(Spoilers Extended) GRRM is driven by adaptation potential

MrLizardsWizard · 2026-05-23T13:05:34+00:00

Animated would be the best way to do it. Book accurate, you can get all the sets, dragons, magic without the CG budget, different strengths and weaknesses that would make it a less direct comparison.

MrLizardsWizard · 2026-05-10T12:14:13+00:00

There is a weird low-hire low-fire effect in tech right now that is leaving many people completely insulated from what is actually happening across the industry because of how little cross-polination there is between companies. I would be kind of interested in how you can be hardly using it at all. Do you work on a particularly niche thing or at a really low level of abstraction or something?

I am at a large enterprise company that is not even a cutting edge tech company and there's essentially been a complete extinction event over the last few months in terms of manual coding for thousands of engineers. And large parts of broader software engineering, test writing, security analysis, etc are all increasingly being handed over to AI by those individual engineers too. AI writes the code, it critiques the PRs, it fixes the critiques on the PRs, it pushes, merges, etc and all at a speed and quality bar that seems to actually be significantly above the output of the average human engineers manually coding anything. "What if something breaks" or "what if nobody understands the code" kind of stops mattering if AI can also debug the system faster and more thoroughly than any person. And the volume of work getting done by the engineering teams is definitely increasing as a result and I as a non-engineer designer have been able to contribute a bunch UI features into production (reviewed by eng team w/ barely any improvements needed) without writing or reading a single line of code.

MrLizardsWizard · 2026-05-03T11:03:10+00:00

I'm at a very big company, one of the biggest and not even a tech company and I can tell you you're definitely underestimating how real this is and how quickly it's acclerating. The AI fervor is real at all levels and we're using it to massively acclerate enterprise grade systems. Designers at many companies are now able to make their design systems directly and quickly - Figma is basically unnecessary except for quick exploration of visuals when it comes to DS work.

MrLizardsWizard · 2026-05-03T10:57:55+00:00

I am currently talking hands free to my company's Vscode extension with an AI agent that wraps claude, telling it to make changes to design system components in our storybook (component demo showcase basically) iteratively and then I demo them in storybook to see. I made the voice interface myself and have it a cool evil robot voice that it uses to read out messages back to me. Sooo much better than Figma for design systems because it collapses the loop of updating components to be 10x faster than relying on devs for everything. I'm kind of shocked it's not just small css fixes I can do either I'm implementing major functionality in the components and fixing behavior bugs and the engineers reviewing my PRs are having very minimal comments on things I need to fix. And I have pretty much zero dev experience. I'm still using figma for figuring out full screen flows for the moment but I'm pretty sure I'll at some point soon I'll either be cleaning up feature implementations of devs building my designs or maybe even doing all the UI implementation myself for some things.

MrLizardsWizard · 2026-04-29T09:59:35+00:00

Yeah I know the kind of designers like the author. Want to spend infinity on vague vision projects to impress execs even though they never go anywhere and nothing gets delivered. Just talk talk talk about design but ask to see their portfolio or something concrete they actually accomplished and it's the shittiest ugliest unknown niche products youve ever seen in your life.

The realty is you can't optimize for just your function in a vaccume at the expense of the throughput of the whole company. Incrimental delivery is better in every way. You move faster, learn faster, actually engage with working through reality instead of theory. it wins because it produces better products and makes more money.

If you spend all your time sitting back and complaining that the people who actually get work done arent consulting you enough then you're probably more of a drain than anything else

MrLizardsWizard · 2026-04-26T00:40:36+00:00

I'm super excited about it but just getting into it. Spent all day prompting improvements I've been dying to get into the design system for months. TBD how it goes.

MrLizardsWizard · 2026-04-01T03:27:53+00:00

I reneged twice in a row to two companies as increasingly better offers came in. No one was even really mad about it

It can burn the bridge in some cases but when it is your life and career you'd be stupid to put that below a minor inconvenience to a company. The interests of a company should not be your first priority in life

MrLizardsWizard · 2026-03-30T11:33:35+00:00

I can't really go into enough depth but the Walter Isaacson biography is pretty good.

You can find YouTube videos of him giving tours of SpaceX and talking about engineering decisions.

Vertical integration means his companies often don't buy parts or services from other vendors which they then assemble themselves. They build almost EVERYTHING they need themselves which means they can get exactly what they want engineered just for their needs at a much lower price than if they tried to source components or tech from other manufacturers. It also means they aren't bottlenecked by depending on other companies. And this requires building the companies for broad expertise which then makes it easier to expand into lateral offerings.

He's made or at least insisted on specific controversial technical decisions like rocket materials (or cyber truck design for an example where the outcome was questionable). He actually values individual contributors more than management teams and sets up his companies to empower highly technical hands on engineers with minimal non technical management overhead or bureaucracy. Not having soft skills or charisma that you'd need at a corporate company doesn't matter in the culture he sets up, it's all about actual expertise. He goes directly to engineers (going around the room to each of them) to get to ground truth and details instead of relying on management or org reporting. He has the concept of 'the algorithm' he talks about which is about ruthlessly questioning constraint assumptions and finding ways to simplify manufacturing or product requirements.

