All of these things I mentioned in the most recent open thread, but since the first one is directly relevant and the comment where I posted it somewhat hard to come across, I figured I'd make a post too. Custom Comment Highlights NOTE FOR FIREFOX USERS: this contained a bug...
or: Why Everything Is Terrible, An Overview.1 It sounds like a theory which explains too much. But it's not a theory, hardly even an explanation, more a pattern that manifests itself once you start trying to seriously answer rhetorical questions about the state of the world. From many perspectives, it's...
Yeah, these aren't that bright. I get about 1900 lux at 3 feet from one of the linked panels, per my light meter, vs about 3000 lux from a vanity light bar with 8 100W-equivalent LED lightbulbs at the same distance.
Thanks for sharing this! Do note that it's significantly more expensive per lumen: the one linked maxes out at 6631 lumens, which is just over what you'd get from 4 100W-equivalent lightbulbs. It comes in a two-pack for $180, for a cost of (6631lm*2)/$180 = 74 lm/$. Compare 90+CRI 1600lm bulbs from Cree at about $8 each, for 200 lm/$.
Another way of putting this is that to get as many lumens as the original (single-strand) lumenator you'd need six of these panels, which would cost you about a thousand dollars and probably give you lower-quality light (CRI of 80 instead of 90).
I bought a pair anyway, though.
I think - I hope - we could discuss most of those without getting into the more culture war-y parts, if there were sufficiently strong norms against culture war discussions in general.
Maybe just opt-in rather than opt-out would be sufficient, though. That is, you could explicitly choose to allow CW discussions on your post, but they'd be prohibited by default.
I would strongly support just banning culture war stuff from LW 2.0. Those conversations can be fun, but they require disproportionately large amounts of work to keep the light / heat ratio decent (or indeed > 0), and they tend to dominate any larger conversation they enter. Besides, there's enough places for discussion of those topics already.
(For context: I moderate /r/SlateStarCodex, which gets several thousand posts in its weekly culture war thread every single week. Those discussions are a lot less bad than culture war discussions on the greater internet, I think, and we do a pretty good job keeping discussion to that thread only, but maintaining both of these requires a lot of active moderation, and the thread absolutely affects the tone of the rest of the subreddit even so.)
Without commenting on the merits and costs of children at Solstice or how they ought to be addressed:
Having attended the East Bay solstice both this year and last, it was my impression that there was significantly more noise made by children during parts when the audience was otherwise quiet this year than there was last year. My recollection is hazy, but I'd guess it was maybe three to five times as much noise? In terms of number of distinct noisy moments and also volume.
This year I was towards the back of the room; last year I was closer to the front.
Note that the Bay Area Facebook event is private for technical reasons; here's the LW thread as an alternative.
It is if we define a utility function with a strict failure mode for TotalSuffering > 0.
Yeah, but... we don't.
(Below I'm going to address that case specifically. However, more generally, defining utility functions which assign zero utility to a broad class of possible worlds is a problem, because then you're indifferent between all of them. Does running around stabbing children seem like a morally neutral act to you, in light of the fact that doing it or not doing it will not have an effect on total utility (because total suffering will remain positive)? If no, that's not the utility function you want to talk about.)
Anyway, as far as I can tell,... (read more)
Good catch. Don't think I'm going to change the behavior, as there's complex cases where there's no obvious behavior: suppose you have a highly upvoted comment, whose parent and grandparent are both below the threshold. Do you color it in the widget differently from its parents? Do you expand both its parent and grandparent when it's clicked on, in order that it be on the page and thus scrollable to? Do you mark its parent somehow so the reader knows that comment wouldn't normally have been displayed?
So I think I'm OK with clicking on a comment which is hidden doing nothing. It's maybe worth greying out such comments in the list, so... (read more)
All of these things I mentioned in the most recent open thread, but since the first one is directly relevant and the comment where I posted it somewhat hard to come across, I figured I'd make a post too.
NOTE FOR FIREFOX USERS: this contained a bug which has been squashed, causing the list of comments not to be automatically populated (depending on your version of Firefox). I suggest reinstalling. Sorry, no automatic updates unless you use the Chrome extension (though with >50% probability there will be no further updates).
You know how the highlight for new comments on Less Wrong threads disappears if you reload the page, making it difficult to... (read 189 more words →)
or: Why Everything Is Terrible, An Overview.1
It sounds like a theory which explains too much. But it's not a theory, hardly even an explanation, more a pattern that manifests itself once you start trying to seriously answer rhetorical questions about the state of the world. From many perspectives, it's obvious to the point of being mundane, practically tautological, but sometimes such obvious facts are worth pointing out regardless.
The idea is this: The subset of participants which rises to prominence in any area does so because its members have traits helpful to becoming prominent, not necessarily because they have traits which are desirable. Thus, without ongoing and concerted effort, a great many arenas end up dominated by players employing strategies... (read 867 more words →)
Major props for actually carrying out the exercise!
Given the recent post about Opus 4.5 playing Pokemon, I do wonder if Opus (or for that matter Gemini 3 or GPT 5) would do better. Sonnet seems to have relatively poor image recognition relative to other frontier LLMs. ...New benchmark?