren't some new quality that wasn't there before.)

Right, mathematicians care about clout and tenure, which is a much higher purpose.