I am not a rationalist, not particularly a Yud-style FOOM-doomer, I have never made a habit of reading LessWrong, I don't particularly like Yud beyond greatly appreciating him as a unique historical character, and I think Yud is spiralling here and too (honestly! he actually believes this!) terrified to control himself anymore.
LessWrong/rationalism/etc, as a loose association of people, tendencies, discussions, ideas, and strongly-activated downstream influencees, is incredibly substantially tied to the ongoing revolution in AI, and not just or even primarily through dogmatic hard-dooming.
It's not just a coincidence that they ended up there and your dentist did not. To develop a novel thought beyond your priors, you need to actually do some rollouts. Their rollouts without feedback did much better than a streetwise normie. What did your dentist think mattered in 2026 from his 2022?
Some of their rollouts turn out to have been wrong and some of them have now become too fixated to update about it. Fine. "They could have just been von Neumann instead" is not much of an attack.
People purely reacting to AI-doomerism (you) have become ahistorically unhinged about this.
"Oh they just happened to collectively stumble into being foundationally early to the most important thing that has ever happened that even now normies are still denying, but it was just a coincidence, they're actually worse than a dentist at evaluating reality"
Neural Networks Are Already Clean
Nick Cammarata (Goodfire AI; formerly of OpenAI) claims to have discovered that earlier foundational research on the semantic structure of neural networks (especially "superposition") were wrong, and they actually (and necessarily!) work pretty much the naive way everybody used to expect them to: particular neurons mean particular, ultimately interpretable things.
If it holds up strongly, my (admittedly jumpy and currently highly-sperged) gut instinct is that this could be epochal, and a candidate for one of the more significant and re-foundational public discoveries since AIAYN if not beyond.
I have not but it was next on my list.
Brotato is the only reason I don't consider the entire genre shameful slop. It's the best version of the Survivors-Like action phase, mixed with a store phase that almost puts it in the family of Slay The Spire or Balatro.
Survivors-Like / Bullet Heaven games:
S-Tier: Brotato
Simple but deep, rewarding gameplay variety, satisfying synergy/optimization snowballs (but in all kinds of different ways, and only sometimes). I play to unlock-completionism and immediately pick back up when any new content is released. Perfect podcast game.
A-Tier: (empty in my limited experience)
B-Tier: Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor
I like the resource-gathering and battle-shaping. Some viscerally satisfying kills and especially explosions. Not much interesting store/upgrade strategy or synergy. Spend half each stage mostly just looking at the minimap. Largely a rote grind.
C-Tier: Vampire Survivors
Often mindless slop. Fun for maybe 10 hours, between when you start consistently snowballing and when you have to start looking up its arbitrary secrets structure on the wiki. Almost entirely a rote grind.
Early MSSP is maybe even his main body of work. The Old Testament, which is all the episodes up until they crash-deleted everything (too late) the day he got SNL. Starts out a little rough, and I might skip the first ~20 episodes if I were working through it in order.
Bro if you want nuclear weapons content:
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Higgsino physics (100k subs)
Particularly Nuclear Fission Visually Explained; physics simulations of eg Chernobyl
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Atomic Tests Channel (250k subs)
Self explanatory historical footage
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atomcentral (200k subs)
Similar, also old documentaries
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Dr. Jorge S. Diaz (70k subs)
General physics history videos, with several on nuclear weapons
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Scott Manley's (1.8M subs) subset of nuclear content and his primary nuclear weapons history series
If you are not familiar with Scott Manley then you have a much more fundamental problem with how you are tuning your Youtube algorithm
... actually I feel like I'm missing some other good ones besides these, but I'm coming up blank; sorry
From a light survey of some playlists, extremely and mournfully inexhaustive, within the spirit though not quite the letter of your small-channels exercise:
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Jeffrey the Librarian (100k subs)
Early American history (Mayflower through Civil War) via maps and surprisingly effective hand-drawn crude graphics
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Bosgoed Animal Paradise (70k subs)
Cute animal videos from a dutch dad who keeps like 200 small animals on his modest property in a non-sloppy way, a little garden of eden; don't miss Kobus, the crow who was raised by chickens
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Type 56: The Story of China's Army (60k subs)
Interesting tales from the development of the PLA (often through the lens of weapons procurement; occasional collabs with the premiere historical firearms channel Forgotten Weapons (3.2M subs)
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RojoFern (50k subs)
Tornadoes and nuclear weapons, elaborately produced in a very entertaining style; an indictment of the algorithm that he isn't much, much more popular (also has a prehistory of other videos I'm not interested in)
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Point Blank Science (50k subs)
Veteran in Idaho who, as an exercise/for fun, practices doing covert surveillance on small towns and chip fabs
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Marshall Bruner (50k subs)
Radar, more than you every thought there was to know, explained in absurdly high quality and quantity with original animations and simulations
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lunarmodule5 (45k subs)
Real-time replays of historical American space missions with the original audio
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Armageddon '41-'45 (formerly StalData) (40k subs)
Some original-in-english archival research on mostly primary documents from and the aftermath of The Battle of Stalingrad; sometimes collaborator sometimes antagonist in TIK's (430k subs) true masterpiece series Battlestorm: Stalingrad (51 eps, ~40 hours, 2 nervous breakdowns)
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Mike’s Videos of Beavers (40k subs)
A guy in Saskatoon who goes down to the river and films the beavers from perhaps irresponsibly close up
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TNMoC (25k subs)
Talks and demos from a historical computer museum
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康康 Kang (14k subs)
A newly-minted chinese factory worker's daily life (attn @DaseindustriesLtd)
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The Warshipologist (6k subs)
High-quality well-organized WWII naval infographics, artifacts, and original research, a natural supplement in the Drachinifel (600k subs) basin, yet he seems to have been punished horribly by the algorithm for some reason
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valerobowie (650 subs)
Exactly 2 topics: Yorktown-class aircraft carriers and The Alamo, explored in high autism mode through original 3D models
If I stretched the exercise much past 100k subs I'd be here all week. There are many bigger channels that are very good. The problem is not channel sub count, it's letting your algorithm stay tuned to normie slop. You want to get to a place where sub-count is a neutral heuristic.
