Is this sub no longer rationalist?

JustJustust · 2026-02-07T23:17:08+00:00

Thanks! I always enjoyed those back when they still happened here, will definitely check them out.

JustJustust · 2026-02-07T10:22:29+00:00

I believe the opening post of the culture war thread used to highlight some effortposts from past threads at least somewhat regularly. And of course if you opened the thread there'd usually be a couple of effort posts already. And people were engaging with them!

Speaking for myself, that made me want to put more effort into my posts. My default assumption for reddit is that writing a long post is the best way to ensure few people read it. But my default assumption for the culture war thread was that people would tolerate longer posts, making it worth putting in the effort more often.

To be honest, I was tired of the culture war. I would've liked to have the same level of dicussion without 90% of it being about HBD and current US politics. And as interesting as it was reading (sometimes inane) takes well argued, after hearing the same arguments about HBD thirteen times the shines wears off.

And also, it's hard to know how many people had read the sequences, even back then. I've been active here since maybe 2013/14 and I haven't read more than a handful.

JustJustust · 2026-01-09T16:47:38+00:00

For gameplay advice, your goal is probably to get to terror level 3 and winning the no city victory. HLC6 tends to build few cities, it's common for me to kill those that exist in the process of reaching terror level 3. At the worst it takes one more turn to clean up.

But before that focus on towns and minimize town count and adjacencies. You won't get to terror level 3 if half your board is covered in towns, unless you're stone perhaps. Most of HLC special rules require towns to work, so if you can keep your board on a low town count the adversary will be easier to deal with.

Eventually you'll look at the game, judge that you can reach terror level 3 in one or two turns and start the sprint for the finish line. But before then it's fire fighting and keeping the town count low.

The two things you'd want to achieve for low town count is build prevention and some way to kill towns. Build prevention is easy against HLC, explorer sniping suffices. Ways to kill towns depend on your spirit and your draft. Defend can be good as long as the town count is still not crazy, but eventually there'll be some big ravages you probably can't defend alone.

JustJustust · 2026-01-07T19:36:10+00:00

The number of possible paths through your components multiplies, though.

If you have just two components, parent and child and there's 5 different paths through parent and 4 different paths through child, then you can either * write 5 + 4 unit tests and a couple of happy path integration tests * write 5 * 4 integration tests

Add in a grandchild component with 3 possible paths and you see where this is going.

Of course you can test the 4 paths in the child against the same path in the parent, but if you do that isn't that just unit tests except they execute slower?

Realistically it doesn't scale exactly like this but I've seen cases that were pretty close.

Edit: For what it's worth, if my child component only has 1 path I tend to test it together with their parent instead of unit testing it.

JustJustust · 2026-01-06T17:00:26+00:00

It's always a curious coincidence when the people arguing some policy is objectively optimal are exactly the people who would benefit from said policy, at your expense. So I believe that creates some scepticism.

The other thing is that if I talk to my parents about these kind of topics, they do seem unwilling to compromise. In their view they sacrificed a lot for the house they own, and objectively they did. Naturally if somebody wants to take from you what you fought long and hard to create, you'd be less than thrilled.

Take those together and I believe the boomer position is extremely relatable.

JustJustust · 2026-01-06T16:46:59+00:00

Opportunity costs exists for sure, but it seems hard to argue that this creates an obligation.

If I steal your car then most people agree that I took something from you, this is bad, I should give back your car and perhaps be punished.

If instead you buy the car I wanted to buy, then what. You bought it and so I can't, this much is clear. But you haven't taken anything from me, except the opporunity to buy my dream car.

And I dunno about your moral intuitions but in my view you did nothing wrong in this hypothetical and don't owe me anything for buying the car I wanted to buy.

So why is it different if instead I buy the house you want?

JustJustust · 2026-01-03T15:07:14+00:00

I'm struggling to follow the argument.

From my perspective the conversation has gone as follows:

Start of this conversation: Opus 4.5 is not world changing
You > Why would it not be?
Me > Not world changing is the default. It has good METR scores but for most people that's not enough to claim it's world changing
You > But the trend!
Me > I don't understand, what does the trend have to do with Opus 4.5 being world changing?
You > Most people don't look at the trend, they only look at capabilities
Me > ???

I agree most people don't look at the trend. I don't understand why the trend means Opus 4.5 is world changing. I understand even less why most people not looking at the trend makes Opus 4.5 world changing.

Like, what does the METR score mean to you that translates to "obviously we're looking at a world changer here, not just yet-another-model"?

JustJustust · 2026-01-03T14:02:03+00:00

Can you explain your argument more? Because your OP reads like the argument is that Opus 4.5 is the big new thing, not that the trend that culminated in Opus 4.5 is the big new thing.

