HDThoreaun

Your "corrected" title is much less descriptive of what actually happened

Hermione is the actual hero of the story. Every time rationalist harry makes a mistake he is acting against her direct advice. Her character literally exists to show off his deficiencies and his coming of age basically boils down to realizing he should be more like her.

For many reasons voldemort is an ultimately worthy adversary. Much of that has to do with Harry's biases that come from being too invested in rationalism. Since he considers himself above everyone he's ever met he longs to find someone he considers his better and voldemort fills this role. He wants a mentor so badly that he's willing to throw out his entire ideology to keep him. I think yudkowsky's portrayal of voldemort as the ultimate adversary to rationalism is better than pretty much any plot arc in the original story. Harry does ultimately completely reject voldemort so Im not sure how sexual violence, genocide, and mass murder as treated as forgivable. From the very beginning Harry is deeply concerned with human rights, his distractions and the path he takes toward achieving human rights in this messed up world is again an integral part of the story.

> The fact that he acknowledges at the very end that the characters he created are fools

I think this is my biggest issue with your characterization. Yudkowsky shows harry to be a fool from the very beginning, as you pointed out with the draco/ron stuff. With his dismissal of much of hermiones advice. He very consciously did not create harry as some ubermencsch character who can do no wrong. He shows that harry believes himself to be a parity of virtue, but that he very much is not until hermione's death.

yes exactly. Fan fiction readers largely do not care about grammar or nice prose, just has to not be overly distracting which unfortunately most fan fic fails at

He convinces Draco that his whole ideology is wrong. He convinces him not to rape anyone before he rapes anyone. Not exactly sure what the better outcome is here, just turning him in would only strengthen his violent ideology. There are many complaints to be made about the story, as you said its boring and too long and often too preachy. A lot of the visible changes in the characters happens in the last quarter. Even though the whole story has been building to that it can seem like its a bit out of nowhere.

Let me be clear, he's no cormac mccarthy(my favorite prose is the passage from blood meridian describing the raiders). My bar for fan fiction prose is basically whether it annoys me, its a low bar. Most of what makes hpmor good is the cleverness with which yudkowsky subverts the original harry potter world to try to make a rationalist argument, whether that be by inverting a character or playing off the harry/voldemort relationship in thoughtful ways.

'"Voldemort," said the old wizard. "I understand him now at last. Because to believe that the world is truly like that, you must believe there is no justice in it, that it is woven of darkness at its core. I asked you why he became a monster, and you could give no reason. And if I could ask him, I suppose, his answer would be: Why not?

They stood there gazing into each other's eyes, the old wizard in his robes, and the young boy with the lightning-bolt scar on his forehead.

"Tell me, Harry," said the old wizard, "will you become a monster?"

"No," said the boy, an iron certainty in his voice.

"Why not?" said the old wizard.'

as you can see its nothing special, just good enough

I really, really dont understand this complaint at all. Harry and draco disliking ron is supposed to show that they are snotty kids who have big blind spots. The characters are supposed to be dislikable at the start, the story is about the growth they experience from there. This is part of what makes it a better story than the original. Yudkowsky's harry grows as a character which basically doesnt happen at all in the original series.

Do you dislike succession too? Some people just need completely heroic protagonists in their stories. Thats fine, but it doesnt make the story bad.

> It's terrible as a work of literature. It has many, many, many flaws

Pretty much all fan fiction is terrible literature. I find yudkowsky's prose to be above average for fan fic which admittedly is just saying hes among the best of the worst. Every single fanfic ever written that doesnt end after 1 book has significant boring sections, theres no editor.

> Not a single character acts anything like the original

This is the point. Yudkowsky recognized that the hp world acts as a natural foil for his ideology. By changing the characters he points out the original characters flaws, but also the ways they are better than the rationalist versions of the characters. I dont understand why people claim fanfic should be always be faithful to the original setting. Using it as a foil can work too. The characters in the original, especially the authority figures are all incredibly flat. Why would you want more of that? Even the ones he largely keeps the same, like dumbledore, he explores in a new light which makes them seem different even though they are very similar to the original. The reveal that the 2 Dumbledore's are actually very similar(the exact same?) characters is central to understanding rationalist harry's deficiencies.

> The fact that people like it is evidence of the bizarre incestuous nature of the community that produced it.

Agreed but I think this says more about how crap HP fan fic tends to be than anything else. Yudkowsky saw unmet demand and used it to shoehorn his ideology in

As far as manifestos go HPMOR is a pretty good one. I think that’s what a lot of the critiques about it miss. Yudkowsky is actually a pretty decent writer, especially in the fan fic scene. Not only is his prose actually acceptable which is pretty rare in fanfic it’s clear that he actually thought through a lot of the plot points ahead of time. Harry Potter universe fits very well for his story not only because it’s popular with the target audience, but because there’s a ton of unexplored authority figures in the original and the main goal of the manifesto largely boils down to rejecting blind belief in authority and blazing your own trail. I think it’s hard to separate the number of people who read it because it’s legitimately the best Harry Potter fanfic from the people who read it for the manifesto stuff which again points to the ingenuity of choosing it as a setting.

Ill stick with the free one

That’s a completely fair take. Countries are free to enact sanctions against the us just like they are free to enact sanctions against Iran if that’s what they want to do.

You can import oil paintings from China for very cheap. I’ve got a ton of nice ones

No one is paying mathematicians to develop a conceptual understanding. If the signal for who is “winning” math in academia disappears mathematicians will have a big problem

Google docs exists as a competitor to microsoft office. Google gives it away free to consumers for the same reason AI labs sell subscriptions for 10% of the price of the api. They hope businesses will switch to what employees know how to use.

Completely wrong. CPI is based on the prices of all things people buy. Comparing inflation in one sector to inflation in the whole economy is a very useful signal.

Where did they claim it as their own? Doesn’t the release cite buckmaster and claim their work is a continuation of what he and levent were working on?

Copy pasting ai code from the browser is not perfectly acceptable. The only reason to do it is because you haven’t tried agents. It shows a lack of imagination and a willingness to settle for inferiority.

All 3 of those things could easily happen with today capabilities.

It bothers me when people have terrible inefficient workflows for no good reason

Isnt the entire history of academic progress iterating on work that other academics shared with you? Obviously this situation is spicy but openAI cited their work no?

The honest answer is that a lot of these academic mathematician types who get hired at ai labs are autist adjacent. Levent is basically the chief example

Nuts that Tao literally predicted the exact strategy openAI seems to have used not even a week ago

All the ai labs are open about training on prompts. The question is if buckmaster had disabled that with the toggle openAI provides.

What makes you say that? You think people like paying professionals to edit their videos? Surely some do, but everyone?

That may all be true, but it was certainly not a hilarious experience. I would say my driving was about on par with average at the time, most drivers aren’t really paying attention. The vast majority of people in my how city are not driving under your definition, instead operating a vehicle.

Because the only force keeping costs down is insurance death panels. One of our problems is that we don’t have enough death panels compared to our peers.

My personal friend worked under bubeck as a grad student and told me he’s abusive.

Yes that sounds like something openAI would do to me. Not that they’re just looking through random professors chats but they heard buckmaster made progress on navier stokes and decided to read his chats.

Those denials are literally the only thing in the entire system keeping costs down

I grew up in a very urban area and learned to drive in about 3 hours when I was 21.

The legal process isn’t a free for all. There’s only so much bullshit they can throw at you before the judge finds them in contempt.