timmytokyo

Since you're here, can you comment on the problem of SEO spam and what DDG is doing about it? Just today I was looking for instructions on how to replace the cushions on my headphones. I typed into DDG the query "instructions to replace bose headphone pads" and it came up with pages and pages of links to SEO slop. The link to the actual Bose website containing accurate instructions was near the bottom of the second page of results.

The New York Times had a similar article a couple days ago [1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/21/technology/agi-house-ai-c...

In a real tug-of-war, the teams are balanced. In the HN tug-of-war, flaggers have an advantage because flagged posts are invisible to people who might otherwise upvote them.

Not sure there's a better avatar for the absurdity of AI slop imagery than the "cowboy on horseback". That's a pony with a child's saddle on it, and they've composited a grown man on top of it.

The Venn diagram has huge overlap.

Exactly. And companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are disproportionately populated by people deeply connected to Effective Altruism or the Bay Area rationalist movement.

War and Peace is shorter than HPMOR.

Anyone who knows anything about Harry Potter fandom in those years knows that its readers were always thirsty for something new in the Potterverse to read or be exposed to. By latching onto that universe's incredible popularity, Yudkowsky exposed a large number of young, inquisitive people to the ideas of rationalism. It was essentially a recruitment mechanism, one that was wildly successful. Many rationalists freely admit that their first exposure to rationalism was via HPMOR.

I don't think the argument is that their sexual practices inherently make them part of a cult. Rather, the argument is that it's very common for cults to include communal sexual practices that fall outside typical social norms.

Common signifiers of cults include:

1. Apocalyptic world view.

2. Charismatic and/or exploitative leader.

3. Insularity.

4. Esoteric jargon.

5. Lack of transparency or accountability (often about finances or governance).

6. Communal living arrangements.

7. Sexual mores outside social norms, especially around the leader.

8. Schismatic offshoots.

9. Outsized appeal and/or outreach to the socially vulnerable.

Rationalism checks most of these boxes.

Is it really a satire if the same woman in the photo (Aella) went on to have a "birthday gangbang" with numerous men, some of whom are present in the photo?

Ok, iPhone.

Effective Altruism. Also the related Bay Area group known as the "rationalists". Effective accelerationism, while seemingly opposed to EA, is in fact the flip side of the same coin. Look up the term TESCREAL.

Members of these groups are deeply embedded and heavily represented within top AI companies. Anthropic is particularly impacted, as its leadership is almost entirely made up of EAs. One of EA's goals has been to get EAs hired at the major AI labs so that they can influence AI's development. If you ever hear people discussing their personal P(doom), you're listening to a discussion topic originated by rationalists.

The problem with your counter-hypothetical is that not only is it unrealistic, it's utterly impossible. No human would be able to do in such a short timeframe what the LLM did. Part of what makes the OpenAI move so egregious is how bullying it was. It was the big guy coming along with their nearly infinite resources and squashing the little guy who's devoted a good chunk of his career to the problem.

A shortcut that isn't visible in any of Finder's menus. Which makes it virtually undiscoverable.

Finder is full of these kinds of hidden secrets.

One must also consider the well-known biases and motives of the authors. They are going to do everything they can to create hype around threats posed by AI.

METR is a cog in the effective altruism machine. It was spun off from Paul Christiano's Alignment Research Center. Christiano is a well-known longtermist and AI doomer, who predicts a 50% chance that AI will end humanity once it reaches human capacity [1].

The author of this piece is also a well-known member of the Bay Area rationalist cult.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-researcher-ai-doom-50...

You forgot [INCOMPETENCE]

"The project is in no way consumed by politics."

https://bsky.app/profile/aly.codes/post/3mttrv3hjcc27

The "About" page basically admits the entire site is written by AI.

https://reinvently.co.uk/about/

>AI hasn't suddenly sent the quality of creativity off a cliff. It's commoditised the low standard of most previous hand-made work and made it easier to access.

Yes. That's why it's called slop. And now we're absolutely swimming in it. I guess a small number of people like it, but then there's no accounting for (bad) taste.

His good friend Dwarkesh should have him back on the podcast.

Consider that HN is not a single person with a single point of view.

Trump claims that. So his cult does too.

Poe's Law. Look it up.

Counterpoint: linux owns the server space.

This sounds to me like a demand that engineers fully submit to their future as reverse centaurs [0]. "Submit to the slop tsunami, become a glorified and burnt out button pusher!"

[0] https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washin...

[1] https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-whe...

Fascinating take from OpenAI. It really gives the lie to the idea that they see AI leading to a better life for all.

"One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes: rather than a market product, AI is a 'public good' which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of 'digital public infrastructure.' This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape, but I've never met an open-weight models advocate who doesn't ultimately concede this is where things end."

He never says why he thinks AI as a "public good" is dystopian, but it's not hard to imagine why. It's because he and his inner circle won't have the power to dictate what we read, see and hear.

I can't count the number of times I've heard people here say the frontier models are 6 months or more ahead of the open-weights models. That's not true anymore. So the goalposts are shifting.

Moore's law also applies to memory. With personal computers, we've gone from ~16KB in the late 1970s to ~640KB in the mid-80s to ~512 MB in the late-90s, to ~1GB in the early 2000s, to ~64GB today. If you look at the memory per dollar graph, it's even more obvious. This is exponential growth.

I see no reason to think the trend won't continue for the next couple of decades.

It's not like the salute is a singular event. Just look at him on X. Most of what he talks about today is his support for racist political movements (like Reform UK and AfD). That's when he's not tweaking grok to insert "white genocide" into responses for recipe requests.

There's a pattern here. The man's brain was utterly broken by the social media platform he bought, and he's an overt fascist at this point.

"Solution architect" sounds like a fancy term for a glorified button-pusher. At this point you're making yourself interchangeable with a bunch of other low-skill button-pushers.