Richard Horvath

Karma: 355

Richard Horvath 27 Nov 2025 14:42 UTC
7 points
0
on: Courtship Confusions Post-Slutcon
I am myself thoroughly confused on this point (and for what its worth, a lot of our experience seem to overlap), but I can provide some competing hypotheses:
1. Some kind of a selection effect: Banter is not the cause of sex, but is a way to discover whether the other person is open for a hook-up. People not into casual sex (either generally or at that particular instance or with the particular person) will produce different responses.
  1. People with similar reference points will recognize each other and the mutual intent and escalate via physicality or discussing logistics/intent openly.
  2. It allows non-interested people to be selected out covertly. This is an important feature as it seems some people feel violated if they receive a (semi) direct inquiry about being interested in hooking up.
  3. Due to different cultures/expectations, people often misidentify the response (typical mind fallacy), which downstream causes things like accidental harassment and the “OMG, I just realized 2 years ago that girls wanted to sleep with me”.
2. It may be an alternative way to increase the hornyness of the other person if physicality such as dance is not an option.
3. Whatever the solution is, the effect may be highly (sub)culture dependent. This is compatible with #1, the point being that your local culture may have specific procedure and signs that are very reliable, but in different groups they may lead you astray. For example, if you have a lot of prior experience showing that hours of banter in a generic college study group does not get you laid, but two minutes of chit-chat in a Fetish party does, you will be thoroughly confused and will not escalate when the latter happens again, as in your experience that is just not how it works.

Richard Horvath 21 Nov 2025 8:52 UTC
1 point
0
on: One King Upon The Chessboard
Another way of pointing to the same concept is how a chain as a whole is a resilient thing, but this is because each link has enough give to absorb strain. So a system is made durable not by its components being unbreakable, but by ensuring that individual parts can bend/fail/adapt. A society can hence be enduring only if its parts can be sacrificed for the whole. If a single specific part is worth you more than anything else, the system/society may be traded away for it.
(I think this thought is from Nassim Taleb, but I am paraphrasing a lot and cannot pinpoint the exact source, likely it is Antifragile)

Richard Horvath 5 Nov 2025 21:38 UTC
0 points
0
in reply to: Garrett Baker’s comment on: Tomás B.’s Shortform
Why? Do you mean that cis women use height only to filter out males that are shorter than them?
If so, I do not think that is the case. Statistics from dating apps (e.g. https://x.com/TheRabbitHole84/status/1684629709001490432/photo/1 ) and anecdotal evidence suggest over 50% of American women filter out man below 6 feet in dating apps/sites even though only 1% of American women are 6 feet or taller.
This and the different distribution of ratings (https://shorturl.at/EZJ7L ) implies that the requirements are not absolute, but relative: majority of women aim for a top subsection (probably top decile?) male partner. Hence if all American males magically become one feet taller, likely this filter would increase to ~7 feet.

Richard Horvath 5 Nov 2025 15:18 UTC
2 points
1
in reply to: Garrett Baker’s comment on: Tomás B.’s Shortform
Because “tall” is context dependent. In Laos the average male height is 163 cm (5″4). In the Netherlands it is 184 cm (6 ft). If your height is 180 cm, you are very tall in Laos, but below average in the Netherlands.

Richard Horvath 23 Oct 2025 11:40 UTC
22 points
3
in reply to: MondSemmel’s comment on: EU explained in 10 minutes
“What does democracy even mean when your vote can’t even in principle influence the laws of where you live? Why should any populace grant its authority to enact certain laws to a larger entity that doesn’t share its values? Etc.”
The concept of nation state is already guilty of this all. The smallest legislature is your city/town/village council, followed by county, and in some cases even a regional legislature-like body. A nation state already takes most of the legislative rights from these and dilutes your votes with millions of other citizens.
Before nation states were invented in the 19th century*, afaik most European laws were actually pretty much locally made and enforced by the feudal lord or town council of the territory. It is feels unfathomable today, but back than a lot of towns had basically the same level of sovereignty as countries do now.
*Technically it started eroding earlier with kings trying to centralize power, but in a lot of places still was mostly intact until incorporation into nation states.

Richard Horvath 16 Oct 2025 11:26 UTC
2 points
0
on: How I Became a 5x Engineer with Claude Code
How likely do you think this quality aspect to stay there long-term? Are you able to allocate more time to quality due to having been sped up on the “core” part of development, but expectations haven’t been increased accordingly? When organizations realize they can push out more productivity, speed of development timeline might be forced to increase and quality may drop back to current levels.
Alternatively, do you think paying/preventing technical debt is quicker with LLM assistance than otherwise? I mean as relative cost compared to building out the specific features.
By the way, what IDE are you using with Claude?