49.3%
You know what, that could even be right. I just really liked the drafting game. But even on the wrong side of that, you can always move at least something forward, even if it's "just" a meta-resource like
This is an important aspect of the RNG mitigation I keep talking about.
IMO (having been seeking them out) the best video for I'm Upping My P(Doom) is Pleometric's. The song in general is the first piece of AI-generated music I've ever had stuck in my head.
Joining it since:
- Bliss (Windows XP) (which you linked)
- The Clodyssey (Superpersuasion) (also from the same guy, anabology)
Unless somehow only these 2 people are especially good at eliciting these, my suspicion is that AI music generation may have actually arrived for me, I just have yet to dive into it.
If you find Cum Town hilarious, you might also like Matt & Shane's Secret Podcast (especially early stuff, pre-SNL-crisis).
Sink-or-swin sample: MSSP - Twisted Teas on the job
If you're interested in stretching to whole episodes of either, here are 2 of what were once (when they had functioning public forums of their original fans) held as the early classics:
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Cum Town - Bonus Ep 5 Bullytown (takes like 15 minutes to really pick up)
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Matt & Shane's Secret Podcast - Ep 27 Q+ (pretty rough for the first 10 minutes but important scene-setting)
Having watched bits of a few streamers' playthroughs, skillful/optimizing drafting is rare, but the biggest key to managing the RNG.
At the stage of the game where the thing you're talking about was relevant to me, I was getting
(again to Testing123, just to emphasize: most people play fully through the part of the game most people natually and satisfiedly stop at, without having had an unfun problem about this)
I maintain that the supposed RNG problem is a skill issue. As a general thing you should be keeping like a priority queue of theories and start each run flexibly. If you start trying for one particular thing every time too early in the game yeah that'll probably get frustrating. Later on there are RNG mitigations that should let you get just about whatever you want on most runs.
(note to Testing123: the supposed RNG problem is not something that usually overfrustrates even casual players in the "main" part of the game most people enjoy; it's a later-game thing)
Crashes are brutal though. I never had one in Blue Prince, but a bad one killed Subnautica for me.
I think I got the final ending but the game is constructed in a way that it is kind of hard to tell
Say where you got to (in spoiler tags) and I'll tell you
I love it, solidly in my games pantheon. Zealous recommendation to all.
Reposting some things I've said about it before:
It's the pinnacle of most of the genres it's attached to, a masterpiece in almost the traditional sense (one very competent guy polished it for 8 years, it's a completely realized coherent vision), and very fun.
Probably 15-20 hours to beat the part of the game that most people will stop at (having greatly enjoyed their time with it), and 100+ hours to optionally go beyond that if you still don't want to put it down.
WARNING unhidden spoilers in the subthread to this comment
What are the most remarkable AI awareness/preference cascade/proto-panic artifacts from the past ~2 weeks?
eg:
- The wildest stream-crossings
- AI-denialists still at it
- Some poor bastard who hasn't been paying attention getting violently yanked into the present live on air
The Old Trader by Light Sweet Crude (Bloomberg writer Joe Weisenthal's country band)
bro
8mo ago
Dredge and Forgotten City are also on my the shortlist. Hadn't heard of Painscreek Killings 🙏
All of those are on my shortlist for what to try next. Please recommend more games lol.
I just started Inscryption (it was between that and Planet Crafter) and have enjoyed the first few hours.
Instant-classic games I played in ~the last year that I must insist anybody even slightly like-minded try:
Roseanne clarifies -- she claims that the Obamas directly pressured the studio to fire her:
Remember when you and your wife called Bob Iger to have me fired?
Further, she has claimed in the past that she was tweeting about Valerie Jarrett in the context of criticising the Obama admin's Iran deal which she knew Jarrett was associated with. She now seems to be making a harder claim that the Iran deal part was significant to her firing:
Because they aren’t the same. I wasn’t fired for lying I was fired for telling the truth about the Iran deal and slandered into oblivion. This will still be worse for our side than theirs. Kimmel will get an entire PR tour to clear his name with the backing of all media.
I don't personally find that very easy to believe, though I don't discount it 100%. The 1st claim I don't know, but it is not helped by the 2nd.
(it's also possible she's just extending the chain of causation back one step to reflect her subjective experience and does not really intend to be making a claim about the motive)
#FreeDase
I value TheMotte at least as much for Dase's participation as for its discourse standards. And certainly at the relatively superficial level he's violated them here (ignore the insults and it's still a substantive turn in the discussion).
Also seconding no permabans for real posters as a general principle.
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