You're right! There's a disclosure on the page but it's fuckin tiny.

The media again builds a virtual public consisting of billionaires of a variety of positions and ask you "which one do you agree with?" This is a strategy to push the public closer to the beliefs of billionaires.

I don't know who these fucking people are. The real public in California still supports Biden by a 25% margin.

I do not recommend using the word "AI" as if it refers to a single thing that encompasses all possible systems incorporating AI techniques. LLM guys don't distinguish between things that could actually be built and "throwing an LLM at the problem" -- you're treating their lack-of-differentiation as valid and feeding them hype.

I mean, if no one's getting paid, then my preferred price is $0, to everyone in the world.

Show HN: I'm 16 and building an AI based startup called Factful with friends

In which the Orange Site is a very bad influence on some minors:

How do you evaluate “factuality” without knowing all the facts, though? That’s the downfall of all such services - eventually (or even immediately) they begin to just push their preferred agenda because it’s easier and more profitable.

Hi there, thank you for your feedback! I think we could potentially go down the route of a web3 approach where we get the public consensus on the facts.

...

Your first meta-problem to solve is to get people to care about the facts, and to accept them when they’re wrong. There is an astonishing gap between knowing the truth and acting accordingly.

Yea, that's why we also added in an grammar checker, even if they dont care about facts, they can get something better than gram marly that checks for way more for way less.

It sounds like ChatGPT is eligible for a degree in business!

Every rationalist I've met has been nice and smart and deserved better. These are nerds and not in a bad way, but in a way that gets them bullied and shamed and gaslit. And in practice I can come to agreement with them on lots of issues.

On this issue I can never pin them down -- responding with what I think are reasonable questions gets me shut down with what I believe is thought-stopping behavior. They rarely state the actual reasons and the actual reasons are always slippier when they have to verbalize them to people who don't agree.

No doubt if you're a cynical manipulator, "having your followers lie about what you believe" works for you. But a lot of these are going to be nice normal guys who are tired of being laughed at and, worryingly, tired of being made to think.

In this respect they have a lot in common with, say, high school kids who became communists in part to piss off their parents. I'm not saying that to mock those kids, because I was one of them -- and I think there's a huge part of this that they're not wrong about and they're entitled to demand to be taken seriously, and precious few people do take nerds seriously. And for that matter, there's philosophically sophisticated people doing the same work as them.

I don't know how we get them into spaces where something is actually done -- if not for humanity or whatever, for people very close to them who actually need it -- and where the seduction of ego and money isn't like, so readily and constantly available.

• high willingness to accept painfully inexact responses
• high tendency to side with authority when given no information
• low ability to distinguish "how it is" from "how it seems like it should be"

Meta:

• default expectation that others are the same way
• indignant consent-ignoring gesture if they're not

I read his blog a while and I agree with you.

Overall the Dimes Square guys seem very similar to each other. To me they're interesting in aggregate, described once, but there's nothing to look at beyond the surface. If you read any two blog posts on Mike's site, you know everything about them.

Of course they have day-to-day lives -- every so often one of them releases a book or something, but this has no real purpose -- none of them ever change. It's not like a man with six funny hats becomes more interesting when he acquires a seventh funny hat.

The social pattern Mike is describing seems pretty fast-paced and destructive. They do a lot of signings and court a lot of press attention, and as long as you're still shocked, they're interested in you. Past that, you kind of have to behave exactly like them to get invited, but it doesn't seem like they actually like their own -- I would be really, really surprised if they read each other's books. They just kind of brood next to each other and engage in disaffected, ironic narcissism.

I can see why he'd be valuable to them, though. Mike has his own pattern -- he's clearly learned how to be entertainingly shocked, but only intermittently -- on other occasions he denies them supply, and sometimes he burns them by being a surprisingly coherent critic. He's hard to reach but ultimately attends often enough that they remember him.

If you substitute "affection" with supply in the form of outrage, and leave everything else the same, he's basically a pickup artist.

