Lots of people are pushing back on this, but I do want to say explicitly that I agree that raw LLM-produced text is mostly not up to LW standards, and that the writing style that current-gen LLMs produce by default sucks. In the new-user-posting-for-the-first-time moderation queue, next to the SEO spam, we do see some essays that look like raw LLM output, and we reject these.

That doesn't mean LLMs don't have good use around the edges. In the case of defining commonly-used jargon, there is no need for insight or originality, the task is search-engine-adjacent, and so I think LLMs have a role there. That said, if the glossary content is coming out bad in practice, that's important feedback.

In your climate, defection from the natural gas and electric grid is very far from being economical, because the peak energy demand for the year is dominated by heating, and solar peaks in the summer, so you would need to have extreme oversizing of the panels to provide sufficient energy in the winter.

I think the prediction here is that people will detach only from the electric grid, not from the natural gas grid. If you use natural gas heat instead of a heat pump for part of the winter, then you don't need to oversize your solar panels as much.

If you set aside the pricing structure and just look at the underlying economics, the power grid will still be definitely needed for all the loads that are too dense for rooftop solar, ie industry, car chargers, office buildings, apartment buildings, and some commercial buildings. If every suburban house detached from the grid, these consumers would see big increases in their transmission costs, but they wouldn't have much choice but to pay them. This might lead to a world where downtown areas and cities have electric grids, but rural areas and the sparser parts of suburbs don't.

There's an additional backup-power option not mentioned here, which is that some electric cars can feed their battery back to a house. So if there's a long string of cloudy days but the roads are still usable, you can transport power from the grid to an off-grid house by charging at a public charger, and discharging at home. This might be a better option than a natural-gas generator, especially if it only comes up rarely.

If rural areas switch to a regime where everyone has solar+batteries, and the power grid only reaches downtown and industrial areas... that actually seems like it might just be optimal? The price of disributed generation and storage falls over time, but the cost of power lines doesn't, so there should be a crossover point somewhere where the power lines aren't worth it. Maybe net-metering will cause the switchover to happen too soon, but it does seem like a switchover should happen eventually.

Many people seem to have a single bucket in their thinking, which merges "moral condemnation" and "negative product review". This produces weird effects, like writing angry callout posts for a business having high prices.

I think a large fraction of libertarian thinking is just the abillity to keep these straight, so that the next thought after "business has high prices" is "shop elsewhere" rather than "coordinate punishment".

Worth noting explicitly: while there weren't any logs left of prompts or completions, there were logs of API invocations and errors, which contained indications that whatever this was, it was still under development and not an already-scaled setup. Eg we saw API calls fail with invalid-arguments, then get retried successfully after a delay.

The indicators-of-compromise aren't a good match between the Permiso blog post and what we see in logs; in particular we see the user agent string Boto3/1.29.7 md/Botocore#1.32.7 ua/2.0 os/windows#10 md/arch#amd64 lang/python#3.12.4 md/pyimpl#CPython cfg/retry-mode#legacy Botocore/1.32.7 which is not mentioned. While I haven't checked all the IPs, I checked a sampling and they didn't overlap. (The IPs are a very weak signal, however, since they were definitely botnet IPs and botnets can be large.)

Ah, sorry that one went unfixed for as long as it did; a fix is now written and should be deployed pretty soon.

This is a bug and we're looking into it. It appears to be specific to Safari on iOS (Chrome on iOS is a Safari skin); it doesn't affect desktop browsers, Android/Chrome, or Android/Firefox, which is why we didn't notice earlier. This most likely started with a change on desktop where clicking on a post (without modifiers) opens when you press the mouse button, rather than when you release it.

Standardized tests work, within the range they're testing for. You don't need to overthink that part. If you want to make people's intelligence more legible and more provable, what you have is more of a social and logistical issue: how do you convince people to publish their test scores, get people to care about those scores, and ensure that the scores they publish are real and not the result of cheating?

And the only practical way to realize this, that I can think of now, is by predicting the largest stock markets such as the NYSE, via some kind of options trading, many many many times within say a calendar year, and then showing their average rate of their returns is significantly above random chance.

The threshold for doing this isn't being above average relative to human individuals, it's being close to the top relative to specialized institutions. That can occasionally be achievable, but usually it isn't.