That’s going to have some overlap with the Central Rationality Application Program

Look, I’ve read some long-ass web novels. I enjoyed Worm, A Practical Guide to Evil, and Katalepsis all start to finish. I have also spent more hours than I could count (even if I did care to) perusing excessively detailed fan wikis and reading interninal debates between nerds about minutia. I have done all of this and enjoyed myself greatly.

But the way they’re describing this sounds absolutely exhausting and incredibly dull. If this isn’t the result of some kind of collaborative project where the debates are between different actual people then it sounds like you’re just dumping your worldbuilding notes into the page and throwing a “he said” every so often.

My understanding is that most professional podcasters start off more or less like this, start getting a Patreon or some light sponsors going in order to fund actually decent equipment, and then look at the numbers one morning and realize that actually they could just do this for a living.

I mean, giving inflated titles and grandiose plans is part of the sales pitch. Y’know, for the cult.

Like, I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding here. The problem isn’t that the people who want to be cult leaders are able to attract a lot of people who are preinclined to be cult followers and those people suffer the associated psychic damages. It’s that even the less culty parts of the rationalist subculture seem to produce a weirdly high number of wannabe cult leaders, even if they don’t conceptualize themselves that way.

I’m sure glad that the people screwing over literally everyone else on the planet for their own benefit aren’t going to screw over us, the investors. Surely there’s no way they could screw over the people who have been giving them a functionally blank check for nearly a decade.

Insert surprised Pikachu face here

Rather than use an LLM to churn through however many zillion tokens and parameters and do an ungodly number of matrix multiplications, maybe consider thinking about the problem and writing the relevant “if()then;” blocks yourself!

You know, like a caveman (according to these same bosses a few months ago).

Seriously. Instead he announced he was going to be throwing somewhat less money into that specific dumpster fire and the investors decided that was worth 4%.

I will confess that my initial reaction was from a partial reading since I got derailed ranting about the silicon valley attitude towards neurodivergence and how much damage it’s doing to us, and basically right after that bit it starts taking a much more (appropriately imo) cynical tone that was honestly refreshing.

Let this be a lesson to those of us who must learn, I guess.

In other news, Cade Metz’ latest piece is actually pretty critical, especially by NYT standards, but you wouldn’t know it from the headline.

“A.I. Agents: They’re Fun. They’re Useful. But Don’t Give Them the Credit Card.”

Ask for it to be password protected.

I think I’m having a stroke. Or at least I hope I’m having a stroke and that this unparodiably dumb piece isn’t any more real than it sounds.