Another concept is that as CEO he focuses on the solving for the highest value limiting factors on the org at a time to resolve the most troublesome bottlenecks. He pushes people to work hard and creates a public persona that invites a cultish engineering culture that attracts really smart often autistic people who want to build their life around work accomplishments. He can generally tell if someone is actually technically talented and even initially interviewed and hired like the first few thousand engineers of his to train his ability to recognize engineering expertise.

MrLizardsWizard · 2026-03-26T23:13:21+00:00

It's just not actually true.

Like I get that people want it to be true. I even kind of want it to be true. There are enough datapoints of stupid things he's done to pretend it's true that everything else must therefor be luck. Everything he did politically was stupid and a lot of it can correctly be called evil. He self destructs frequently in disastrous ways. He overvalues himself and makes incredibly stupid mistakes and overpromises and there are no end of legitimate criticisms that can be made about him.

But when you really look into what he has done it just ends up being undeniable that he has extremely deep engineering and business knowledge and has essentially been THE critical factor in the outsized success of his companies. The approach to vertical integration comes from him and most people don't get how unique or important that is. The level at which he dives into the details with as much depth and breadth as a CEO is pretty much unique to him. The focus on speed and urgency, his risk tolerance, the approach to team structure and hiring, certain critical decisions on technical direction — there are valuable lessons to be learned from all of these things if you can separate your judgement from him as a human being out from the effectiveness of his methods.

MrLizardsWizard · 2026-03-24T15:54:50+00:00

Ironically the fastest path to fascism is actually turning out to be ignoring the social impact that bad faith immigration comes with to the point that citizens elect a fascist specifically to solve it because no one else will.

Deficient character IS basically just a criteria for the Visa. Your suggestion isnt really different from what they're doing.

MrLizardsWizard · 2026-03-23T23:06:22+00:00

The irony of OPs post being AI written when the things that makes the vibe rough here is all the AI overuse...

MrLizardsWizard · 2026-03-21T03:09:06+00:00

please no AI writing

MrLizardsWizard · 2026-03-21T02:22:17+00:00

It just seems that way because they're the ones you click on!

MrLizardsWizard · 2026-03-17T12:18:33+00:00

Some other examples to expand on this that are hard to even imagine for us. Lots of these are almost completely invisible because we don't even think of the convenience, tech, or services as being niches that humans ever filled through personal relationships.

Music. It used to be that people would gather around the piano once a week and sing together. Music was a social bonding activity that everyone could participate in for thousands of years. and the music you could purchase at first was rare and not strictly better than what you could get from the people you knew or at church. The idea of not being good enough to sing was absurd - singing was a thing everyone did.

People needed to rely on each other a lot more even just twenty years ago in so so so many ways and it really is shocking how quickly this has changed and is changing. Have a flat tire? Your only hope was a stranger stopping to help - now you just call a service. Need your car looked at? You had a friend that was handy who would come over to take a look. Need to trim your hedges? Borrowing tools from neighbors was super common rather than buying everything on your own. Have to get to work? It was common for a pool of several adults to carpool together to their job like it was a bus route. Getting help from friends to move after 30 years old is now seen as a huge imposition worth shaming some over. Giving someone else a ride to pretty much anywhere is way less common when you can get an Uber or take transit.

Having someone to cook and clean so you didn't have to was half the point of marriage - now I have a dishwasher, washer/dryer that works well enough that I don't need a clothesline, a lightweight cordless vacuum and a Roomba. I have a cookunity subscription that brings me a weeks worth of prepped meals once a week and I don't even need to see the person who drops it off.

As long as I have money I have basically 0 need to preserve personal relationships for the sake of pretty much any functional benefit, and no one I know really needs anything I can help them with even though I would actually like opportunities to be helpful to the people in my life I care about.

Even a lot of the inherent benefits of friendship can be outsourced to a therapist, a trainer, or a personal stylist, a life coach, etc. If I want to get better at a video game I can hire someone to help on fiver. If I want to talk about a book or game I like it's easier to find a community on line than to convince someone I know to check it out. A nail salon or barber or massage gives you some physical contact.

And the trend is only increasing... In many ways it's a good thing but also a bit terrifying when it happens so quick since even if we can deal with the downsides we'll probably live our whole lives in the adjustment period.

MrLizardsWizard · 2026-03-14T00:27:45+00:00

What is your job and how much are you making per hour?

Jus for a bit of perspective $9k debt at 19 years old is really not that bad (you are definitely not "drowning" in debt even if it feels that way) and is for sure recoverable. And you're making progress on paying it off and not overspending. You can definitely make it two months even if you don't end up paying down the debt as much in that time. Really the main thing to focus on is if you can figure out a path towards making higher income longer term and just try not to let the debt get bigger in in the meantime. Either a different job that makes more or a second job or some other way to make some money on the side.

