Am seeking suggestions on audiobooks to listen to! I think I’d like to start with the works of Ursula K. Le Guin, tho I don’t know what order to go with, or if that matters.
this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2026
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For the Hainish Cycle books the order doesn't matter too much, they're not direct sequels.
I started with (and would recommend starting with) The Left Hand of Darkness. The first 3 Hainish novels are also her first novels and she was still developing her style, in my opinion. I think The Dispossessed is her finest work, although I still haven't read all of her novels.
Barbara Rosenblat's recordings of the Amelia Peabody novels are fun.
presented without comment: https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/my-falling-out-with-the-rationalist (via https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/my-falling-out-with-the-rationalist)
I don't think that the Rats are an offshoot of the Skeptics and New Atheists just a space which competed for the same young, male, educated, Autistic Anglo audience. They deliberately removed the parts of the skeptic curriculum which involve introspection and ethnography, because they all wanted to run some grift on their audiences so the audiences needed poor epistemic hygiene.
That was kind of a nothing post? I think the author is misrepresenting the growth (or at least failing to connect the most important dots) of the lesswrong rationalist by portraying them as a natural evolution of the skeptics movement and not the deliberate cultivation of an audience by Eliezer looking for people to spread his ideology to and by Thiel looking to influence farm and create a cult incubator. And then the post is titled "my falling out with the rationalist", and they write they "wanted to offer a more personal perspective " but they don't actually discuss that much of the personal angle either...
yeah, subculturally they're unrelated strains
like, just factually in terms of history, they're unrelated strains. LW rats come in a straight line from the Extropians in the '90s. The previous-millennium skeptics have crossover with those guys, but they're not the same as a group at all.
Yes exactly how can you write an entire thing treating rationalism like something you can do an apostasy out of and never mention Yud once.
I assume the personal perspective is him tacitly admitting to being attracted to skepticism for the debate bro culture, especially the parts that bordered on harassment. Even the inciting incident of "leaving rationalism" is framed more as him growing out of the need to long-form debate someone, specifically James Damore, the google engineer who published a manifesto about how women don't belong in tech.
I don't know the author so I don't know if it is important that he was fine with pranking the timecube guy but decided enough is enough when it was time to take a pro-feminist side.
how did it not click that lcamtuf was an ex-rat
via dumpsterfire
Robotaxi riders are falling asleep, sparking frantic emergency service calls
So many robotaxi customers have nodded off in the midst of a ride that Austin police and firefighters even have a name for the incidents: “sleepers”. The Texas capital recorded 99 such calls in Waymo’s first nine months of service there, said Roger Patterson, a commander with Austin-Travis County Emergency Medical Services.
Apparently it's cheaper to foist the job of waking passengers up on 911 than to hire an employee to do it. Good ol' privatize the gains / socialize the losses!
Daft ai project of the week: “lore”, a version control system that should not be confused with another vcs of the same name open-sourced by epic games a few weeks ago.
lore does not track your code. it tracks the prompts, notes and decisions that produced it. you commit intent. when you want code, you run lore materialize: it replays the accumulated intent into a brief, and an agent reconciles the working tree to match it.
the code is build output. the intent is the source.
…which would be great, if the output of llms were deterministic, and generally it is not. This means rolling back a change to undo or fix something is just another spin of the roulette wheel, with the analogy being reinforced by the number of tokens you’ll have to buy and burn to do a rebuild. It looks like it still needs a real vcs behind the scenes, given that it isn’t entirely self-hosting, but maybe I misunderstood something.
You might wonder if this is some kind of satirical work, or perhaps piece of performance art, but I’m fairly certain it isn’t… the creator and sole human author (naturally, claude is the only other “contributor”) is a big fan of something called “open audio protocol” and a project called “audius” which came about by someone asking what if spotify and soundcloud, but on the blockchain? With ai agentic integration?
Finally a VCS that simulates the horrific results of cvs merge gone wrong, 20 years since the last time I used cvs.
kayfabe vcs
Considering this is the logical endpoint of the "LLM's are just like compilers bro" line of thought, I'm not surprised at all.
Wait, did I get that right and it reruns the prompts every time you want to look at the code? Holy token costs batman.
I’ve always thought that the ability for a VCS to show me exactly what my codebase looked like at any point in the past wasn’t as dementia-simulating as I’d like
The Guardian published a William McAskill editorial in the what-if-the-stateless-text-generators-had-moral-agency genre of fiction, and Emily Bender did a thread
From the article:
But the sheer pace of growth in AI means that, once we produce the first artificial moral patients, we will soon after have enormous quantities of them. After a few years, so many morally significant AI systems could exist that their collective interests would outweigh those of all humans on Earth combined.
Get fucked, Will.
But also, if we grant the untenable sci-fi premise, this would be like a star trek episode where the federation cedes unconditionally to the expansionist alien fascists of the week if they have a much greater population because that's all it takes to outweigh the other side's moral concerns.
Earth-Trisolaris Organisation-ass moral framework.
It's pretty grim to be as immersed as I am in all the tech news bullshit (which I continue to do largely because I am the most techy person in most rooms I exist in, and the closest thing to an AI expert (it feels so weird to say that, but I do have a fair bit of experience coding machine learning from scratch in a scientific context, so I probably do need to get more comfortable with thinking myself as an expert — it's a relative term, after all)
However, I really enjoy that in addition to there being names that make me grimace because I know they will have dogshit takes on things, there are also names that I really respect. It makes me feel more connected to people, because it makes me reflect on how meaningful knowledge production is based on trust. Emily Bender, for instance, is someone whose work I am familiar with, and thus I am far likely to spend the energy to read stuff like the thread you linked.
As grim as modern tech is, it makes me smile that there are so many people who are fighting the good fight.