The overlap between rationalists and the skeptic community was indeed tiny. I say this as someone heavily involved in Usenet skeptic communities since the late eighties. In fact the Bay Area doesn’t even register as a locus of the skeptic community at the times he’s talking about.

I’m not trying to excuse what much of the skeptic/atheist community later became in the 2010s. It’s definitely turned into something nearly unrecognizable since its earlier days. But that had nothing to do with any sort of imagined rationalist adjacency.

His non-apology apology:

I’m not going anywhere. I am not retreating from public writing, and I am not retreating from saying inconvenient things in public. I am unfazed by harsh criticism, and I know that a reaction of this magnitude is in part the result of having struck a chord. Bear with me, and if you can, remember that I am a human being with a six-month old boy to raise, a book to write, a new job, and much more questions than answers about our collective future.

Guys, he has a baby. Don’t be too mean to him.

That feeling when you’re an OpenAI exec and you realize the jig is up.

What will EA (and, more specifically, Lighthaven) do with all the money they expect to receive once the Anthropic IPO mints a bunch of hundred-millionaires? I’m not granting all of the article’s premises, but the interviews with rationalists might be of interest.

How do we know this isn’t the AI god creating the first diamondoid bacteria?

So Anthropic slopmaxxxed a hamfisted Chinese AI lab detector into Claude Code. And I’m kinda surprised at how much hate Anthropic is getting for it on the orange site.

It makes a twisted sort of sense that so many of them go into life coaching. In their hermetically sealed subculture of highly paid, socially inept nerds, it probably pays the bills to set yourself up as an authority on reading social cues.

From the billionaire’s perspective, confiscatory taxation should be preferable to guillotines.

A predatory slop publisher has turned to algorithmic moderation by clankers? A shocking turn of events, to be sure. They’re probably just trying to wring the last few pennies out of their operation before they meet their inevitable oblivion.

IANAL, but my understanding is that companies are allowed to keep confidential the fact that they even filed the S-1. That’s how I read OpenAI’s statement. But it’s not completely clear what “it” means in “we expect it to leak”.

AI slop will absolutely kill any forum in which it proliferates. So I’m totally fine with it proliferating on LW.

That’s bizarre. Why?

One of the most egregious examples of p-hacking I’ve ever seen.

Everyone knew it was going to be a total shitshow once the free money ran out. Copilot is just the first shoe dropping. Getting out the popcorn.

After concluding the same thing, I scrolled through the whole thing out of a sick sense of curiosity just to see how long it ended up being. IIt must have taken me 30 seconds just to use my touchpad to scroll to the bottom (including the pages of footnotes). These people are beyond parody.

deleted by creator

The rsync slop-code scandal (mentioned here earlier) has now blown up in rsync’s github issues tab. And of course on the orange site.

Why doesn’t she just ring up Peter Thiel. She seems like just the type of person he’d love to donate some Thiel bucks to.

EDIT: I just went to her linked GitHub sponsors page. I was surprised to find Simon Willison there, but maybe I shouldn’t have been. It certainly gave me another reason to look sideways at him.

Related:

Paul Graham: “You’re holding it the wrong way.”

If you want to witness a bunch of emotionally stunted clanker fondlers totally missing the point, check out the comments on this orange site thread.