I suspect that the actions that make up Mike's pattern are deliberate, but when it comes to explaining them, he has zero self-awareness. He's doing it too well for it to be accidental though, as much as there's a lot of denial there, and when he makes comments like the one I've selected, I think that's the mask slipping.

I don't understand why people take him at face value when he claims he's always been a Democrat up until now. He's historically made large contributions to candidates from both parties, but generally more Republicans than Democrats, and also Republican PACs like Protect American Jobs. Here is his personal record.

Since 2023, he picked up and donated ~$20,000,000 to Fairshake, a crypto PAC which predominantly funds candidates running against Democrats.

Has he moved right? Sure. Was he ever left? No, this is the voting record of someone who wants to buy power from candidates belonging to both parties. If it implies anything, it implies he currently finds Republicans to be corruptible.

This is another one for the "throw an AI model at the problem with no concrete plans for how to evaluate its performance" category.

Apparently, if you want to get away with crimes, you should find someone you can rat on and commit them in a way that makes that person highly complicit.

Wait I intended to post this in Sneer Club

My opinion is that Jesse Lyu is lying about making any significant changes. (Because otherwise the demo wouldn't have worked)

I don't want bad things for him personally, but I want bad things to happen to people who lie in public.

The code is open source with licensing requirements, so I'm therefore hoping someone Jesse has already made a statement to can write him with these requests:

• For GPL2 licensed components such as Linux: Give me your changes in source form.
• For Apache-licensed components such as Android: What files did you change?

I can imagine him responding in three ways:

• "Sure, here is another lie" -- and then he's locked into an answer which will probably make him look clueless as hell
• "We don't think we have to do that" -- and now the Open Source Reply Guy Brigade instantly hates him.
• -- and now, given that a conversation has actually occurred, he looks evasive.

Is there an amount of testosterone that will turn me into a lizardman

If it helps, I know who you are and will still happily tell you incorrect information about yourself and your profession if asked to!

It's the technique of running a primary search against some other system, then feeding an LLM the top ~25 or so documents and asking it for the specific answer.

Before I was posting about tech on the internet I was posting about philosophy. I don't know enough about philosophy to be good at it -- I've read almost nothing -- but I noticed you could get pretty far by saying "Kant probably didn't have anything valuable to say -- he was a massive racist." A balm for people who are looking for an excuse not to have read Kant.

My bleak theory is that to be convincing I'd have to switch to calculatedly mediocre text deliberately orchestrated to be unsurprising. My experience is that when an extremely successful article contains genuine insight, it separately contains an absolutely mediocre take that is the real explanation for why it went viral.

Let's start with "Scott is a bigot" as an example claim. That's true, but the evidence is basically just a bland admission of "yeah." Nobody can spin that into a detailed and personal story about how Scott got mindhacked, which is the single part of Scott Alexander's bigotry that can be discussed at a level interesting to bored idiots. Discussing his bigotry directly would make it obvious -- he hasn't stated any takes that aren't incredibly commonplace for tech-adjacent eugenics losers, and has waffled publicly about whether or not to disavow even those stances.

What options are left? I could write a history of the ideas involved and risk boring people to sleep: such a story would contain basically zero concrete events, because we only have his distant past-tense account of how he came to his current conclusions. Or I could write something wildly speculative and commit defamation: "here's how it might have happened: a fictionalized account of how a mediocre person became racist." Or I could go into hyperbole: Eliezer Yudkowsky is Scott Alexander is Mencius Moldbug is George Lincoln Rockwell.

Would the latter post do OK? I'm afraid to try it: one because I'm afraid it wouldn't and I'd feel like more of a failure, and two because I'm afraid it would.

These are the opinions I don't like having about other people, but they also feel increasingly vindicated when I look at what text performs well on Reddit, and when I observe the basically-zero correlation between the topic of an article and the text of its responses. I've seen an enormous number of successful posts that can be summarized as "the author presents their grand unifying theory of X, with the understanding that the reader will never attempt to apply it to examples outside the post."

I'M A BAT

I'M GAY

Holy fuck! That man does not sound like an engineer. Why is he the CTO of anything?