Edit: I feel less strongly following the clarification below. habryka clarified that (a) they reverted a more disruptive version (pixel art deployed across the site) and (b) that ensuring minimal disruption on deep-links is a priority.
I’m not a fan of April Fools’ events on LessWrong since it turned into the de-facto AI safety publication platform.
We want people to post serious research on the site, and many research results are solely hosted on LessWrong. For instance, this mech interp review has 22 references pointing to lesswrong.com (along with 22 further references to alignmentforum.org).
Imagine being a normal academic researcher following one of these references, and finding lesswrong.com on April Fools’ day or Arkhipov / Petrov day[1]. I expect there’s a higher-than-normal chance you’ll put this off as weird and not read the post (and possibly future references to LessWrong).
I would prefer LessWrong to not run these events (or make them opt-in), for the same reason I would expect arxiv.org not to do so.
It’s always been a core part of LessWrong April Fool’s that we never substantially disrupt or change the deep-linking experience.
So while it looks like a lot of going on today, if you get linked directly to an article, you will basically notice nothing different. All you will see today are two tiny pixel-art icons in the header, nothing else. There are a few slightly noisy icons in the comment sections, but I don’t think people would mind that much.
This has been a core tenet of all April Fool’s in the past. The frontpage is fair game, and April Fool’s jokes are common for large web platforms, but it should never get in the way of accessing historical information or parsing what the site is about, if you get directly linked to an author’s piece of writing.
I initially noticed April Fools’ day after following a deep-link. I thought I had seen the font of the username all wacky (kind-of pixelated?), and thus was more annoyed. But I can’t seem to reproduce this now and conclude it was likely not real. Might have been a coincidence / unrelated site-loading bug / something temporarily broken on my end.
I initially noticed April Fools’ day after following a deep-link. I thought I had seen the font of the username all wacky (kind-of pixelated?), and thus was more annoyed.
You are not imagining things! When we deployed things this morning/late last night I had a pixel-art theme deployed by default across the site, but then after around an hour decided it was indeed too disruptive to the reading experience and reverted it. Seems like we are both on roughly the same page on what is too much.
Edit: I feel less strongly following the clarification below. habryka clarified that (a) they reverted a more disruptive version (pixel art deployed across the site) and (b) that ensuring minimal disruption on deep-links is a priority.
I’m not a fan of April Fools’ events on LessWrong since it turned into the de-facto AI safety publication platform.
We want people to post serious research on the site, and many research results are solely hosted on LessWrong. For instance, this mech interp review has 22 references pointing to lesswrong.com (along with 22 further references to alignmentforum.org).
Imagine being a normal academic researcher following one of these references, and finding lesswrong.com on April Fools’ day or Arkhipov / Petrov day[1]. I expect there’s a higher-than-normal chance you’ll put this off as weird and not read the post (and possibly future references to LessWrong).
I would prefer LessWrong to not run these events (or make them opt-in), for the same reason I would expect arxiv.org not to do so.
I can see a cost-benefit trade-off for Arkhipov / Petrov day, but the upside of April Fools’ seems much lower to me.
It’s always been a core part of LessWrong April Fool’s that we never substantially disrupt or change the deep-linking experience.
So while it looks like a lot of going on today, if you get linked directly to an article, you will basically notice nothing different. All you will see today are two tiny pixel-art icons in the header, nothing else. There are a few slightly noisy icons in the comment sections, but I don’t think people would mind that much.
This has been a core tenet of all April Fool’s in the past. The frontpage is fair game, and April Fool’s jokes are common for large web platforms, but it should never get in the way of accessing historical information or parsing what the site is about, if you get directly linked to an author’s piece of writing.
I largely retract my criticism based on this. I had thought it affected deep-links more than it does. [1]
I initially noticed April Fools’ day after following a deep-link. I thought I had seen the font of the username all wacky (kind-of pixelated?), and thus was more annoyed. But I can’t seem to reproduce this now and conclude it was likely not real. Might have been a coincidence / unrelated site-loading bug / something temporarily broken on my end.
You are not imagining things! When we deployed things this morning/late last night I had a pixel-art theme deployed by default across the site, but then after around an hour decided it was indeed too disruptive to the reading experience and reverted it. Seems like we are both on roughly the same page on what is too much.