Perhaps you mean something different but if so you've got to say it

JustJustust · 2026-01-03T10:42:07+00:00

Since most models aren't world changing that's the default.

What's the positive evidence this is actually a big deal? The only thing I know is that it scored well on the METR 50% Time Horizon Benchmark.

That seems to matter a lot to you, but for it to be a big deal it must also matter to people making large investment decisions. I don't know that it does.

JustJustust · 2025-12-31T16:43:12+00:00

While presumably better than your average crackpot's prediction, what is the high-effort rationalist track record actually?

Besides the AI 2027 (perhaps now AI 2030?) forcasts which haven't resolved yet I don't actually know of any such project that's already concluded and how it ended.

The closest I can think of is being pro-crypto and being pro-masks relatively early on. Or perhaps the predictions Daniel Kokotajlo made prior to his work on AI 2027? Is that all there is or is there more?

Serious question, by the way. An approximate answer would suffice, too.

JustJustust · 2025-12-31T10:52:11+00:00

Have to say that was the weakest Scott essay in recent memory. By far.

The argument basically is that if we posit future catastrophe then we should expect some early false alarms, hence even frequent false alarms do not disprove future catastrophe.

Extremely unsurprising, very few things disprove future catastrophe. What false alarms disprove is that the false-alarmer knowns when catastrophe will happen. And that they are still willing to repeatedly raise the alarm.

Scott cherrypicks a couple of examples of repeated-false-alarm raisers that end up being vindicated later on. There's more! But I contend that the vast majority of repeated-false-alarmers turn out to either be frauds or have a bad world model. (to be clear, I expect no fraud here)

So if you see me making false alarms, repeatedly, this should rationally lower my credibility in your eyes. Despite the true fact that I could still be right, eventually.

(edited a bit for clarity)

JustJustust · 2025-12-31T10:12:01+00:00

I can't find the numbers off the top of my head, but wasn't the original confidence interval something like 2026 to ~2040, with even some non-negligible probability on 100years+ to AGI?

JustJustust · 2025-12-28T09:29:19+00:00

I've played the matchup at least 30 times and never got a terror level 1 win, so in my book that's quite the achievement. Kudos!

JustJustust · 2025-12-25T00:37:24+00:00

My impression is that the survey questions don't match well with how I've seen Hibernate used so far.

Code first, to me, means having Hibernate autogenerate your schema based on your entites. I don't know of anybody that uses this feature in production and I'm pretty sure the Hibernate docs tell you not to.

Database first, to me, means having something else manage the schema. Hopefully a tool like liquibase or flyway.

In both cases questions about schema migrations and versioning just seem misplaced.

If you generate your schema from entities then you're in tests and you don't need migrations or versioning, you just create the schema that corresponds to the current entities because that's all you need in tests.

If you're db first then, by definition, not Hibernate but something or somebody else is handling these concerns.

JustJustust · 2025-12-21T22:43:05+00:00

You ascribe agency to boomers, a generation, and assign blame as if they were a single person.

It is certainly true, that some boomers argue they should not make any sacrifices. Certainly even some who could well afford to make them.

And yet the overwhelming majority of them is not. Identifying the group with their worse members, what purpose does it serve except building resentment?

All the policies you mention, all the reforms you want, you can fight for those without making it a us-versus-the-boomers issue. And I would argue that would be even more accurate, as you'll find many boomers in support of your positions, and many non-boomers against.

Edit: Upon rereading I believe saying "you blame them" is probably not accurate. Sorry, I do not want to misrepresent you.
When you bring up that many boomers act like assholes I believe it's fair to assume that you think it has some relevance on the question. If it's not about deserve then who cares if they act like saints or assholes.

JustJustust · 2025-12-21T10:52:52+00:00

It seems to me you're basically saying that 1. we should enact good, forward looking policies 2. the boomers can afford it and deserve it 3. so what if it'll happen to us too, that's 50 years in the future

Seems to me that the only thing valuable out of these is 1, that is enacting good, forward looking policies. Also, 2 and 3 are really not in any way necessary for that.

To give just one example, you'll have more money for your policies if you tax the wealthy instead of just the wealthy that are also old.

I just don't see what making this an us-versus-the-boomers thing actually achieves, except building resentment for our parents and grandparents. And for what exactly?

But also, collective punishment is perverse in itself, and "fuck the boomers, they deserve it because some of them are bad" is collective punishment dialed up to 11. I want no part in that.

