I don't know what everyone else is doing but I've certainly been writing a lot more often because of my interactions with AI. Maybe some people used to write more but have been leaning on AI so they can write less but I don't think that's universally the case.

I agree that being lazy about writing and simply using a short prompt or list is detrimental if you are replacing your own output but you don't have to do that and you don't have to accept any of the output either. The best chats I've had usually start with a large amount of my own writing up front, thinking through the idea, listing several alternative ideas, asking a lot of questions, jotting down related topics, etc. and then reading the resulting output and critiquing it, asking for clarification, doing my own research on it, even just discussing it with the AI and doing this for a number of turns until I feel like I've exhausted the topic in the chat. I then often take what I've shaped in my own mind from that process and write something myself, either that or take the best parts of the output and edit, rearrange, reinterpret, and add to it in order to produce something.

I guess it all comes down to whether you are actively engaging with the material, regardless if that material is the result of a Google search, pulled from a book or generated by AI. If you just read it or copy paste it and don't engage with it and think about it then it doesn't do much good.

Is this some kind of astroturf campaign? It's like the 4th time this topic sourcing a BBC article has appeared on the first page in about as many days and the comments on it are all the same drab, short and repetitive expressions of support. This really doesn't seem like the kind of material that normally interests HN users.

I assume there are a lot of Canadians and Europeans (myself included) on HN, who like some positive news for a change.

This seems like US centric view. It’s big news, and highly relevant to tech workers across Canada and Europe.

I'm not even in the US. I just think it's absurd that minor variations on this news keeps ranking so high and a lot of the comments are basically "Good", "Great", "I support this".

Right, we are only interested in anything AI

Don't forget written in Rust

Maybe the US Admin is deeply unpopular, and people are happy to discuss all the ways in which it is wrong and shortsighted?

When you write longer comments you just get flagged down to -4 unless they’re blindly positive.

Something being judgemental is not a reason to dismiss it.

Imo judgemental as in starting from "my life experience" and getting to that's "how to live" is a reason to dismiss it as an argument, as others may have different life experiences and yours is not universal.

It is when there’s no concrete reasoning behind it. The reasoning provided here is “well I don’t like it, therefore it must be bad!”

That kind of thinking would be acceptable if we were like… 8 years old. But as an adult, having that reasoning process is embarrassing.

Yes and indulging this appetite is much like any other, a good comparison being the other fundamental one: hunger. I think that also frames it in a way that makes it more concrete as to what the negative aspects are as well as showing that total abstinence is not necessarily an unalloyed virtue. If you don't eat at all you will starve but you can easily eat too much or eat the wrong things and it becomes gluttony at the extremes. Coming up with systems that allow you to cheat the negative aspects also turns pathological in the long run. Deadly sins exist even without the religious framing but the spiritual, social and psychological aspects are very real regardless of what anyone professes to believe.

You've made a hypothesis, provided no basis for it, blew past that and built some more conclusions on top of it. Along the way you introduced a few more unsubstantiated thoughts.

The post in it's entirety reads as a religious rant, but it might have had something to offer to the reader if you had bothered to provide some sort of philosophical foundation for why you feel that the middle way is the superior way. And that all excess is inherently not only nearly identical in terms of effect, but by definition harmful.

There's basically zero content to your reply so I'm ignoring it.

Just nuke everything in front of the boulder in order to prevent it.

I guess the EA and rationalist cult members are out in force since this got flagged. Not a good look guys, you're just confirming what everyone thinks.

It may have been flagged as the title being misleading, as it did not really present as many details around the sex part as the title suggested.

Jokes aside it would have probably flown a bit better by removing the sex from the title, as the issue and problem brought up is about it being a cult, and not about the sex part specifically.

The title is the one used by the author, how is that misleading?

I meant about the title as used by the author, not the one who linked it here. But in any case I said it was a joke about not giving many sex related details in the article.

I mean I saw it 10 hours later. I'm thrilled to see stuff like this getting multiple hundreds of upvotes on HN, one of the deepest dens of tech capitalist worship in the world. It performing here is a couple steps from it performing on LessWrong itself. I take that as a sign a breakthrough is nearing. It is probably linked to whether the AI lab IPOs are successful or not.

The really amazing thing is, if the Yudkowskians are this weak, how doomed is the rest of our society that can't put up any defense to them completely dominating the narrative about where our economy is heading?

Tyranny is a cancer and Managed Democracy is the cure!

Other countries may not have learned the lessons of history Germany tried to rectify with Art 9 Par 2 GG, as is evident by comments like these.

Unfortunately, the Germans themselves have forgotten. Never Forget rings hollow these days.

Only partly, they also live in extremely remote areas that don't have a lot to offer. It's not like all the other indigenous populations were pacifists, they fought wars, murdered, raided, etc. but they were living in areas that were much more desirable for conquest.

This seems like an odd take. I remember when a large portion of the people I'd speak with online were very pro 2a while also being countercultural. There was a strong individual liberties/responsibilities, anti-government, pro-decentralization and devolution of power, and dare I say libertarian streak. This isn't an attitude I'd associate with the modern definition of progressive.

The big tech era certainly diluted a lot of that but I don't think it ever went away. I haven't seen a huge resurgence in this either so it seems strange to believe that tech is becoming less progressive. From my vantage it is still very far away from where it was in the 80s and 90s. I can agree that it has become much, much less countercultural since it's basically 100% mainstream opinion now.

You're not wrong. We're talking about different eras--and it sounds like you may have been around a bit longer. The mostly libertarian/individualistic (I would dare say _left libertarian_, who seem now to be pretty much politically extinct) era was notable to me in the late 90s through about the mid-aughts. This transitioned into a more progressive culture somewhere in the 05-08 era -- and its rise and fall pretty well overlapped with Twitter's, as best I can tell.

I can't directly speak to The Culture Of The Internet before about '97.

What use is this when you can just prompt the LLM to insert those or use any other style of writing that looks human?