jml7c5

This is a label applied from outside

I don't think this is accurate. Most rationalists seem to self-describe as rationalists, and talk about rationalism as a "thing".

There is some dogma, sort of, in the form of The Sequences. (An extraordinarily goofy name that belies some of the mysticism-adjacent LARP that sought to treat the ideas as revolutionary. I suspect a 20 year old was behind it.) I say "sort of" dogma because people are aware that the studies referenced in there turned out not to replicate and have generally abandoned them. But you still see some references to them and vague reverence of them.

They're not arguing for American-run websites to not exist.

I found the winning video entry (Photoelastic Particles in a Rolling Drum) absolutely fascinating.

No, there should be no PFAS. The surface will be covered in trace amounts of oil from production, but other than that it should be entirely aluminum alloy.

https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2025-04/foil-stud...

The people having glass literally break from the vibrations would probably disagree with your opinion

Can you cite a source for this? It's not in the video, as far as I can tell.

I would be wary of Benn Jordan's videos. They are full of mistakes and misrepresentations, as Andy Masley has convincingly demonstrated: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-benn-jordan-data-center...

I recall seeing Benn Jordan's responses on Bluesky and thinking they were quite poor. He was unwilling to admit to mistakes, and kept trying to grasp at newly searched papers that didn't actually support his arguments.

For those who can't decipher what this is, a video might be helpful. It literally crawls the controller along a tabletop using the haptic feedback motors: https://x.com/FossPrime/status/2070013003752251660

It was published early 2019, maybe late 2018.

Searching for the title of the article ("Is sunscreen the new margarine?") makes it easy to pinpoint: there is a open letter responding to the article, dated January 15, 2019. https://www.asds.net/Portals/0/PDF/LetterToTheEditor-Outside...

(2019)

It looks like I misremembered a bit. The first iteration that blew up was AI Dungeon 2 (probably this link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21717022 ), which he apparently had to shut down after a day or two because it ended up costing $20,000 for weird GCS reasons.

It was briefly an easy way to access GPT-3 before the public release, but that was later and apparently not as important as I thought.

Was this AI Dungeon? If I recall correctly, it was popular as a way to access GPT-3 which wasn't available publicly.

Oh, I wouldn't worry about posting a dupe. Announcement vs release is different enough, and people are clearly interested in it. I didn't link it as any sort of admonition; there was just some good discussion there.

If there had been no major regressions, do you think anyone would have complained?

If there had been the same regressions but no AI, do you think there would be a 300 post issue full of people complaining? People are holding the update to a higher standard just because they used AI.

Previous discussion from two months ago, when this was announced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47561678

I loved that demo, but the problem with "monitor as a window into the world" is that monitors are relatively small and people don't sit very close to them. The FOV you obtain with most setups is disappointingly small. You need to be relatively close to a large display for it to work well. It's one of the reasons why the idea never took off in the first place, I think.

The problem is that this is either unsupported by evidence or a meaninglessly shallow claim. After all, almost every herbal remedy does something, but it doesn't mean it's actually therapeutic for some given condition.

Ah, my mistake! I saw the references to writing style and assumed. I'm sorry. Unfortunately I can't delete or edit my comment any more.

Thanks. I was confused for a bit, given these days you can do

    echo "-1000" > /proc/<pid>/oom_score_adj

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/include/uapi/l...

Probably a copy-paste mistake while quoting the source. If anything, it makes me less inclined to believe it's AI generated.

that doesn't smell like AI

Note that it is AI-generated. It appears to be based on a human-written outline: https://github.com/Explosion-Scratch/locusts/blob/main/artic...

The 267% number is the rise from 2020-2025, so it already includes that.

I thought that might be what you were referring to. As far as I know the issues there were construction causing turbidity, and water used for construction accidentally going metered. Neither are really relevant to it being a datacenter. Apparently it'll use closed-loop cooling, so it's not going to draw much water in operation either.

It does seem like a canard.

https://dustinrhone.substack.com/p/on-fayetteville-georgia

In Florida a data center drew water in an unauthorized way and the surrounding community had issues with brown water and had to go into water rationing.

Can you cite a source for this? I can't find it anywhere.

Searching for "267%", I think the source of this claim is a misinterpretation of Bloomberg's September article on datacenters: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-data-centers-elec...

I that article, 267% represents the highest increase seen. It's not any sort of average. It's odd that it's reappeared in this article now.

It's a bit different than that analogy would suggest. Learning things piecemeal can leave strange gaps in one's knowledge, in my experience. A book is often much quicker.

That reminds me of this story, from developing for the Playstation:

In the main engineering room, there was a whoop and cry of success.

Our company financial controller and acting HR lady, Jen, came in to see what incredible things the engineers and artists had come up with. Everyone was staring at a television set hooked up to a development box for the Sony Playstation. There, on the screen, against a single-color background, was a black triangle.

“It’s a black triangle,” she said in an amused but sarcastic voice. One of the engine programmers tried to explain, but she shook her head and went back to her office. I could almost hear her thoughts… “We’ve got ten months to deliver two games to Sony, and they are cheering over a black triangle? THAT took them nearly a month to develop?”

https://rampantgames.com/blog/?p=7745

This is probably part of their "weird stuff" marketing scheme. They pick strange items to draw people in: either an item that is truly inscrutable (though often appearing related to sex) or an item that doesn't seem like it would/could be sold on their marketplace.

To them, I have a question like, are we watching the same interview? How can anyone watch that interview and then consider it in any way positively or anything like that, like huh, have we watched the same interview?

It all comes down to a belief in "trolling". Once you assume that your chosen individual might act stupid on purpose, you lose the ability to discern between actual stupidity and fake stupidity. GameStop enthusiasts see that interview and assume Cohen is mocking the interviewers as a show of intentional disrespect. They think he's not actually clueless, just trolling.

Unfortunately, this sort of belief is self-reinforcing. Once you get over the hurdle of believing in trolling the first time, the next instance seems completely plausible. Every time it happens, you become more convinced that the person engages in a pattern of trolling — after all, you've seen it so many times! You don't realize that the source of your belief is not accumulated independent evidence, but a chain that rests on a single link.

I suspect this is confusion between the statistic that 40% of global shipping traffic is transportation of fossil fuels.

https://qz.com/2113243/forty-percent-of-all-shipping-cargo-c...

The Wikipedia page for it is pretty good. Basically, there are a number of short-chain carbohydrates that tend to pass through the small intestine (where nutrients are digested and absorbed into the bloodstream) and reach the large intestine (where water is removed). Bacteria in the large intestine eat these nutrients (fermentation). In some people, this causes intestinal distress. (Bloating, gas, discomfort, watery stool, etc.) It's not clear why this only affects some people.

You hear a lot about it because a large subset of people have discovered that a low-FODMAP diet relieves their torment of intestinal distress.

Unfortunately, because the number of imports is restricted the cars will likely be about as expensive as the competition. Chinese car companies have no strong incentive to undercut the market when they can take a fat margin and still sell out anyway.