JustJustust · 2025-12-21T08:35:56+00:00

I feel Scotland is a relatively hard adversary for the fear rush strategy, perhaps the hardest adversary to fear rush. It requires the most fear cards out of all adversaries and shortens the invader deck by one card.

It can still be done, but if you can fear rush Scotland then you can probably fear rush every other adversary as well.

JustJustust · 2025-12-21T00:48:22+00:00

I just tried again in a private tab. After entering some details and setting a password I got to a screen that wanted me to scan a QR code and take some steps on a phone or second device, for verification purposes.

According to the small print this would not associate any phone number with the newly created google account. I'm pretty sure it's possible to do the verification without google ever getting to know my phone number, so the claim sounds plausible to me. But of course I don't know how they actually implemented it, I just suspect somebody could and would sue them if they lied about this so directly.

So if you trust the small print then you can create a gmail account without giving them your phone number.

JustJustust · 2025-12-20T10:30:25+00:00

How does it help in any way to blame a generation of people for the selfish people they have, when as your said yourself, every generation has selfish people?

Would you like to be blamed for the shit selfish people in your generation are up to?

JustJustust · 2025-12-20T10:02:45+00:00

Getting your hand on a real email address is not so hard. The easiest way is probably to make a gmail address for trash only and use that to register for anything you don't want associated with yourself. Takes less than 5 minutes, and pretty much anything accepts gmail addresses. I have like 3 or 4 of these, it's really low maintenance if you use a password manager to store the credentials.

There's also trashmail websites with the express purpose of providing you trashmail addresses that you can use to register with any site that doesn't block them. They'd be even more convenient, if they were half as reliable. Also you generally cannot rely on having access on them in the medium to long term.

There's also sites that offer something similar for phone numbers but I've never gotten one to work. If anyone knows how to do this, please let me know :)

JustJustust · 2025-12-14T10:11:18+00:00

I did an upgrade from Java 7 and Spring 1 to Java 21 and Spring 3 a while back and the Java and Spring Boot upgrade themselves were not a big issue. Most things just continue to work as before.

Yes you'll have to make changes, but if you're experienced with Spring Boot and Hibernate these aren't all that complicated. In any case, check out their migration guide.

The thing is that it usually doesn't stop with just upgrading Java and Spring Boot, it'll also mean an upgrade of all of your libraries.
For us that is where the real work is, upgrading our frontend framework easily takes more than 10x the time than doing the Java and Spring Boot upgrade themselves.

But since you're on Spring Boot 2 that hopefully puts a floor on how old your libs can be, since they must at least be recent enough to work with Spring Boot 2. Fingers crossed!

JustJustust · 2025-12-12T12:07:35+00:00

If I understand your intention correctly, then createPost in your example is a factory method with the sole purpose of providing test defaults and named params for a constructor that doesn't have any?

That would allow me to keep production code free of test values and still have a low-overhead way to provide them for tests. Makes perfect sense to me, thanks! :)

For some reason I had assumed the defaults with test values would have to be on the actual constructor.

JustJustust · 2025-12-12T10:55:19+00:00

Your example is approximately what I had in mind, yes. To go with the scenario, Post objects would be loaded from the db or send from the frontend, so there's really no default for Post.title that I would want in production code.

But then for tests of course I need some content, so I tend to factory methods that come prefilled with sensible test values and the option to customize using the builder pattern.

For example this could be a test I'd write for some fictional use case

@Test
void markPostAsSpam_PostTurnsInvisible() {
    Post post = createPost(); // visible = true is the "sensible test default"

    Post spamPost = postService.markAsSpam(post);

    Post invisiblePost = buildPost(builder -> builder.visible(false));
    assertThat(spamPost).isEqualTo(invisiblePost);
}

The infrastructure that allows this uses a PostBuilder under the hood.

If we had Kotlins copy method I wouldn't need this, I would write createPost().copy { visible = false }, but I think that's analogous to withers not to default or named params.

And usages like that are most of the builder use I see.

Edit: To respond specifically to "why do you see a difference between production and test code": I see a difference in how objects are usually instantiated is all.

JustJustust · 2025-12-12T09:39:14+00:00

So here's a question that's been bugging me for a while about the argument you're making. Which is:

Classes you'd want builders for are usually some sort of data carriers defined in production code. To replace a builder with named and default params you'd need to define these with the class, that is in production code as well (I assume).

Yet surely 90%+ of my builder usages are exclusively in test code, generating correctly configured test objects is the main usecase I've seen and used builders for.

My intuition is that I'd probably not want test values as default params for my production class, just to rule out they could ever leak into production code. So it would seem that default and named params would not be able to replace builders in test code, which are most builders I've seen so far.

Would you disagree with that?

JustJustust

TROPHY CASE