Richard Horvath 10 Oct 2025 13:33 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: bfinn’s Shortform
I am pretty sure there are honest and well-meaning financial advisors too. E.g. there are valid and professional blogs/youtube channels (e.g. “The Plain Bagel”). There are some confounding factors though, in particular, pretty much anyone can call himself a financial advisor. Even if they do not know anything about finance and their only goal is to sell overpriced insurance policies.

Richard Horvath 15 Sep 2025 13:07 UTC
7 points
4
on: The Culture Novels as a Dystopia
“Essentially, the Culture must have value lock-in for the values of the Minds that were present at its founding.”
Probably at least some value lock-in is somewhat required, unless you want the particular civilization to fracture. If it is allowed to create your own cult of space nazis intent on exterminating everyone else, your post scarcity utopia may not live long. Even “live and let live” is a value, and many people do not subscribe to it.
“But I think it is more likely that it was achieved by genetic changes, so that it’s safe to raise full Culture citizens in other cultures”
I agree, or at least that genetic change is also a strong contributor. However, if you think about sociopathy as a disability that in most cases makes one’s and their fellows life worse, this genetic modification is a good thing.
“In other words, these superhuman minds have not solved alignment”
I think they did kinda solve it, as long as the other system is somewhat dumber than they are. Just as we are able to more-or-less align dumb systems, probably Minds can do that too. As long as they are not another mind or comparable level.
I think it really is a somewhat large disempowerment to humanity, but I see this as a better alternative. It might sound great to make all the important decisions, but in the end, humans are just too limited and we would likely fail and ruin ourselves. A Culture where humans make the final decision could not have won the Idiran War. If I am to play chess against Kasparov and my life depends on it, I would much rather let Stockfish make the decisions.

Richard Horvath 15 Aug 2025 7:31 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: dr_s’s comment on: European Links (15.08.25)
It sounds so weird I must be missing something. Any idea from someone what is the chain of thought behind it?

Richard Horvath 30 Jun 2025 10:20 UTC
12 points
0
in reply to: Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel’s comment on: Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel’s Shortform
Adding context/(kind-of) counter argument from reddit (the link has a link to the main article and contains a summary of it):
https://www.reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/comments/1ll7ypj/article_i_fought_in_ukraine_and_heres_why_fpv/
I think the comments are also worth a read. I want to share one particular comment here, which I think has a good explanation/hypothesis regarding the situation:
The scaling up of FPV drones for the Ukrainians was definitely the result of artillery and mortar ammo shortages. But that can’t be the only answer, as Russia never suffered that degree of shortage and they’ve gone as hardcore into FPV drones, if not more so, than the Ukrainians.
I think the biggest problem relying on artillery and mortars in THIS war is the ultra static nature of it. With the lines barely moving, it’s very hard to create an artillery or mortar firing position that has decent survivability. Enemy recon drones, which can’t be jammed or shot down easily (as most use freq hopping, fly at altitude, have limited radar signatures, etc), they are prowling the tactical rear areas. Since the start of the war, indirect fire has had to greatly disperse, especially artillery, which operates as single guns now. They can’t even do “shoot and scoot” for survivability, since moving is where most of them will be caught. And if they fire, then counterbattery radars will detect their location. What most are doing is having to dig into treelines, at the least using maximum camouflage, if not building overhead cover, making it much more difficult to take them out with counterbattery.
However, there is only a certain number of hiding spots they can do that. I heard a report last fall about how the Russians in the Pokrovsk sector, despite having ample artillery ammo, had their fire rates drop, because as they were advancing, their artillery could not find and occupy enough hidden firing points to adequately support ground operations. It will be just as hard with mortars, if not harder, because even more enemy recon drones (including those belonging to the enemy’s small unit level) can reach into their range to see.
Whereas, drone operators are much harder to perform the equivalent of counterbattery, especially destructive (actually hitting them). While artillery and mortars are next to impossible to stop once they’re airborne, for drones its often the opposite, it’s not even worth trying to go after the drone operators, they’re too hard to kill, whereas its much easier to try to down the drone using EW especially, or using some sort of passive system, like C-UAS cage. Or active systems, to include dudes armed with shotguns, other drones, or even hard kill remote gun systems that the Ukrainians and Russians haven’t developed/fielded much of.
I’m personally convinced that the ultra static nature of the Russo-Ukraine War is mostly responsible for most of these novel TTPs. And why a lot of this isn’t applicable outside Ukraine.