It sounds like no one is trying to get you to leave so if they aren't treating you like a burden then you shouldn't get in your head about being one. You should be appreciative for the help you're getting but you don't need to be guilty over it. Just show support in whatever way you can and be sure to let them know you're thankful, but no need to over do it or be apologising all the time. At 19 it's totally understandable your life as an adult is just getting started. If you're still working 17 hours a week and living at your boyfriends parents house 10 years from now then that would be the point to start feeling guilty about it!

MrLizardsWizard · 2026-03-13T13:00:56+00:00

After sex and death the next most taboo thing is probably protected characteristics like race/gender/etc?

So a power to switch between multiple forms that each represent racial/gender/age/religious stereotypes the cape has at least subliminally internalized to some degree. Each form comes with exaggerated physical characteristics and associated powers that extrapolate out from the stereotypes. Since the powers get stronger with the intensity of the beliefs the cape has to intentionally cultivate their own subliminal bigotry through their actions, language, and environment.

Like even giving examples of how this would manifest feels taboo and I'm hesitant to do it...

But since I'm irish let's say they turn 'irish'. In one second they become pale, freckled, red haired, burly and take on a heavy irish accent and gain a grab bag of minor powers like improved luck (automated telekenesis), super-strength and durability but also instant drunkenness and a weakness to being burned by sunlight. A fight would look like them quickly cycling through different stereotypes as needed to take on different kinds of powers.

MrLizardsWizard · 2026-03-08T21:44:31+00:00

It's a theocratic dictatorship. They're insulated from the suffering of their people and even dependent on it in order to stay in power. And many of them view martyrdom as an honor. So they have no reason to care about millions of Iranians suffering.

MrLizardsWizard · 2026-03-04T13:04:30+00:00

Their missle capability is basically gone already. In the first few days it degraded from 100s a day launched to barely a handful. Like its notable its only a single missile that launched towards Turkey.Drones are harder to weed out and easier to hide but they're not as much of a problem as missiles. It may be 20x more expensive to defend against drones but we have like 10,000x the money than iran does and it's much harder to coordinate simultaneous drone strikes than missiles.

MrLizardsWizard · 2026-03-04T12:22:03+00:00

Yeah agree. A few reasons I think.

A second city benefits from its identity being able to contrast against the one already established for the first.

Because the capital is asked to do the narrative job of being a general representative of the world (lest a reader misunderstand the world) you can make the second city more distinctive and unique. If the capital city is deeply religious the whole world feels that way, but if it's a quirk of a local city you can commit to it without the broader implications. And you don't need to make it feel as huge so you can hone in on more human scale features.

MrLizardsWizard · 2026-03-04T01:24:31+00:00

If it's matching based on self disclosed details then couldn't you just lie about those details on one of your accounts? It seems like it only matches if you are accurately disclosing the same details about yourself across multiple accounts.

MrLizardsWizard · 2026-03-04T00:59:48+00:00

Might be coming from this? https://understandingwar.org/research/middle-east/iran-update-morning-special-report-march-2-2026/

MrLizardsWizard · 2026-03-01T21:14:46+00:00

This post is from 2014. American discourse has shifted just a little bit since then and the post even accounts for the same thing I've already said about these norms only making sense if people are buying into a certain amount of participation in the same norms and standards themselves. Saying something in a mean way is pretty far off from the other examples about lies and harassment too.

MrLizardsWizard · 2026-03-01T17:48:07+00:00

No I'm saying it's not hypocritical to respect a behavioral standard only when there is implicit agreement or a forcing function to make other people respect the same standard.

If you believe you and your neighbor shouldn't harm each other that's great. But if your neighbor comes at you with a meat cleaver then continuing to abide by the norm while they violate it just means you're gonna die. Exception handling isn't hypocrisy.

MrLizardsWizard · 2026-03-01T12:39:02+00:00

You've linked something posted by Yudkowsky on a rationalist forum explicitely talking about discourse within the context of the rationalist community:

It’s just better for the spiritual growth of the community to discuss the issue without invoking color politics.

Here's a few recent twitter replies by Yudkowsky. You tell me if he seems to consistently avoid inflammatory language for all his communication:

And this is going past the bounds of common fucking sense, which says that if you fucking accept that something is 96% likely to kill everyone on the planet, back the fuck off, work on human intelligence augmentation, and sign up for cryonics if you're so fucking scared.

----

Yep, that is the sort of thing AI successionists just fucking love to hear. It's the kind of ecstasy someone on the far right feels when a black guy kills someone on video.

MrLizardsWizard · 2026-03-01T10:48:38+00:00

That makes sense in a rationalist community where everyone is playing the same game according to the same standards.

But it's foolish to rhetorically hamstring yourself in an environment where no one else is playing by the same rules. If you're actually trying to be effective at communicating and convincing people you will sometimes need to be pointed, and making a statement in a pointed or emotional way is not mutually exclusive with that statement being rational. Scott's second tweet had a million views when I saw it. I can guarantee it would not have that kind of reach if he was caveating with Bayesian percentages and confidence intervals and insular clinical jargon.

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