I feel as though the LessWrong team should experiment with even more new features, treating the project of maintaining a platform for collective truth-seeking like a tech startup. The design space for such a platform is huge (especially as LLMs get better).
From my understanding, the strategy that startups use to navigate huge design spaces is “iterate on features quickly and observe objective measures of feedback”, which I suspect LessWrong should lean into more. Although, I imagine creating better truth-seeking infrastructure doesn’t have as good of a feedback signal as “acquire more paying users” or “get another round of VC funding”.
This is basically what we do, capped by our team capacity. For most of the last ~2 years, we had ~4 people working full-time on LessWrong plus shared stuff we get from EA Forum team. Since the last few months, we reallocated people from elsewhere in the org and are at ~6 people, though several are newer to working on code. So pretty small startup. Dialogues has been the big focus of late (plus behind the scenes performance optimizations and code infrastructure).
All that to say, we could do more with more money and people. If you know skilled developers willing to live in the Berkeley area, please let us know!
I use Cursor, Copilot, sometimes GPT-4 in the chat, and also Hex.tech’s built-in SQL shoggoth.
I would say the combination of all those helps a huge amount, and I think has been key in allowing me to go from pre-junior to junior dev in the last few months. (That is, from not being able to make any site changes without painstaking handholding, to leading and building a lot of the Dialogue matching feature and associated stuff (I also had a lot of help from teammates, but less in a “they need to carry things over the finish line for me”, and more “I’m able to build features of this complexity, and they help out as collaborators”)).
But also, PR review and advise from senior devs on the team has also been key, and much appreciated.
It does, quite a bit! Definitely speeds me up somewhere between 20% and 100% depending on task. And I think it’s a bigger deal for those now working on code and who are newer to it.
(low confidence, low context, just an intuition)
I feel as though the LessWrong team should experiment with even more new features, treating the project of maintaining a platform for collective truth-seeking like a tech startup. The design space for such a platform is huge (especially as LLMs get better).
From my understanding, the strategy that startups use to navigate huge design spaces is “iterate on features quickly and observe objective measures of feedback”, which I suspect LessWrong should lean into more. Although, I imagine creating better truth-seeking infrastructure doesn’t have as good of a feedback signal as “acquire more paying users” or “get another round of VC funding”.
This is basically what we do, capped by our team capacity. For most of the last ~2 years, we had ~4 people working full-time on LessWrong plus shared stuff we get from EA Forum team. Since the last few months, we reallocated people from elsewhere in the org and are at ~6 people, though several are newer to working on code. So pretty small startup. Dialogues has been the big focus of late (plus behind the scenes performance optimizations and code infrastructure).
All that to say, we could do more with more money and people. If you know skilled developers willing to live in the Berkeley area, please let us know!
Does GPT-4 or Copilot help with the coding? Have you tried?
I’m a software developer, but it would have to be remote, and might depend on your stack.
I use Cursor, Copilot, sometimes GPT-4 in the chat, and also Hex.tech’s built-in SQL shoggoth.
I would say the combination of all those helps a huge amount, and I think has been key in allowing me to go from pre-junior to junior dev in the last few months. (That is, from not being able to make any site changes without painstaking handholding, to leading and building a lot of the Dialogue matching feature and associated stuff (I also had a lot of help from teammates, but less in a “they need to carry things over the finish line for me”, and more “I’m able to build features of this complexity, and they help out as collaborators”)).
But also, PR review and advise from senior devs on the team has also been key, and much appreciated.
It does, quite a bit! Definitely speeds me up somewhere between 20% and 100% depending on task. And I think it’s a bigger deal for those now working on code and who are newer to it.
Agreed! Cf. Proposal for improving the global online discourse through personalised comment ordering on all websites—using LessWrong as the incubator for the first version of the proposed model would actually be critical.