Richard Horvath 12 Jun 2025 17:08 UTC
4 points
−2
on: Beware General Claims about “Generalizable Reasoning Capabilities” (of Modern AI Systems)
Thank you for putting in the effort required to review this. Post like this help a lot in interpreting hyped literature. I am also skeptical myself whether LLMs are the path to AGI, and likely would have counted the paper as an additional (small) datapoint in favour of my conclusion if not for your detailed summary (I did not read the original paper myself and had no intention to, hence only ‘small’ data point).
“There’s a common assumption in many LLM critiques that reasoning ability is binary: either you have it, or you don’t.”
I agree, and would even push it further: I think the crux of the whole issue is our lack of good understanding of the concept space we refer to with words such as “reasoning”, “thinking”, “intelligence” or “agency”.
I do have a hunch that we have some inherent limitations while trying to use our own “reasoning”/”intelligence”/etc to understand this space itself (something like Gödel’s incompleteness theorem), but I do not have a proof. Than again, maybe not and we will figure it out.
Whatever the case is, we are not good at it right now. I imagine an analogy for this if we had the same (lack of) understanding for moving around in physical space:
Car-3.5 is invented, and is being used to carry things from one location to another. Some people claim it cannot “move on its own”, as Car-3.5 could not move over hill #1 or muddy field #1, so it is just a road following engine, not a general artificial mover. Car-4 is created, with stronger engine, being able to climb over hill #1, Car-o1 has better transmission and wheels, being able to cross muddy field #1. It still cannot cross hill #2 or creek #1, so some people claim again, that it cannot actually move on its own. Other people show that just increasing engine power and doing tricks like adjusting wheel structure will help overcome this, and even most humans would be unable to cross hill #2 or creek #1, we would just go along the roads and use the tunnel or bridge to cross these, just as Car-o1 does it. Are we not general movers after all either? Do we need to increase only engine power and get some scaffolding in place for creek crossing to get a something that can move at least as well as a human in all spaces?
Replace the “Car-” string with “Humanoid_robot-”, and think about it again. Change back to “Car-” but imagine this is the thought process of a horse, and think about it again.
We do not know which of the three variant describes our situation best.

Richard Horvath 29 May 2025 15:05 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Seth Herd’s comment on: Mo Putera’s Shortform
Well, the disturbed protagonists in the Culture series (as in: books, and in the whole of the fictional universe) are usually not from the “Culture” (one particular civilizations within the whole fictional universe), but outsiders hired to act as agents.

Richard Horvath 27 May 2025 9:37 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: Mo Putera’s Shortform
In books about the Culture sci fi universe such things are described a couple of times. E.g. in the novel “Use of Weapons” the “crew” (the ship is fully automated, so more like permanent passengers) of a ship deliberately weaken their immune system to basically get a seasonal cold just for the experience, which otherwise could not happen due to their genetically enhanced immune system.

Richard Horvath 20 May 2025 18:35 UTC
1 point
0
on: Semen and Semantics: Understanding Porn with Language Embeddings
Is the data reliable? I just did a search on PornHub, xHamster and iXXX for the following keywords:
violence, incest, rape, torture
Results:
Pornhub returns a warning “Your search could be for illegal and abusive sexual material...etc” (it is a longer description), returning no videos for ‘violence’, ‘incest’ and ‘rape’. It does return results for ‘torture’ though.
The cases is somewhat similar for xHamster and iXXX, except they do not return any special message for the first three, but also do not return any results. They do work fine with violence though.
It does seem there is some official or unofficial policing.

Richard Horvath 10 May 2025 12:28 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Screwtape’s comment on: Interest In Conflict Is Instrumentally Convergent
Any opinion on this regarding being a somewhat good solution?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q3huo2PYxcDGJWR6q/how-to-corner-liars-a-miasma-clearing-protocol

Richard Horvath 5 Mar 2025 14:56 UTC
47 points
32
on: How Much Are LLMs Actually Boosting Real-World Programmer Productivity?
In my personal experience, LLMs can speed up me 10X times only in very specific circumstances, that are (and have always been) a minor part of my job, and I suspect this is true for most developers:
- If I need some small, self-contained script to do something relatively simple. E.g. a bash script for file manipulation or an excel VBA code. These are easy to describe just with a couple of sentences, easy to verify, I often don’t have deep enough knowledge in the particular language to write the whole thing without looking up syntax. And more importantly: as they are small and self-contained, there is no actual need to think much about the maintainability, such as unit testing, breaking into modules and knowing business and most environment context. (Anything containing regex is a subset of this, where LLMs are game changer)
- If I need to work on some stack I am not too familiar with, LLMs can speed up learning process a lot by providing working (or almost working) examples. I just type what I need and I can get a rough solution that shows what class and methods I can use from which library, or even what general logic/approach can work as a solution. In a lot of cases, even if the solution provided does not actually work, just knowing about how I can interact with a library is a huge help.
  Without this I would have to spend hours or days either doing some online course/reading documentation/experimenting.
  
