Running Lightcone Infrastructure, which runs LessWrong and Lighthaven.space. You can reach me at habryka@lesswrong.com.
(I have signed no contracts or agreements whose existence I cannot mention, which I am mentioning here as a canary)
habryka
Karma: 42,492
Context: LessWrong has been acquired by EA
Goodbye EA. I am sorry we messed up.
EA has decided to not go ahead with their acquisition of LessWrong.
Just before midnight last night, the Lightcone Infrastructure board presented me with information suggesting at least one of our external software contractors has not been consistently candid with the board and me. Today I have learned EA has fully pulled out of the deal.
As soon as EA had sent over their first truckload of cash, we used that money to hire a set of external software contractors, vetted by the most agentic and advanced resume review AI system that we could hack together.
We also used it to launch the biggest prize the rationality community has seen, a true search for the kwisatz haderach of rationality. $1M dollars for the first person to master all twelve virtues.
Unfortunately, it appears that one of the software contractors we hired inserted a backdoor into our code, preventing anyone except themselves and participants excluded from receiving the prize money from collecting the final virtue, “The void”. Some participants even saw themselves winning this virtue, but the backdoor prevented them mastering this final and most crucial rationality virtue at the last possible second.
They then created an alternative account, using their backdoor to master all twelve virtues in seconds. As soon as our fully automated prize systems sent over the money, they cut off all contact.
Right after EA learned of this development, they pulled out of the deal. We immediately removed all code written by the software contractor in question from our codebase. They were honestly extremely productive, and it will probably take us years to make up for this loss. We will also be rolling back any karma changes and reset the vote strength of all votes cast in the last 24 hours, since while we are confident that if our system had worked our karma system would have been greatly improved, the risk of further backdoors and hidden accounts is too big.
We will not be refunding the enormous boatloads of cash[1] we were making in the sale of Picolightcones, as I am assuming you all read our sale agreement carefully[2], but do reach out and ask us for a refund if you want.
Thank you all for a great 24 hours though. It was nice while it lasted.
- ^
$280! Especially great thanks to the great whale who spent a whole $25.
- ^
IMPORTANT Purchasing microtransactions from Lightcone Infrastructure is a high-risk indulgence. It would be wise to view any such purchase from Lightcone Infrastructure in the spirit of a donation, with the understanding that it may be difficult to know what role custom LessWrong themes will play in a post-AGI world. LIGHTCONE PROVIDES ABSOLUTELY NO LONG-TERM GUARANTEES THAT ANY SERVICES SUCH RENDERED WILL LAST LONGER THAN 24 HOURS.
- ^
You can now choose which virtues you want to display next to your username! Just go to the virtues dialogue on the frontpage and select the ones you want to display (up to 3).
Absolutely, that is our sole motivation.
I initially noticed April Fools’ day after following a deep-link. I thought I had seen the font of the username all wacky (kind-of pixelated?), and thus was more annoyed.
You are not imagining things! When we deployed things this morning/late last night I had a pixel-art theme deployed by default across the site, but then after around an hour decided it was indeed too disruptive to the reading experience and reverted it. Seems like we are both on roughly the same page on what is too much.
Yeah, our friends at EA are evidently still figuring out some of their karma economy. I have been cleaning up places where people go a bit crazy, but I think we have some whales walking around with 45+ strong upvote-strength.
Lol, get a bigger screen :P
(The cutoff is 900 pixels)
It’s always been a core part of LessWrong April Fool’s that we never substantially disrupt or change the deep-linking experience.
So while it looks like a lot of going on today, if you get linked directly to an article, you will basically notice nothing different. All you will see today are two tiny pixel-art icons in the header, nothing else. There are a few slightly noisy icons in the comment sections, but I don’t think people would mind that much.
This has been a core tenet of all April Fool’s in the past. The frontpage is fair game, and April Fool’s jokes are common for large web platforms, but it should never get in the way of accessing historical information or parsing what the site is about, if you get directly linked to an author’s piece of writing.
Wait, lol, that shouldn’t be possible.
The lootbox giveth and the lootbox taketh.
Where is it now? :P
Huh, I currently have you in our database as having zero LW-Bux or virtues. We did some kind of hacky things to enable tracking state both while logged in and logged out, so there is a non-trivial chance I messed something up, though I did try all the basic things. Looking into it right now.
LessWrong has been acquired by EA
Ah, yeah, that makes sense. Seems like we are largely on the same page then.
It seemed in conflict to me with this sentence in the OP (which Isopropylpod was replying to):
Elon wants xAI to produce a maximally truth-seeking AI, really decentralizing control over information.
I do think in some sense Elon wants that, but my guess is he wants other things more, which will cause him to overall not aim for this.
I am personally quite uncertain about how exactly the xAI thing went down. I find it pretty plausible that it was a result of pressure from Musk, or at least indirect pressure, that was walked back when it revealed itself as politically unwise.
sadistic people (or malicious bots/AI agents) can open new posts and double downvote them in mass without reading at all!
We do alt-account detection and mass-voting detection. I am quite confident we would reliably catch any attempts at this, and that this hasn’t been happening so far.
Why not to at least ask people why they downvote? It will really help to improve posts. I think some downvote without reading because of a bad title or another easy to fix thing.
Because this would cause people to basically not downvote things, drastically reducing the signal to noise ratio of the site.
FWIW, I would currently take bets that Musk will pretty unambiguously enact and endorse censorship of things critical of him or the Trump administration more broadly within the next 12 months. I agree this case is ambiguous, but my pretty strong read based on him calling for criminal prosecution of journalists who say critical things about him or the Trump administration is that the moment its a question of political opportunity, not willingness. I am not totally sure, but sure enough to take a 1:1 bet on this operationalization.
My best guess is (which I roughly agree with) is that your comments are too long, likely as a result of base-model use.
Maybe I am confused (and it’s been a while since I thought about these parts of decision theory), but I thought smoking lesion is usually the test case for showing why EDT is broken, and newcombs is usually the test case for why CDT is broken, so it makes sense that Smoking Lesion wouldn’t convince you that CDT is wrong.
I am planning to make an announcement post for the new album in the next few days, maybe next week. The songs yesterday were early previews and we still have some edits to make before it’s ready!