This isn’t about the content, but: Thank you for publishing the transcript. It’s really, really aggravating when useful and/or interesting material is trapped in a form that can’t be ctrl-F’d.
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Karma: 3,443
IABIED and Memetic Engineering
LW@Dragoncon Meetup
Ahh, thanks for the context. I’m not on Twitter so I wouldn’t have known. LO2025 was my first encounter with the phrase.
(I suppose that also answers the mystery of what This Part of Taldor was spoofing in Planecrash, which I’ve wondered about since I first read it)
I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s something like that. My first guess was concerns about doxxing of well-known writers. My second was participants who might face professional or social costs IRL for associating with Weird Nerds; I met at least one person who didn’t want to be known-to-be-there for approximately that reason. Which is sad because they were one of the more interesting people I ran into but I had to cut/vagueify them in the writeup.
I didn’t cite either possibility because I don’t actually know the organizers’ reasoning. For all I know there could be California-specific privacy laws about photos at events, or something.
Fooey. Nothing I can do, but I’ll leave the link just in case someone who can changes that.
That’s bizarre, I have no such option. From either the playlist or the individual songs, my “share” menu has “copy link”, “copy link at current time”, and “share to...”, and none of the sub-options under the latter are for downloading.
(edit: and I’m logged in as far as I can tell, so it’s not a logged-in-only thing)
Why does nobody ever ask about the Project Lawful / Planecrash epilogue? I still have to finish that one too!
Datum: I want to see a Planecrash epilogue, but after the second case of missing-epilogue I began to suspect that the “missing” part was purposeful—some combination of trolling the reader and encouraging meta-fanfiction to continue the story—and that I should treat both stories as completed.
I have no idea if others have the same impression. I didn’t read HPMOR until long after it and its discussions were done, and all Planecrash discussion happened on platforms I don’t use.
Recursions on LessOnline 2025
The hard problem is, how do you differentially get the screen time you want?
With grave difficulty. :-(
My partner has tried to break her phone addiction more than once, and always runs into the same issue: necessary inputs arrive through the same channel as the dopamine drip. It’s hard to define notification filters that only pass items that matter. It’s hard to find a device that can be efficiently used for travel directions, job coordination, emergency phone calls, and e-books, but not for Instagram, Youtube, et al.
I’m grateful to be mostly immune to that particular siren (on account of finding the screen-poking modality of phones utterly intolerable), but an open web browser hits me in a similar way. Tools exist to block timewasting sites, but my problem isn’t specific timewasting sites, it’s tabsplosions that might go anywhere. Blacklisting is useless; whitelisting makes it impossible to use the browser in ways that I actually need (e.g. troubleshooting searches).
I find phones distracting when doing non-internet activities even when there are zero notifications. Merely having the option to look is a tax on my attention.
People in the room are like this for me. Or pets. Distracting even if they aren’t trying to get my attention, because they might do so at any moment. Also, chores. Undone chores are a pebble in the shoe of my mind.
Memento Errata
I love this phrase. It could practically be a LW motto, or a title for some adjacent project, or something like that. It’s even self-referencing—or at least, Claude tells me it’s grammatically incorrect, and that feels appropriate.
I suspect this varies by event, and also what you think of as “value”. At LessOnline I got a large fraction of the value out of side conversations, but that value mostly wasn’t in the form of practical benefits; the kinds of conversations on offer were simply extremely scarce in the rest of my personal life.
OTOH, at Dragoncon I get most of the value from structured events and the general sense of being-among-one’s-tribe. It’s crowded and anonymous, making private conversations difficult, and I know plenty of other fans in my everyday life, so there’s not that sense of “suddenly having a badly-needed outlet”. Two decades ago, when fandom conventions were smaller and local geeks were (for me) rare-to-nonexistent, that was less true.
I enjoyed the hell out of LessOnline and would love to go to this too. I’m not sure yet if I can make the budget work; is anyone I met at LO looking for roommates?
Every year I have run the Rationalist Megameetup [...], we’ve run out of space and I’ve had people ask if they can come anyway. We could limit the size by taking applications and turning people away.
I thought about this after LO—overcrowding is an attractor state for conventions—and wondered if overcrowding could be managed by dynamic pricing. If you know the size of the space, it feels like you could fill it nearly exactly by making the price some function of
(time-before-event, number-of-remaining-slots). This is one of the few crowds where that sort of mathematical jiggery might not alienate people.(on the other hand, I expect it would make budgeting the event much harder, so I dunno).
Not sure of the title. The tagline was “almost no one is evil; almost everything is broken.” The address was http://blog.jaibot.com. Some specific essays originating there were “500 million, but not a single one more,” “Foes Without Faces”, and “The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics”.
First blog that comes to mind is Jai’s old one. A fair number of rationalist memes began there, I think, but it disappeared at some point. I’m not sure if it was rehosted elsewhere or what.
I can’t imagine integrating any of those things into my normal, day to day routine unless the content of what I was doing were, in normal course, exposed only to me.
I’ve had something like this issue. The places I most want to use LLMs are for work tasks like “refactor this terribleness to not be crap”, or “find the part of this codebase that is responsible for X”, or “fill out this pointless paperwork for me”; but I’m not going to upload my employer’s data to an LLM provider. Also, if you’re in tech, you might want to apply for a job at an AI company. If so, then anything you type into their LLM is potentially exposed to whoever is judging that application. Even if you’re not doing anything questionable, you still have to spend attention on HR-proofing it.
(I’m sure privacy policies are a thing. Have you read them? I have not. I could fix that, but that is also an attention cost, and you have to trust that the policy will be honored when it matters)
The places where exposing things to the LLM provider is a non-issue (e.g. boilerplate), I mostly don’t need help with and mostly do better than the LLM does.
(...for now)
Yeah, it’s okay, conveying visuals is a legitimately not-terrible reason for it. My gripe with the trend just jumped to the front of my brain because I tried to C+P something and got a mouseful of image instead.
I feel dumb asking, but...what’s the significance of “Stanley Peterson?” Google turns up no relevant hits on the name. Is it just an Americanized version of Petrov’s?
I’m sorry I missed out on this. I follow the site with a feed reader, so I never saw the button. :-( Oh well, perhaps next year.
[edit]: Also, from the major-psychotic-hatreds department but not directed at you in particular: What is with the trend of the last 5-10 years of posting screenshots of text instead of quoting the actual text? It breaks copy/paste, ctrl-f, and anything that relies on the text actually being....text. It drives me up the wall every time I see it.
It’s not obvious to me that those are the same, though they might be. Either way, it’s not what I was thinking of. I was considering the Bob-1 you describe vs. a Bob-2 that lives the same 40 years and doesn’t have his brain frozen. It seems to me that Bob-1 (40L + 60F) is taking on a greater s-risk than Bob-2 (40L+0F).
(Of course, Bob-1 is simultaneously buying a shot at revival, which is the whole point after all. Tradeoffs are tradeoffs.)
I found the trailer/intro a bit off-putting too. It didn’t bother me, exactly, but it seemed over the top, and makes me hesitant to share the interview with others.
That said, I think JTM makes a good point above, about the expectations of the general public. I rarely watch talk shows; I don’t know what’s normal. I could understand a tradeoff where the optimal tone for the public also provides ammo for certain kinds of criticism.