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The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety

aphyr.com

11–20 of 195 posts

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety

#11
post #8

Every one of these posts is immediately pushed to the front page, this one within 4 minutes.

That’s unsurprising given the author’s long history in the tech community. A ton of people see that domain and upvote.

Sure, but 4 front-page posts from the same url in 4 days surely sits at the tail of the distribution. (I guess they all capitalize on the same 'LLM-is-bad' sentiment).

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety

#14

Every one of these posts is immediately pushed to the front page, this one within 4 minutes.

It's been weirdly uneven. Sections 1, 3, and 5 did well on HN; 2, 4, and 6 sank with essentially no trace. The distribution of views is presently:

1. Introduction: 33,088 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47689648)

2. Dynamics: 3,659 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47693678)

3. Culture: 5,914 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47703528)

4. Information Ecology: 777 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47718502)

5. Annoyances: 7,020 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47730981)

6. Psychological Hazards: 199 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47747936)

Feedback from early readers was that the work was too large to digest in a single reading, so I split it up into a series of posts. I'm not entirely sure this was the right call; the sections I thought were the most interesting seem to have gotten much less attention than the introductory preliminaries.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety

#15
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s unsurprising given the author’s long history in the tech community. A ton of people see that domain and upvote.

Sure, but 4 front-page posts from the same url in 4 days surely sits at the tail of the distribution. (I guess they all capitalize on the same 'LLM-is-bad' sentiment).

It's also aphyr, who is incredibly popular. Take one very popular author, have him write a series of posts on the zeitgeist everyone can't help but talk about, and yes, the outcome is that his posts are extremely popular.

I still remember his takedown of mongodb's claims with the call me maybe post years and years ago filling me with a good bit of awe.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety

#17
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s unsurprising given the author’s long history in the tech community. A ton of people see that domain and upvote.

Sure, but 4 front-page posts from the same url in 4 days surely sits at the tail of the distribution. (I guess they all capitalize on the same 'LLM-is-bad' sentiment).

It’s because it’s aphyr.

If ‘tptacek posts a blog post, I bet it similarly does well, on average, because they’re a “known quantity” around these parts, for example.

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