  The cavet here is that even in cases when the solution works, the provided code is not something that I can simply add into an actual project. Usually it has to be broken up and parts may go to different modules, refactored to be object oriented and use consistent abstractions that make sense for the particular project.
Based on above, I suspect that most people who report 10X increase in software development either:
1. Had very low levels of development knowledge, so the bar of 10X is very low. Likely they also do not recognize/not yet experienced that plugging raw LLM code into a project can have a lot of negative downstream consequences that you described. (Though to be fair, if they could not write it before, some code is still better than no code at all, so a worthy trade-off).
2. Need to write a lot of small, self-contained solutions (I can imagine someone doing a lot of excel automation or being a dedicated person to build the shell scripts for devops/operations purposes).
3. Need to experiment with a lot of different stacks/libraries (although it is difficult to imagine a job where this is the majority of long-term tasks)
4. Were affected by the anchoring effect: where they recently used LLMs to solve something quickly, and extrapolated from that particular example, not from long-term experience.

Richard Horvath 7 Jan 2025 15:03 UTC
13 points
2
in reply to: sapphire’s comment on: Capital Ownership Will Not Prevent Human Disempowerment
This is only true if you restrict “nobility” to Great Britain and if you only count “nobles” those who are considered such in our current day. This is a confusion of the current British noble title (specifically members of “Peerage of Great Britain”) with “land owning rentier class that existed before the industrial revolution”. For our discussion, we need to look at the second one.
I do not have specific numbers of UK, but quoting for Europe from wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobility#Europe):
”The countries with the highest proportion of nobles were Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (15% of an 18th-century population of 800,000^[^{citation needed}^]), Castile (probably 10%), Spain (722,000 in 1768 which was 7–8% of the entire population) and other countries with lower percentages, such as Russia in 1760 with 500,000–600,000 nobles (2–3% of the entire population), and pre-revolutionary France where there were no more than 300,000 prior to 1789, which was 1% of the population (although some scholars believe this figure is an overestimate). In 1718 Sweden had between 10,000 and 15,000 nobles, which was 0.5% of the population. In Germany it was 0.01%.^[46]
In the Kingdom of Hungary nobles made up 5% of the population.^[47] All the nobles in 18th-century Europe numbered perhaps 3–4 million out of a total of 170–190 million inhabitants.^[48]^[49] By contrast, in 1707, when England and Scotland united into Great Britain, there were only 168 English peers, and 154 Scottish ones, though their immediate families were recognised as noble.”
Based on above, I think expecting 1% to be landed rentier is a conservative estimate for 18th century for whole Europe. Even if we go with one tenth of this, expecting 0.1% of the population to retain this (which would imply that their population dropped while all other classes increased dramatically), would mean about 68 thousand people in the UK, and over 700 000 in whole Europe.
AND they are expected to live off from rents of land. I doubt that living of land rents is true for the majority of the 1500 current British nobles you referred to.

Richard Horvath 6 Jan 2025 11:28 UTC
1 point
−3
in reply to: sapphire’s comment on: Capital Ownership Will Not Prevent Human Disempowerment
Not fully. Most of the nobility is gone. Only like 0.01% remains maybe what could be called “rentier”, or even less compared to what had been before.

Richard Horvath 27 Oct 2024 17:39 UTC
6 points
0
on: A superficially plausible promising alternate Earth without lockstep
You lost me at “Bywayeans generally save up enough to move out of their parents’ houses around age 9”. Likely you will lose most people at “ancap”.
But these are only minor things, and I can imagine that it would be possible to pull up some plausible explanation or just to revise one or the other, and keep the core message. I think the main issue with your description Byway are in these:
″...even though Bywayeans are smarter than Earthlings...”
“Bywayeans have a lot of energy...”
″...they love working and innovating...”
These imply that they are already better then us, and would run the world better even in the structure we have on our real Earth.
The message of Dath Ilan is that they and us are the same people, with the same genetic heritage, hence intelligence and vices. But they can still do better, just by having better institutions/methods for cooperation, hence, we can get better too! If you give special power to the inhabitants of your alternate Earth, it may explain why are not stuck in the same mire as we are, and imply we cannot learn from their success.

Richard Horvath 17 Oct 2024 21:15 UTC
4 points
0
on: Concrete benefits of making predictions
Thanks. Some of these seem to be good ideas indeed.
Isn’t it an issue though that in a lot of these cases you/your colleagues have large direct impact on the outcome, and knowing the prediction itself can change your/their behaviour? E.g., if you have 90% public prediction that Adam will complete task X and 10% that Bob will complete Y, their knowledge of these can impact how they approach their work. Maybe Bob will .
That being said, it can still be an effective productivity tool, but it no longer directly measures the outcome of the stated prediction. Instead, it will become a reflective statement (“The probability of Bob completing Y provided he knows this prediction is 10%”).