Front-end developer, designer, writer, and avid user of the superpowered information superhighway.
I appreciate the assumption of preconceptions, but I began having a poor experience and then discovered the post discussing the move. It was while trying to figure out why things were acting up that I found the announcement of migration.
When I first discovered LW 2.0, I was blinded by its majesty. It was beautiful. However, I can't help but feel some of that beauty has been lost.
I feel even more has been lost in a move to Next.js and the horrors of Vercel. I regularly find myself staring down the barrel of a black void with the all too common text: 'Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information).'
So many little bugs and glitches that never reoccur twice but are everywhere. This isn't even something I can report, because the issues are everywhere and appear inconsistently. Most of the time they can't be replicated, but I figure most people using this site know what I'm talking about. The framework special of clicking a button and nothing happening, then clicking it again and the initial action happening, and then the second input suddenly taking place immediately after, by which point you've already clicked the button again and now things are in some half-broken state until you click away and then back.
I'm certainly not alone in these thoughts.
I understand that these actions have been taken in an effort to make the site easier to develop and more in line with the tech used by the rest of the projects the team works on, but the user experience is abysmal. I don't personally love the experience or appearance of GreaterWrong (due to personal preference, not any particular issue with the site), but it seems like the only way to read LessWrong without experiencing constant breakages and interruptions.
LessWrong was such a beautiful and well-crafted website, but it seems to only stray further and further from that polish. Every action taken seems to push the site further from the web platform and further towards using some reinvention of the wheel. Please reconsider the choice of technologies and whether the recent changes are worth it.
To me, this sounds like you're simply pushing the problem a little bit downstream without actually addressing it. You're still not verifying the facts; you're just getting another system with similar flaws to the first (you). You aren't actually fact checking at any point.
I just saw the term 'Synthetic Intelligence' thrown forward, which I quite like.
Many people agree that 'artificial intelligence' is a poor term that is vague and has existing connotations. People use it to refer to a whole range of different technologies.
However, I struggle to come up with any better terminology. If not 'artificial intelligence', what term would be ideal for describing the capabilities of multi-modal tools like Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT?
We talk and think a lot about echo chambers with social media. People view what they're aligned with, which snowballs as algorithms feed them more content of that type, which pushes their views to the extreme.
I wonder how tailor-made AI-generated content will feed into that. It's my thinking and worry that AI systems can produce content perfectly aligned with a user in all ways, creating a flawless self-feeding ideological silo.
I was thinking a little bit about the bystander effect in the context of AI safety, alignment, and regulation.
With many independent actors working on and around AI – each operating with safety intentions regarding their own project – is there worrying potential for a collective bystander effect to emerge? Each regulatory body might assume that AI companies, or other regulatory bodies, or the wider AI safety community are sufficiently addressing the overall problems and ensuring collective safety.
This could lead to a situation where no single entity feels the full weight of responsibility for the holistic safety of the global AI ecosystem, resulting in an overall landscape that is flawed, unsafe, and/or dangerous.
Taking time away from something and then returning to it later often reveals flaws otherwise unseen. I've been thinking about how to gain the same benefit without needing to take time away.
Changing perspective is the obvious approach.
In art and design, flipping a canvas often forces a reevaluation and reveals much that the eye has grown blind to. Inverting colours, switching to greyscale, obscuring, etc, can have a similar effect.
When writing, speaking written words aloud often helps in identifying flaws.
Similarly, explaining why you've done something – à la rubber duck debugging – can weed out things that don't make sense.
I don't necessarily believe or disbelieve in the final 1% taking the longest in this case – there are too many variables to make a confident prediction. However, it does tend to be a common occurrence.
It could very well be that the 1% before the final 1% takes the longest. Based on the past few years, progress in the AI space has been made fairly steadily, so it could also be that it continues at just this pace until that last 1% is hit, and then exponential takeoff occurs.
You could also have a takeoff event that carries from now till 99%, which is then followed by the final 1% taking a long period.
A typical exponential takeoff is, of course, very possible as well.
When reflecting on the past, I, like many others, cringe. However, I've come to consider this not as a source of regret but as a positive signal of growth.
I once heard the perspective that cringing about the past indicates growth from that time. You're identifying that there are things you did at that point which were regrettable and which you would endeavour to avoid now. It is representative of the difference between your current self (your updated models, values, and social calibration) and the past self who performed the offending action.
Much of the time, things we look back and cringe about now we did not find cringe-worthy at the time, indicating a change has occurred.
Thus, cringe works somewhat as a measurement of growth. If you do not cringe at all looking back at past actions, then it implies one of two things:
I consider cringing as valuable data evidencing that self-correction and learning mechanisms are functioning.